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Tuesday at the White House’s Easter breakfast, President Barack Obama momentarily attempted to address the current religious freedom controversy but stopped himself after reactions from the crowd.

Towards the end of his speech at Tuesday morning’s Easter Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama appeared to veer off script to make some comments that implicitly referenced the fierce debate that has been raging over the last week about “religious freedom” laws in Indiana, Arkansas and elsewhere. “On Easter, I do reflect on the fact that as a Christian, I am supposed to love,” Obama said. “And I have to say that sometimes when I listen to less-than-loving expressions by Christians, I get concerned.” As the crowd began to murmur, the president backed off, saying, “But that’s a topic for...

President Barack Obama appeared to poke fun at his critics Tuesday during an Easter prayer breakfast speech at the White House. “On Easter I do reflect on the fact that as a Christian I am supposed to love,” Obama said. “I have to say that sometimes when I listen to less-than-loving expressions by Christians I get concerned.” The President didn't specify what those "less-than-loving expressions" were. "But that's a topic for another day," he added to laughter and applause from the audience. "I was about to veer off. I'm pulling it back." Obama faced a barrage of criticism from the...

Obama’s Self-Professed “Confusion” About Islamic TerrorPosted By Raymond Ibrahim On February 27, 2015 @ 12:30 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 3 Comments During the National Prayer Breakfast earlier this month, U.S. President Obama tried to shield Islam from criticism by depicting Christianity as equally violent and intolerant (via comments about crusades, inquisitions, and “high horses”). Much lesser known is that he also tried to shield Islam by invoking Christian virtues.In many ways, his comments on “humility” might be the strangest of his entire speech—to the point that Obama himself got visibly confused, and admitted it, by his own lack of...

Obama's argument is part of ISIS' justification for merciless jihad. Within hours of the release of a horrific ISIS video showing the gruesome beheading of 21 Coptic Christians, Egypt launched retaliatory airstrikes against Islamic State targets in neighboring Libya where the mass murders apparently occurred. The bombings of ISIS training camps and weapons storage facilities, according to a report on Inquisitr, were Egypt’s first official foreign military action in some 24 years. The ISIS video graphically showing the beheadings of the helpless Christian captives has reportedly been confirmed as authentic by the Coptic Church. In that unspeakably horrible video, an...

resident Obama's scolding of Western civilization at the National Prayer Breakfast ("Lest we get on our high horse...") may go down in history as the emblematic moment of his presidency. It was atrociously ill timed and characteristically sophomoric. My colleague Jay Nordlinger observed that Obama sounded just like the students in the 1980s who, when presented with evidence of the Soviet gulag, would respond with the tu quoque rejoinder: "Well, what about racism?" During the Cold War, we called this the "moral equivalence" fallacy, because however grave our flaws were (and some were serious), they didn't exist on the same...

Osama bin Laden, meet Mother Teresa. Salvation Army, meet the Taliban. After all, you’re just different sides of the same coin anyway, or so says President Obama essentially. Last week, Obama famously used the National Prayer Breakfast to scold Christians for having more than their fair share of scalawags who have “hijacked” their religion, lest we judge these professed Muslims who are killing, raping, and pillaging all over the world. Thus, there is a moral equivalence between Islam and Christianity. We all have our good and our bad apples. He said, "Unless we get on our high horse and think...

resident Barak Obama didn't intend to make the Battle of Yarmuk (636 A.D.) a 2015 news item. However, his bizarrely incomplete sketch of the Crusades, delivered last week at a national prayer breakfast, did just that. The president's media defenders contend he intended to make a justifiable point: Throughout history, people have corrupted religious faith to self-serving, murderous ends. That, however, is an oft-repeated truth -- something everyone already knows. But our president, while repeating something we already know, equated medieval Christian crusaders with 21st-century Islamic State terrorists. See, man? They both committed atrocities. Obama started solid, dubbing the Islamic...

Barack Obama has one final year to realize that the National Prayer Breakfast just isn’t a good venue for him. Obama’s track record at the annual function has been little other than disastrous, and another president—one with a more hostile media and a less dedicated constituency—would have been ruined already by previous catastrophes.Obama’s problems with the National Prayer Breakfast began in earnest in 2012, when the keynote speech at the affair was given by author Eric Metaxas. The speech Metaxas gave in advance of Obama’s own address was a tour de force and an indictment, though a polite one, of...

President Obama, during his National Prayer Breakfast speech, Thursday: "No god condones terror. No grievance justifies the taking of innocent lives or the oppression of those who are weaker of fewer in number." All people at all times and locations have the right to defend themselves from terror. Despite Obama's words that have clearly angered people, we can see the following as an example: Christians within the confines of the Byzantine Empire had a right to defend themselves from Muslims who terrorized them, but we all know that Pope Urban II could in no way possible know that anyone who...

