Esquire’s Van Loon: The “regularly scheduled Stupid” Charles Pierce @ESQPolitics

One can only guess at what Esquire’s Van Loon Charles P. Pierce is getting at in his latest post, but isn’t it astonishing how these leftist ghouls can look right past the thousands of girls gang-raped and sold in sex markets, millions of Christians ethnically cleansed from Nigeria, Syria, the CAR, Congo, Iraq, etc., beheaded children, beheaded journalists and aid workers, misogyny, honor slaughter, etc., and mock those who give voice to the voiceless?

Pierce is praising the Muslims because they wore silk robes instead of suits of armor? These must have been bad Muslims, since Muhammad forbade silk. And they ate peaches — so never mind those jihad beheadings. But based on Pierce’s measure of humanity, the Nazis must have been great humanitarians– though they didn’t wear silk robes, they loved music (Wagner!) and art, and were one of the most technologically advanced countries in the world — so according to Pierce, that would make them great role models, eh?

One thing he doesn’t mention in his loony history lesson is that the concept of religious war was unknown in Christianity before the time of the Crusades, and that the Crusades were a late and small-scale defensive action after 450 years of Islamic jihad that had conquered and Islamized what had previously been half of the Christian world. So one other thing the Europeans are likely to have picked up from the Muslims was the idea that they should go to the Middle East and start “warring and pillaging and general massacrin’ mayhem” in the name of Christianity.

He is also wrong, of course, that the Crusaders were only interested in “warring and pillaging and general massacrin’ mayhem.” They did many things that cannot be excused. They also created societies that were so attractive to the area Muslims that the Muslims preferred living in them to life in the neighboring Muslim countries. Robert Spencer says in The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades:

What’s more, the Spanish Muslim Ibn Jubayr (1145-1217), who traversed the Mediterranean on his way to Mecca in the early 1180s. found Muslims had it better in the lands controlled by the Crusaders than they did in Islamic lands. Those lands were more orderly and better managed than those under Muslim rule, so that even Muslims preferred to live in the Crusader realms: “Upon leaving Tibnin (near Tyre), we passed through an unbroken skein of farms and villages whose lands were efficiently cultivated. The inhabitants were all Muslims, but they live in “comfort with the Franj [Franks, or Crusaders—may God preserve them from temptation! Their dwellings belong to them arid all their property is unmolested. All the regions controlled by the Franj in Syria are subject to this same system: the landed domains, villages, and farms have remained in the hands of the Muslims, Now, doubt invests the heart of a great number of these men when they compare their lot to that of their brothers living in Muslim territory. Indeed, the latter suffer from the injustice of their coreligionists, whereas the Franj act with equity.”

So much for the contention that the Crusaders were barbarians attacking a far superior and more advanced civilization.

Righteous, Mr. Pierce, righteous. He must be a blast at funerals.

We interrupt our regularly scheduled Stupid to bring you the following message from the great Hendrik van Loon, author, journalist, confidant of presidents, teacher of America’s young people, and renowned eccentric prose stylist. This week’s reading comes to us from Van Loon’s masterwork, The Story Of Mankind, which he published in 1921. In today’s lesson, we discover that, upon returning home from their warring and pillaging and general massacrin’ mayhem, the Crusaders began to act in a way that would have distressed almost everyone at The Corner.

When the Crusader returned home, he was likely to imitate the manners he had learned from his heathenish foe, compared to whom the average western knight was still a good deal of a country bumpkin. He also brought with him several new food-stuffs, such a peaches and spinach which he planted in his garden and grew for his own benefit. He gave up the barbarous custom of wearing a load of heavy armour and appeared in the flowing robes of silk and cotton which were the traditional habit of the followers of the Prophet and were originally worn by the Turks.

Pamela Geller already is half-finished constructing her time machine in order to go back and prove Godfrey de Bouillon’s connection to the Muslim Brotherhood. Watch this space.

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