Resorting to jihadist rhetoric, Esra, the daughter of Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, recently attacked the West and Christianity.

In a tweet written, not in her native Turkish, but in Islam's tongue, Arabic, she declared that "There is little left for the Islamic crescent to break the Western cross."

This phrase is as universally understood by Muslims as it is universally misunderstood by Westerners and is, therefore, emblematic of Muslim continuity and Western confusion.

It has both a literal and figurative meaning.

Concerning the former, Muslims have been, quite literally, "breaking the cross" in keeping with their prophet's commandment.  Past and present, Muslims have destroyed and continue to destroy the crucifix — in cemeteries, on churches, on Christians — as a reflection of their animosity to the Gospel, specifically, that Christ was crucified, killed, and resurrected, three doctrines central to Christianity that Islam rejects.

Indeed, the June 2015 cover of the Islamic State's magazine, Dabiq, featured a Muslim breaking a cross off a church steeple, with the words "Break the Cross" underneath.

Less literally, "break the cross" has meant "defeat Christianity" — another thing that Muslims, past and present, have been fervently striving for — including, apparently, the ostensibly "secularized" daughter of Turkey's president.

In the past, Muslims managed, through violent jihad, to swallow up three quarters of the original Christian world — including the Middle East, North Africa, and "Turkey" (Anatolia).  They also temporarily conquered several other Christian territories (Spain, the Mediterranean, the Balkans) and continuously harried the rest (eventually reaching even Iceland for slaves and provoking a newborn American into its first war as a nation).

Back then, when Islam was a formidable force, Europeans fought tooth and nail to repulse the terrorists and safeguard their homeland's faith and heritage.

Today, however, when Islam is weak and easily confined, the West finds itself bending over backwards to accommodate and take in more and more Muslim migrants — many of whom, rather than show gratitude, display Islam's traditional contempt for and prey on "infidels."

In short, whereas Muslims — including Erdoğan's daughter, a "sociologist" by profession — know well and strive to achieve the meaning of "break the cross," Westerners, who for over a millennium had been on the receiving end of such animosity, until they managed to reverse the tide in the eighteenth century, are today not only not doing anything about it, but facilitating it.

In this sense, the assertion that "there is little left for the Islamic crescent to break the Western cross" is more reflective of the state of Christianity in the West than of Islam.

Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar, is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.

Image via Max Pixel.