Free Republic

The Crusades in the Checkout Aisle Thomas F. Madden When I spied the U.S. News & World Report with the Crusades splashed across its cover, I braced for the worst. As a crusade historian, I long ago learned not to expect accuracy on this subject from the popular media. In fact, I usually avoid newspaper and magazine articles on the Crusades altogether, if only to keep my blood pressure under control. But there it was, staring me in the face. I had to read it. First, the good news. The article, written by Andrew Curry, was not dreadful. Curry did...

anyone know a good non-PC book about the crusades. thanks

Within a very short period of the formation of the Poor Knights of Christ and the Temple of Solomon, a new style of church architecture began to spread across Western Europe. The first examples of this are to be seen in France, where great Cathedrals such as that of Chartres sing loud the praise of what became known, much later as 'Gothic'. Whether or not the Knights Templar had any direct part in the creation of this revolution in religious building has always been something of a bone of contention, though it is clear that the fledgling organisation had...

One of the few positive effects of 9/11 has been renewed American interest in Islam and the Middle East. Unfortunately, much of the information disseminated in the media about those topics is ignorant and misleading. This is unfortunate because any hope that the predominantly-Christian West and the Muslim world might transcend conflict requires that the former be accurately informed about the latter (and vice-versa, but that's an issue for another column). There are in particular seven myths about Islam and Islamic history that have been repeated so often in the media that they've achieved conventional wisdom status. First, it is...

Today, 7 October 2005, is the 434th anniversary of the Naval Battle of Lepanto -- the defeat of the invasion fleet of the Ottoman Empire by the Holy League fleet under command of Don John of Austria. They were an ad hoc fleet thrown together at the last moment from a rabble of squabbling principalities. England's ships did not join the defense -- their Protestant queen looked the other way. The French fleet, by orders of her Catholic king, were similarly absent. They were outnumbered, outgunned, and fighting with their backs to the wall. But they had one weapon the...

D.C. Watson speaks truth to power: While many Muslims in the U.S. simply go about their business and mean no harm to anyone, many other Muslims are continually stating that they are offended by our policies and our behavior. It's all our fault, you know. At least that's what Geneive Abdo, in a column entitled "Islam in America: Separate but Unequal," would seem to wish everyone to believe. The column is extensive, yet portions of it stand out like a badly penciled-in headscarf. For example, Abdo wrote the following comments, which I will answer here. As the U.S. relationship with...

(snip) As the title suggests, Thomas Asbridge’s The First Crusade: A New History begins at the beginning. The First Crusade was called in 1095 by Pope Urban II in response to an urgent plea for assistance from the Byzantine Empire, the last Christian state in the East. Things had been going badly for Christians for several centuries, ever since the explosion of Muslim warriors out of Arabia in the seventh century. Egypt, Palestine, Syria, North Africa—the core of the Christian world—had been conquered by Muslim jihad warriors and subjected to Islamic rule and law. When Turkish jihad warriors invaded and...

For better and worse, Italy has long been the political and cultural laboratory of the Western world. From the glory days of Rome, through the Renaissance and the various nation-states, into the experiment at nation building that is still very much a work in progress, Italy has tried out the best and the worst in us. ‘snip’ Like the rest of us, the Italians have a jihadi problem, and they have it for the usual reason: For a long time they refused to acknowledge the problem existed, and now they are trapped in a political and cultural web of political...

Robert Spencer has written five books about Islam. His newest book is "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)." The following are excerpts of a telephone interview with Mr. Spencer. Question: Why did you write this book? Answer: I wrote this book in order to counteract a lot of politically correct falsehood about Islam and terrorism that are hindering our response to this problem. Q: You've written several books on Islam before. What's different about this one? A: Obviously, it contains different information in an approach that I haven't taken before. It discusses the Crusades, which I've never...

The slaughter in London is another grisly wake-up call that likely will go as unheeded as earlier ones. Already the standard narrative is being trotted out: evildoers created by what the New York Times predictably called the “root causes of terrorism”: autocracy, or economic stagnation, or Palestinian suffering, or globalization's dislocations, or Western historical sins, or the war in Iraq (the cause will depend on the political prejudices of the pundit) have “hijacked” Islam and distorted its peaceful message. And now they are using Islam to justify murder in order to further their own ambitions or dysfunctional psychic needs. Given...

If there is one thing that everybody knows about the Crusades, it is that they were a Bad Thing. In the eyes even of most Christians, let alone others, the Crusades were a crime against humanity, one for which apologies are due, especially to Muslims. President Bush's early reference to the war on terror as a "crusade" was seen as a catastrophic blunder, justifying the accusations of Osama bin Laden and other Islamists who habitually refer to their enemies as "crusaders," with all the negative connotations the word now possesses. Condemnation of the Crusades is based on the premise that...

