The Religion of Peace Strikes Again! 'Persistent killings': Christians flee deadly attacks in Nigeria

all ancient history, but none the less all justifiable

How exactly would one go about justifying, much less rationalizing, the Crusades?

lets see...much like today many muslim fundementalists were intruding their back assward beliefs upon a world by force and violence in countries who held differing beliefs. the crusades were a counter measure to muslim mauraders. a history of muslims who cant get along with their neighbors, which continues even today and is responsible for most of the worlds conflicts.

Muslims started the Crusades by invading Europe FIRST. http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/imperialism/notes/islamchron.html

"Muslims started the Crusades by invading Europe FIRST"
One small problem:
The Muslim incursion into Western Europe was repelled well over three centuries BEFORE the Crusades.

"muslim fundementalists were intruding their back assward beliefs upon a world by force and violence in countries who held differing beliefs"
WRONG
Prior to the Christian crusader invasion of the Middle East in the 11th and 13th Centuries, Muslims had ruled what was known in Western Europe as the "Holy Land" of the Near East since only a very short time following the foundation of the Muslim Religion on the Arabian Peninsula.
The Muslims had long before conquered the Near East, ruled by the Christian Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire [the capitol city of which, Constantinople, the Christian Western European Crusaders burned to the ground on their way to the "Holy Land", along with the remnants of the Library of Alexandria, burned to the ground centuries earlier by the Christian Romans].
The Crusades were called upon Western European nations by the Roman Catholic church, in order to "take back" the "Holy Land" from the Muslims that had ruled them for centuries. (And who would continue to rule the Middle East for a millennium and counting after the failed genocidal Dark Ages Medieval Christian Holy Wars.

"all justifiable"
How, exactly, is reactionary bigoted xenophobic evangelical-religious-occult fundamentalist zealotry-motivated mass-genocidal brutal, savage, and barbaric slaughter "justifiable" by any rational, or at all reasonable, definition of that term?

simple really. protecting ones homeland from invading murderous hordes of islamo-facists who cant get along with their neighbors in anyones book with an honest and reasonable mind is justifiable. as usual, as it is with most of the worlds conflicts, it was the muslims who started the fight.

THE CRUSADES AND JIHAD

Back in 1999 while our mission was being bombed by the National Islamic Front government in Sudan, fellow missionaries were organising “Reconciliation Walks” to the Middle East to apologise for “The Crusades”. At the time, as our church services were under aerial and artillery bombardment by Jihadists, it seemed rather bizarre. Therefore I undertook a study of the crusades and Jihad.

Anin Maalouf in “The Crusades through Arab eyes” claims that the Crusaders conquest of Jerusalem in 1099 was “The starting point of a millennial hostility between Islam and the West.” Islamic scholar John Esposito blames the Crusades for disrupting “Five centuries of peaceful coexistence elapsed before political events and an imperial papal power-play led to a centuries long series of so called Holy Wars that pitted Christendom against Islam and left an enduring legacy of misunderstanding and distrust.” (“Islam: The Straight Path” OUP).

What Preceeded The Crusades?

However the Crusades only started after five centuries of Islamic Jihad had conquered and annihilated, or forcibly converted, over two thirds of what had formerly been the Christian world. Shortly after the Islamic conquest of Jerusalem, in 638, Christian pilgrims were harassed, massacred, and early in the 8th Century, 60 Christian pilgrims from Amoriem were crucified.

The Muslim governor of Caesarea seized a group of pilgrims from Iconium and had them all executed. Muslims extorted ransom money from Pilgrims, and threatened to ransack the most holy churches in Christendom such as the Church of the Resurrection - if they didn’t pay exorbitant taxes. In the 8th Century a Muslim ruler banned all displays of the Cross in Jerusalem. He also increased the penalty tax (Jizya) and forbad Christians to engage in any religious instruction, even of their own children! In 772, the Calipha al Mansur ordered the hands of all Christians and Jews in Jerusalem to be branded.

