The Myth of the Crusading Zionists

With bonus essay "Iran's Reality: Karbala in the Nuclear Age"

Forward by Daniel Clarke-Serret (Editor)

Today, Guerre & Shalom is honoured to publish two articles by Eli Kavon, a Rabbi, essayist, and lecturer based in West Palm Beach, Florida, whose thoroughly research writings on history are both insightful and fabulously written. The first article relates to the oft-pedaled myth that Zionism is but a modern incarnation of the Crusades from the Middle Ages. Eli digs into history to challenge the truth of this assertion. Then in his second, but related essay on Middle Eastern history (a bonus for paid subscribers), Eli looks into the history of Karbala and the early days of Shia Islam in order to explore the reality of modern Iran in the nuclear age.

The Myth of the Crusader Zionists by Eli Kavon

[Image: Crusaders from the film Kingdom of Heaven. Credit: David Appleby. Copyright: TM and © 2005 Twentieth Century Fox]

In September 1947, Jewish officials pleaded with the leaders of the newly established Arab League to make peace with the emerging State of Israel. Abdel Rahman Azzam, the League’s first secretary-general, rebuffed the offer by claiming the Arabs would eject the Jews of Palestine as the Muslims had thrown the Crusaders out of the Middle East centuries before. Twenty years later, Egyptian dictator Gamel Abdel Nasser claimed that the medieval Crusades “represented nothing else than Imperialism, domination and despotism in every sense of these terms.” Today, it is Isis, Iran, Hamas, Hezbollah, Al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and all the jihadists—Muslim fundamentalists calling for holy war against their enemies—who call for the extermination of Islam’s mortal foe, the “Zionist-Crusaders.” The holy wars of the distant past obsess Muslim extremists. The historical reality, however, is quite different from the mythologizing of the Crusades by the jihadists.

In 1095, Pope Urban II addressed a council of bishops and senior clergy in the French city of Clermont, calling for Christians to retake the Holy Land from the Muslim Turks. The pope’s “Soldiers of Christ” would avenge the Turks’ harassment of Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land and their desecration of Christian holy places in Jerusalem by hastening “to exterminate this vile race” of Muslims. While Arab propagandists and Islamic fundamentalists have seized on the medieval Pope’s words to prove that Europeans were out to destroy Islam, the truth behind the Crusade is far more complex. In 1054 the Pope in Rome and the Patriarch in Constantinople excommunicated each other during an argument over certain theological issues. When the Eastern Christians called for Rome’s help in repelling the Turks from sacking Constantinople forty years after the schism, Urban saw an opportunity to unite Christendom. This was the Pope’s primary goal—not the destruction of Islam.

In 1099 the knights of the First Crusade captured Jerusalem from the Seljuk Turks. While the crusade was a disaster for the Jews of the German Rhineland, it certainly was as severe a defeat for the Muslims. Yet, as celebrated scholar Bernard Lewis has shown, the Crusades aroused “very little interest” among Muslims in the Middle East. The Muslim holy war to expel the Christian invaders did not begin until almost a century after the initial Crusader conquest of Jerusalem. The Muslims only took action against the Crusader kingdoms when the Christians launched a series of raids against caravans and commerce in what is today Saudi Arabia. The Christian raiders harassed pilgrims to Mecca, interfering in their religious life and practice. Had the Crusaders not threatened Mecca, the 1187 Muslim victory by Saladin to take back Jerusalem from the Christians might not have taken place. For all of Nasser’s and bin Laden’s boasting of ousting the “Zionist-Crusaders” from the Middle East, for all their rhetoric about the centrality of Jerusalem to Islam, the reality of the Muslim response to the Christian holy wars was very different from the way it has been idealized and mythologized by propagandists and terrorists in the post-colonial epoch.

The Crusades were far from a “clash of civilizations”—a term bandied about often today when discussing jihadist hatred of the West in the post 9/11 world. According to historian Efraim Karsh in his study Islamic Imperialism, “there was no total war on either side, let alone an ideological one.” The native population of Palestine viewed the Crusaders as just another foreign power to dominate them following the Arabs, the Egyptian Fatimids and the Seljuk Turks. Ibn Qalasini, the earliest Arab historian to write about the Crusades, considered the European presence in Palestine as a positive factor of friendly relations, prosperity and safety. Different Muslim dynasties vied with each other for domination of the Middle East and were not shy, in their bid for regional power, about concluding commercial treaties and political alliances with different Christian parties. The Crusades were not an apocalyptic, all-out war of Muslim versus Christian.

For the past two centuries, Western domination of the Middle East on all levels—military, economic, political, and religious—has heightened the importance of the Crusades in Muslim eyes. Jihadists see in the heroism of Saladin an inspiration for today’s terrorists to destroy Israel and eliminate the Western presence in Arab lands. The Muslim world, which not long ago exerted great power over the Middle East and parts of Europe, has gone into decline. The Ottoman Turkish Empire that once besieged Vienna is now a memory. Mustafa Kemal of Turkey abolished the traditional Islamic leadership posts of the Sultan and Caliph more than a century ago.

While the Islamic world today decries “Crusader Imperialism,” the reality is that in the modern epoch the West thwarted the imperial dreams of Muslims to control much of the world. The rise of a Jewish State in the heart of Muslim lands in the Middle East has overturned all the traditional Islamic conceptions of Jews being an inferior people who should be punished for rejecting Muhammad as Allah’s final prophet. Islamic fundamentalists have reinvented and reimagined the events of centuries ago to suit their violent agenda. In doing so, they distort the realities of history to justify modern murder. The jihadists libel the Jewish people by calling the Zionists a movement of Crusaders. But the medieval knights did not yearn for ultimate redemption in Jerusalem. The French, English and German warriors who fought under the banner of the cross could not trace their origin back to the Land of Israel. Palestine was not the Promised Land of the Christian conquerors. Anti-Israel propagandists can continue to rob the State of Israel of its legitimacy by portraying Jews as a foreign, imperialist element in the Land of Israel. Yet, in the end, the truth will win out. The Zionist movement—an anti-imperialist movement to the core—returned to the Jewish people to their homeland. The myth of the “Zionist-Crusader’ is a distortion of history that has only yielded lies and misery.

BONUS ESSAY FOR PAID SUBSCRIBERS

Iran’s Reality: Karbala in the Nuclear Age by Eli Kavon

[Image: Shi'ite Muslims perform ritual acts of self-flagellation with knives and chains during a religious procession in the Iraqi city of Karbala on November 23 2012. Retrieved from rferl.org]

The next president of the United States must be prepared to face the challenge of Karbala. While it is the name of a town today in Central Iraq, Karbala was the site of one of the most important battles in the history of Islam. On the plain of the town, the forces of the Umayyad caliphate massacred fellow Muslims who supported the family of Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, rivals to the Umayyads for power in the emerging Islamic world. The death of Ali’s son Hussein at Karbala on October 10, 680, was the culmination of an almost fifty-year struggle between Muslims to determine who would succeed Muhammad as the religious and political leader of the Islamic realm. While the events of Karbala are more than 1300-years old, the massacre is an important key for world leaders today to understand the emergence of Iran as a nuclear power, as well as the terror of Hamas, Hezbollah and the Houthis.