Internacional: The Origin of Bloody Islamic Imperialism

While charges of Western aggression are made against the European Crusaders, who are blamed for creating hostile feelings between East and West, James Arlandson helpfully reminds us of the nearly half a millenium of jihad waged by Muslims against the West that preceded the First Crusade. Mohammed himself led the first jihad against the Byzantine Christians in Tabuk in 630 AD. His followers followed his policy of bloody religious imperialism for centuries (Arlandson provides a list of major Islamic jihads) until Pope Urban II dispatched the First Crusade in 1095 to repel the Islamic invaders of Christian eastern Europe.

The Muslims turn the truth on its head to claim the Crusades as unprovoked aggression, conveniently forgetting their own centuries of aggression against the West. Some Muslims go on to dishonestly claim the Crusades as justification for their own current war on the West. And the same policy of jihad is carried out by radical Muslims, urged on by the Wahhabis of Saudi Arabia, for the same reasons to this very day.