From a popular English World War II song:

There'll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow, just you wait and see.

There'll be love and laughter
And peace ever after
Tomorrow, when the world is free.

The shepherd will tend his sheep,
The valley will bloom again,
And Jimmy will go to sleep
In his own little room again.

There'll be bluebirds over
The white cliffs of Dover,
Tomorrow, just you wait and see.

A long half-century ago, my mother and father -- along with millions of other English, Scottish, Irish, Welsh, Americans, Yugoslavs, Russians, Greeks, Canadians, Africans, Australians and other heirs to the Christian West, along with surviving Jews, Indian Hindus and even hard-edged French atheists, risked and often sacrificed their lives to defend their (our) way of life from the Nazi menace.

It was the great ferocious struggle of their lives. And we -- their heirs -- have frivolously prospered in the peaceful and secure aftermath of their exertion. Where once our parents marched through the mud, jungle, sand or urban bombscapes of world combat -- asking nothing, offering all -- and prevailing, gaining glorious victory, we, their diminished progeny, whine that the world has not given us enough of a living.

But into every generation, a storm must come. And as we boomers slide toward our incontinence and as our children approach their young-adult vigor, the new barbarism reveals its menace to our civilization. Every week has its own largely ignored example of the coming struggle.

Two weeks ago, the story came from a town with a college that has been a leading force in the advancement of Christian civilization for 900 years: Oxford, England. Once again, something more than bluebirds threatens English skies. It seems that authorities at the Oxford Central Mosque have requested permission to use loadspeakers to blast the call to prayer five times a day from atop their minaret across the town that has heard for the past 900 summers, falls, winters and springs only the bells of the local churches. Continued...