Apartheid
Apartheid Apartheid
46 Overboard in Outremer: The Crusaders’ Kingdom of Jerusalem Beginning in 1096 CE, racist and sectarian Roman Catholic fanatics from western Europe arrived by land and by sea to invade Palestine and adjacent regions in order to ‘win back’ the country where Jesus Christ was born and killed. (It had been under Christian rule for a few centuries under West and then East Roman rule.) The scene was set now by Pope Urban II and the new militant monastic ideologues, such as St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who preached holy war against Muslims. Many of the crusaders were warrior monks, organized in military orders, known as the Templars, the Hospitalers, and the Teutonic Knights, and bound by chastity vows and other strict rules. Yet again – after having been Imperial Rome’s state religion and having become Vatican state policy – the supposed religion of loving the enemy became the religion of suppressing, exploiting, hating, and annihilating the enemy. In what was to last nearly 200 years, a kingdom consisting of more or less connected feudal fiefdoms, also involving satellite Latin principalities, was set up in today’s Israel/Palestine and Lebanon, as well as in parts of Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Egypt, by Roman Catholic elites, mainly from what is today France, England, Italy, and Germany, but also from Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Hungary, Scandinavia, and elsewhere in Europe. ‘Outremer’ is French and means ‘Oversea’. Often, all crusaders were referred to by the local Arabic-speakers as ‘Franks’. There was a colonialist aspect in much of the behavior of the westerners, but it was even more genocide, and mostly apartheid. Especially Muslims were ‘ethnically cleansed’ by the crusaders, but so were Palestinian and European Jews, and even Palestinian and Egyptian Christians. The politically most important of the fiefdoms was Jerusalem, which was the capital most of the time, though the indigenous people and their neighboring allies, also mainly Arabs and Muslims, won the city back twice before the westerners finally withdrew. Other crusader-held cities such as Acre (in present-day Israel) and Damietta in Egypt became the Christian kingdom’s de facto capitals during these periods. Although the crusades have been interpreted mainly as the results of religious fanaticism, zeal and intolerance, I believe western European ethnicism against Arabs, Turks, Kurds, and Jews played a substantial, and often dominant, role in the making of the crusades as well as of Outremer. This can be confirmed by a closer look at the crusaders’ treatment of Jews and Arab Christians. On many occasions Palestinian Christians were targeted along with Muslims, and so were Palestinian Jews, all of whom must have looked rather alike to the invaders, and all of whom had Arabic as a mother language. Moreover, crusaders murdered many Jews in Europe, usually whilst marching through the continent on their way to the Holy Land. Of course, Arab Christians did not recognize the Pope in Rome as their leader or as a divine appointee – they were Greek-Orthodox, Jacobites, Maronites, Georgian, Armenian, Nestorians, Melkites, and Coptics – and so sectarianism within Christianity also played a role. Aside from this, a temporary population surge in western Europe along with the missionary nature of both Christianity and Islam, and the violence with which both religions spread, also played important roles in enabling the crusades. It was only after the Byzantine emperor had called for western European military aid against the Seljuk Turks, whose militant expansionism had progressively shrunk the Byzantine empire, that the crusades actually got off the ground. Yet, the exceptional cruelty of the crusaders set new standards, becoming a source of both embarassment and worry for the Byzantines. The motivation as well as the behavior and ideology of the crusaders and the many semi-civilian settlers and pilgrims who came with them to Palestine have confounded many historians and others, but especially the native populations. On their way south in 1098, the presidential elections in Bolivia. See Gordon, G.: Evo Morales Becomes Bolivia’s Next President, Now His Real Challenge Begins, 2005.
