• The new B5TV.COM is here. We've replaced our 16 year old software with flashy new XenForo install. Registration is open again. Password resets will work again. More info here.

The Word "Crusade"

KoshN

Super Moderator
The Word \"Crusade\"

I was watching the Osama bin Laden home movies last night, and the new commentator was saying how Bush's use of the word "Crusade" was probably unfortunate.

All I could think about was that they'd probably have to change the name of the show now, if they ever brought it back, and that the my "Crusade" hat, jacket, and the decals I have on my car's rear window will now probably have a completely wrong connotation to anybody seeing them. Hell, now I wonder what people think when they see my "Babylon 5" hat, jacket and decals on the car.

The universe finds yet another way to screw with the Crusade and B5.
frown.gif


------------------
KoshN
----------------
Vorlon Empire

"To Live and Die in Starlight"
pilot movie for the new series
"Babylon 5 - The Legend of the Rangers"
January 2, 2002 on The Sci-Fi Channel.
http://www.scifi.com/b5rangers/
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

That's a good point, KoshN. The Universe sometimes has a twisted sense of humor, no?
crazy.gif


------------------
"I do not believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense,
reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."-- Galileo
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by hypatia:
That's a good point, KoshN. The Universe sometimes has a twisted sense of humor, no?
crazy.gif


<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

It's just that every time something seems to be going great for anything connected to B5 or Crusade, something else seems to have to come along and royally FUBAR things. If it isn't TNT, it's Osama bin Laden. It's as if the universe is playing a practical joke, and then says Gotcha!
frown.gif


------------------
KoshN
----------------
Vorlon Empire

"To Live and Die in Starlight"
pilot movie for the new series
"Babylon 5 - The Legend of the Rangers"
January 2, 2002 on The Sci-Fi Channel.
http://www.scifi.com/b5rangers/
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

Oddly though Crusade was not aptly named. The show that is.

The original Crusades were holy wars. Which is exactly what this country is embarking upon, like it or not, it will come down to our freedoms and religious ideologies versus that of Islamnic Fundamentalism and whatever comes afterward.

Oddly, I don't think it will harm the return (if there is to be one) of the show Crusade. Sci Fi has its own universe to delve into and create and follow.

Who knows, we may be the deliverers of mankind.

To Boldly go where no "man" has gone before.

No, the line isn't sexist, never was.

Hate to quote "Star Trek" cuz I know JmS hates Star Trek, but if the quote fits . . .




------------------
Colleen L. Stanford
Gideon's Mine, all Mine
(he just doesn't know it yet, LOL)
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by GideonsMine:
Hate to quote "Star Trek" cuz I know JmS hates Star Trek, but if the quote fits . . .<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>*sigh*... Here we go again... Well, maybe not... You're mainly a TOS fan right? That one's easy:

Original Star Trek: it doesn't get much better than that, folks.

Taken from a chat at SciFi.com.


------------------
You are not entitled to your own opinion. You are only entitled to your own informed opinion.
-- Harlan Ellison qouting Gustave Flaubert
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

When does fiction become a reality?!

We write stories about our future's history, where we look back upon the time we lived in today and the wars we fought. We write frightfully painful stories of the power we do consist of at this very minute to destroy ourselves. In our writing we throw in conceptual thoughts/ideas (and characters) we all can associate and identify with, to make the scenario and big picture as realistic as possible. Realism provokes emotional thought which contributes to state of mind! But still these stories remain fiction at heart, in which ever format.

In many science fiction tales we've told, we foretell and elaborate about a dark phase in the early 21st century of humankind - where humans became to powerful among themselves to preserve earth's life or even their own, a third war of some sorts. It all makes for a very nice story, but then again, how far fetched are we in writing such stories like these?! Is a third world war that far fetched in the time we live today?! It makes me wanna gag when I just think about the realism attached to biotech weapons. Just think of the technology that's come forth in the last 10 to 15 years or more. Where will we stand in another 100 to 150 years from today's date. Is space travel really that far fetched?!

I think it has become inevitable that someday soon we'll all be brutally exposed to the power which humans have come into possession of, in a much larger capacity and destructive force than anyone can ever visualize or would like to imagine. Do we really have to show off power to one another, and kill, before we're allowed further evolution. What of those who have already past that test and find human life, all life vital?!

