Zitat des Tages über Kreuzzüge / Crusades:
When I was a boy, I took over the shed at the bottom of the garden and displayed fossils and potsherds and coins in it and proudly called it my 'museum'. I charged people to come in, and my most prized possession was a Saracen shield dating from the Crusades.
During the crusades all were religious mad, and now all are mad for want of it.
The crusades made great improvement in the condition of the serfs.
The crusades of Vietnam and Watergate seemed like a good idea at the time, even a noble one, not only to the press but perhaps to a majority of Americans.
The history of Israel-Palestine conflict cannot be understood without its underlying emotional meanders. The emotional frameworks of the loss of Palestine for the Arab-Islamic world touched deep scars that go back to the Crusades, symbolizing a proof of Arab-Islamic decay, political impotence, and perceived (British/French) betrayal and antagonism.
I am writing a book about the Crusades so dull that I can scarcely write it.
If there is a horrific attack on this country like 9/11, the American people will demand we go to war and settle accounts with those who did it. But America's appetite for intervention, for nation building, for democracy crusades, is fully sated.
If you are an Arabic-speaking, Greek-Orthodox going to a French school it makes you deeply sceptical if you have to listen to three different accounts of the Crusades - one from the Muslim side, one from the Greek side and one from the Catholic side.
War is war. Vietnam is no different from the Crusades.
Ever since the Crusades, when Christians from western Europe were fighting holy wars against Muslims in the near east, western people have often perceived Islam as a violent and intolerant faith - even though when this prejudice took root Islam had a better record of tolerance than Christianity.
The first two crusades brought the flower of European chivalry to Constantinople and restored that spiritual union between Eastern and Western Christendom that had been interrupted by the great schism of the Greek and Roman Churches.
There is nothing intrinsic linking any religion with any act of violence. The crusades don't prove that Christianity was violent. The Inquisition doesn't prove that Christianity tortures people. But that Christianity did torture people.
