The Real Truth about The Crusades and Islam's Blasphemy Law |
Two new articles:
Soon after Muslim gunmen killed 12 people at Charlie Hebdo offices, which published satirical caricatures of Muslim prophet Muhammad, the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC)—the “collective voice of the Muslim world” and second largest inter-governmental organization after the United Nations—is again renewing calls for the United Nations to criminalize “blasphemy” against Islam, or what it more ecumenically calls, the “defamation of religions.”
Yet the OIC seems to miss one grand irony: if international laws would ban cartoons, books, and films on the basis that they defame Islam, they would also, by logical extension, have to ban the entire religion of Islam itself—the only religion whose core texts actively and unequivocally defame other religions, including by name....KEEP READING
Were the Crusades a reflection of the “terrible deeds [done] in the name of Christ” as U.S. President Obama recently warned, or were they a reflection of something else, namely, centuries of Islamic jihad? In the following essay, one of the top historians of the Crusades definitively answers the question.
Thomas Madden — former Chair of the History Department at Saint Louis University and Director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies — wrote this article in 2002 when President Bush used the word “crusade” in a positive sense, creating controversy. Its relevancy today is that Obama invoked the Crusades in a negative sense, also creating controversy.
Madden presents the most recent scholarship on the Crusades — scholarship that completely contradicts the popular image of these wars that permeates much of Hollywood, the writings of amateurs such as Karen Armstrong and, as seen, the worldview of Barack Obama... KEEP READING
|
No comments:
Post a Comment