All settler colonial projects, including Israel, reach a point when they embrace wholesale slaughter and genocide to eradicate a native population that refuses to capitulate.
Thank you Chris, that is a powerful essay. I am struck by your statement " Genocide lies at the core of western imperialism". That should be carved in marble on the front of the congressional building, or perhaps it would be better to place it over the entrance to the Whitehouse, so that every president gets to see it as they enter the building. I wonder if it would have any effect?
I have another question that haunts me lately. How is it that the jews of Israel do not remember the holocaust? I remember it. I was 8 when I saw the news reels of the Nazi concentration camps and the starving prisoners and the piles of dead. I will never forget that! I'm not jewish, I'm just an anglo American who happened to be alive when this was going on, and the horror of what Nazism produced has never left me, even though I didn't actually experience it - I only saw it in photos. So how is it that the people of Israel who are the decendants of those who lived it can treat Palestinians the way their relatives were treated and then call them Nazis? Are they totally insane? What is wrong with them, and how can we deal with a government that has gone completely nuts and needs to be put in an insane asylum and kept from attacking innocent people. Have we gone crazy too? It looks that way to me. What can Biden and the Pentagon leaders and the CIA and all the rest possibly be thinking as they work to continue this insanity? Can you perhaps explain this? The more I think on it the worse it looks and it's very scary to think that basically ALL our leaders in both parties have become completely insane as they promote mass murder.
I hear you and have been feeling similar emotions from up here in Canada...I'm so ashamed of the lot of our politicians. But I don't think they are crazy...I think they are responding to the power of the Jewish lobby AND to the hard fact that America wanted a Jewish state in the Middle East as a bulwark against the Arab countries perhaps deciding they could manage their own oil
Israel is essentially an American outpost in the middle east.
And as for the citizens of that country.......many of them didn't personally experience the holocaust...many of them are American....or from other parts of the western empire....
The settlers may be another story. I think they tend to be poorer....and more orthodox. They are land hungry I think....and a great demographic willing to push the frontiers of Israel further and further into Palestinian lands. It's a land grab...and in the world of today, getting your hands on a piece of real estate isn't easy.
Finally....not all Israelis support their government....but many want to live as if there is not an occupation. Like many in America and Canada....they don't want to be political or pay political attention....they just want their private lives to go on smoothly.
Still, I'm with you in the horror of realizing a people Hitler tried to exterminate are now busy trying to exterminate a Semetic people who likely spring from the same ancestral stock as do they.
It is not insanity, it is bribery. A good example of how our politicians dance to the beat of their donors, I remember how I was shocked when I learned that Newt Gingrich, who earned a PhD in history at Tulane University and had been a professor of history, reached into the pocket of Sheldon Adelson when he was bidding for the White house and declared that the Palestinians were invented people.
"Many analysts say Newt Gingrich’s recent rise in the Republican contest would have been impossible without the backing of one man: multi-billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. Adelson and his wife have donated $10 million to the pro-Gingrich super PAC, Winning Our Future, which has run a series of ads attacking Gingrich’s opponent Mitt Romney. Gingrich has openly admitted Adelson’s support came down to a single issue: Israel. Gingrich has adopted the most extremist anti-Palestinian stance of the Republican presidential field, calling the Palestinians themselves an “invented” people."
Multi Billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson was an American jewish who was married to Miriam Farbstein, an israeli medical doctor, and when he died in his residency at Malibu, California on 2021 his body was draped in US and Israeli flags, sent to Israel and displayed at Ben Gurion Airport where P. M. Benjamin Netanyahu came to pay his respects. Next day he was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
During his life Adelson was a big contributor to the Republican party and he donated $25 million to the Trump campaign in 2016 who later moved our embassy to Jerusalem.
I can only bow my head in shame that I have anything to do with this. And yet....I do. Just my life style makes me an accomplice.
I am revolted to the core of my being at what is being done in my name and that all I can do is wave a sign, write a check for $25 to independent journalists and the ACLU, email the White House and plead to Mr Biden to call a cease fire, plead with them to stop before it is too late to even pretend that America stands for justice and respect for human life...even if it is already too late. My heart is filled with grief, my conscience with shame. The trauma is everywhere.
