Welcome to the podcast.

This is episode 360. I'm Douglas Wilson. You've arrived at the podcast. I'm glad you came. Thank you for coming. So what I want to do today in my introductory comments is talk about the Crusades and talk about support for the modern state of Israel and compare the two.

And you might say, well, what are you doing? Well, I recently read Defenders of the West by a jet named Ibrahim.

And it was quite a fascinating, interesting take on the Crusades,

giving biographical sketches of various heroes of the Crusade, some of whom I think really would

be heroes and some of whom I think shouldn't be included. Like Vlad the Impaler shouldn't be.

He was a character that figured into the whole story, but heroic he was not.

So, well, heroic in a stark and ugly kind of way.

He was just, he really was brutal and bad.

But I want to talk about not whether the crusades are defensible or whether

the crusades are justifiable, because I think they manifestly were. And I'm talking about the initial

crusades. I'm not talking about some of the detritus later on. I'm not talking about the children's

crusade, and I'm not talking about the

fourth crusade that wound up sacking Constantinople. But initially, what were the crusades?

I think the crusades were a long overdue reaction to Muslim aggression. So the crusades, I think, were defensible as a geopolitical measure,

defensible on grounds of prudence. They were a lawful Christian reaction to Muslim aggression.

But there was a problem with the Crusades from the very beginning.

When Pope Urban preached the First Crusade,

one of the things that was entailed in it was the promise of heaven

to anyone who died on the crusade.

Now, what this is, is it was fundamentally a Muslim move. That's how the

Muslims motivate their jihad, jihadi warriors. You know, you get the 72 virgins or 70 or

...