Guest Post: Louis IX, Richard the Lionheart Welcome Renaming the Crusades as "Cru"

And now for something completely different.

Let it be noted that we’ve published pieces (for example this interview with Rodney Stark) correcting misperceptions about the Crusades.  Nonetheless, the following guest post was sent to me by Hillary the Adequate (no, it’s not me), and he is entitled to his perspective.

Louis, Richard the Lionheart Welcome Renaming the Crusades as “Cru”

(Paris, France) King Louis IX, celebrated throughout the western world for his murderous onslaughts in the Holy Land, has decreed that the campaign to wipe Islam from the map and restore Christianity to Jerusalem will no longer be called a “Crusade.”

“Despite serving us well, the term ‘Crusade’ has unfortunately taken on a bad connotation,” the French monarch stated from his throne room at the Palais du Louvre. “For whatever reason, some find it offensive, even.”

The next time the King leads an army of Christians to the Levant to plunder Mohammedan holy sites, disembowel imams and impose the faith at the edge of a sword, it will be called a “Missions Festival” or just plain “Cru”.

“Surely these Saracens dogs will see our actions in a much more favorable light when we change the name of our forays into the Holy Land to ‘Cru,'” said Richard the Lionheart, enjoying the “Third Cru” as he set fire to the grand mosque of Acra.

Evidently the new public relations approach is working.  “When the various parts of the Caliphate hear that Pope Urban has offered plenary indulgences to any Roman Catholic who dies during a ‘Crusade,’ we tremble, knowing full well what that means: an army of bloodthirsty Europeans  bent on our destruction are about to besiege us,” said Zeydoun Islamabad, a Jerusalem-area goat farmer.  “But now, when the pope whimsically summons his ‘crew’ to embark on a ‘Cru’, we all smile and think, ‘What’s the worst that could happen?’  I mean, we laugh at the Second Crusade that Louis VII and Bernard of Clairvaux tried to pull off — we call it 2 Live Cru now — and we expect all future Christian excursions into the Holy Land to have a similar comical quality to them.”

Mr. Islamabad was subsequently set upon by “Cru-ers”  who broke him on the wheel, and flung him into a noisome dungeon where he awaits his execution at the stake.