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Within several centuries of Muhammad’s death in 632 C.E., based upon the “proto-jihad” campaigns he waged in Arabia, Muslim jurists and theologians formulated the institution of permanent jihad war against non-Muslims for the submission of the known world to Islam. The essential pattern of the jihad war is captured in the great Muslim historian al-Tabari’s recording of the recommendation given by Umar b. al-Khattab to the commander of the troops he sent to al-Basrah (636 C.E.), during the conquest of Iraq. Umar (the second “Rightly Guided Caliph”) reportedly said: [7] Summon the people to God; those who respond to your...

The website of a Catholic civil rights group was hacked over the weekend, apparently by Islamic extremists. William Donohue, president of the New York City-based Catholic League, said the breach began yesterday, one day after his comments about the controversial new Hollywood film on the Crusades, "The Kingdom of Heaven," were published in the New York Post. The unknown hackers replaced the home page with one of their own, featuring a photo of a Palestinian holding a rock in each hand, facing down Israeli soldiers. It included epithets against President Bush and Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, called for freedom...

kickoff since 1991's Backdraft in terms of tickets sold. According to distributor 20th Century Fox's exit polling, the audience was 66 percent over the age of 25 and 52 percent male. "I'm delighted with its performance," 20th Century Fox head of distribution Bruce Snyder told Box Office Mojo. "We had it pegged at about $17 million going into the weekend. The market is still a little bit soft. But the picture performed extremely well with audiences, and I think it will be around for a long time." The Medieval era has been an unappealing subject to audiences in recent decades....

'Kingdom of Heaven' – Truth in Limbo - - James Hirsen These days it seems that whenever Hollywood meets history, history gets the squeeze. Last year "King Arthur," "Troy" and "Alexander" were put through the revisionist wringer. Today it's the factually challenged movie "Kingdom of Heaven" whose historical content appears to have been schmushed. "Kingdom of Heaven"'s director Ridley Scott recently took a cue from Cecil B. DeMille and chose the Crusades as the subject of his latest epic. This is the same fellow who brought us "Gladiator" and "Blade Runner," which makes me wonder: How did a talented filmmaker...

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The lucrative summer movie season suffered its worst start in years Sunday, as the costly Crusades epic "Kingdom of Heaven" crawled into the No. 1 slot at the North American weekend box office with meager ticket sales of just $20 million. The film, which cost nearly $150 million to produce, stars Orlando Bloom -- "Hollywood's No. 1 pretty boy," according to Rolling Stone magazine -- as a humble French blacksmith who takes on the Arabs during the 12th century. It was directed by British filmmaker Sir Ridley Scott, who had better luck with such films as...

The lucrative summer moviegoing season suffered its worst start in years on Sunday, as the costly Crusades epic "Kingdom of Heaven" crawled into the No. 1 slot at the North American weekend box office with meager ticket sales of just $20 million. The film, which cost nearly $150 million to produce, stars Orlando Bloom -- "Hollywood's No. 1 pretty boy," according to Rolling Stone magazine -- as a humble French blacksmith who takes on the Arabs during the 12th century. It was directed by British filmmaker Sir Ridley Scott, who had better luck with such films as "Gladiator" and "Hannibal,"...

went to Kingdom of Heaven last night, and since i'm a huge fan of these type of pictures: full blown epics, i loved it. Of course, i could see why someone would not like it. First off, I was most impressed by: the sets and the costumes are awesome, like all of Ridley's Scott's other films, "black hawk down', ' gladiator' you are seriously thrown back into the time that he is trying to create and in this picture, you can feel the Crusades and you feel it. Much has been in the presses about how the film would portray...

All Ridley Scott wanted to do was make a movie about a medieval knight.... Months before that, Jonathan Riley-Smith, an ecclesiastical professor and Crusades expert at Cambridge University, had the opposite take. "It's Osama bin Laden's version of history," he told London's Daily Telegraph newspaper in January 2004. "It will fuel the Islamic fundamentalists..." While his goal was balance, Mr. Scott admits the movie has a point of view: Religious fanaticism leads to pointless slaughter.... Also, that Christians started it. "I think we did," Mr. Scott says, referring broadly to Western Christendom and echoing conventional 20th-century wisdom that the Crusades...

www.catholicnewsagency.com Scholars call new Crusade movie ‘rubbish’ Los Angeles, May. 04, 2005 (CNA) - With anticipation of English director Ridley Scott’s new film, Kingdom of Heaven steadily growing, the skepticism of many scholars of the middle ages is also growing. Hollywood observers are predicting that the film will be one of the summer’s biggest blockbusters with a cost of over $150 million and an all-star cast including Orlando Bloom of Lord of the Rings fame. A recent New York Times review said that Muslims in the film “are portrayed as bent on coexistence until Christian extremists ruin everything. And even...

Trust this director to turn the Crusades, a subject fit to overflow with muck and mania, zeal and bloodlust, into a delectably pretty 12th-century castle tour. Kingdom of Heaven is stultifying . . .If you thought the Crusades were really about Christians and Muslims being nice to one another, this is the film for you. It's set during a talky respite between the Second and Third Crusades, with Jerusalem in the hands of the Christian "leper king" Baldwin IV . . .The Saracens, led by wily old Saladin (Ghassan Massoud), are biding their time before the next recovery campaign, while...