In 789, Muslims beheaded a monk in Bethlehem, plundering the monastery and slaughtering many more Christians. In 923, a new wave of destruction of churches was launched by the Muslim rulers. In 937, Muslims went on a rampage in Jerusalem on Palm Sunday plundering and destroying the Church of Calvary and the Church of the Resurrection.

In 1004 the Fatimid Calipha Abu Ali al–Mansur al–Hakim unleashed a violent wave of church burning and destruction, confiscation of Christian property, and ferocious slaughter of both Christians and Jews. Over the next ten years, thirty thousand churches were destroyed and vast numbers of Believers were forcibly converted or killed.

In 1009, Al-Hakim ordered that the most holy churches in Christendom – the Church of the Holy Sepulchre and the Church of the Resurrection in Jerusalem - be destroyed. He heaped humiliating and burdensome decrees upon Christians and Jews forcing Christians to wear heavy crosses around their necks, and Jews to have blocks of wood in the shape of a calf around their necks. Ultimately, he ordered Christians and Jews to either accept Islam or flee his areas of control.

Christians remained in a precarious position and under threat throughout the Middle East. When the Seljuk Turks swept into Jerusalem in 1077 they murdered over three thousand people, including many Christians. It was at this point that the Christian Emperor of Byzantium, Alexius I, appealed for help to the Western churches.

Pope Urban II challenged the knights of Europe at the Council of Clermont in 1095: “The Turks and Arabs have attacked our brethren in the East and have conquered the territory of Romania (the Greek Empire) as far as the shore of the Mediterranean and the Hellespont…have occupied more and more of the lands of those Christians and have overcome them in seven battles. They have killed and captured many and have destroyed the churches and devastated the Empire. If you continue to permit them to continue thus for a while with impunity, the faithful of God will be much more widely attacked by them. On this account I…persuade all people of whatever rank, foot soldiers and knights, poor and rich, to carry aid promptly to those Christians…”

Nowhere was the call for the launch of the Crusades talking about either conquest or conversion, they were merely to remove the Islamic invaders from the lands that had previously been Christian, to restore religious freedom to the Holy Lands.

Myths And Misconceptions

The politically correct dogma that the Crusades were unprovoked, imperialist actions against the peaceful, indigenous Muslim population is simply not accurate. Such propaganda reflects a hostility for Western civilization, and often against Christianity itself, rather than any actual historical research.

Similarly, the characterization of the Crusaders as greedy for loot, only out for personal gain, is simply out of touch with reality. Those who participated in the Crusades saw it as an act of sacrifice rather than of profit. The Crusades were in fact prohibitivly expensive. Many Crusaders had to sell their property to raise money for the long journey to the Holy Land and knew that their chances of returning alive were slight. Most who did manage to survive and return came back with nothing material to show for their efforts.

Similarly the modern PC myth that the Crusaders attempted to forcibly convert Muslims to Christianity is a politically motivated fantasy. Search as one might through the writings and records of the Crusaders, one will not find any mention of Crusaders seeking to convert the Sarracens or the Turks. The Crusaders saw themselves as Pilgrims seeking to recapture and liberate Christian lands from vicious invaders.

Even Maalouf in The Crusades Through Arab Eyes, reports the observations of Spanish Muslim Ibn Jubayr who traversed the Mediterranean on his way to Mecca in the early 1180’s and found that the Muslims were far better off in those lands controlled by the Crusaders than they were in Muslim ruled lands. And that Muslims preferred to live in the Crusader realms as those lands were more orderly and better managed.

Ibn Jubayr wrote: “Whose lands were efficiently cultivated. The inhabitants were all Muslims. They live in comfort with the Franks – may God preserve them from temptation! Their dwellings belong to them and all their property is unmolested. All their regions, patrolled by the Crusaders in Syria are subject to the same system: The land that remains, the villages and farms, have remained in the hands of the Muslims. Now, doubt invests the hearts of a great number of these men when they compare their lot to that of their brothers living in Muslim territories. Indeed, the latter suffer from the injustices of their co-religionists, whereas the Franks act with equity.”

