Iraq War = Crusades?

Does anyone else see a resemblence between the wars?

Until I see Army ads on TV "Jesus wants you to shoot Muslims!!", or "Bush is the defender of the Christian Nation!"... Or something... I would say no.

I hear this idea thrown around a lot, I never really see any real comparasion.

No. The President respects Muslims as he would Christians, Just my opinon.

When the Pope calls for their heads, then its a Crusade.

SoupySayles said:

When the Pope calls for their heads, then its a Crusade.

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Well put!

SoupySayles said:

When the Pope calls for their heads, then its a Crusade.

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Yep, that's what I'd call a crusade.

But even then, crusaders were aiming to reconquer Jerusalem, so that's another point where the comparison is awkward.

However, it was not a good idea to use the word "crusade" as Bush did. He didn't speak explicitly only about Iraq, he meant a crusade against the "Axis of Evil". To me, that was a clumsy use of terminology.

Were the Crusades about oil too?

No. Maybe you guys should study some actual contemporary views on the Crusades. They were fought to regain Christian territory taken by force by Muslims. They were defensive. If they hadn't been fought, Europe would have become Muslim 1000 years ago, instead of in the next generation, as they are embracing it by immigration now.

brewmama said:

No. Maybe you guys should study some actual contemporary views on the Crusades. They were fought to regain Christian territory taken by force by Muslims. They were defensive. If they hadn't been fought, Europe would have become Muslim 1000 years ago, instead of in the next generation, as they are embracing it by immigration now.

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I have never ever heard that. And, perhaps you should read the news. People aren't taking to kindly to the Muslims in Brussels. So much angst in fact that the government has had to step in in places like Belgium

brewmama said:

No. Maybe you guys should study some actual contemporary views on the Crusades. They were fought to regain Christian territory taken by force by Muslims. They were defensive. If they hadn't been fought, Europe would have become Muslim 1000 years ago, instead of in the next generation, as they are embracing it by immigration now.

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The Crusades were not defensive. They were offensive. They were foriegn Christians attacking Muslims in places they had never even seen before they invaded. Not to mention they were mostly just another case of Europeans slaughtering innocent people in the name of God.

didn't bush himself refer to it as a "crusade"

QustantinahQuaker said:

The Crusades were not defensive. They were offensive. They were foriegn Christians attacking Muslims in places they had never even seen before they invaded. Not to mention they were mostly just another case of Europeans slaughtering innocent people in the name of God.

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No, that isn't true. Just because they had never been there has nothing to do with the fact that all of the Middle East and North Africa was once Christian before the Muslims took it by conquest. Not to mention that they got Spain and had started invading France, and got as far as Vienna on the other side. They would have overtaken Europe if they hadn't been turned back, by war.

phylis said:

I have never ever heard that. And, perhaps you should read the news. People aren't taking to kindly to the Muslims in Brussels. So much angst in fact that the government has had to step in in places like Belgium

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I am actually aware of news. And it's a little late now, since Europeans have a negative birth rate and won't be able to keep the economy going without the Muslim immigration, although, as you say, they are beginning to rue it.

brewmama said:

No, that isn't true. Just because they had never been there has nothing to do with the fact that all of the Middle East and North Africa was once Christian before the Muslims took it by conquest. Not to mention that they got Spain and had started invading France, and got as far as Vienna on the other side. They would have overtaken Europe if they hadn't been turned back, by war.

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The whole of the Middle East and North Africa was not Christian before Muslim conquest. For one thing, much of the Middle East was pagan, having nothing to do with Christianity or Islam. They were worshiping multiple gods and so forth.North Africa on the other hand was only Christian on the coast. Most of the coastal cities were Christian wehreas the vast majority of it was pagan Berbers. How did the Christians take North Africa and the Middle East? Conquest. No different than did the Muslims. The only reason those regions were Christian is because Rome conquered them and then made Christianity the state religion. The Christian Europeans who went into the Holy Land were not attacked by Muslims. The French were not attacked by Mushreqis. They were attacked by North Africans. The Spainards took back the penninsula in a brutal fashion, and at least had claim to the penninsual. Frenchmen, Germans, Englishmen etc. had no claim in the Levant. The Byzantines who were suppressing many Christians in the regions that Crusaders were trying to take back for them treated Christians there worse than the Muslims did. The Reconquista was defensive, the Crusades into the Holy Land were offensive just like the initial European movements into it. Furthermore there is no way to justify the murderous behavior of the Crusaders once they reached the Holy Land. The Crusader attitude is the same of the Katai'b and Gaurdians of the Cedars who use relgion to justify killing Muslim/Arab women and children. What did the Albigensian Crusade have to do with Muslims? Nothing at all. What about the Northern Crusades? Those were offensive in every manner. The Battle of Viena was defensive, but most others before that were on offense and were murderous onslaughts of innocent people. Furthermore the atrocious crimes against the Jews in Europe and the treatment of nonChristians by the chruch during the Crusades were not Christian in their character and were certainly on offense. If these actions are "defensive" than September 11 and the massacres in Algeria by the GIA/FIS are "defensive" as well as the Muslim extremists want to "take back" their Islamic culture. The Crusaders were terrorists.

