Date: Sunday, 28 October 2001, 1:23 p.m.
Crusades Permeate "Global War"
(Conspiracy Nation, 10/27/01) -- Not World War I, but the Crusades,were the first of the "World wars."
In 1095 A.D., Pope Urban II called upon knights to go east to free Christians from Islamic rule and to recapture the Holy Land, then known as Outremer, from the Muslims.
This call to war by the then international leader of Christians was troubling to the consciences of many members of that faith. How could a Christian, adjured by Jesus Christ Himself to "turn the other cheek" and avoid violence, go to war and kill people?
The answer to the dilemma was provided by, among others, St. Bernard, who argued for "a new kind of religion... the union of warfare with religion, so that religion, being armed, maketh her way by the sword, and smiteth the enemy without sin." [1]
This Christian call to arms may have been precipitated by the rise of Islam, whose prophet, Mohammed, "was alike instructed to preach and to fight." [2] Mohammed's "voice invited the Arabs to freedom and victory, to arms and rapine, to the indulgence of their darling passions in this world and the other..." [3]
The common perception is that the Crusades ended in 1291 A.D., after the fall of Acre and consequent loss of control of mainland Outremer. That perception is erroneous. Popular crusades continued: in 1309 A.D.; in 1320 A.D.; in 1390 A.D. The 1390 A.D. Crusade "was followed, as the threat to Europe from the Ottoman Turks grew, by disastrous forays into the Balkans, the Crusades of Nicopolis (1396) and of Varna (1444), although the Turkish advance was temporarily halted at Belgrade in 1456." [4]
The defeat of the Turks at Belgrade in 1456, by forces led by John Capistrano, himself instigated by Pope Nicholas V, offered only a temporary respite from the ongoing Christian-Muslim wars. Belgrade fell to the Turk/Muslim forces in 1521. The Serbs, however, despite subsequent centuries of Ottoman rule, remained loyal to the Greek Orthodox Christian Church. The Serbs finally regained their independence in 1878, under the Treaty of Berlin. "After the Balkan wars of 1912 and 1913, the frontiers of the Ottoman Empire, now the state of Turkey, were pushed back into Thrace..." [5]
To the Arabs, our own common (erroneous) perception of the Crusades as being remote and long ago conflicts with that culture's sense of time. According to Mary-Jane Deeb, adjunct professor at American University and a Middle East specialist, Arab societies "have a very fluid sense of time." For them, the Crusades "are as immediate as yesterday. And they are very, very powerful events in the Arab mind. A lot of Islamic rhetoric revolves around the crusaders." [6]
Truly, the Crusaders' footprints are giant, as pointed out by Ken
Ringle. [7] The Arabs, through their "fluid sense of time," have not lost contact with a history which is ongoing. In the Christian West, however, for whatever reason, our sense of history is obscured. (This is exemplified by President George W. Bush, who declared, on September 15th, 2001, that "this crusade, this war on terrorism, is going to take a while." [8] His choice of the word "crusade" apparently was clumsy -- or was it? Recall that Bush is advised and supported by factions of Christianity.)
All of the foregoing leads to an article in the latest issue of New American magazine. That article, by William Norman Grigg, shows how the forces of Islam once again have succeeded in gaining a Balkan base of operations. Between 1878 and the NATO war on Yugoslavia, Muslim militancy had been pretty much expelled from the region. Now, writes Grigg, the Yugoslav provinces of Kosovo and Bosnia are a "safe haven" for the Mussulmans. [9]
How did it happen? After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, Osama bin Laden, the modern Saladin, organized the Mujahideen ("Holy Warriors"). During the Afghan war, bin Laden allied himself with Sheik Abdel-Rahman, the blind Egyptian cleric now imprisoned for his role in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. With massive financial and weapons support from the U.S. government, the Mujahideen drove the Soviets out of Afghanistan.
In the early 1990s, bin Laden helped organize the importation of the Mujahideen into Yugoslavia. (This region, as already shown, is the historic "no man's land" between Europe and the Islamic world.) These "Holy Warriors" allied themselves with fellow Muslims, the Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA). Helping pay for the "Holy War" (Jihad) were heroin sales. This heroin flowed from Asia's "Golden Crescent," which includes the Afghan poppy fields. Eighty percent of the European heroin now flows through Kosovo; at least twenty percent of U.S. heroin originates in the Afghan/Kosovo Axis. In the United States, the KLA has achieved political protection; like Don Corleone, they "carry politicians in their pocket."
One result of this Afghan/Kosovo Axis is that the Balkans are now "a terrorist staging area." On September 20th, 2001, president George W. Bush stated that "we will pursue nations that provide safe haven to terrorism." [10] Since one of these "safe havens" is Kosovo, and since Kosovo is under United Nation's control,
does this mean we are at war with the U.N.?
See the original for notes and link to Conspiracy Nation
http://www.rumormillnews.com/cgi-bin/archive.cgi?read=14001
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