RESPONSE (Continued):
CRUSADES
4. Another general topic broached by the drive-by smear is the Crusades. While the post makes many accusations, the portions relating to the Crusades to the Middle-East are, again, illustrative of the general tenor of the treatment of this subject.
As incredible as it should seem to anyone with a modicum of historical learning, it evidently still needs to be pointed out that for over half a millennium the Middle East and North Africa were Christian. The Mediterranean was, in essence, a Christian lake.
Mohammedanism didn't develop until the 7th Century and was subsequently spread by fire and sword until North Africa, the entire Middle East, and Spain had been overrun. To be sure, this wasn't a phenomenon experienced exclusively by Christians. The Mohammedan conquest of Persia and of large parts of present day India and Pakistan were perhaps even more brutal.
The Crusades to the Holy Land didn't arise because one morning Pope Urban II awoke and thought that it would be entertaining to ask thousands of Christian warriors to go off to fight Mohammedans in the Middle East. No, he raised the call because the indigenous Christians in the Middle East had been pleading for help in warding off the Mohammedans.
In the 40 years preceding Urban II's call, the Seljuk Turks had, for example, slaughtered the Byzantines at Manzikert, taking the Byzantine Emperor prisoner, conquered Syria, and slaughtered thousands of Christians in Jerusalem. Add to this the usual Mohammedan practice of murder, rape, and enslavement of Middle Eastern Christians and pilgrims, and the call for help, the Pope's response becomes understandable, even to the modern mind.
The Crusades were quite clearly the beginning of a nearly 600 year defensive effort to stop Mohammedan expansion and predation. That effort only ceased when Mohammedans were turned away for the second time from the gates of Vienna in 1683.
Like all men, the Crusaders were fallen. Not everything that they did was right, but neither was most of what they did wrong. The Crusaders did occasionally and reprehensibly violate Christian principles. Nevertheless, even Mohammedans who lived in the newly established Crusader kingdoms were treated better by their Christian rulers than by Mohammedan rulers. Here is how a Spanish Mohammedan, Ibn Jubayr, who travelled through the Crusader kingdoms described the situation: "Upon leaving Tibnin (near Tyre), we passed through an unbroken skein of farms and villages whose lands were efficiently cultivated. The inhabitants were all Muslims, but they live in comfort with the Franj [Franks or Crusaders] – may God preserve them from temptation! Their dwellings belong to them and all their property is unmolested. All the regions controlled by the Franj in Syria are subject to this same system: the landed domains, villages, and farms have remained in the hands of the Muslims. Now, doubt invests the heart of a great number of these men when they compare their lot to that of their brothers living in Muslim territory. Indeed, the latter suffer from injustice of their coreligionists, whereas the Franj act with equity." It's interesting that the apparent worry of this Muslim traveler was that his coreligionists might be tempted to convert because they had experienced the difference between living under Christians and living under Mohammedans.
Of course, no discussion of the evils of the Crusades is complete without some horror-stricken reference to the siege of Jerusalem. Yes, the Crusaders captured Jerusalem after a siege, and their behavior was consistent with the rules of war that were followed in connection with sieges well into the 17th Century.
Siege warfare was relatively common prior to the modern period. It was also a very risky proposition for the besieging army, which not only faced the danger of decimation through pestilence, but also of tremendous casualties attempting to take the walls of the besieged city. The general convention that had developed was that at any time up to the breaching of its walls, a city could surrender, and the lives of the people would be spared. If the besieging army was forced to take the walls, no quarter would be given. This created a strong incentive for cities whose leaders had doubts about their ability to withstand the siege to save many lives on both sides by surrender.
One famous example of this was immortalized in Shakespeare's Henry V, in which Henry tells the Mayor of Harfleur that unless the city surrenders he will not be able to restrain the fury of his soldiers and Harfleur would be sacked. Happily, the city surrendered, the people were spared, and Henry was off to meet his destiny at Agincourt.
In the case of Jerusalem, the Mohammedans did not surrender, the Crusaders finally breached the walls and forced open the gates, and Jerusalem was sacked. Some accounts report that during the siege the Crusaders allowed Muslims and Jews to leave the city if they wanted. It is known that Count Raymond, a leader of the Crusaders, gave a personal guarantee of safety to the governor of Jerusalem to allow him to leave the city. This is significant because, according to the understanding of the times, failure to take advantage of an offer of free passage out of a besieged city was taken to establish that those who remained behind were committed to battle and had accepted the consequences.
