The recent Hollywood epic Kingdom of Heaven has provoked a flurry of articles re-evaluating the crusades. According to the Director, Ridley Scott, the Knights Templar were the “right-wing or Christian fundamentalists of their day.” Scott, who describes himself as an agnostic, has gone on record stating: “If we could just take God out of the equation, there would be no f…. problem!” Reinforcing popular stereotypes about the crusades, Scott’s politically correct, anti-Christian 'Kingdom of Heaven' has been described by Professsor Jonathan Riley-Smith, one of the foremost authorities on the crusades, as “Osama Bin Laden’s version of history” which “will fuel the Islamic fundamentalists.”
The popular misconceptions about the crusades are that these were aggressive wars of expansion fought by religious fanatics in order to evict Muslims from their homeland, and force conversions to Christianity. Those who really believe any of that betray their ignorance of history.
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Maranatha Christian Fellowship again organized a series of public meetings for me in three universities in Minnesota, this time on 'The Crusades and Jihad'.
Previously I’d been invited to speak at the universities in Minnesota on Sudan, and on 'Slavery – The Rest of The Story'. These presentations had engendered a lot of controversy and attention, particularly from Muslim students. This year’s university meetings on The Crusades and Jihad received even more opposition from Muslim and Atheist students. When I was invited to lecture on: “Slavery – The Rest of the Story” at three university campuses in Minnesota, I expected that it would engender some opposition. What I could not have foreseen was the intensity of hostility and emotion that would be whipped up by some radical students against myself and those who had invited me.
Karl Marx declared: “The first battlefield is the rewriting of history.” Evidently, many of Marx’s disciples have been very busy on the university campuses rewriting history, rearranging reality and brainwashing students. The University of Minnesota has 37,000 students, including over 2,900 international students from more than 130 countries, including China, India, Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and many others. I have been invited to lecture at the university campus before, on the persecution of Christians in Sudan. Those presentations received some opposition, but nothing like what we received on this occasion. |
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