crusaders destroyed, plundered and conquered whole towns, cities and countries, including Ma’ara in Syria. After a protracted siege of their town, around 10,000 Arab and Turkish inhabitants were massacred by the crusaders, despite previous assurances that their lives would be spared. The Christian soldiers then proceeded to eat human meat, i.e. Muslim men, women and children. Men and women were boiled. Children were barbequed on spits. It is unknown if this was done only due to food shortage, but it appears that it was not. Ethnic hatred also played a considerable role, so much so that one of the crusaders who participated in the carnage, Albert d’Aix, a historian, implied that eating Arabs and Turks was in any event preferable to eating dogs. Similarly, when the crusaders first conquered Jerusalem in 1099, they killed every single Muslim and every single Jew in the city. Though they might have been exaggerating slightly with the description, contemporary sources stated that there was no street in the city in which one did not wade ankle-deep in blood, guts, hacked-off heads, limbs and other body-parts after that conquest. (On this particular occasion Palestinian Christians were spared, yet probably only inadvertently, as the Muslim and Jewish defenders had expelled the indigenous Christians prior to the crusader onslaught, fearing that they might betray their Arab brethren. There were no Christian Palestinians in the city for the crusaders to massacre on this occasion.) 47 After the massacre, Muslims and Jews were legally forbidden from entering Jerusalem. The Al-Aqsa Mosque; Islam’s third holiest site, was turned into a church and warehouse for the Templars. Things stayed this way until Saladin’s forces liberated Jerusalem 88 years later. By 1243, fourteen years after having retaken the holy city, the Europeans appear to have become more civilized, as they expelled all the Muslims from Jerusalem rather than killing them all. However, they still expelled the Muslims in breach of the very treaty by which they had regained the city from Muslim rule. 48 In fact they did something very similar to what Israel is doing in the same city today: a slow but relentless, mainly bureaucratic, kind of ethnic cleansing. Again, Muslims are the main victims, but Palestinian Christians and other non-Jews are also now being targeted. The crusaders’ conquest of Bilbeis in Egypt in 1168 was followed by another wholesale massacre of Muslim and Christian men, women and children, for no known reason. Usually communities that put up resistance were massacred by the crusaders, but Bilbeis had surrendered without a fight. Similarly, when the crusaders reconquered the Palestinian city of Nablus in 1242, they killed many of the inhabitants, Muslim and Christian alike. The historian of the Templars, Piers Paul Read, refers to James of Vitry, the Bishop of Acre, who reported to the Pope that ‘…the indigenous Christians so loathed the Latins [the western Europeans in Outremer] that they would rather be ruled by Muslims.’ Ethnicity thus seems to have been the priority with regard to victimization, not religion. James, who was one of very few missionaries among the crusaders, nevertheless wanted the crusade to continue. The reason that there were so few missionaries seems to have been that Turks, Kurds and Arabs, whether Muslims or Christians, as well as Jews, were mostly or always seen by the crusaders as 47 Maalouf: Der Heilige Krieg der Barbaren: Die Kreuzzüge aus der Sicht der Araber, 3 2003 (1983): 54f; 66ff. One possible attempt at an excuse for the cannibalism would be that the crusaders might have heard from Muslims that dogs are unclean, i.e. unedible to them like pigs, and believed them. But it seems a bit contrived to me. Since the crusaders hated the Muslims so much, it appears far-fetched to assume that they would trust Muslims as to what meat is edible. Secondly, Muslims would hardly have told them that human meat was fit for consumtion. 48 Read: The Templars, 1999: 218. That civilizing process (in the most basic meaning of the term) had no doubt been initiated by Saladin, the liberator of Jerusalem, who spared all the city’s inhabitants – even letting many of them go rather than enslaving them – when he conquered it from Latin rule in 1187, after a bloody siege. Furthermore, during Jerusalem’s second term as capital of a Roman Catholic kingdom, it was under conditions by treaty between the Latins and the Muslims. Those conditions, previously demanded by Muslim negotiators, included tolerance of Muslims and Jews. During this era, Cairo and Baghdad were the economic, financial, trade, political, technological, cultural, and spiritual centers of the so-called ‘old’ world, and Europe was only part of the periphery. As such, it received more from the center in terms of culture and technology than it gave back. 47
- Page 1 and 2: Apartheid Ancient, Past and Present
- Page 3 and 4: Interlude: The Other Gross Human Ri
- Page 5 and 6: outbreak of the Palestinians’ Sec
- Page 7 and 8: Nevertheless, among other things th
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- Page 13 and 14: elsewhere in Cape Town: Emma Thomas
- Page 15 and 16: I. The State of Apartheid and the A
- Page 17 and 18: Americans), Nazi Germany (against J
