Posted on 04/29/2005 1:00:01 PM PDT by missyme
We recently attended a preview of director Ridley Scott's crusader epic, "Kingdom of Heaven," which opens nationally May 6. The $130 million film -- which stars Orlando Bloom, Liam Neeson and Jeremy Irons -- tells the story of a 12th century blacksmith who rises to defend Jerusalem from Muslim invaders.
We're unable to officially review the film until its release, but we had these observations:
Although Scott put "Kingdom" in development before the 9/11 attacks, it's obvious that the War on Terror forms the backdrop for the film. "Kingdom of Heaven" is clearly intended to be a parable for our time, and it's therefore disappointing that a director of Scott's skill and experience (directing classics like "Alien," "Blade Runner" and "Gladiator") would opt for such a conventional, secular-liberal interpretation of the present conflict.
Even with its gorgeous settings, splendid action sequences, and some fine performances by Neeson and Irons, "Kingdom of Heaven" wears its politics too much on its sleeve.
The Western crusaders are too often dismissed as bloodthirsty and rapacious, and religion itself (both Christianity and Islam) is reduced to little more than a source of fanaticism. Scott doesn't glamorize the Islamic cause -- yet he can't understand it, either. Neither side's worldview is explored in any depth, because Scott assumes that war is the natural outflow of religion -- any religion.
Liberal Hollywood is struggling to find its voice in the post-9/11 world. Ridley Scott's effort may be the most ambitious yet in this regard, but the limitations of the liberal wordview in understanding our current struggle are become more obvious by the day. Aesthetically, "Kingdom of Heaven" may be a huge leap forward from "Fahrenheit 9/11," but its values are only baby steps removed.
Use of a primary source in an online debate?! Unprecedented!
I was being sarcastic. We tend to dismiss atrocities committed by our side, while trumpeting those committed by the enemy. It was no less during the Crusades.
Not by contemporary standards.
Are you friends with Howard Zinn?
How nuanced of you? And which side of the pentagon do you call your own? Go dance your little dance with someone else. I can't wait to hear the clinton-like statement you're about to post in reply. It will start something, "both sides..." I can feel it.
its ok....
this guy is way off trying to show people as Non Christian. Just look at his posts. I know by looking at your previous posts on previous threads that you most certainly aren't what he attempted to say you were....
Not all crusaders were involved in that.
Oh I know. But the accounts of the ones that were are chilling to say the least.
OK. I read it a couple of times and was beginning to wonder if it was me. ;^)
You can't use twentieth Century Standards of behavior to judge people living 1000 years ago.
Look at the Mongols, the Turks, etc.
and by the same token, not all muslims are blowing up cars and strapping bombs to themselves either.....
Frankly, I now have to wonder if you could feel your... if you put both hands on it.
Well done, well done.
On d'aneiph tw adelfw autou, raka, enoxon estai tw sunedriw.
Since you're not an idiot, apparently, you'll be able to translate that easily.
How shall I begin to tell of the deeds wrought by these nefarious men! Alas, the images, . . .
And blah, blah, blah.
these words were written by Nicetas Acominatos.
Nicetas was a supporter of Alexius III and related to him by marriage.
This is the writing of a man who witnessed the slaughter of the Venetians of Constantinople and the desecration of their churches and uttered nary a peep of condemnation, but rather extolled the despoiler of the Venetians, Dositheos.
Dositheos was the kind Greek churchman and pastor of Hagia Sophia who proclaimed in 1190, 13 years before Constantinople fell to Alexius IV, that it was praiseworthy for a Greek to kill a Latin heretic.
Nicetas' whining, while picturesque, seems a bit over the top for a man who approvingly watched the disembowelment of pregnant Venetian women.
But how would you explain some conservatives like Mel Gibson? He too, was trashing our effort in Iraq! He wasn't trashing it as much as some like these two in your post, or someone like Michael Moore. But he didn't have too many nice things to say either. Which was strange, considering his portrayal of freedom fighters and patriots in movies such as: "Braveheart", "The Patriot", "We Were Soldiers Once", etc..!
Yet most Muslims will not speak out nor fight against those who do such things. Explain that.
Soon to be published from Robert Spencer
"The 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.
