Obama was right about the Crusades, but his point says a lot more about anti-Muslim violence today.
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By Matt Rozsa
If there is one thing we can learn from the Christian Right’s continued response to President Obama’s National Prayer Breakfast speech, it is that religious prejudice isn’t limited to any specific religion. Ironically, the online effort by social conservatives to rebut Obama’s most controversial point — namely, that we “remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ” — wound up demonstrating precisely why he was correct in making it. By distorting not only that landmark historical event but its implications for the modern world, Christian conservatives betray a fundamentalism and intolerance not terribly dissimilar from the Islamic variety they’re so quick to condemn.
This is how much right-wingers hate Obama. He spoke out against the Crusades, so NOW THEY’RE DEFENDING THE CRUSADES.
— Bilge Ebiri (@BilgeEbiri) February 8, 2015
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#ISIS sound an awful lot like #republicans. pic.twitter.com/tDHS11WzZC
— bennydiego (@bennydiego) February 6, 2015
“Obama’s defense of Islam was combined with repeated efforts to criticize Christianity, which provided the intellectual foundation for America’s culture of self-reliance and its small-government Constitution,” wrote Neil Munro of the Daily Caller. Characterizing the speech as “an attempt to deflect guilt from Muslim madmen,” Bill Donohue of the Catholic League published an online response that the “Crusades were a defensive Christian reaction against Muslim madmen of the Middle Ages.” Erick Erickson of RedState.com agreed, accusingObama’s speech of “reeking with contempt for faith in general and Christianity in particular” before claiming the Crusades “started as a response to Islamic invasion.”
“Obama is using his #NationalPrayerBreakfast remarks to defend Islam – without actually mentioning Islam,” tweeted Fox News’ Todd Starnes, later adding that “Obama reminds people at the #NationalPrayerBreakfast about the violence done by Christians during the Crusades.” Former Rep. Allen West was more succinct, tweeting “the Islamopologist-in-Chief is at it again trying to conflate Christianity with ISIS, at the prayer breakfast no less.” According to Louisiana Congressman Rep. John Fleming, though, he wasn’t just trying to conflate the two. Fleming argued, “Not only did he vilify Christianity, but he actually made a case to defend radical Islam, that’s killing people around the world.”
Anyone else find it hilarious that Obama resorted to the “BUT THE CRUSADES” stupidity?
— RB (@RBPundit) February 5, 2015
The Crusades!!!! Obama has to dig through the dustbin of history to the Crusades??!!! This may be his greatest #alinsky bait-and-switch EVER
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) February 5, 2015
Even an atheist would find Obama’s dragging out the Crusades a laughable political ploy.
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) February 5, 2015
Even an atheist would find Obama’s dragging out the Crusades a laughable political ploy.
— James Woods (@RealJamesWoods) February 5, 2015
Obama compares the evil in the Muslim religion to the Crusades?? Really. He needs a history lesson on what the… http://t.co/1nx3mijkUU
— Kevin Sorbo (@ksorbs) February 5, 2015
What Obama’s #Crusades comment actually proved: for over a 1,000 yrs, Muslims have killed Christians, burned churches & forced conversions.
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— anne (@amr033) February 5, 2015
Obama, Yes there were atrocities on both sides! But the #Crusades were a series of JUSTIFIED responses, by #Christians, to Muslim invaders!
— David Higgins (@dhiggins63) February 5, 2015
In fact, the Christians who slaughtered thousands of innocent Muslims and Jews during the Crusades were very much motivated by religious zealotry. “From a Western perspective, there was a growing interest in the Holy Land,” explained Jay Rubinstein, author of Armies of Heaven: The First Crusade and the Quest for Apocalypse, in an interview with Bloomberg. Depending on the historian, the motives ascribed to those who joined ranged from a desire for power or profit and “penance and the opportunity to have sins forgiven” to “a real sense of prophetic mission,” all stemming from the religious conviction that the Christian god would consider it holy to capture the Holy Land from the Islamic world.
Importantly, as historian Will Durant noted, the chief legacy of the defeat ultimately suffered by Christendom in the Crusades was that “the beaten West … wandered out on the high seas of reason, transformed its crude new languages into Dante, Chaucer, and Villon, and moved with high spirit into the Renaissance.”
As such, when members of the Christian Right attempt to defend the Crusades, they are doing more than rewriting history. They are perpetuating the very bigotry that caused that terrible event in the first place. As Vox’s Max Fisher argued, “Let’s be clear: The Obama Crusades controversy is over whether it’s OK to hate Muslims.”
On an immediate level, the revisionism is a poorly concealed attempt to simultaneously advance both the case for Christian exceptionalism and the prejudice that Islam is inherently more violent than other major world religions. By falsely inferring that the Crusades were a response to immediate Islamic aggression (even though four centuries separated the Muslim conquest of the Holy Land from the First Crusades), Christian conservative leaders are encouraging their followers to see the Muslims of a thousand years ago as no different than the so-called “Muslim madmen” in ISIS and al-Qaeda. Similarly, by arguing that the Christians were liberators instead of aggressors, the Right is playing on the “messianic” strain in American foreign policy that has fueled unwanted foreign interventions from the heyday of Wilsonianism to George W. Bush’s visions for Iraq.
