Just Politics

[janice shell]

No, it doesn't help. The world is full of perfectly reasonable, civilized Muslims.

The people we all object to are extremists. Just as the crusaders were extremists. After all, they started it. The first few crusades had some kind of religious--"Christian"--pretext, but they quickly became a vehicle for greedheads to get rich by stealing from people in the Middle East.

Which, by the way, happened for most of the 20th century, too.

The crusades, however, did have some unexpected benefits for the West. People from pretty primitive countries like England learned that there were better ways to live, and opened trade channels that endured for centuries. We also learned a lot about math, accounting, and science from the Arabs.