Trudy Rubin of The Philadelphia Inquirer
wrote an excellent column on Sec. of State John Kerry’s February
2014 efforts in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but the column
included an unfortunate phrase picked up in its headline by my local
newspaper and elsewhere: "Kerry’s crusade just what the Mideast needs."
"Crusade"? Really? Like George W. Bush didn't screw that one up enough for editors to remember?
Working on my own writing, I had out Matthew White’s The Great Big Book of Horrible Things: The Definitive Chronicle of History’s 100 Worst Atrocities (2012) and could do some quick checking undone at several respectable news sources.
The literal Crusades of 1095-1291 make #30 on White’s list of mass killing, with a body count of approximately three million.
A significant and — trust me on this — highly restrained paragraph in
White's entry describes the climax of the First Crusade: "Finally,
Jerusalem was besieged and captured in July 1099. The crusaders looted
the city and killed 70,000 people in the streets — Muslims mostly, but
also anyone who looked Muslim. Jews who had taken refuge in a synagogue
were burned inside. The chroniclers wrote of crusaders wading through
blood as deep as their horses’ bridles — an exaggeration obviously, but
we can certainly imagine them splashing through sticky puddles of blood
leaking from bodies in the streets" (p. 101).
Please do picture crusaders splashing through "puddles of blood" and
those bodies in the streets in Jerusalem — and at other times in
Constantinople (killing Greek Orthodox Christians) and Acre and a number
of cities on the crusaders’ routes; and then never again wish on the
Mideast or any place else another crusade. Especially not on the Middle
East.
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