to the poster “hello” above who states: “You can’t choose when history is relevant for your argument”… You also shouldn’t twist history to promote your own bizarre pro-Islam anti-Christian narrative. You conclude your post by suggesting that you believe “ALL RELIGION is a joke.” Well enough, but an examination of your post reveals a curious yet consistent lauding of Islam and Islamic motives, and a denigrating attitude against Christianity and Christian motives:
“The wealth of the Muslim occupiers and the relative poverty of the papacy are not stressed in popular accounts of the Crusades…” – how did those Muslims come to possess that “wealth” — could it have possibly been from campaigns (crusades) far more reaching, rapacious, and sustained than anything the Christians ever committed? By the time of the First Crusade, the Muslims had rampages across the entirety of the “Holy Land” and “Arabia”, formerly occupied by Jews and Christians et al, looting and slaughtering genocidally, all of Northern Africa, looting and slaughtering genocidally, Spain, looting and slaughtering genocidally, and as far as Persia and India, looting and slaughtering genocidally. Could this have had anything to do with the putative wealth you ascribe to them? Were their motives any better than those you ascribe to the Christians? Of course not, yet you concentrate on excoriating only the Christians, who waged 4 notoriously unsuccessful “Crusades”, yet give the Muslims a pass. Why is that?
You also state: “On the minus side, the Crusades are often touted as a harbinger of the revival of Europe from the intellectual slumber of the Dark Ages through contact with a higher civilization. In fact, it was peaceful contact with Spanish Muslims, not warfare with Palestinian Muslims, that awakened Europe. ” Aside from being an unsubstantiated assertion, this also follows the same assumptions that you express above, i.e. Islam is somehow “superior”, and the Christians are inferior. Why is that?
The post-modern narrative which largely ascribes criminality only to the Western camp, while lauding and excusing the actions of the avowed enemies of that camp is very threadbare. And attempts by such posters to shift attention away from Muslim misdeeds and Islam onto putative Christian misdeeds of nearly a thousand years ago strikes me as slightly insane. The poster assures us he is an equal opportunity religion scoffer — yet the only religion I see him attacking is Christianity, while giving Islam a pass. This is one reason why dismissing concerns about the warmongering genocidal “religion” of Islam is so dangerous. Yes, those Christians who fought their various Crusades did so for various, and often quite un-Christian reasons, whereas those Muslims who raped and pillaged their way to the front yard of Western Europe in Spain, Byzantium, Austria, etc. did so following the essential tenets of their hideous faith. It is a bleak reality that many radical secularists have so deeply consumed the deeply anti-Christian anti-Western (and very often Marxist) “analysis” of history, also are the first to give Islam a complete historical pass, despite their claims of secularism or contempt for religion.
