The Crusades Are Irrelevant

The Crusades Are Irrelevant

By Jack Kelly - 

Radical Islamists and Christians both have bloody hands, President Barack 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 Muslims” after the Muslim conquest of Christian Jerusalem in 638 AD, wrote Douglas Murray for the Gatestone Institute.

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

Crusaders committed atrocities. Muslims committed atrocities. Muslims probably 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.”

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, the Islamic State group 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 at National Review Online.

Slavery is older than recorded history, was practiced everywhere in the world, but perhaps by no groups more vigorously than by Muslims, who over 14 centuries enslaved nearly 100 million non-Muslims, 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. 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,” wrote Mr. Murray.

A century after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, slavery was legal in Saudi Arabia. It is still practiced by Muslims in Mauritania and by the brutal extremists of Boko Haram in Nigeria.

“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,” Gen. Flynn said on Fox News.

“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,” wrote former National Security Council staffer Marc Thiessen in The Washington Post.

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