In the year 1212 a peasant boy named Stephen from a village near Vendome, France began to preach that the Holy Land could not be taken by force of arms. Adults were by their nature impure, and only the blessed innocence of children had the holy power necessary to retake Jerusalem. In Cologne, Germany, a boy named Nicholas preached the same doctrine. Tens of thousands of children left their homes, and with little adult supervision, tried to reach The Holy Land. As they traveled through Medieval Europe many of them were captured and sold into slavery. Others were killed outright. Some were turned back along the way, and those few that actually made it into the Arab world were slaughtered or forced to accept Islam This crusade alone killed tens of thousand of innocent children. In all of human history there has been no social or political idea as supremely stupid as the belief that the power of innocence would allow children to retake the Holy Land.
The crusades began in 1096, and fighting continued through The Crusade of Nicopolis in 1396. Note that the crusades didn't officially end until 1945, when the last crusade tax was finally abolished in the diocese of Pueblo, Colorado.
According the the sources I've read, no one really know how many people were killed in the Crusades. The records generally note the names of the knights and nobles who fell during a particular battle and also mention that "lots of peasants died." However, if one considers that each of the dozen or so Crusades involved tens of thousands of soldiers who often looted and raped their way through Europe before taking ship to the Holy Land, where they fought other armies of similar size, besieged lots of big cities, (whose inhabitants they frequently slaughtered) killed numerous peasants, and died in droves themselves, it would be safe to estimate that at least a million people died. I imagine that the total went much higher than that.
However, in a very real sense, the Crusades were going on long before the Pope Urban II called for the first Christian Crusade. There are, of course, all the battles, rapes, coups, and religiously motivated assassinations mentioned in the Bible as the Jews took, were removed from, and retook the Holy Land ad nauseum.
We still haven't come to the end of it. The Crusades are still ongoing. Beyond the hordes of religious and social movements which call themselves "Crusades," some unhappy holy warriors are still fighting over Jerusalem... Witness the battles that have happened merely in the last century just because the Jews decided they want the Holy Land back. Beyond the Palestinians killed when the Jews kicked them out of modern day Israel, there were the Egyptian, Israeli Jordanian, Syrian, and Lebanese casualties in the years following the founding of the modern Jewish state. These deaths add another hundred thousand or so to the toll run up in the various fights for possession of the Holy Land in the last thousand years. It's no longer fashionable to call yourself a Crusader, particularly if you're Jewish or Arab, but lets face it. These folks are fighting over the same damn land that sucked down so much blood in Medieval times and Old Testament days. They're Crusaders whether they call themselves Hamas or Mossad or Knights Templar.
Already, at least two million people are dead just because The New Testament, The Old Testament, and/or The Holy Koran said that the Jews should live in Israel, that Jerusalem is the Holy City, and Israel the Holy Land for each of three religions.
I must confess, I have terrible trouble thinking of Israel as a Holy Land, or Jerusalem as a Holy City. I tend to think of them as attractive nuisances that exist to suck down the blood of believers. Sometimes, in my worst, most cynical moods, I wonder if the white haired, bearded, cranky Old Testament Wrath God of the Semitic people has yet spilled his fill of Jewish, Arab, and Christian blood on Golgotha. Looking at the morning paper, I'd guess not.
But isn't it irrational to blame God for the human problems of war and covetousness? What we're discussing is a whole big bunch of people who claim to be peaceful, but fight like hyperactive, spoiled children whenever they think someone else might make a grab for the really good religious toy. Lets face it, despite thousands of years of what a demented children's therapist might call "learning experiences," these blood crazed holy rollers are like three year olds whose potty training has gone badly. They just can't share. The rest of the world just wishes these people would get it. We want them stop making guns and preparing for war and putting their children through boot camp, and like nice parents, we've tried to convince them that they should share. We've tried again and again and again to convey this idea. You've gotta share.
This is a concept that any nursery school graduate can explain in words of one syllable, but the Kings, Popes, Prime Ministers, Ayatollahs, Presidents, Guerrilla Fighters, Knights and Rabbis, some of whom are old, supposedly wise men, just don't seem to get it.
Now any parent knows that you can only push the sharing idea so far. There just plain comes a time when the whining and hitting and screaming have gone on too long, and it is necessary, for the sake of your own sanity, and for the disciplinary effect it has on the kids, to take the damn toy away. Its obvious that we can't just take whole city and put it up on a shelf where the Israelis, Arabs, Palestinians and Christians can't reach it. But we can nuke it. We can plaster it with atom bombs and turn it into a radioactive lava pit. That's my plan for handling the situation, and I think its really the best thing we could possibly do.
Let me explain why.
