Thursday, February 5, 2015

Obama Condemns the Middle Ages

"We are summoned to push back against those who would distort our religion for their nihilistic ends," Obama said during remarks at the National Prayer Breakfast. He singled out the Islamic State group in Iraq and Syria, calling the militants a "death cult," as well as those responsible for last month's terror attacks in Paris and deadly assault on a school in Pakistan."
Obama had a more non-denominational message for the audience that also included prominent leaders of non-Christian faiths. The president said that while religion is a source for good around the world, people of all faiths have been willing to "hijack religion for their own murderous ends."

"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."
Only two or three days after ISIS released a gruesome video of the burning alive of a Jordanian pilot, in the name of Islam, the president of the US looks back... way back. Bizarre?  

37 comments:

Christy said...

I've made Obama's point myself, mostly to point out that Islam needs to grow up/ reform. Still. Today I am ashamed.

Leland said...

See the thing about the Crusades is that they pushed the Caliphate out of what is now Spain. One could argue, as Al Qaeda has, that all of North Africa and much of southern and western Europe were Muslim and should be returned to Islam, just like Israel returned to Palestine (as if... I digress). We are to forget that the Romans held that same territory before the Muslims.

Anyway, I would just like the Climate! community to quit referring to Inquisition time concepts like "layman" and various others appeal to authority rather than use of the scientific method in which hypothesis are actually tested by empirical evidence. You know, like seeing that temperatures have actually risen? Or seas actually rose? Or more severe hurricanes measured by wind speed and power, not by dollar value damage, as if cost of damage has always been a measure of energy intensity.

chickelit said...

IMPOTUS never speaks the mind of the American people - ever. Somebody must really have him by the short and curlies.

Lem the artificially intelligent said...

Profile in courage Obama condemning the crusades.

XRay said...

He has himself by the short and curlies. No outside influence needed.

chickelit said...

XRay said...He has himself by the short and curlies. No outside influence needed.

I disagree. I think he's beholdered to something greater. It probably involves money and debt. It probably came with the job.

chickelit said...

The mere fact that the same people who despise ISIS can support Jordan's response tells me that those people aren't anti-Muslim bigots. BTW, did IMPOTUS or his handlers respond or comment at all on Jordan's response?

Chip Ahoy said...
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Chip Ahoy said...

Crusades are a bad example of Christian aggression because there would be no crusades were there no Islamic aggression so nanner nanner booboo stick your head in doodoo.

Plus that was then and this is now. And that is all very trite. What is this, the 7th grade? Why yes, I suppose it is. If you must reach that far back for your equivalency points then you are doing poorly.

It this Obama's way of saying we ain't all that ourselves, we get it, we get it, we get it. If this is Obama's way of saying that wasn't so long ago right here (by associating radical Islam beheading Christians with Jim Crow laws) then I must say, for a so-called progressive you sure do dwell in the past. At least go there for a lot for your didactic examples.

A long time ago I asked my Krishna friend what he thought about 9-11 and he said not much. I asked why not, why his hackles weren't up.

He said, "We shouldn't do anything. What the heck. We bomb each other's buildings all the time."

Astonishing. But see the difference? The president reaches to the past to make his equivalency, the Krishna guy acknowledges it is utterly ordinary smack dab in the present, we blow up each other's buildings (all the time). That's how he sums it up.

edutcher said...

Vintage Uncle Saul, but the Crusades ended about 800 years ago.

The Moslems still think this stuff is cool.

Leland said...

See the thing about the Crusades is that they pushed the Caliphate out of what is now Spain

No crusades in El Andalus; they were intended to free the Holy Land.

Also the Crusades ended a couple of hundred years before the Reconquista.

Consider Ferd, Is, and Chris Columbus.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

Summoned to push back . . .

Summoned?

Summoned by whom, by God?

Sounds like crusade-talk to me.

AllenS said...

The Crusades were even worse than you think. When I have more time, I'll tell you about the time when Brian Williams and myself crossed that big desert on some camels.

Unknown said...

In order to make a tortured point about moral relativism, the left MUST travel back in time to do so.

Unknown said...

He also brought up Jim Crow and made a tortured comparison.

Unknown said...
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Unknown said...
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Unknown said...

I have mentioned this before.
A friend of mine is on the political far left. She cannot talk about radical Islam without mentioning the abortion doc killer as the main reason why she feels it is obvious that radical Islam and Christianity are the same.

Some of my neighbors went an open house at the new Islamic Center around the corner (yes - true story )(It used to be a Baptist church now it is an Islamic Center) A neighbor asked about condemning terror - and the answer from the Islamic Center was -- Why condemn ? Americans have an abortion killer doctor who killed in the name of Christianity.

The meme is the same from both camps.
The left have it all figured out. They refuse to look honestly at Modern Islamic terror because is breaks their entire paradigm. They must find some thread of evidence that all other religions, especially Christianity, are just as evil.

The fact that our own president indulges in this logic is beyond pathetic.

the left's anti- free speech stance with Charlie Hebdo is all telling.

Mitch H. said...

edutcher:

The last official eastern crusade came a cropper some fifty years before the final war of the Hispanic Reconquista, the so-called "Crusade of Varna" in 1443-1444 along the lower Danube. After that, the popes didn't have the prestige or global vision to really pull for full-throat declared "crusades", having been drawn heavily into Italian politics and warfare.

