Thousand-Year-Old Lessons From the Crusades for Today

Kingdom of Heaven is a movie about the Crusades, a clash of civilizations between Islam and Christianity that lasted two centuries. Could a similar clash of civilizations lie ahead?

by Melvin Rhodes

Kingdom of Heaven is a new movie about the Crusades. So far as historical movies go, it's fairly accurate. However, that in itself is a cause for concern.

To most Westerners, the Crusades are ancient history. For Americans, it's ancient history about something that occurred thousands of miles away, totally irrelevant to anything going on today.

Not so in the Middle East, where the Crusades are remembered as a fairly recent event and where the word crusade (Arabic: al-Salibiyyah) is highly emotive. Soon after Sept. 11, President Bush called for a "crusade" against Islamic fundamentalism. He has never used the word again!

The concern about the movie is that the Muslims end up looking better than the so-called Christians. "So-called" because the Crusader version of Christianity was not, to put it mildly, biblically based. When the Crusaders took Jerusalem, they slaughtered all the Muslims and Jews. By contrast, when the Islamic forces recaptured Jerusalem, they let the captives go.

The fear is that this movie could stir up anti-Western passions throughout the Islamic world.

That's happened anyway. Thanks to Newsweek magazine, which ran a story in its May 9 issue claiming that American forces desecrated the Koran, anti-American riots took place in a number of countries, leaving more than a dozen people dead.

Although Newsweek retracted the story, their columnist Eleanor Clift pointed out on NPR's Diane Rehm Show (May 20) that this does not mean the story is false. U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice apologized to Muslims on behalf of the United States and assured them that the American government has great respect for Islam and the Koran.

Interestingly, nobody in the mainstream media realized the full implications of these developments. The cold reality is that Islam in general and the Koran in particular cannot be criticized. This goes to the very core of free speech issues upon which our modern Western civilization has been built.

Read the full article at www.wnponline.org/wnp/wnp0506/thousandyear.htm

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