by Mukheled Al-Amiry

Created on: June 13, 2009

It is baffling that 21st century humanity can reach out to distant stars, communicate directly with one another across opposite sides of the globe, successfully fight and often eradicate hosts of killer diseases and yet; we still live under a shadow that was cast upon mankind by medieval mentality. It is the dark shadow of enmity, mistrust and hatred; which to this day causes young men and women, who should be busily making plans for happy futures, to instead blow them selves up and countless other fellow-humans in the name of god and whatever other causes they foster.

After several centuries of Islamic conquests and westward expansion, the Byzantine Empire had lost most of Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) to the Seljuk Turks and Constantinople was itself under threat. In spite of the deep 40-year schism between the Catholic Church of Rome and the Eastern Christian Orthodox Church, Emperor Alexius I, appealed directly to Pope Urban II, in 1095, for help to save the teetering Byzantines from capitulation.

Pope Urban II; responded in an impassioned speech, preaching the necessity of mounting a "Crusade" (a Christian holy war) against the many enemies of Christianity, including Pagan Slavs, Old Prussians, Mongols, Tatar, Cathars, Jews, Muslims and generally all whom the Church of Rome had deemed to be heretics or political enemies of the Pope. All Christians who died for the cause would be granted remission of all past sins.

Humanity's real first world-war began with European Christian mobs attacking and slaughtering European Jews, and then in 1096 mounting four armies of volunteer peasants led by Knights with the immediate aim of going to the aid of Byzantium, but an ultimate aim of the re-conquest of the Holy-land and wresting the sacred city of Jerusalem from its Muslim rulers.

During the siege of Jerusalem of 1099 and in the city's subsequent fall and the slaughter of all of its remaining inhabitants, Muslims and Jews had fought and died side-by-side in defence of their holy city against their common enemy, it is therefore one of history's sad ironies that the descendants of those allies of nine centuries ago, have in the past sixty years been fighting and killing each other for control of that same city!

The legacy left by the crusades lived on, etching deep lines of division, mistrust and suspicion between the three monotheistic religions whose followers on the one hand declare their devotion to the same god, whilst on the other they declare war upon

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