Deceit vs. valor, murder vs. mercy, courage vs. cowardice, faith vs. uncertainty. Throw in a horrendous case of leprosy, brutal sword fights, the cross of Christianity, and the crescent moon of Islam, and you have a glimpse into Ridley Scott's Kingdom of Heaven — a 130-million-dollar epic about the Crusades. Set in 1184, between the second and third of eight crusades, the film focuses on a time of uneasy truce in Jerusalem when Christians, Muslims, and Jews were able to worship and pray at their holy sites. Not intending to be a documentary, Kingdom of Heaven is an elegant drama...

“Kingdom of Heaven”: Bin Laden’s Slanted Crusade Movie May 5, 2005 By Debbie Schlussel Mark Twain said, “History tells us that the truth is not hard to kill, but a lie told well is immortal.” “Kingdom of Heaven,” Ridley Scott’s extremely boring movie version of the Crusades, is Twain’s words in action. Scott is serial killer of truth—giving immortality to 1,000 lies—in this propaganda film. The wannabe-epic is being panned for its lack of accuracy by a host of Islam experts, like Robert Spencer. Crusades expert Jonathan Riley-Smith says it’s basically “Osama bin Laden’s version of History.” But the folks...

The upcoming film Kingdom of Heaven seems to suffer from a heavy-handed pro-Muslim (if not an anti-Christian) slant. What book or books do you consider fair accounts of the Crusades (laying blame on both sides where is belongs and not solely blaming Christians). I've found Thomas F. Madden but wanted to find what Freepers had to say.

The New York Times’ Alan Riding recently opined that  “…[The C]rusades were waged, [by] European monarchs, lords, knights and their armies of devout followers to fight — and settle — in an area stretching between what is today Syria and Egypt. The Muslims responded  [emphasis added] with their own sporadic jihads until finally, by 1291, the Christians had been driven out.” He further lauds the fact that in Ridley Scott’s new film portrayal of the Crusades, Kingdom of Heaven   “…Mr. Scott and his screenwriter, William Monahan, have tried to be balanced. Muslims are portrayed as bent on coexistence until Christian extremists...

Crusading Against History By Robert Spencer FrontPageMagazine.com | May 3, 2005 "It’s not like a stupid Hollywood movie,” said French actress Eva Green about the English director Sir Ridley Scott’s Crusades flick, Kingdom of Heaven. That’s true. It’s, like, a stupid English movie. The Crusades are hot, and Ridley Scott (director of Alien) is about to make them hotter. “Muslims,” gushed the New York Times after an advance showing of the new blockbuster, “are portrayed as bent on coexistence until Christian extremists ruin everything. And even when the Christians are defeated, the Muslims give them safe conduct to return to...

c 'He was forgetting that the crusaders were the bad guys' BRIAN D. JOHNSON Making a romantic epic about the Crusades -- and a hero of a Christian defending Jerusalem from a Muslim horde -- sounds like a dodgy proposition. But with Kingdom of Heaven, Sir Ridley Scott navigates a moral minefield to make a movie that glorifies combat while preaching tolerance. After Gladiator and Black Hawk Down, the 57-year-old director offers another spectacle of noble warriors on the wrong side of history. Its hero is Balian (Orlando Bloom), a knight who beds the wife of a Christian zealot, inherits...

On February 11, 1847, the Scala opera house in Milan, its stage fitted out with fantastic arabesque ogees, onion domes and filagree fretting (representing the harem at Antioch), echoed to wild applause at the premiere of Verdi's I Lombardi alla prima crociata (The Lombards on the First Crusade). It was not so much the music that wowed the opera-goers, but the identification of Jerusalem, occupied by the cruel Saracens, with Milan, occupied by the cruel Austrians. Lombard nationalists saw themselves as Crusaders. That was, obviously, an absurd projection of modern values on to a creaky historical framework. But it was...

The featured critic of Kindom of Heaven is Hollywoodreporter.com's Kirk Honeycutt. (no idea whether or not that's his real name) The featured snippet of the featured review isn't even about the movie. It is an editorial judgement about the crusades, and it is a lie- "Kingdom fulfills the requirements of grand-scale moviemaking while serving as a timely reminder that in the conflict between Christianity and Islam it was the Christians who picked the first fight." Er, no, it doesn't serve as a timely reminder of anything, actually, because Christians didn't pick the first fight. The Crusades were a response to...

http://enjoyment.independent.co.uk/film/news/story.jsp?story=635179

Crusading Against HistoryThe new film Kingdom of Heaven invents a history of the Crusades for the leftie crowd.By Robert Spencer May 3, 2005 "It’s not like a stupid Hollywood movie,” said French actress Eva Green about the English director Sir Ridley Scott’s Crusades flick, Kingdom of Heaven. That’s true. It’s, like, a stupid English movie. The Crusades are hot, and Ridley Scott (director of Alien) is about to make them hotter. “Muslims,” gushed the New York Times after an advance showing of the new blockbuster, “are portrayed as bent on coexistence until Christian extremists ruin everything. And even when the...