President Compares Islam to Christianity

"And lest we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ. ... So this is not unique to one group or one religion."

It is important to analyze these words -- because the president of the United States spoke them in a major forum, and because what he said is said by all those who defend Islam against any criticism.

Referring to Islamic violence, the president accuses anyone who implies that such religious violence "is unique to some other place" -- meaning outside the Christian West -- as getting on a "high horse."

Is this true? Of course, not. In our time, major religious violence is in fact "unique to some other place," namely the Islamic world. What other religious group is engaged in mass murder, systematic rape, slavery, beheading innocents, bombing public events, shooting up school children, wiping out whole religious communities and other such atrocities?

The answer is, of course, no other religious group. Therefore massive violence in the name of one's religion today is indeed "unique to some other place." To state this is not to "get on a high horse." It is to tell the most important truth about the world in our time.

Would the president have used the "high horse" argument 30 years ago regarding Western condemnation of South African apartheid?

Of course not. Because contempt for Western evils is noble, while contempt for non-Western, especially Islamic, evils is "to get on a high horse."

The president then defends his statement that religious violence is not "unique to some other place" by providing Christian examples: first the Crusades and the Inquisition and then slavery and Jim Crow.

Before addressing the specific examples, a word about the timing. The Crusades took place a thousand years ago and the Inquisition five hundred years ago. Is it not telling that -- even if the examples are valid (which they aren't) -- the president had to go back 500 and 1,000 years to find his primary Christian examples?

Doesn't going back so far in the past render the argument a bit absurd? Imagine if the president had said, "When the Jews conquered Canaan in 1,000 B.C., they committed terrible deeds in the name of Judaism." Anyone hearing that argument would have thought that the president had lost his mind. Yet he and almost everyone else who wishes to defend Islam raise the Crusades and the Inquisition. The president also mentioned slavery and Jim Crow, but it's the Crusades and the Inquisition that are almost always used to equate Muslim and Christian evildoing.

Furthermore, it is difficult to see why comparing Muslim behavior today to Christian behavior a thousand or five hundred years ago provides a defense of Islam. On the contrary, isn't the allegation that Islamic evil at the present time is morally equivalent to Christian evil a thousand years ago a damning indictment of the present state of much of Islam?

And as regards the substance of the charge, this widespread use of the Crusades and the Inquisition is ignorant of the realities of both. The Crusades were Christian wars to retake territories in the Holy Land that Muslims had forcefully taken from Christians. Unless the question of "who started it?" is morally irrelevant, and therefore all wars are immoral, the Crusaders' war on Muslims in the Holy Land is a poor example of evil in the name of Christ.

Now, as it happens, there was terrible evil in the name of Christ during the Crusades -- the wholesale massacre of Jews in Germany by various Crusaders on their way to the Holy Land. For the record, however, in no instance did the Church order these killings and in almost every case Jews sought and received aid and support from local bishops.

In any event, other than Jews, few people know of these massacres. Almost everyone who cites the Crusades as an example of Christian evil is referring to the Crusaders' wars against Muslims.

As for the Inquisition, suffice it to say that it is now acknowledged among scholars that in its worst years -- 1480 to 1530 -- the Inquisition killed an average of 40 people a year. Each was unspeakably tragic and evil, but the Inquisition was benign compared to Boko Haram, al-Qaida, Islamic State, the Taliban, Hamas and the other Islamic terror organizations.

We live in an age of moral idiocy. Moral equivalence is the left's way of resisting fighting evil. It did it during the Cold War when the U.S. and the Soviet Union were morally equated, and it is doing it now when it morally equates all religions and societies. Take, for example, this imbecilic equation by writer Ta-Nehisi Coates in The Atlantic, defending the president's comments on Islam and Christianity by invoking slavery: "Americans have done, on their own soil, in the name of their own God, something similar to what ISIS is doing now."

There is a major moral crisis in one religion on earth today -- Islam. To say so is not to get on a high horse. It is to identify violent Islam as the greatest evil in the world since Nazism and Communism.

Anyone notice he went from the Crusades to slavery to Jim Crow to ISIS?

He skipped right over The Holocaust (Master Race ) and how the Jews have been blamed by anti-Semites frequently using the excuse that they "killed Jesus." The Klan was (is) not just a hate black organization. They harbored just as much hatred for Jews.

Sometimes it is not what he says that gives him away, but what he doesn't say.

He is a little off on his Biblical history. The Israelites settled in the land of Canaan before 1200 B.C. The Egyptian pharaoh Merneptah mentions "Israel" among the enemies in the land of Canaan he claims to have defeated, a little before 1200.

There have been isolated cases of killings by other religious groups since 1945 but all of them together probably resulted in fewer victims than a typical year's toll of victims of Muslim extremists. The killings in Northern Ireland and in the former Yugoslavia were between groups which had religious labels (Protestant and Catholic in one case, Orthodox Christian, Muslim and Catholic in the other) but the killers were not motivated by religion and were often indifferent to their own tradition.

Obama’s Fictional History about Islam and the Crusades

Townhall.com ^ | February 9, 2015 | Bethany Blankley

Excerpts

Someone recently remarked that Obama is a one man sleeper cell after hearing about his National Prayer Breakfast remarks and refusal to aid Jordan against ISIS. Sadly, his remark could not have been more accurate. Obama patiently and silently planned, as one of many in an intentional sleeper cell, to advance in America what Islam is advancing worldwide.

But Obama’s friends have made quite clear their sleeper cell’s activities.

Consider Valerie Jarett, Obama’s closest confident and chief of staff, who said at Stanford University, “I am an Iranian by birth and of my Islamic faith. I am also an American citizen and I seek to help change America to be a more Islamic country. My faith guides me and I feel like it is going well in the transition of using freedom of religion in America against itself.”

Or consider Omar Ahmed, Chairman of the Board of CAIR (Council on American-Islamic Relations) who advocates, “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Qur’an should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”

There’s also Mohammed Elibiary, who in 2013 tweeted, “Yes I do consider the United States of America an Islamic country with an Islamically compliant constitution.” A member of the Department of Homeland Security’s presidential Advisory Council, Elibiary is close to Shukri Abu Baker, who was convicted for funding terrorism through Hamas via his “charity” to which Elibiary financially contributed.
And consider these Muslim Brotherhood members who hold high level positions in the Obama Administration: Arif Alikhan, assistant secretary of Homeland Security for Policy Development; Rashad Hussain, the U.S. Special Envoy to the Organization of the Islamic Conference; Salam al-Marayati, co-founder of the Muslim Public Affairs Council; and Eboo Patel, member of Obama’s Advisory Council on Faith-based Neighborhood Partnerships.

The “hope and change” Obama planned all along is inextricably linked to Islam.

As former Muslim Dr. Wafa Sultan recently noted, despite the atrocities committed against the Jews during the Holocaust, “We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people. Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them.”

Muhammad killed innocent people propagating a message of hate. Jesus allowed himself to be killed expressing love and forgiveness. Obama, as a Muslim, knows full well that Islam means “surrender” to Allah— or death— and is inherently violent. And taqiyya, lying encouraged by Muhammad, is why Obama has no problem blaming the crusades on Christians.

The whole article

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/3256007/posts

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