The shadow of the darkness is so huge. Standing before those with vast power, who have as their only metric of goodness "Return On Investment" leaves me breathless and feeling small. So with the only choice that I can see availab in my life right now is to go out onto my little organic farm and grow healthy food and medicine and share it with as many as I can, teach as many as I can to do the same, gave a safe place for two homeless women to camp at night, teach math to the children, pet my dog, love others and express gratitude for my blessings. I can put what positive energy that I am able to into the web of universal consciousness and weep because I know it is not nearly enough.
Thank you Chris for showing us the truth of it all so at least we can, with clear eyes, do what we can, even if small, and at the very least, the very least... be a witness to the presence and action of evil and not turn away our gaze. Your voice keeps us from turning away Mr. Hedges.
We individually can do very little to change the situation but if we all collectively do the same things that you are doing our politicians will be scared.
This Israel vs. Hamas war is an act of unbridled genocide instrumented out of hate. A piece from Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" comes to mind: "Create havoc and let slip of the dogs of war", spoken by Marc Antony upon Caesar's death. Israel has the full blessing of the United States, unleashing their dogs of war to sate their blood lust. If Israel did not have that blessing, this war would be prosecuted in a less deadly slaughter. Netanyahu is getting his jollies from killing so many Palestinians. Let that be no doubt. Thousands of children exterminated. The Jews, once reviled by the wider world, have now executed thousands of innocents. Will the Jews once again become the world's pariah? Doubtful. What they once saw as consummate evil exacted against them, they now see as their opportunistic divine right to persecute and decimate an entire people. This is motivated by one thing: Pure, unadulterated hatred of Palestine.
Not all the jews. Check the news on the multiple and massive protests organized and populated by thousands of them. New york city this weekend (400 arrested), for instance. I'm a great admirer of the jews for their intelligence, emphasys on learning and, specially, their love for freedom. Unfortunately like within the Christians many have fallen prey to the teachings of their fundamentalists religious leaders. Following I'm transcribing parts of Democracynow.org interview:
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this month, you tweeted, quote, “Reminder: 6 mos before Israeli elex that made Kahanists arguably most powerful political force in Israel, the Biden Admin decided to do its part in normalizing Kahanism by removing Kahanist groups from US list of foreign terrorist orgs, where they’d been listed for decades.” For those who don’t understand who Kahanists are, explain the significance of this tweet.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re also joined by Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, former Foreign Service officer who served in Jerusalem, Tunis and Beirut, has worked on Israel-Palestine and the broader region for over 30 years, former director of policy and government relations at Americans for Peace Now, Americans for Shalom Achshav.
LARA FRIEDMAN: Well, I mean, whole books have been written about the Kahanists. The Kahanists — Rabbi Meir Kahane was an American citizen rabbi from the New York area. He wrote many, many books. His basic philosophy was, you know, all of the land of Israel — and that extends far beyond Israel’s current borders — belongs to the Jews, because it was given to the Jews by God. And he made clear that — I mean, you have to give him credit for honesty — that this wasn’t — that this is not a conflict that was going to be resolved in a way that would address everybody’s rights or needs, that this was going to be a war and that the Arabs were going to have to lose, and this meant removing Arabs. And he was very, very clear. It’s a worldview that is openly racist, openly Islamophobic, almost proudly so, and, in effect, suggests that people who think that there’s some other solution are naive.
That strand of thinking was much, I would say, maligned and disrespected for a very long time. The Kahanist party was outlawed in Israel as a racist party during Rabbi Kahane’s lifetime. He was eventually assassinated. But what’s happened since then is the mainstreaming of his worldview in Israel and, I would say, in the United States amongst many supporters of Israel — a lot of the financing for his work and his thoughts comes from the United States still — and to the point where today you have very powerful people in the Israeli government, very powerful political strands in Israel, which are largely identical, whose worldview is largely identical to that of the Kahanists. The fact that the Biden administration elected to remove the Kahanist parties from the terrorist list — and they were on the terrorist list because of acts of terror committed by acolytes of this movement against American citizens, you know, not in recent years, but it was — I don’t know why they chose that moment to remove them, but it certainly speaks to the mainstreaming and normalizing of this approach to the Palestinians.
I do not blame all Jews. Logically. Sensibly. American Jews cannot be faulted for this. I have lifelong close friends who are Jews. The hate toward American Jews has absolutely no defense. To blame them for the war between Israel and Hamas is fruitless and foolish.
