"Io sono Roma"

Io sono Roma.  "I am Rome".

This could -- yea, should -- become a new rallying cry for the West, along the lines of the recently famous Je Suis Charlie after the Charlie Hebdo attacks; but hopefully not so quickly dissolved in incoherence and losing sociopolitical traction so quickly.

What does it mean?  The "Rome" referred to is the object of Islam's conquest, and it doesn't merely signify the capital of Italy, seat of the Vatican, home of the cappuccino in sidewalk cafes, memories of Marcello Mastroianni and Sofia Loren...  No, in the perspective of Islam, "Rome" is the entire West.

Certainly, the concrete city of Rome (and its Italian environs) was prey to Islamic Jihad back when Muslims were able to muster frank warfare against the West; most devastatingly perhaps back in the 9th century; 846 A.D. to be exact.  Back in 2006, the relatively Islamo-savvy Italian Catholic journalist Sandro Magister penned a review of Andrew Bostom's compendium of the history of Islamic Jihad, The Legacy of Jihad, in which he succinctly describes what happened then:

It happened that in April of 846, the Muslim Arabs, who arrived with a fleet at the mouth of the Tiber, reached Rome, invaded it, sacked it and took away all the gold and silver it contained from the basilica of St. Peter.

And it wasn't an occasional attack. By the year 827 the Arabs had conquered Sicily, which they held for two and a half centuries. Rome was seriously under close threat. In 847, the year after the assault, the new Pope, Leo IV, began construction of walls around the entire Vatican area, 12 meters high and equipped with 44 towers. He completed them in six years. They are the Leonine Walls of which large tracts remain. But very few today know that they were erected to defend Peter's home from Muslim jihad. And among those who know many are silent out of modesty. "Not walls but bridges" is the slogan that is in fashion today.

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Similarly, the Mohammedans had on their Jihad Bucket List the conquest of the 'eastern Rome' -- Constantinople, which they did eventually succeed in despoiling, in 1453, about two centuries before Islam's star began to wane, at least geopolitically, as the West began by the 17th century to outstrip Islam and the rest of the world on a stupendous arc of progress that increased exponentially with each passing century, and continues to this day.  But those twin spiritual and political capitals of Europe in the Middle Ages were but specific (albeit glittering) loci of the general target in the eyes of Islam: the West, to be followed by the Rest (of the world).

And if we fast-forward to the hot present, we saw the report from January of this year, where a Muslim cleric delivered a sermon at the Al-Aqsa mosque -- the second most holy site for mainstream Islam outside of Mecca -- in which he vowed that:

“We Will Soon Establish the Caliphate, Liberate Jerusalem and Conquer Rome”

I've written only in passing about this now and then on my previous blog, The Hesperado, over its 11-year tenure.  Here are some sample quotes:

From The Decline and Fall of Western Education, written in March of 2014:

Muslims are far worse, and are a species distinct from the barbarian. Classical barbarians, though of course uncouth and knocking over furniture left and right like bulls in a china shop, eventually had the good sense to recognize that the Roman Empire they were repeatedly invading through incursions and inroads represented a way of life and culture superior to theirs and they effectively converted to Rome, rather than sought its destruction—coinciding, give or take a century,  with the epochal Christianization of the Roman Empire and its translation (translatio Imperii) into the “Holy Roman Empire” (pace Voltaire’s glibly supercilious aphorism)—graduating into that historical advancement on, and sublimation of, Graeco-Roman civilization called Christendom.

From Tourism and Terrorism, written in April of 2013:

I don't know if Henri Pirenne's book Mohammed and Charlemagne goes further to imply that this Islamic catastrophe represents the missing key to explain what historians have been scratching their heads and hypothesizing over for centuries -- namely the reason why Rome fell and the "Dark Ages" began.  Indeed, one could conjecture that, but for the appearance of the malignant metastasis of Mohammedanism on the world stage at that stage, the Roman Empire never really "fell" per se; it rather transmogrified, from one butterfly to another, so to speak -- from the classic imperial form into the Christian form of the Holy Roman Empire.  For a good three centuries beginning approximately in the third century A.D., this in fact was happening, and the thriving Mediterranean culture continued to flourish, now under the aegis of a new monotheistic theocracy -- until, in the middle of the 7th century, Arabs stormed out of the desert in an expansionist ferocity that would make ancient Roman colonialism and before that Alexandrian imperialism pale by comparison.

