Christian Crusaders never fought any Arabs -- The Real Crusaders were the Mongols

THE REAL CRUSADERS

Written by Dr. Jack Wheeler

Tuesday, 10 February 2015

[This was written in 2005.  We are republishing it in light of Zero's idiotic Prayer Breakfast speech last week, comparing Medieval Christians to Moslem terrorists of today who want the whole world to live in their world of Dark Ages barbarism.  This is the real history of the Crusades in summary form.  It is not taught in schools or universities today, and certainly never learned by Zero.  He claims to have been educated at Harvard and Columbia, but extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence, and his words and deeds have never provided any evidence he is educated in any way.]  It’s amazing how much the Arabs complain about the Crusades when they had so little to do with them. The Crusades were their great trauma, they constantly moan, the bottomless source of their resentment of the West and Christianity. Mysteriously, they never condemn the Real Crusaders who wiped out their entire civilization. There were eight separate Crusades over two hundred years, from 1095 through 1294. The Arabs played no significant role in any. The first was caused by the Seljuk Turks, who had swarmed out of Central Asia to conquer the Middle East, and seized Jerusalem in 1070. The Holy City had been part of the Fatimid Empire of Ismaili Shia Berbers from North Africa, who provided Christian pilgrims unhindered access to their holy places and freedom to worship in their churches. The Seljuks conducted pogroms on the Christians and desecrated their churches. They also terrified Byzantine Emperor Alexius I, who had lost much of his empire to them, so much that he pleaded with his rival in Rome, Pope Urban II, to call for all Christendom to rescue the Holy Sepulcher from the Islamic infidels. The French answered the call and conducted the First Crusade, culminating in their sack of Jerusalem on July 15, 1099. Led by Godfrey of Bouillon, they slaughtered 70,000 Moslems (the majority Berbers and Turks), and herded every Jew into a synagogue to burn them alive. Thus was formed the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem. After this initial atrocity, the European citizens of this new kingdom (almost all men) began marrying local ladies, adopting local customs, dress, and speech, many Christian-Moslem friendships and alliances formed, and there was over 40 years of peace. Then a Kurdish army out of Mosul (now in northern Iraq) overran a remote Christian stronghold called Edessa (now in southeastern Turkey) in 1144, and somehow this prompted Pope Eugenius III to call for a Second Crusade. Two armies set out separately, one French, one German, and in 1148 on their way to Edessa in the middle of Turkey, were slaughtered almost to a man by Seljuk armies. Forty more years of peace for the Kingdom of Jerusalem passed. By that time, the legendary Saladin (Salah al-Din Al-Ayyubi 1137-1193), leading that Kurdish army that had taken Edessa, had become Sultan of Egypt, replacing the Berber Fatimid dynasty with his Kurdish Ayyubid dynasty. Saladin’s defeat of a Crusader army at the Horns of Hittin on July 4, 1187 above the Sea of Galilee was the most famous battle of all the Crusades. When Jerusalem surrendered to him on October 12, there was no sack and slaughter, and the Holy Sepulcher remained open to Christians. Nonetheless, Jerusalem’s fall led to the 67 year-old Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa (Red Beard) to call for a Third Crusade in 1189. He led a French army into Turkey where he drowned crossing a small river, and most of his men subsequently wiped out by the Seljuks. Then the new King of England, 31 year-old Richard the Lion Heart sailed to the Holy Land with an army of Norman knights. He captured Acre and Jaffa, and defeated Saladin at Arsuf. Showing the utmost chivalry and respect for each other, Richard and Saladin signed a peace treaty on September 2, 