the “more educated” conservatives I know are citing a blog written by a conservative Christian medievalist (Thomas Madden) that reviews The Crusades, Christianity, and Islam (NYU. 2008) by Jonathan Riley-Smith.

The book basically offered nothing new, and argues the old Bernard Lewis line that since Muslims weren’t united during the Crusades there was no “Muslim consciousness” of the Crusades as a series of religious wars. Lewis argued that Middle Eastern consciousness of the Crusades was a product of anti-colonial Arab nationalism and was distorted by Western higher education (twentieth-century liberal denouncements of Western imperialism)… but the blogger (Madden) goes further to suggest that the attacks Christians made on the Holy Land weren’t economically motivated (that’s just a “liberal” interpretation) and were religiously justifiable because of the old “Christians in peril”/”just war” canard. It becomes for them a story of Christians sacrificing themselves to save other Christians. (apparently ignoring the Great Schism between East and West)

of course it ignores all of the recent research by cultural historians that’s shown how Christian discourse against Jews and Muslims had become more hateful and extremist throughout Christendom during that time.

to some extent I think Lewis had a point, and con pundits seem to not notice that the voices who speak for ISIS don’t complain about the Crusades. They are mad about more recent colonialist slights like Sykes-Pecot.

http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/06/inventing-the-crusades