Those Evil Crusades
by Anestos Canelides
As long as I can remember I have been told about the evils of the Crusades, and how wrong they were.
One of the best articles I have ever read, one that really proves that much of what I was taught is a lie, is entitled “The Crusades in Context” by Dr. Paul Stenhouse. The Crusades were a delayed response to the invasion of Christian lands by the Muslims. It is true that atrocities were committed by the so-called Christian armies, but the Muslims initiated the warfare and committed innumerable atrocities of their own.
After the death of Muhammad, in 632 AD, Abu Bakr rose to power as the first Caliph, and that was when the invasions of the Roman Empire (Byzantine) began. These violent incursions ranged geographically from the Middle East to Spain in the west, and in the east of the Empire the armies of Islam showed up at the gates of Constantinople, only to fail after two attempts to seize the city.
Dr. Stenhouse focuses only on the invasion of Christan lands, but we cannot forget about the Islamic invasion of the former Persian Empire, and later in the 8th century the invasions of India.
I highly recommend reading Dr. Stenhouse’ essay in order to equip yourself better when your liberal, or non-religious, or historically illiterate friends ask, “What about the Crusades?” I have gained more wisdom about the Crusades, thanks to articles such as this one, and through other research.
I also suggest reading “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades” by Robert Spencer to further your understanding of the true context of the Crusades.
Previous posts by Anestos Canelides:
| 2010 | May | 29 | The Last Empire | |||
| Jun | 18 | The Muslim Devastation of India | ||||
| Aug | 20 | Are They Lying to Us? | ||||
| Sep | 28 | Devshirme: A Muslim Scourge on Christians | ||||
| Oct | 6 | AIFD: Friends of America and Freedom | ||||
| Dec | 3 | A 19th-Century Jihad on American Shipping | ||||
| 2011 | May | 29 | Borders, Language and Culture | |||
| Oct | 18 | The Jihad Against Dogs | ||||
| 31 | Slavery and Jihad | |||||
| Nov | 15 | Abuse of Power | ||||
| Dec | 10 | Islam is not a Pacifist Religion |
29 comments:
I must be older than you since my mother told me they were good!:)
"...equip yourself better when your liberal, or non-religious, or historically illiterate friends ask, “What about the Crusades?” I have gained more wisdom about the Crusades', ..... or when Ron Paul says 'well, we were in their lands', or somesuch, as to why they destroyed the WTC, or why the Iraninas want 'the b0mb".
Forward to Ron Paul
P.S. Ron Paul has some good positions, but this posture is not one of them.
I started school late 40's and until 1964 both in schools and university the crusades were described, warts and all, as a reaction to the Arab conquest of the holy land. I have been a keen student of history all my life and I can date the start of this revision of history, the day the price of oil went from $4 to $25 a barrel - 1973. That was also the day the hijab and burqa started their invasion of the fashion scene. The Smithstonian has a photo oollection from the last Ottoman sultan covering the period 1880-90, not a burqa and very few headscarves in sight.
Anonymous -
This topic about the Crusades.. What's the link with Ron Paul???
Kind regs from Amsterdam,
Sag
I have always considered the crusaders heroes. Were it not for them, Western civilization would not exist. Were it not for the Crusaders, we probably would not even have electricity, as the modern world we live in today is entirely the invention of Western civilization. No apologies, never!
Valerie Boyer Is Threatened and Her Website Is Hacked by Turks
The aftershocks of the French National Assembly's law criminalizing denial of the Armenian genocide continue.
Valerie Boyer, an author of the bill and Vice President of the France-Armenia Friendship group, has been threatened and the threats extend to her children and parents. “
Death threats, threats of rape and threats of destruction, name-calling and insults. I find this very shocking,” said the deputy. She has been receiving police protection.
Boyer's website was attacked by Turkish hackers....
israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/151152
Ciccio, you're absolutely right about when the worm turned. I got the same "warts and all, reaction to muslim conquest" teaching in 1975 as a tenth grader, but I went to a school in the South and we were probably using old textbooks (and old teachers, too!).
By the time I got to College in 1978, it was all "Post-Colonial, Ejido, Apartheid, Dead White Male" cant, and Muslims, especially those in Palestine, had become pets of the Left. And now my children have friends down the street who attend a Charter School run by Turkish Islamists. Lord knows what history they're being taught in that place.
Watching Montefiore's Jerusalem on the BBC iPlayer, he describes the Crusades as "christian jihad". He vaguely waves away the 300 years of islamic war that preceded the crusades, and never once describes that as jihad. He details the barbaric slaughter by Crusaders, but never mentions that muslims had been doing the same. He calls Mohammed "the Prophet", but doesn't call Abraham "father of the jews", nor Jesus "the son of God". He does not mention the muslim invasion of Spain, just 80 years after Mohammed's death, and the hundreds of years of murder and persecution that followed that.
