A lion among the Dhimmi

Some people don't just go out of their way to prostrate themselves before their Muslim betters. Some even devote their lives to the advocacy of corrupt, one-sided historical dogma, embuing one side with the sacred shield of victimology, as well as a frankly inhuman purity of purpose.

No-one should deny that the Crusades undertaken by various European forces to retake Outremer from the Turks was a nasty, bloody affair. Many people did a lot of needless killing, (on both sides, funnily enough) and a good many people found themselves among the unnecessarily dead.

But it is a mistake of mental retardation proportions to view the Crusades in a vacuum. Doing so only serves the political purpose of making it seem as though Europeans had stormed in from the west, on the flimsy pretext of the Byzantine Emperor appealing for their aid.

Carole Hillenbrand has proven herself adept at this massaging of history to advance the perception of the victimhood of Islam, and she, as a good Dhimmi, has been suitably rewarded by her masters:
A British scholar who produced an "unashamedly one-sided" account of the Crusades from the Muslim perspective has been honoured with a prestigious award worth $200,000 (£107,000) by an academic foundation in Saudi Arabia.

Professor Carole Hillenbrand of Edinburgh University was chosen for the King Faisal prize for Islamic studies for her pioneering research. The judges said she had clarified several misconceptions shrouding the subject and made it possible for history to be viewed from a more balanced perspective.

She said that the award marked the biggest moment in her career. "I feel that this is a very big gesture and a great boost to people working in the west to produce a better understanding of the middle-east," she said.

Prof Hillenbrand added: "Ninety per cent of all accounts of the Crusades have been totally ignorant of the other side of their history. I tried to find some insight into the Muslims fighting at the time, looking at themes of social context, jihad, armaments and the like."
Prof Hillenbrand very wisely chooses not to cite any of the "Ninety per cent of all accounts of the Crusades" which "have been totally ignorant of the other side of their history", primarily because she is lying.

I spent a full year at Sydney University going over Crusader History in laborious detail with Professor Lyn Olson. I can say without hesitation that not one of the required reading texts (or the stuff read just for fun) failed to devote at least 50% of the subject matter to the Islamic perspective of the Crusade experience.

In fact, most of those works written after 1980 were of the usual liberal-biased sort, and therefore suffered from the same blinkered lionizing of Islam that Hillenbrand specializes in.

The fact is -- and shall remain despite the dribbling of Dhimmi fools like Hillenbrand -- that the Crusades were an extremely limited military response to the massive Islamic encroachment and conquest of traditionally Christian lands which had been taking place since the lifetime of the Prophet.

Outremer, the Crusader kingdoms forged from the conquests, consisted of small segments of the modern nations of Israel, Lebanon and Syria. All of those lands, it should be noted, were Christian lands for more than 600 years before they were invaded and brutally conquered in the early Islamic expansions.

Compare the military extent of the Christian crusade with the initial Islamic invasions which had taken place 200-300 years before.

Now read this excerpt of a speech made by Hillenbrand at a CAABU Meeting in the House of Commons:
The Crusades shaped western European perceptions of the Muslim world just as decisively as they formed Muslims views of the West. The Stereotypical images of the old 'enemy' are deeply entrenched. It is undoubtedly time to balance the western view with the Islamic perspective.
One would have to be either mad or willfully ignorant to believe that the comparatively tiny invasion and occupation of Outremer did more to "shape views" than the massive Islamic invasions which annihilated dozens of Christian Kingdoms, and was only narrowly repulsed by Charles Martel in France.

But if one looks too closely at that completely unprovoked and unprecedented hostility, and the fact that it did not lead to any overwhelming European need to be seen eternally as a victim, you might come away with the suspicion that Muslims are a whiny pack of backward, hypocritical, senselessly violent animals. And that just wouldn't be PC.

Hillenbrand has said that being handed a wad of cash by a Saudi Despot "marked the biggest moment in her career".

We would do well to bear in mind that it is people like this who are shaping the minds of our children.

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