ISIS immolates a pilot, Obama retaliated by attacking Christianity. You see, somehow it’s OUR fault that Islamic extremists commit these heinous acts.
“There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency, that can pervert and distort our faith.”
We are guilty of the crime of high-horsery.
“Lest 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. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
How dare we Christians be offended by barbarous Islamic violence? What were we thinking?
And he screwed that up too. Let’s have a look at Professor Obama’s historic moral equivalences.
The Crusades
The Crusades were a response to the Muslim invasion of Europe and the Holy Lands.
The Crusades were started by the Muslims in the year 630 A.D. when Muhammad invaded and conquered Mecca. Later on, Muslims invaded Syria, Iraq, Jerusalem, Iran, Egypt, Africa, Spain, Italy, France, etc. The Western Crusades started around 1095 to try to stop the Islamic aggressive invasions. Islamic Crusades continued even after the Western Crusades.
The Crusades are routinely misrepresented:
One of the most potent myths of our age is that the Crusades were little more than an unprovoked attack by a barbarous Europe against a quiescent and cultured Islamic world. According to conventional ideas, the seventh and eighth centuries constitute the great age of Islamic expansion. By the eleventh century — the time of the First Crusade — we are told that the Islamic world was quiescent and settled and that, by implication, the Crusaders were the aggressors. Indeed, the Crusaders are routinely portrayed as a horde of barbarians from a backward and superstitious Europe irrupting into the cultured and urbane world of the eleventh century Near East.
This at least is the populist language often employed on television and in newspaper articles. In my recent book Holy Warriors: Islam and the Demise of Classical Civilization, I have shown however that before the advent of Islam Christians had no concept of “Holy War” at all, and that it was from the Muslims themselves that Europeans took this idea. I showed too that the Crusades, far from being an unprovoked act of aggression on the part of Christian Europe, was part of a rearguard action aimed at stemming the Muslim advance which, by the start of the eleventh century, was threatening as never before to overwhelm the whole of Europe.
Spanish Inquisition
Again, let’s have a look at its genesis:
The Spanish Inquisition can be seen as an answer to the multi-religious nature of Spanish society following the reconquest of the Iberian Peninsula from the Muslim Moors. After invading in 711, large areas of the Iberian Peninsula were ruled by Muslims until 1250, when they were restricted to Granada, which fell in 1492.
Obama’s remarks came the day after a “secret” meeting with Muslim leaders, off-limit to the press and to photographers.
Whether or not you find the Crusades and the Inquisition offensive, the fact remains that both were reactions to Islamic aggression. For Obama to draw a moral equivalence between the Christianity of ages ago and the Islam of today is to remind us all that Islam is a millennium behind the civilized world and of Islam’s continuous history of violence.
But what sort of history can you expect from a guy who thinks George Washington lived in the White House?
DrJohn has been a health care professional for more than 30 years. In addition to clinical practice he has done extensive research and has published widely with over 70 original articles and abstracts in the peer-reviewed literature. DrJohn is well known in his field and has lectured on every continent except for Antarctica. He has been married to the same wonderful lady for over 30 years and has three kids- two sons, both of whom are attorneys and one daughter on her way into the field of education.
DrJohn was brought up with the concept that one can do well if one is prepared to work hard but nothing in life is guaranteed.
Except for liberals being foolish.