Robert Spencer points out that even the early accounts of the sacking of Jerusalem probably exaggerated the number killed (which is not to deny that many were killed), presumably to make it appear a greater feat of arms than it was. Much later, as Spencer also points out, Mohammedan writers began inflating the number killed enormously when they discovered its propaganda value.
As a general proposition, readers of documents written before our modern, quantitatively oriented age need to bear in mind that the use of numbers in such texts were seldom meant to be taken literally. More often than not, numbers served as literary devices for emphasizing the importance of events rather than as accurate indicators of quantities. In fact, in many situations, it is clear that it's very unlikely that numerical claims in such texts could have been known with any degree of accuracy.
In this vein, anti-Christian bigots also often take advantage, or fall victim to, the general inability of the public to bring an intelligent hermeneutic to bear on old texts. The post mentions the claim that the Crusader knights were wading ankle deep through Jerusalem in the blood of the defeated Saracens, which was taken from an anonymous source. In fact, it is surprising that the poster didn't use the reliably attributed and facially more lurid statement by Archbishop Daimbert, Godfrey, Duke of Bouillon, and Raymond, Count of Toulouse, to Pope Paschal II that "…in Solomon's Porch and in his temple our men rode in the blood of the Saracens up to the knees of their horses."
A non-comatose reader would undoubtedly recognize that what is claimed by the anonymous source and by the Archbishop, Duke, and Count is obviously literally physically impossible. A more informed reader would also immediately recognize that the point of this bit of hyperbole was not to communicate the extent of the destruction of the Saracen defenders, though destroyed they were. Rather, the point was allude to the language in Revelation 14:20, thereby identifying themselves and their military mission with the agents of God's wrath described in the destruction of evil-doers toward the end of chapter 14 of Revelation. This is, indeed, was how the Crusaders saw themselves.
But to return to the point: Were the Christian Crusaders wrong in going to the Holy Land? The Bible doesn't require "pacifism" in the face of the murder, rape, man-stealing, and pillaging. There is also no question that the Mohammedan Saracens were in fact the aggressors in the Middle East and were elsewhere carrying out Jihad.
While the Crusader undertaking was not unblemished by sin – and no human undertaking ever is - they were generally men who left relatively comfortable lives to venture into an unknown, hostile environment for the purpose of responding to calls for help by the largely defenseless Middle Eastern Christians who were the object of Jihad. Some might call this selfless. Moreover, the quality of these men can be seen in the quality of the kingdoms they established.
Perhaps they may be thought foolish for going on this errand. Certainly, others have delighted in pointing out the imperfections of the men. But it is incontrovertible that for most part, their motives were right and the territories they came to control were well and justly governed. Yes, eventually they were forced out of the Middle East, but they and their successors at Rhodes and Malta held the Mohammedans at bay long enough to allow what remained of Christendom to prepare for the centuries of Jihad directed at Europe.
Theodore Roosevelt places the importance of the Christian warriors from Charles Martel (grandfather to Charlemagne), through the Crusaders, Graf von Salm and his Landsknecht, the Knights of Malta, and Don Juan of Austria to Jan Sobieski and his Poles in their overall context: "Christianity was saved in Europe solely because the peoples of Europe fought.  If the peoples of Europe in the seventh and eighth centuries, and on up to, and including, the seventeenth century, had not possessed a military equality with, and gradually a growing superiority over, the Mohammedans who invaded Europe, Europe would at this moment be Mohammedan and the Christian religion would be exterminated.
Wherever the Mohammedans have had complete sway, wherever the Christians have been unable to resist them by the sword, Christianity has ultimately disappeared.  From the hammer of Charles Martel to the sword of Sobieski, Christianity owed its safety in Europe to the fact that it was able to show that it could, and would, fight as well as the Mohammedan aggressor."
The civilization of Europe, America, and Australia, exists today at all, only because of the victories of civilized man over the enemies of civilization—because of victories through the centuries from Charles Martel, in the eighth century, and those of John Sobieski, in the seventeenth century.  ...There are such "social values" today in Europe, America and Australia only because during those thousand years, the Christians of Europe possessed the warlike power to do what the Christians of Asia and Africa had failed to do—that is, to beat back the Moslem invader."—
As an aside, there has been a remarkable effort by many to whitewash Mohammedanism by many academics and members of the press – abetted, oddly enough, by both the Bush and Obama administrations. In earlier generations in the West we had many public men who spoke straight-forwardly about Mohammedanism.
John Wesley, for example, described Mohammedanism as "…Ever since the religion of Islam appeared in the world, the espousers of it…have been as wolves and tigers to all other nations, rending and tearing all that fell into their merciless paws, and grinding them with their iron teeth…"
Churchill said of Mohammedanism that "No stronger retrograde force exists in the world."
