@oralloy,
This is pure, polemical bullshit, and is of a piece with your hyper-Zionist distortions of history. The actual, effective fighters of the first crusade were Franks. They had no stake in Jerusalem. You're appealing to some abstract devotion to religious purity and devotion on the part of people who were so depraved that when they got hungry, they killed, cooked and ate their prisoners. These were people who had plundered, raped and murdered their way across the western portion of the
Roman Empire. (Try to get it through your thick skull that there was no "Byzantine Empire--they didn't call it that, the Empire did not call itself that--it only got that name from monkish, gnomish historians centuries later. How can anyone take you historical abortions seriously when you can't even take on-board basic historical fact?)
The Church of the Holy Sepulchre was ordered destroyed by the Fatimid Caliph who then controlled Palestine, in 1009. The First Crusade did not begin until 1095,
eighty-six years later. The church had already been rebuilt with the consent of the Fatimid Caliph who had succeeded the Caliph who had order its destruction. The reconstruction of the church was completed in 1048,
forty-seven years before that crusade began. The fate of a church which had already been re-built was a
casus belli, an excuse for war. There was nothing the least bit defensive about it. The crusaders were Franks. The Franks had never lived in Palestine, they had never own one square foot of Palestine--it was nothing more than am excise to invade and attempt to set up a kingdom in Jerusalem.
The Franks not only did nothing to defend the Roman Empire, they plundered it shamelessly as they marched across Europe, long before they arrived anywhere near Constantinople. The alarmed Emperor ferried them over the Bosporus to get them the hell out of his territory. They did nothing to protect Roman territory from the Turks, and they did nothing to recover lands already overrun by the Turks. After all, it was so much easier to plunder unarmed populations, or to take territory from corrupt, weak rulers. The crusade, no matter what holy joe bullshit you come up with, was a naked plundering expedition and a land grab.
This is all of a piece with your Zionist polemics. You think that a claim that Jews lived in Palestine almost 2000 years previously justified the plundering and murder of the inhabitants of Palestine in 1947. Invoking the crusades is just as big a load of bullshit as the Zionist claims. It is gross historical distortion to claim any sort of holy and virtuous motives to the organized brigands who comprised the actual fighting force of the first crusade. They were not defending anything to which they had ever held title, and they did nothing to return the former territory to the Roman Empire, or to defend it from the Turks. It is a lie, plain and simple, and typical of the sort of fairy tale you consistently advance as "history" to justify your polemical positions.
There is a serious problem within Christianity when their adherents bomb abortion clinics and murder doctors who perform abortions, and their body guards and the employees of such clinics. There is a serious problem within Christianity when atrocities such as the slaughter at Srebenica was allowed to take place without interference, and the criminals who committed it are allowed to go unpunished. There is a serious problem within Judaism when Zionists routinely murder innocent men, women and children, and go unpunished. These things don't seem to bother you, while you so eagerly blame the actions of a tiny minority of Muslims on all of Islam, and use your bullshit to justify the crimes of others.
I consider you a shameless liar.