The rot is deep indeed. In my mind, Islam corrodes all good values with which it comes into contact.
Ciccio said... "I started school late 40's and until 1964 both in schools and university the crusades were described, warts and all, as a reaction to the Arab conquest of the holy land."
I started school about 1969. At that time I was also instructed the Crusades where a reaction to Arab conquest of the Holy Land.
I have since learned, however, that the crusades where a reaction to the Islamic invantion of Christian Europe. Ultimately resulting in a follow-on mission to wrestle the Holy Lands from Muslims and protect Christians seeking to travel to those lands. (Lots of other political reasons, of course, but for purposes of brevity I leave it at that.)
Muslims being Arab's, or Persians, or martians fom outer-space had little to do with the fact that Christians fought back against the Islamic invasion.
Islamic aggression against the Europe was met with minimal initial resistance, since Europe didn't mount any serous resistance for a long time. However when Europe did resist the Islamists didn't just run away.
Given the initial Islamic invation of Europe was relatively bloodless becomes lost in all the focus on the extensive blood-shed cause by Europe's ultimate resistance.
In this the extensive blood-shed of the crusader's counter invasion gets all the notoriety, when in fac the Islamists shed as much if not more blood than the Crusaders if we look at the full history of this conflict.
islamic thugs want the land they invaded in the 8th century:
alertadigital.com/2011/12/26/grupos-islamistas-radicales-piden-una-%e2%80%9cprimavera-andalusi%e2%80%9d-a-traves-de-internet/
deportation.
what happened to the site barenakedislam.wordpress.com ?
Cicero, I would date the revision-trend much earlier. I was an exchange student in Germany in 1961, and while attending a festival with my hosts, I commented on the sizable group men sitting dourly well away from the general crowd. I was told they were Turks recruited to provide a much-needed labor force, and that they, and other "Easterners" were much more wanted than "Gypsies." I was more than a bit disturbed because of what I had been told about the personal/family experiences of Armenian friends back home, and too-frequent slants of both conversations and news articles in Germany about a cheap workforce who would stay out of the way when off the job, and had been "agreeable" during the recent unpleasantness. In Germany, they were "certainly better" than any other European, and I bet the same preferences were being exercised in every country trying to compensate for the decimated labor force that resulted from WWII.
Re: Anonymous @ 6:49 p.m.
ChristianInfidel says:
I checked the BareNakedIslam web site maybe a week ago and they had just been issued a threat by Muslims or Muslim supporters to shut them down if they didn't censor themselves or something. They did not take it seriously, nor did I, but it looks like the web hoster did.
I could not support their name-calling, but I appreciated them as a source of information, including some that I got nowhere else. I hope they can resurface somewhere.
I think that the Crusades are an interesting bit of history, but fundamentally not terribly relevant to the modern world. Christianity has simply changed too much, both for good and ill. The Christians of that day certainly aspired to the simple moral teachings of Christ, but I believe that the religion itself hadn't yet really begun to escape the cage of being a servant of the state that was imposed on it when Constantine adopted it as a state religion for Rome.
Modern Christianity is almost unparalleled as a powerful criticism of collectivism in all its forms, despite having been weakened considerably by humanist influences in the last couple of centuries.
While the stories of the personal trials and triumphs of the Crusaders can still be important, the Crusades themselves are ancient history as irrelevant to today as the treasure junks of Imperial China. Fascinating, of course. But with little to teach us about how modern commerce and international relations should be approached.
Chiu Chun-Ling.
"the Crusades themselves are ancient history as irrelevant to today as the treasure junks of Imperial China. Fascinating, of course. But with little to teach us about how modern commerce and international relations should be approached."
I disagree profoundly. Islam has been presented in the West as "The Religion of Peace" (only 5 years ago some muslim conference in London had a massive banner declaring that falsehood to be true.)
1) Westerners are indoctrinated to believe that the greatest genocide in history was that of the Nazis against the jews, and that many western countries were complicit in this genocide by not taking jewish refugees before the war, and not doing enough after the war. But the greatest genocide in history was that of the muslim invasion of asia - something no westerner is taught in school, something no western media outlet discusses.
2) Westerners are indoctrinated to believe that throughout the history of islam, muslims have lived peaceably side-by-side with christians, jews, buddhists, etc. Nothing could be further from the truth. The Crusades were a response to hundreds of years of muslim aggression. Instead, westerners are indoctrinated to believe that it was the Crusaders in their savagery and lust for violence who attempted to colonise "muslim lands" such as Palestine.
