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Monday, September 20, 2004

So it is a Crusade after all
Posted by Jill | 10:37 AM
Isn't it interesting how the "C" word keeps cropping up among conservatives in the context of President Bush's so-called "War On Terror"? A few days after 9/11, Bush referred to his new war as a "crusade", that unfortunate name of the medieval war against Islam, which also targeted Europe's Jews, and which eventually became a a war against all forms of cultural and religious dissent. Bush's handlers quickly put the kibosh on that phrasing, but it has popped up intermittently ever since.

Three-plus years later, the war is still being called a crusade, this time by Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute think tank. Today in the Kansas City Star and the Hackensack, NJ Record AP reporter Pauline Jelinek quotes Thompson as saying "The Bush administration is on a crusade to make the world safe for democracy..."

This is dangerous thinking. When we have a president who regards himself as God's anointed instrument, having his surrogates continue to frame his war as a
crusade may play well with the president's evangelical base, but it also serves to inflame the very people Bush claims to be fighting.

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