1192, leaving the Holy Land’s coast in Christian and Jerusalem in Moslem hands. Saladin died the next year and Pope Innocent III called for a Fourth Crusade. It ended up having nothing to do with Jerusalem, or any Moslems at all. The Crusaders, most of whom as before were French, gathered in Venice and were paid (downpayment, 200,000 silver marks) by the son of the recently deposed Byzantine Emperor Isaac II Angelus to sack Constantinople and restore his father to the throne. Innocent III forbade it, the armada sailed anyway, when the Roman Catholic Crusaders entered Constantinople the Greek Orthodox populace revolted, and the sack was on. Not many Greeks were killed, but for three days, April 12-14, 1204, the pillage was unrestrained. Most of the Crusaders returned home with their spoils, and the recapture of Jerusalem forgotten. Innocent III’s successor, Honorius III never forgot and insisted on a Fifth Crusade, with the Crusaders (this time mostly Germans and Hungarians) sailing to Egypt in 1217 (thinking to reach Jerusalem from the south), wasted three years in fruitless fighting with the Kurdish Ayyubids in the Nile Delta, and sailed back. Through all of this there still was a Kingdom of Jerusalem, no longer possessing the Holy City itself but ruling the Holy Land coast from the city of Acre (north of Haifa in Israel). In 1225 it was ruled by John of Brienne, whose daughter, Isabella, married the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II (grandson of Barbarossa). Claiming he now had a title on Jerusalem, Frederick called for a Sixth Crusade. Frederick II (1194-1250) was one of the most extraordinary personalities of the Middle Ages, so extraordinary he was known in his own time as Stupor Mundi, the Wonder of the World. He spoke nine languages, could read and write in seven, had a working understanding of all the science of his day, was a renowned warrior, and advocated a medieval version of free market economics. He conducted the Sixth Crusade peacefully, without a single battle or casualty. As their armies faced each other at Nablus north of Jerusalem, Frederick sat down with Ayyubid Sultan Malik al-Kamil (Saladin’s nephew who had defeated the Fifth Crusaders in Egypt), and impressed him with his knowledge of Islamic literature, science, and philosophy. They signed a ten-year treaty, with Sultan Kamil ceding Jerusalem (excepting the Enclosure with the Dome of the Rock) plus Nazareth and Bethlehem to Frederick, who was crowned King of Jerusalem (deposing 80 year-old John of Brienne in the process) in the Church of the Holy Sepulcher on March 18, 1229 with the blessing of the Sultan standing by. Christians and Moslems in the Holy Land rejoiced. Pope Gregory IX, who hated Frederick, denounced the treaty as an insult to Christendom and refused to ratify it. Sultan Kamil died in 1238. The Ayyubid army was now dominated by mameluks, captured and enslaved soldiers (mostly Slavs and Turks). One of them, a huge Kipchak Turk from Russia named Baibars, began seizing power. Leading a Mameluk army, in October 1244, he sacked Jerusalem, killing its citizens indiscriminately. King Louis IX of France (St. Louis 1214-1270) declared a Seventh Crusade. Marching up the Nile towards Cairo, his army was destroyed by Baibars, and he himself was subsequently captured in March of 1250 and held captive for four years. Baibars completed his seizure of power in 1260 when he killed the last Ayyubid Sultan and became Sultan himself. Dedicating himself to destroying the remaining Christian cities along the Holy Land coast (the Levant), he sacked Caesara in 1265, Safad in 1266, Jaffa in 1267, and ancient Antioch, “The Queen of the East,” in 1268, killing and enslaving tens of thousands of Christians. This roused Louis IX to declare an Eighth Crusade. He was persuaded to launch it in Tunis in North Africa as an approach to Egypt. He died of dysentery a few days after his arrival on August 25, 1270. The last remaining Christian city in the Holy Land was Acre with its impregnable walls. Baibars died in 1277. A Mameluk successor, Sultan al-Asraf Khalil, assaulted it and after a siege of 43 days, Acre fell on June 17, 1291. 