I noticed that John Ray’s “Dissecting Leftism” today has a link to a Thomas Woods article criticising the PC version (or is it the Monty Python version?) of the history of the Crusades. Readers interested in this issue should check out the work of historian Thomas Madden who is a crusades specialist.

Madden dispels some popular myths about the Crusades here but perhaps more importantly points out how mythology about the crusades impacts modern foreign policy debate here.

If the Muslims won the crusades (and they did), why the anger now? Shouldn’t they celebrate the crusades as a great victory? Until the nineteenth century that is precisely what they did. It was the West that taught the Middle East to hate the crusades. During the peak of European colonialism, historians began extolling the medieval crusades as Europe’s first colonial venture. By the 20th century, when imperialism was discredited, so too were the crusades. They haven’t been the same since. In other words, Muslims in the Middle East - including bin Laden and his creatures - know as little about the real crusades as Americans do. Both view them in the context of the modern, rather than the medieval world. The truth is that the crusades had nothing to do with colonialism or unprovoked aggression. They were a desperate and largely unsuccessful attempt to defend against a powerful enemy.

That’s the thing about bin Laden, he is a troublesome mix of the modern and the medieval. He and his lieutenants regularly fulminate about the “nation,” a reference to a Muslim political unity that died in the seventh century. They evoke an image of the crusades colored with the legacy of modern imperialism. And they call for jihad, demanding that every Muslim in the world take part. In short, they live in a dream world, a desert cloister where the last thousand years only partially happened.

To continue reading about this debate see here. This article describes how the PC version of the Crusades distorts most media discussion of the roots of the conflicts in modern mid-east.

Why do educated, allegedly objective members of the media attempt to inculcate such distorted views of history in Americans’ minds?  Several theories come to mind. One is that the leftward tilt of the media predisposes them to a critical view of the West, in particular in the realm of religious matters. Many in the media being themselves irreligious, are appalled by putative Christians fighting a holy war like the Crusades. And being critical of Western civilization, they automatically defer to non-Westerners when it comes to defining their own concepts, such as “jihad.” Most journalists are rather ignorant of history but they do have some vague idea that European-American civilization has oppressed and exploited the rest of the world, particularly Muslims; this makes media types sympathetic to non-Westerners.

None of this, of course, excuses such drivel as PBS, A & E and U.S.  News have produced lately. And in fact “it would be funny, this journalistic malpractice, if it didn’t buttress the convictions of the fanatics….” And, I might add, reinforce the anti-Western prejudices of our own young people.

The anti-crusader stance is usually liberally salted with buckets of anti-Christian or anti-Catholic tut-tutting by modern secularist liberal and social democrats who fail to see any similarity between (allegedly hypocritical) Crusader atrocities and the worse atrocities committed by modern secularist liberal and social democrats in what General Eisenhower called “The Crusade in Europe”. Let’s not even mention Japan.

Furthermore, that there is at least some kind of symbiotic relationship between the anti-western ideologies pushed in the western media and the actions of terrorists has, of course, been demonstrated elsewhere, notably the Bali bombers’ legal defence team quoting Michael Moore as an authority and Osama Bin Laden’s rehash of Moore’s “My Pet Goat” jibe. We shouldn’t be surprised if PC mythology blows up in our faces.

(P.S. It’s fascinating that the Australian left, generally supporters of the Australian led peacekeeping mission in East Timor, themselves somewhat embarrassed that it was a conservative government that overturned previous Labor governments’ realpolitik “see no evil” stance over Jakarta’s annexation, seem to deny or ignore or otherwise blank out any kind of ‘blowback’ connection between Timor and the Bali bombings, even going so far as to repaint Bali terrorism as blowback for Australian military participation in the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, which, of course, came later!)