The Crusader Struggle and Islam Today

 

Anthony Harrigan

      Anthony Harrigan is the author, co-author or editor of twenty books. He has lectured at Yale University, Vanderbilt University, the University of Colorado and the National War College.

      Coming down from Syria’s Golan Heights in 1967 at the end of the short, bloody war between the Jewish state and the militant Muslim forces, I saw in the distance an enormously impressive Crusader castle.

      This was only one of many colossal castles that loomed over the war-torn landscape. Europeans projected their power and their faith, utilizing these tremendous combat structures. More than eight hundred years after their construction, they symbolize the implacable struggle between the Christian world and the Islamic faith, which used the sword in the protracted offensive to extinguish the Christian faith and its foundation in Judaism. The Muslim world still hates the Christian crusaders.

      Evidence of the Christian warriors and their penetration of the Muslim world is widespread in Syria, no more strikingly than in the great castle known as the Crac des Chevaliers on the Golan Heights.

      Crac des Chevaliers, built in 1171 on the site of a Kurdish citadel, has been called “the paragon of castles.” It is one of the major symbols of the two-century-long struggle in the Middle East between two major religions. It was built at a height of 650 meters on the top of a volcanic cliff and has a commanding view of the area from Mount Lebanon to the sea. In 1142 the Crusader prince of Tripoli gave it to the Knights of St. John, the knights of the hospital.

      This colossal, intimidating structure guards the Homs Gap, the land passage from inland Syria to the Mediterranean Sea. To control this gap was to control Syria. Thus the Crac des Chevaliers was the most important crusader stronghold, a fortress that accommodated a garrison of 2,000 fighting men. It contained provisions to feed the garrison for a siege lasting five years. It is built of perfectly fitting blocks of stone, with formidable ramparts and high towers. The walls are 8.5 meters thick. The castle is a maze of rooms and passages. The knights’ hall was 690 feet long.

      The entire crusader enterprise with such structures as Crac des Chevaliers, was, in Arnold Toynbee’s view (The Study of History, p. 351), evidence of “the amazing outburst of energy in the 11th century.” The fortress was not impregnable, however. In 1271, the Arab Sultan Bebars captured it. The Crusaders didn’t have a sufficiently strong commitment from Europe to ensure permanent control of the lands they regained for Christians of the East and West.

      That was the story of the overall crusader effort. The crusaders won many battles but lost the war with Islam. In one amazing swoop, Arnold Toynbee wrote, the crusaders acquired large territories in the Muslim world, establishing a chain of Christian principalities from Antioch to Jerusalem. They built mighty bastions in Syria such as the Crac des Chevaliers.

      The Norman kingdom of Sicily seized extensive lands in Tunisia and Tripolitania in 1134. But they were all lost by 1158. Toynbee cited “the eventual collapse of the medieval Christian ascendancy” in the Middle East, adding that “they lost almost all their conquests.”

      A major reason for the losses was that the crusaders became diverted from their original objective. Instead of focusing exclusively on the Muslim threat, cupidity drove them to war on sister Christian lands. In 1204, there was a Franco-Venetian sack of Constantinople. French rulers were installed in Constantinople and Athens.

      One of the tragedies of the crusades is that they did not unite the two great branches of the Christian faith. On the contrary, they sharpened hostility between them and weakened Byzantine defenses against the growing Ottoman power which was not eliminated until the end of the first World War—which did split the so-called Arab nation and created new political entities in the Arab world under British and French indirect rule. In a sense, this was a triumph of the crusader effort about seven centuries after the epoch of the Crusades. For the first time Western concepts entered the Muslim world, especially in Turkey.

      Writing of the later crusades, Morris Bishop accounted for the collapse of the crusader effort to “want of enthusiasm, want of new recruits, want indeed of stout purpose.” Thus

. . . the remaining Christian principalities gradually crumbled. Antioch fell in 1268, the Hospitaler fortress of Crac des Chevaliers in 1271. In 1291, with the capture of the last great stronghold, Acre, the Moslems had regained their possessions and the great crusades ended in failure.

