President Barack Obama stirred outrage with his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday, comparing the atrocities committed by ISIS to those of Christians “in the name of Christ.”
“Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and 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.”
“So it is not unique to one group or one religion,” Obama said. “There is a tendency in us, a simple tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.”
The comments drew swift reaction.
Appearing on “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan fumed at Obama comparing the extreme barbarity of ISIS to the Crusades.
“He’s trying to give them all equivalence to what happened in the 11th century to what’s happening today? It’s astonishing,” Buchanan said.
“The whole idea of the Inquisition in Spain – I mean these things are hundreds of years ago. That was a 30-year war long, long ago.
“I can’t think of any atrocities that have really been committed in the name of Christ … There’s no justification anywhere in all the books of the New Testament for any kind of violence on the scale of what we just saw with that Jordanian pilot.”
Buchanan said Obama has a “real problem with the cold hard truth and reality of our times” regarding terrorism.
“There is an element in the Islamic community worldwide, which has awakened and is embarked on a global crusade of its own to conquer western countries,” Buchanan said.
“But first [they want to conquer] Arab and Muslim countries and to impose upon them a Sharia law to expel the Christians, Jews, and the nonbelievers if they’re Shiite and not part of what they consider the mainstream.
“They’re using all manner of violence in order to achieve this, from Boko Haram to ISIS to Ansar al-Sharia and to al-Qaida. Can the president not see the reality of his own time that he’s got to retreat centuries to find what he thinks might be a moral equivalence?”
Buchanan also objected to Obama’s reference to racial segregation laws during the Jim Crow era during the same speech.
“To call it Jim Crow, which was a form of segregation of racists; to say that was rooted in Christianity, it seems to be an absurdity and injustice,” he said.
Former U.S. Rep. Allen West said: “President Obama is the gift that keeps on giving,’ “The Islamapologist-in-Chief attempted to find moral equivalency between the brutality of ISIS and Christianity.”
And in a statement on his website, Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, said “the president should apologize for his insulting comparison.”
Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, a Republican, said Obama’s remarks were “the most offensive I’ve ever heard a President make in my lifetime.”
Gilmore said it illustrated that “Obama does not believe in America or the values we all share. There is no moral equivalency for the horrific behavior of terrorists whose atrocities are shocking and reprehensible”
Reaction also poured in on Twitter.
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@ yamit82:
No genocide of the Philistines was based on any commandment.
If you think otherwise, produce the cite.
@ bernard ross:
That’s your favorite charge. But it’s not evasion when the question is not clear or both parties do not agree as to what it means.
I can guess at what he thinks he means.
It’s not about what I know.
It’s about what HE knows.
And he hasn’t commented on the verses he quoted. I see no problem w/ the verses. If he does, it’s up to him to say WHAT
— because at this point it’s not at all clear to me that he even knows what those verses mean.
What ‘questions’?
It’s you who are evading.
I’ve asked you a dozen times or more whether you consider independent non-church affiliated scholars who specialize in NT studies whether you regard them as “Christian sources,” a term which YOU introduced to the exchange and used many times.
You’ve systematically — and quite conspicuously — ignored the question. Now, THAT’s evasion.
I think you’re as clueless as Huff’n’puff is, and that you think to use these unclear ‘questions’ of YOURS to control the direction of discourse. Aint gonna happen.
@ bernard ross:
No. Christ himself defined his followers as those who followed his TEACHING
— as you would know if you read those teachings.
If they don’t accept his DISCIPLINE, they are not, in fact, his DISCIPLES — regardless of what they call themselves.
Yep; people who took the name of Christ.
I’m not the pretender here; you are.
HONEST Jews (not all Jews are like you) know that the name somebody takes for himself does not necessarily tell you what he’s made of.
Sometimes it only tells you the lengths he will go to HIDE what he’s made of.
@ bernard ross:
What’s the question? Seems to me that I answered the only question that’s been asked so far.
And what ‘issue’ would that consist of?
Until I hear a discernible question, yes.