President Bush has said many of the right words this week, words of grief, consolation, anger, and determination. But Sunday, of all days, he said the wrong word: crusade.
He did not read the word from a prepared text–he was speaking off the cuff–and he stumbled to find the word he needed to describe a sustained effort to defeat the sources of terrorism. But he said it, nonetheless. Crusade.
The president is many things, but is not by reputation the kind of person who, by disposition or education, would be alert to word etymology or connotation. But these things matter, especially in the context of politics, war, and religion. George Orwell revealed for us, in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” written after World War II, how the corruption of language leads to political corruption, and vice versa, a tendency that affects all ideologies.
The word “crusade” comes from the Latin word “crux” which means “cross.” A crusade is a war fought under the sign of the cross. Make no mistake about it, “crusade” is the Christian synonym for “jihad,” the Islamic concept of holy war. To the ears of Moslems, the word “crusade” bears a thousand years of bad history.
In the history of the West, the Crusades referred to military campaigns fought by European Christians from the 11th to the 13th centuries, with the purpose of capturing Jerusalem from Moslem “infidels.” While many of us have grown up with romantic legends associating the Crusades with gallantry and heroism, Robin Hood and King Richard, historians view them as a disaster, a military and cultural failure, and a driving force of anti-Semitism in the West.
“Participation in the Crusade,” writes one historian, “was presented as having great spiritual value for the individual crusader. It was regarded as an act of atonement and as an opportunity to gain the merit, or ‘credit’ in Heaven, of having been to the Holy Land.” Those who crashed planes into the Twin Towers were motivated by a distorted Islamic version of the same reward, an eternity of heroic glory.
By describing our response as a crusade, the president slipped. He deserves a lot of slack right now, but “crusade” is a word that should not be repeated by our leaders, our columnists, or our headline writers. It will be exceedingly difficult, amid the choruses of “God Bless America,” to keep a careful watch on the language of political and religious leaders. But it is one of the journalist’s more serious duties. Remember: What many now call the Holocaust, the German engineers of genocide termed the “Final Solution.”
