Almost one thousand years ago, on November 27, 1095, Pope Urban II exhorted European kings, princes, and dukes to drop their quarrels and wage a Crusaders’ war to liberate the Holy Land from its (mostly Muslim) people.

He said, “Set out on the road to the Holy Sepulchre [in Jerusalem], take the land from that wicked people, and make it your own.”

They came and stayed a couple hundred years. Wherever they went, the sword was their tool, and blood was their language. When they entered Jerusalem, the blood of slaughtered inhabitants covered their knees. In Acre (Akka), the friendly Christian people greeted them. Because of their white robes, the Crusaders thought they were Muslims and butchered them.

They are gone, but their bloody record is remembered. Their heirs are still lusting for blood.

I cannot help but observe the string of European leaders falling over each other’s heels to pay tribute to Zionist Israel and offer their guns, airplanes, and media to spread black propaganda and vilify the defenders of their homes.

They came in droves. From England with its Indian prime minister Rishi Sunak and his foreign minister James Cleverly, sweeping under the rug 300 years of British brutality, including the Amritsar massacre. Macron came from France with its horrendous record of killing one million Algerians by suffocating them with poison gas in a cave or dropping them from helicopters in the sea. From Belgium came those with the blood of one million Africans on their hands. From Holland came the bloody Afrikaners’ record in South Africa with its apartheid legacy, now developed and expanded in Israel.

Then we have the 20th-century newcomer, the United States, with a record of one million slaughtered Iraqis and with disgraceful escape, hanging on to the tails of helicopters from Vietnam and Kabul. This newcomer to the Crusaders army is moving its aircraft carrier to our shores and transporting weapons and phosphorus bombs, all this to subdue 1,500 young refugees in a Gaza camp who dared last week, to destroy the barriers of their prison camp, attack the squatters on their land, in order to do the natural thing, to return home.

The U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken proudly proclaimed he is not only acting as the American foreign minister but as a Jew whose grandfather escaped death in Europe.

He failed to explain why he was gathering U.S. might to attack innocent people who never saw his grandfather. Or why is he not fighting the people who attacked and destroyed the lives of many Jews like his grandfather? This is plainly an act of cowardice to leave the guilty, turn on defenseless people, and butcher them. 

And butcher them they have. The Zionists committed 356 war crimes, including 90 massacres, in 1948- 1949, and they depopulated 560 Palestinian cities and villages. They have never stopped since then, now for 27,000 days, as the “civilized” conscience of Europe has laid in a deep coma.

The new Crusaders, including the new member, the U.S., have waged a propaganda war against refugees who tried to rise from a concentration camp and return home. They spread the despicable lie that the resistance fighters smashed the babies’ heads and raped women. They retracted the horrible story, but its effect lingers on.

The irony, not of course publicized, is that this is precisely what the Zionist Israelis did. In one case, on May 13, 1948, they attacked the village of Abu Shusha-Ramleh district, killing a large number of people in their homes, in the streets, and in the fields. One soldier held a woman with her child in one corner and split the child’s head with an axe. He told her, “Go and tell others what happened.”

As to the rape of women, the history with which Zionists have filled their own books, including those by the Zionist historian Benny Morris, tell the same story.

Thinking of the Gaza concentration camps, Israel created 17 concentration camps and forced labor camps in Palestine in 1948-1953, in which captured farmers were forced to work as slave labor. That was only three years after these camps were closed in Germany. The evidence came from ICRC archives and the testimony of survivors.

For 75 years, the Gaza concentration camp exceeded in duration and size those of Auschwitz, Treblinka, and Dachau, before they were liberated. Gaza’s population is 2.3 million people, at a density of 7000 people/km2 in 1.3% of Palestine. They were expelled from 247 villages in southern Palestine. The settlers on their land are less in number than Rafah camp in Gaza.

They are not yet liberated. On the contrary, they are now attacked by the very same forces that liberated Europe’s camps. 

Banning demonstrations in Europe and the U.S. in support of Palestinian rights or return and criminalizing justice in Palestine is evidence that the Crusader’s war is still alive.

But the Palestinians, even after three generations, have not forgotten where their homes are and are still determined to return to them.

They will chart the future. For there is a basic rule, not comprehended by their enemies: you cannot defeat the human quest for freedom.