For an honest academic's assessment of modern-day Mohammedanism, see Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. The intellectually curious would also benefit from reading Dario Fernandez-Morera's relatively short article titled "The Myth of the Andalusian Paradise", which is now available online. In summary, Fernandez-Morera, a professor at Northwestern University, punctures the PC lie that Moorish Spain was a vibrant, multicultural paradise.

HITLER, etc.
5. In the tradition of saving the most infamous for last, we now turn to the post's mendacious insinuation that Christians were responsible for the murder of millions of Jews by Germany's National Socialist regime. In addition to being oblivious to obvious and inconvenient facts such as it was the National Socialists who put Jews in the "kilns", and Christian men from the United States and Great Britain who rescued the survivors from many prisons and several camps, including Buchenwald and Bergen-Belsin, the post evidences little knowledge about Germany and National Socialism.
Plainly, the post's drive-by smear on this account is an echo of the effort by the secular humanists to create a new, useful (to them) historical "narrative" in which National Socialism is portrayed as a Christian movement.
In point of fact, by 1914 Christianity was a hollow shell in Germany. Outward observances were maintained, but the beliefs and commitments required of Christians were largely gone. This was a reflection of the assault on the historicity of the Bible begun by Friedrich Schleiermacher and continued by Julius Wellhausen, David Friedrich Strauss, Ludwig Feuerbach, and what came to be known as the "Tubingen School".
The remaining Christian veneer of German society was completely shattered by the trauma of World War I. It is difficult today for comfortable, secure Westerners to imagine the concrete social impact of the death and destruction caused by WWI. Moreover, as severe as the impact was in Britain and France, it was vastly worse in defeated Germany: A huge percentage of German brothers, fathers, husbands, and marriageable young men had simply disappeared - interred in the trenches of the Western and Eastern Fronts. The remaining German people were suffering from starvation as a result of a blockade by Britain preventing food from reaching Germany. The German economy was destroyed. The Treaty of Versailles imposed a Carthaginian peace, and, in time, the savings of Germans were utterly destroyed through inflation.
The immediate result was an attempted Communist seizure of power, and, somewhat later, the founding of the Frankfurt School, and the creation of the Weimar Republic: the first postmodern culture.
Into the moral void created by the utter destruction of the older German Christian culture and the rise to dominance of postmodernism rushed the two most consequential parties of the left – the socialists of the Internationale (Communists) and the National Socialists (Nazis). The result was street fighting among various formations of these groups, with members of each side often switching sides when it offered an advantage. In the end, however, the National Socialists proved stronger than their other socialist competitors and began to consolidate their power.
Early on, the Nazis took advantage of the historical Lutheran church/state relationship to take control of remaining, rotting Protestant ecclesiastical structure. As a result, the Nazis began changing theology and replacing unsympathetic pastors. This hardly mattered because, although many Germans claimed to be Protestant, they were at best nominal (cultural) Christians who observed Christmas and Easter. For their part, the Nazi's leadership privately detested Christianity, considering it a "slave religion."
As the Nazis forcibly took control of the Protestant churches, the relatively small number of actual Christians who remained in Germany formed what was known as the Confessing Church. Because the Confessing Church was truly Christian and not supportive of the Nazis, the leadership was persecuted and many were imprisoned or sent to the concentration camps.
One of the peculiar facets of the Nazi movement that is known to scholars, but not the general public, was that the Nazi party leadership was deeply involved in homoeroticism and other forms of sexual deviance. The founders and top leadership of the Brown Shirts (Sturmabteilung), for example, were homosexuals, as were almost all of rank-and-file Brown Shirts.
The leadership of the Hitler Youth, most of Hitler's ministers, his body guards, and others in Hitler's government were also homosexuals. Of the top leadership, only Himmler and Goering were not thought to be homosexual. Goering, however, engaged in transvestitism.
Hitler himself appears to have contained more sexual identities than a leather bar. As Professor Lothar Machtan (Bremen University) writes in The Hidden Hitler (Basic Books), the evidence indicates that Hitler was, depending upon the season of his life, a homosexual (incuding probably being a homosexual prostitute in Vienna and having a homosexual relationship with Rudolph Hess), a celibate, and an autoerotic. Other evidence suggests that he was at one point bisexual and a coprophiliac. Further, Machtan and others clearly show that Hitler's closest associates were homosexuals, and they were responsible for bringing him into politics.
