Ron Paul seems to think that 9/11 was caused by
America. He says the motivation for the attacks came from America being in the
Middle East, specifically in those countries like Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan,
Pakistan and others which support terrorists and terrorism. I say the
motivation for the attacks came from the koran, and from nowhere else. To
support this, I offer this little history lesson on just what the koran has
caused over the centuries. The first article in this little history lesson is
called “The Muslim PR Game Called ‘The Crusades’.”
The
muslim PR game called "The Crusades"
(Note: In order to give credit where credit is due,
this article was written by Armin Vamberian and Robert Sibley. It is reprinted
here by permission of Mr. Vamberian.)
The Muslim Game:
Muslims love talking about the
Crusades, and Christians love apologizing for them. To hear both parties tell
the story, one would believe that Muslims were just peacefully minding their
own business in lands that were legitimately Muslim, when Christian armies
decided to wage holy war and "kill millions."
The Truth:
Every part of this myth is a lie. By
the rules that Muslims claim for themselves, the Crusades were perfectly
justified, and the excesses (though beneath Christian standards) pale in
comparison with the historical treatment of conquered populations at the hands
of Muslims.
The crusades are quite possibly the
most misunderstood event n European history.
The
Crusades were in every way a defensive war. They were a direct response to
Muslim aggression -- an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests
of Christian lands.
The West may now dominate the
Islamic world, but that has only been the case since the late 18th century,
when a young general, Napoleon Bonaparte, conquered Egypt and temporarily
imposed French rule. This initial European penetration into one of the
heartlands of Islam was "a terrible shock" to Muslims, says historian
Bernard Lewis. Until then, they had thought of themselves as the victors in the
Crusades.
That assumption is understandable.
Muslim rulers held the preponderance of power as far as Europe was concerned
until the 17th century and had done so, more or less, since the Prophet
Muhammad issued Islam's initial declaration of war against other religious
faiths in the seventh century. The Prophet wrote the Christian Byzantine
emperor and the Sassanid emperor of Persia to suggest they surrender to his
rule because, well, their day was done.
"I
have now brought God's final message," the Prophet declared. "Your
time has passed. Your beliefs are superseded. Accept my mission and my faith or
resign or submit ... you are finished."
This claim
propelled the armies of Islam to take on the rest of the world.
Muslim armies charged out of the
Arabian Peninsula to conquer Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Egypt -- all of
which, as part of the late Roman Empire, were officially Christian. By the
eighth century, Christian North Africa was under Muslim control.
Islam soon swept into Europe,
grabbing Spain, Portugal and southern Italy. In the 11th century, the Seljuk
Turks conquered much of Asia Minor, or Turkey.
Here are some quick facts about the
Crusades:
The first Crusade began in 1095, 460
years after the first Christian city was overrun by Muslim armies, 457 years
after Jerusalem was conquered by Muslim armies, 453 years after Egypt was taken
by Muslim armies, 443 after Muslims first plundered Italy, 427 years after
Muslim armies first laid siege to the Christian capital of Constantinople, 380
years after Spain was conquered by Muslim armies, 363 years after France was
first attacked by Muslim armies, 249 years after Rome itself was sacked by a
Muslim army, and only after centuries of church burnings, killings, enslavement
and forced conversions of Christians. By the time the Crusades finally began,
Muslim armies had conquered two-thirds of the Christian world.
Europe had been harassed by Muslims
since the first few years following Muhammad's death. As early as 652,
Muhammad's followers launched raids on the island of Sicily, waging a
full-scale occupation 200 years later that lasted almost a century and was
punctuated by massacres, such as that at the town of Castrogiovanni, in which
8,000 Christians were put to death. In 1084, ten years before the first
crusade, Muslims staged another devastating Sicilian raid, burning churches in
Reggio, enslaving monks and raping an abbey of nuns before carrying them into
captivity.
In theory, the Crusades were
provoked by the harassment of Christian pilgrims from Europe to the Holy Land,
in which many were kidnapped, molested, forcibly converted to Islam or even
killed. (Compare this to Islam's justification for slaughter on the basis of
Muslims being denied access to the Mecca pilgrimage in Muhammad's time).
The
Crusaders only invaded lands that were Christian.
They never attacked Saudi Arabia or sacked Mecca as the Muslims had done (and
continued doing) to Italy and Constantinople.
