Other Religious Wars Miffed Obama Didn’t Cite Them

“We suspect the president chose them simply because some of the Crusades were fought against Muslim armies, which, frankly, smacks of discrimination.”

Wittenberg, Germany, February 8 – The backlash against US President Barack Obama’s invocation of the Crusades last week intensified today when other religious conflicts expressed displeasure at again being overlooked.

The Hussite Wars of the fifteenth century, the Thirty Years’ War of the seventeenth, and scores of smaller, though no less intense, faith-driven conflicts protested the president’s skipping over them in an effort to mention an occasion when Christians engaged in warfare primarily on religious grounds, noting that singling out the Crusades was both a distortion of what contributed to them and a shortchanging of other conflicts to provide more recent, and therefore more relevant, analogies.

“We, the intra-European religious wars of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance, take exception to Mr. Obama’s use of the Crusades as a compelling example of Christian religious warfare,” said the Hussite Wars, ostensibly a war over doctrine and liturgy between central European bishops and Rome. “A serious examination of the actual history of Christian Europe demonstrates that the Crusades were no more or less religiously motivated than other conflicts, and we suspect the president chose them simply because some of the Crusades were fought against Muslim armies, which, frankly, smacks of discrimination.”

Religion was simply a tool wielded by the leadership to unify their diverse constituencies, argued the Thirty Years’ War. “As a rule, the propaganda value of framing a fight as religious far outweighs any genuine issue of doctrine,” said the war, which pitted emerging Protestant communities against the traditional Roman Catholics. “What actually drove the Crusades, as with most other supposedly religious conflicts, was a mix of demographic shifts, economics, political maneuvering, and plain old opportunism. It’s disingenuous to say the Crusades were fought against Islam, when in fact they were primarily an effort to consolidate power in a fractured Europe. The Muslims in the Holy Land just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

The majority of the Crusades, in fact, were actually fought within Europe. “Technically we were the result of several Crusades,” noted the Hussite Wars. “Religious wars of the Middle Ages are better able to hide beneath the veneer of religion, but religion is only ever a contributing factor, not a genuine cause of war – and we would know.”

More recent ideological conflicts lent support to the religious wars’ contentions, and called on Obama to retract his statement. “Aside from the invocation of a specific deity, we were as much a series of religious wars as the Crusades,” said the Cold War of the twentieth century. “The leaders on both sides simply used ideology to marshal and motivate their people, but it was all really about political influence and economic gain.” It also noted that the First World War, which sowed the seeds for the Cold War, took on much of the same Messianic flavor in the rhetoric that surrounded it, but was in its essence a struggle over control of various strategic areas.

“‘The War to End All Wars,’ indeed,” scoffed the Cold War. “You don’t get much more religious than that – it’s right out of Isaiah. But what was it really about? Hegemony. Resources. Power.”

The same goes for the Crusades, it continued. “The Medieval Catholic Church was an important temporal power in its own right. The split with the Eastern Orthodox forty years before the Crusades was in practical terms an economic and political blow, and the burgeoning population of Northern Europe provided the perfect source of mass discontent to harness toward reclaiming the ‘lost’ East, and reopening the Mediterranean trade routes,” said the Cold War. “The Crusaders sometimes allied themselves with Muslims, and didn’t save their violence for only Muslims – they took out anyone and everyone they could, and religion was just the pretext.”

“Except for the Jews,” interjected World War II. “Nobody even needs a pretext for killing Jews.”

“Except for the Jews,” agreed the Franco-Prussian War.