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.

Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.

With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.

That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.

Pope Urban II called upon the knights of Christendom to push back the conquests of Islam at the Council of Clermont in 1095. The response was tremendous. Many thousands of warriors took the vow of the cross and prepared for war. Why did they do it? The answer to that question has been badly misunderstood. In the wake of the Enlightenment, it was usually asserted that Crusaders were merely lacklands and ne’er-do-wells who took advantage of an opportunity to rob and pillage in a faraway land. The Crusaders’ expressed sentiments of piety, self-sacrifice, and love for God were obviously not to be taken seriously. They were only a front for darker designs.

During the past two decades, computer-assisted charter studies have demolished that contrivance. Scholars have discovered that crusading knights were generally wealthy men with plenty of their own land in Europe. Nevertheless, they willingly gave up everything to undertake the holy mission. Crusading was not cheap. Even wealthy lords could easily impoverish themselves and their families by joining a Crusade. They did so not because they expected material wealth (which many of them had already) but because they hoped to store up treasure where rust and moth could not corrupt. They were keenly aware of their sinfulness and eager to undertake the hardships of the Crusade as a penitential act of charity and love. Europe is littered with thousands of medieval charters attesting to these sentiments, charters in which these men still speak to us today if we will listen. Of course, they were not opposed to capturing booty if it could be had. But the truth is that the Crusades were notoriously bad for plunder. A few people got rich, but the vast majority returned with nothing.

QustantinahQuaker said:

The whole of the Middle East and North Africa was not Christian before Muslim conquest. For one thing, much of the Middle East was pagan, having nothing to do with Christianity or Islam. They were worshiping multiple gods and so forth.North Africa on the other hand was only Christian on the coast. Most of the coastal cities were Christian wehreas the vast majority of it was pagan Berbers. How did the Christians take North Africa and the Middle East? Conquest. No different than did the Muslims. The only reason those regions were Christian is because Rome conquered them and then made Christianity the state religion. The Christian Europeans who went into the Holy Land were not attacked by Muslims. The French were not attacked by Mushreqis. They were attacked by North Africans. The Spainards took back the penninsula in a brutal fashion, and at least had claim to the penninsual. Frenchmen, Germans, Englishmen etc. had no claim in the Levant. The Byzantines who were suppressing many Christians in the regions that Crusaders were trying to take back for them treated Christians there worse than the Muslims did. The Reconquista was defensive, the Crusades into the Holy Land were offensive just like the initial European movements into it. Furthermore there is no way to justify the murderous behavior of the Crusaders once they reached the Holy Land. The Crusader attitude is the same of the Katai'b and Gaurdians of the Cedars who use relgion to justify killing Muslim/Arab women and children. What did the Albigensian Crusade have to do with Muslims? Nothing at all. What about the Northern Crusades? Those were offensive in every manner. The Battle of Viena was defensive, but most others before that were on offense and were murderous onslaughts of innocent people. Furthermore the atrocious crimes against the Jews in Europe and the treatment of nonChristians by the chruch during the Crusades were not Christian in their character and were certainly on offense. If these actions are "defensive" than September 11 and the massacres in Algeria by the GIA/FIS are "defensive" as well as the Muslim extremists want to "take back" their Islamic culture. The Crusaders were terrorists.

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How sad that you have swallowed such propaganda. Your comment here,

"Byzantines who were suppressing many Christians in the regions that Crusaders were trying to take back for them treated Christians there worse than the Muslims did." is particularly baffling, since the Byzantines were the Christians. And the Middle East and north Africa were indeed Christian prior to Islam invasion, I don't have any idea how you can justify otherwise.

