by Rod D. Martin
January 17, 2015

Facebook is again filled with defenders of Islamist “feelings” in the aftermath of the Paris attacks. Eventually but invariably they invoke that favorite liberal trump card, the Crusades.

But I have to marvel at the tendency of these people to focus so heavily on a handful of European invasions of a tiny part of the western Levant (primarily modern Israel, which is the size of a postage stamp), all of which happened 800 to 900 years ago anyway, without a thought to:

1. The Muslim conquest and forced conversion of that same area just a few centuries earlier.

2. The Muslim conquest and forced conversion of all of Christian Egypt

3. The Muslim conquest and forced conversion of all of Christian Libya

4. The Muslim conquest and forced conversion of all of Christian Tunisia and Algeria (as they are called today)

5. The Muslim conquest and forced conversion of all of Christian Morocco (as it is called today)

6. The Muslim conquest and forced conversion of all of Christian Spain and Portugal, resulting in a 700 year war of liberation which was only won by the conquered native inhabitants a month before Columbus sailed to the New World.

7. The attempted Muslim conquest of France

8. The Muslim conquest (later reversed) of Sardinia and of Sicily

9. The Muslim conquest and forced conversion of all of Christian Asia Minor (now Turkey)

10. The Muslim conquest of “the city of the world’s desire,” Constantinople (now Istanbul), the seat of the Patriarch (rough equivalent of the Pope for the Eastern church; and thus the city’s fall was roughly the same as if an American army were to conquer and then forcibly convert Mecca), barely a generation before Columbus

11. The Muslim conquest of all of the Christian Balkans, literally to the gates of Vienna as late as September 11, 1683, just 100 years before American independence and half a millennium after the Crusades.

12. The Muslim conquest and forced conversion of all of Zoroastrian Persia

13. The Muslim conquest and forced conversion of all of what we now call Central Asia

14. The Muslim conquest of and genocide in Hindu India, which took place after Columbus and at a time when that area had three times the population of all of Western Europe.

Sadly, I’m not even addressing the Muslim conquests and forced conversions of large parts of the rest of Africa or Southeast Asia. And you may draw whatever conclusions you will (if any) about the nature of Islam.

My point is simply that in even so much as mentioning the Crusades, you might as well just say that Hitler was right when he blamed Poland for World War II. The concept is utterly ignorant of history at best, pure propaganda at worst. Indeed, you might as well blame a massacre on the publication of a cartoon.