Those Crusades were a disgrace...

...although they were an effort to stop this kind of thing.

Yazidis face genocide by ISIS after US turns away.

Let's stop apologizing for the 11th Century.

Rodney Stark on the Crusades:

The Crusades is a topic that generates a lot of books each year. Why did you want to write God’s Battalions: The Case for the Crusades and what makes this book different from others?


Since my teens I have read a great deal of military history, but until now I had not written any myself. Along the way I read many books about the Crusades and in the past few years I have been greatly impressed by the work of historians such as Jonathan Riley-Smith and others including Thomas Madden. Unfortunately, these wonderful new studies have not reached the intelligent reading public. Nonsense about Crusaders as greedy, colonizing, brutal barbarians still prevails in the public sphere. So, I wrote a chapter on the matter as part of a proposal for a book on anti-Catholic historiography. My publishers responded that they wanted that chapter expanded into a book. So I did it. What makes my book different is, first, that it pulls together the scholarly literature (all of it carefully acknowledged) in one volume written for the general reader in hopes of setting the record straight. Secondly, my book begins in the seventh not the eleventh century, since I regard the Crusades as part of many centuries of conflict between Christendom and Islam. Thus far there have been four major book club pre-publication adoptions, so maybe God’s Battalions can have some corrective effects.

If one starts one's study of the Crusades in 1098, it looks like Christian aggression, in the same way that starting with a freeze-frame of one guy hitting another makes that person look like the aggressor.  Roll the tape back and a different picture emerges.  With respect to the Crusades, that picture includes the fact that the Crusades were into formerly Christian territory with a majority Christian population after Islamic Turks had lopped off the largest and richest part of the Christian territory in Turkey.

Fight the Pseudoknowledge.

4 Myths about the Crusades.

The one that depicts the Crusades as unprovoked aggression is pretty amazing.  Muslims had been attacking Christians for 450 years before the First Crusade.  200 years before the First Crusade, Muslims had attacked Rome.  In that light, the Crusades were identical to Obama's present policy with regard to Libya and Afghanistan.

Dhimmi Alert.

Egyptian Muslim crowd of 10,000 attack Christian Coptic community:

The large mob of Muslims from el-Nowahed and the surrounding villages besieged and waged an attack against Coptic homes amidst cries of "Allah is the greatest" and other Islamic Jihadist slogans. They threw fireballs, gasoline and stones at Coptic homes and detonated Butane Gas cylinders. Christian-owned homes were looted and shops were broken into, plundered and burned. There were no reported casualties.


The attack resulted in the burning of twenty-two Coptic-owned homes (video), two commercial shops, a bakery, as well as livestock. The sound of automatic weapons fired in the air was heard, to terrorize and intimidate the Copts, according to Ra'fat Samir, who heads the Luxor branch of the Egyptian Union for Human Rights.

Coptic News Bulletin aired a recording of phone calls made to several Copts from inside the burning village. Terrorized Copts were hiding on the roof tops of their homes, afraid to venture in the streets, could only cry out: "help us, save us, they are burning us." None of them could concentrate enough to tell the reporter the reason behind the sudden Muslim attack, they just kept pleading for help.

Security forces were able to impose order a few hours later, and a curfew was imposed on el-Nowahed village and the city of Abu-Tesht.

The rampage against the Coptic inhabitants of the village came in the wake of a story which circulated in town three days earlier, about an affair between 19-year-old Copt Hossam Noel Attallah and a 17-year-old Muslim girl, Rasha Mohamed Hussein, a relative of the village mayor. According to Anba Kyrillos, Bishop of the Diocese of Nag Hamadi, some witnesses saw the teenage couple walking together towards the graveyards, after which it was rumored in the village that he raped her, "although a Muslim woman confirmed that Hossam did nothing wrong to the girl," he said.