The Crusade Was the Reply

 Patrick Bet-David put it as an or. Islam, or a West that has gone soft. Raymond Ibrahim would not take the or. He is an American historian, born here to Coptic immigrants from Egypt, fluent in Arabic, a former Arabic specialist at the Library of Congress, and the author of *Sword and Scimitar* and *Defenders of the West*. This is his hour on PBD Podcast #869, posted Thursday. Bet-David opened on the title. The answer was yes to both.

Watch interview here [VIDEO]

He set the Moslems aside first. The doctrine, he said, is the thing you can read. The people are a separate conversation. Born to a Moslem father, you are a Moslem. Leave it, especially for Christianity, and the law calls you an apostate. Blasphemy is death. A Christian or a Jew can live under it and pay the jizya, and in the classical law a non-Moslem’s testimony is not accepted against a Moslem. A Moslem’s word counts against a non-Moslem. The reverse does not. That is not religious freedom as the West uses the phrase.

Then the other half. On his telling, Islam is not a strong force walking into a locked house. It is being invited, and the criticism is what gets treated as the offense. He put the softening earlier than the last decade. Reformation polemics against the Crusades. Enlightenment secularism. The 1960s, and the movies. Fake history, he said, is worse than fake news, because the news cycle ends.

The Crusades are the chapter he thinks the universities got backward. John Esposito’s line, five centuries of peaceful coexistence, is the one he wanted off the table. What he put in its place was the Seljuk push into Asia Minor. Ani, called the city of a thousand churches, desecrated. The Holy Sepulchre wrecked in 1009. Asia Minor was the country of the churches in Revelation. It is Turkey now. The First Crusade, in his account, is a response. Not the opening move.

He tied the rewrite to the money. Saudi and Qatari funding into the centers that teach the softer version. Georgetown came up. Then the alliance that does not sit in the usual column. The wars that reached Europe, he said, came from Sunni states. Saudi Arabia as the home of Wahhabism. Turkey as a neo-Ottoman project. America is allied with those, and opposed to Iran. He called the Saudi reforms a surface, and used the word taqiyya — concealment of what you actually hold, which the schools allow under threat, and which he was stretching to cover a state policy.

Migration is in the interview, and he treats it as a problem. Not as an invasion. As an invitation. His line is that Moslems are not forcing the door while police hold it. Governments are bringing them in, and jailing the criticism. He names Britain, France, Sweden, and Germany, and says the crime followed the influx. Hungary and Poland, he says, do not have the problem because those governments said no. Greece, on a trip he described, was a pass-through. The destination was the rich country that would pay. In the law as he reads it, a Moslem is not supposed to settle in a non-Moslem country unless the trip is dawa, preaching and winning goodwill. That is the permission he thinks a lot of the later arrivals are using.

The percentage is the same argument, not a census. A jar of a hundred candies. Most of them fine. Ten that might kill you. Are you still eating from the jar. At least 10 percent, he said, and he pointed at Texas, a mosque and Sharia fight at about 1 percent, against European cities he called enclaves the police will not enter. I wrote on September 12 that the enemy changed shape, and that post stopped before this argument. This episode is that argument. His history is not signed here. The question he was asked is still not only one question.