Posted on 02/05/2015 1:50:44 PM PST by Kaslin
If you were to engage in a debate about religious violence with your average high school senior, you might encounter the claim that the modern scourge of religiously-inspired barbarity attributable to those who consider themselves Muslims is no historical anomaly. They might contend that the Christian world engaged in its own form of fundamentalism at the turn of the first millennium when the medieval European world embarked on a campaign to liberate the Middle Eastern territories conquered by Muslim armies. Having erected a dubious moral equivalency, your interlocutor is likely to then insist that it is hypocritical for Westerners to scold the Muslim world for incubating a violent strain of Islam that has become one of the predominant threats to international security.
This was essentially the familiar argument President Barack Obama made at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday. After conceding that there will likely always be those who will seek to “hijack religion for their own murderous ends,” he reminded his audience that Islam is merely following a dark path forged centuries ago by Christians.
“Unless we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
Obama also denounced Islamic State terrorists for professing to stand up for Islam when they were actually “betraying it.”
“We see ISIL, a brutal vicious death cult that in the name of religion carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism,” he said criticizing them for “claiming the mantle of religious authority for such actions.”
Entering into arguments over which great religion holds the most defensible claim to moral purity is often a waste of effort. What is noteworthy in Obama’s comments is not his attempt to establish an equivalency between Christian and Islamic violence, but that he has undermined his oft-repeated claim that ISIS and its cadre of supporters are unrepresentative of their faith.
It’s strange that so few see the contradiction inherent in this assertion. The president, and many of his allies on the left, frequently trip over themselves to emphasize – correctly, as it happens – that ISIS’s acts of brutality are not archetypical Islamic behavior. The insurgency’s most recent atrocity, the immolation of a captured Jordanian pilot, is apparently a violation of Islamic norms according to even Koranic scholars in the Middle East.
But to assert this and in the same breath suggest that Christianity was also a violent, expansionist religion a mere 800 years ago is a contradiction. Why make this comparison if ISIS is not representative of Islam? Isn’t the concession in this claim that those who commit acts of violence in the name of their religion, regardless of whether those acts are supported by a majority of coreligionists, that they are representative of their faith? Therefore, by perfunctorily nodding in the direction of a moral equivalency between Christian and Islamic violence, isn’t the president invalidating his own claim that ISIS, Boko Haram, Ansar al-Sharia, al-Qaeda, Jemaah Islamiah, Abu Sayyaf, and a host of other fundamentalist Islamic terror groups are agents of a violent strain of the Islamic faith?
A tired liberal shibboleth holds that the strain of violent militancy that is self-evidently more prevalent among Muslims today than among other religious adherents is not historically noteworthy. This is not to say that Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Sikhs, &c. are incapable of violence, though that must be plainly stated in order to satisfy the willfully obtuse. The president’s decision to link medieval Christian violence committed in the name of their faith to the atrocities perpetrated by Islamic terrorists today, however, has eroded the foundations of his argument that religion plays no role in the global war against Islamist terrorism.
Yeah. CENTURIES AGO.
1. We got over it. We don’t do that kind of thing anymore.
2. That kind of thing was the polar opposite of what our founder taught. If your founder taught that as a _good_ thing, then you might reconsider who you’re following.
Still defending the godless savages that he supports.
Hope he’s not invited back next year.
Well that is true. Every day there are news reports of Christians cutting throats, blowing up bombs, raping women.
/off-dripping black sarcasm
The guy is nuts. It is almost like he follows some kind of socio economic cult that has religion as a beard.
If you say a group of individuals was guilty of something a few centuries back, it speaks volumes about how it has been overall in recent years.
a communist
an islamist
a Black Panther
a flakey left wing professor handing out degrees in ethnic studies
Which makes human barbecue totally okay.
What a dumbass he is. He spews phoney info to the press, and none of them are bright enough to call him on it. He probably thinks Jesus was born just a few centuries ago too.
According to the article 800 years is more than a few centuries.
I wonder if the prez ever reads the speeches before delivering a speech? I doubt it but I do believe he believes this crap.
If only Richard the Lionheart had today’s weaponry, we wouldn’t have to deal with this $hit.
This ignoramus has not an inkling of an understanding of history. He is so completely wrongheaded it would be impossible to explain how an otherwise intelligent, educated person could believe such claptrap. His comments demonstrate his inability to think and his utter disregard for truth. Obama is the quintessential dumkoff.
Offended yet?
We still have two more years of increasingly Bidenesque babbling from the spoiled brat.
The scary part is that unless he is stopped, he will ignore the Constitution and run again. Do you know what’s scarier than that? He’d win again.
Bullschit. We didn’t start the crusades and, while inexcusable, the number of inquisition deaths was about 80 and it was all nobility.
More people have been killed by governments, often in the name of religion, than by many, if not most other causes.
Maybe we need to revisit some of those techniques for dealing with the Moslems. Vlad the Impaler had it about right.
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