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Crusades – Limits to Growth https://www.limitstogrowth.org An iconoclastic view of immigration and culture Sun, 22 Apr 2018 18:09:45 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.5.3 Robert Spencer Explains Why the Crusades Were Not an Evil Attack on Poor Innocent Muslims https://www.limitstogrowth.org/articles/2018/04/22/robert-spencer-explains-why-the-crusades-were-not-an-evil-attack-on-poor-innocent-muslims/ Sun, 22 Apr 2018 18:09:45 +0000 https://www.limitstogrowth.org/?p=16455 Kudos to Robert Spencer for supplying a briefo history of the Crusades that obliterates the whole idiot idea that Islamophobia springs somehow from meanie Christians invading the Middle East in the Middle Ages. Jihadists would have us believe that the Crusades were an unwarranted attack upon peaceful muslims when that is not an accurate history [...]]]> Kudos to Robert Spencer for supplying a briefo history of the Crusades that obliterates the whole idiot idea that Islamophobia springs somehow from meanie Christians invading the Middle East in the Middle Ages. Jihadists would have us believe that the Crusades were an unwarranted attack upon peaceful muslims when that is not an accurate history at all.

Robert Spencer reports that Holy Cross’ Crusader mascot is being axed because of political correctness regarding Islam.

Islam was spread by the sword across the region to North Africa and beyond following its founding. So Westerners have no reason to feel guilty in any way about the Crusades or beholden to muslims who want to manipulate us about immigration or in other ways.

(For a little more detail on this subject, see The Real History of the Crusades by Professor Thomas Madden.)

As the founder of JihadWatch.org and author of many well referenced (and readable!) books about Islam, Robert Spencer is an excellent explainer of all things muslim.

Spencer’s recent video was a reading of an article published online in March:

College of the Holy Cross Axes ‘Crusader’ Mascot to Avoid ‘Islamophobia’ By Robert Spencer, PJ Media, March 21, 2018

The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, is dropping its Crusader mascot. The College Fix reports that the Catholic college “has decided to stop using ‘knight imagery’ to represent its ‘Crusaders’ nickname amid concerns that it evokes ‘the violence of the Crusades’ and promotes ‘Islamophobia.’”

The Holy Cross Board of Trustees declared that the Crusades were “among the darkest periods in Church history,” but the college is going to continue using the Crusader name while dropping the knight mascot. The Board exhorted students to instead see themselves as Crusaders for Leftist buzzwords: “Crusaders for human rights, social justice, and care for the environment; for respect for different perspectives, cultures, traditions, and identities; and for service in the world, especially to the underserved and vulnerable.”

Holy Cross President Fr. Philip Boroughs explained: “[T]he visual depiction of a knight, in conjunction with the moniker Crusader, inevitably ties us directly to the reality of the religious wars and the violence of the Crusades.”

The lesson is clear at Holy Cross: the Crusades are something to be ashamed of, and the school’s Catholic students should not take pride in knowing that the Crusades are part of their Church’s history.

Yet as I show in my forthcoming book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, the Crusades were not, as Holy Cross administrators and students evidently assume, an unprovoked exercise of proto-colonialism directed against a peaceful Muslim world.

The Crusades were in reality a late, small-scale defensive response after 450 years of jihad attacks had conquered and Islamicized what had previously been over half of the Christian world.

Armies animated by the jihad ideology (or that eventually justified their actions by recourse to it) had occupied much of the Middle East, North Africa, and Spain — as well as Persia and much of India — centuries before a Crusade was even contemplated. They had entered France and besieged Constantinople, the capital of the Christian Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, several times.

The Seljuk Turks’ victory over the Byzantines at Manzikert in 1071, when they took the Emperor Romanus IV Diogenes prisoner, opened all of Asia Minor to them. In 1076, they conquered Syria; in 1077, Jerusalem. The Seljuk Emir Atsiz bin Uwaq promised not to harm the inhabitants of Jerusalem, but once his men had entered the city, they murdered 3,000 people.