So, why is it that a science fiction fan like myself can not get enough of these fictional stories of the future. Multiple possibilities and endless tales partaking place years and years from today's date, in the future. So far fetched, but still so real. Maybe we've already written our own future in stone, or maybe we know nothing as of yet. But can't we see from our own minds's writing what could quite possibly happen if we made the wrong choices today. When does fiction become a reality?!

So, will technology be our own destruction, or will it be our key to our future?!

My father was born during the WW1, he lived through the WW2. But a possible WW3 could be the most dangerous of them all. Your guess is as good as mine when that time will be. What would be the better choice? The Shadows may indeed be our enemy!


<Galen>

------------------
"Appears when least wanted, but most needed!"

"Peace stands between the symbols of War & Death!"
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>So, will technology be our own destruction, or will it be our key to our future?!<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Well, it can become both. I would say it depends on balance. You can't get to the stars without technology. But getting the technology before knowing when *NOT* to use it... is dangerous, to say the least. Talk about spells with one term.

The interesting thing with technical exploration is... that we can't control it. It can't be regulated or slowed -- perhaps only directed. One can only try to match it with equal development in other fields... which may be much, much harder to achieve.

------------------
"We are the universe, trying to figure itself out.
Unfortunately we as software lack any coherent documentation."
-- Delenn
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

The Crusades are not quite the silly episode many history books paint them.

The Islamic expansion extended through Spain into France. The expansion was only stopped with the help of pagan warriors brought in from the North.

The Crusades were the counter attack to the expansion, fought mostly in Spain. In practice the Crusades finished 800 years later when the Islamic forces had been pushed back across the Mediterranean, and Scandinavia was Christian.


------------------
Andrew Swallow

[This message has been edited by AndrewSwallow (edited September 21, 2001).]
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR> and the new commentator was saying how Bush's use of the word "Crusade" was probably unfortunate. <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


With a bit of luck, someone will be able to Explain to the Shrub why that word will HURT our efforts to capture Osama bin Laden.

Large parts of the Middle East dislike Bin Laden almost as much as we do. His own Family disowned him. (how unanimous & honest that was is open to question, but it DID happen)

The Word Crusade, OTOH, is a reminder to the entire Muslim world of a time when religious fanatics came and murdered, raped, robbed and destroyed in the name of God.

Not the image of America we should be invoking at this time.

For most of US, it's a fairly neutral word because what little we know of the Crusades was taught to us in History class as a boring little "good" war a thousand years ago.

The descendents of the people on the "Sharp End of the Stick" learned their History of the Crusades much differently.


For instance, Richard Lionheart ordered the murder of close to 50,000 refugees one afternoon. Mostly women and children. He ordered them killed so his soldiers could search the bodies for any gold or jewelry the refugees might have Swallowed in an attempt to smuggle it out of the city Richard's troops had just captured.


Our history classes skip over such things.

Theirs don't.

BTW, I believe the incident WAS mentioned in the British Robin Hood movie titled "Robin & Marion" which starred Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn as the famous couple at the End of Robin Hood's life.



------------------
Yes, I like cats too.
Shall we exchange Recipes?
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

Bakana, just as a side note: I never learned in school that the ancient crusades were good in any way. I don't think I studied them much. But I definitely remember that the idiotic nature of the crusades (as a religious campaign) was clear to me.

And they helped to set us up for what we see today.
frown.gif


------------------
"I do not believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense,
reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use."-- Galileo
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR> But I definitely remember that the idiotic nature of the crusades (as a religious campaign) was clear to me.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

You mean things like the Children's Crusade?

Encouraging a bunch of Children to walk a thousand miles across Europe to "recapture the Holy land for God" by the force of their Innocence?

It's pretty hard to imagine the sort of bloody minded monster who could come up with such an idea.

Let alone the sort of society that went along with it.




------------------
Yes, I like cats too.
Shall we exchange Recipes?
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

Does anyone else think it's rather odd that, as we're about to kill people and break things, we're worried about offending people with the word "crusade?"

I realize the need for sensitivity and all, but really!

Language evolves. Words develop and lose meanings that they did not centuries ago.

The word "jihad," for instance.


------------------
"We are all Kosh."
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by taichidave:
Does anyone else think it's rather odd that, as we're about to kill people and break things, we're worried about offending people with the word "crusade?"
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

So who's worried about offending people with the word Crusade? Not me. I just hate to see it reflect negatively on B5- Crusade in any way. Sometimes it seems Babylon 5 & Crusade, if I can anthropomorphise them for a moment here, were the ones who sat around the campfire and smoke followed 'em everywhere. Good grief, can't the universe give 'em a break for once?


