Posted on 04/12/2002 9:28:57 PM PDT by Brian Kopp DPM
CRISIS Magazine - e-Letter
April 12, 2002
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Dear Reader,
Well, the media is at it again. Last week, as you probably noticed, U.S. News & World Report ran a cover story on the Crusades, promising to tell "the truth about the epic clash between Christianity and Islam."
(Here it is: http://www.usnews.com/usnews/issue/020408/ideas/8crusades.htm)
Unfortunately, after reading the piece, it was pretty clear that they failed to fulfill that promise.
Coincidentally, the current issue of CRISIS also has a cover story on the Crusades, written by renowned Crusades historian, Dr. Thomas F. Madden. I encourage you to compare the two.
(You can read it here: http://www.crisismagazine.com)
Naturally, after reading the U.S. News & World Report piece, I knew we needed to respond. So we went back to Dr. Madden, and asked him to have at it.
That he did. Here it is...
Sincerely,
Deal W. Hudson
p.s. Please forward this to anyone you think could use the information. Like me, I know you're tired of hearing the media recycle the same nonsense about the Crusades.
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Whoops. I was about to say: "This makes much more sense, especially since one of the great Christian commentators on Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, was influenced by Moses Maimonides, the scholar from Cordoba."
Then to confirm my knowledge of history, I did a brief search. Here's what Encyclopedia Brittanica says:
"Jewish philosopher, jurist, and physician. Born in Córdoba, Spain, he was obliged to practice his faith secretly under Islamic rule. To gain religious freedom he settled in Egypt (1165), where he won fame for his medical skill and became court physician to the sultan Saladin."So somehow the Spanish expatriate Maimonides exerted enough influence for his works to get from Egypt to Europe.
Exactly. Just forget the over 400 years of Jihading from Spain and the gates of Paris to Asia (leading to the near extinguishing of Eastern Christianity); present a sanitized benign view of the dhimmis under Islam and you have the recipe for pro-Islamic revisionism.
Isn't this what the Israelis have done in the current military push thru the refugee camps? If it sounds so acceptable then, why is it not acceptable now?
It's going to be interesting to see how far all of this goes. Will we begin a new "Reconquista" to take back the Holy Kingdom of "Outremer"?
Dieu le Veut!
Regards,
By the way, we should remember Karen Armstrong the ex-Catholic, ex-nun, ex-Christian is trying to rewrite the history of everything (including the Crusade) while giving her "august" blessing to the Muslims.
Present day Islamics, leftists, Christian bashers, etc. yap about the Crusades as if they happened in a vacuum. What happened to the history of this issue is that European Arabist historians began to sanitize the Jihad and the history of Islamic expansionism. In the last several years these lies have been exposed. Bat Ye'or for example in her two books The Dhimmis and The Decline of Eastern Christianity Under Islam has examined the historical hegemony of Islam in its repression, dhimiization and cleansing of whole Christian and Jewish communities, in North Africa, the ME, Asia Minor, etc.
The problem with the Crusades of course is not the initial purpose - to role back the Islamic tide particularly in the Holy Land - but that it went awry turning on Christianity itself, eventually the 4rth Crusade attacking the seat of Eastern Christianity in the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople. The latter definitely was fatal to the empire which eventually led to the success of the Islamic Turks and the beginning of the Ottoman Empire.
Is there a pattern here? A tendency? A natural drive by some organism? Or what-have-you?
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