By Moses Oludele Idowu
The first and second parts of this article was published earlier. In this third part we focus on the Crusaders deconstruct the lies that have been told about them.
Lie No.7: Christians started the conflict with Muslims. Muslims were only defending themselves. Crusaders were the aggressors
Again Reno compounded his lies against the Church when he made Christians the aggressors and Muslims the defenders. Hear him in his own words:
“A lot of the mistrust between Christians and Muslims started during the Crusades. The Crusades were directed and financed and initiated by the Catholic Church against Muslims. Muslims were not the aggressors they were defending themselves.”
That was the historical “gospel” from Reno Omokri. This is the same nonsense and lies that have been spewed for centuries to tarnish Christianity and especially the Catholic Church since the days of Voltaire and Edward Gibbon.
Let us take this systematically.
It is not true that the mistrust started only during the Crusades, it started much longer right from when Muslims began with their Jihads against Christendom and displaced Christianity from its traditional centres and origins.
He said the Crusades started the mistrust, so what caused the Crusades? A student of History who is unbiased ought to ask the question. If the Crusades was the problem why were Crusades held, what prompted them and why was it financed by Europeans? [It wasn’t the Catholic Church that financed it, that was another lie.]
These are the questions many have failed to ask themselves preferring to instead blame the Church and blame Christianity for launching wars against the Muslims. You can hear even Reno blaming Christians as the aggressors and Muslims as only defending themselves. That is the extent of miseducation and falsification of History. The History of the Crusades has been distorted.
Now let us examine the facts with dates.
- In 636AD Muslims without any provocation entered and invaded Syria, a Christian nation.
- Two years later the same Jihadist gangs sacked Jerusalem completely from Christians.
- A year later in 639 AD the same unruly hordes of a “religion of peace” laid waste Egypt and took Alexandria the second largest city in Christendom – not by preaching but by the sword.
I don’t know the kind of history people are being taught today and the teachers teaching them because Omokri shouldn’t have so criminally distorted the facts. But we can’t blame him, that is what goes on today in many schools and colleges in the face of Political Correctness and Cultural Marxism that has taken over the universities and especially the teaching of History. - In 698 AD Carthage was captured by Muslim forces and burned to the ground, killing most of its inhabitants.
- In 846 AD Muslims entered and sacked Rome.
- In 923 AD Caliph Abd- Er- Rahman III destroyed Cordova, Zarajoza and Merida with all adult males executed and all women and children enslaved.
One convenient lie that has been told throughout ages is that the Muslims only became brutal because of the Crusaders. Reno Omokri repeated the same lie in his letter.
So if that were the case where did they learn all the atrocities committed above since the Crusades had not been inaugurated then?
With Jerusalem taken and Syria and Egypt taken and pilgrims to the Holy Land robbed and raped by the hordes and bandits – the forerunners of the same hooligans wreaking havocs on farmers and travellers today in our nation – there was no other options left but for Christians too to take up arms. - There were worse provocations but the greatest provocation occured in 1009 AD when Muslims at the direction of Fatimid Caliph al- Hakim destroyed the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem – the splendid basilica that Constantine had erected over what was believed to be the site of the tomb where Christ lay before the Resurrection. Worse still they attempted to destroy the tomb itself, leaving only traces of the hollow in the rocks.” [ See Rodney Stark, The Case for the Crusades, Southern Baptist Journal of Theology 20.2 (2016):9-28]
The news of this sacrilege caused great consternation and anger all through Europe and in the whole Christendom. One thing about Muslims is they always end up overdoing things, excess, until they finally bring a deadly backlash that they can’t contain.
This was what informed Pope Urban’s great oration in November 27, 1095 summoning the Christians to retake all Holy Lands from the Muslims.
This is the background the distorters of historical scholarship who keep the gates of academic scholarship in our universities would not tell you except to blame the Crusaders for their barbarity and the Catholic Church for financing holy wars. Stupid.
The earlier jihads that had laid waste Christian’s domains for three hundred years do not concern them. It is the reaction or over-reaction that bothers the revisionists of history.
It is false that Muslims were innocent, they were not. They caused the Crusades. They brought it upon themselves. Let the truth be told. There is no smoke without fire.
This was what really happened and it is recorded in History but to the children of error they see only what they want to see.