      Bishop asked “Why? What went wrong? There was a failure of morale clearly. There also was a failure of military organization and direction.” These failures eight hundred years ago constitute a somber warning to the U.S. and its coalition partners engaged in the war on terrorism. Today, of course, the coalition faces internal threats from seditionist elements in the powerful mass media and the radicalized secular elites.

      There is a lesson here for American and coalition forces as they struggle with protracted resistance in Iraq. It is not enough to embark on a noble crusade. The effort must employ all available resources and remain committed to an arduous task that involves sacrifice of lives and national treasure. There must be a realization that the struggle will continue for generations, not simply for a few years.

      Since 9/11, the American government, in order to obtain a measure of cooperation from so-called moderate Moslem countries, has repeatedly insisted that Islam is a religion of peace and that militants have simply “hijacked” it. Much as this line may make sense as a political gambit to buttress America’s strategy, it is not historically accurate. And the American people and Westerners generally should know the historical facts. In seeking perspective, Americans would do well to heed J. M. Roberts, author of The History of Europe (Allen Lane, 1996) who gave a definitive statement on Islam, saying that “Islam from the start has been a religion of conquest.”

      In view of the historical reality cited by Dr. Roberts, it clearly is a mistake for the United States to rhetorically alter the war against terrorism in the Middle East into a war for democracy in the Middle East. There is no history of democracy in that region of the world and no evidence that it has a chance of taking root in that religious and cultural milieu. Democracy is a product of English and American history. It is alien to many European societies. How much less chance therefore, that democracy will arise out of the ruins of Saddam’s torture regime.

      Nevertheless, the United States must do everything possible to prevent any new form of despotism in the country. So republican institutions must be introduced to as great a degree as possible, not expecting full-fledged, democracy but promoting limited government and as wide a measure of civil liberties as the security situation allows. We need to introduce practical systems without creating overblown expectations. This will be difficult to do, to be sure.

      We have had experience with this approach in the case of Japan, which also had no experience with authentic democracy and no tradition in this regard. And our efforts proved successful.

      Cal Thomas, the religious affairs commentator, writing in The Washington Times, Nov. 12, 2003, presented a devastating critique of the notion that our morality can be imposed on those who don’t want it. He denied that democratic rule is consistent with Islam, adding that “to suggest that what happened in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe can be replicated in the Middle East is dangerous.” He quoted Guiseppe Da Rosa, writing in Civilta Catolica, who said that, “All of Islamic history is dominated by the idea of conquest of the Christian lands of Western Europe and of the Eastern Roman Empire whose capital was Constantinople.” “That warrior spirit continues today,” said Mr. Thomas. American officials choose to overlook this fact of history and the results, therefore, undoubtedly will be tragic.

      The history of Islam is the history of warfare against Christians. It began in 638 when Muslim forces stormed Jerusalem, then under the control of the Byzantine emperor, and drove the Christians of the Eastern empire out of Palestine. In the 640s, Islamic armies attacked and conquered Armenia and Egypt. In 655 the Muslims waged and won a major naval war against the Byzantines. By 711, the Muslims controlled all of North Africa, seizing it from the Eastern Empire.

      Tarik, the Arab overlord of Tangier, crossed the Strait of Gibraltar into Spain in 711 with 7,000 Berbers under his command. The Muslims gradually cemented their rule over the greatest part of the country after many battles and protracted negotiations with Christian communities, which did not understand that Islam would come to dominate in every way. The lingering opposition was in the northern part of the country. Islamic rule would last until 1492.

      In 732, however, Christian forces won a decisive battle at Poitiers in present-day France. Charles of Heristal, Charlemagne’s grandfather, led a Frankish army to an epochal victory, slaughtering the Muslim host. He became known to history as Charles Martel, Charles the Hammer. This victory saved Western Europe from a complete Muslim takeover. It may properly be viewed as the most significant battle for the West since a Greek fleet defeated the Persians at the Battle of Salamis in classical times.

      This victory, however, did not prevent Muslim conquests in other parts of Europe. South Central Europe proved to be a softer objective for Islam. Islamic expansionism continued from the Pamir Mountains on China’s border to the major islands of the Mediterranean. Crete was overrun in 823 and Sicily was assaulted from 840 until 902. The Muslims also conquered the Eastern Empire’s lands in Southern Italy. In 846, Islamic traders penetrated to the outskirts of Rome. In 983, the Muslims sacked Barcelona. They landed in Southern France and drove inland to the Alpine passes.