60,000 Christians were slaughtered or enslaved. The Kingdom of Jerusalem was extinguished and the Crusades were over. You’ll notice that in this entire struggle of two centuries, the Christian Crusaders never fought any Arabs. They fought Berbers, Turks, Kurds, and Mameluks - none of which were Arab. So where were these guys? Off in Baghdad. This was the seat of the Abassid Caliphs whose rulers claimed descent from Abbas, an uncle of Mohammed, and had run the Arab Empire since 750. The most famous of them was the fifth, Harun al-Rashid (763-809), whom Scheherezade entranced with her Tales of a Thousand and One Nights. When Moslem refugees from Godfrey of Bouillon’s sack of Jerusalem in 1099 fled to Baghdad begging for their Moslem Arab brethren to help them recapture the sacred city, Caliph al-Mustazhir ignored them. As a Sunni orthodox Moslem, he couldn’t be bothered with the plight of these Fatimid Ismaili Shia heretics. When Saladin appealed to the Abbasid Caliph An-Nasir in 1191 for help against Richard, the Arab caliph ignored him. No Arab ruler, no Arab Caliph in Baghdad, ever fought the Christian Crusaders, or ever offered help to their fellow Moslems who did. Right up to 1258, when the Real Crusaders arrived and obliterated Arab civilization. The Real Crusaders were the Mongols. To this day, much of Central Asia and the Middle East - the Heartland of Islam - has never recovered from their depredations. Under Genghis Khan, the Mongol invasion of Islam began in 1219. The great Central Asian Silk Road cities were razed to the ground, Bukhara, Khiva, Nishapur, Rayy, and Merv, slaughtering every man, woman, child, cat, and dog - in Merv over 700,000 people, over 1,000,000 (yes, one million human beings) in Nishapur. Genghis returned to Mongolia and died in 1227. Thirty years later, his grandson Hulagu, decided to finish the Moslems off. On February 10, 1258, his giant Mongol army broke through the gates of Baghdad beginning forty days of pillage and massacre. 800,000 people were put to the Mongol sword, libraries with hundreds of thousands of volumes burned down, the entire city turned to rubble, Caliph Al-Mustassim (the last of the Abbasids) wrapped in a carpet and trampled to death by Mongol horses, the capital of Arab civilization and culture smoldering in Mongol ashes, and with it Arab civilization itself annihilated for centuries. But you never hear a word of this from the Jihadis, from Osama and other Arab terrorists fanatics crazed with hate for... us? We, the Christians, the Crusaders, the West, we had nothing to do with the destruction of Arab civilization. All this Al Qaeda fulminating about “the Crusaders” is just a phony rationale for their pathological hatreds. Hopefully, this history will enable those liberals not inextricably buried in self-mortification to resist their perennial call for America and the West and the Vatican, et el, to “apologize” for the Crusades. Apologize... to whom? Certainly not the Arabs. Certainly not the Turks. We should make the Moslems a deal. We won’t demand an apology from them - Arabs in particular - for conducting a Moslem Crusade that conquered the Christian Middle East by the sword in the 7th Century (a crusade that killed vastly more Christians than all the 8 Crusades together killed Moslems). In return, the Arabs should feel free to demand an apology from the Mongols. If they don’t take the deal, then from now on we’ll point out that they, the Arab Moslems, were the real Real Crusaders. What right did they have to swarm out of the sands of Arabia and spread their religion by the sword over lands that had been Christian for centuries, over places that had been Holy to Christians for centuries? Ultimately, the Arabs are the Real Crusaders, and until they stop whining about “the Crusades,” we should never let them forget it.

