Originally Posted by The Old Fat One
This war kicked off around the time of the first crusade
I am getting almost as tired of self-hating westerners as I am of terrorists. Re-posting from the 'Bliar Revelations' thread:
Actually, I think you'll find the Umayyad caliphs kicked things off when they expanded their empire through then-Christian North Africa soon after Mohammad's death, crossed into the Iberian peninsula in 711 and fought their way up to Poitiers before being halted by Charles Martel. The Crusades were a response to that rapid expansion, by 1095 a second front of which posed a direct threat to the Christian heartland of antiquity (Byzantium, i.e. modern-day Turkey).
The Truth about the Crusades | Raymond Ibrahim
That is what gave birth to the Crusades. They were not the brainchild of an ambitious pope or rapacious knights but a response to more than four centuries of conquests in which Muslims had already captured two-thirds of the old Christian world. At some point, Christianity as a faith and a culture had to defend itself or be subsumed by Islam. The Crusades were that defense.
Unfortunately the modern western fashions for self-flagellation, virtue-signalling and "white man's guilt" cause too many of us to swallow revisionism of the sort that seeks to lay all blame for the woes of the Muslim world at our feet.
Karl Popper's '
paradox of tolerance', published in 1945 before the question of immigration really troubled the public consciousness, bears some thought:
Unlimited tolerance must lead to the disappearance of tolerance. If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them. – In this formulation, I do not imply, for instance, that we should always suppress the utterance of intolerant philosophies; as long as we can counter them by rational argument and keep them in check by public opinion, suppression would certainly be most unwise. But we should claim the right to suppress them if necessary even by force; for it may easily turn out that they are not prepared to meet us on the level of rational argument, but begin by denouncing all argument; they may forbid their followers to listen to rational argument, because it is deceptive, and teach them to answer arguments by the use of their fists or pistols. We should therefore claim, in the name of tolerance, the right not to tolerate the intolerant.