School Changing Nickname, Mascot After Islamic Protest POSTED: 9:34 am EDT June 14, 2005 HINESBURG, Vt. -- The Crusaders of Champlain Valley Union High are now history. The School Board in the Vermont community is selecting a new nickname and mascot for the school. The Islamic world has criticized the Crusades. And closer to home, some people object to a knight bearing a crucifix as the symbol for a public school. The image makeover will be implemented in time for the next school year. Redhawks, Bobcats and Red Wolves are all in the running for Union High's new nickname.

Not quite three weeks after the film's release we can say one thing for sure: the First Crusade was much more successful than Ridley Scott's movie. I was stunned to hear Islamic anti-defamation groups condemn Scott's "Kingdom of Heaven." The Muslims appear much nobler than the Christians in the film, and on the Christian side the only remotely sympathetic characters are at best agnostic. Jonathan Riley-Smith, an expert on the Crusades, described the movie as "rubbish" for just this reason - the film, he says, is "not historically accurate at all" in its depiction of "the Muslims as sophisticated and...

The Kingdom of Self-Hate Kingdom of Heaven is spectacular, silly, historically inaccurate, unwittingly funny, badly scripted, and pretentious. So far, so conventional, you may say: just another Hollywood big-budget yarn a la DeMille and Troy. What makes Ridley Scott's epic about the Crusades different is a political message more insidious than the standard leftist-revisionist pap we've been fed by Tinseltown for decades. That message is that, in a conflict between Christians and Muslims, the former attack, the latter react. The true hero of the movie is Saladin, a wise warrior-king sans peur et sans reproche; its villains, the coarse and...

The alleged desecration of a single copy of the Koran sends deadly Muslim mobs into the streets, creates howls from Muslim governments and gathers condemnation mixed with groveling from the U.S. Government and mainstream media. The actual Muslim destruction of Christian churches, this year, in Iraq, Kosovo, Indonesia, Pakistan and Nigeria is met with silence. Apparently, moral equivalency for desecration isn’t moral or equivalent. The same holds true for Jihads and Crusades. Americans are lectured endlessly that ‘Jihad’ means a personal struggle to subject oneself to godliness. Yet, 300 Muslim clerics in Tajikistan outraged with the one Koran tidy bowl...

If straight talk of savagery offends you, if you believe in ethnic and gender diversity but not diversity of thought or if you think there is an acceptable gray area between good and evil, then turn to the funny pages, and take the children, too. This piece is not for you. We published pictures Thursday of burnt American corpses hanging from an Iraqi bridge behind a mob of grinning Muslims. Some readers didn’t like it. Mothers said it frightened their children. A woman who works with Muslim physicians thought it might offend or endanger them. Well, we sure don’t want...

Kingdom of Heaven: Propaganda or History? by James F. Burke New Republican Archive After the anti-Christian Left was blind-sided by the popularity of Mel Gibson’s Passion of the Christ, key influencers in the media complex were eager to promote the release of Ridley Scott’s Kingdom of Heaven. Indeed, one finds the loudest praise for the film coming from the pages of the most radical left-wing papers and journals here in the U.S. and, of course, in Europe. Why then is turnout so high here in the U.S.? Viewers hoping for a more positive (or at least less anti-Christian) take on...

Kingdom of Heaven is spectacular, silly, historically inaccurate, unwittingly funny, badly scripted, and pretentious. So far, so conventional, you may say: just another Hollywood big-budget yarn a la DeMille and Troy. What makes Ridley Scott’s epic about the Crusades different is a political message more insidious than the standard leftist-revisionist pap we’ve been fed by Tinseltown for decades. That message is that, in a conflict between Christians and Muslims, the former attack, the latter react. The true hero of the movie is Saladin, a wise warrior-king sans peur et sans reproche; its villains, the coarse and bloodthirsty Knights Templar. The...

History and Big ScreenFawaz Turki, disinherited@yahoo.comWhen they go to the movies to see a feature dealing with their part of the world, Arabs are predisposed to think the worst: Here we go again, some wretched Hollywood filmmaker is out to besmirch our name, distort our history and degrade our identity. Well, folks, when you stand in line to buy a ticket to “Kingdom of Heaven,” the much anticipated big budget epic about the clash of Islam and Christendom, set between the second and third Crusades in the 12th century, directed by the legendary Ridley Scott (“Gladiator”), don’t be. The film...

If you want to learn something about the Crusades, stay as far away from Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven as you can. There's more historical accuracy in The Lord of the Rings, which took place in a world that never existed. On the other hand, if you just want to see some big medieval battle scenes and eat popcorn while absorbing Scott's obvious message, then this one's for you. Kingdom of Heaven is the story of Christian zealots inciting a war against the innocent Muslims because their bloodthirsty God wants them to kill infidels. Sound like a familiar lament from...