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.
Cool story, President Bro.
So, what about those Muslims that burned a man to death in a fire so hot that his face melted off and poured into his own hands before he died just last month?
What about those guys, President Bro, because I do not give a damn crap about people did a few centuries ago.
True. Also consider the kind of response lefties give when you point out the atrocities of Communism. Without fail, they will say:
“Well those can’t be attributed to Communism, because Communism has never been truly implemented”
So, we could just say “Well, those acts can’t be attributed to Christianity, because anyone doing such things isn’t following true Christianity.”
Yeah, it’s the “no true Scotsman” fallacy, but since they rely on it so much, they can’t afford to point that out :)
six centuries ago!?????????????
so that gives O an excuse for his world-wide support of IslamoNazi aggression terrrorism subversion and mass murder, TODAY!?
BS flag time again, folks:
Probably not. He recently talked about George Washington sleeping in the White House. Huh?
Exactly. The crusades were a response to Muslim atrocities.
More have been killed by government in the name of the state and most of the time they killed those with religious beliefs.
LOL. Tow can play at that game. You know, Obama opposed gay marriage a couple years ago. You know, Obama smoked pot a couple decades ago. You know, Obama opposed deficit spending a decade ago. You know, the Democrats advocated slavery and White Supremacy a century or two ago. You know, the Democrats formed a terrorist army, the KKK, 150 years ago. This is fun, isn’t it?
You know, Obama’s Arab ancestors were buying and selling African slaves less than a few centuries ago.
Fool of a liar and Muslim Obama is too stupid to know the reason the crusades started in the first place was because the Muzzies were interfering with Christians visiting the Holy Land.
“The Crusades occurred solely to prevent The Religion of Pieces from conquering Europe.They were completely defensive from start to finish.”
That is correct. The Muslim armies had slaughtered millions of Christians in Europe and the Crusades were undertaken to stop them. The Crusades were justified then, and they will be justified in the future.
People need to read history...
What a piece of $h!t.
He hates Christians more than he supports Muslims.
What possible evidence do you use to support your assertion that he is “otherwise intelligent.” He’s dumber than a box of rocks.
BTW - The Crusades were a good thing.
LOL, That is right.
And then Christianity underwent something you might have heard of. It was called a Reformation. The Muslim religion needs one.
dummkopf
My erudition got the better of me.
Let the Kenyan commie b*stard try & deny that.
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