If you dig deeper, however, the parallels between the Christian fundamentalists and Muslim counterparts like ISIS become even more troubling. “[ISIS] presents itself as an apocalyptic movement, talking about the end of days, the return of the caliphate and its eventual domination of the world,” said Hassan Hassan, co-author of ISIS: Inside the Army of Terror, in an interview with Israel National News. He argues that these beliefs of Islamic religious privilege are “mainstream”: “They are preached by mosques across the world, particularly in the Middle East. ISIS takes these existing beliefs and makes them more appealing by offering a project that is happening right now.”
Of course, many American conservatives do identify with Christian sects that openly proclaim that their faith is destined to conquer the world, including Dominionists like Rick Perryand Michele Bachmann. Many others, by erroneously insisting that the founding fathers intended for America to be a Christian nation, add an undercurrent of religious imperialism to their rationalization for American geopolitical interventionism. Even those who don’t overtly preach global conquest, however, often betray a level of intolerance for non-believers that would make them quite at home with ISIS if they happened to be Muslim instead of Christian. Indeed, the keynote speech at the Prayer Breakfast delivered by NASCAR driver Darrell Waltrip declared that “if you don’t know Jesus as your Lord and Savior” and “you’re just a pretty good guy or a pretty good gal, you’re going to go to Hell.”
In short, what you believe matters far less than your ability to accept and respect differences of opinion, especially in an Internet age where everyone’s viewpoints are given a public platform. For an authentic American perspective on this subject, we can best turn to Thomas Jefferson. “The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others,” the author of the Declaration of Independence famously wrote. “But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg. … Reason and free enquiry are the only effectual agents against error.”
As the hashtag #MuslimLivesMatter trends on Twitter in the aftermath of an alleged hate crime that took the lives of three Muslims in Chapel Hill, N.C., Jefferson’s words are more important than ever. In his Vox essay, Fisher reminded us, “A number of Americans, it seems, are clinging desperately to their anti-Muslim bigotry and are furious at Obama for trying to take that away from them,” and that bigotry, whether religiously motivated or otherwise, costs lives. Just as zealots like those in ISIS have been found in Christendom as well as amongst other faiths, they are finding a home today, as they crusade for hate in the name of justice.
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This article originally appeared on The Daily Dot.
Photo via DonkeyHotey/Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
This was such a stretch that I had to muster up what I could to speed read through it.
I’m ashamed that it was even printed … Oh wait, “Daily Dot” appears to be the up and coming feed. I may as well just go there and read the articles.
The more i read this article the more i see leftist spin doctoring. Consider the cartoon. Rightists with guns over bound science Ready to kill it over what? But we all know that wouldn’t even be in the picture vs isis in reality doing it. Then there is the idea supporting free speech and belief and respect. The left has no respect for the belief of the right nor the right for the left. But at least we can argue about it. In islam there is no free speech and no debate. In fact anything but the line means death.… Read more »
Besides. Our more recent history shows the fringe left is far more capapable of violence toward non believers in their “religion”. Look at the rise of anti free speech promoted by them via PC. The student riots and bombings in the 60s and even as recently as occupy Wall. The nailing” trees. Trying to ram fishing boats. They just believe theirs is a moral imperative much more like isis than the far right.
Fringe is always dangerous but isis is not fringe but a part of the overall islamic philosophy of their already established religious way of life.
Oh c’mon G. This, is one comment rather than a sweeping condemnation of all Christianity and hardly in the same category ad isis. It is nowhere near the same. And obama made the comparisons to the crusades not to wit all of Christianity today. To be sure we should be vigilant that the far right fringe doesn’t substantially impose its own version of sharia. But even at its worst wrstboro baptist is not held in any place anywhere near wide spread isis thought
Bill Moyer had an article earlier last week about some Negroes being hang and burn so yeah we can make a comparison between the two groups. On Alternet, there is an article where a Republican Congress man wants to arrest and jail women for wearing Yoga pants so we are being like Saudi Arabia and other Arab countries for dictating how women should were clothes http://www.alternet.org/news-amp-politics/gop-lawmaker-wants-arrest-and-jail-women-wearing-yoga-pants
Obama was NOT correct. The crusades were a political war to take back the christian holy land that had been taken by islam. If christians took mecca you might have an argument. But they didn’t and this article shows the fallacy of the left trying to make their pre predicated belief seem justified. Gee, now thats a real shocker hey?
When Christians start chopping people’s heads off and setting people on fire I might consider making a comparison between the two.
Well, just to point out… http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Wallace#Capture_and_execution Granted, 1305 is not the same as 2015; but I don’t think that really mattered a lot to William Wallace at the time (or, for that matter, anyone else executed in a similar manner for transgressions against a Divine Right monarchy) that in 700 years in the future his execution would indeed be seen as excessive, anachronistic, or otherwise unjust or barbaric. There is something to be said for historical contextualization, and not comparing unequal quantities as though all was equal when it was not. But given that, I would concede the point that,… Read more »
I think that’s the salient point, mostly. To excuse the barbarism of today, even remotely implying that its understandable since you guys did it too 700 years ago is way off the mark. Besides. If the muslims took the holy land first leading to the crusades then one can assume they killed off those folks first which started the whole thing off. But i’m not suggesting a tit for tat blame game as the president did. But to be fair the inquisition was not a holier than though place to be. They just liked to kill just about anybody.