What were the Crusades?

Washington post has an idea:

Islamophobes want to recreate the Crusades. But they don't understand them at all.
By Matthew Gabriele, June 6 2017
https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/06/06/islamophobes-want-to-recreate-the-crusades-but-they-dont-understand-them-at-all/

What would it have taken for Bush and successors to have made the war in Afghanistan a Crusade? Simply to insist with their allies, converting to Christianity must be legal and the Bible must be a legal book in Kabul. That is it.

The Crusade is in defense of the Christian religion. Having another religion, unless you are baptised, is not an aggression on it. Islam may inspire agressions on Christianity from time to time, as so many other non-Christian religions (including, properly speaking, Protestantism, especially Calvinism : St Fidelis of Sigmaringen and Cardinal Beaton and Mary Queen of Scots would have a thing or two to say about that; including also Communism, which is why the War in Spain has on Franco's side been termed "the last Crusade").

A Muslim who is not bothering Christians is not a target for a Crusade.

"Islamophobes" are not wrong about everything, one may have reasons to look into what Muslim's "on our side" or "integrated" are really proning. Are they pushing the medical criteria for alcoholism or insanity so it is easier to be stamped as either madman or drunkard? Are they proning a taking away of children from their parents (especially in Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Finland, countries which probably share the world record of children and teens removed from parents)?

But what the Islamophobes at their most extreme are proning is still not what the Crusades were about. It is an insult to the Crusades to compare certain kinds of Islamophobia to them.

Hans Georg Lundahl
Nanterre UL
St Severus of Barcelona
6.XI.2017