BBC AMERICA:
Behold the perils of invoking moral equivalency - even, or perhaps especially, when some of the events in question are separated by 800 years.
During a speech Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Barack Obama leavened his condemnation of the Islamic State's recent atrocities with a word of warning to his fellow Christians who wish to conflate the militant group's actions with Islam as a whole.
"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," the president said. "In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ."
Murderous extremism, he continued, "is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith."
The comments prompted an angry reaction - bordering on apoplexy - from many on the right.
Washington Post columnist Charles Krauthammer called the president's comments "banal and offensive" and "adolescent stuff".
"Christianity no longer goes on Crusades,"
he said on
Fox News "The story of today, of our generation, is the fact that the overwhelming volume of the violence and the barbarism that we are seeing in the world from Nigeria to Paris all the way to Pakistan and even to the Philippines, the island of Mindanao in the Philippines, is coming from one source, and that's from inside Islam."
Others, such as conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh,
took issue with the president's contention that IS is not reflective of Islam as a whole. "Sharia law is the present day threat to individual and civil liberties all over the world," he said. "Sharia is not a narrow cult. Sharia law is Islam."
» | Anthony Zurcher | Editor | Echo Chambers | Friday, February 06, 2015
