kingdomofheaven

Kingdom of Heaven - Hollywood's Crusade Against History

By Dr. Peter Hammond

Frontline Fellowship, Cape Town, South Africa

Ridley Scott's blockbuster epic "Kingdom of Heaven" presents

one of the worst distortions of history seen on any screen in

recent years. Focusing on the fall of Jerusalem in AD1187, to

Saladin's Muslim armies, this anti-Christian, politically correct revisionism gets

everything wrong.

The theology in Kingdom of Heaven is also all wrong. The film depicts some monk

standing by the roadside repeating: "To kill an infidel is not murder it is the path to

heaven!" As any student of the Bible would be able to tell you, neither the concept nor

those words appear anywhere in the Christian Bible. However, as any student of the

Quran should be able to inform you that is what the Islamic doctrine of Jihad teaches.

Insults to Intelligence

Quite aside from the factual errors in geography, the attributing of Islamic doctrine to

the Christians, and the blatant distortion of history, the Kingdom of Heaven is an insult

to the intelligence of its viewers in terms of its preposterous script.

Crude Stereotyping

"Kingdom of Heaven is a whole lot of nothing about O, you know, that thing that

happened in olden times when a bunch of power hungry men went a bit

God-crazy and invaded the Middle East on a moral superiority kick. The gold wasn't

bad either." (Walter Chaw - filmfreakcentral.net) This typical, if crude, stereotyping of

the crusades is quite enlightening. It illustrates the pervasive ignorance of history that

enables revisionist film makers like Scott to get away with distortions of reality.

The Facts of History

The fact is that the crusades of the Middle Ages were a reaction to centuries of Islamic

Jihad. In the first century of Islam alone Muslim invaders conquered the whole of the

previously Christian North Africa destroying over 3200 churches - in just 100 years. In

the first three centuries of Islam, Muslim forces killed Christians, kidnapped their

children to raise them as Muslims, or compelled people at the point of the sword to

convert to Islam. Up to 50% of all the Christians in the world were wiped out during

those first three centuries of Islam. The Saracens (as the Muslim invaders were called)

desecrated Christian places of worship and were severely persecuting Christians.

Pilgrims were then prevented from visiting those places where our Lord was born, was

crucified and raised from the dead. It was only after four centuries of Islamic Jihad

that the crusades were launched as a belated reaction to the blatant Islamic Jihad.

Logistics and Economics

As the Christian History Institute has pointed out, the characterizing of crusaders as

only in it for the plunder and the loot betrays an ignorance of both geography and

history. The vast majority of the crusaders were impoverished and financially ruined

by the crusades. Crusaders, through great sacrifice and personal expense, left their

homes and families to travel 3000 km across treacherous and inhospitable terrain -

and the shortest crusade lasted 4 years. Considering that only 10% of the crusaders

had horses, and 90% were foot soldiers, the sheer fact of logistics is that the

crusaders could not possibly have carried back enough loot to have made up for the

loss of earnings and high expenses involved with these long crusades. Many crusaders

lost their homes and farms to finance their involvement in the crusades.

Perhaps self-seeking materialistic agnostics in the 21st Century cannot understand

that some people could be motivated by something other than personal financial

enrichment, but the fact is that many people make sacrifices for their religious

convictions, and in order to help others. In the case of the crusaders, the historical

record makes clear that amongst the motivations that led tens of thousands of

volunteers to reclaim the Holy Land was a sense of Christian duty to help their fellow

Christians in the East whose lands have been invaded and churches desecrated by

Muslim armies, and a desire to secure access to the Holy Lands for pilgrims. There

was also a desire to fight for the honor of their Lord Jesus Christ, Whose churches had

been destroyed and Whose Deity had been denied by the Mohammedan aggressors.

To the crusaders this was a defensive war to reclaim Christian lands from Muslim invaders.

The Missing Jihad

Scriptwriter William Monahan, and Director Ridley Scott, obviously don't understand

the motivations behind the crusaders, and apparently they do not understand the

Islamic doctrine of Jihad either - which the film makes no reference to. Considering

that Jihad was the central threat that had lead to the reaction of the crusades, this

omission is inexplicable. Kingdom of Heaven preoccupies itself with fictionalizing

crusader atrocities, but it ignores the pattern of the preceding five centuries of

genocide and aggression by Islamic armies.

Scott's Kingdom of Heaven is politically correct, anti-Christian, pro-Muslim

propaganda. It makes poor entertainment and is a worthless distortion of reality.