Romney's Jerusalem speech: "The contrast with Obama could hardly be more dramatic."

Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes quoted in PowerLine ... READ MORE

Check out Jonah Goldberg in the comments!

Lookin' good for Romney, bad for Obama.

Jerusalem...in 5 minutes

Hat tip: ATLAS SHRUGS

...divided we fall

VP Joe Biden refused to applaud today when Israeli Prime Minister told Congress that Jerusalem must never be divided.

Why?

Proof that HAMAS is evil

UPDATE: The media is aligned with the jihad force. May they rot in hell - the whole lot of leftist leeches and Jew haters. Congratulations as they are outted as this century's nazi enablers...

Five members of the Fogel family in Itamar Udi (father age 36) Ruth (mother age 35), Yoav (age 11), Elad (age 4) and Hadas (age 3 months) were murdered in their home in Itamar in Shomron by terrorists who infiltrated the Jewish community by jumping over the town's security fence. The five were stabbed to death.

Professor William Jacobson: But the thought of the person or people who stood over her, and what was going through their minds as they cut her, is just unimaginable...

UPDATE: I had second thoughts about publishing the pictures...but then, so many liberals think HAMAS is so great...

Newly released report by the US National Archives details the close collaborative relationship between Nazi leaders and the grand mufti of Jerusalem...

Amazing photographs: Nazis promised grand mufti of J'lem Haj Amin al-Husseini leadership of Palestine after slaughter of its Jews, according to US report...

SWEET

From Sultan Knish: And finally at Boker Tov Boulder, Sweet Home Alabama meets Sweet Home Jerusalem

Aaron Klein, Jerusalem bureau chief for WND.com, broke the first major story on Van Jones

In a post yesterday I praised God and thanked Glenn Beck for getting this self-avowed Communist, radical, and 9/11 Truther out of our government...but I forgot all about WorldNetDaily!

In April, Aaron Klein, Jerusalem bureau chief for WND.com, broke the first major story on Jones who was identified as a self-described radical communist and "rowdy black nationalist" who said his environmental activism was actually a means to fight for racial and class "justice."

Succeeding revelations by WND included:

Top Ten Myths About the Middle East Conflict

by Jonathan S. Tobin

So much of the American press is steeped in sheer ignorance. Debunking these misconceptions with facts is a good start.

For all too many members of the press (as well as other Americans who like to think of themselves as being informed about the great issues of the day), lack of knowledge about the underlying facts of the Middle East conflict is commonplace. Myths about the State of Israel, its origins and its actions have found their way into general discourse in the academy and the media. Those who seek to stand up for Israel need to recognize that many of the problems that Israel has in getting its case across stem from a failure to debunk these myths and to answer them with the truth.

So here is a list of the top ten myths about Israel and the Middle East conflict. This list is by no means comprehensive, but it is a good start to understanding the heart of the problem.

Myth #1: Jews have no historic connection to Israel/Palestine.

A key element of Arab and anti-Zionist attacks on Israel is the notion that the Jewish presence in the country is a remnant of 19th century imperialism in which Europeans colonized and exploited parts of the third world. But far from being outsiders there, the Jewish ties date back 4,000 years to the very beginning of Jewish history recounted in the Bible and verified by much of the evidence of archeology that has been discovered.

Though the Romans expelled most of the Jewish population from the country, Jewish settlement continued without interruption throughout the last 2,000 years. In all this time, the Land of Israel remained a constant in thoughts and the hearts of Jews throughout the world, as it was remembered in their daily prayers and in their dreams.

Myth #2: Jews have no unique claim to the ancient and holy city of Jerusalem.

Though both Christianity and Islam have holy sites in the city, the Jewish ties predate that of any other existing religion. King David made Jerusalem the capital of Israel 3,000 years ago -- 1,700 years before Islam was even founded. Jerusalem never served as even a provincial capital during the centuries of Muslim rule. The entire city is sacred to Jews; only the Dome of the Rock has religious significance to Muslims. Moreover, in the modern era, Jews have been the majority of the population of the city since the 1840s.

As for freedom of worship, the only period during which all faiths have been free to worship in peace has been since 1967 when the city became unified under Israeli sovereignty.

Myth #3: The Zionist movement was never prepared to share the land.

From the very start of the Jewish return to their historic homeland in the late 19th century, it has never been the goal of the Zionist movement to uproot the Arab population or to create a state where only Jews could live. In 1922, the League of Nations' Mandate for Palestine was partitioned by Britain, with the east bank of the Jordan River reserved for Arab rule (it eventually become the Kingdom of Jordan), and the area between the Mediterranean and the Jordan being designated as the Jewish National Home. Dating back to the 1930s, every subsequent peace plan that has been proposed involved some sort of partition of the Western portion of Palestine. Though all of these schemes involved painful concessions for the Jews, the leadership of the Zionist movement and subsequently the Jewish state always accepted this principle of sharing the country.

