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Crusades/Jihad (1 Viewer)

rockaction

rockaction

Footballguy
How many people think there is an actual crusade going on? Can we admit it if there is? 

How do we defend ourselves, if we can admit it?  

If we don't think so, why not?  

For the left punks, here you go, in errata for a long time, but a great song.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aUm0NmOQMAU

 
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Honestly I blame the Byzantine Empire and Pope Innocent. If the Byzantines had been supported and not torn down we wouldn't be in this mess today.

 
Okay, how does that relate to today?  The ME has a long historical memory. I'll hang up and listen to you.  

 
rockaction said:
Islamists, westward.   
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There's been a spread of Humanism for 500 plus years.  I view our current battle as the last gasp of religious extremism.  In another 100 or 200 years religion will have accepted their loss and blended in with secular beliefs.

 
rockaction said:
Okay, how does that relate to today?  The ME has a long historical memory. I'll hang up and listen to you.  
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I was kind of kidding, but also trying to help your topic.

However on a more serious note yeah the Byzantine Empire stretched from Southeastern Europe through Anatolia to modern day Palestine. That was the bulwark against Islam. 

Now what did Pope Innocent and other Papal kings and their allies do? More than 3/4s of the Crusades were spent attacking the Byzantines or other Christians like the Cathars of the poor Euro kingdoms which lay on the way to the Holy Land.

Ultimately when the Kingdom of Jerusalem fell the major kingdoms weren't willing to put the resources into defending it. And ultimately the Byzantine Empire fell too.

Is all this relevant? Yeah maybe. I also think WW1 is relevant. If the Ottoman Empire had been left alone the ME would not be the basket case powder keg it is now.  The Sykes Picot agreement owed some of its conceptualization to romanticism of old Biblical themes (Ur, Assyria...). 

 
rockaction said:
Islamists, westward.   
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I think no, not literally. While expansion and global caliphatism is baked into the cake that is Islamism, for a 'crusade' you need a nation state involved somehow and also a single religious figure, in this case a grand mufti.

However developments in Turkey are crucial. I have all sorts of problems with the Russian and ME foreign policy of the last 25 years but one major one is again - see above - the failure to sufficiently support a healthy state in Turkey. Some things never change.

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
I think no, not literally. While expansion and global caliphatism is baked into the cake that is Islamism, for a 'crusade' you need a nation state involved somehow and also a single religious figure, in this case a grand mufti.

However developments in Turkey are crucial. I have all sorts of problems with the Russian and ME foreign policy of the last 25 years but one major one is again - see above - the failure to sufficiently support a healthy state in Turkey. Some things never change.
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Why does a lack of a nation-state preclude expansionism of ideology? Why does a caliphate need a territory when it can claim one later? Indeed, isn't that the goal? 

 
rockaction said:
Why does a lack of a nation-state preclude expansionism of ideology? Why does a caliphate need a territory when it can claim one later? Indeed, isn't that the goal? 
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Just IMO of course. But I think caliphate means essentially a kingdom, really a sort of papacy where the kingdon is both bureaucratic and religious, a kingdom is a state by definition. I think a scholar could say what the ismalic counterpart to crusade is but if there is a crusade there must be someone organizing it and someone calling for it.

Now there was the People's Crusade.

The peasant population had been afflicted by drought, famine, and plague for many years before 1096, and some of them seem to have envisioned the crusade as an escape from these hardships.
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There could be a counterpart here in the sort of reverse migration whereby Arab peoples have been flooding into Europe for just those reasons, some of them - a few - I suppose carry one purpose besides relief and opportunity and safety.

 
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cstu said:
There's been a spread of Humanism for 500 plus years.  I view our current battle as the last gasp of religious extremism.  In another 100 or 200 years religion will have accepted their loss and blended in with secular beliefs.
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Numerous Muslim governments and societies are more overtly religious today than they were in the mid Twentieth Century (Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, etc.).  Numerous former Soviet republics are more overtly religious today than they were when the Communists tried to strip religion from their culture.  Both the more moderate Muslims and the Communists of the mid Twentieth Century also likely thought that they had already seen the last gasp of religious fundamentalism.

