Psychologically is this a Crusade as much as a Jihad? http://www.thenation.com/doc/20040920/carroll?

Question

George W. Bush plumbed the deepest place in himself, looking for a simple expression of what the assaults of September 11 required. It was his role to lead the nation, and the very world. The President, at a moment of crisis, defines the communal response. A few days after the assault, George W. Bush did this. Speaking spontaneously, without the aid of advisers or speechwriters, he put a word on the new American purpose that both shaped it and gave it meaning. "This crusade," he said, "this war on terrorism."





Crusade. I remember a momentary feeling of vertigo at the President's use of that word, the outrageous ineptitude of it. The vertigo lifted, and what I felt then was fear, sensing not ineptitude but exactitude. My thoughts went to the elusive Osama bin Laden, how pleased he must have been, Bush already reading from his script. I am a Roman Catholic with a feeling for history, and strong regrets, therefore, over what went wrong in my own tradition once the Crusades were launched. Contrary to schoolboy romances, Hollywood fantasies and the nostalgia of royalty, the Crusades were a set of world-historic crimes. I hear the word with a third ear, alert to its dangers, and I see through its legends to its warnings. For example, in Iraq "insurgents" have lately shocked the world by decapitating hostages, turning the most taboo of acts into a military tactic. But a thousand years ago, Latin crusaders used the severed heads of Muslim fighters as missiles, catapulting them over the fortified walls of cities under siege. Taboos fall in total war, whether crusade or jihad.

For George W. Bush, crusade was an offhand reference. But all the more powerfully for that, it was an accidental probing of unintended but nevertheless real meaning. That the President used the word inadvertently suggests how it expressed his exact truth, an unmasking of his most deeply felt purpose. Crusade, he said. Later, his embarrassed aides suggested that he had meant to use the word only as a synonym for struggle, but Bush's own syntax belied that. He defined crusade as war. Even offhandedly, he had said exactly what he meant.

I am a terrorist? Ha ha.... ha ha ha what?

I did study history, church history at university in fact.
Condemning hardly matters when your sacred book has stuff like this:
Anyone who is captured will be run through with a sword. Their little children will be dashed to death right before their eyes. Their homes will be sacked and their wives raped by the attacking hordes. For I will stir up the Medes against Babylon, and no amount of silver or gold will buy them off. The attacking armies will shoot down the young people with arrows. They will have no mercy on helpless babies and will show no compassion for the children. (Isaiah 13:15-18

Answer 1

As a Catholic who is very thankful for his crusading ancestors, I have to say no, this excursion into the Middle East is not a Crusade in the Holy War sense. Christianity in the Middle East is not being promoted or protected.

It may however, turn into the very first Protestant Crusade if Israel gets nuked, given the exaggerated (and false) sense of eschatological importance Protestants place on the state of Israel.


PS You should also do more of a study of history and stick to the primary sources if you think the Crusades were "world-historic crimes". The difference between Jihad and the Crusades is that all the excesses are the norms of Jihad governed by the Qu'ran while the Catholic Church clearly condemned the excesses of the Crusades

Answer 2

I had the exact response of vertigo and fear when I heard Bush being announced at Camp David a few years back as

"Our Born' Again Commander-in-Chief"

I am sure you ar aware that some "Christians" consider Islam to be the Anti-Christ.

Answer 3

Can you say Illuminati?