Well, first of all, there were a lot of inquisitions, which is just Latin anyway for “inquire”, which is what, you know, inquiring minds do—a lot!—because, you know, they want to know! And the Crusades, well, they were “largely defensive wars intended to beat back the aggression of Muslim colonizers”.
My own “take” on the Crusades is that they were examples of “Christian aggression” no more and no less objectionable than “Muslim aggression”, though I do worry a little about all the Jews who were murdered, more so than Jonah apparently, who fails to mention them.
Jonah’s shout-out to the Deus Vult crowd comes in the course of a complaint regarding the current left-liberal enthusiasm for statue removal, which is getting predictably excessive, especially in, of course, New York City. As for Christopher Columbus in particular, well, the guy was in many ways a shit, but he was the father of blue-water sailing, no mean feat, and made the whole darn US of A possible, which I regard, on balance, as a good thing. So one cheer, at least, for Jonah on this one.
Afterwords
Jonah also bitches about the possibility of the Washington Redskins no longer being, you know, the Washington Redskins, apparently not up on the recent Supreme Court decision protecting “controversial names”. I rather sympathize with comedian Robert Klein’s take on ethnic nicknames for sports teams. The “New York Jews”? Maybe not.1
- On the other hand, if you’re winning, it’s all good. “Hey, how bout them Jews?” “Let’s go, Jews!” “Come on, Jews!” “Can’t talk now, gotta find out how my Jews did.” And, for a headline, “Tribes win pennant!” ↩︎