Lie No. 8: The Crusaders showed no humanity to Muslims in the Holy Land – men, women and children were slaughtered whereas Saladin allowed surrendered Catholic knights safe passage
Going on from the last error about the Crusades Reno compounded his errors by again distorting the facts. We cannot blame him for this because this is what was probably taught to him or what he heard others say. That is what has been emphasized in history for generations: the barbarity of Christian Crusaders compared with the civilized conduct of the Muslims.
Foul.
But that is not exactly what happened.
A lot of nonsense has been concocted about the benevolence of the Muslims and the barbarity of the Crusaders. I have not had the time to really write on this subject.
First we cannot judge the Crusaders by our own standard or law or by the rules of Geneva Convention. We must judge them by the law and convention of wars in their day. It is a serious blunder of history to judge a man of the past by the standard of the present.
Did the Crusaders just massacre Muslims in the Holy Land without a reason?
Here is what happened.
It was a rule of war in those days that you can surrender and save the warriors or attackers and even yourself. It is like plea bargain today. If a suspect knows that his case is so bad and evidence weighty against him which would result in conviction anyway he would immediately admit his guilt to save the judge’s time who also will be lenient for not wasting their time.
When a city sees it was outnumbered there was a choice left open: to surrender or enter into treaty with the attackers. Then the gate of the city can be opened to the warriors and the inhabitants allowed safe passage to leave. Or they could fight on believing in their strength and take the risks. If they win, fine but if they lost then they are at the masses of the victors either to save them or massacre them for wasting their time. This is not cruelty because if the battle had turned the other way the defending party would do the same or similar.
That was the rule of war then. If Jerusalem had surrendered when the Crusaders surrounded its walls there would have been no massacre but they fought on believing the army of Allah could not be defeated. So if they were defeated then massacre followed or as the whims of the commanders.
The Crusaders held on to the Holy Land for more than a hundred years and it was their return back to Europe and Europe’s loss of interest in defending the Land that enabled Saladin to retake it in 1187.
Here is another distortion or misrepresentation. Did Saladin actually treat Christians better when he retook the Holy Land? It has been said that he allowed the Catholic knights free passage without killing anyone. This is compared and juxtaposed with the earlier “barbarity” of the Crusaders.
This is another lie and misrepresentation.
This is what happened.
On the face value it would appear Saladin behaved much more morally and with high ethics but it is not so. In point of fact Saladin had a history of barbarity against Christians. His own secretary Imad ed- Din gave us that much to know. Following the Battle of Hattin he himself participated in killing some of the captured knights. Said the secretary: “He ( Saladin) ordered that they should be beheaded, choosing to have them dead rather than in prison…” [ See Madden, A Concise History of the Crusades]
So the question is why did the same Saladin act differently this time? It is simply because the Crusaders seeing they were outnumbered and the time it would take for reinforcements to arrive from Europe saw the case as bad and instead surrendered.
By the treaty of war you were not supposed to kill anyone who surrendered without fighting. It was the treaty with the Knights that they would leave the city for a safe passage which Saladin honoured. He was not behaving any more ethically or morally as the leftist revisionist historians of Western universities parroting age-old distorted alienated discourses to tarnish Christianity.
Saladin behaved immorally elsewhere even in war and was as bloody as many Muslim commanders of that era.
The notion that the Muslims behaved more morally during war is a falsehood, a grievous falsehood that has gone on for too long and must now be challenged and debunked.
In 1266 Baybars, Sultan of Egypt took the Knights of the Templar fortress of Safad and had all the inhabitants massacred even though he had promised to spare their lives during negotiations. This is one trait with Muslim commanders in war: they sometimes reneged on their agreement.
The same year he put Antioch, a great Centre of Christianity and where people were first called Christians to the sword despite their surrender killing all the men and enslaving women and children.
This is what Reno Omokri is glorifying and exhorting. Muslims acted as brutally as the Crusaders both before and after as history shows. But you will never read the above story about Baybars or Saladin in any Western universities, only the atrocities of the Crusaders and the benevolence of the Muslims. These are the lies and manipulation that Reno Omokri has fallen captive to and has swallowed hook, line and sinker and for which he is deluding his unfortunate, mesmerized followers in their thousands.l
[To be continued]
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April 30, 2025
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