Crusades all over again

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[h=2]The Real History of the Crusades[/h][h=3]A series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics? Think again.
Thomas F. Madden/ MAY 6, 2005

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Image: Jean Colombe / Wikimedia Commons
Siege of Tyre (1187)

With the possible exception of Umberto Eco, medieval scholars are not used to getting much media attention. We tend to be a quiet lot (except during the annual bacchanalia we call the International Congress on Medieval Studies in Kalamazoo, Michigan, of all places), poring over musty chronicles and writing dull yet meticulous studies that few will read. Imagine, then, my surprise when within days of the September 11 attacks, the Middle Ages suddenly became relevant.
As a Crusade historian, I found the tranquil solitude of the ivory tower shattered by journalists, editors, and talk-show hosts on tight deadlines eager to get the real scoop. What were the Crusades?, they asked. When were they? Just how insensitive was President George W. Bush for using the word crusade in his remarks? With a few of my callers I had the distinct impression that they already knew the answers to their questions, or at least thought they did. What they really wanted was an expert to say it all back to them. For example, I was frequently asked to comment on the fact that the Islamic world has a just grievance against the West. Doesn't the present violence, they persisted, have its roots in the Crusades' brutal and unprovoked attacks against a sophisticated and tolerant Muslim world? In other words, aren't the Crusades really to blame?
Osama bin Laden certainly thinks so. In his various video performances, he never fails to describe the American war against terrorism as a new Crusade against Islam. Ex-president Bill Clinton has also fingered the Crusades as the root cause of the present conflict. In a speech at Georgetown University, he recounted (and embellished) a massacre of Jews after the Crusader conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 and informed his audience that the episode was still bitterly remembered in the Middle East. (Why Islamist terrorists should be upset about the killing of Jews was not explained.) Clinton took a beating on the nation's editorial pages for wanting so much to blame the United States that he was willing to reach back to the Middle Ages. Yet no one disputed the ex-president's fundamental premise.
Well, almost no one. Many historians had been trying to set the record straight on the Crusades long before Clinton discovered them. They are not revisionists, like the American historians who manufactured the Enola Gay exhibit, but mainstream scholars offering the fruit of several decades of very careful, very serious scholarship. For them, this is a "teaching moment," an opportunity to explain the Crusades while people are actually listening. It won't last long, so here goes.



[/h][h=4]The threat of Islam[/h][h=3]Misconceptions about the Crusades are all too common. The Crusades are generally portrayed as a series of holy wars against Islam led by power-mad popes and fought by religious fanatics. They are supposed to have been the epitome of self-righteousness and intolerance, a black stain on the history of the Catholic Church in particular and Western civilization in general. A breed of proto-imperialists, the Crusaders introduced Western aggression to the peaceful Middle East and then deformed the enlightened Muslim culture, leaving it in ruins. For variations on this theme, one need not look far. See, for example, Steven Runciman's famous three-volume epic, History of the Crusades, or the BBC/A&E documentary, The Crusades, hosted by Terry Jones. Both are terrible history yet wonderfully entertaining.
So what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.
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Not much has changed. Time to start a new Crusade. Oops that is not politically correct to say LOL much less to do. Obama had a blast in Cuba while the people in Brussels faced real blasts.
 