And, yes, I undertand Israel's goal to fully eliminate and decimate Hamas. But, the "collateral" cost raises moral and ethical concerns. 3,000+ children reported dead (killed). 8,000 Palestinians dead. Yet, there is a discernible vengeance and hatred that is not confined solely to Hamas. How does one extract the good from the bad? Hard to say. Hamas uses the innocents as human shields.
Thank you for your elaborate dissertation. It is informative and educational. However, it does not lessen my belief that Netanyahu and his allies see this moment as an opportunity to exercise vengeance against all of Palestine; to obliterate them entirely. In the meantime, Ukraine has lost its place on the front pages of news outlets, for which I am confident Putin is most pleased.
Holocaust–Shmolocaust. This isn't, as you said Chris, to minimize the horror of the holocaust. But as Hafez al Assad said to Henry Kissinger, I know that the holocaust was horrible but why do take it out on my people? The Jews clearly didn't learn humanity from the holocaust. They learned how to perpetrate it.
'Asking' from your own home! The colonial empire in full view.
All one needs do is see through.
Truth anyone?
As things go, one believes the usa empire--as empires of old--will have a day of reckoning?
Thoughts today No! As more succumb to the ideal of 'mans' god given right of exceptionalism.
The burdened continually, willing, carrying the load, sacrificing themselves for the goal of empire; 'knowing' (wink wink) they will be met with 'gold' with their offering; come the hereafter????
See:
Native Bidaské with Mark Charles (Diné) on Abraham Lincoln and the Narrative of White Messiahship
I don't fully remember the 'low-Q', but Amiri Baraka recited from what he called, "Low-Q's for Black People" something like this (he admitted that he wasn't firm with the 5-7-5 syllabic form of traditional haikus, I try to keep the 5-7-5 as I try to remember the powerful message):
wow, just wow. Very powerfully put. The hate for you fellow man has reached a depth I can not make sense of. Do you think they (both sides) can come across the body of tortured and murdered child and only become enraged and grief stricken once they have clarified whether the child was a Jew or Palestinian?
I had a crazy idea late last night that the one thing that could stop the bombing immediately, would be for Pope Francis to go to Gaza, to the Rafah Crossing and enter into Gaza with the Gazans. I believe this would change the dynamics as soon as such a visit was announced. I make a petition on change.org
If anyone thinks this might work, and would like to support it , please sign:
This murderous colonization of Palestine and the hatred for Islam reminds me of the motivations for the first crusade that invaded Palestine and committed the slaughter of its inhabitants. Following is an excerpt from the book "The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land" by Thomas Asbridge:
"Urban’s vision was of a devotional expedition sanctioned by Rome, focused first and foremost upon the defence or reconquest of sacred territory. In some ways his choice of Islam as an enemy was almost incidental, and there is little to suggest that the Latins or their Greek allies truly saw the Muslim world as an avowed enemy before 1095.* The pulse-quickening notion of avenging the ‘execrable abuses’ enacted by demonised Muslims may have captivated Urban’s audience at Clermont, but his ‘crusading’ message contained a further, even more powerful, lure; one that addressed the very nature of medieval Christian existence. Bred upon a vision of religious faith that emphasised the overbearing threat of sin and damnation, the Latins of the West were enmeshed in a desperate, lifelong spiritual struggle to purge the taint of corruption from their souls. Primed to seek redemption, they were thus enthralled when the pope declared that this expedition to the East would be a sacred venture, participation in which would lead to ‘the remission of all their sins’. In the past, even ‘just war’ (that is, violence that God accepted as necessary) had still been regarded as innately sinful. But now Urban spoke of a conflict that transcended these traditional boundaries. His cause was to possess a sanctified quality–to be a holy war, not simply condoned by ‘the Lord’, but actively promoted and endorsed. According to one eyewitness, the pope even averred that ‘Christ commands’ the faithful to enlist."
The war cry of "God wills it" that the crusaders used in their attacks is echoed today in the sermons of the clerics of the fundamentalist Christians and Jews.
Thank you Chris, that is a powerful essay. I am struck by your statement " Genocide lies at the core of western imperialism". That should be carved in marble on the front of the congressional building, or perhaps it would be better to place it over the entrance to the Whitehouse, so that every president gets to see it as they enter the building. I wonder if it would have any effect?
