[Sherman Logan]

You are giving short shrift to the support and alliance that many Jews made with the Muslims.

The Jews allied themselves with Muslims for the very logical reason that Muslims of the time treated them much better than Christians did.

Crusaders slaughtered Jews in Europe and the Middle East for equally logical reasons. While the Pope and kings may have had the geopolitical motives discussed by the author, most of the Crusaders intended to just kill the enemies of God. Why travel all the way to Palestine to kill Muslims when Jews, equally the enemies of God, are right here in Germany?

The author is, however, absolutely right about the counter-attack nature of the Crusades. In fact, the Crusades were an incorporation of the idea of jihad into Christianity. That this took 400 years to occur is a result of the fact that jihad just doesn't fit well into Christianity.

The author also leaves out that the Crusades were a minor irritant on the edge of the Muslim world. Most Muslims were unaffected and unconcerned.

The Mongol invasions during the same time were catastrophic, dang near destroying Islam.

[Woebama]

The Jews allied themselves with Muslims for the very logical reason that Muslims of the time treated them much better than Christians did.
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In what time and place? The muslim / christian conflict started in 600 ad and lasted well into 1600 ad. A very amorphous statement -- basically meaningless. Are you saying the Jews in that 1,000 years were always noble and rational and right?!
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Crusaders slaughtered Jews in Europe and the Middle East for equally logical reasons. While the Pope and kings may have had the geopolitical motives discussed by the author, most of the Crusaders intended to just kill the enemies of God. Why travel all the way to Palestine to kill Muslims when Jews, equally the enemies of God, are right here in Germany?
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One time and place, one event, which within the article is said to have been condemned by two Popes of the time. Do you really know the motivations of the people involved? My point is that this was a 1,000 year long conflict and people take one day, one moment and extrapolate some theory or viewpoint based on that, and without much knowledge even about the event or the time -- which is nonsense. I'm not very knowledgeable about the that millenium of conflict -- but at least I know that I don't know! The article points out that the history of the Crusades was sort of twisted or corrupted by the British to support their imperial worldview in the 1800's. The crusades are an intersection of politics and religion . . . so the reality of the times are going to get twisted by propagandists even more than usual.

[skeeter]

The article provides context

But there are many Crusade myths. For example, some would characterize the campaigns as anti-Semitic. Yet, while there were two notable massacres of Jews during the Crusades, there is more to the story — as Madden also explained in the Zenit interview:

No pope ever called a Crusade against Jews. During the First Crusade a large band of riffraff, not associated with the main army [the aforementioned “People’s Crusade”], descended on the towns of the Rhineland and decided to rob and kill the Jews they found there.... Pope Urban II and subsequent popes strongly condemned these attacks on Jews. Local bishops and other clergy and laity attempted to defend the Jews, although with limited success. Similarly, during the opening phase of the Second Crusade a group of renegades killed many Jews in Germany before St. Bernard was able to catch up to them and put a stop to it.