Egypt has just joined the war against the Islamic State group. Its air force has attacked the jihadist army in retribution for the beheading of 21 Egyptian Christian Copts held in Libya, whom they described as "Crusaders."
As usual, jihad polemics were ignorant. Coptic Christianity goes back to the earliest Christian conversions in Egypt, centuries before the Crusades. Its adherents are mostly members of the original population of Egypt. They were Christians long before Egypt's incorporation into the Islamic Arab caliphates in the seventh century and after.
This is one more instance of the sheer ignorance influential in driving events in the Middle East in modern times. The United States' invasion of Iraq under George W. Bush was conceived as a crusade by many evangelical American Protestant churches, and so seen by many others in the U.S. (At the time, President George W. Bush even called it a crusade). It has so been seen in the Islamic countries.
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