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April 2015 AD


"Thou Shalt Kill"


The Islamic religion states that Muslims not only SHALL KILL but MUST KILL.

Centuries of Islamic jihad has amounted to 270 million murders

Here are some quick facts about the Crusades:

The first Crusade began in 1095,

  •  460 years after the first Christian city was overrun by Muslim armies,
  •  457 years after Christian Jerusalem was conquered by Muslim armies,
  •  453 years after Christian Egypt was taken by Muslim armies,
  •  443 after Muslims first plundered Christian Italy,
  •  427 years after the first siege of the Christian capital of Constantinople,
  •  380 years after Spain was conquered by Muslim armies,
  •  363 years after France was first attacked by Muslim armies,
  •  249 years after Rome itself was sacked by a Muslim army,
  •  and only after centuries of church burnings, killings, enslavement and forced conversions of Christians.
  •  In 1084, ten years before the first crusade, Muslims staged another devastating Sicilian raid, burning churches in Reggio, enslaving monks and raping an abbey of nuns before carrying them into captivity.
  •  In theory, the Crusades were provoked by the harassment of Christian pilgrims from Europe to the Holy Land, in which many were kidnapped, molested, forcibly converted to Islam or even killed.
  •  (Compare this to Islam’s justification for slaughter on the basis of Muslims being denied access to the Mecca pilgrimage in Muhammad’s time).
  •  By the time the Crusades finally began, Muslim armies had conquered two-thirds of the Christian world.
  •  The Crusader army marched deep into enemy territory to reclaim the ancient Christian cities of Nicaea and Antioch, and on July 15, 1099, Jerusalem.
  •  The Crusaders only invaded lands that were Christian.
  •  They never attacked Saudi Arabia or sacked Mecca as the Muslims had done (and continued doing) to the capitals of Christianity in Rome and Constantinople.
  •  The period of Crusader “occupation” (of its own former land) was stretched over less than two centuries.
  •  The Muslim occupation is in its 1,372nd year.
  •  By the end of the 13th century, the Christian Crusaders had been chased from the Middle East.
  •  From then on the concern was no longer about reclaiming Christian homelands, but about saving Europe.
  •  In 1453, Muslims captured the capital of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople (or Istanbul, as it is now known).
  •  In the late 15th century, Rome was evacuated when Muslim armies landed at Otranto in an unsuccessful invasion of Italy.
  •  By the 16th century, the Ottoman Turk Empire stretched from North Africa and Arabia to the Near East and Asia Minor.
  •  Turkish Muslims penetrated deep into Europe, conquering Greece, Bulgaria, Hungary, Albania, Croatia and Serbia.
  •  In 1529, the Ottomans laid siege to Vienna.
  •  It wasn’t until 1572, when the Catholic Holy League defeated the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto, that Islam’s threat to the West finally ended,

Crusade or Jihad Worst?


The Muslim PR Game called “The Crusades”

Unlike Jihad, the Crusades were never justified on the basis of New Testament teachings. This is why they are an anomaly, the brief interruption of fourteen centuries of relentless Jihad against Christianity that began long before the Crusades and continued well after they were over. Islam unquestionably won the Crusades, even though Europe was ultimately able to reassert itself and dominate the world. The reasons for this success are much debated, but it’s reasonable to conclude that the West won the war of ideas.

Notions of individualism and freedom, capitalism and technology, and, most of all, the West’s turn from theology to science, carried the day. Religion became in the West an essentially private concern. It is on this “modern” turn that the anti-Crusade attitude developed.

During the Protestant Reformation, when the authority of the Catholic church was under attack, the Crusades began to be regarded as a ploy by power-hungry Popes and land-hungry aristocrats. This judgment was extended by the Enlightenment philosophers, who used the Crusades as a cudgel with which to beat the church.

The Enlightenment view of the Crusades still holds sway. After the Second World War, with western intellectuals feeling guilty about imperialism and European politicians desperate to abandon colonial responsibilities, the Crusades became intellectually unfashionable.



