Robert Spencer has written a great many essential books alerting the world to the truth about the jihad threat, but now he has delivered his magnum opus. The History of Jihad: From Muhammad to ISIS is the first book to provide an overview of the entire history of jihad, against Europe, against India, against Africa, against Israel, against the United States of America, and more. If more of our policymakers knew this history, they would be formulating more realistic and more effective policies, both domestic and foreign, to deal with the jihad threat.

The History of Jihad makes it clear that most of what people in the U.S. think they know about Muhammad, Islam in general, and Islam’s bloody record throughout history, is wrong. The most shocking portions of this book detail the centuries-long and astonishingly bloody jihad against India. The Muslim invaders did not consider the Hindus of India to be “People of the Book” (the Quran’s designation for Jews, Christians, and several other groups), and so they treated them with appalling harshness and laid waste across the Indian subcontinent, destroying Hindu temples and building triumphal mosques wherever they could. Even when the Hindus were granted honorary “People of the Book” status, because there were simply too many of them to kill, the Muslims continued to behave toward them with exceptional brutality.

Spencer is one of the first in the Western world to tell this story, and he does so in the words of people who were there. The History of Jihad is full of the accounts of Muslim chroniclers who watched the jihadis slake their lust for blood and recorded their deeds for posterity, gleefully recounting their brutality as if it were heroism and martial glory. This reliance on eyewitness and contemporary accounts gives this book a shocking vividness -- you’re hearing about what happened from people who were there. There is none of the excuse-making and sugar-coating of modern-day historians, who, when they deign to take notice of the 1,400-year jihad at all, minimize its human toll and turn a blind eye to the innumerable lives and entire peoples that it has destroyed.

Even more important is how Spencer pulls all the various strands of the global jihad together, so that for the first time we can see the whole picture -- not just stretching back in time to the seventh century, but spanning the globe, from Myanmar to New York City. This is one of the first books to explain the Israeli/Palestinian conflict within the context of the global jihad, and to analyze the West’s latter-day failure of nerve and denial of reality in the face of today’s jihad terrorism in light of the long struggle of the forces of Islam to overcome the free world.

The tenth and last chapter of The History of Jihad is titled “The West Loses the Will to Live: Jihad in the Twenty-First Century.” Coming after one reads through fourteen centuries of unremitting and worldwide jihad warfare, this failure strikes the reader as particularly craven and inexcusable. Europe, and notably the Catholic Church, were on the front lines of the defense against the global jihad for centuries; today, as Spencer recounts in breathtaking detail, European leaders, as well as Pope Francis and other Catholic prelates, couldn’t be more eager to welcome Muslims into Europe. They have forgotten history. They have forgotten why they live in free societies today. They have forgotten the heroism and courage of their ancestors, whose exploits fill the pages of The History of Jihad.

But The History of Jihad is also full of stories about many, many people who are truly the ancestors and role models of the likes of Pope Francis, Angela Merkel, Theresa May, and Barack Obama. The history of the advance of jihad around the world is also a history of non-Muslim appeasers, collaborators, opportunists, and useful idiots. It is to them, as much as to the unending stream of jihadis, that we owe the state of the world today. That’s why, among the many things that it is, The History of Jihad is a cautionary tale, and a warning to today’s free societies: the jihad is advancing, as it always has been, and no amount of appeasement will mean that any non-Muslim will be spared.

If the free world does survive today’s jihadi onslaught, it will be to a significant degree because of Robert Spencer’s efforts to sound the alarm.

Click here to preorder The History of Jihad – order two and send one to your representative. It will open his or her eyes.

Pamela Geller is the President of the American Freedom Defense Initiative (AFDI), publisher of The Geller Report and author of the bestselling book, FATWA: Hunted in America, as well as The Post-American Presidency: The Obama Administration’s War on America and Stop the Islamization of America: A Practical Guide to the Resistance. Follow her on Twitter or Facebook.