<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>
I realize the need for sensitivity and all, but really!

Language evolves. Words develop and lose meanings that they did not centuries ago.

The word "jihad," for instance.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I agree, but some people are stuck in the mud, and only ascribe one meaning.



------------------
KoshN
----------------
Vorlon Empire

"To Live and Die in Starlight"
pilot movie for the new series
"Babylon 5 - The Legend of the Rangers"
January 2, 2002 on The Sci-Fi Channel.
http://www.scifi.com/b5rangers/
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by GideonsMine:
The original Crusades were holy wars. Which is exactly what this country is embarking upon, like it or not, it will come down to our freedoms and religious ideologies versus that of Islamnic Fundamentalism and whatever comes afterward.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I don't think this war is about Islamic Fundamentalism. Seems to me that people use religion as an excuse to advance their agenda, like Falwell and Robertson did with Christianity earlier this week.

It ain't about God or Allah. It ain't even about Israel vs. Palistine. Bin Laden hates the US becasue US forces "occupied" Saudi Arabia during the Gulf War. The fact the US was invited in is totally irrelevant to him.

In the end though, maybe you're right. As many times as our leaders say "Islam is not the enemy," more people will say "It's the Christians and Jews ganging up on Muslims again."

------------------
"We are all Kosh."
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

My knowledge of the Crusades is negligible. Whatever I learned in school was whitewashed to make it acceptable. However, I'm sure President Bush used it in the sense of a holy war against the evil terrorists. I agree it was a poor choice of words stirring up resentment against the infidels (us).

Insofar as B5-Crusade is concerned I doubt if it will make any impact on its possible renewal. I doubt if it would be shown in many Arab countries.
crazy.gif


------------------
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

Sorry, a little late in this post...

Posted by... GideonsMine

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR> The original Crusades were holy wars. Which is exactly what this country is embarking upon, like it or not, it will come down to our freedoms and religious ideologies versus that of Islamnic Fundamentalism and whatever comes afterward.

<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


Bush is using the term "Crusade" under the mythological Crusade for the cup of Christ, to cleanse the world of evil. The same way JMS intended, to cleanse the world of the evil shadow plague. Using the additional myth of the 'sword' Excalibur, returning in its time of need. Bush needs to change the name of the operation to Code Name "EXCALIBUR", to cleanse the world of the evil of terrorism.



------------------
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

There is a very SIMPLE reason to worry about the people who might be offended by the term "Crusade":

Most of them are our Allies in this.
The True Muslims are as horrified by the murder of innocent people as we are.
It goes against everything their faith teaches.

Just because Osama bin Laden's mother dresses him funny doesn't make every Arab in the world guilty.

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR> Here's a relevant passage from =The Call to the Believers in the Clear Qur'an= by Shaikh Ahmad Fathu'llah Jami, commenting on the sura regarding retribution and the deeper meaning of "freeman for freeman, slave for slave, woman for woman."

"You must exact retaliation from the actual perpetrators, and from no other... Do not transgress by killing someone other than the actual perpetrator, for, if the life of anyone else is taken, it will not count as retaliation, but rather as wrongfulness and transgression." <HR></BLOCKQUOTE>


It's no different from Robertson & Falwell spewing their garbage and claiming to be "Christian".
They ain't.
Their words and actions have proved it.
More than once.



------------------
Yes, I like cats too.
Shall we exchange Recipes?
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Hesperous:
The same way JMS intended, to cleanse the world of the evil shadow plague.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>No... I think he used the word to refect that the characters would start with a noble cause, but get so obsessed with it that their actions become corrupted. You can already see this with Gideon's reliance on the Apocalypse Box...



------------------
You are not entitled to your own opinion. You are only entitled to your own informed opinion.
-- Harlan Ellison qouting Gustave Flaubert
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

In English "crusade" with a capital "C" refers to the attempts to retake the Holy Land from Islam and set up a Christian kingdom in the middle east during the 11th to 13th centuries. With a lower-case "c" it means "a remedial enterprise undertaken with zeal and enthusiasm" according to Merriam-Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary. Clearly that is the common meaning that President Bush had in mind, and he was not aware of what a touchy word this still is in the Muslim world.

