"I'll have a cup of interesting, yet overly simplistic coffee..."

Raymond Ibrahim, part of the Leadership of the Counter-Jihad Mainstream (if only by virtue of the fact that he posts articles now and then on Jihad Watch, and has for years and is not just some pseudonymous slob in various comments threads attached to various counter-jihad blogs, but is well-known, at least in Counter-Jihad circles), published an interesting essay on Jihad Watch recently.  Its thesis is that Martin Luther's Reformation triggered a concatenation of a process that has paved the way for the currently widespread & dominant Western tendency to bend over and spread its butt-cheeks for Muslims.

In short,

-- Ibrahim writes, also relying upon historian Franco Cardini --

“The Reformation produced one logical if unexpected result: a definite boost to the positive evaluation of Islam, and therefore to the birth and development of an often conventional and mannered pro-Islamic stance.” This “mannered” and “pro-Islamic stance” continues to haunt the West to this day. After all, it’s not for nothing that naïve and favorable views of Islam — to say nothing of passive responses to Muslim aggression and a paralytic, all-consuming fear of being seen as “crusading” against Islam — are especially ingrained in and compromise the security of historically Protestant nations, including the U.K., Scandinavia, Germany, Australia, and the U.S.

While Ibrahimi's thesis is interesting (and I've noted how Martin Luther and Jean Calvin both made intemperate remarks about how the Pope is a worse evil than the "Turks" (the Muslims of the day)), the Counter-Jihad synthesis it would create would be overly simplistic.  For one thing, his list of "historically Protestant nations" who are soft on Islam leaves out Catholic Spain and Rome, no less soft (not to mention that the Papacy and much of its official culture is and has been for decades egregiously soft on Islam, with the previous Pope, Benedict XVI, the exception rather than the rule).  More importantly perhaps, it leaves out other contributing factors, including the collective PTSD (Post-Terrorist Stress Disorder) which the West suffered from for over 1,000 years (from the 7th clear up to the 17th century and beyond) of relentless attacks, tortures, massacres, and enslavements by Muslims; a PTSD that did not vanish when the West became spectacularly dominant globally beginning in the the late 17th century (after it won its last major battle, 1683 at the Siege of Vienna, defending itself against Muslim onslaughts).  As time went on and the West's amazing progress and expansion unfolded exponentially from the 18th to the 19th centuries, the PTSD only became submerged into a collective cultural unconscious, mingling with increasing fascination, sometimes morbid, sometimes forgetful & fanciful, of things Oriental.

As the West embarked upon its tumultuous yet still breathtakingly progressive 20th century, bringing the entire world with it, a collective amnesia about Islam became entrenched and this, coupled with the seeming backwardness of the Muslim world by the turn of the 20th century and into the first couple of decades, made it seem even to learned scholars and observers of Islam like Snouck Hurgronje that Islam's star (& crescent moon) was likely on the wane and its days of historical grandeur were gone, and it would be inevitable that most Muslims would change and therefore shed their "medieval" mores (a habit of mind condescendingly underestimating the atavistic fanaticism of Mohammedans that tends to persist into our 21st century in the broader Western Mainstream if not at times also in the Counter-Jihad Mainstream).

Also missing from Ibrahim's interesting yet overly simplistic brew are healthy factors from the West's Judaeo-Christian/Graeco-Roman heritage -- chief among which were an interest in other cultures, a self-criticism about our own culture, and a transcending of tribalism towards universalism -- which paradoxically provided a framework for their distortion in the later development of PC MC; a distortion whose major (though not the first) manifestation, symptom and further spur was the European Enlightenment of the 18th century -- itself with likely precursors in the cultural upheaval of the Reformation, though taking a more circuitous and complex route of development than Ibrahim seems capable of appreciating.

So we can add Ibrahim's factor to the hill of coffee beans as one more important facet -- but not the only one -- explaining why the West is now, in the 21st century, proceeding full-steam ahead toward civilizational suicide.