I have another question that haunts me lately. How is it that the jews of Israel do not remember the holocaust? I remember it. I was 8 when I saw the news reels of the Nazi concentration camps and the starving prisoners and the piles of dead. I will never forget that! I'm not jewish, I'm just an anglo American who happened to be alive when this was going on, and the horror of what Nazism produced has never left me, even though I didn't actually experience it - I only saw it in photos. So how is it that the people of Israel who are the decendants of those who lived it can treat Palestinians the way their relatives were treated and then call them Nazis? Are they totally insane? What is wrong with them, and how can we deal with a government that has gone completely nuts and needs to be put in an insane asylum and kept from attacking innocent people. Have we gone crazy too? It looks that way to me. What can Biden and the Pentagon leaders and the CIA and all the rest possibly be thinking as they work to continue this insanity? Can you perhaps explain this? The more I think on it the worse it looks and it's very scary to think that basically ALL our leaders in both parties have become completely insane as they promote mass murder.
I hear you and have been feeling similar emotions from up here in Canada...I'm so ashamed of the lot of our politicians. But I don't think they are crazy...I think they are responding to the power of the Jewish lobby AND to the hard fact that America wanted a Jewish state in the Middle East as a bulwark against the Arab countries perhaps deciding they could manage their own oil
Israel is essentially an American outpost in the middle east.
And as for the citizens of that country.......many of them didn't personally experience the holocaust...many of them are American....or from other parts of the western empire....
The settlers may be another story. I think they tend to be poorer....and more orthodox. They are land hungry I think....and a great demographic willing to push the frontiers of Israel further and further into Palestinian lands. It's a land grab...and in the world of today, getting your hands on a piece of real estate isn't easy.
Finally....not all Israelis support their government....but many want to live as if there is not an occupation. Like many in America and Canada....they don't want to be political or pay political attention....they just want their private lives to go on smoothly.
Still, I'm with you in the horror of realizing a people Hitler tried to exterminate are now busy trying to exterminate a Semetic people who likely spring from the same ancestral stock as do they.
Madness....Horror....Tears.
It is not insanity, it is bribery. A good example of how our politicians dance to the beat of their donors, I remember how I was shocked when I learned that Newt Gingrich, who earned a PhD in history at Tulane University and had been a professor of history, reached into the pocket of Sheldon Adelson when he was bidding for the White house and declared that the Palestinians were invented people.
From Democracynow.org issue of 01/27/2012
"Many analysts say Newt Gingrich’s recent rise in the Republican contest would have been impossible without the backing of one man: multi-billionaire casino mogul Sheldon Adelson. Adelson and his wife have donated $10 million to the pro-Gingrich super PAC, Winning Our Future, which has run a series of ads attacking Gingrich’s opponent Mitt Romney. Gingrich has openly admitted Adelson’s support came down to a single issue: Israel. Gingrich has adopted the most extremist anti-Palestinian stance of the Republican presidential field, calling the Palestinians themselves an “invented” people."
Multi Billionaire casino owner Sheldon Adelson was an American jewish who was married to Miriam Farbstein, an israeli medical doctor, and when he died in his residency at Malibu, California on 2021 his body was draped in US and Israeli flags, sent to Israel and displayed at Ben Gurion Airport where P. M. Benjamin Netanyahu came to pay his respects. Next day he was buried on the Mount of Olives in Jerusalem.
During his life Adelson was a big contributor to the Republican party and he donated $25 million to the Trump campaign in 2016 who later moved our embassy to Jerusalem.
We are a doomed species - preying on and destroying each other. We are parasites, feasting on
the blood of our own. Is any other species so cannibalistic? so inhumane?
Lacewings
I can only bow my head in shame that I have anything to do with this. And yet....I do. Just my life style makes me an accomplice.
I am revolted to the core of my being at what is being done in my name and that all I can do is wave a sign, write a check for $25 to independent journalists and the ACLU, email the White House and plead to Mr Biden to call a cease fire, plead with them to stop before it is too late to even pretend that America stands for justice and respect for human life...even if it is already too late. My heart is filled with grief, my conscience with shame. The trauma is everywhere.
The shadow of the darkness is so huge. Standing before those with vast power, who have as their only metric of goodness "Return On Investment" leaves me breathless and feeling small. So with the only choice that I can see availab in my life right now is to go out onto my little organic farm and grow healthy food and medicine and share it with as many as I can, teach as many as I can to do the same, gave a safe place for two homeless women to camp at night, teach math to the children, pet my dog, love others and express gratitude for my blessings. I can put what positive energy that I am able to into the web of universal consciousness and weep because I know it is not nearly enough.
