The Crusades were the outgrowth of many factors but they are generally categorized as a series of wars between European Christians and Middle Eastern Muslims occurring from 1096 to 1291 AD involving competing claims over the Holy Land, especially Jerusalem. The catalyst for the first Crusade was a call to Christians made by Pope Urban II at the Council of Clermont in France in November 1095. Urban declared that God had willed Christians to oust Muslims from the sacred sites. Urban promised remission of sins for any Christian who died in this vital service of Christ. Thousands of English, French, German, Italian, Spanish and others “took up the cross.”
Later in the New World, priests, clerics and politicians and plain Americans have spent from the 15th century to 2024 spreading the gospel at home and continuing to attempt to control the beliefs and behaviors of Middle Easterners. Manifest Destiny was based on the premise that the god of Christians had ordained that America must eliminate paganism and not commit the sin of omitting to develop the land. Such “crusades” as the Trail of Tears were the outgrowth of European immigrants and their descendants’ beliefs that their god had ordained that America was the Promised Land for Caucasian Christians and that Native Americans had to be evicted, killed or converted to Christianity. This ingrained racial memory from 1492 until today may influence the justification for our invasions into the Muslim Middle East. Just as Native Americans had to be destroyed to save them, Muslims are still the enemies of Christ who must be saved from their misguided faith.
Most recently the United States has continued the tradition of the Crusades by invading Iraq twice and belligerently engaging Iran and such groups as ISIS, Hamas, Taliban, Hezbollah, Al Qaeda and others. America designates these groups as terrorists but they claim to be part of a resistance movement. These organizations are generally Islamic in their religion as were the native Arabs and Persians during the original Crusades. There were Jewish populations in the Holy Land during the time Christian Europeans were seeking to take over the Middle East, but they were a small minority and could not mount an effective resistance to the Crusades.
Today, due to the world’s post-holocaust revulsion of the Nazi atrocities and the beliefs of many American fundamentalist Christians, such as dreamers in the Rapture, the United States is defending Israel’s aggression and is allied with the Zionists against Muslims, especially Iranians. Many of our politicians and much of the national media are on a crusade to support the hegemony of Israel under the guise of its self-defense. Israel has nuclear weapons it developed by spying on the United States and has an extremely modern and powerful military. It has nothing to fear from the rag-tag Muslim militias even if they are backed by countries such as Iran, China and Russia. Israel does not need our military support. And its current aggression in Lebanon, Iran, Syria, Gaza and elsewhere, to say nothing, as most media does, about Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians, clearly proves Israel does not deserve our support.
Israel is conducting its own crusade against Muslim countries in the Holy Land. If the United States cannot find the moral courage to confront this decades long injustice, we should, at least, not supply it with weapons and diplomatic immunity. It is long past the time America atoned for its own sins against our native population and that we not repeat those sins in the Middle East. To do so, all we need is to be guided by those principles of our Constitution and the philosophy of that Christian faith many Americans profess. Perhaps, if we make a good faith effort to act in the Middle East as the country we claim to be, we will not be misled by the Zionists among the Israelis into the same type of disaster those holier than thou European Crusaders had to endure a thousand years ago.