      J. M. Wallace-Hadrill, author of The Barbarian West, 400-1000, says that “The attack on Europe, from the Mediterranean was delivered by the Sarranceni, by which name contemporaries knew the Arabs, the Berbers, and the Moors, the conquerors of Egypt, Roman Africa, and Spain. During Charlemagne’s time, “the danger was not from Spain but the emirate of Tunisia, which sent out expeditions to raid the coastline of Provence and Italy. The hero of the Frankish resistance was Louis II, who spent most of his life fighting the Saracens in Italy. The Arabs were a sea power that “could strike anywhere,” said Wallace-Hadrill.

      Generations of raiders plundered monasteries and waylaid travelers. It was only when they seized the great Abbey of Cluny in Burgundy that a massive counteraction was organized, which led to the destruction of the Muslim terrorists of the time. The Islamic hegemony lasted until the 11th century.

      Despite the Muslim offensives in and against Western Europe, it was crises in the Eastern Empire and beyond that led to the launching of the Crusades. In the 950s and 960s, the Byzantines recovered some of the lands that they had lost to the Islamic forces. Among the gains were the recovery of the islands of Crete and Cyprus.

      In 1009, an Arab ruler known as Hakim was in power in Jerusalem, and ordered the destruction of the Church of the Holy Sepulchure. Shortly thereafter, the Seljuk Turks, who converted to Islam, seized power in Jerusalem and other Byzantine territories. They cut the pilgrimage routes used by Christians over the centuries.

      This was one of the principal causes of the Crusades. In 1071, the Byzantines fought a major battle near Lake Van in present-day Turkey, resulting almost in total devastation for the Eastern Empire. This, in turn, led the emperor in Constantinople to appeal for help from the Latins in the West.

      The West responded in 1095 when Pope Urban II, speaking at a council in Clermont, France, called for a crusade to open the pilgrimage route to the Holy Land.

      Morris Bishop, writing in The Middle Ages (American Heritage Press, 1970) said that the pope “made one of the most potent speeches in history.” He stressed that the crusades “were conceived of as a service to the Christian God. . . . The Crusades were many things, but originally they were beautiful, noble ideals.”

      The medieval response to the Seljuk Turks and the Arabs and today’s conflict in Iraq and the overall Muslim terrorist threat are worth exploring for parallels, but they are not numerous. The crusades suffered because Europe was fractionalized with many kings and principalities, pushing their own desires whereas today the war against terrorism is threatened by ideological offensives within the United States, Britain, and Europe.

      As the U.S. government will face an ongoing and accelerating assault from internal forces, the permanent, hardcore, seditionist elements in American and Western society that hate any affirmation of our civilization—the elements that in earlier decades opposed any strong action against the Stalinists and leftist fellow travelers. These are the elements that have organized large demonstrations at home and abroad against coalition actions in Iraq and, as the British foreign secretary noted, never demonstrated against Saddam’s unspeakably cruel and barbaric regime. They have what Donald Luskin wrote in National Review, Nov. 10, 2003,

. . . inchoate feelings of loathing for the president (Bush). These feelings extend to the Israeli people and to stalwart Westerners such as Prime Minister Tony Blair of Great Britain. Though largely anti-religious, they have developed a sense of solidarity with the Muslims. For them, the Muslim terrorists and their political sympathizers can do no wrong. They did not protest or demonstrate when Mahatheir Mohammed told the Organization of the Islamic Conference that “Jews control the world by proxy.” Mohammed added that 1.3 billion Muslims cannot be defeated by a few million Jews.

His speech could have been a chapter in Hitler’s Mein Kampf, but the antiwar movement was silent. So much for their moral credibility. They have lacked a moral basis as long as they have existed in the United States, Britain and elsewhere, going back to their passion for anarchism, which was so strong among radicalized people in the late 19th century. Thus they supported Lenin, Stalin, and the concentration camp system, the Gulag, and the purges, and they engaged in widespread espionage and subversion.

      Dealing with the combined internal and external threat is very difficult and will continue to impose a heavy burden on the United States. This is the unholy burden of sedition and terrorism.