Now someone has told him and I'm sure the word will be avoided in the future. No harm, no foul.

Most Americans (and I daresay most non-Muslims) don't associate the word "Crusade" with the wars of 1,000 years ago, dimly remembered as they are in the West. But they are a central fact of Islamic history, and especially important to radical fringe movements like Bin Laden's which, in effect, are an attempt to reverse the last 500 to 1,000 years of world history. Anybody who thinks that this is about Israel, or the United State's involvement in the Middle East over the past 50 years is mistaken.

This is a war between a corrupt and twisted interpretation of Islam and all of Western Civilization. Bin Laden doesn't hate Israel because its people are Jews, or even because they displaced the Palestinians. (That is merely a good excuse for recruiting among the Palestinians.) He hates Israel because it is an outpost of the West in the center of Muslim lands.

Bin Laden thinks that the spread of Islam should not have been halted at the gates of Vienna, and that the Moors should never have been driven out of Spain by Ferdinand and Isabella. He blames all of the worlds ills on secular governments of every stripe, and wants the entire world to be ruled by an Islamic Theocracy, one that preaches his brand of Islam, and in which no other beliefs or views are tolerated.

The modern phase of this war did not begin with the establishment of Israel in 1948. It began with the Arab defeat in the Six Day War of 1967, when Bin Laden was an impressionable 10 year old. That's when some splinter Muslim groups decided that a tiny country like Israel could only have defeated the mass armies of several Arab nations if God himself had ordained it.

They believed that the secular governments of the Arab states were responsible for the defeat, and that only Islamic governments would defeat Israel. This is the tradition that led to the revolution in Iran, and the tradition that Bin Laden embraced as he grew up. (To the horror of his own government and his family, both of which expelled him.)

If Israel ceased to exist tomorrow, Bin Laden and those who share his views would not end their struggle, because that is just one of their goals. They want to absolutely purge the current Muslim world of the "cancer" of pluralistic, egalitarian Western influences as a first step. Then they want to overthrow non-Islamic regimes, one by one. The United States is their primary target, because as long as the U.S. is a superpower and engaged in world affairs, they have little chance of destabilizing regimes and fomenting revolutions around the world.

They want us either destroyed, or so frightened that we will retreat into an isolationist shell, leaving them free to bring down our allies one by one, until only we are left and they can use their captured resources to destroy us. (Hitler had much the same plan, which is why he ignored U.S. provocations in the North Atlantic and refused to declare war on us until after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor - doing do in the foolish belief that the Japanese would declare war on the Soviet Union as a quid pro quo.)

The word "crusade" (which derives from the word "crux" or "cross") should be avoided because even Muslims who do not share Bin Laden's view of Islamic history find the term distasteful, thinking only of the "Crusades" But the reality is that this will be a crusade in the common English usage, the one that Dwight Eisenhower had in mind when he told the troops embarking for D-Day that they were about to begin a great crusade to liberate Europe. That was a crusade of largely Chrisitian nations fighting other largely Chrisitian nations, and clearly had no religious component.

The current war is a battle between the civilized world and muderous terrorists, some of whom happen to belong to an especially vicious cult. But the war is not going to stop with Bin Laden and his group. There are numerous links between otherwise unrelated terrorist organizations, from the PLO, Islamic Jihad and Al Queda to the IRA, the Red Brigade and the Basque separatists in Spain. They share intelligence, resources and training facilities. They help members of "brother groups" with logisitics and transportation. And they are all supported by the same rogue nations who support Bin Laden.

It isn't only Muslim states that want to bring down western civilization. There are plenty of other radical belief systems antithetical to our values, and the terrorist states are more than happy to use any stick to beat us with. These groups will also be the targets of the new international anti-terrorist efforts. Bin Laden may be the first, but the list is long and growing.

Regards,

Joe

------------------
Joseph DeMartino
Sigh Corps
Pat Tallman Division

joseph-demartino@att.net
 
Re: The Word \"Crusade\"

And check out The Emperor's New Clothes at:
http://www.emperors-clothes.com/

for some interesting insight on how the United States made Osama bin Ladin who he is today.

Our own spook boys thought they could Use & Control this nutcase. They made him rich.

He's using Our Own Money to pay for his attacks on us.

------------------
Yes, I like cats too.
Shall we exchange Recipes?
 

Latest posts

Members online

No members online now.
Back
Top