Thank you Chris for showing us the truth of it all so at least we can, with clear eyes, do what we can, even if small, and at the very least, the very least... be a witness to the presence and action of evil and not turn away our gaze. Your voice keeps us from turning away Mr. Hedges.
We individually can do very little to change the situation but if we all collectively do the same things that you are doing our politicians will be scared.
War crimes all day long. There needs be a Tel Aviv - Hague shuttle.
This Israel vs. Hamas war is an act of unbridled genocide instrumented out of hate. A piece from Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" comes to mind: "Create havoc and let slip of the dogs of war", spoken by Marc Antony upon Caesar's death. Israel has the full blessing of the United States, unleashing their dogs of war to sate their blood lust. If Israel did not have that blessing, this war would be prosecuted in a less deadly slaughter. Netanyahu is getting his jollies from killing so many Palestinians. Let that be no doubt. Thousands of children exterminated. The Jews, once reviled by the wider world, have now executed thousands of innocents. Will the Jews once again become the world's pariah? Doubtful. What they once saw as consummate evil exacted against them, they now see as their opportunistic divine right to persecute and decimate an entire people. This is motivated by one thing: Pure, unadulterated hatred of Palestine.
Not all the jews. Check the news on the multiple and massive protests organized and populated by thousands of them. New york city this weekend (400 arrested), for instance. I'm a great admirer of the jews for their intelligence, emphasys on learning and, specially, their love for freedom. Unfortunately like within the Christians many have fallen prey to the teachings of their fundamentalists religious leaders. Following I'm transcribing parts of Democracynow.org interview:
AMY GOODMAN: Earlier this month, you tweeted, quote, “Reminder: 6 mos before Israeli elex that made Kahanists arguably most powerful political force in Israel, the Biden Admin decided to do its part in normalizing Kahanism by removing Kahanist groups from US list of foreign terrorist orgs, where they’d been listed for decades.” For those who don’t understand who Kahanists are, explain the significance of this tweet.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re also joined by Lara Friedman, president of the Foundation for Middle East Peace, former Foreign Service officer who served in Jerusalem, Tunis and Beirut, has worked on Israel-Palestine and the broader region for over 30 years, former director of policy and government relations at Americans for Peace Now, Americans for Shalom Achshav.
LARA FRIEDMAN: Well, I mean, whole books have been written about the Kahanists. The Kahanists — Rabbi Meir Kahane was an American citizen rabbi from the New York area. He wrote many, many books. His basic philosophy was, you know, all of the land of Israel — and that extends far beyond Israel’s current borders — belongs to the Jews, because it was given to the Jews by God. And he made clear that — I mean, you have to give him credit for honesty — that this wasn’t — that this is not a conflict that was going to be resolved in a way that would address everybody’s rights or needs, that this was going to be a war and that the Arabs were going to have to lose, and this meant removing Arabs. And he was very, very clear. It’s a worldview that is openly racist, openly Islamophobic, almost proudly so, and, in effect, suggests that people who think that there’s some other solution are naive.
That strand of thinking was much, I would say, maligned and disrespected for a very long time. The Kahanist party was outlawed in Israel as a racist party during Rabbi Kahane’s lifetime. He was eventually assassinated. But what’s happened since then is the mainstreaming of his worldview in Israel and, I would say, in the United States amongst many supporters of Israel — a lot of the financing for his work and his thoughts comes from the United States still — and to the point where today you have very powerful people in the Israeli government, very powerful political strands in Israel, which are largely identical, whose worldview is largely identical to that of the Kahanists. The fact that the Biden administration elected to remove the Kahanist parties from the terrorist list — and they were on the terrorist list because of acts of terror committed by acolytes of this movement against American citizens, you know, not in recent years, but it was — I don’t know why they chose that moment to remove them, but it certainly speaks to the mainstreaming and normalizing of this approach to the Palestinians.
I do not blame all Jews. Logically. Sensibly. American Jews cannot be faulted for this. I have lifelong close friends who are Jews. The hate toward American Jews has absolutely no defense. To blame them for the war between Israel and Hamas is fruitless and foolish.