      The entire Western world has faced internal threats going back to the late 19th century when anarchists committed outrages in attempts to destabilize civilized order. Witness the assassination of President McKinley by an anarchist. Anarchists opposed U.S. participation in World War I action which required the U.S. government to deport alien seditionists. With the Russian revolution and the rise of Bolshevism, Communists established power bases in the United States. The Soviet government was able to penetrate the U.S. government at the highest levels as evidenced in the trial and conviction of Alger Hiss and the conviction of the Rosenbergs, atomic spies for Stalin. In Vice President Henry Wallace, the Soviets had a political tool who was only a heartbeat away from the presidency. British security was similarly penetrated by the Cambridge cabal that worked for Stalin. France in the 1930s was paralyzed by Communist elements.

      The United States was able to overcome these elements and was not deterred from resisting the Soviets who hoped that mass protests against the hydrogen bomb and advanced missiles in Western hands would weaken the United States and Britain. Protests similar to these have been held in Washington and London and elsewhere, aimed at forcing the coalition to quit Iraq and permit the return to power of Saddam’s surviving thugs. The hope of the Muslim terrorists is that a combination of bloody actions against coalition troops and subversive protests promoted by seditionists in the mass media will weaken the will of the United States and crack its resolution to deal with the Muslim terrorists who launched their first major attack on the United States on 9/11 after preliminary attacks leveled against embassies in Kenya and Tanzania, and the assault on the USS Cole.

      The Crusades were weakened by a different process. Different factors were involved. But the retreat of the Crusaders, also resulted in a loss of the will to win in Europe. Had the Crusaders been able to maintain and expand their power bases in the Middle East, Islam might have been stopped in its tracks. The process of expelling the Moors from Spain most probably would have accelerated and North Africa and Asia Minor would have been emancipated from Muslim rule. Almost certainly the Muslims would have been unable to capture Constantinople, conquer Hungary or threaten Vienna in the centuries to come, events which were the result of allowing the Arabs to capture the Crusader fortresses and the principalities they guarded.

      We know the devastating and tragic results of withdrawing the forces of freedom at a turning point in history when it is possible to snatch victory from the jaws of revolution and tyranny. A case in point was the withdrawal of U.S. and allied forces from Siberia in the final phase of the Bolshevik Revolution.

      The allied intervention in Russia commenced June 23, 1918 when a British force landed at Murmansk. On August 2, a combined British and French force occupied Archangel. The United States also landed a force. And during the spring of 1919, there was considerable fighting between the allies and the Communists. But after the armistice, British and American efforts to assist the anti-Bolshevik forces diminished greatly. On Sept. 30, 1919, the American forces abandoned Archangel. On Oct. 2, the allies left Murmansk. President Wilson’s war to make the world safe for democracy clearly was not to be extended to the Russian people.

      Japanese forces had been landed at Vladivostok Dec. 30, 1917. Ample opportunities existed for a combined allied-Japanese force to intervene successfully in the war over the future of Siberia and eastern Russia. But the will to deter and defeat the Bolshevik revolutionaries did not exist in the free world. The United States was beginning to adopt an isolationist posture, for which it would pay dearly in the future. Then, as now, there were demands for the U.S. to turn away from grave threats to freedom. Finally, all hopes for defeating Bolshevism in the East were extinguished when the Japanese withdrew from Vladivostok, Oct. 2, 1922. America was in a state of complete euphoria. Pacifist sentiment was building, a process that accelerated after the doughboys were demobilized. An historical turning point had been reached and the American people failed to understand. Their government failed to act.

      The United States and its coalition partners have a similar opportunity at a turning point in history because of their preemptive intervention in Iraq. They must not withdraw from the country. Iraq represents a forward base in the war against Muslim terrorism which threatens free people around the world, including Muslims who are not supporters of al Qaeda, Hamas, Hezbollah, and similar groups. Syria, as a supporter of such groups and a possible recipient of Saddam’s weapons of mass destruction, remains a dangerous state. The terrorists and their supporters hope to expand and create a power base in Saudi Arabia.

