“And 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.”
— President Barack Obama,
speaking at annual national Prayer Breakfast, Feb. 5, a few days
after radical Muslims released a video in which they burned a young
Jordanian pilot alive in a cage.
Of all the statements made
by presidents or any other politicians that I’ve heard in my
lifetime, this was the most outrageous — and for anyone who hasn’t
heard or read it, I must write about it here.
This month we celebrate
George Washington’s birthday. Imagine him on his magnificent white
high horse, as he fought to begin a better human history, being told
that in 235 years American voters would elect a president who’d
respond to evil by saying, well, other people have been evil too.
The prayer breakfast statement would be dumb to say about any bad
behavior at any time by any one, but keep in mind that America
didn’t exist during the Crusades (1095-1291) or the Inquisition
(1492), so the Christians noted by Obama weren’t Americans. What was
the point of his comment at an American prayer breakfast following
an act of radical Muslim terror?
Today is Abraham Lincoln’s
birthday. Imagine him at a prayer breakfast telling abolitionists to
get off their high horse, that slavery has existed throughout human
history so why be outraged by those southerners who practice it in
1863?
We’ve turned this part of
February into Presidents’ week, to honor all who’ve held our
nation’s highest elected position, so unfortunately, the great
merged with the mediocre, and now include the worst president in
history.
No normal person, never
mind one elected president by American voters, would address the
burning alive of a young pilot, during a period of kidnapping, rape
and slaughter of Christians in the Middle East and Africa, the
burying alive and crucifixion of children, happening now, in real
time, by lecturing us about the bad things Christians did in 1192,
in 1492.
I’d wonder why the
emphasis on Christians in his speech, since all religions have done
bad things, but fear the answer is obvious: Obama is, incredibly,
attempting to make moral equivalency between the worst elements of
the Muslim religion, today, and the worst historical elements of
what is presently the largest American religion, just to get America
off its “high horse” of exceptionalism, which he has always
disavowed.
It would have been fair to
remind his audience that not all Muslims are beheading infidels, and
noting that almost all the varied Muslim sects, even many
terrorists, are as horrified as we by the burning of the pilot. But
that’s not what he did. He reached back into the 12th and 15th
centuries, and even half a century of our own time, to compare
Christians to radical Muslims, so that we can, what? — identify with
them?
ISIS — the Islamic State,
which wants to conquer the world and force us all to submit to
sharia law in a radical Muslim caliphate — is evil. Those who join
it have made a decision that they can live their lives only within
the cult of hatred — of infidels in general, of independent women
and gays in particular, certainly of Israel, which has achieved so
much against centuries of terrible odds.
Raised Catholic myself, I
was taught that evil exists in the form of a red, forked-tail devil;
I eventually stopped believing in this manifestation, but still
found evil when I read “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” then learned about the
Holocaust.
I also learned about the
Crusades, but a romanticized version: the Catholic textbook and
teaching nuns made the Crusaders heroes, not mentioning their
atrocities en route to save the Holy Land for Christianity. I loved
the epic poem about Roland, nephew of Charlemagne, holding the pass
in Spain against the Saracens — the name given to Muslims at that
time.
However, somewhere I
picked up some balance, I think in the stories from my favorite
Robin Hood era, about King Richard, who led the Third Crusade
against the noble Saladin; and the movie “El Cid,” who drove the
Moors from Spain, where they had a great culture, building monuments
still admired today.
The Inquisition had no
redeeming qualities: my own present Christianity comes from
Dostoevsky’s “The Grand Inquisitor,” a story within “The Brothers
Karamazov.” Jesus returns to earth, to Seville, where he is
imprisoned as a threat to what his Church has become. The Grand
Inquisitor tells him that civilization can only be saved through
fear, by men being forced to obey. Jesus doesn’t buy this; his
libertarian response is a high point in world literature.
I love that Jesus. So even
if I’d been around, I wouldn’t have committed terrible deeds in His
name; wouldn’t have burned infidels in the Inquisition, any more
than excusing it in the present Islamic State. I was a young
northerner during the Civil Rights era, horrified when learning
about actions by the Ku Klux Klan. But this has nothing to do with
today, despite Obama bringing race into so many discussions.
Today, I want the
president of my country to set aside his intellectual discourse
about history, and simply share our disgust at the evil actions of
ISIS while vowing to somehow destroy it.
Barbara Anderson of
Marblehead is president of Citizens for Limited Taxation and a Salem
News columnist.