Once the Muslims were entrenched in power, they began to levy the jizya, the tax on non-Muslims:
. . . Amr’s position became stronger from day to day. He levied the tax that had been stipulated . . . But it is impossible to describe the lamentable position of the inhabitants of this town, who came to the point of offering their children in exchange for the enormous sums that they had to pay each month, finding no one to help them because God had abandoned them and had delivered the Christians into the hands of their enemies.[3]
An eyewitness of the Muslim conquest of Armenia in 642 tells what happened when they took the town of Dvin: “The enemy’s army rushed in and butchered the inhabitants of the town by the sword. . . . After a few days’ rest, the Ismaelites [Arabs] went back whence they had come, dragging after them a host of captives, numbering thirty-five thousand.”[4]
On the island of Cos a few years later, the Muslim general Abu l-A’war, according to another contemporary account, “laid waste and pillaged all its riches, slaughtered the population and led the remnant into captivity, and destroyed its citadel.”[5]
According to the Syrian Orthodox patriarch, Michael the Syrian (1126–1199), Muslims conquered Cilicia and Caesarea of Cappadocia in the year 650 in this way:
They [the Taiyaye, or Muslim Arabs] moved into Cilicia and took prisoners . . . and when Mu’awiya arrived he ordered all the inhabitants to be put to the sword; he placed guards so that no one escaped. After gathering up all the wealth of the town, they set to torturing the leaders to make them show them things [treasures] that had been hidden. The Taiyaye led everyone into slavery — men and women, boys and girls — and they committed much debauchery in that unfortunate town; they wickedly committed immoralities inside churches.[6]
Muslim chroniclers of the time make no secret of this. The Muslim historian Ibn al-Athir (1160-1233), in his world history entitled The Complete History, includes this account of eighth and ninth century Muslim incursions into Spain and France:
In 177 [17 April 793], Hisham, [Muslim] prince of Spain, sent a large army commanded by Abd al-Malik b. Abd al-Wahid b. Mugith into enemy territory, and which made forays as far as Narbonne and Jaranda [Gerona]. . . . For several months he traversed this land in every direction, raping women, killing warriors, destroying fortresses, burning and pillaging everything, driving back the enemy who fled in disorder. He returned safe and sound, dragging behind him God knows how much booty.
In Amorium in Asia Minor in 838, says Michael the Syrian, “there were so many women’s convents and monasteries that over a thousand virgins were led into captivity, not counting those that had been slaughtered. They were given to the Moorish slaves, so as to assuage their lust . . .”[7]
Much later, when Muslim armies resumed their expansion in Europe after a period of relative decline (which most notoriously included the loss of Sicily in 1091, the capture of Jerusalem by the Crusaders in 1099, and the steady erosion of their power in Spain), they held true to this pattern of behavior. On May 29, 1453, Constantinople, the jewel of Christendom, finally fell to an overwhelming Muslim force after weeks of resistance by a small band of valiant Greeks. According to the great historian of the Crusades Steven Runciman, the Muslim soldiers “slew everyone that they met in the streets, men, women, and children without discrimination. The blood ran in rivers down the steep streets from the heights of Petra toward the Golden Horn. But soon the lust for slaughter was assuaged. The soldiers realized that captives and precious objects would bring them greater profit.”[8]
The circumstances of the first Crusade were these: Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land were being molested by Muslims and prevented from reaching the holy places. Some were killed. This was finally the impetus that moved Western Christianity to try to take back just one small portion of the Christian lands that had fallen to the Muslim sword over the last centuries. “The Crusade,” noted historian Bernard Lewis, “was a delayed response to the jihad, the holy war for Islam, and its purpose was to recover by war what had been lost by war — to free the holy places of Christendom and open them once again, without impediment, to Christian pilgrimage.”[9]
Whatever undeniable sins Christians committed during their course, the Crusades were essentially a defensive action: a belated and insufficient attempt by Western Christians to turn back the tide of Islam that had engulfed the Eastern Church. “When accusing the West of imperialism,” says the historian of jihad Paul Fregosi, “Muslims are obsessed with the Christian Crusades but have forgotten their own, much grander Jihad.” The lands in dispute during each Crusade were the ancient lands of Christendom, where Christians had flourished for centuries before Muhammad’s armies called them idolaters and enslaved and killed them. If Westerners had no right to invade these putative Muslim lands, then Muslims had no right to take them in the first place."
http://www.jihadwatch.org/archives/005439.php
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