The Crusades have often been portrayed as European Colonialism, but the Crusader states were not ruled from Western Europe. The governments they established did not answer to any Western power. Nor did the Crusader rulers siphon off the wealth of their lands and send it back to Europe. No streams of settlers came from Europe to settle in these states, which were established only in order to provide permanent protection for Christians in the Holy Land.
http://www.frontline.org.za/articles/JihadAndCrusades.htm...again, muslims who cant get along with their neighbors

So let me ask you this: If since, prior to the Crusades, Muslims had established sovereignties in European lands, the Crusaders were thereby acting in self defense; then, seeing as how the United States has had, and continues to have, tens of thousands of armed military fighting forces stationed indefinitely within earshot of Islam's holiest shrines in Saudi Arabia for several decades, how, exactly is it that the Jihadists (Muslim Crusaders) were somehow NOT acting likewise in defense of their homeland on their bombing of two Manhattan skyscrapers a decade ago.
Surely an argument can be made that, if Muslim kingdoms in the Balkans could rationalize Western European armies burning and pillaging their way across the Near East, then Western American military occupations of the Arabian Peninsula can be used to justify small groups of Middle Eastern Holy Warriors attacking cities in Northeastern Atlantic Seaboard Metropolitan megacities.
So, by the same reasoning (which i believe to be profoundly flawed) by which you attempt to justify the mass-genocidal slaughters and massacres of the Christian Crusader Armies in the Middle East by Arabic armies entering Southern and Eastern Europe, you must, by the same logic, accept as equally justified Muslim Jihadists' attacks on American metropolises vis a vis American soldiers surrounding Muslim cities in Arabia.
I believe that when you begin to attempt to justify and rationalize the September 11th 2001 Terrorist bombings of Manhattan, that is the very epitome of a "slippery slope"
So i ask you now: Is that really the avenue you want to god down?

nice spin, you should become a professional apologist. it suits you

"nice spin"
Question: What's the difference between a Crusade and a Jihad?
Answer: There isn't any.
In other words, if you a capable of rationalizing the Christian Crusades of the 11th through 13th Centuries, then there is, quite literally, no possible way in which, by the very same logic, the Islamist Jihad of the 20th and 21st Centuries is NOT also likewise perfectly justifiable.
I would certainly hope that there would be as few people as humanly possible who would agree with you in saying that the terrorist bombings of September 11, 2001 were in any way shape or form at all whatsoever "justified"; and so it is reasonable to deduce that you stand just as equally in claiming that the mass-genocidal ethnic cleansing of the 1000's was, as you put it "perfectly justifiable".
Especially when one takes into consideration the overwhelming extent to which the sheer numbers of Westerners killed by Islamist Fundamentalists in the entire 21st Century thus-far are dwarfed in comparison to the merciless slaughters of innocent civilian men women and children by the Christian Evangelical Reactionaries in the Holy war of the late 11th Century alone.

" you should become a professional apologist"
In order to be an apologist, one must first be religious.
You can't be a defender of a faith if you don't have any faith.
I'm a scientific empirical rationalist.
There are no such things as scientific apologists.
If for no other reason than because empirical rationalism, historically speaking, has nothing to apologize for (except, perhaps, for being responsible for, saving, and prolonging the lives of anti-education anti-scientific bigoted reactionary zealots such as yourself whose fundamentalist literalist ideology uses manipulative intimidation, terrorism and violence to prevent innumerable countless lives from being saved on a daily basis, and to force unnecessary unfortunate incidents which are indisputably and irrevocably damaging to the human race and to the world, which could very probably be looked upon, from a pragmatic standpoint, as science having done a disservice to the human species and to the planet on which we live).
For saving your life, and the lives of all those like you, each and every single day of you lives, i would be more than happy to apologize for on behalf of science.

always like the typical leftylib. willing to rewrite history to make invalid points

Anything in the last 900 years?

