CHEYENNE - A University of Wyoming theology professor says Gen. Tommy Franks' name is the same as the Arab word for the crusaders who first marched into the Middle East more than 900 years ago.

Paul Flesher, whose specialty is the complex and bloody history of the Holy Land, pointed out the inauspicious link in his regular online column, "Religion Today."

"The main implication is to be aware of it and try to counter it," Flesher said Friday. "As far as I can tell, Gen. Franks is a perfectly good general. I'm not suggesting that he be removed or anything. It's just one of those unfortunate things."

According to Flesher, Arabs came to know crusaders as "Franks" after the First Crusade, which began in 1096 A.D. and ended a few years later with the conquest of Jerusalem.

Most participants in the First Crusade were French and called themselves Franks. Arabs carried the name over to all subsequent crusaders from the West whether they were French or not.

The word is still used to this day. And, as shown by the furor over President Bush's use of "crusade" to describe the war on terrorism, the word does not carry a positive connotation, Flesher said.

"If you travel in Syria, if you travel in Lebanon, you can run into Arab storytellers who still tell the stories of the crusades and especially of the Muslim heroes who drove them out," said Flesher, who estimates he has spent a total of about two years in the Middle East.

He suggests that Westerners not be oblivious to such meanings.

"It's a difference in world perspectives that they have and we have. Something that is completely innocuous to us carries a whole load of baggage in their perspective," he said.

"We're shortly going to be an occupying force in one definition or another," Flesher said. "One of the problems occupiers have is they don't understand the culture that they're in."

There were nine crusades over nearly two centuries, all of them aimed at wresting portions of the Holy Land from Muslim control. Only the First Crusade was successful from the crusaders' perspective.