With that said, Pope Fran does seem like he's making a conscious effort to temper Catholic dogma with secular humanist beliefs.

 
Beheading priest in a ⛪  

No crusade here.

We are not at war with Islam.

A tiny few have perverted the religion of peace Islam.

Just a tiny few. 

 
Granted, I'm pretty uneducated on some of these historical matters, but won't stop me from weighing in . . . 

It seems that battles for "religion" are really about battles for power.  You want to take over an area, religion is one of the tools in your arsenal.  Albeit, it doesn't really have to be (see Ghengis Khan and the Mongol invasion of the known world, I guess). Maybe that's apropos of nothing.

I was just thinking the other day that we are in a modern-day crusades.  But I actually thought it was in the opposite direction.  Americans/Christians eastward.

 
Gary Coal Man said:
Numerous Muslim governments and societies are more overtly religious today than they were in the mid Twentieth Century (Afghanistan, Iran, Turkey, etc.).  Numerous former Soviet republics are more overtly religious today than they were when the Communists tried to strip religion from their culture.  Both the more moderate Muslims and the Communists of the mid Twentieth Century also likely thought that they had already seen the last gasp of religious fundamentalism.

With that said, Pope Fran does seem like he's making a conscious effort to temper Catholic dogma with secular humanist beliefs.
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I think the Gulan Movement sounds like a positive thing. I'm not quite sure I fully understand it but it sounds like the kind of thing we should be behind.

 
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Sweet J said:
Granted, I'm pretty uneducated on some of these historical matters, but won't stop me from weighing in . . . 

It seems that battles for "religion" are really about battles for power.  You want to take over an area, religion is one of the tools in your arsenal.  Albeit, it doesn't really have to be (see Ghengis Khan and the Mongol invasion of the known world, I guess). Maybe that's apropos of nothing.

I was just thinking the other day that we are in a modern-day crusades.  But I actually thought it was in the opposite direction.  Americans/Christians eastward.
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Wow. Really? That's fascinating. I'd have thought the West did more in the name of nation-states and commodity than in the name of religion, and the East and Africa was constantly doing things in the name of Islam. 

Rarely do we hear Onward Christian Warriors and the like anymore. At all.  

How did you reach this conclusion?  

 
cstu said:
There's been a spread of Humanism for 500 plus years.  I view our current battle as the last gasp of religious extremism.  In another 100 or 200 years religion will have accepted their loss and blended in with secular beliefs.
Click to expand...
this

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
I think no, not literally. While expansion and global caliphatism is baked into the cake that is Islamism, for a 'crusade' you need a nation state involved somehow and also a single religious figure, in this case a grand mufti.
Click to expand...
Technocally, for a crusade, you also need a cross

;)

 
Dr Oadi said:
Beheading priest in a ⛪  

No crusade here.

We are not at war with Islam.

A tiny few have perverted the religion of peace Islam.

Just a tiny few. 
Click to expand...
“Too often we judge other groups by their worst examples, while judging ourselves by our best intentions.”

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
Ha, yeah, thought of that. But hey, I'm going with Rock's premise here.
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The Moors' expansion across the Mediterranean, the Ottoman Empire's Balkan expansion and potentially the Mongol hordes (albeit the latter were not muslim) would be examples of "Anti Christian Jihads" - as I assume Saladin's original onslaught against Jerusalem, Acre etc.

What we are seeing now is nothing compared to that (or indeed to the brutality of the original Christian crusades). It seems a lot closer to guerrilla warfare than all out religious war, not least because the combatants are so relatively few compared to the whole muslim population

 
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SaintsInDome2006 said:
I was kind of kidding, but also trying to help your topic.

However on a more serious note yeah the Byzantine Empire stretched from Southeastern Europe through Anatolia to modern day Palestine. That was the bulwark against Islam. 

Now what did Pope Innocent and other Papal kings and their allies do? More than 3/4s of the Crusades were spent attacking the Byzantines or other Christians like the Cathars of the poor Euro kingdoms which lay on the way to the Holy Land.

