“The means by which he can be stopped must be evaluated. Stopping the aggressor is legitimate.”
It would be fine if the next crusade resulted in the final defeat of Islam.
Then it could truly be the “last crusade”
Historically, the church has been smeared by liberal historians for the crusades and the Islamist then painted as some type of innocent victims. It’s time for ordinary people to realize that that too was a canard used by liberals to undermine the Christian faith and its history.
THE NEED FOR A NEW CRUSADE AGAINST MURDEROUS ISLAM
Does the Vatican Owe an Apology to Muslims for the Crusades?
Robert Spencer, at frontpagemag.com (3-22-05):
Excerpts
Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades, which will out from Regnery Publishing in a few months. In it, I am clearing away propaganda and telling what really happened.
Islam originated in Arabia in the seventh century. At that time Egypt, Libya, and all of North Africa were Christian, and had been so for hundreds of years. So were Palestine, Lebanon, Syria, and Asia Minor.
The churches that St. Paul addressed in his letters collected in the New Testament are located in Asia Minor, modern Turkey, as well as modern Greece. North of Greece, in a buffer zone between Eastern and Western Europe, were lands that would become the Christian domains of the Slavs.
Antioch and Constantinople (Istanbul), in modern Turkey, and Alexandria, in modern Egypt, were three of the most important Christian centers of the first millennium.
But then Muhammad and his Muslim armies arose out of the desert, and — as most modern textbooks would put it — these lands became Muslim. But in fact the transition was cataclysmic. Muslims won these lands by conquest and, in obedience to the words of the Qur’an and the Prophet, put to the sword the infidels therein who refused to submit to the new Islamic regime. Those who remained alive lived in humiliating second-class status. Conversion to Islam became the only way to live a decent life. And lo and behold, the Christian populations of these areas steadily diminished.
Conventional wisdom has it that these Christians welcomed the invaders, preferring the yoke of Islam to that of Byzantium. Clinton may be right that Muslims still seethe about the sack of Jerusalem, but he and they are strangely silent about similar behavior on the Muslim side. Here is a contemporary account of the Muslims’ arrival in Nikiou, an Egyptian town, in the 640’s:
Then the Muslims arrived in Nikiou. There was not one single soldier to resist them. They seized the town and slaughtered everyone they met in the street and in the churches — men, women and children, sparing nobody. Then they went to other places, pillaged and killed all the inhabitants they found. . . .But let us now say no more, for it is impossible to describe the horrors the Muslims committed when they occupied the island of Nikiou. . . .
Not only did this involve massacres, but exile and enslavement — all based on a broken treaty:
Amr oppressed Egypt. He sent its inhabitants to fight the inhabitants of the Pentapolis [Tripolitania] and, after gaining a victory, he did not allow them to stay there. He took considerable booty from this country and a large number of prisoners. . . .
The Muslims returned to their country with booty and captives. The patriarch Cyrus felt deep grief at the calamities in Egypt, because Amr, who was of barbarian origin, showed no mercy in his treatment of the Egyptians and did not fulfill the covenants which had been agreed with him.
THE REST OF THE HISTORY
Pope Francis has no ability to speak authoritatively on who is the "legitimate authority", whether it's the U.N., the United States, Syria, Russia, or some "coalition of the willing". It is up to each one of those entities to determine whether or not they are in a position to do this.
Who is Pope Francis to tell the United States that we have no legitimate right to defend the innocent Christians being persecuted?! We not only have the right, but we have the obligation! And it is up to us to decide the what constitutes the "minimum force necessary" to do that. He has no spiritual or professional expertise in that part of the issue.
Pope Francis absolutely boldly proclaiming the moral principles involved. But he should leave the practical interpretation of those principles to others.
There was a reason for the first Crusade....it was what muslims were doing back then just as it is today. The religion is the problem, it is evil.