Commentator Jonah Goldberg's apologia for Christian supremacy ("Obama's comparison of Christianity, radical Islam defies logic," Feb. 7) itself defies logic, especially for any Jew who is knowledgeable about Jewish history.
The writer defends the Crusades as a purely "defensive effort," echoing the view of Douglas Murray of the Gatestone Institute that "they were an effort, by Christian nations in Europe, to defend Christians in the Middle East" and to "specifically to take back the city of Jerusalem from the Muslim armies who had invaded it."
How is it, then, that the so-called Rhineland Massacres of 1096, during which Jewish communities were viciously attacked, are remembered to this day as some of the most horrific examples of anti-Semitic violence prior to the Holocaust?
The crusaders methods included starvation, burning victims' bodies with hot coals, forced overconsumption of water, hanging by straps, thumbscrews, metal pincers and of course the rack. Believe it or not, all of this was meant to be for the victim's own good: It was better to confess heresy in this life, even under duress, than to be punished for it in the next.
Although there have been times when Jews have suffered politically under Muslim rule, there has been nothing comparable, in dimension and scope and excess, to the Nazi Holocaust and Kishinev massacres which took place on Christian soil — where, incidentally, the words "pogrom" and "ghetto" also originated. Not to mention the expulsion of Iberian Jewry by the Inquisition, to whose refugees the Islamic Ottoman Empire provided refuge.
Unfortunately, the tragic political circumstances of the last 60 years in the Middle East have caused people to forget such historical and theological truths. Not to mention the salient role which the so-called "Protocols of the Elders of Zion" — a vicious Czarist forgery — has assumed in contemporary Muslim radical propaganda.
Issachar Friedmann, Baltimore