"A steady patriot of the world alone, "The friend of every country -- but his own." George Canning's couplet about the Englishmen who professed love for all the world except their own native land comes to mind on reading Obama's remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. After listing the horrors of ISIS, al-Qaida and Boko Haram, the president decided his recital of crimes committed in the name of Islam would be unbalanced, if he did not backhand those smug Christians sitting right in front of him. "And lest we get on our high horse ... remember that during the Crusades...

There was a time when the 63-year-old National Prayer Breakfast was a rather mundane affair. It rarely made news. Speakers -- evangelist Billy Graham spoke at most of the early ones -- talked about Jesus and salvation. Presidents, beginning with Dwight D. Eisenhower, would follow with unremarkable comments mostly ignored or relegated to the religion page by the secular press. In recent years the breakfast's higher purpose has sometimes been tainted by politics from a lower kingdom, not by the choice of the Senate and House members who alternate organizing the event, but by some speakers who have used it...

There is no doubt that President Obama’s remarks about Christianity at the National Prayer Breakfast last week were historically accurate. But they were also — let’s face it — glib, facile and patronizing. [snip of brief, gratuitous, misleading snark to burnish and retain his progressive credentials] My objection is that Obama — in drawing parallels between past atrocities perpetrated in the name of Christianity and current ones by terrorists acting in the name of Islam — constructed an all-too-pat narrative that lets everyone off the hook, including himself. The admonition not to “get on our high horse” about jihadist terror...

"....Something I have asked myself: Does he really believe what he says, or is it all just for political effect, to send conservatives into a tizzy, eat up the airwaves, and keep us off-balance? He must have known how ridiculous, how unintelligent, and how offensive his comments were going to sound, correct? There’s a pause after he delivers the Crusades remark, you can see it below, and I just wonder, did he know that this was a stupid thing to say? I hope so, I really do. Maybe he was just caught up in the moment, already committed to the...

resident Obama has hijacked Christianity in an attempt to defend Islam. At the National Prayer breakfast Thursday, he said, “There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency, that can pervert and distort our faith.” And that there will always be people willing to “hijack religion for their own murderous ends.” So we shouldn’t “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.” Yes, people have done terrible deeds in the name of Christ, but they were against the...

Mitchell criticized Obama for leaning over backwards to be philosophical days after it was found out that a captured Jordanian pilot was burned alive by ISIS. "You don't use the word Crusades, number one, in any context right now," Mitchell said on NBC's Meet the Press today. "It's just it's too fraught. And the week after a pilot is burned alive, in a video shown, you don't lean over backwards to be philosophical about the sins of the fathers. You have to deal with the issue that's in front of you or don't deal with it at all." Oddly, Mitchell's...

Joshua DuBois, former head of the White House Office of Faith-Based and Neighborhood Partnerships, appeared yesterday on MSNBC’s “UP with Steve Kornacki,” during which he defended President Obama’s profoundly insulting anti-Christian remarks at last Thursday’s National Prayer Breakfast in the Nation’s Capital. The president admonished Christians not to think their faith somehow different than the faith that has produced ISIL (and al Qaeda and Boko Haram and Abu Sayyaf and Hamas and Hezbollah and all too many other Islamic terrorist groups). “Remember,” spake Obama, “during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” And...

Nailed it

In response to President Barack Obama drawing a parallel between the barbaric acts of the Islamic State today with actions by Christians during the Crusades, which ended 700 years ago, evangelist Franklin Graham said there was a difference between Jesus Christ who “taught peace “ and did “not take life” versus Mohammed, who “was a warrior and killed many innocent people.” Reverend Graham further said that, “True followers of Christ emulate Christ – true followers of Mohammed emulate Mohammed.” President Obama made his remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday in Washington, D.C. He referenced the Islamist attacks on...

Obama: Christianity No Different Than the Islamic StatePosted By Raymond Ibrahim On February 6, 2015 @ 12:18 am In Daily Mailer,FrontPage | 40 Comments As the world reacts with shock and horror at the increasingly savage deeds of the Islamic State (IS)—in this case, the recent immolation of a captive—U.S. President Obama’s response has been one of nonjudgmental relativism.Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast on February 5, Obama counseled Americans to get off their “high horse” and remember that Christians have been equally guilty of such atrocities: Unless we get on our high horse and think this [beheadings, sex-slavery, crucifixion, roasting humans]...