From The Conquest of Constantinople: A Jihad Planned in Prayer for Centuries, written in November of 2007: 

Mohammed himself dreamed of the conquest of “Rome”—which in his milieu meant foremost the Eastern Empire—as chronicled by the first Muslim biographer of Mohammed, Ibn Ishaq (died circa 773 A.D.): According to the tale, Mohammed during the Battle of the Trench rolled up his sleeves and jumped in to help his men dig the trench they needed to defend their position. As he was digging into the rocky earth, his spade (or whatever comparable tool they had in 7th-century Arabia) struck a rock and a bright spark shot out, illuminating the trench in the dark of night. Then he struck again and a second spark was ignited, and then a third. Mohammed was supposed to have taken this for a sign:

Did you really see that. . .? The first [spark] means that God has opened up to me the Yaman [i.e., Arabia]; the second Syria and the west; and the third the east.

While the third spark indicated the lands to the East (the Persian Empire and the kingdoms of India), the second spark’s signification—“Syria and the west”—would embrace not only the remainder of the Middle East to the west of Arabia, not only Africa and Spain (and, hopefully, the West proper—i.e., Europe), but also the greatest Empire during that era: Byzantium.

Notable and authorative Islamic exegetes of the Koran—including Ibn Kathir and Ibn Juzayy of the 14th century, and As-Sawi of the 13th century—, interpreted Koran 9:29 to be contextually referring to Mohammed’s religious imperative to expand Islam by military attacks on “Rome”.

Koran 9:29 states:

Fight against such of those who have been given the Scripture as believe not in Allah nor the Last Day, and forbid not that which Allah hath forbidden by His messenger, and follow not the Religion of Truth, until they pay the tribute readily, being brought low.

The aforementioned exegetes wrote:

[Koran 9:29] was revealed when the Messenger of Allah was commanded to fight the Byzantines. When it was sent down, the Messenger of Allah prepared for the expedition to Tabuk [a Byzantine trading outpost in the northwestern part of the Arabian peninsula].

And:

Allah commanded His Messenger to fight the People of the Scriptures, Jews and Christians, on the ninth year of Hijrah, and he prepared his army to fight the Romans and called the people to Jihad announcing his intent and destination.

Furthermore, an entire chapter of the Koran, Sura 30, is devoted to “the Byzantines” (as Robert Spencer, in his series on Blogging the Qur’an, has aptly translated the Arabic title, Ar-Rum, explaining that it “literally means ‘The Romans,’ but refers to the forces of the Eastern Roman Empire, commonly known today as the Byzantine Empire.”). This chapter, unsurprisingly, is saturated with supremacist military overtones in the context of how the true Believers (Muslims) must fight the Unbelievers (non-Muslims), reading more like a medieval history of Mongol conquests than any spiritual manual.

And the last word (for now), from The A-Word, revisited, written in April of 2016: 

As long as the Counter-Jihad doesn’t address the Problem of Muslims in General, and articulate an analytical argument defending the proposition that all Muslims are the problem -- rather than constantly shirking this on the defensive and thereby playing by the rules of the PC MC Mainstream paradigm (and this is not counting the many Counter-Jihadists who themselves either directly or indirectly defend innumerable Muslims whom we are supposed to conclude are "not extremists" or "not Wahhabis" or "not Salafis" etc.) -- this bickering will continue interminably; while Rome burns around us and the Mohammedans take over the West, step by step, decade upon decade, until this 21st century will be our last in which to live free.

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Siamo Romani ("We are Romans") -- whether we survive past this 21st century or not.