The Crusades as Cliche

Big Government has an excerpt from Jonah Goldberg's Tyranny of Cliches regarding the Crusades and the irony encased in arguments that critics marshal to slam the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq as the continuation of Western imperialism and colonialism that all began, of course, during the Crusades of the eleventh and twelfth centuries.  But as Goldberg argues, this is all wrong:

Until fairly recently, historically speaking, Muslims used to brag about being the winners of the Crusades, not the victims of it. That is if they talked about them at all. “The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineff ectual re­sponse to the jihad—a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war,” writes Bernard Lewis, the greatest living historian of Islam in the English language (and perhaps any language).⁵ Historian Thomas Madden puts it more directly, “Now put this down in your notebook, because it will be on the test: The cru­sades were in every way a defensive war. They were the West’s belated response to the Muslim conquest of fully two-thirds of the Christian world.”

The irony of the anti-imperialist arguments:

Robert Frost defined a liberal as someone too broad-minded to take his own side in a fight. In their desperation not to take their own side, today’s anti-imperialists take at face value the fl awed arguments of nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperialists just so they can condemn their own country for its imperialism. And, in their conde­scension, liberal commentators assume the West was always in the position of the aggressor, the hegemon, the empire builder, and that we have noth­ing to offer to the rest of the world but apologies. They lecture the rest of us about the burning need to understand and empathize with the frustra­tion of the Arab street, and for Westerners to see things through their eyes so we don’t breed even more terrorists (see Chapter 23, Understanding).

Also, I don't know if you caught Piers Morgan's interview attempted ambush of Jonah the other night on CNN.  The hapless Morgan unknowingly proved Goldberg's thesis, without himself even bothering to get past the cover of the book.  David Limbaugh has a take here and Jonah has his own take here (Jonah's post has a link where you can watch the whole thing.  I would highly recommend watching it, because it really is a case study on the tyranny of cliches that unfortunately makes up a large part of cable news opinion shows).