3) Westerners are indoctrinated to believe that the slave trade was something invented by christian europeans. Instead, the slave trade was an abominable but relatively short aberration on the part of europeans. It is the muslims who continuously took slaves from the time of Mohammed until now (the UN expert report on slavery in 1951 said that 1 in 20 of the population of Arabia and Yemen were slaves in 1950). The west should be proud (and Britain in particular) that it spent 200 years wiping out the muslim trade in slaves. I'd like to see museums running exhibits of that, alongside their displays of how many Africans were previously crammed into Briitsh slaving vessels.
These things are not irrelevant. They are directly relevant. The inverse of the truth is propounded by schools, museums, communists, the media and muslims, all in order to portray muslims as peaceful victims, and to shame the europeans into accepting the invaders and the destruction of western culture.
I can say this, because until 3 years ago I was one of those dhimmi lefties who believed (and propounded) precisely the false histories I'm outlining above.
Until muslims and westerners are educated about the shameful past of islam, muslims are not going to leave their ghetto mentality and their supremacism. If such an exodus from islam does not happen in the west in the next 2 generations, then we are going to see civil war.
I see the spread of these truths as profoundly important to preventing a devastating future. The Museum of London has a huge permanent exhibition on slavery. Despite being visited mostly by muslim school children, the exhibition contains not one word of the history of islamic slaving.
#12 Anonymos, 6:59pm.
I for myself used to work in different jobs during the 60ies and haven`t seen any Turks then.Be it.
But I assure, they are still sitting dourly away.The turkish father-in-law of a friend of mine arrived in the early sixties, has three lovely daughters with academic degrees,MD,Executive,.... and still doesn`t speak the barest german.Most of the older ones can hardly express themselves after 30 or more years in the country. This can not only have the reason in tricky grammar,that Mark Twain commented about in "A Tramp Abroad".They just don`t care.
Is the history of the Crusades important in our current so-called "modern" era?
It is when it comes to understanding the Islamist point of view and their motivations toward violence.
It doesn't say much about Christianity nor other religions, other than other religions aren't the one's striving to wage Holy Wars against every nation on the globe.
And if you're in a geography not directly affected by it past or present, then it holds little meaning.
Yeah, the Crusades were Holy Wars, but they were not initiated by European Christians the way revisionist historians want people to believe.
The real history, and the real importance in understanding the Crusades is understanding the long history of and deep seeded nature of aggression and violence woven througout Islamic ideology, doctrine, and culture.
Joe Bloggs
Good general description of the mythologies and miseducation regarding Isalm. I hope to hear more from you, especially hoping that there can be more and more specific, historical data to support revival of the use of the C-word. Those of us who overcame a progressivist background understand the allure of ahistorical fabrication.
Important notice from Ciccio
"I can date the start of this revision of history, the day the price of oil went from $4 to $25 a barrel - 1973."
I do think that the various Jihads of Islam are still very relevant today...the medieval ideology that drove them all is still very much a force in the world of today.
But, for good or ill, the statist Christianity of the Crusades is gone from the face of the Earth. The Reformation went a long way to weakening it, and the Enlightenment and Revolutionary periods finished it off completely. There are those delusional enough to claim that the Western nations are in constant danger of being taken over by Christian theocracies, but the charge is baseless. There is not a single Western government that would even consider seriously imposing Christian theocracy, and there can hardly be found a meaningful percentage of Christians that want them.
No, we should not cast all of history aside in our attempt to understand the present. The true history of slavery is still a vital issue, given that the Muslim world still practices it openly in their own countries and covertly even in the West. The massacres perpetrated by Muslims are as relevant today as ever, because they were motivated by the identical ideology which the West now seeks to understand.
But just because something was in the past and thus has somehow contributed to advancing history to the present moment, that doesn't mean that all of those events have much to tell us about how we ought to proceed. Seeing the Crusades in their correct context as a response to Islamic aggression is important to understanding them...but understanding the Crusades really doesn't tell us anything useful about the current situation.
Europe has changed. Christianity has changed. Islam hasn't changed, but the dramatic changes in Europe and Christianity have totally altered the character of the conflict. Can anyone imagine Muslims of a thousand years ago trying to use political suasion, mass immigration, and interfaith dialogues as weapons with which to subdue the West?
It's easier to imagine building nuclear powered naval vessels out of wood (though the Chinese apparently have tried it, who says they aren't innovative?). I am interested in the Crusades, but I think that it is easier to convince liberals that the Crusades have very little to teach us about today's world than to convince them that the Crusades were justified.
Both may be true...but one is a little more practical.
Chiu Chun-Ling.
Chiu said... "But just because something was in the past and thus has somehow contributed to advancing history to the present moment, that doesn't mean that all of those events have much to tell us about how we ought to proceed."
Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it.
But what you're saying is that just because the militant resistance to Islam worked for the Crusaders, that type of response may not be the correct response in our current day and age?
Herein lies or dilemma. The Islamic Crusades never ended. The Islamic aggression driving those initial conquests has never stopped and for the most part have solidified into their core ideology of global conquest.
