Dear Brigade, I just returned from visiting with the family. Hope all of you had a wonderful Thanksgiving. Here is Pat's column for today and last Friday's, "No More Undeclared Wars." FTC-Linda ------ WorldNetDaily - November 27, 2001 Is America Ashamed of its Christian Past? By Patrick J. Buchanan Five days after declaring war on terrorism, the president urged Americans to be patient: "This crusade ... is going to take awhile." Immediately, the cry arose, "How could he be so cruelly insensitive!" Bush was scourged and admonished that he had insulted the Islamic world. Did he not know the Crusades were wars of criminal Christian aggression marked by pillage and massacre? The president apologized, and no one has since embraced the dreaded term. At Georgetown, Bill Clinton suggested Sept. 11 may even be payback. "Those of us who come from various European lineages are not blameless," said the paragon of the Woodstock generation. "In the First Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it, and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was Muslim on the temple mount. The contemporaneous descriptions of the event describe soldiers walking on the temple mount, a holy place to Christians, with blood running up to their knees. I can tell you that story is still being told today in the Middle East, and we are still paying for it." But why Americans, whose first president was a Mason who did not take office until 1789, should be slaughtered in 2001 because of a crusade preached by a pope in 1095, Clinton left unexplained. A little history. In 600 A.D., the Mediterranean basin was largely Christian. But within a century of the death of Mohammed in 632, armies of Islam had conquered Syria and Palestine, swept over North Africa, and overrun Spain, only to be defeated at Poitiers by Charles Martel. Had they triumphed, Christianity might have died in Europe, as it would in the cities of Augustine and Athanasius. "The common assumption that the Crusades were an act of unprovoked Christian aggression" is false, writes Warren Carroll, the historian of Christendom. Before 1095, "all the aggression had been Muslim. The Muslims were the original and continuing attackers and conquerors of Christian territory." Only after centuries living in fear of the hosts of Islam did Urban II preach the First Crusade. The goal that animated the Crusaders was Jerusalem. "Those who deride this as a Christian objective have lived too long in books and under lamps," writes Carroll. "Real men and women, as distinct from scholarly abstractions, have homes which they love. Jesus Christ was a real man. He had a home. He loved it. His followers [and] worshipers who came after Him loved the land and places He had loved and trod, simply because He had loved and trodden them. Utterly convinced that He is God, they could not believe it right that any people not recognizing Him as God should rule His homeland." A majority in Palestine was probably still Christian in 1095, writes Carroll, "They had ... as much right to their land as the Muslim conquerors." If Mecca were overrun by heathen armies, would not Muslim peoples be justified in launching a "jihad" to liberate their holy city? Would they apologize or be ashamed of having done so? The Crusader armies, led by Godfrey of Bouillon and Raymond of Toulouse, captured Jerusalem in 1099, where a massacre did occur. But that same evil befell the knights, and their wives and children, when the last Crusader castle, Acre, fell to the Mameluks in 1291. Have we heard any apologies for the slaughter at Acre? Offered the title King of Jerusalem, Raymond and Godfrey both refused to wear a crown of gold in the city where Christ had worn a crown of thorns. It was an age of faith. The First Crusade, writes Carroll, was "a just war conducted for a deeply spiritual purpose, though often seriously flawed in its execution." As was World War II. After that Good War in which British Air Marshal "Bomber" Harris incinerated thousands of refugee women and children in Dresden, Dwight Eisenhower titled his memoir "Crusade in Europe." If he was not ashamed of the term, why are we? Because this generation has been indoctrinated in a pack of lies by the moral sappers of the 1960s nesting in our schools. To them, Western Civilization is an abomination. The greatest explorers, like Columbus, are genocidal racists. Our founding fathers were slave- owning hypocrites. The soldier-statesmen of Western empires were brutal imperialists. Now, we must also be ashamed of crusades launched to recapture, in the name of our Lord, the Holy Land seized from Christendom by the armies of Islam. The great enemies of the West today are its over-privileged children who are undermining this greatest civilization the world has ever seen. If we should be ashamed of anything, it is for having twice elected one of them as president. Bill Clinton could not carry the sandals, let alone the sword, of Godfrey of Bouillon. ------ WorldNetDaily - November 23, 2001 No More Undeclared Wars By Patrick J. Buchanan FDR "lied us into war because he did not have the political courage to lead us into it," Rep. Clare Luce blurted out in 1944. The target of Luce's accusation was a president