Those who attempt to cover-up the deeply homoerotic nature of the Nazi regime claim that homosexuals were persecuted during the Nazi era, arguing that, therefore, the Nazi party couldn't possibly have been dominated by homosexuals. This is a deceitful smokescreen. Indeed, some homosexuals were sent to camps – effeminate homosexuals. The Nazi homosexuals, however, were hypermasculine, detested "fems", and sought to eliminate them.
And, of course, where you find homosexuals you find pedophilia. The Nazi homosexuals who were concentration camp guards were notorious for indulging their sexual appetites for boys. This was observed first hand by Elie Weisel while he was interned in a Nazi concentration camp.
Hitler's sexual "identities" were just part of the overall package, however. His Nazi party was big on "public/private partnerships", social control of industry, income redistribution, and "protecting" nature and the environment. Moreover, besides being anti-semetic, the Nazis were sympathetic to, and allied with, Mohammedans. The Nazi regime further sought at every turn to undermine Christian moral values - particularly those relating to sex - through the Hitler Youth and government education. If we throw in Hitler's anti-smoking fanaticism, his vegetarianism, and his love of animals, it is apparent that with suitable "rebranding", Hitler and his friends would not in any way be identified with Evangelicalism, but would fit very well into the mainstream left today, especially the university left.
ODDS AND ENDS
Here are a few parting observations – some of which touch on the post and some that don't.
Looking over the balance of the post, there are a few howlers – the Pope didn't order the slaughter of the Huguenots; it was Catherine de Medici and Charles IX. Moreover the massacre had multiple motivations. On the side of the royal family and nobility, the matter had largely to do with a dynastic dispute between the Houses of Bourbon and Guise. On the part of the Paris mob, the willingness to riot and kill was partly motivated by religious differences, but also involved deep discontent resulting from rising taxes and poor harvests and resentment of the relatively prosperous Huguenots.
More generally, if you look carefully at what are often portrayed as "Christian religious wars" in Europe, you find that the reasons for the conflicts are not only complex, but largely arise out of political disputes. Consequently, you will find in the 30 Years War, for example, Catholic France fighting at one point with the Catholic nations and, at another, fighting with the Protestants. If that fails to convince you, perhaps it would help to know that the Mohammedan Turks and Protestants were at one point fighting against the Hapsburgs. These kinds of things wouldn't happen in a war that was truly about religion.
It did happen, however, and it was because the war was mainly over the balance of power in Europe. For its part, France was determined to make sure that the Spanish Hapsburgs could no longer dominate the continent, while the German princes wanted to be independent of the Hapsburgs and their Holy Roman Empire.
Moreover, the 16th and 17th Century European conflicts that for polemical purposes are alleged to have been "religious wars" were in the main dynastic and territorial disputes. The Hapsburg's 80 years war against the Netherlands, for example, would have occurred even if Netherlands had been exclusively Catholic. The Hapsburgs simply were not going to give up part of their territory without a fight. The same was true in the overlapping 30 Years War – the German princes were not going to be allowed to become completely independent of the Hapsburgs without a fight.
It is true, however, that Huss, Bruno, Savonarola, and others were killed for heresy. Here we have good examples of the fallen nature of man that extends to all human undertakings, including the church. But, to return again to the "dreaded" Spanish Inquisition, if you were to compare the total number of executions by the Spanish Inquisition over its entire 400 year history with, say, the number of executions by the "Enlightened" humanists of the French Revolution in the course of three years or so, you would again be very, very surprised.
But even burning someone at the stake for alleged heresy was sometimes at bottom largely a pretext for concealing a political objective. William Tyndale is a good example. While it was true that the church arrested him and had him strangled and burnt at the stake, the power behind this crime was Henry VIII. Henry VIII, who was known as the perfect "Renaissance Man", was infuriated by Tyndale's publishing of a work condemning his divorce (which Henry viewed as a dynastic necessity). Subsequently, Henry VIII set in motion the events that led to Tyndale's execution.
Let me close this note by acknowledging that Christians must always struggle against the flesh, but the greatest failing of the modern church is cowardice in pulpit, a lack of genuine commitment to a Christian worldview, weak theology, intellectual laziness, and a failure to make the effort to carry the gospel and God's law into the culture.
The kinds of wild accusations by secular humanists that abound on the internet are mainly a distraction. Our focus should be on both the Gospel and on confronting and repairing our rotting culture.
BNS

Bruce N. Shortt, J.D., Ph.D., is a practicing attorney in the Houston area. He is a committed home educator and member of Exodus Mandate. He is also chairman of the board and unofficial historian of VBM, Inc.