The Zionist "Crusader" Paradigm

Many Arabs indigenous to the Land of Israel see Zionism as just another "Crusader" phenomenon. See: David Ohana, "The Cross, the Crescent and the Star of David: The Zionist-Crusader Analogy in the Israeli Discourse", Iyunim B'tkumat Yisrael 11 (2002). pp. 486-526 (Hebrew)

And now this:-

Despite centuries of conflict and countless Crusades, the Christian armies ultimately failed in their bid to reconquer the Holy Land...Yet as historians point out, the Crusades are often subject to serious misrepresentation.

Left-liberals have shown themselves peculiarly eager to accept a standard Islamic view of the Crusades as episodes of unprovoked Western aggression against peaceful, tolerant and vastly more civilised Muslim lands.

Ex-Python Terry Jones's television history of The Crusades was an outstanding example of this, as was Ridley Scott's movie Kingdom Of Heaven. Bill Clinton even apologised for them. But does this make any sense?

It is vital to understand that, before the Crusades were ever dreamed of, Islamic armies had struck many times at the heart of Europe.

Jerusalem itself was never 'conquered' initially by Christianity or the West, of course: Christianity simply grew there, spread by preaching.

But it was conquered by the armies of Islam in 638, erupting out of the Arabian peninsula armed with scimitar, shield and, above all, a fanatical new faith that urged them to perpetual jihad with all unbelievers. By 715 they had conquered most of Spain, and soon they had got as far as Northern France, only stopping with their defeat at Tours by Charles Martel.

Shortly afterwards, the Caliphate of Jerusalem ordered all Jews and Christians to bear a special symbol on their hands - the first instance in history of such a measure.

Another Muslim army ravaged France in 848 two years after they had attacked Rome, sacked St Peter's itself and extorted promises of tribute from the Pope.

In 850, Caliph al-Mutwakkil forced all Christians and Jews in his territory to affix wooden images of devils to their houses, and to wear only yellow garments to mark them out.

And a century later, Muslims went on a rampage through Jerusalem, plundering and destroying both the Church of Calvary and the Church of the Resurrection.
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Some scholars even argue the very idea of 'holy war' was learned from the example of Islam on the march

In this same century before the Crusades, Muslim armies captured Crete, Cyprus and Sicily. Under Caliph al-Hakim in the early 11th century, thousands of churches were destroyed throughout the ancient Christian heartland of the Middle East, and when the Seljuk Turks captured Jerusalem in 1077, just 22 years before it fell to the Crusaders, they too massacred some three thousand inhabitants.

All these Islamic attacks on the West occurred before the First Crusade. Some scholars even argue that the very idea of 'holy war' was learned from the example of Islam on the march.

...the great Muslim leader Saladin still enjoys a reputation for chivalry, in contrast to the brutish Europeans - yet this wasn't always the case. After his great victory at Hattin in 1187, he followed to the letter the instructions of the Koran. 'When you meet the unbelievers on the battlefield, strike off their heads.'

Saladin himself beheaded Reynald de Chatillon, kneeling unarmed before him. He went further with some other knights, handing them over not to professional executioners but to some attendant scholars and Sufi ascetics.

They were extremely grisly and drawn-out executions indeed.

As one Arab source records, 'each of these begged to be allowed to kill one of the unbelievers, and drew his sword and rolled back his sleeve. Saladin sat upon his dais watching, his face joyful'.

...The fall of the Crusader kingdom of Antioch to Sultan Baibars in 1268, for instance, was followed by the slaughter of some 17,000 civilians, and the enslavement of perhaps 100,000 more.

Baibars subsequently boasted in letters to the remaining Crusader princes of the massacre and of how 'the pulpits and crosses were overturned, the leaves of the Gospel torn and cast to the wind, the dead devoured by the fire of this world'.

Even greater slaughter of innocent civilians followed the Islamic capture of Christian Constantinople in 1453, a date which arguably brought the Middle Ages to an end.