who by then had entered the pantheon alongside Lincoln and Washington. FDR's courtiers savaged the lady for maligning the Great Man, but few could credibly deny the truth of what she had said. No matter the justice and nobility of America's cause in World War II, FDR had lied us into war. Even as he soothingly reassured the mothers and fathers of America ("I have said this before, but I shall say it again and again and again: Your boys are not going to be sent into any foreign wars"), he was stoking war, and provoking Germany and Japan. FDR lied about the secret war he had ordered U.S. warships to conduct against German U-boats. He lied about who fired the first shots when the U.S. destroyers Greer and Kearney were attacked. He lied about having discovered Hitler's plans for the conquest of South America and the Nazification of Christianity. No such plans existed except in the fertile and creative minds of British intelligence. FDR sent picket ships out into the path of the Japanese fleet in the hope they would be sunk. He gave Lord Halifax secret, but unconstitutional, assurances America would defend His Majesty's colonies in the Pacific. He spurned a secret peace offer from Japan's Prince Konoye and issued a secret ultimatum to Tojo's regime on Nov. 26, 1941. As Secretary of War Henry Stimson wrote in his diary two weeks before Pearl Harbor, "We should maneuver them into ... firing the first shot." FDR was guilty of impeachable high crimes. But as Field Marshal Moltke told Admiral Tirpitz, as he ordered the German army to invade neutral Belgium in 1914, "Success alone justifies war." And America succeeded absolutely. And with FDR's death on the eve of total victory in the "Good War" in 1945, people no longer cared how the war had begun. Yet, our politics were poisoned by Roosevelt's mendacity, as it would be by Truman's undeclared war in Korea ("a police action") and by Vietnam, when senators learned they had been deceived in the Tonkin Gulf incident. Today, America is being stampeded into a new undeclared war, against Iraq. Thus it is a time for truth =96 a time for Congress to do its duty, and debate and decide on war or peace. We do not need to have our politics poisoned for yet another generation by the mutual recriminations of a War Party and a Peace Party in the aftermath of yet another undeclared war. Questions need answering. Was Saddam involved in the massacres of Sept. 11? Was he behind the anthrax attacks? Is he harboring terrorist cells of al-Qaida? Is he preparing nuclear or bio-terror weapons to attack us? If the answer is "Yes," let Congress lay out the evidence before the nation and empower the president to take us to war. Henry Hyde and Joe Biden, chairmen respectively of the House and Senate foreign relations committees, should assume their duty to the nation and history, and assert Congress' rightful role in the decision on war or peace. Both have said that they oppose a war on Iraq. But that is not enough. On Sunday, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice seemed to assert that President Bush had the justification and right to take us to war against Saddam, should he so choose. But where did he get this authority? When did Congress cede it to him, or authorize U.S. attacks on the other Arab states on the War Party's enemies list? While the United States could launch air strikes on Iraq at any moment, the ground troops needed for an invasion are not in place. And given the halving of U.S. forces since Desert Storm, it would take months before they are ready to march =96 time enough for reasoned debate. Indeed, the semi-hysteria of the War Party suggests it does not have the evidence to convict Saddam of Sept. 11, and a war on Iraq is but the next move on the little chessboards of empire they carry about in their book bags. But a war on Iraq could ravage our relations with Britain, Russia and NATO; shatter the Afghan war coalition; inflame the Arab street; and destabilize our Arab allies, Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia. Should the Saudi monarchy fall to a revolution as a result of an attack on Iraq, Bush would have lost the oil storehouse his father went to war to defend in 1991. It's time for Congress to debate again Iraq and Saddam Hussein. Is it to be containment or war? If it is to be war, we have a right to know why, and to hold accountable those who take us into war. No more Munichs, no more Yaltas, Bush said. Right he is. But let us add: No more undeclared wars. No more presidential wars. Buchanan's WorldNetDaily Archives 2001: http://www.worldnetdaily.com/news/archives.asp?AUTHOR_ID=3D185 Buchanan's Brigade Archives 1990-2001: http://www.buchanan.org/000-p-articles.html ------ end ------ ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T H E I N T E R N E T B R I G A D E Linda Muller - WebMaster 47671 Whirlpool Square, Potomac Falls, Virginia 20165 Email: linda@buchanan.org Web: http://www.buchanan.org ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ T H E B R I G A D E E M A I L L I S T To Subscribe/Unsubscribe send an email with: SUBSCRIBE BRIGADE - or - UNSUBSCRIBE BRIGADE in your message to: MAJORDOMO@BUCHANAN.ORG ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~