Crusades? Wuzzat?

Apparently the "Crusades weren't so bad" pseudo-argument is spreading. No longer confined to mere morons, it's now on its way to becoming official Vatican policy.

The Vatican has begun moves to rehabilitate the Crusaders by sponsoring a conference at the weekend that portrays the Crusades as wars fought with the “noble aim” of regaining the Holy Land for Christianity.At the conference, held at the Regina Apostolorum Pontifical University, Roberto De Mattei, an Italian historian, recalled that the Crusades were “a response to the Muslim invasion of Christian lands and the Muslim devastation of the Holy Places”.

Right, because we all know how respectful the Church has been of other folks' holy places.

He said that the Crusaders were “martyrs” who had “sacrificed their lives for the faith”.

Where have we heard that before?

Professor Riley-Smith has attacked Sir Ridley Scott’s recent film Kingdom of Heaven, starring Orlando Bloom, as “utter nonsense”. Professor Riley-Smith said that the script, like much writing on the Crusades, was “historically inaccurate. It depicts the Muslims as civilised and the Crusaders as barbarians. It has nothing to do with reality.” It fuels Islamic fundamentalism by propagating “Osama bin Laden’s version of history”.

Yes, and obviously the answer is to go to the opposite idiotic extreme.

He said that the Crusaders were sometimes undisciplined and capable of acts of great cruelty. But the same was true of Muslims and of troops in “all ideological wars”. Some of the Crusaders’ worst excesses were against Orthodox Christians or heretics — as in the sack of Constantinople in 1204.

Yes, and THIS is why the Crusades are an example of something BAD, genius. Because it was an ideological war that contained a lot of cruelty and brutality. Condemning Muslim jihad and Christian crusades is not meant to exhonorate either, it is a way of demonstrating that ideological, and in this case specifically religious, war, is REALLY dangerous, and often has crappy results. Pope Rottweiler's attempt to whitewash this is sadly not really surprising, and rather scary.

And who turned up at the conference? Surprise, surprise.

The American writer Robert Spencer, author of A Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam, told the conference that the mistaken view had taken hold in the West as well as the Arab world that the Crusades were “an unprovoked attack by Europe on the Islamic world”. In reality, however, Christians had been persecuted after the Muslim conquest of Jerusalem.

And so, obviously, counter-persecuting Muslims was just fine and godamned dandy. And killing tons of Jews while they were at it, just for good measure.

What a bunch of a-holes.