"Byzantines who were suppressing many Christians in the regions that Crusaders were trying to take back for them treated Christians there worse than the Muslims did." is particularly baffling, since the Byzantines were the Christians. And the Middle East and north Africa were indeed Christian prior to Islam invasion, I don't have any idea how you can justify otherwise.

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The Crusaders did not for the most part come from the Byzantine Empire. They came from Western Europe. The Byzanitines were indeed oppressing Arab/Monophysite Christians left and right, especailly the Arabs of Ghassan (Syria/Palestine/Lebanon). They were further repressive of the Christians of Egypt. "The Christians" were a lot of people; a lot of different people. The Byzantines were and empire that treated nonconformist Christians like dirt and wanted to maintain control over those people and continue to treat them like dirt and keep its foothold in the region.
Furthermore, you seem to lack knowlege of North Africa and the Middle East. Prior to Islamic invasion, North Africa especially, was mostly pagan. Only the coast was Christian as it was controlled by Rome. The Romans however, could not get past the mountains in Algeria, Morocco and the desert in those regions as well as in Tunisa. Thus, this left the Berbers (who had been in the Sahara for thousands and thousands of years before Romans or Christians arrived) to their own religion until the Islamic invasions came. The Middle East before Islam arose was in the west, mainly Christian though most of the rest of it was pagan Arabs and Persians or it was controlled by the Byzantines and only Christian because the Byzantines controlled it. If you say that the Middle East and North Africa was Christian prior to Islamic invasion, you must admit too that these regions were pagan before Christian/European invasion, and empty prior to that with no Roman Churches or anything of the sort before these were forced upon them. When put into historical context, the Crusaders have no legitimacy because they, as were the Muslims, were invaders in these lands. They did not have historical claim. The Crusaders were actors working on the behalf of a corrupt and repressive Empire that used relgion as a means to retake lands that it had taken. I have not swallowed any "propaganda". I have drawn a different conclusion than you based on the fact that Western Europeans during the Crusades were acting in a manner no different than modern day Islamists and treated innocent people in a manner no different. Furthermore, the Christians of the Mushreq turned agaisnt the "Christian" Byzantines because they were repressed by them and did not want to be a part of them. It was a part of a long history the West has had in the Middle East with not admitting that it has no place there and that it cannot repress the people of that region and then expect not to have them break from them. The Crusaders would not accept a Middle East that Westerners did not dominate, the Byzantines could not, the British, French and Italians could not and the Americans cannot. A long history of offense.

I cannot believe that you would say that Christianity spead initially due to invasion. That is totally false. Also that the Crusaders acted "in a manner no different than modern day Islamists and treated innocent people in a manner no different." Again that is false. Although there were indeed a few renegades that acted totally against the wishes and orders of the Church, all in all the Crusaders were religious people that fought what they viewed as a just and defensive war. The older Romantic views of the "bloody" Crusades have been shown to be false. I don't know where you get your ideas, since you don't bother to source them, but it sounds like various anti-Catholic,and anti-early Church propaganda, yes, I'll defend the use of the word. Saying the West has always and still desires only to "control" the Middle East is absurd. Rome itself was foundering against barbarian invasions, at the time the Christian Middle East was against the Persians and Muslims. They did not have the power to intervene for centuries after Islam began its violent spread.
And of course there were still pagans, and Jews, and whoever, because if you study history with a fair and unprejudiced mind, you will see that compared to any other coexisting nation, Christian countries have always been more tolerant to those who are different than any other. That is the basis of America, and it is founded on Christian ideals, much as those opposed to Christianity try to deny it.

You should check out many of the early saints, they were from northern Africa, Syria and various other parts of the Middle East.

However, it is true that the crusaders killed also many non-catholic Christians and of course all non-Christians.

The thing is, although under Muslim rule the vast majority of Jerusalem's population were still Christians. And all of them were killed by the intruding crusaders. Not by mistake, in fact they were considered as pagans. There was also one crusade which ended in the plundering of Constantinopel, clearly greed was the motif for those crusaders. This weakened the Byzantine state that much that it could not recover any more, and its capture by the Turks was merely a question of time. Hence, one could also argue that the crusades were kind of counterproductive and they failed to reach their goal by far, as Jerusalem became a part of the Ottoman empire.

ServantofTheOne said:

didn't bush himself refer to it as a "crusade"

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That's true. I can not remeber his words exactly, he said that he was leading a crusade against the evil I think. That was the sense of his word, sort of.