Ultimately when the Kingdom of Jerusalem fell the major kingdoms weren't willing to put the resources into defending it. And ultimately the Byzantine Empire fell too.

Is all this relevant? Yeah maybe. I also think WW1 is relevant. If the Ottoman Empire had been left alone the ME would not be the basket case powder keg it is now.  The Sykes Picot agreement owed some of its conceptualization to romanticism of old Biblical themes (Ur, Assyria...). 
Click to expand...
What do you mean if the Ottomans were left alone? Were they not allied with the Germans to try to recover lost territories?

 
SaintsInDome2006 said:
I think no, not literally. While expansion and global caliphatism is baked into the cake that is Islamism, for a 'crusade' you need a nation state involved somehow and also a single religious figure, in this case a grand mufti.

However developments in Turkey are crucial. I have all sorts of problems with the Russian and ME foreign policy of the last 25 years but one major one is again - see above - the failure to sufficiently support a healthy state in Turkey. Some things never change.
Click to expand...
How did we not support a healthy state in Turkey?

 
bueno said:
What do you mean if the Ottomans were left alone? Were they not allied with the Germans to try to recover lost territories?
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The argument against Sykes Picot is that they ignored ethnicity (e.g.  the Kurds without a home land, split among four nations) and from that follows a lot of the regional unrest we see today

 
msommer said:
The argument against Sykes Picot is that they ignored ethnicity (e.g.  the Kurds without a home land, split among four nations) and from that follows a lot of the regional unrest we see today
Click to expand...
The Europeans tended to do that a lot, but in some areas, different cultures/tribes were so intermingled separating them into contiguous countries wasn't possible. See India/Pakistan, Jordan/Israel, etc.

 
cstu said:
There's been a spread of Humanism for 500 plus years.  I view our current battle as the last gasp of religious extremism.  In another 100 or 200 years religion will have accepted their loss and blended in with secular beliefs.
Click to expand...
500 plus?  What do you consider some of the earliest examples of the spread of Humanism?  (I'm not saying you're wrong, just surprised by a time so long ago.)

 
So we keep invading the middle east under the guise of bringing democracy and you think it is the east invading the west?

Moreover we keep supporting counties in the middle east with bases and selling them arms.

 
Juxtatarot said:
500 plus?  What do you consider some of the earliest examples of the spread of Humanism?  (I'm not saying you're wrong, just surprised by a time so long ago.)
Click to expand...
Off the top of my head we know one or more of our founders were examples... gets us half way there!

 
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cstu said:
There's been a spread of Humanism for 500 plus years.  I view our current battle as the last gasp of religious extremism.  In another 100 or 200 years religion will have accepted their loss and blended in with secular beliefs.
Click to expand...
Another major factor working against this prediction is world demographic trends. 

The groups most apt to currently hold secular humanist beliefs have the lowest fertility rates.  Namely, Europeans.  

The groups who have so far shown to be the most opposed to adopting secular humanist beliefs have the highest fertility rates.  Namely, Africans and Arabs.

Those demographic trends are a major reason why Islam is the world's fastest growing major religion, and a major reason why secular humanism is actually declining, not inclining, per percentage of the world population.

 
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Flying Spaghetti Monster said:
So we keep invading the middle east under the guise of bringing democracy and you think it is the east invading the west?

Moreover we keep supporting counties in the middle east with bases and selling them arms.
Click to expand...
Wouldn't that just be warfare? A crusade implies we do it for religious reasons.

 
Gary Coal Man said:
Another major factor working against this prediction is world demographic trends. 

The groups most apt to currently hold secular humanist beliefs have the lowest fertility rates.  Namely, Europeans.  

The groups who have so far shown to be the most opposed to adopting secular humanist beliefs have the highest fertility rates.  Namely, Africans and Arabs.