As we've already seen, Jerusalem has claimed more than its share of war dead. At least a couple million to date. But what about the future? What about the dead who will make tomorrow's paper. I'm not really talking about the couple hundred Palestinians who will be killed when the Israelis bomb a camp in Lebanon in reprisal for the rocket attack that will hit a school bus full of Hasidic orphans next week. Sure they'll be added to the Holy Carnage Scorecard, but I'm talking about the Next Holy War, the one that will be fought with real weapons of mass destruction; fuel air weapons, tanks, poison gas, bio-weapons, laser guided missiles, napalm, attack helicopters, machine guns, grenades, smart bombs, cluster bombs, neutron bombs and atom bombs.
The Next Next Holy War will be fought with plasma rifles, tachyon grenades, holographic diseases, laser cannons, neutron beams, particle bombs, smart bullets, memetic viruses, combat robots andanti-matter warheads.
The war after that will be fought with sticks and rocks - if we're lucky. How many people can we expect those future Holy Wars to kill? Consider just how earth's population has grown since the First Crusade in 1096 and read the list of weapons again. The relatively light casualties that would be sustained in a surprise nuclear attack on Jerusalem are minor in comparison to the death toll we can expect from a full scale modern war.
Think my scenario is a little too doomsday? Consider this There's already one country in the region which has nuclear weapons and is full of crazed religious zealots. I'm referring, of course, to Israel. The zealots aren't in control, but it seems like the Israeli government changes it's complexion every six months. Pakistan doesn't really have more than a passing, hateful interest in Israel, but they are Islamic, and they do have the bomb. Sure, the Pakistanis are more likely to lob their nukes at India, but why take chances? What about Iran? So far they've managed to give the U.N. inspectors the run around, and no-one really knows just what they've got. It's looking kinda scary there in the Middle East, and there's if the place goes up we'll most likely discover that the fuse was lit in the Holy City
Why take chances? Let's destroy Jerusalem now.
Okay, I can hear you saying it. If we nuked Jerusalem, everyone would hate us. I'm not sure that's true. First of all, it could happen by "accident." Hearings could be held and the names of a few chosen sacrificial lambs could be named. A couple of low level military personal could be court martialed. We'd pay reparations. Maybe it would be a "terrorist' bomb, and the hunt for Osamu bin Ladin would (hopefully) intensify. Or maybe we'd just bomb Iran.
I think that the best solution would be for a team of American commandos disguised as archaeologists to plant several small nukes under the places in Jerusalem that cause contention. We'd target places like The Wailing Wall, The Temple Mount, and The Dome of the Rock, igniting our bombs and blowing these monuments into a powdery, radioactive ash that no-one could possibly ever fight over again. Finally, after the survivors had been evacuated, we'd hit the place with a final airburst, just to fully erase the city from the face of the earth.
Afterwards, intelligently chosen commentators could discuss the advantages of not having a Jerusalem anymore. They could talk about how wars are less likely, how the combined heroism and sufferings of the Palestinian and Israeli people were a sacrifice towards the peace to come, how the peace treaty was signed without further dispute now that Jerusalem was no longer an obstacle, how the Jews and Arabs had grown closer through sharing a common tragedy. These pundits could talk about how the Islamic people still have their Holy City of Mecca, and about how a New Jerusalem, one designed and accepted by all as a Holy City of Jews alone could be built somewhere near Tel Aviv, in an area far, far away from any place a member of another religion could find sacred.
No matter who was perceived to have pushed the button, the clerics of the various faiths which were affected would begin use the event to push their own ideas of God and Sin. We weren't worthy to have a Jerusalem, they'd say, because we have sinned. Maybe one of them, a little brighter than the rest, would even realize that the sin everyone was guilty of regardless of whether they had thought impure thoughts or charged interest, was the simple sin of immaturity, of the inability to share, or love, or tolerate, and maybe, just maybe, the Christians and Jews and Muslims who heard these religious interpretations would sit down in their comfy chairs and think things through. Maybe the event would really cause the ones who felt affected to reflect a little on what those words the prophets have spoken really mean, and maybe we'd all grow up a little. Hey, I can dream, can't I?
More importantly, imagine the feeling of relief. Yes, you read it correctly; imagine the feeling of relief. Put away your religious ideas for a second and concentrate on just how nice it would be to know that there was no Jerusalem, no more magnet for wars and killing, no more holy city to be fought over by the religious factions of the world. There would be no more geopolitical fuse for in the middle of the desert, and the atomic strategists would be able to downgrade to almost nil the chances of the Middle Eastern Scenario ever sending missiles up and reducing a few hundred million people to glowing vapor. You know, its actually a very comforting thought - until the religious training that killed a million of your spiritual ancestors rears its ugly head and strikes the idea down with full scale righteous fury. C'mon, you're an adult, you can get over that hateful stuff that killed so many people. Ask God to help you.
Nuke Jerusalem now. Nuke it to give meaning to the deaths of all the poor innocent kids who died in The Children's Crusade. Nuke Jerusalem so the restless spirits of innocent Christian foundlings who never should have left their homes on a holy quest can know that we've eliminated the blood magnet that lured so many of them to slavery and death. Nuke Jerusalem so that there will be no more Crusades. Nuke Jerusalem with love. The world will be a better place.