The Odyssey teaches a message that still resonates in time - and it is that a threat does not always arrive with swords drawn, but can come in the form of a gift that makes us flatter the generosity and pride of the enemy.
But we Europeans have not learned much from Homer.
We have before us a gigantic new Trojan horse, not on a Moroccan beach like in Christopher Nolan’s movie, but inside our cities, not made of wood but of bricks, alliances and complicit silences.
Today in Europe there are 30,000 mosques.
The Trojans celebrated the horse as a symbol of peace; the Europeans celebrate the mosques as trophies of multiculturalism. Both peoples, blinded by an excess of trust, ignored the warnings. The result then was the fall of Troy; for us, it is the Islamisation of London, Rome and Paris.
King Charles has just visited the Cambridge Central Mosque, the “first eco-mosque in Europe."
After inaugurating a commemorative plaque, the King said: “An enormous contribution, I am sure. Not only to the Muslim community, but to Cambridge itself." The largest public donations, unsurprisingly, came from Turkey and Qatar. Erdogan donated 16 million pounds, almost two-thirds of the total construction costs. Another massive public donation was made by Qatar.
Both Turkey and Qatar are strong supporters of the Muslim Brotherhood and collaborate to finance the construction of mosques in Europe.
In Strasbourg, meanwhile, after ten years of work, the crowns have been placed on top of the two 36-metre minarets of the new mosque: “the largest in Europe," promoted by Millî Görüş, close to Erdogan.
Perhaps it is worth reading what the former Turkish prime minister Necmettin Erbakan, Erdogan’s mentor, says. During a speech in Ludwigsburg, Germany, Erbakan stated that “the Europeans are sick. … We will give them the medicine. All of Europe will become Islamic. We will conquer Rome."
Since coming to power Erdogan has built 13,000 mosques in Turkey. And throughout Europe.
In Germany a third of all Islamic centres depend on Ankara. Turkey has also financed the construction of 27 mosques in Denmark. Of the 475 mosques in the Netherlands in 2018, 146 are controlled by the Turkish Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet). And in Austria the Turks control 58 mosques out of 250.
And still 400 out of 2,500 mosques in France, 70 mosques in Belgium…
Erdogan goes to Bosnia to inaugurate a new mosque. Then to Roubaix, in France, for the Grand Turkish Mosque. Then another Turkish mosque again in France, in Valenton. Then yet another in Saint-Vaast in Belgium. Then to Wuppertal, in Germany, where there is also the muezzin who calls everyone.
“Anyone who thinks we have forgotten the lands from which we withdrew in tears a hundred years ago is mistaken," Erdogan has said, and he has also stated: “Western hegemony is over."
Yet the Europeans seem far more worried that the Israeli minister Itamar Ben Gvir prays on the Temple Mount in Jerusalem than about all this.
Poor idiots.
Meanwhile Erdogan declares: “The mosques are our barracks, the domes our helmets, the minarets our bayonets and the faithful our soldiers…"
If it looks like a new Trojan horse, that is because it is one.
A new mosque is opened every week in France, at the rate of 50 a year. The Ministry of the Interior estimated 150 in 1976, 900 in 1985, 1,555 in 2001 and so on in a dramatic progression.
Radical Islam does not want to “resist" in Gaza, but to destabilise and conquer the West, exploiting like a wooden horse its freedoms, its porous borders, its internal divisions and its intellectual elites.
The Odyssey warns us: beware of the gifts of enemies.
But at least with the fall of Troy the fugitives founded Rome. Once the West is colonised, where will we go?