Those demographic trends are a major reason why Islam is the world's fastest growing major religion, and a major reason why secular humanism is actually declining, not inclining, per percentage of the world population.

http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/04/23/why-muslims-are-the-worlds-fastest-growing-religious-group/
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Really not wanting to welcome our new Muslim overlords....

 
jamny said:
Wouldn't that just be warfare? A crusade implies we do it for religious reasons.
Click to expand...
I think if you start getting into why someone is "really" doing something, it gets dicey.  It's hard to say that when the west attacks the east, it's "just war," but when the east attacks "its really about religion."  Lot's of religious attacks are really just war, right?  I mean, come on, when Europe showed up in the America's and conquered "in the name of god," was that REALLY about spreading god's word?  Maybe to some.  Maybe not to others.

When various Arab constituencies attack Israel, is it about land?  About power?  About religion?  A sprinkling of everything?  

America has been in a fight with various members of the middle east for the past 40 years at least, most likely longer.  How much does religion have to do with it?  I'm not sure I'm smart or educated enough to tease out all the factors.  But I DO know that we have destroyed the infrastructure of one nation over the last 15 years, killing millions in the process (tens of millions?).  How much of that was really about power?  How much of that was really about religion?  Or something else?  I call BS on anyone here who purports to have a definitive answer.

So, to answer @rockaction, speaking as a guy who only knows what I read in the papers, an occasional Atlantic or Esquire or Economist article, and talking to friends in person and on these boards, I see a completely one-sided "fight" between the east and the west.  It's hard to say that the East is bringing back modern day crusades when what actually appears to be happening is that the West (christian) is killing people of the East (Muslim) by the millions.  Sure there are some random attacks by severely radical Muslims.  But by and far, most of the muslims in the world are peaceful and "mainstream" and not interested in killing christians.

If you went to a random Trump rally in South Carolina, I'd be willing to bet that if you took a sampling of "Mainstream" Christians at the rally, and asked them if they'd be ok with just dropping a bomb on certain portions of the mideast and ridding the world of the muslim problem once and for all, you'd have a scary number of people who'd shrug and say "sure."  If we polled a similar number of "mainstream" muslims in Pakistan for example (to be fair to me, I'd insist we picked a country where we haven't killed a sizable population), how many would advocate wiping the US off the map?  I'm not confident that the Muslim number would be higher than the Christian number.

Rock - Did I answer your question?  I'm happy to be educated if I'm wrong.  I'm just going by a gut feeling here.

 
Sweet J said:
I think if you start getting into why someone is "really" doing something, it gets dicey.  It's hard to say that when the west attacks the east, it's "just war," but when the east attacks "its really about religion."  Lot's of religious attacks are really just war, right?  I mean, come on, when Europe showed up in the America's and conquered "in the name of god," was that REALLY about spreading god's word?  Maybe to some.  Maybe not to others.

When various Arab constituencies attack Israel, is it about land?  About power?  About religion?  A sprinkling of everything?  

America has been in a fight with various members of the middle east for the past 40 years at least, most likely longer.  How much does religion have to do with it?  I'm not sure I'm smart or educated enough to tease out all the factors.  But I DO know that we have destroyed the infrastructure of one nation over the last 15 years, killing millions in the process (tens of millions?).  How much of that was really about power?  How much of that was really about religion?  Or something else?  I call BS on anyone here who purports to have a definitive answer.

So, to answer @rockaction, speaking as a guy who only knows what I read in the papers, an occasional Atlantic or Esquire or Economist article, and talking to friends in person and on these boards, I see a completely one-sided "fight" between the east and the west.  It's hard to say that the East is bringing back modern day crusades when what actually appears to be happening is that the West (christian) is killing people of the East (Muslim) by the millions.  Sure there are some random attacks by severely radical Muslims.  But by and far, most of the muslims in the world are peaceful and "mainstream" and not interested in killing christians.

If you went to a random Trump rally in South Carolina, I'd be willing to bet that if you took a sampling of "Mainstream" Christians at the rally, and asked them if they'd be ok with just dropping a bomb on certain portions of the mideast and ridding the world of the muslim problem once and for all, you'd have a scary number of people who'd shrug and say "sure."  If we polled a similar number of "mainstream" muslims in Pakistan for example (to be fair to me, I'd insist we picked a country where we haven't killed a sizable population), how many would advocate wiping the US off the map?  I'm not confident that the Muslim number would be higher than the Christian number.

