Thomas Asbridge: 'The First Crusade'. Simply bloody awful.

The academic and media animus against the Crusades is largely unfounded. Reality, facts, archeology, and the pernicious effects of 400 years of ceaseless Jihad by Muslims against Christian Europe, would affirm to an objective observer that the Crusades were a laggardly reply to what was then, the fight for the survival of Western Civilisation. When Pope Urban II's call went out to recapture lost Christian lands, aid Byzantium, and protect pilgrims being slaughtered in their thousands from the Turks; the year was 1095 – 462 years after Islamic Arabs had raped, and plundered Jerusalem. This was 375 years after Spain was conquered by Islam, a Jihad which destroyed a rich Visigothic Kingdom [albeit a corrupt and rather unpopular one], and enslaved millions of Christians and destroyed the lives of millions more.

But enter the academics. Along with the lower educational systems and Hollyweird, academia has a mendaciously perverse and narrow-minded, view of the Crusades. Asbridge is emblematic of this mental disease. A tax-paid lecturer at the University of London, Asbridge's work on the Crusades tells us nothing worthwhile. It is simply the usual tired, profane and incorrect litany of what the popular culture has already told us; the Crusaders were barbarians; they were dumb brutes; the Muslims were wonderful sophisticates, there was no reason for this unprovoked war; and atrocities were unevenly distributed with the Latin 'Frank's committing most of the sins against God and morality. Today's Islamic Fascism was given birth directly the by the toothless mid-wife named the Holy Crusade:

“The First Crusade's impact upon the relationship between western Christendom and Islam proved the most insidious and destructive.”

This ignorance permeates the entire book. In fact the ignominious illiteracy is so widespread that no one who has even a passing fancy with facts can read this book in its entirety. It is well documented by Arab and Muslim sources that Europe was to be conquered. First Constantinople which did fall in 1453, and then Rome itself. Rome was attacked and pillaged in 846. The Arabs were 120 miles south of Paris when they were defeated in 732 AD by Charles the Hammer. Large tracts of Italy, southern France and even Switzerland were under the control of the Muslims for some 100 years. Slavery, slave-trading, taxation, trade disruption, the initiation of a dark period of economic and social turmoil, not to mention hundreds of thousands dead; followed.

Asbridge covers up his obvious hatred of Western civilization and of the Crusades by a long list of primary and secondary sources. But they are very selective. Almost all of the works are by those authors – all of them refuted by facts and archeology – who are themselves hostile to the West. In this sense Asbridge's book is little more than just a polishing and refurbishing of tired all gibberish already purveyed and discounted by real research. I would expect even an English academic, steeped in cultural Marxism and theoretical bafflegab to be somewhat more even-handed and perspicacious in the handling of such an important topic. Asbridge is simply a tax-payer paid hack, playing to the choir of neo-Marxists who love Islam, hate the West and view any and all matters of Western civilization through an oriental lens of victim hood and pagan purity. Without the Crusades it is clear that Europe might well have fallen to the Muslim – and hacks like Asbridge would be writing in Arabic not English. A far more important book to read is that by Rodney Stark – 'God's Battalions'. Stark is a brilliant writer and researcher at Baylor University and in reviewing his work I wrote:

As Stark relates the Crusades were a success. They nullified the Muslim jihad against Europe. They proved the superiority of European culture. They ensured European salvation and progress by opening up trade, the flow of ideas from East to West and by exposing the various weaknesses of Islam and Muslim states. They were not permanent for two simple reasons. First, there never was enough of the Crusaders to resettle and exhaustively protect their Levantine holdings. Second, the European population tired of the enterprise, unable and unwilling to sustain the high taxes and the loss of young leaders that the Crusades demanded. They became war-weary.
The value of this book is that it destroys the lies, the myths, and the Marxist inspired innuendo so prevalent in the current culture about one of Europe's most vital responses to Muslim jihad. The 'medieval' European was advanced, superior and more certain of himself, than anything that Europe can produce today. That is also an important lesson from Stark's research and from the profound cultural efflorescence which can send men 2500 miles away to fight in impossible conditions to defend right, morality and civilization.

All of this is true. The difference between Stark and Asbridge is this; Stark let's his views be informed by facts, Asbridge by cultural Marxist theory. The modern world was created by Christian Europe – a fact which is the most important and obvious observation possible. From that fact must flow both the antecedents and the sources of European superiority.

As Rodney Stark relates, the Crusades were an expression of superiority not of inferiority. The entire civilization of Europe was richer, better educated, and far more advanced in industry and agriculture than the Islamic. It had to be. Europeans cleared forests, marshes, bogs and even reclaimed land from the sea. They built the largest colossi on the planet. Roads, canals, and bridges in quantity and quality were created which far exceeded in both number and usefulness anything found within the Islamic world. From axles, to the deep iron plough, to the clock and glass lens, European invention abounded. Nothing of note, nor even of comparable genius can be found anywhere in the Islamic world. Asbridge and academics just assume that a barbarous, pagan moon cult, produces civilization.

The real world tells us otherwise. Christian Europe created the foundations of the modern world from 500 to 1500 AD. Every single invention during the rather poorly named 'Enlightenment' was already formed or in use before 1500 AD. Islam invented and created nothing. Yet academics and others like Asbridge still persist in using propaganda to tell us the opposite. It is revolting.

When you read this book, or I should say, when you try to read this rather importunate and illiterate tome of Arab propaganda, some other salient points come to mind. Tax payers in England have funded the CRU-Hadley Globlaoney Warming scam based on criminally fraudulent data. Globaloney Warming is of course a criminal enterprise. Prince Charles is an open advocate of Islam and believes that Islam can save the environment. The English state funds mosques, Islamic centers and radical Imams some 40% of whom are on welfare. So perhaps a work by an English academic like Asbridge extoling Islam and denigrating Christian Europe and the Crusades is no surprise. English culture no longer exists. Neither does rationality. The legacy of Roger Bacon is long dead in England.