But now and again the Renaissance and Counter-Reformation popes threw their weight behind alliances which can sort of look like crusades from the right angle. The "Holy League" that backed the fleet that broke the Ottomans at Lepanto in 1571 is an example of what I'm talking about. The eastern and central Mediterranean was dotted by literal Crusader outposts like Malta and Rhodes before the final siege of 1522, from which Hospitaler pirates sallied forth to seize Muslim shipping and take slaves among the infidel.

Unknown said...

Even at a prayer breakfast, this man is a weird twisted anti-free speech morally confused dictator.

More Obama: Freedom of speech obligates us to condemn insults to religion

Unknown said...

Q: "Who decides what qualifies as an insult? "

Obama Answer: The bullies in black face masks with machine guns and radical delicate beliefs. Please, don't hurt their feelings. You know you have it coming if you do.


*Please note: No one died because of piss Christ.

Eric the Fruit Bat said...

In one of the lecture series I listened to, on medieval European history, the guy said that there were a good number of incidents where noblemen would levy extra taxes to finance their expedition to fight in the Holy Crusades and then use the money to buy big screen TVs and outdoor kitchens and stuff like that.

Evi L. Bloggerlady said...

Obama knows less about Christianity than he does about Islam…and that is saying a lot.

William said...

The Mongol invasion of Islamic lands occurred after the Crusades. The Mongol sack of Baghdad was much more thorough and horrendous than anything the Crusaders ever did. It destroyed learning and civilization in that part of the world for centuries. Historians used to blame the Mongol Invasion for the backwardness of the Baghdad area.. Sadly, the Mongols were not European, nor even Christian so it's no longer possible to talk of their negative effects on Islamic lands.

Rabel said...

ISIS has an American female hostage. Obama is scared shitless of how the final outcome of that situation will reflect on him.

Amartel said...

She's dead, apparently. Jordanian airstrikes to blame. (Yeah, right.)

Amartel said...

The Middle Ages condemn Obama:

"I don't want to talk to you no more, you empty-headed animal food trough wiper! I fart in your general direction! Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries!"

Mitch H. said...

William: The Mongolian invasions of the Middle East occurred while the Crusader States of the Levant were under pressure, and concurrently with the last three-four crusades to actually reach the Levant, and the last crusader city of Acre only fell in 1291. It was a truism in historiography of the period when I was in school that the Mongolian incursions extended the life-span of the Crusaders in the East by about thirty years.

As for ferocity - I can't make much of a distinction between the Crusader sack of Jerusalem, the Mongol destruction of Baghdad, and the ruthless Muslim massacres of Acre. But then, maybe I'm not enough of a connoisseur of atrocity to make those fine distinctions.

Amartel said...

Obama spox sez: "Obama wanted Americans to be humble and honest about its past."

Zee highlarious comedy jokes, zey write zemzelves.

[Also, point of clarification: does dull Barry think the Crusades happened in America?]

Fr Martin Fox said...

Christians no more need to apologize for the Crusades than Americans need to apologize for waging World War II.

For specific wrong actions as part of them? Yes. And the same is true for WW2.

Fr Martin Fox said...

And most people get the Inquisition all wrong too.

In fact, most history of the 2nd millenium is badly colored by the polemics of the Reformation, and then the Enlightenment.

Methadras said...

The crusades were basically the first surge to push Muslims out of Europe and to protect pilgrimages to the holy land. However, the Muslim-in-Sharia in office doesn't see it that way when he plays his moral equivalence card because that would mean he needs to lie in order to equivocate what ISIS is doing as being the same as what happened in the crusades over a millennia ago. Never mind the fact that Christianity has seen reformation, so what has Islam done? Only gotten worse. Yay!!!

edutcher said...

AllenS said...

The Crusades were even worse than you think. When I have more time, I'll tell you about the time when Brian Williams and myself crossed that big desert on some camels.

Was that the one with Peter O'Toole or Chuck Heston?

And, y'know, Sophia Loren and Liz Taylor...

Were they, y'know..., real?

Mitch H. said...

edutcher:

The last official eastern crusade came a cropper some fifty years before the final war of the Hispanic Reconquista, the so-called "Crusade of Varna" in 1443-1444 along the lower Danube. After that, the popes didn't have the prestige or global vision to really pull for full-throat declared "crusades", having been drawn heavily into Italian politics and warfare.


Granted, but when you hear "Crusades", you think Richard, Saladin, Jerusalem.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

What was the aim of the crusades and which parts of the inquisition are under-appreciated, O Great Spiritual Guide?

I doubt you could lead a camel through the desert, but please let everyone know what these great goals were in marauding through Jerusalem and torturing heretics, that have been lost to history. Kindly summon your direct link to the Heavens and explicate these unjustly besmirched grand endeavors.

Bleach Drinkers Curing Coronavirus Together said...

Fox severely resents being subjected to any historical inquisitions. Thou shalt not inquire into his understanding of the past. He's rather more a one-way inquisitor.

chickelit said...

"Why hast Thou come now to hinder us?"

chickelit said...

Pray for more Schislam

Mitch H. said...

ritmo, all I'm sayin', if'n you-all are goin' to make mock a' holy men, y'all ought to keep an eye out for bears.