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President Obama is quite
 wrong about the Crusades

Sorry to say so, but either the President could do with an intensive course in world history, or he was being deliberately disingenuous when, at the National Prayer Breakfast, he claimed that the Crusades and the Inquisition are somehow the moral equivalent of the Islamic State’s barbarism in Syria and Iraq.

The Emirate of Córdoba

Al-Andalus under the Umayyad Caliphates (The Emirate of Córdoba), 756–788. From Wikimedia, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

Granted that bad deeds have been done in the name of Christianity, but they have been aberrations, utterly contrary to the Church’s teachings, and not at the behest of a theological imperative. Moreover, it was largely Christians, inspired by Christ’s admonitions, who rid our country of slavery and Jim Crow.

By contrast, mass executions, raping women, crucifying children, burying children alive, murdering homosexuals, stoning adulterers, mass enslavements, forced conversions, lopping off hands and feet (not to overlook the burning of a Jordanian pilot alive) have all been part of life’s rich pattern throughout the entire 1,400 year history of Islam.

As Jonah Goldberg pointed out in The National Review Online, the Inquisition and the Crusades aren’t the indictments the president thinks they are. “For starters,” he wrote, “The Crusades—despite their terrible organised cruelties—were a defensive war.”

Then quoting Bernard Lewis, the “greatest living English-language historian of Islam,” he went on: “The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad—a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war.”

The First Crusade, which began in 1095, was launched:

460 years after the first Christian city was overrun by Muslim armies.

457 years after Muslims conquered the Christian and Jewish Holy City Jerusalem.

453 years after the Christian country of Egypt was invaded and conquered by Muslims.

443 years after Italy was subjected to rapine and pillage by Muslim invaders.

427 years after Muslims armies first besieged the Constantinople, the capital city of the Christian Byzantine Empire.

380 years after Christian Spain was conquered by Muslim invaders.

363 years after France was first attacked by Muslim invaders.

249 years after Rome, a major centre of Western Christianity, was sacked and pillaged by Muslim armies.

Bataille de Poitiers, en octobre 732

Bataille de Poitiers, en octobre 732, (Charles Martel in the Battle of Tours), by Charles de Steuben (1788–1856). From Wikimedia.

The First Crusade was, thus, a much belated response to centuries upon centuries of church burnings, massacres, enslavements, and forced conversions of Christians. Indeed, by the time the crusades began, Muslims had conquered two thirds of the Christian world.

In short, the very idea that the crusades were the moral equivalent of the barbaric history of Islam is sheer effrontery. GPHX✠

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