US President Obama has taken flak for his National Prayer Breakfast address equivocating the actions of ISIS with the Medieval Crusades. The main issue is that Medieval scholars, that is, those who actually do the hard historical work of shifting through the primary sources and attempting an objective interpretation of historical data, have rejected the idea of the Crusades being a war of aggression. Rodney Stark's book God's Battalions: The Case for the Crusades and the more recent book The Concise History of the Crusades by Thomas F. Madden are recent scholarly works on the Crusades, and as such the Liberal equivalence of ISIS and the Crusades is just plain wrong.
The Liberals however prove that truth does not actually matter to them. This hack job at New Republic asserts what the author thinks is true, without interacting with the scholarly arguments medieval scholars have put out. The author evidently thinks she knows much more than medieval scholars about what actually happened in the Crusades. Forget about the primary sources, forget about actually thinking historically; one does not actually have to do the work of a medieval scholar to know he/she is wrong! If that is not anti-intellectualism, nothing is!
Yes, the Crusades were not pretty and crimes were committed by all sides. But the kind of sloppy thinking liberals have just show that truth to them is totally unimportant. When truth gets in the way of a "good story," then lies should be believed. The academic work of medieval scholars can be ignored, as they have done to the work of all who do not share their beliefs. How much lower can Liberals stoop? Or do they remain so deluded that nothing can ever show them how intellectually dishonest they have become?
If Liberals actually want to speak intelligently about the Crusades, they should actually deal with what the Medieval Scholars have actually said. But I guess I'm asking too much from them to do that.
Erratum: It is not the SOTU, but the National Prayer Breakfast, in which Obama said those comments
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