Your are incorrect about the Crusaders- you cannot ascribe the genesis of the crusades to any one motive, imo, nor can you place only one motive on their lust for Jerusalem.
the-orb.net
As this article states, and I happen to agree, the medieval mind was able to tolerate a lot more cognitive dissonance in their mixed motives than more educated people are today- although there are plenty of people wandering around with medieval mindsets now- basically people who eschew logic, and fail to examine the consistency of their opinions.
Now, putting aside the not-relevant-to-foreign-affairs-of today topic of the crusades, let's turn to what your problem is with this article. You don't like his conclusion, obviously, that the desire to liberate homelands is primarily secular. Different people may want land for different reasons, but the conquest of land is secular generally, and the desire to liberate a perceived homeland and return to it appears to me to be secular. The fact that a people want land, is separate from their idea of how they will rule that land, or what religion they will worship on that land. Two separable issues. Two different things. People rarely want land for religious reasons, really. They want the resource; religion may be trotted in to justify taking the resource from someone else (preferably someone of a different religion, or someone of the same religion, who can be seen to be following the religion not quite the way they should be....etc), but rarely is it much of a reason. Lots of people are totalitarian, and want land, and want to establish their own rule on that land- and not all those totalitarian folks are Islamic- and many aren't religious at all- like communists.
"Rather, what nearly all suicide terrorist campaigns have in common is a specific secular and strategic goal: to compel liberal democracies to withdraw military forces from territory that the terrorists consider to be their homeland."
I'm not sure what bothers you so much about it being secular- but it clearly pushes some button. The Palestinians don't want their homeland back because they are going to worship it, or worship on it, they just want land, that they are under the impression is theirs. Whether that impression is correct or not, whether their religious leaders encourage this thinking or not, is beside the point- they want land that they consider to be their homeland, because it is (they think) their homeland. |