The period
of Crusader "occupation" (of its own former land) was stretched over
less than two centuries. The Muslim occupation is in its 1,372nd year.
The period
of Crusader "aggression" compresses to about 20 years of actual
military campaign, much of which was spent on
organization and travel. (They were from 1098-1099, 1146-1148, 1188-1192, 1201-1204,
1218-1221, 1228-1229, and 1248-1250).
By
comparison, the Muslim Jihad against the island of Sicily alone lasted 75
grinding years.
Christian Europe certainly fought
back. In the eighth century, campaigns to recover the Iberian Peninsula began,
but it wasn't until the end of the 15th century that the Reconquista swept
Islam out of Spain and Portugal. Other counterattacks were made, the most
famous of which were the war-pilgrimages known as the Crusades.
In 1095, Pope Urban II called for the
First Crusade. He urged Europeans to aid fellow Christians who were being
slaughtered by Muslims. "They (the Muslim Turks) have invaded the lands of
those Christians and have depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire; they
have lead away a part of the captives into their own country, and a part they
have destroyed by cruel tortures."
The Crusader army marched deep into
enemy territory to reclaim the ancient Christian cities of Nicaea and Antioch,
and on July 15, 1099, Jerusalem.
Admittedly it wasn't a pleasant
reclamation. As was standard practice when a city resisted, much of population
was slaughtered. That, however, doesn't mean the threat to which the Crusades
were a response wasn't real.
The
Crusades were a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims
had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point,
Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by
Islam.
Unfortunately, subsequent Crusades
over the next three centuries weren't as successful. By the end of the 13th
century, the Christian Crusaders had been chased from the Middle East. From
then on the concern was no longer about reclaiming Christian homelands, but
about saving Europe.
In 1453, Muslims captured the
capital of the Byzantine Empire, Constantinople (or Istanbul, as it is now
known). In the late 15th century, Rome was evacuated when Muslim armies landed
at Otranto in an unsuccessful invasion of Italy. By the 16th century, the
Ottoman Turk Empire stretched from North Africa and Arabia to the Near East and
Asia Minor. They penetrated deep into Europe, conquering Greece, Bulgaria,
Hungary, Albania, Croatia and Serbia. In 1529, the Ottomans laid siege to
Vienna. Luckily for Europe, the siege failed; otherwise the door to Germany
would have been open. It wasn't until 1572, when the Catholic Holy League
defeated the Ottoman fleet at Lepanto, that Islam's threat to the West finally
ended, at least until the late 20th century when the doors to Europe were once
again opened to Muslims.
Unlike Jihad, the Crusades were
never justified on the basis of New Testament teachings. This is why they are
an anomaly, the brief interruption of fourteen centuries of relentless Jihad
against Christianity that began long before the Crusades and continued well after
they were over. Islam unquestionably won the Crusades, even though Europe was
ultimately able to reassert itself and dominate the world. The reasons for this
success are much debated, but it's reasonable to conclude that the West won the
war of ideas.
Notions of individualism and
freedom, capitalism and technology, and, most of all, the West's turn from
theology to science, carried the day. Religion became in the West an
essentially private concern. It is on this "modern" turn that the
anti-Crusade attitude developed.
During the Protestant Reformation,
when the authority of the Catholic church was under attack, the Crusades began
to be regarded as a ploy by power-hungry Popes and land-hungry aristocrats.
This judgment was extended by the Enlightenment philosophers, who used the
Crusades as a cudgel with which to beat the church.
The Enlightenment view of the
Crusades still holds sway. After the Second World War, with western
intellectuals feeling guilty about imperialism and European politicians
desperate to abandon colonial responsibilities, the Crusades became
intellectually unfashionable.
Historian Steven Runciman reflected
this attitude in his three-volume study, A History of the Crusades, published
in the early 1950s. He cast the Crusades as "morally repugnant acts of
intolerance in the name of God."
Almost single-handedly Runciman
managed to define the modern popular view of the Crusades.
The greatest crime of the Crusaders
was the sacking of Jerusalem, in which30,000 people were said to have been massacred.
This number is dwarfed by the number of Jihad victims, from India to
Constantinople and Narbonne, but Muslims have never apologized for their crimes
and never will.
What is
called 'sin and excess' by other religions, is what Islam refers to as the will
of Allah.