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Why Obama’s use of the term ISIL instead of ISIS is actually really important By Meghan Updated 09/15/2014 | 2:22 PM EDT Share This Tweet This0 Comments ISIL. ISIS. IS. DAISH. You have probably heard each one of those acronyms at least once over the last several months as the media and politicians attempt to determine the best way to refer to the terror group that declared a caliphate spanning Syria and Iraq. IS simply stands for the Islamic State, while ISIS stands for the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria. ISIL is the acronym for the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, which seems remarkably similar to ISIS. The differentiation between the word ‘Syria’ and the word ‘Levant’ is actually quite significant, however, given the usage of the term by President Obama and his administration. “ISIS and ISIL. The President is making a big deal out of this is ISIL, right? The Administration wants to call it ISIL,” Glenn said on radio this morning. “Stu, what’s the difference between ISIS and ISIL?” “Interesting fact about the Levant,” Stu responded. “[It] encompasses parts of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Egypt, and a place called Israel.” Quartz has more on the distinction: The group’s name in Arabic is al dawla al islamiyye f’il iraq w’al sham. The last word, sham, is the problematic one. It is used, in the phrase bilad al sham, to refer variously to: the contemporary Levant, a somewhat amorphous region sometimes understood to include Iraq, and sometimes not; to the historical region called al sham in classical Arabic but known to the ancient Greeks and other civilizations as “Syria” or a variant thereof, which is roughly contiguous with the Levant; and to a Syrian nationalist dream of a “Greater Syria,” a region of similar extent that includes Iraq. Sham is also a contemporary nickname for Damascus, the Syrian capital; but modern-day Syria is called suriya. […] At Quartz we’ve chosen to render sham as “Levant” over “Syria,” on the grounds that while scholars of Middle Eastern history might recognize “Syria” to have a broader meaning, most of our readers will take it to mean modern-day Syria, i.e., suriya, not sham. And then, if you’re using “Levant,” you might as well as abbreviate it logically—so, ISIL. “So the president has the most powerful microphone on the planet,” Glenn said. “The slightest thing from the president reverberates… We have been joking ISIS, ISIL, what’s the difference. You say tomato; I say tomato. It makes a big difference because of this: ISIL includes Levant, which includes the area we like to call Israel.” Obama has come under fire for underestimating the threat of this “jayvee team” wreaking havoc across the Middle East and threatening the western way of life, and yet he continuously refers to them as ISIL. “They changed their name because they started saying, ‘We are bigger than this. We are bigger than Iraq and Syria. We are Iraq, Syria, and Levant,’” Glenn said of the terror group. “I don’t know what that means, but, believe me, the President does… What that means is: They have designs that go from Iran through Egypt. There is no Israel.” “So by the President saying ‘this is ISIL,’ he is sending the message: I know who you are. I know what lands you are planning to take,” he concluded. “The President knows who these guys are. [But] he’s not telling you who they are. He’s trying to downplay that they are putting together a caliphate from Egypt to Iran. It does not include Israel. Maybe we should have a real frank conversation about what’s really going on.”

Source: http://www.glennbeck.com/2014/09/15/why-obamas-use-of-the-term-isil-instead-of-isis-is-actually-really-important/?utm_source=glennbeck&utm_medium=contentcopy_link
 

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Bosnian Serb officials have named a student dorm after wartime leader Radovan Karadžić only days
ahead of a Hague-based war crimes court for his role in the 1990s conflict.
He just today was sentenced to 40 years in jail because of his actions in the Bosnian Civil War by the
one-sided World Court in Belgium of all places.

How the World Court sided with Bosnian Muslims in a civil war with the Southern Slavs is beyond me.
Was Karadžić trying to keep at bay the hideous infestation that Europe is experiencing now, seems to me
he was.
 

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Bosnian Serb officials have named a student dorm after wartime leader Radovan Karadžić only days
ahead of a Hague-based war crimes court for his role in the 1990s conflict.
He just today was sentenced to 40 years in jail because of his actions in the Bosnian Civil War by the
one-sided World Court in Belgium of all places.

How the World Court sided with Bosnian Muslims in a civil war with the Southern Slavs is beyond me.
Was Karadžić trying to keep at bay the hideous infestation that Europe is experiencing now, seems to me
he was.

I would love to know the full story of Milosovich and the Muslims. This was pre-internet days so all we had to rely on for news was CNN. The picture painted was Christians slaughtering Muslims, a genocide, 3 soldiers captured, Jesse Fucking Jackson, and finally Milosovich to the Hague. Nobody thanked America for interceding as far as I remember.
 

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I would love to know the full story of Milosovich and the Muslims. This was pre-internet days so all we had to rely on for news was CNN. The picture painted was Christians slaughtering Muslims, a genocide, 3 soldiers captured, Jesse Fucking Jackson, and finally Milosovich to the Hague. Nobody thanked America for interceding as far as I remember.

It makes me sick to think we probably supported the wrong side.
 

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