      Iran, with its nuclear ambitions, also remains a center of great danger and potential threats. It is shocking and tragic that major nations in old Europe, France and Germany, have been so completely captured by anti-American elements that they won’t support the coalition’s vital operations to Iraq, especially as they also are targets of terrorism and are vulnerable because of large immigrant Muslim populations. They lack the understanding and will of Italy. The anti-Semitic bombings and arson incidents in France point to what they can expect in the future, namely more of the same.

      No matter how resolute the United States is in opposing terrorism in Iraq, the position of the U.S. and the coalition can be difficult. The difficulty in the region is compounded by all the turmoil resulting from the Palestinian suicide bomber offensive against Israel. In dealing with this problem, the U.S. has made many errors over a long period of years. The root problem is the American acceptance of the notion that the Palestinians constitute a legitimate nation. Hence, political proposals such as the so-called road map are based on a failure to understand and respect historical truths.

      On June 15, 1969, Israeli Prime Minister Golda Meir told the Sunday Times of London that “there was no such thing as Palestinians.” It was and is a widely shared Israeli belief—indeed, an historical fact, that there never has been a Palestinian entity. That truth was unacceptable in international circles then. It is an utterly unacceptable, politically incorrect view more than 30 years later. The unpalatable truth can’t be swallowed by the horde of pro-Palestian partisans on both sides of the Atlantic—so much so that the conservative largely pro-Israeli Bush administration embraced the idea of a Palestinian state and outlined the process it believed or wanted to believe would lead to peace in the Middle East. The reality is that a future Palestinian state would be controlled by suicide bomber groups and their political supporters. It would be an entity with no other goal than driving the Jews into the sea after a host of them were killed by bombers.

      The United States missed an historic opportunity after the 1967 war in which Muslim forces suffered a defeat. That was the time to support the expansion of Israel to its historic borders. The Palestinians should have been relocated from the West Bank and Gaza to Jordan and other Arab territories well able to absorb this culturally compatible population. Such realignment of populations has been a commonplace event in Europe, as in the case of a Polish-German border and the Hungarian-Romanian border.

      This action would have given Israel permanently secure borders. And this action would have been politically feasible in the euphoric aftermath of the 1967 war. Today, of course, it would be impossible, given the rising tide of anti-Zionist and Jewish feeling in Europe. However, it would be possible for the United States to stiffen the conditions of the administration’s “road map,” insisting even more firmly that the Palestinians not only end all suicide bomber operations, eliminating the bombers’ support groups, but demanding that all anti-Jewish rhetoric be abandoned by Palestinian officials and their media. This would effectively prevent the establishment of a new Muslim terrorist state—as the controlling forces in the Palestinian camp are wedded to anti-Jewish propaganda, as well as being tied to the organizers of suicide bombing campaigns.

      Whether a stiffening of the “road map” conditions will take place is anyone’s guess. We can be sure, however, that there would be great opposition to this from governments that are very unlikely to retreat from their positions. Leftist hostility to the United States almost certainly will increase inside the European Union, prodded by France and Germany. Hostility towards Israel already is at a record level—Israel being the subject of a hate campaign even more ferocious than the hate campaign directed at the United States. Indeed anti-Israel fury is a central force or theme in the global agenda of the left.

      In high places in the West there are apologists for suicide bombers and other terrorists. Mark Steyn, senior American columnist for Britain’s Telegraph Group, reported Dec. 8, 2003, on an address Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, gave to the Royal Institute for International Affairs. In his address, Williams argued that terrorism can have serious moral goals. He said that “it is possible to use unspeakably wicked means to pursue what is intelligible or desirable.” It is hard to conceive of a more wicked argument.

      For many contemporary Christians in the United States, support of Israel is a moral imperative, precisely as the reopening of the pilgrimage route to the Holy Land was a moral imperative to crusaders in the Middle Ages.

      The situation involving Israel and Palestinian ambitions is of major concern, but it is essential to remember that the great imperative is the successful prosecution of the war on terrorism. Donald Henninger of The Wall Street Journal, writing Nov. 25, 2003, reminds us that

. . . the threat is the proliferation of the technical knowledge beneath weapons of mass destruction, and the existence of people willing to use these technologies against large civilian populations or whole nations. That, in sum, is terrorism.

