Source: Jihad Watch, BY
As I show in my forthcoming book The History of Jihad From Muhammad to ISIS, the Crusades were not a gratuitous imperialistic venture, but a late and small-scale defensive reaction to 450 years of imperialist jihad aggression that had conquered and Islamized what had been half of the Christian world, and threatened the life of the Christian empire, the Byzantine empire. The College of the Holy Cross students and faculty show know this, but it is doubtful that such truths have been taught there in many a year. And so the West continues its cultural self-abnegation in the face of the chimera of “Islamophobia,” a propaganda neologism designed to make people ashamed of defending themselves and their homeland against a newly aggressive Islamic jihad.
“‘Crusaders’ mascot succumbs to ‘Islamophobia’ concerns,” by Sandor Farkas, College Fix, March 16, 2018 (thanks to the Geller Report):
After a month of indecision, the College of the Holy Cross has decided to cease using a Christian knight as its mascot despite a Board of Trustees decision to retain the “Crusader” moniker.
Students first voted to adopt the Crusader name in 1925, replacing two concurrently-used Native American symbols, and later changed the name of the student newspaper from The Tomahawk to The Crusader in 1955.
“Over the coming months, the College will gradually phase out the use of all knight-related imagery.”…
The students, spurred to outrage by a letter-to-the-editor signed by 48 faculty members, also complained that the newspaper’s name promoted “Islamophobia” and argued that the 2016 election necessitated a change in both the paper’s name and the college’s mascot—also the Crusader.
The mascot’s defenders, however, pointed out the historical reality that the Crusades were a conflict between expanding Muslim empires and declining Christian powers that had already been fighting each other over land for centuries, arguing that the contemporary inclination to disparage the Crusaders overlooks the fact that both sides committed atrocities.
The school’s president, Fr. Philip Boroughs, nonetheless announced in September that he “had convened a working group” to explore whether “the Crusader moniker and mascot are appropriate, or inappropriate, representations of the college, given our mission, values, and identity.”…
One day later, after hearing the working group’s report, the Board of Trustees decidedto continue using the Crusader name, acknowledging that while the Crusades were “among the darkest periods in Church history,” the college considers its students and staff “Crusaders for human rights, social justice, and care for the environment; for respect for different perspectives, cultures, traditions, and identities; and for service in the world, especially to the underserved and vulnerable.”
In a video accompanying the announcement, Boroughs explained that the college would “assess” how this understanding aligns with “the ways in which we depict” its Crusader identity, stating in another letter that the administration had assessed “all visual representations of the Crusader, to ensure they align with our definition of what it means to be a Holy Cross Crusader.”
Boroughs reported that “the visual depiction of a knight, in conjunction with the moniker Crusader, inevitably ties us directly to the reality of the religious wars and the violence of the Crusades.”…
