WAS OBAMA’S SMEAR OF CHRISTIANITY JUST STUPID OR WORSE?

Radical Islamists and Christians both have bloody hands, Barack Hussein Obama said at the National Prayer Breakfast Feb. 5.

"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," he said. "In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ."

Mr. Obama’s moral equivalence shocked even those accustomed to his habitual disregard for truth.

 "To compare the depredations of the Islamic State with those of the Crusaders is patronizing in the extreme," said liberal Washington Post columnist Eugene Robinson.

It was like FDR saying he couldn’t speak out against Hitler because of what we did to the Indians a century ago, said MSNBC talk show host Joe Scarborough.

The Crusades were an effort "to defend Christians in the Middle East who were being slaughtered by Moslems" after the Moslem conquest of Christian Jerusalem in 638 AD, said Douglas Murray of the Gatestone Institute.

In calling the First Crusade in 1195, Pope Urban II said Moslems have "invaded the lands (of the Christians of Jerusalem and Constantinople) and have depopulated them by the sword, pillage and fire."

Crusaders committed atrocities. Moslems committed atrocities. Moslems committed more.

"The Egyptian leader Baybars, for example, captured the Christian city of Antioch in 1268 and massacred its entire population," noted Thomas Madden, a professor of Medieval History at St. Louis University. "Even Salah al Din, who is generally well regarded today, estimated he had killed or executed 40,000 European Christians after the Battle of Hattin in 1187."

Christ never commanded His followers to murder His critics, Raymond Ibrahim noted. Mohammed did.

Religious persecution by Christians effectively ended with the Thirty Years War (1618-1648). Joan of Arc was burned at the stake in 1431. A week ago, ISIS burned a Jordanian pilot to death. "There is a gap," noted columnist Charles Krauthammer.

"Isn’t the allegation that Islamic evil at the present time is morally equivalent to Christian evil a thousand years ago a damning indictment of the present state of much of Islam?" asked Dennis Prager

Slavery is older than recorded history, was practiced everywhere in the world, by no one more vigorously than by Moslems, who over 14 centuries enslaved nearly 100 million non-Moslems, mostly black Africans, estimates Ralph Peters, a retired Army intelligence officer.

For centuries before there was a United States, "endless slave caravans crossed the Sahara, while Arab slave ships plied the Indian Ocean and Red Sea," he said.

Christians didn’t begin slavery. (Protestant) Christians ended it.

 "It is a very strange interpretation of history to put the blame for slavery on Christians, but to ignore William Wilberforce, Abraham Lincoln and other Christians who led the world in fighting to abolish it," Mr. Murray said.

A century after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery was legal in Saudi Arabia. It is still practiced by Moslems in Mauritania and Sudan, by Boko Haram in Nigeria, and ISIS in Iraq.

"The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President," said Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal.  "Please deal with the radical Islamic threat today."

He isn’t doing nearly enough, say retired generals Jack Keane and James Mattis, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell, and former Defense Intelligence Agency Director Michael Flynn.

 "You can’t defeat an enemy you don’t admit exists," LtGen. Flynn said.

The purpose of Mr. Obama’s "deep dive into moral equivalence" is to "soften up the outrage" that will follow the announcement expected soon of his "complete appeasement of Iran’s nuclear ambitions," radio talk show host Hugh Hewitt thinks.

"When the president of the United States watches Islamic terrorists burn a man alive in a cage and responds by saying we should not ‘get on our high horse’ because ‘people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,’ it is a propaganda victory for the terrorists," said former National Security Council staffer Marc Thiessen.

Whatever his reasons, said Liz Peek of the Fiscal Times, "President Obama has given ISIS a propaganda clip of incalculable value."

Here’s a scary question:  Did he do this on purpose?

Jack Kelly is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

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