Is it time to call for a new crusade? Not long ago, merely uttering the word “crusade” in connection with Islam was enough to provoke outrage. When George W. Bush casually referred to the coming war on terrorism as a “crusade” in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, the backlash was swift enough that the administration distanced itself from the word. Considering the countless apologies, condemnations, and mea culpas concerning the crusades that Westerners have been subjected to ever since, one might have assumed that “crusade” had been permanently banished from public discourse.
Yet, today, amid mounting anger over Islam and mass Muslim immigration, Westerners are once again openly invoking the crusades—and some appear to mean it quite literally.
Last week, for example, Jake Lang led what was explicitly billed as a “Christian Crusader” march in Dearborn, Michigan, home to one of America’s largest Muslim populations. Its stated purpose was to oppose the “Islamification of America,” and Lang was hardly coy about what he thought was happening.
“The Muslims have not come here to assimilate,” he said. “They have come here to steal the wealth of this land to rape our women… The crusade has begun,” he declared, adding to Muslims, “Your time in this country is running short… Muslims go home before we send you home.”
Nor are these sentiments confined to America. In Britain, Katie Hopkins has declared that her nation has been “overrun in every way” by Islam; therefore, “the time of the crusades will need to come again.” Even Deus vult—“God wills it,” the famous cry associated with the First Crusade—is making a mighty comeback.
It is hardly difficult to understand the sentiment behind all this. Millions of Westerners look around their cities and scarcely recognize them. They see Muslim enclaves and parallel societies, mosques and preachers promoting doctrines diametrically opposed to Western norms, demands for ever greater Islamic accommodation, elements of sharia appearing in Western life, and the targeting and killing of apostates and critics of Islam. They have also witnessed sexual-abuse scandals, attacks on Christians and Jews and their holy sites, and a seemingly endless succession of jihadist atrocities.
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