In his ignorant and bigoted remarks to religious leaders this week, President Obama parroted jihadi propaganda. Bored (when not annoyed) by facts, the president referred to the Crusades and the Inquisition as evidence of the horrors religion can wreak. That kind of talk emboldens the Islamist line that Christian bad behavior justifies the Middle East’s bad behavior even today.
The president knows as little about history as he does about warfare, and even less about religion. But he’s not alone. With the Left’s successful destruction of history instruction in our schools and universities, even “well-educated” creatures of Washington accept the Arab fantasy that the cultural incompetence, practical indolence, and spiritual decay of the entire Middle East stems from Richard Coeur de Lion’s twelfth-century swordplay.
Stop it! All of you! And try reading a book or two on the subject. Meanwhile, here’s a starter course in the vast tragedy jihad has posed for every civilization it’s touched for the past 14 centuries — while the Crusades mythologized by Islam’s apologists were a two-century blip whose only practical legacies are a few ruined castles.
During their stay, the European knights and religious orders sometimes fought each other and sometimes allied with local Muslim lords to fight other Muslims. And when Christians and Muslims squared off, the Muslims increasingly won. The damage that venal Crusaders did to Constantinople, the last bulwark of Eastern Christianity, was far worse than any harm they wreaked in Muslim lands.
And then the Crusaders were gone — and the Arabs’ real problems began. The Mongols were the ones who leveled Baghdad and shattered Arab rule in the Levant. The destruction was horrific. Millions died. The next invaders were fellow Muslims, the Seljuk and then Ottoman Turks (who would rule the Arabs for over half a millennium).
But “historical” memory is selective. And those boorish European tourists (plus ça change!) who visited the Middle East’s coastal resorts in 1099 and briefly overstayed their welcome have become the all-purpose bogeymen excusing every failure, great and small, between Benghazi and Baghdad.
In fact, the Muslim conquest of Christianity’s Middle East heartlands and the occupation of much of Europe into the 20th century did the actual damage to civilization. Two hundred years of Crusades? How about 14 centuries of jihad?