That same year, the Seljuks established the sultanate of Rum (Rome, referring to the New Rome, Constantinople) in Nicaea, perilously close to Constantinople itself; from there they continued to threaten the Byzantines and harass the Christians all over their new domains. The Byzantine Empire, which before Islam’s wars of conquest had ruled over a vast expanse including southern Italy, North Africa, the Middle East, and Arabia, was reduced to little more than Greece. It looked as if its demise at the hands of the Seljuks was imminent.

The Church of Constantinople considered the Pope a schismatic and had squabbled with him for centuries, but the new Byzantine Emperor Alexius I Comnenus swallowed his pride and appealed for help.

And that is how the First Crusade came about: it was a response to the Byzantine Emperor’s call for help against Muslim invaders who threatened to destroy the Christian empire.

It is undeniable that the Crusaders committed many atrocities. So did their jihadi opponents. But in the main, the Crusader endeavor was not an exercise in imperialism or proto-colonialism, but an attempt to protect Christians from jihad attacks.

So why shouldn’t Holy Cross College have a Crusader mascot and take pride in its own culture and heritage? Because that culture is spent, and weak, and confused, and anxious to appease a much more confident alternative culture that regards the Crusades as an affront.

The West continues its cultural self-abnegation in the face of the chimera of “Islamophobia” — a propaganda neologism designed to make people ashamed of defending themselves and their homeland against a newly aggressive Islamic jihad.

Holy Cross, of course, is not alone. The rush to disavow any connection to Crusaders is part of a larger tendency to remain in denial about the jihad aggression that threatens so many in the world today. It manifests an acceptance of the Islamic view of history — which has been aggressively thrust upon the West in recent decades — that blames the origin of conflict between Muslims and Christians upon the evil Crusaders despite the timeline which proves this false.

At a time when the Crusaders’ ancient jihadi foes are newly invigorated and more aggressive than they have been for centuries, this cultural self-hatred is a recipe for disaster.

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Obama Uses Prayer Breakfast to Bash Americans and Christians https://www.limitstogrowth.org/articles/2015/02/05/obama-uses-prayer-breakfast-to-bash-americans-and-christians/ Fri, 06 Feb 2015 01:52:11 +0000 https://www.limitstogrowth.org/?p=10967 The President really should avoid the National Prayer Breakfast because it is not a good venue for his unique skill set. Rather than adopting an attitude of humble spirituality, his inner lecturer tends to take over, and expresses itself in tiresome tropes of moral equivalency like comparing medieval Christianity with today’s headchoppy arsonist Islam.

His [...]]]> The President really should avoid the National Prayer Breakfast because it is not a good venue for his unique skill set. Rather than adopting an attitude of humble spirituality, his inner lecturer tends to take over, and expresses itself in tiresome tropes of moral equivalency like comparing medieval Christianity with today’s headchoppy arsonist Islam.

His strongest religious belief is apparently that Americans are sinners, both historically and currently, who need to be scolded and punished, as well as replaced by illegal aliens.

Yes, Professor, the Inquisition was evil, and bad things happened during the Crusades, though the goal of defending Christianity’s home from hostile Muslims was quite noble. But appalling atrocities occur today and the President routinely excuses them because of the religion of the killers.

The mention of the Crusades is another bow to jihadists, who commonly refer to Christians as Crusaders, and not in a friendly way. In 1998, Osama bin Laden urged fellow Muslims to join him in jihad against “Jews and Crusaders.”

This is the same Obama who declared to the United Nations assembly in 2012, “The future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.”

Laura Ingraham appeared on Fox News on Thursday to discuss the Obama shenanigans.

Victor Davis Hanson dashed off some relevant historical background to refute Obama’s equivocation:

Still More of President Obama’s Moral Equivalence, By Victor Davis Hanson, NROnline, February 5, 2015

President Obama, at the National Prayer Breakfast this morning, said:

Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.

This is banal.

The problem with all such high-horse declarations by Obama is his continual omission of historical context and, in this case, his conflation of the frequent with the rare. The Crusades began in 1095, almost a millennium ago; the Inquisition in 1478, now over 500 years past. When the president says “people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” he should remember that all religions at the time committed terrible deeds that shock the modern sense of morality — given the savage wars between Christendom and Islam, and the religious purifications and civil discord common to all the religious factional strife that played out, violently, in accord with the ethos of the times.

