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  • The Crusade

    American Daily, OH
    Aug 5 2004

    The Crusade
    By Bruce Walker (01/27/2003)

    President Bush was sharply criticized for initially describing
    America's war against evil as a crusade. Moslem nations, pundits
    warned, would take offense at comparing this war to campaigns by
    medieval Christians against Moslem military conquerors of the Holy
    Lands. But of course President Bush used precisely the right term.

    Christians, ever mindful of our own sins, often accept more guilt
    than we should. The accusation that the crusaders killed exclusively
    Jews in Jerusalem in 1099 has now been disproved by archeology. The
    number killed has also been reduced from 70,000 Jews to 3,000 Moslems
    and Jews. This is smaller than the massacre of Christians by Moslems
    in Acre in 1291, and much less than 1.5 Million Armenians killed by
    Moslems in the last century.

    The `Golden Age' of Moorish Spain was a myth: Berber conquest was
    horrific for the people of Spain, and Moorish Spain was more often a
    land of turmoil than tranquility. Christians were deported en masse
    in 1126 to Morocco, and Jews were massacred in Grenada in 1066.

    Christophobic Hollywood presents lurid films about the Salem Witch
    Trials, ignoring key facts: (1) only twenty people out of the greater
    number accused were actually hung as witches; (2) five years after
    the trials, the Massachusetts general court offered public repentance
    for these actions and deploring the action of the judges, (3) one
    judge publicly confessed his sin from the pulpit; (4) the jurors who
    convicted the alleged witches signed a statement of regret; and (5)
    indemnity was offered to the family members of those who had been
    executed.

    Christophobes also ignore Christians at the end of the Seventeenth
    Century began to oppose slavery. As a result, slavery was abolished
    on English soil in 1772. Slavery existed all over the world and among
    every religion and race until it was abolished throughout the British
    Empire. African nations - Gambia, the Congo, and Dahomey - sent
    official delegations to London to protest the British decision to
    outlaw slavery.

    `Intolerant' Christians had earlier passed mankind's first laws
    banning cruelty to animals in 1641. Christians like Wilberforce and
    Bergh were the world's leaders in successful campaigns to prevent
    cruelty to children, stop domestic violence, and promote equality for
    women.

    Christians know all too well that people pretending to embrace Jesus
    have often failed to act like Christians. But the notion begun by
    Marxists, supported by pagan nihilists in jaded Europe, and now
    shouted loudly in Moslem countries - that Christians and Jews are the
    author of all misery - is completely false. Serious devotion to the
    moral and spiritual tradition of Jews and Christians is all that
    separates mankind from Hell on Earth.

    What is missing from the wretched realms of Iraq, Syria and Iran?
    Christians free to preach the Gospel without fear of harm, and - at
    least as importantly - without fear of harm to their flock. When Ann
    Coulter wrote her `horrible' column over a year ago, saying that we
    should conquer the vicious lands of Islam and convert them all to
    Christianity, she was right. The term `convert' however, needs to be
    understood in its true sense.

    People are converted to Christianity when they are peacefully
    approached and welcomed into the fellowship of Christians.
    Missionaries, radical Moslems warn, are the most dangerous forces of
    all. Why? Because they come with medicine, food and books. Christians
    convert people with love, and Moslems convert people with terror.

    Why did the most brutally efficient empire in human history, the
    Roman Empire, become Christian? Because the meekness and kindness of
    Christians attracted women in a way that no religion which viewed
    sons as cannon fodder ever could. Because the spiritual truth of
    Christianity inspired wise men in a way that the stale intellectual
    systems of Greek philosophy could not. Because Christianity presented
    a place to kneel and seek forgiveness for those soldiers who had
    spent twenty years murdering and oppressing other peoples.

    We need a new crusade. We need armies in Iraq, Syria, Sudan and
    Libya, not because the people there should be converted by force to
    any faith. We need armies because Christians who try to bring the
    Gospel to the desperate peoples of those lands are being brutally
    murdered along with their flock by those who cannot accept a God of
    Love. Political freedom and market economies are good, but the
    treasure that makes all other treasures real is not found in politics
    or economics.

    In 1940, when Churchill and FDR stood on the decks of HMS Prince of
    Wales to announce that Hitler would not conquer the world, they sang
    `Onward Christian Soldiers.' When men huddled around campfires
    steeling themselves to face an awful war to end slavery, they sang
    `...as He died to make men holy, let us live to make men free.' We
    are in a war, and it is a holy war, but it is a righteous war. It is,
    in fact, a crusade.




    Bruce Walker has been a dyed in the wool conservative since, as a
    sixth grader, he campaigned door to door for Barry Goldwater. Bruce
    has had almost two hundred published articles have appeared several
    professional and political periodicals.
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