Islam has succeeded, for the most part, in convincing the modern world that the Crusades were some mad design by the ancient West and that Westerners have no right to the Holy Lands. How is it that we Westerners seem to swallow these lies, especially when you consider that Christianity and Judaism predate Islam by many centuries? Now, once again, Islamic leadership is attempting to further change the historical facts by asking for an official apology from the Vatican for the Crusades.
Robert Spencer has written an excellent article on these subjects that you should read now:
Ever mindful of keeping the West on the defensive and portraying it as the guilty party in today’s global jihad, Al-Azhar (the highest ranking religious authority in Egypt and most respected Sunni Muslim authority in the world), has asked the Vatican for an official apology for the Crusades. Sheikh Fawzi Zafzaf, President of the Interfaith Dialogue Committee of Al-Azhar, explained that “Al-Azhar is only asking for a similar treatment” following Vatican apologies to other groups. According to the Vatican ambassador to Egypt, the Holy See is thinking it over.
This is just the latest indication that the Crusades have grown into a myth that little resembles reality, and remain politically charged over three years after President Bush was roundly criticized for labeling the war on terror a “Crusade.” Bill Clinton even explained 9/11 as fallout from the Crusades: “Indeed, in the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the Temple mound?. I can tell you that that story is still being told to today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it.”
The West has questioned the Crusades — something probably not possible if the shoe were on the Islamic foot — almost since they took place. Virtually all Westerners have learned to apologize for the Crusades, but less noted is the fact that the Crusades have an Islamic counterpart for which no one is apologizing and of which few are even aware. Over a hundred years ago, Mark Twain spoke for many Westerners in Tom Sawyer Abroad when he has Tom explain to Huck Finn that he wants to go to the Holy Land to liberate it from the Muslims.
“How,” Huck asks, “did we come to let them git holt of it?”
“We didn’t come to let them git hold of it,” Tom explains. “They always had it.”
“Why, Tom, then it must belong to them, don’t it?”
“Why of course it does. Who said it didn’t?”
Historical fact says it didn’t. As it happens, I am these days working on a new book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades, which will out from Regnery Publishing in a few months. In it, I am clearing away propaganda and telling what really happened. Islam originated in Arabia in the seventh century. At that time Egypt, Libya, and all of North Africa were Christian, and had been so for hundreds of years. So were Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Asia Minor. The churches that St. Paul addressed in his letters collected in the New Testament are located in Asia Minor, modern Turkey, as well as modern Greece. North of Greece, in a buffer zone between Eastern and Western Europe, were lands that would become the Christian domains of the Slavs. Antioch and Constantinople (Istanbul), in modern Turkey, and Alexandria, in modern Egypt, were three of the most important Christian centers of the first millennium.
But then Muhammad and his Muslim armies arose out of the desert, and — as most modern textbooks would put it — these lands became Muslim. But in fact the transition was cataclysmic. Muslims won these lands by conquest and, in obedience to the words of the Qur’an and the Prophet, put to the sword the infidels therein who refused to submit to the new Islamic regime. Those who remained alive lived in humiliating second-class status. Conversion to Islam became the only way to live a decent life. And lo and behold, the Christian populations of these areas steadily diminished.
Read the entire article here.
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