Myth #4: The lack of an independent Palestinian Arabs state is the fault of the Zionists.

In 1947, the United Nations approved the partition of Palestine between a Jewish state and an Arab state. The response of the Palestinian Arabs, as well as the rest of the Arab and Muslim world, was a categorical rejection of any scheme that allowed a Jewish state on any part of the land, no matter what its borders might be. No effort was made to set up an independent Arab state in the part of Palestine allotted for that purpose. In the aftermath of Israel's War of Independence, in which it repelled the invasion by five Arab armies, the West Bank, Gaza and half of Jerusalem, were left in Arab hands. But for the next 19 years when these territories remained under Arab control, there was never any consideration given to creating an Arab state there. On the contrary, the focus of the Arab world was on extinguishing the fledgling state of Israel that existed in the truncated borders left by the 1949 armistice lines.

In the years after the 1967 war, Israel has maintained a willingness to negotiate a peace deal based on the concept of "land for peace." Indeed, at Camp David in July 2000 and the following January at Taba, Egypt, Israel offered the Palestinians a state in these lands as well as part of Jerusalem. The answer from Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat was "no," and he followed up that refusal by launching a terrorist war of attrition that resulted in over a thousand Jewish deaths and even more suffering on the part of his own people.

Myth #5: The plight of Palestinian refugees is a special case of dispossession that must be redressed by international action.

In the aftermath of World War II, millions of refugees were created by the partition of India, the re-drawing of the map of Europe, as well as by the war brought on by the Arab refusal to accept the UN's partition of Palestine. Only in the case of Palestinians who fled their home during the course of Israel's War of Independence, was there a failure to re-settle the refugees. The Palestinian refugees, whose exit from the country was caused more by a general fear of the war sweeping over the land than by any action on the part of the Israelis, were the only refugees who were kept in camps and not allowed to integrate into the populations of the Arab countries that received them. They were kept homeless as a means of maintaining the illusion that the creation of Israel could be undone. Subsequent generations of this population have been raised in these camps and inculcated in an irredentist ideology whose premise is the rejection of any Jewish state. They remain the wards of a UN agency (the United Nations Relief Works Agency) that is devoted to perpetuating their status as refugees at a cost of billions of dolllars on international aid.

On the other hand, several hundred thousand Jews living in Arab countries were evicted from their homes during this same era and forced to flee to safety in Israel or the West -- where they were integrated into society.

Myth #6: The occupation of eastern Jerusalem, the West Bank, Gaza and the Golan Heights in 1967 was the result of an Israeli war of aggression.

In May 1967, Egypt launched a blockade of Israel's southern port of Eilat. Egyptian and Syrian forces massed on Israel's borders. Egypt demanded, and got, the UN peacekeeping force that separated their army from Israel in the Sinai, to withdraw. Egyptian dictator Gamal Abdul Nasser and other Arab leaders told their peoples that they would soon launch a battle of annihilation that would result in Israel's destruction. When international diplomacy failed to get the Arabs to back down, Israel decided that it would not wait to be attacked and launched a defensive war to forestall the Arab assault.

After the war ended in a sweeping Israeli victory, Israel stated its willingness to make peace, but an Arab summit conference a month later answered with three no's. No peace. No recognition. No negotiations.

Myth #7: Jewish settlements are the main, if not the sole, obstacle to peace in the Middle East.

Though many legal sources claim that Jewish settlements in the West Bank are illegal, the fact remains that the right of Jewish settlement in those lands was guaranteed by the Mandate for Palestine of the League of Nations. This territory was never part of any other sovereign state and its final legal status is subject to negotiations that must be concluded between the competing parties. Until such time as there is a peace accord which gives one side or the other sovereignty in this territory, it is inaccurate to refer to this land as belonging to one side or another.

