Colonel Gaddafi was making something of a point when he kept referring to the Western coalition against him as crusaders. It harked back to President George Bush’s words five days after the outrage of September 11, 2001: ‘This crusade, this war on terrorism is going to take a while.’ He was immediately jumped on, not only by Muslims abroad but also by people at home to whom it was self-evident that crusades were bad things.
How quickly fashions in language change. Until recently a crusade was self-evidently good. Harold Wilson, bound for Downing Street, told the Labour party conference in 1962: ‘This party is a moral crusade or it is nothing.’ Roosevelt’s address to his nation on D-Day 1944 called on God to give them ‘faith in our united crusade’. A Pathé film from 1937, about giving a million slum-dwellers decent housing, was called The Great Crusade.
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