Mistakes Were Made - Carol Tavris [101]
The Crusades indeed gave European Christians license to massacre hundreds of thousands of Muslim “infidels.” (Thousands of Jews were also slaughtered as the pilgrims marched through Europe to Jerusalem, which is why some Jewish historians call the Crusades “the first Holocaust.”) From the West’s current standpoint, the Crusades were unfortunate, but, like all wars, they produced benefits all around; for instance, the Crusades opened the door to cultural and trade agreements between the Christian West and the Muslim East. Some books have gone so far as to argue that Christians were merely defending themselves and their interests from the holy wars that had motivated the Muslim invasion of formerly Christian countries. For example, the cover of Robert Spencer’s book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades), states boldly: “The Crusades were defensive conflicts.” So we actually were not the perpetrators that so many Muslims think we were. We were the victims.
Who were the victims? It depends on how many years, decades, and centuries you take into account. By the middle of the tenth century, more than a century before the Crusades began, half the Christian world had been conquered by Muslim Arab armies: the city of Jerusalem and countries in which Christianity had been established for centuries, including Egypt, Sicily, Spain, and Turkey. In 1095, Pope Urban II called on the French aristocracy to wage holy war against all Muslims. A pilgrimage to regain Jerusalem would give European towns an opportunity to extend their trade routes; it would organize the newly affluent warrior aristocracy and mobilize the peasants into a unified force; and it would unite the Christian world, which had been split into Eastern and Roman factions. The Pope assured his forces that killing a Muslim was an act of Christian penance. Anyone killed in battle, the Pope promised, would bypass thousands of years of torture in purgatory and go directly to heaven. Does this incentive to generate martyrs who will die for your cause sound familiar? It has everything but the virgins.
The First Crusade was enormously successful in economic terms for European Christians; inevitably, it provoked the Muslims to organize a response. By the end of the twelfth century, the Muslim general Saladin had recaptured Jerusalem and retaken almost every state the Crusaders had won. (Saladin signed a peace treaty with King Richard I of England in 1192.) So the Crusades, brutal and bloody as they were, were preceded and followed by Muslim conquests. Who started it?
Likewise, the intractable battles between Israelis and Arabs have their own litany of original causes. On July 12, 2006, Hezbollah militants kidnapped two Israeli reservists, Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev. Israel retaliated, sending rockets into Hezbollah-controlled areas of Lebanon, killing many civilians. Historian Timothy Garton Ash, observing the subsequent retaliations of both sides, wrote, “When and where did this war begin?” On July 12, or a month earlier, when Israeli shells killed seven Palestinian civilians? The preceding January, when Hamas won the Palestinian elections? In 1982, when Israel invaded Lebanon? In 1979, with the fundamentalist revolution in Iran? In 1948, with the creation of the state of Israel? Ash’s own answer to “What started this?” is the virulent European anti-Semitism of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, which included Russian pogroms,