Spain, Portugal?

"Anything in the last 900 years"
One word: "Inquisition"

"Anything in the last 900 years"
In terms of Reactionary Regressive Evangelical Christian Fundamentalist Literalist zealots mercilessly persecuting and slaughtering non-christians for no readily apparent rational reason?
How about Germany circa 1938? (You know, where the pope came from)
That recent enough for you?

"Spain, Portugal"
Okay, all right, fine, TWO words:
"SPANISH Inquisition"

Of course, In terms of Christian Evangelicals mercilessly slaughtering non-christians, there are always Columbus, Cortes, and Pizarro.

The post I was responding to had to do with Christian violence against Muslims. I was wondering if you had examples form the last 900 years.

Thank you for the interesting reads.

"Christian violence against Muslims.examples form the last 900 years."
Afghanistan circa 2001
Iraq circa 2003.

Hm..maybe in that Bush was a Christian, and Obama is a Christian who perpetuated those wars (yes, I know three years in Iraq is winding down).

Not the same type of example as your earlier references.

Thnak you for the response. I appreciate the dialogue.

"maybe in that Bush was a Christian,"
And the fact that The commander in chief of the most powerful armed military fighting force the world has ever known referred to the unprovoked and preemptive bombings and invasions of Aghanistan ad Iraq as a "Crusade" [Literally meaning "war for the cross ( or for Christ/Christianity)"]
as well as the fact that, as per Department of Defense mandates from the office of Bush/Cheney Regime Pentagon Cabinet Secretary Donald Rumsfeld himself, the weapons of mass death and devastation that American soldiers carried with them into their illegal and unjustifiable invasion and occupation of Afghanistan and Iraq had Bigoted, Xenophobic, Misanthropic, Genocidal Murderous Religious Old Testament Bible verses stamped into their manufacture.

"Obama is a Christian "
I don't buy that.
Barack Obama is way too smart to be that gullible.

"three years in Iraq is winding down"
Try Nine years and OVER.

Yes sure it had some religious overtones given the individual religious preferences of the two presidents who carried it out, your personal preferences not withstanding, but its not the Crusades.

Obama himself says he is a Christian. Who are any of us to question him or assume cynically that the claim is for political expediency?

Three years in Iraq under Obama. Troops out. Largest US embassy in the world. Who works out of the embassy? Still over 60,000 contractors. Contractor....just another word for military?

"its not the Crusades"
No, it's far worse than that.
The Crusades only took place in one place in the Near East.
The Cheney Regime's "Crusade" again the primeval human emotion of fear ("war against Terror") sent hundreds of thousands of American teenagers and young adults to fight unspecified amorphous evildoers in far-flung places around the globe, thousands of whom never returned home alive (many of these having never once seen nor heard any trace of the "enemy" nor fired a single shot).
The Crusades only resulted in civilian noncombatant casualties in the the thousands.
The casualty counts for innocent unarmed nonviolent men women and children in the Cheney Regime's "Crusade" range from the hundreds of thousands to the millions.
The Crusader armies conquered cities, slaughtered their inhabitants, then defended them from invading armies attempting to retake them.
The Cheney-Rumsfeld taxpayer-funded private for-profit mercenary paramilitaries moved into an occupied city in order to impose an iron-fisted authoritarian dictatorial martial law, all too often mowing innocent noncombatant civilian men women and children on a whim.
Compared to the Cheney Regime's war on fear, the Crusades of the eleventh century were child's play.

"Obama himself says he is a Christian"
It's called "pandering", and its because he knows that, in spite of the Constitution strictly prohibiting religion form factoring into one's eligibility for the Presidency, the United States has not elected a non-christian President since 1830.