      To deal with this threat, President George Bush developed and enunciated the doctrine of pre-emption. Of course, the strike against Iraq was not the first time the United States has acted preemptively. As World War II approached and German U-boats stepped up their ferocious attacks on cargo vessels in the Atlantic, President Franklin Roosevelt ordered U.S. Navy vessels to depth charge German submarines that were aiming to halt all shipments of food and other supplies to Britain. This was pre-emptive war and led to German U-boat attacks on American destroyers.

      The United States has a long history of combating terrorism. President Jefferson ordered attacks on pirates from Tripoli who were harassing American shipping in the Mediterranean. Two centuries later Americans became incensed when the Germans engaged in terrorism at sea, sinking the liner Lusitania in 1915 with 1,500 civilians on board. This terrorism at sea was a major factor in America’s decision to go to war against Imperial Germany in 1917.

      The liberal, multicultural mindset of contemporary America makes it very difficult for a great number of Americans to understand and accept the fact that not all cultures are the same or equal. Hence many Americans are unprepared to fight real civilizational enemies or comprehend that they are prepared to engage in violent struggles for decades to come. It is this mindset that accounts for the fury of liberal-leftists at the detention of Muslim terrorists and the insistence that they be granted all the legal rights guaranteed to American citizens. In short, the liberal-leftist establishment in the United States is incapable of accepting the reality of civilizational enemies and the deadly thrust of their beliefs. It is this same mindset that causes Americans and Europeans of the multicultural stripe to believe the Palestinian suicide bombers will be transformed into people as pacific and responsible as the Danes.

      To successfully prosecute the war on terrorism—terrorism which has as its aim the destruction of the United States, its government and way of life—the United States must eliminate the liberal, multiculturalism which threatens and undermines our war effort. Our struggle is therefore far more complex than the struggle of the crusaders who built the Crac des Chevaliers. They did not have to deal with an internal enemy as they fought against Muslim terrorism and conquest in their time.

      The appeasers and apologists for the Muslim terrorists, who are bent on inflicting damage on the United States, represent a challenge, as much as the suicide bombers of Baghdad and the Sunni Triangle and the Gaza Strip. The terrorists abroad and their supporters at home have to be fought with crusading zeal. Those abroad who will not support the U.S. in the war against terrorism have to be countered with every measure at our command. For example, if Canada allows itself, through open immigration, to become a haven for Middle Eastern terrorists who want to target the United States, then the U.S. most probably will have to restrict access to the United States from Canada, implementing a visa system based on the record of each applicant for short-term admission.

      It is essential to bear in mind that waging the war against Islamic terrorism will require just as massive and far-reaching a control mechanism as the U.S. set up in World War II to keep the Axis from subverting the nations of Latin America.

      It is largely forgotten that many Americans in that period envisioned the war lasting a decade or more and, but for the invention and use of the atomic bomb, it might have continued for many years after 1945. Certainly, the United States and its Allies would have proved to be up to the extraordinary challenges they faced. They gave unstinting support to the response required. In the Cold War, they demonstrated the stamina that was necessary for victory. And in each case victory was achieved. There were those who did not believe that a comfort-loving society could or would stand up to the armed ideology of the Soviet Union. Then, as now, large elements of protesters called for a weak national posture. In the 1950s, the Ban the Bomb crowds suggested to some that the old stamina and resolution had been seriously eroded. Those of little faith were wrong, and they are undoubtedly wrong to believe that Americans in the 21st century haven’t the stomach to resist Muslim terrorists and win the long war against terrorism.

 

      With strong, continuing leadership, as President Bush has provided since 9/11, the United States surely will be able to muster the resources to carry on the fight to victory. Other nations in other times have been able to carry on truly protracted struggles for the survival of their sovereign entity and civilizational order. Such was the nature of Rome’s long struggle to defeat the Carthaginians. What Rome did in ancient times America can do in the 21st century. Carrying on and winning such protracted struggles is the mark of greatness.     Ω

“The theory of democracy had presumed that man was a rational animal; no doubt some one had seen this in a book of logic. But man is an emotional animal, occasionally rational; and through his feelings he can be deceived to his heart’s content. It may be true, as Lincoln pretended to believe, that “you can’t fool all the people all the time”; but you can fool enough of them to rule a large country.” —Will Durant, from The Pleasures of Philosophy, (p. 292)