Christopher Hitchins Barely Touched Upon Islam’s Predations

by S. David Sultzer

In a viral clip, Hitchens spoke about the Muslims’ centuries-long slave trade against Europeans and Americans. He understated the severity of the problem.

A viral clip is making the rounds showing Christopher Hitchens, who passed away in 2011, giving a talk in 2005. In it, he discusses the Barbary slave trade that captured an estimated 1.5 million Europeans and Americans over several hundred years. If anything, Hitchens understated how aggressive the Islamic world was against the West.

Anyone with a knowledge of history knows that Islam, born in seventh-century Arabia, has always been at war with Western civilization. Indeed, it has been the single most prolific conquering and colonizing force in history, much of it being Christian lands. And all of this has been driven by religious imperatives and duties written into the Koran.

That is reality, not “Islamophobia,” a word the left recently invented to protect their radical Islamist allies in the West. The threat of destruction from radical Islamists, as we term them today, has always been real and as imminent as their abilities allowed.

America fought its first wars outside of its borders—the Barbary Wars—to stop Islamic nations from attacking our ships and enslaving their crews. That was what Christopher Hitchens was referring to in this 21-year-old clip that recently went viral:

Christopher Hitchens: ”In 1786, when the United States was barely a country, it was having its sailors taken as slaves by the Barbary states, the states of the Ottoman Empire and North Africa. Tripoli, shores of Tripoli. Ships stopped, its crews carried off into slavery. We… pic.twitter.com/hbRRR4mCYP

— Taya (@travelingflying) March 21, 2026

Take a moment to see if you can find any substantive differences between that explanation and what Ayatollah Khomenei, who founded the current evil theocracy in Iran, said almost 200 years later as he dreamed of bloody conquest over Christian nations:

I am decisively announcing to the whole world that if the world-devourers [i.e., the infidel powers] wish to stand against our religion, we will stand against their whole world and will not cease until the annihilation of all them. Either we all become free, or we will go to the greater freedom which is martyrdom. Either we shake one another’s hands in joy at the victory of Islam in the world, or all of us will turn to eternal life and martyrdom. In both cases, victory and success are ours.

Those were not idle threats, whether spoken in 1786 or written in 1979. Were it not for a few brave Christians who blocked the Muslim invasions, Western civilization would have been overrun and extinguished centuries ago. Their names ring down through history.

In 732, Charles Martel stopped a Muslim invasion of Western Europe at the Battle of Tours.
In 1091, Roger I reconquered Sicily after 250 years of Muslim occupation.
In 1492, Ferdinand and Isabella reconquered Spain and Portugal after 700 years of Muslim occupation.
In 1571, Don John won the naval Battle of Lepanto, destroying an Ottoman fleet bent on conquering Christian lands.
In 1683, John Sobieski crushed the Ottoman army before the Gates of Vienna, halting their invasion of southern Europe.

And while Muslim conquests ended at the Gates of Vienna, Muslim predation did not. The biggest threat arose from the coasts of North Africa, where state-sponsored Islamic pirates—the Barbary Pirates—prowled the waters. By 1500, these pirates had been attacking Christian ships in the Mediterranean for hundreds of years.

Then they began coastal raids to capture Christian slaves. Notable were the slave raids at Liparia, Sicily (1544), Gozo, Malta (1551), Vieste, Italy (1554), Balearic Islands, Spain (1558), and the repeated raids on Cornwall and Devonshire, England (1625-1645). Perhaps the most notorious raid was in 1631, when the Islamic pirates raided and enslaved the entire population of Baltimore, Ireland, in 1631.