"assume cynically that the claim is for political expediency"
I disagree that it is cynical at all to think that a man as driven as Barack Obama would be willing to say and do whatever he deemed necessary in order to fairly and undisputedly attain the necessary position of prominence to do the undeniable and indisputable good that he has done for the citizens of the nation he feels such responsibility to.
What i do, however, think would be jaded in the extreme would be to doubt the intellectual capacity of a man who has, and continue to, repeated demonstrate so resoundingly to be of such unprecedented erudition.
To assume him to be a Christian, in the vain of his unelected imbecile predecessor, would be to demean his formidable intellect by baselessly and unfoundedly proclaiming on his behalf his gullibility an susceptibility to irrational belief in demonstrably fantastical and fictitious impossibilities.
I earnestly do not believe Barack Obama to be an ignoramus or a dunce/dolt, nor do i believe him to be delusional or psychotic.
what he is, and has demonstrated himself repeatedly to be, is a rational pragmatist.
His only faith comes in the form of his repeatedly demonstrated propensity toward perpetual, eternal, and indefatigable, at times even nearly approaching apparently deliriously dissociative , optimism.
In so many words, i do not view presuming President Obama's profession of religious faith to be the actions of a pragmatist masterful politician as being in any way shape or form cynical or jaded at all.
Rather instead, that presumption of decency is, to me, granting such a man his well-deserved benefit of the doubt.

"Who are any of us to question him"
He works for us. We pay his salary.
Questioning our employees is our responsibility.

"Largest US embassy in the world."
CORRECTION: Most EXPENSIVE embassy in the world.
Partly because it is staffed and guarded by for-profit corporate mercenaries, and in no small part because it sits in the crossfire of what has been for several years a rapidly developing civil war (the nearly-inevitable end result of a foreign military toppling a formerly sovereign nation's stable, however authoritarian, ruling government, and irrevocably and irreparably devastating its physical as well as social and sociological infrastructure).
It would have been much the same had we set up a privately owned and operated corporate embassy in Saigon following our surrender to the Vietcong (which of course, knowing better even then, we didn't do).

"Contractor....just another word for military"
That may be one of the most patently ludicrous things i've read all week.
The united States Military is the United States Department of Defense, whose budget, (well over more than half of the annual United States Federal Government Budget) is appropriated and allocated by the United States Congress.
A private-sector "contractor" could mean anything from Boeing and Lockheed to Haliburton and Blackwater.
In any case, the primary difference is that, like all for-profit corporations, the sole and exclusive purpose of any and all private-sector contractor is to make money, which they do by being hired (or "contracted") to perform services overseas, as well as domestically, by a wide-ranging variety of local, municipal, county, state, and national government entities, from the Departments of Agriculture and Natural Resources to Education and Health and Human Services to National Security and Defense.
The list of corporations with government contracts runs the gambit from junk food manufacturers such as Hershey's, coca cola and pepsi to fast food "restaurants" such as mcdonalds and burger king, to agricultural corporate conglomerates such as monsanto and oil and natural gas industry corporations such as Enron, exxon, BP, shell, chevron, and David H Koch industries, to transportation manufacturing industry corporations such as General Motors, Ford, Toyota, Honda, Hyundai, Boeing, Lockheed, and Hummer.
By attempting to synonymies the words "contractor" and "military", you are, for all practical intents and purposes, calling the workers of Seattle, Detroit, Houston, St Louis, and Hershey Pennsylvania soldiers.
This is patently ludicrous, and ranks among the most ridiculous things i have ever heard.
The United States Department of Defense (the US Military) is wholly funded by hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money.
Albeit a truly staggering quantity of that goes to for-profit private mercenary paramilitaries such as Blackwater (Haliburton still has enough left over to help BP pump the Gulf of Mexico full of Crude oil).

Glad I could amuse you.

I find ignorance amusing.
I know that makes me strange.