December 01, 2015

Like Most People, President Obama Gets The Crusades Wrong

Greg Scandlen makes many good points in telling us what the crusades were really about -- points which are accurate and well-informed as far as I can see.  And I speak as someone who has made something of a study of the Byzantine period.  He points out the basic truth that the Crusades were a response to the Muslim invasion of Christian lands, not an invasion of Muslim lands.  The crusaders simply took back lands that had belonged to Christendom for a thousand years -- Biblical lands.

But the main point surely is to ask:  WHY is something that happened a thousand years ago any excuse for something happening today?  Why are the crusades any excuse for anti-Western violence by Muslims today? No-one would normally think that a sane proposal to make but when you are dealing with Muslims and their apologists reason flies out the window.  If it were sane we would have Britons going to Germany and bombing Germans because Germans invaded Britain a thousand years ago.

The whole idea is a version of punishing children for the misdeeds of their parents, which is generally recognized as a breach of natural law:  You should not be punished for something you didn't do

If we were to use Muslim reasoning, we should be making random raids on Muslim lands to steal their property, kill their men and rape their women -- because that is what the Muslim corsairs  of North Africa did to coastal Europe right up until the 19th century  -- until finally terminated by the French conquest of Algiers in 1830.

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