Rock - Did I answer your question?  I'm happy to be educated if I'm wrong.  I'm just going by a gut feeling here.
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Yeah, that answered it. I think it's the absolute reverse, but your impression definitely addressed what I was getting at.  

 
Juxtatarot said:
500 plus?  What do you consider some of the earliest examples of the spread of Humanism?  (I'm not saying you're wrong, just surprised by a time so long ago.)
Click to expand...
Humanism is a key component of the Renaissance which began in Italy in the 14th century so that gives us more than 500 years. The Renaissance paved the way for the Enlightenment and then the Scientific Revolution. Each of those were major blows to the religious order.

 
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Sweet J said:
I think if you start getting into why someone is "really" doing something, it gets dicey.  It's hard to say that when the west attacks the east, it's "just war," but when the east attacks "its really about religion."  Lot's of religious attacks are really just war, right?  I mean, come on, when Europe showed up in the America's and conquered "in the name of god," was that REALLY about spreading god's word?  Maybe to some.  Maybe not to others.

When various Arab constituencies attack Israel, is it about land?  About power?  About religion?  A sprinkling of everything?  

America has been in a fight with various members of the middle east for the past 40 years at least, most likely longer.  How much does religion have to do with it?  I'm not sure I'm smart or educated enough to tease out all the factors.  But I DO know that we have destroyed the infrastructure of one nation over the last 15 years, killing millions in the process (tens of millions?).  How much of that was really about power?  How much of that was really about religion?  Or something else?  I call BS on anyone here who purports to have a definitive answer.

So, to answer @rockaction, speaking as a guy who only knows what I read in the papers, an occasional Atlantic or Esquire or Economist article, and talking to friends in person and on these boards, I see a completely one-sided "fight" between the east and the west.  It's hard to say that the East is bringing back modern day crusades when what actually appears to be happening is that the West (christian) is killing people of the East (Muslim) by the millions.  Sure there are some random attacks by severely radical Muslims.  But by and far, most of the muslims in the world are peaceful and "mainstream" and not interested in killing christians.

If you went to a random Trump rally in South Carolina, I'd be willing to bet that if you took a sampling of "Mainstream" Christians at the rally, and asked them if they'd be ok with just dropping a bomb on certain portions of the mideast and ridding the world of the muslim problem once and for all, you'd have a scary number of people who'd shrug and say "sure."  If we polled a similar number of "mainstream" muslims in Pakistan for example (to be fair to me, I'd insist we picked a country where we haven't killed a sizable population), how many would advocate wiping the US off the map?  I'm not confident that the Muslim number would be higher than the Christian number.

Rock - Did I answer your question?  I'm happy to be educated if I'm wrong.  I'm just going by a gut feeling here.
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You need to pick a country in the Arab core, where extremism is more prevalent if you are going to compare it to a Trump rally.

 
The last great Jihad I remember was the Cugly board (Curly, but lol spellcheck).  We should have killed them all, as one or two followed us back and went all Latin Prince on FFT, and eventually landed on these shores.  Make it stop!

 
Juxtatarot said:
500 plus?  What do you consider some of the earliest examples of the spread of Humanism?  (I'm not saying you're wrong, just surprised by a time so long ago.)
Click to expand...
Humanism is a key component of the Renaissance which began in Italy in the 14th century so that gives us more than 500 years. The Renaissance paved the way for the Enlightenment and then the Scientific Revolution. Each of those were major blows to the religious order.

 
bueno said:
You need to pick a country in the Arab core, where extremism is more prevalent if you are going to compare it to a Trump rally.
Click to expand...
No, that's the thing:. The whole idea is that a trump rally DOESNT represent Christian "extremism."  This is the heartland of Christianity in America. If we define trump Christians as "extremists," we've just stuck that label on a whole lot of folks. 

 
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