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Islam - some facts on The Crusades.
http://photos1.blogger.com/img/282/6612/1024/usukflag0013jo.jpg
http://photos1.blogger.com/img/282/6612/1024/usukflag0013jo.jpg
Tuesday, May 1, 2007
We here a
lot about oppression of Muslims, the attacks on the Muslim world and well they
never seem to forget about the crusades, I am sure that we all remember Osama
banging on about Crusader troops in Iraq and on Muslim holy ground. (For those
not wise to what holy ground is as far as Muslims are concerned - that can be
defined as any ground that Muslims own/owned/want to own/looked at once or think
it might be there's one day.)
So anyway next time you here some Muslim going on about the bloody crusades and
how the Christians started it all remind them of this...
The first Crusade began in 1095…http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_Crusade some
460 years after the first Christian city was overrun by Muslim armies, 457 years
after Jerusalem was conquered by Muslim armies, 453 years after Egypt was taken
by Muslim armies(Christian at that time), 443 after Muslims first plundered
Italy.
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Ok let's pause on this one. Yes Muslim armies raided Italy and
that the Basilica of St. Peter’s in Rome, with its floors of silver and its
walls of gold, was sacked by the Muslims in the ninth century, 46 years after
Charlemagne was crowned emperor there? Did you know that in the same century
Brindisi and other Italian cities were conquered and controlled by the Muslims
for decades, that Naples and Capua were attacked several times, that the Muslims
burned the abbey at Monte Cassino and that Muslims crossed the Alps from Spain
into Italy?
http://chiesa.espresso.repubblica.it/printDettaglio.jsp?id=44479&eng=y
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Another point of trivia is that during the late Middle Ages, many
rich Moslems travelled to Florence/Milan and other Renaissance cities and had
their portraits put on display something that many Muslims say is against Islam.
In fact in the Duomo in Milan (Il Duomo di Milano) many portraits of
powerful Muslims can be seen gracing the walls, guess the old saying of when in
Rome (or is that Florence?)... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Duomo_di_Milano
Pope Urban
was the man who started off all this Islamic whining, Urban the II's main
achievement was convoking the Council of Clermont, November 1095, which called
the First Crusade. The Byzantine Emperor, Alexius Commenus, had sent a desperate
appeal to Urban for armed knights to defend Christianity against the Moslem
enemy. When the Pope laid the Emperor's pleas before the knights in Clermont,
the main concern of the noblemen there was not so much the defense of Byzantium
as the rescue of the Holy land from Moslem domination. Palestine had been under
Moslem control since the days of the Caliph Omar, but at least the Arab Moslems
had allowed Christian pilgrims to visit the places made sacred by the life of
Christ. The Seljuk Turks, now the dominant Moslem power, had, on the other hand,
closed off the Holy Land. More: http://www.catholiceducation.org/articles/history/world/wh0010.html
Part of the reason for this call to arms was the long history of losing
territories to a religious enemy which in turn created a powerful motive to
respond to Byzantine emperor Alexius I's call for holy war to defend
Christendom, and to recapture the lost lands, starting at Jerusalem. In earlier
centuries Christian lands of Palestine, Egypt, Syria and Lebanon had fallen to
Muslim armies.
And the Crusades took place some 427 years after Muslim armies first laid siege
to the Christian capital of Constantinople, some 380 years after Spain was
conquered by Muslim armies.
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Oh and 363 years after France was first attacked by Moslem armies:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abdul_Rahman_Al_Ghafiqi and of course they would
have taken over all of France had it not been for a certain battle where they
got their Islamic buts kicked back across the Pyrenees:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Tours and lets not forget that this was
after Muslim forces had crossed the Pyrenees, entered Gascony and reached as far
as the gates of Toulouse, it is widely believed they planned on taking over the
whole of France. Still Charles The Hammer had something to say about that:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Martel and well I shall link to a rather
amusing joke related to this:
http://clarityandresolve.com/archives/2005/10/hammer_time.php
So the
Crusade by Christians started some 249 years after Rome itself was sacked by a
Muslim army, and only after centuries of church burnings, killings, enslavement
and forced conversions of Christians in all the lands they occupied.
By the time the Crusades finally began, Muslim armies had conquered two-thirds
of the Christian world.
Europe had been harassed by Muslims since the first few years following
Muhammad’s death. As early as 652, Muhammad’s followers launched raids on the
island of Sicily, waging a full-scale occupation 200 years later that lasted
well over two centuries and was punctuated by massacres, such as that at the
town of Castro Giovanni (859 AD), in which 8,000 Christians were put to death.
Sicily was occupied in a full scale invasion in 827 and was completely under
their control of Muslim forces by 965, it became eventually the Emirate of
Sicily until finally being liberated by the Normans who finally won in 1072:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirate_of_Sicily
In 1084, ten years before the first crusade, Muslims staged another devastating
Sicilian raid, burning churches in Reggio, enslaving monks and raping an abbey
of nuns before carrying them into captivity. Then we have the invasions of Malta
in 869 AD and their capture of Syracuse in 870 AD. Add to this that in 909 AD
Muslim forces controlled the passes in the Alps between France and Italy –
cutting off passage between the two countries.
In theory, the Crusades were provoked by the harassment of Christian pilgrims
from Europe to the Holy Land, in which many were kidnapped, molested, forcibly
converted to Islam or even killed. (Compare this to Islam’s justification for
slaughter on the basis of Muslims being denied access to the Meccan pilgrimage
in Muhammad’s time).
The Crusaders only invaded lands that were Christian. They never attacked Saudi
Arabia or sacked Mecca as the Muslims had done (and continued doing) to Italy
and Constantinople.
The period of Crusader “occupation” (of its own former land) was stretched over
less than two centuries. The Muslim occupation is in its 1,372nd year.
The period of Crusader “aggression” compresses to about 20 years of actual
military campaign, much of which was spent on organization and travel. (They
were from 1098-1099, 1146-1148, 1188-1192, 1201-1204, 1218-1221, 1228-1229, and
1248-1250). By comparison, the Muslim Jihad against the island of Sicily alone
lasted 75 grinding years. Not that Muslims ever let facts get in the way of a
good old whine about how hard done by they are by the infidels.
Unlike Jihad, the Crusades were never justified on the basis of New Testament
teachings. This is why they are an anomaly, the punctuation of fourteen
centuries of relentless Jihad that began long before the Crusades and continued
well after they were over.
The greatest crime of the Crusaders was the sacking of Jerusalem, in which
30,000 people were said to have been massacred. This number is dwarfed by the
number of Jihad victims, from India to Constantinople and Narbonne, but Muslims
have never apologized for their crimes and never will. Some more details on
Islamic expansion can be found here:
http://www.bigpicweblog.com/exp/index.php/weblog/trackbacks/1849/
Source:
http://newportcity.blogspot.com/2007/05/islam-some-facts-re-crusades.html
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