Textbook aims to ‘provoke debate’
THE comparison between the Crusades and the September 11 terrorists in a Victorian textbook was deliberately provocative and designed to spark debate, teachers said yesterday.
Oh, that’s alright then.
No hang on a minute, it’s not. If we accept that then it’s open slather. The next book will go on about Howard being a baby killer and how he ruined every working man’s dream of owning his own house and the defence will be……..it’s just designed to promote debate.
The text book is also using a false analogy that ignores the time-line. The text tries to compare the Crusades/Christians of the Middle Ages with current terrorism.
The obvious point is; us Christians have softened over the centuries (read become civilized) and the terrorist haven’t.
We need a book burning.
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I must admit I had accepted the “provokes debate” statement not happy about it but could not come up with a suitable rebuff. However, you make a very good point and more importantly you are right
cheers
If provoking debate is the idea why not propose to the kids that Islam is a bloodthirsty cult that has been massacring people across the world for centuries.
Or how about “As Prime Minister Gough Whitlam was a clown who almost destroyed this country – discuss”
Both those topics should get some debate going.
The comparison also ignores the facts.
http://www.crisismagazine.com/april2002/cover.htm
“what is the truth about the Crusades? Scholars are still working some of that out. But much can already be said with certainty. For starters, the Crusades to the East were in every way defensive wars. They were a direct response to Muslim aggression—an attempt to turn back or defend against Muslim conquests of Christian lands.
Christians in the eleventh century were not paranoid fanatics. Muslims really were gunning for them. While Muslims can be peaceful, Islam was born in war and grew the same way. From the time of Mohammed, the means of Muslim expansion was always the sword. Muslim thought divides the world into two spheres, the Abode of Islam and the Abode of War. Christianity—and for that matter any other non-Muslim religion—has no abode. Christians and Jews can be tolerated within a Muslim state under Muslim rule. But, in traditional Islam, Christian and Jewish states must be destroyed and their lands conquered. When Mohammed was waging war against Mecca in the seventh century, Christianity was the dominant religion of power and wealth. As the faith of the Roman Empire, it spanned the entire Mediterranean, including the Middle East, where it was born. The Christian world, therefore, was a prime target for the earliest caliphs, and it would remain so for Muslim leaders for the next thousand years.
With enormous energy, the warriors of Islam struck out against the Christians shortly after Mohammed’s death. They were extremely successful. Palestine, Syria, and Egypt—once the most heavily Christian areas in the world—quickly succumbed. By the eighth century, Muslim armies had conquered all of Christian North Africa and Spain. In the eleventh century, the Seljuk Turks conquered Asia Minor (modern Turkey), which had been Christian since the time of St. Paul. The old Roman Empire, known to modern historians as the Byzantine Empire, was reduced to little more than Greece. In desperation, the emperor in Constantinople sent word to the Christians of western Europe asking them to aid their brothers and sisters in the East.
That is what gave birth to the Crusades.”
The whole article is well worth reading.