Twice before, Israel has shown a willingness to uproot Jewish communities for the sake of peace: in the Sinai (given back to Egypt in the 1979 Peace Treaty) and in Gaza (from which Israel withdrew unilaterally in 2005). The existence of settlements in these areas is no bar to a peace deal under which they might be withdrawn.

Myth #8: The failure of the Oslo peace process was the result of actions by hard-line Israeli governments.

The Oslo process was embraced by Israel in the hope that an offer of land would be met with genuine peace. However, the result of years of negotiations and various Israeli withdrawals has not been peace. From the start of Palestinian Authority rule in the West Bank and Gaza in 1994, Palestinian leadership has encouraged terrorism against Israel and fomented hatred against the Jewish state -- while "peace education" is promulgated in Israeli schools. Throughout the 1990s as Israel signed several agreements that gave the Palestinians more autonomy, the corrupt PA leadership continued to tolerate and even fund terror groups. In 2000, Yasser Arafat refused Israel's offer of a Palestinian state in virtually all of the West Bank and Gaza as well as part of Jerusalem -- and launched the terror offensive known as the Second Intifada.

Though all Israeli governments have, at times, been forced to reply with force to terrorist attacks from Gaza, Lebanon and the West Bank, all have stated a willingness to negotiate a peace. Today the Palestinians are split between the Palestinian Authority led by Mahmoud Abbas which is too weak to make peace and Hamas, the rulers of Gaza, who reject it under any circumstances. Both factions reject the legitimacy of a Jewish state.

Myth #9: The Arab-Israeli conflict is the key to all of America's political, diplomatic and military problems in the Middle East.

The battle over Israel/Palestine is but one of many disputes in the Middle East. The rivalry between the two great Muslim religious strains, Shia and Sunni, has been the source of more wars and more bloodshed than any battle between Arabs and Jews. Similarly, the tensions between Persians (modern day Iran with its Islamist rulers and nuclear ambitions) and Arabs is another perennial conflict that predates the renewal of Jewish sovereignty in the region.

Even more to the point, the conflict between radical Islamists who seek to impose their religious and political views on the rest of the Muslim world, and those who oppose them in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, has nothing to do with Israel or the Palestinians. It is this schism which is at the core of the rise of Al Qaeda and the Taliban. It is this battle for the soul of Islam that gave the impetus to the 9/11 attacks, not the dispute over the borders of the Jewish state.

Though Israel's foes claim that resentment over its creation fuels Arab and Islamic resentment of the West, such sentiments long predate the rise of Zionism. The clash of civilizations between Islam and the West was the cause of wars between European nations and Muslim countries for centuries with no Jewish involvement. Linking world peace to a resolution of the Palestinian conflict is just another tactic of rejectionist groups bent on perpetuating the conflict and diverting attention from the real issues.

Myth #10: American support for Israel is the result of the manipulations of the U.S. government by Jews.

Support for the return of the Jews to their ancient homeland dates back to the very beginning of American history. Sympathy for the idea of a renewed Jewish state is rooted in the faith of most Americans, as well as in their belief that the persecuted Jewish people were entitled to find a new life in their old home. From the very beginnings of the Zionist movement, it found both a welcome and support from large numbers of Americans. In the aftermath of the Holocaust that support became even greater.

Today, the overwhelming majority of Americans of all faiths and both major political parties see Israel as a friend and an ally. They need no prodding from a Jewish lobby to understand that the alliance with the Jewish state is based on common values and a shared belief in democracy. While Israel's supporters in Washington are vocal and proud of it, their financial clout is dwarfed by that of an oil industry and other factions with a vested interest in appeasing Arab dictators and monarchs. But the American people's identification with Israel and their sense of solidarity with it have prevailed because these ideas are rooted deeply in American history and tradition.

For even more information about myths and facts about Israel, please go to www.jewishvirtuallibrary.com