Yet another example of the ill effects of Fake History is manifesting itself. Because Pete Hegseth, Trump’s pick to lead the Department of Defense in his incoming administration, is a “crusader fanboy,” the media alleges that once in office, he may, like his heroes, usher in an age of religious violence.
One of the media outlets suggesting this is The New York Times, which recently published a hit piece titled, “Pete Hegseth and His ‘Battle Cry’ for a New Christian Crusade.” It begins:
Before Donald J. Trump picked him to lead the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth spoke often about a medieval military campaign that he saw as a model for today: the Crusades, in which Christian warriors from Western Europe embarked on ruthless missions to wrest control of Jerusalem and other areas under Muslim rule.
The NYT piece never correctly defines the Crusades; it leaves readers thinking that the Christians of Europe, for no reason whatsoever, invaded and tried to conquer the otherwise peaceful Muslims in the Holy Land. In other words, it invokes the popular version of the Crusades, well summarized by Georgetown University academic, John Esposito:
Five centuries of peaceful coexistence [between Islam and Europe] elapsed before political events and an imperial-papal power play led to centuries-long series of so-called holy wars that pitted Christendom against Islam and left an enduring legacy of misunderstanding and distrust (Islam: The Straight Path, 58).
Building on this, the NYT article defines the Crusades as “campaigns that featured so many atrocities” and “a shameful stain on the religion’s history.”
The NYT is hardly the only one to attack Hegseth in the context of the Crusades. According to New Lines Magazine, Hegseth’s Crusader tattoos, including the Latin phrase Deus Vult (“God wills it”) are “a call to religious violence, expressly linked to a pretty horrific episode in history [the Crusades]. There isn’t another way of reading it other than that.” That article also defines the Crusades as “one of the bloodiest periods of Christian history” — and “explicitly Islamophobic” — without once providing context or background.
The Real Crusades
The truth, of course, is very different from the Fake History being peddled by the NYT and friends. The Crusades were a militant response to more than four centuries of jihadist aggression that saw three-quarters of the Christian world swallowed up by Islam. The particular Muslim invasions (between 1071 and 1095) that occasioned the First Crusade were actually motivated by noble — indeed, altruistic — sentiments. During that period and in the decades before it, hundreds of thousands of Eastern Christians (Armenians, Greeks, Syrians, etc.) were killed or enslaved, and tens of thousands of churches were ritually desecrated, torched, and/or turned into mosques. Think what “ISIS” did to Christians and other minorities in Iraq and Syria in the 2010s, but times a hundred, and for decades.
Nor were atrocities limited to Asia Minor or its indigenous Christians: “As the Turks were ruling the lands of Syria and Palestine, they inflicted injuries on [European] Christians who went to pray in Jerusalem, beat them, pillaged them, [and] levied the poll tax [jizya],” writes Michael the Syrian, a contemporary. Moreover, “every time they saw a caravan of Christians, particularly of those from Rome and the lands of Italy, they made every effort to cause their death in diverse ways.” Such was the fate of one German pilgrimage to Jerusalem. According to one of the pilgrims:
Accompanying this journey was a noble abbess of graceful body and of a religious outlook. Setting aside the cares of the sisters committed to her and against the advice of the wise, she undertook this great and dangerous pilgrimage. The pagans captured her, and in the sight of all, these shameless men raped her until she breathed her last, to the dishonor of all Christians. Christ’s enemies performed such abuses and others like them on the Christians.
Cause and Effect
It was due to all these horrors that Pope Urban II made his famous appeal to the knights of Christendom during the Council of Clermont, November 27, 1095:
They [Muslim Turks] have completely destroyed some of God’s churches and they have converted others to the uses of their own cult [mosques]. They ruin the altars with filth and defilement. They circumcise Christians and smear the blood from the circumcision over the altars or throw it into the baptismal fonts. They are pleased to kill others by cutting open their bellies, extracting the end of their intestines, and tying it to a stake. Then, with flogging, they drive their victims around the stake until, when their viscera have spilled out, they fall dead on the ground. They tie others, again, to stakes and shoot arrows at them; they seize others, stretch out their necks, and try to see whether they can cut off their heads with a single blow of a naked sword. And what shall I say about the shocking rape of women? . . . [W]ho is to repair this damage, if you do not do it?… Rise up and remember the manly deeds of your ancestors!
When Urban concluded by calling on Western Christians to undertake an armed pilgrimage to Jerusalem — both to help fellow Christians and to liberate the Holy Land from Muslim control and abuse — all the knights in assembly shouted a resounding Deus Vult, “God wills it!”
This is the truth behind the Crusades: They sought to right so many wrongs. If that was more widely known, men like Hegseth, and his tattoo of Deus Vult, might be more appreciated. But, as it is, the Crusades are now presented as quintessential examples of unprovoked aggression; and those who hold a favorable view of them are deemed unhinged religious fanatics and bigots. Such is the power of decades of indoctrination in Fake History.
Raymond Ibrahim, author of Defenders of the West and Sword and Scimitar, is the Distinguished Senior Shillman Fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the Judith Rosen Friedman Fellow at the Middle East Forum.