The Mythistory of the Crusades
by Ibn Warraq (October 2013)
The Islamic countries, in general, and Arab ones in particular, are failures in every way possible. Here is one summary of the situation in the Arab world in 2005:
These failures are unbearable for the Arabs whose only explanation for them is the one that they have been taught over the last seventy five years by intellectuals and frauds like Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, and Edward Said, namely, Western imperialism and colonialism, seen as a continuation of the Crusades. Victimhood is exploited to the maximum to blackmail Western nations into giving economic aid, and eases the guilty consciences of the Arabs themselves: it is not their fault that they are such abject failures- it is all the fault of the Crusaders. It is the only way they are able to live with themselves and their moral, intellectual, and economic defeats. At the same time, invoking the Crusades reminds the Arabs of their past triumphs when they succeeded in routing the Crusades at, for example, the Battle of Hattin [1187].
[1] Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam, New York: Columbia University Press 2008, p. 79.
[2] Ibid.,.p..9.
[3] Ibid.,pp.11-12.
[4] Ibid.,.p. 60.
[5] Ibid..,p. 65.
[6] Moshe Gil, A History of Palestine: 634-1099, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 373.
[7] Ibid., p. 374.
[8] Steven Runciman, A History of the Crusades, Vol. III, The Kingdom of Acre and the Later Crusades, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1951, p. 474.
[9] Andrew Bostom, The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism, Amherst: Prometheus Books, 2008, p. 33.
[11] Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby, Book IV, Ch. X, quoted in Bernard Lewis, Islam in History, New York, 1973, p. 317 n.15
[13] Ibid., pp. 21-22
[18] Ibid., p. 68.
[19] Ibid., p.71
[20] Ibid., p. 73.
[21] Osama bin Muhammad bin Laden, Messages to the World, ed. Bruce Lawrence, trans. James Howarth, London and New York, 2005, p. 16, quoted in Riley-Smith, p. 75.
[22] Ibid., p. 59, quoted in Riley-Smith, p. 75.
[23] Ibid., quoted in Riley-Smith, p. 75.
[24] Ibid.,p.76.
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