And, yes, I undertand Israel's goal to fully eliminate and decimate Hamas. But, the "collateral" cost raises moral and ethical concerns. 3,000+ children reported dead (killed). 8,000 Palestinians dead. Yet, there is a discernible vengeance and hatred that is not confined solely to Hamas. How does one extract the good from the bad? Hard to say. Hamas uses the innocents as human shields.
Thank you for your elaborate dissertation. It is informative and educational. However, it does not lessen my belief that Netanyahu and his allies see this moment as an opportunity to exercise vengeance against all of Palestine; to obliterate them entirely. In the meantime, Ukraine has lost its place on the front pages of news outlets, for which I am confident Putin is most pleased.
Holocaust–Shmolocaust. This isn't, as you said Chris, to minimize the horror of the holocaust. But as Hafez al Assad said to Henry Kissinger, I know that the holocaust was horrible but why do take it out on my people? The Jews clearly didn't learn humanity from the holocaust. They learned how to perpetrate it.
Thank you for your defense of humanity.
Occupy Peace. Justify Love.
'Asking' from your own home! The colonial empire in full view.
All one needs do is see through.
Truth anyone?
As things go, one believes the usa empire--as empires of old--will have a day of reckoning?
Thoughts today No! As more succumb to the ideal of 'mans' god given right of exceptionalism.
The burdened continually, willing, carrying the load, sacrificing themselves for the goal of empire; 'knowing' (wink wink) they will be met with 'gold' with their offering; come the hereafter????
See:
Native Bidaské with Mark Charles (Diné) on Abraham Lincoln and the Narrative of White Messiahship
Native News Online
https://youtu.be/GbmBP3OdiC0
I don't fully remember the 'low-Q', but Amiri Baraka recited from what he called, "Low-Q's for Black People" something like this (he admitted that he wasn't firm with the 5-7-5 syllabic form of traditional haikus, I try to keep the 5-7-5 as I try to remember the powerful message):
The worst Nazi crime
Was in turning its victims
into one of them
wow, just wow. Very powerfully put. The hate for you fellow man has reached a depth I can not make sense of. Do you think they (both sides) can come across the body of tortured and murdered child and only become enraged and grief stricken once they have clarified whether the child was a Jew or Palestinian?
I had a crazy idea late last night that the one thing that could stop the bombing immediately, would be for Pope Francis to go to Gaza, to the Rafah Crossing and enter into Gaza with the Gazans. I believe this would change the dynamics as soon as such a visit was announced. I make a petition on change.org
If anyone thinks this might work, and would like to support it , please sign:
https://chng.it/tfYb2DjFDy
I can't think of anything else, given the craven behavior of the western government. It might not work, but maybe it's worth trying.
Protect the Innocents! Safe passage to new home in Sinai, subsidized by “Peace Dividend “🌈
This murderous colonization of Palestine and the hatred for Islam reminds me of the motivations for the first crusade that invaded Palestine and committed the slaughter of its inhabitants. Following is an excerpt from the book "The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land" by Thomas Asbridge:
"Urban’s vision was of a devotional expedition sanctioned by Rome, focused first and foremost upon the defence or reconquest of sacred territory. In some ways his choice of Islam as an enemy was almost incidental, and there is little to suggest that the Latins or their Greek allies truly saw the Muslim world as an avowed enemy before 1095.* The pulse-quickening notion of avenging the ‘execrable abuses’ enacted by demonised Muslims may have captivated Urban’s audience at Clermont, but his ‘crusading’ message contained a further, even more powerful, lure; one that addressed the very nature of medieval Christian existence. Bred upon a vision of religious faith that emphasised the overbearing threat of sin and damnation, the Latins of the West were enmeshed in a desperate, lifelong spiritual struggle to purge the taint of corruption from their souls. Primed to seek redemption, they were thus enthralled when the pope declared that this expedition to the East would be a sacred venture, participation in which would lead to ‘the remission of all their sins’. In the past, even ‘just war’ (that is, violence that God accepted as necessary) had still been regarded as innately sinful. But now Urban spoke of a conflict that transcended these traditional boundaries. His cause was to possess a sanctified quality–to be a holy war, not simply condoned by ‘the Lord’, but actively promoted and endorsed. According to one eyewitness, the pope even averred that ‘Christ commands’ the faithful to enlist."
The war cry of "God wills it" that the crusaders used in their attacks is echoed today in the sermons of the clerics of the fundamentalist Christians and Jews.