Michael Coren On The Crusades
Posted on November 28, 2010 by Joel at http://www.barnzilla.ca/blog/?p=3942
From As I See It:
There is nothing easier and more productive in these addled times than an enterprise with its origins in Europe or Christendom, particularly if the alleged victims are members of another religion or ethnicity. President Bush was obliged to expunge the word "crusade" from a speech about the war in Iraq and it is a standard insult in Arab rhetoric to call opponents "Crusaders" and to allege that The Crusades themselves have never actually ended.
Odd really, in that it was the Muslims themselves who started these wars in the first place. The Crusades were almost entirely defensive in nature, an attempt to gain back Christian lands that had been conquered by Islamic armies, often with the utmost brutality. Far from the multi-cultural liberals depicted by contemporary history, many of the leaders of the Islamic empire were grotesquely violent, profoundly intolerant and had entered the region without any moral right or cause.
Palestine, Syria and Egypt were at one point almost entirely Christian and represented the very epicenter of Christian thought and energy. By the eighth century Muslim armies has [sic] conquered North Africa and most of Spain and were determined to move into other Christian territory.
It is essential to remember that Roman Catholic Spain was invaded by foreign, Islamic soldiers and occupied for generations. It was only armed resistance by the Christian knights and people of the region that led to the country being liberated. Odd how this is not used as some historical stick with which to beat Islam, whilst Islam so frequently pours guilt over the west by referring to the Crusades.
In the eleventh century the Seljuk Turks declared war on Asia Minor, modern Turkey, an area that had then been Christian for a thousand years. This was a prolonged and deliberate world war, started by a loose coalition of Islamic nations and directed against the Byzantine Empire.
It was only after such systematic provocation that in 1095 Pope Urban II called for Europe to take back these Christian lands, mainly because of the screams for help from the eastern emperor in Constantinople. What followed was a number of attempts over more than a century, some successful and some ludicrous, to win back large chunks of the Middle East for Christianity. To restore the region to what it had been before Islamic expansion.
The last Crusaders were defeated and expelled by 1291, but in their time in the region they had experienced success as well as defeat. Jerusalem was captured, a Christian kingdom was established, new orders of Christian knights had been developed. There had been horror and heroism, grace and grime.
Our sound-bite culture, however, is allergic to nuance. Far easier and more politically convenient to depict Christians as festering warlords and Muslims as perennial victims. The problem is that life, history, religion and reality is a little more complex than that. (pp. 55-56)