Pope Benedict XVI, the “Panzer pope,” has done the unusual in modern discourse: he has jumped into the war on terror with armored facts from six centuries ago that refute a deal of the appeasement from 21st-century Europeans and their American fellow travelers.

You will recall that Pope Benedict recently spoke, auf Deutsch, at Regensburg University, where he once enjoyed a professorship. The speech was dry, mechanical, unappetizing, a predictable German exercise in theology, with much attention to how reason and faith are compatible. In Calvinist seminary we used to call this a Roman disquisition on epistemology. Yet in the speech, the pope chose to illustrate what is not reasonable, what is not faithful, by arguing not surprisingly that violence is both unreasonable and faithless.

For an example the Pope could have chosen any number of incidents of war-making by church-anointed Christian kings and their modern elected pretenders — the Vatican’s cooperation with Hitler and Mussolini comes to mind — but instead the pope reached back to the last days of the Byzantine Empire, not only to speak of jihad but also to box Mohammed’s ears.

Accident? Unlikely. Arrogance? Less unlikely. The pope and a legion of exceedingly well-read apologists in many languages have now begged pardon in person and in deed. The routine Pakistani mob displays with English signage the various murders, fire-bombings, puffy statements of outrage, and threats with timelines. (My favorite is from the Islamic Salafist Boy Scout Battalions, who will kill all Christians in Iraq in three days unless the pope apologizes to the whole planet). All instances have several months to run in the magazines and journals. However, none of the voices claiming context or shouting condemnation is going to remove the facts of the matter.

The pope chose the reference to Byzantium with potency. The pope was careful to introduce his illustration with a clear statement that it “touches on the theme of jihad.” The Pope then traveled back in time six centuries in order to demonstrate his case against jihad by using the voice of a long-dead empire that was defeated and obliterated by the jihad that, according to the pope, was originally launched by Mohammed himself, according to the Koran and the commentaries called the Surahs.

The facts that support the Pope’s argument that jihad is worse than unacceptable are that the followers of Mohammed, especially the Umayyads and Turks, pursued a war of theft and attrition against civilized Christian Byzantium from the seventh century until Constantinople was smashed like glass in the 15th-century. It was total war. The four Crusades were just distractions inside the ceaseless bloodlust. At the end, the losers not only were pushed into slavery, but also were forced to convert to Islam or die.

Also, the greatest church of Constantinople, the fourth-century Hagia Sophia, was defaced into the bland, cavernous mosque it remains. The conquerors, whom we inherited as the Ottomans, imposed a tyranny of faith on their subjects that was so massively intolerant that the teachings and memory of Christianity were erased from the Balkans to the Indus river, from the steppes to the Nile River Valley.

What the pope did at Regensburg was point to the most spectacular victory for jihad in the last thousand years and say that it is not an example of religion nor of humanity. How else to read this stark passage from the speech, in which the pope characterizes the frustration of one of the last Byzantine emperors, “Without descending to details, such as the difference in treatment accorded to those who have the ‘Book’ and the infidels, [the Emperor Manuel II Palaiologos] addresses his interlocutor with a startling brusqueness on the central question about the relationship between religion and violence in general, saying,‘Show me just what Mohammed brought that was new, and there you will find things only evil and inhuman, such as his command to spread by the sword the faith he preached.'”

Six centuries after the murder of Byzantium by the sword, from my well-armed Protestant redoubt, surrounded in the Hudson River Valley by the battlefields of those who fought to rid America of the intolerant faiths, it is easy to sympathize with Manuel II Palaiologos, who could see the end coming and could only complain, whine, and disabuse.

Today, for American leaders, there are bolder options when faced with jihadists. It is easy to see that Pope Benedict XVI hit his target squarely — Mohammed and his earthly heirs. Spreading the faith by the sword is evil and inhuman, says the pope. Jihad is ungodly, says the pope.Saying less than this is appeasement. As the criminal Osama Bin Laden aims to create a global caliphate of evil and inhumanity via jihad, so the lawful America can aim to restore reason and faith by defeating jihad, presto.

Mr. Batchelor is the host of the “John Batchelor Show,” now on hiatus.