How do we resist a miltant assault without a miltant defense?
The normal avenues of diplomacy don't work, can't work, when it comes to Islamic doctrine of global domination.
I can say this, because until 3 years ago I was one of those dhimmi lefties who believed (and propounded) precisely the false histories I'm outlining above.
you were a dhimi because you don't live on the border...
christians abolished slavery.
Anonymous: "Christians abolished slavery."
NO. That is the myth that enables leftists to convince everyone that WE will NOT be slaves. Slavery is still well and alive - as Muslims well know and intend to teach US through their enslavement of the West.
All sorts of slavery exists today - especially sexual slavery where women and children are kidnapped or sold off to be 1) young wives or child prostitutes shopped out for profit by Muslim families, or 2) child or adult prostitutes for criminal syndicates in cities or countries foreign to them - with sexual slaves of options 1 or 2 having little or no opportunity to escape their sexual enslavement.
The normal activity of national defense in response to overt aggression doesn't really qualify as "militant" in my understanding of the term. Not in the sense that military aggression is generally militant, at least. Securing one's borders and insisting on enforcing reasonable laws against violent criminality should merely be considered business as usual (that it is not currently usual in the West is distinctly unusual).
If the West delays too long in mounting a sane defense against the threat of Jihad, then some element of history might indeed repeat itself. Eventually, under the regressive social pressure that Koranic Islam is beginning to exert on Europe, it is possible that some form of Christian militancy could reemerge as the basis for waging a war, not of mere defense, but of ethnic survival.
I would hope that it is clear that waiting for such a situation to occur would not be an optimum strategy for countering Jihad. Furthermore, even that would not make the Crusades an adequate historical model for understanding the nature of the conflict and predicting the outcome. The Crusaders had homelands (and often estates and families) to return to after their campaigns in the Holy Land were finished. This dramatically affected the character and ultimate strategy of their military operations.
In the coming conflict, particularly if it is left to develop into a outright religious war on both sides, Europeans will be fighting on "death ground". There will be no homes for them to return to after the war, they will be fighting in the ruins of their own nations. There will be no option of orderly mass retreat, the great mass of the indigenous European people will have to choose between victory or death.
There are advantages and disadvantages to this situation from a military perspective...but from a historical perspective it is utterly incomparable with invading a hostile country or even defending a neighboring nation.
Continued...
One must also consider that, with the advance of modernity, Koranic Islam is simply not going to receive an infinite number of second chances in their pattern of mindless aggression resulting in humiliating defeats whenever they meet a determined opponent. Not to mention that most Muslims aren't really that eager to return to the poverty and oppression that are the lot of fully Islamic nations whenever they are left to their own devices. Even if Europe's Muslims still have the ability to return to their nations of origin in twenty years...they probably won't be particularly keen on doing so.
In light of these factors, I still am inclined to doubt that the Crusades (and their ultimate failure to either permanently secure the Holy Land or defend Byzantium) can really provide adequate tools to understand anything that is likely to occur in the coming conflict.
Indeed, the alterations wrought by modern dependence on energy resources such as oil rule out even the relevance of a serious push by modern Europe (or other modern nations) to gain control of the Middle East. The coalition that invaded Iraq declined to loot the natural resources present (despite accusations of having gone to war for no better reason), and the occupying forces are now pulling out as a deliberate statement of commitment to anti-imperialist principles (and a less-deliberate nod to the decline of the West's ability to maintain such an occupation). This seems to starkly contrast with the lessons that might have been drawn from the Crusades, from which Europe drew back as a result of improving conditions at home (not entirely unrelated to economic performance gains resulting from the conquests in the Holy Land despite the lack of any essential natural resources to be found there at the time).
Perhaps the main lesson the Crusades have to offer us is that the energetic efforts of the Western nations to improve the rest of the world in one way or another are bound to wane as long as they remain the very nicest places for anyone to live. And as long as the Western nations remain the leaders in promoting the values of Western Civilization, that is likely to ever be the case. While if they lose the distinction of being the nicest places to live...they aren't likely to engage in such 'benevolent' acts of 'conquest'.
Chiu Chun-Ling.
Anonymous: "Christians abolished slavery."
NO.
christians abolished slavery in christians countries.
That is the myth that enables leftists to convince everyone that WE will NOT be slaves. Slavery is still well and alive - as Muslims well know and intend to teach US through their enslavement of the West.
All sorts of slavery exists today -
TRAITORS (some are neoliberalists).
Not to mention that most Muslims aren't really that eager to return to the poverty and oppression that are the lot of fully Islamic nations whenever they are left to their own devices. Even if Europe's Muslims still have the ability to return to their nations of origin in twenty years...they probably won't be particularly keen on doing so.
but they want to islamise the west.
1/02/1492 - Granada was taken back from the invaders! God save the queen and the king of Castilla y Aragón!
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