Jay Rubenstein

Anders Breivik's trial for mass murder has begun in Norway. He has pled not guilty. Proud of committing a massacre at a youth camp, he sees himself as a soldier at war. More accurately, he is a general -- a Justiciar Knight in the Knights Templar -- a...

Rick Santorum's description of President Obama's "phony theology" is by now famous. He immediately defended his choice of words by saying that they applied not to the president's religion but rather to radical environmentalists. Looking at what he said in context, the defense is, basically, sound....

The First Crusade (1096-1099) spawned horrors the likes of which none of the crusaders had ever experienced. And they were horrors of their own making. Of the massacre in Jerusalem, a contemporary observed, "The knights could hardly bear it, working as executioners and breathing out clouds of hot blood."

Particularly...

On July 15, 1099, a few thousand European soldiers broke through the walls of Jerusalem and massacred its garrison. At the time, everyone involved saw this moment in apocalyptic terms, and the memory won't go away. Nine centuries later, for example, former President Clinton recalled the massacre as...

These days everyone is piling on Harold Camping, the prophet who forecast the world's end on Oct. 21. Even me. As we know, he was wrong. But I, for one, feel a smidgen of admiration for him -- not pity, but actual respect. Comparatively speaking, he is a...

According to Scandinavian sociopath Anders Breivik, the number one example of anti-Western propaganda in the school curriculum is "falsified information about the Crusades." He points especially to the widely accepted belief that the crusades were offensive rather than defensive campaigns.

Breivik is not alone in this belief. Last February current...

As the never-ending war on terror enters its second decade, commentators and opinion continue to seek insight from the medieval crusades, when European Christian armies marched to the Middle East to make war against Muslim adversaries. To the casual observer, the crusades would seem to be the origin of all...