- Page 19 and 20: to leave the Occupied Territories,
- Page 21 and 22: includes racism, but it also goes b
- Page 23 and 24: that covers all aspects. In concret
- Page 25 and 26: have settled and ruled supreme in S
- Page 27 and 28: Finally, the cultures of an aparthe
- Page 29 and 30: well. (Apart from that, the Afrikan
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- Page 35 and 36: also obstruct any structural unders
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- Page 39 and 40: sociology. In my view his is a diff
- Page 41 and 42: Third Reich Racism The South Africa
- Page 43 and 44: land that had been the Empire of Zi
- Page 45: all agricultural land in Guatemala
- Page 49 and 50: systematically by people who identi
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46<br />
Overboard in Outremer: The Crusaders’ Kingdom of Jerusalem<br />
Beginning in 1096 CE, racist and sectarian Roman Catholic fanatics from western<br />
Europe arrived by land and by sea to invade Palestine and adjacent regions in order to ‘win<br />
back’ the country where Jesus Christ was born and killed. (It had been under Christian rule for<br />
a few centuries under West and then East Roman rule.) The scene was set now by Pope Urban<br />
II and the new militant monastic ideologues, such as St. Bernard of Clairvaux, who preached<br />
holy war against Muslims. Many of the crusaders were warrior monks, organized in military<br />
orders, known as the Templars, the Hospitalers, and the Teutonic Knights, and bound by<br />
chastity vows and other strict rules. Yet again – after having been Imperial Rome’s state<br />
religion and having become Vatican state policy – the supposed religion of loving the enemy<br />
became the religion of suppressing, exploiting, hating, and annihilating the enemy.<br />
In what was to last nearly 200 years, a kingdom consisting of more or less connected<br />
feudal fiefdoms, also involving satellite Latin principalities, was set up in today’s<br />
Israel/Palestine and Lebanon, as well as in parts of Syria, Jordan, Turkey, and Egypt, by<br />
Roman Catholic elites, mainly from what is today France, England, Italy, and Germany, but<br />
also from Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, Hungary, Scandinavia, and elsewhere in<br />
Europe. ‘Outremer’ is French and means ‘Oversea’. Often, all crusaders were referred to by<br />
the local Arabic-speakers as ‘Franks’. There was a colonialist aspect in much of the behavior<br />
of the westerners, but it was even more genocide, and mostly apartheid.<br />
Especially Muslims were ‘ethnically cleansed’ by the crusaders, but so were<br />
Palestinian and European Jews, and even Palestinian and Egyptian Christians. The politically<br />
most important of the fiefdoms was Jerusalem, which was the capital most of the time, though<br />
the indigenous people and their neighboring allies, also mainly Arabs and Muslims, won the<br />
city back twice before the westerners finally withdrew. Other crusader-held cities such as<br />
Acre (in present-day Israel) and Damietta in Egypt became the Christian kingdom’s de facto<br />
capitals during these periods.<br />
Although the crusades have been interpreted mainly as the results of religious<br />
fanaticism, zeal and intolerance, I believe western European ethnicism against Arabs, Turks,<br />
Kurds, and Jews played a substantial, and often dominant, role in the making of the crusades<br />
as well as of Outremer. This can be confirmed by a closer look at the crusaders’ treatment of<br />
Jews and Arab Christians.<br />
On many occasions Palestinian Christians were targeted along with Muslims, and so<br />
were Palestinian Jews, all of whom must have looked rather alike to the invaders, and all of<br />
whom had Arabic as a mother language. Moreover, crusaders murdered many Jews in Europe,<br />
usually whilst marching through the continent on their way to the Holy Land. Of course, Arab<br />
Christians did not recognize the Pope in Rome as their leader or as a divine appointee – they<br />
were Greek-Orthodox, Jacobites, Maronites, Georgian, Armenian, Nestorians, Melkites, and<br />
Coptics – and so sectarianism within Christianity also played a role. Aside from this, a<br />
temporary population surge in western Europe along with the missionary nature of both<br />
Christianity and Islam, and the violence with which both religions spread, also played<br />
important roles in enabling the crusades. It was only after the Byzantine emperor had called<br />
for western European military aid against the Seljuk Turks, whose militant expansionism had<br />
progressively shrunk the Byzantine empire, that the crusades actually got off the ground. Yet,<br />
the exceptional cruelty of the crusaders set new standards, becoming a source of both<br />
embarassment and worry for the Byzantines.<br />
The motivation as well as the behavior and ideology of the crusaders and the many<br />
semi-civilian settlers and pilgrims who came with them to Palestine have confounded many<br />
historians and others, but especially the native populations. On their way south in 1098, the<br />
presidential elections in Bolivia. See Gordon, G.: Evo Morales Becomes Bolivia’s Next President, Now His Real<br />
Challenge Begins, 2005.