The Real History of the Crusades

The remainder of the 13th century’s Crusades did little better. The Fifth Crusade (1217-1221) managed briefly to capture Damietta in Egypt, but the Muslims eventually defeated the army and reoccupied the city. St. Louis IX of France led two Crusades in his life. The first also captured Damietta, but Louis was quickly outwitted by the Egyptians and forced to abandon the city. Although Louis was in the Holy Land for several years, spending freely on defensive works, he never achieved his fondest wish: to free Jerusalem. He was a much older man in 1270 when he led another Crusade to Tunis, where he died of a disease that ravaged the camp. After St. Louis’s death, the ruthless Muslim leaders, Baybars and Kalavun, waged a brutal jihad against the Christians in Palestine. By 1291, the Muslim forces had succeeded in killing or ejecting the last of the Crusaders, thus erasing the Crusader kingdom from the map. Despite numerous attempts and many more plans, Christian forces were never again able to gain a foothold in the region until the 19th century.

Europe’s fight for its life

One might think that three centuries of Christian defeats would have soured Europeans on the idea of Crusade. Not at all. In one sense, they had little alternative. Muslim kingdoms were becoming more, not less, powerful in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. The Ottoman Turks conquered not only their fellow Muslims, thus further unifying Islam, but also continued to press westward, capturing Constantinople and plunging deep into Europe itself. By the 15th century, the Crusades were no longer errands of mercy for a distant people but desperate attempts of one of the last remnants of Christendom to survive. Europeans began to ponder the real possibility that Islam would finally achieve its aim of conquering the entire Christian world. One of the great best-sellers of the time, Sebastian Brant’s The Ship of Fools, gave voice to this sentiment in a chapter titled “Of the Decline of the Faith”:

Our faith was strong in th’ Orient,
It ruled in all of Asia,
In Moorish lands and Africa.
But now for us these lands are gone
‘Twould even grieve the hardest stone …
Four sisters of our Church you find,
They’re of the patriarchic kind:
Constantinople, Alexandria,
Jerusalem, Antiochia.
But they’ve been forfeited and sacked
And soon the head will be attacked.

Of course, that is not what happened. But it very nearly did. In 1480, Sultan Mehmed II captured Otranto as a beachhead for his invasion of Italy. Rome was evacuated. Yet the sultan died shortly thereafter, and his plan died with him. In 1529, Suleiman the Magnificent laid siege to Vienna. If not for a run of freak rainstorms that delayed his progress and forced him to leave behind much of his artillery, it is virtually certain that the Turks would have taken the city. Germany, then, would have been at their mercy.

Yet, even while these close shaves were taking place, something else was brewing in Europe—something unprecedented in human history. The Renaissance, born from a strange mixture of Roman values, medieval piety, and a unique respect for commerce and entrepreneurialism, had led to other movements like humanism, the Scientific Revolution, and the Age of Exploration. Even while fighting for its life, Europe was preparing to expand on a global scale. The Protestant Reformation, which rejected the papacy and the doctrine of indulgence, made Crusades unthinkable for many Europeans, thus leaving the fighting to the Catholics. In 1571, a Holy League, which was itself a Crusade, defeated the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto. Yet military victories like that remained rare. The Muslim threat was neutralized economically. As Europe grew in wealth and power, the once awesome and sophisticated Turks began to seem backward and pathetic—no longer worth a Crusade. The “Sick Man of Europe” limped along until the 20th century, when he finally expired, leaving behind the present mess of the modern Middle East.

From the safe distance of many centuries, it is easy enough to scowl in disgust at the Crusades. Religion, after all, is nothing to fight wars over. But we should be mindful that our medieval ancestors would have been equally disgusted by our infinitely more destructive wars fought in the name of political ideologies. And yet, both the medieval and the modern soldier fight ultimately for their own world and all that makes it up. Both are willing to suffer enormous sacrifice, provided that it is in the service of something they hold dear, something greater than themselves. Whether we admire the Crusaders or not, it is a fact that the world we know today would not exist without their efforts. The ancient faith of Christianity, with its respect for women and antipathy toward slavery, not only survived but flourished. Without the Crusades, it might well have followed Zoroastrianism, another of Islam’s rivals, into extinction.




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The Christian Solution ©             First Release: March 15, 2008