Slavery was outlawed in the U.S. in 1865. Jim Crow ended officially a half-century ago. Indentured servitude, however, continues, almost exclusively among some Islamic groups in the Middle East and Africa. The caste system and ethnic and religious tribalism that institutionalized discrimination and second-class status, quite akin to Jim Crow, persist in places in Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. I doubt today whether a Jew of any nationality would be allowed to immigrate and buy real estate in too many corners of the Islamic Middle East. Outside of the West, women and homosexuals are often treated no differently than in the Seventh Century.

In fact, Christian countries were the first to legally end the age-old human sin of the slave trade, and the first to outlaw slavery’s continuance. The president, is fond of historical sloppiness and moral equivalence (cf. the Cairo Speech). But what is the point of citing sins of 1,000, 500, 150, or 50 years ago, without acknowledging 1) that such pathologies still continue today outside the West, especially in the world of Islam, and 2) that Christianity had a unique role in ending these wrongs?

So the question for the president is, why does such medieval violence persist to a much greater degree among so many Islamic extremists in the present world than among most zealots of other religions? (This is an empirical statement. Cf., for instance, the nature of recent global terror attacks in resources such as the Global Terrorism Database). And why search the distant past for examples of moral equivalence, unless the present does not offer suitable data?

Did Churchill point to the excesses of Oliver Cromwell, or did Daladier to the French Revolution, to remind their contemporaries that National Socialism in Germany was not doing anything differently in the 1930s than had their own countries in the distant past? Those of the 1930s who sought to make such facile comparisons between their own past and Germany’s present were written off as appeasers.

Areas of Central and Latin America are as poor as the Middle East, but Christian liberation theologists, unlike the Islamic State, are not beheading and burning prisoners alive to advance their redistributionist cause. Chinese imperialists and colonialists have absorbed Tibet, but the Dalai Lama is not sending suicide bombers into China. The children of East Prussians expelled from 1945-47 are not suiting up with suicide vests to attack Poles. Impoverished Hindu extremists, angry at centuries of British colonialism, do not hijack planes and ram them into high-rises in British cities. Jews are not blowing up cartoonists and satirists in Paris and Germany who deny or caricature the Holocaust.

No one has easy answers to the dilemma of contemporary violent Islamism; for brief interludes in the recent past, secular ideologies were more likely than radical Islam to be the expressed popular driving forces in the violent Middle East (e.g., fascism [1930s], Communism [1940s], Baathism and Pan-Arabism [1950s], which produced the Grand Mufti, Nasser, the Assads, Arafat, Saddam, and Qaddafi). The president and his advisers should be investigating why radical Islam is currently terrorizing the globe, rather than denying it entirely, hiding it by euphemisms, or excusing it by citing morally equivalent examples from the past.

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BBC Islamic Puff Piece Pierced https://www.limitstogrowth.org/articles/2010/08/29/bbc-islamic-puff-piece-pierced/ Mon, 30 Aug 2010 06:08:43 +0000 https://www.limitstogrowth.org/?p=1973 It’s both unfortunate and disturbing that Britain’s state news organization, the BBC, has become a propaganda arm for hostile Islam, while simultaneously denigrating Christianity and free societies like the United States. (The news organization apparently believes that the noble “Religion of Peace” has been hijacked by a small band of violent extremists.)

The BBC presentation [...]]]> It’s both unfortunate and disturbing that Britain’s state news organization, the BBC, has become a propaganda arm for hostile Islam, while simultaneously denigrating Christianity and free societies like the United States. (The news organization apparently believes that the noble “Religion of Peace” has been hijacked by a small band of violent extremists.)

The BBC presentation shown below about the history of the Crusades must be aimed at young people with short attention spans, given the brevity (several hundred years explained in less than 5 minutes!) and snarky attitude. But even worse than the flippant style is the disinformation concerning important events in the history of western civilization.

Blogger Vladtepes has annotated the piece with corrections on the most egregious whoppers.

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