By Edward B. Driscoll, Jr.

If you want to know why President Obama's condemnation of the Crusades in a speech at this year's National Prayer Breakfast dumbfounded historians and infuriated Americans, Victor Davis Hanson has the answers.

He put the Crusades in their proper context in an eight-part video series about "The Western Story," and they had nothing to do with the "terrible deeds in the name of Christ" that Obama imagined. To the contrary, the Crusades were Western civilization's direct response to the threat of Islamic conquerors.

Hanson captured the crux of the religious clashes in one episode of the series, which is available at the PJTV Store. The message: "Stop, Islam, this [land] was traditionally part of the Roman Empire and the birth of the Judeo-Christian religion, which is essential to the Roman Empire, and we want it back."

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The video lecture is about more than the Crusades. It provides a long view of Middle Eastern history – from the rise of Islam through the Ottoman Empire and the present day, where Muhammad's followers are waging jihad once again.

The story began with what Hanson called a "crisis of confidence" in Christianity, motivated in part by centuries having passed since the promised return of Jesus Christ. This crisis created an opening for another theology in the 7th and 8th centuries, one the Arab world embraced.

"Within the space of 150 years, a new, ecstatic religion had gone all through North Africa into Iberia and reclaimed about a third of what had traditionally been Roman lands," Hanson said.

The Battle of Tours halted the spread of Islam in 732 and preserved Christianity in Europe. But over the next three centuries, adherents to Islam slowly peeled territories away from eastern Roman control. This awakened Christians and triggered nine expeditions into the Middle East – the Crusades.

"The crusaders displayed a level of rationalism, military efficacy, knowledge, organization and logistics," Hanson said. "It was quite unusual." And to the extent that it again slowed the spread of Islam, it was quite successful.

The pursuit of an Islamic empire did not end there, however. Nomadic, fierce and warlike Sunni Muslims made gains in Anatolia, Asia Minor and Eastern Europe over the next few centuries. They surrounded eastern Christendom in Byzantium by 1400 and conquered Constantinople in 1453, which Hanson called "one of the great landmark days in the history of Western civilization."

"In 1500 the Ottoman Empire had unified Muslims in one cohesive system," he said.

The empire remained the world's dominant power for a century and an influential one into the 1800s. But as Christianity evolved and became more open to scientific methods and rationalism, Hanson said, Europe gave the West access to a new world and "the Mediterranean became a backwater."

"Islam in general did not seem flexible, did not seem willing to listen to new scientific methods of production," he said.

The lecture begins and ends with a discussion of how this history shapes today's conflict between Western civilization and Islam – namely the terrorist mindset of men like Osama bin Laden. The series as a whole also tackles several other aspects of the Western worldview.

The other topics include:

The origins of the Western mind;

The genres of Western learning;

The value of reading classical literature;

The role of classical warfare in shaping military dynamism in the West;

The reasons that this dynamism inspired great American military victories;

The dangers of pure democracy as envisioned by the Greeks;

And a critical look at Western thinking and those who question it.

Order the complete series to better understand not only why Obama's commentary about the Crusades was off the mark but also why the Western story is still being written today, more than two millennia after it began.