Point-by-point Analysis

Note: Text from the original article is italicized . Our responses are bold .

Trade routes and immigration began to make the world more of a global enterprise well before our contemporary period. As a result of these and more stable ways of travel, cultures and religions began to collide.

The Crusades are a violent episode between Europe and the East. They begin in the eleventh century and last for several hundred years. One notable purpose of the Crusades was to take back the Holy Land ( Jerusalem ) from the Muslims. Europe succeeded in this endeavor in the first crusade. In the end, history has not looked kindly on this exposition that Pope Innocent II had declared a holy war against the infidels.

This simplistic narrative ignores the previous four centuries of Muslim expansion at the expense of the Christian Middle East, North Africa, Mediterranean islands, and Iberia. These regions included modern-day Palestine, Syria, Egypt, Spai , and Portugal. Jerusalem fell in 638 A.D. and Cyprus in 647, and Islamic forces crossed over from North Africa into Spain in 711. Muslim forces also invaded modern-day France , but were defeated by Charles Martel in 732. Click here for a map of the Islamic caliphate.

Islam rebounded and expanded with the creation of the Ottoman Empire . They won back Constantinople (which changed hands several times before the modern day name change of Istanbul ) and took Serbia in the key Battle of Kosovo where the Ottoman army met the Serb's Christian forces. The year was 1389.

Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, was never in Muslim hands before the Ottomans conquered it, so to assert that it was “won back” is nonsensical. The city did, indeed, change hands—in 1204, when Christian Crusaders sacked it. Further, the Ottoman conquest occurred in 1453, not 1389. Click here for a map of the Ottoman Empire.

Then, in 1683, the Ottomans went on the offensive again and took Austria in the decisive Battle of Vienna . This resulted in even more influence given to the Ottoman Empire in the state of European politics. There were now two equally powerful sides and a widening gulf between what would later be called the East and West.

The Ottomans failed twice to conquer Vienna (in 1529 and in 1683) and never succeeded. Indeed, the battle of Vienna was decisive, but only in the sense that it ushered in their decline. An unprecedented degree of contact between East and West followed, during which time the Ottoman Empire eventually came to be viewed as “the sick man of Europe” and in need of Western support.

The Ottoman Empire quickly declined in the first years of the 1900s due in part to civil unrest. There were also disputes over the British control of the Suez Canal that connected Europe with the Far East in terms of trade. By 1924, the Ottoman Empire came to a close when it was constitutionally abolished internally.

It is impossible to explain the breakup of the Ottoman Empire without even mentioning World War I, during which the Ottomans were allied with the Central Powers Germany, Austro-Hungary, and Bulgaria ). Because the Ottomans were on the losing side, the British and French victors at the end of the war divided up the various territories of the Ottoman Empire amongst themselves, essentially creating the modern-day map of the Middle East.

Jihad is an idea that goes back to Muhammad and means "struggle." Taken to an extreme, jihad can mean holy war against those who do not adhere to Islamic faith. There are many reasons for the acting out of such views – whether in the Middle East due to the development of the nation of Israel in the 1940s, or more recently the bombing of the U.S. embassies in Africa, the first World Trade Center bombing attempt, the USS Cole blast, the 9/11 catastrophe, or the British bombing of last year.

It is true that jihad literally means “struggle,” but to suggest that only extremists define it as holy war is ludicrous. Since the time of Muhammad and his immediate successors, Muslims have engaged in violent jihad, both defensive and offensive, against non-Muslims. There are different kinds of jihad, however, most of them non-violent. The creation of the state of Israel is but one reason why al Qaeda and its affiliates are waging war against the United States , Europe , and other governments and peoples around the world. Osama bin Laden and others like him seek the establishment of a pan-Islamic caliphate (or empire) stretching from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific Ocean . This poorly written paragraph states that terrorist attacks by Islamic extremists are reasons for Islamic extremism, as opposed to illustrations of the results of Islamic extremism, which makes about as much sense as the rest of this article.