...Indeed, why single out Islamists when Crusaders also butchered Jews? Why should contemporary Muslims be prohibited from doing what Crusaders so excelled at a millennium ago? Throughout the ages Jews were accused of being too inherently intransigent for their own good. We still apparently are. Even today we stubbornly will not acquiesce in our own mass-murder by Muslims just because the Crusaders attempted it first. Egotistically we refuse to appreciate the wisdom of getting nuked out of existence by Islamic zealots just because their Christian counterparts strove to eradicate us beforehand. Obama’s edifying equivalency fails to overcome our parochial tunnel vision.
Sarah Honig..
Another Tack..
12 February '15..
Last week, at Washington’s annual National Prayer Breakfast, US President Barak Obama admonished us all lest “we get on our high horse and think that this [religious fanaticism] is unique to some other place – remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ … So, it is not unique to one group or one religion.”
This presidential platitude looks innocuous enough except that it’s deceptively simplistic. For one thing it casually glosses over the fact that the crimes it alludes to aren’t contemporaneous.
I am the last who’d seek to whitewash the Christian record. I hazard a guess that my family line was affected way more by Christian brutality than were any of Barack Obama’s ancestors. (Even if we accept his thesis that slavery in the American South and its Jim Crow laws were imposed in the name of Christ, none of Obama’s forebears suffered therefrom).
But one quick glance at my uniquely long genealogical chart will show many names accompanied by the notation “killed for Kiddush Hashem” – the sanctification of the Holy Name – Jewish euphemism for martyrdom.
Some of my ancestors were executed by Christian persecutors because they resisted attempts to convert them forcibly. Others were massacred by their frenzied Christian neighbors and rampaging Crusaders who hacked them to death in their own homes. The most seminal early mega-trauma registered on our family tree occurred during the First Crusade of 1096, when the Rhineland Jewish communities of Speyer, Worms and Mainz were destroyed in a homicidal tempest.
Peter the Hermit of Amiens and Count Emich of Leiningen exhorted the masses to slaughter the Jews as an extension of their Christian mission. They vilified the Jews as the crucifers of Christ and these helpless heretics were available for immediate retribution – in contrast to the hardly vulnerable, hardly peace-loving, hardly non-aggressive, hardly blameless and more distant Muslims. Besides, robbing the Jews also served to fill Christian coffers and finance the onward march to Jerusalem.
Godfrey of Bouillon, one of the leaders of the First Crusade and first ruler of the Kingdom of Jerusalem, left no doubt when he vowed that he would embark for the Holy Land “only after avenging the blood of the Crucified One by shedding Jewish blood and completely eradicating any trace of those bearing the name ‘Jew,’ thus assuaging His own burning wrath.”
All this, conveniently ignored by today’s educators, was but a prelude to many centuries more of massacres of Jews, expulsions and noxious religious preaching that eventually and inexorably culminated in the Holocaust. Christian clerics implanted in the European mind a deep-seated aversion to Jews that endured even when the hate no longer necessarily relied on religious pretexts.
“Completely eradicating any trace of those bearing the name Jew,” became a slogan shouted loudly and clearly on European soil in the 20th century and millions of ecstatic Germans and their numerous avid collaborators hoarsely shrieked “heil” in approval.
So, if anyone should bear a grudge against the Crusaders, it’s us Jews. We, here today largely descend from survivors of murderous Christian predations. We are also the children of those who escaped the death warrant issued against every single Jew anywhere by Godfrey’s ideological torchbearer, Adolf Hitler.
Our most compelling historical lesson is inscribed in one phrase of our Passover Hagada: “in each generation they rise against us to destroy us.” In each generation, the guise of the would-be destroyer may change and his idiom mutates, but he is no less dedicated to our annihilation.
Our would-be destroyer at this point in time isn’t burning us at the stake under the sign of the cross and he doesn’t speak Old German or proto-French, or even later Russian and Ukrainian. He speaks Arabic and Farsi. He quotes the Koran, esoteric instructions from the Hadith and fiery sermons by imams and ayatollahs – Sunni, Shiite and all other rival variations.
For that reason, without belittling or exonerating the dark history of Christendom, the Crusaders aren’t our problem today. Neither are the Crusaders the problem of the rest of the West. Obama knows that full well.
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