So Barack Obama, leftwing community organizer and closet theologian, used the National Prayer Breakfast to throw a tu quoque at anyone critical of Islam while continuing to fancy himself as the Pope of Islam:

“Unless 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,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

Obama also denounced Islamic State terrorists for professing to stand up for Islam when they were actually “betraying it.”

“We see ISIL, a brutal vicious death cult that in the name of religion carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism,” he said criticizing them for “claiming the mantle of religious authority for such actions.”

I am not more equipped to argue Islamic theology than Obama. Suffice it to say that killing people for insulting Mohammed and for leaving Islam are not practices that are rejected by orthodox muslims living in the muslim world.  Granted, you can find a few people who are adherents to any religion who will do bad things. The real difference comes when there is a demonstrable departure from faith by an action (like, say, burning a prisoner of war alive) and when actions are endemic to a religion. Here I must note that Obama’s best friends in Iran continue to hang Christian converts from Islam.

Obama’s criticism of the Crusades is really bizarre. While I’d be the last to assert that the Crusades were carried out under the Hague and Geneva Conventions the fact remains that the areas of the Middle East we consider to the muslim were Christian areas. Saint Paul was from Turkey. Saint John and Mary, mother of Christ, died in Turkey. Saint Augustine was born in Algeria. The current populations are muslim because their forefathers were conquered and forcibly converted to Islam from Christianity and Judaism. To look at the Crusades as Western aggression is something only a community organizer could do. The Crusades were the West’s counter-reaction to Islamic aggression.Likewise, the Inquisition (which I hasten to point out was not a concept limited to Catholics, Elizabeth I cheerfully burned Catholics just as her sister Mary had burned Protestants) has been studied and explained.

While he is correct that Jim Crow and slavery were both justified by their supporters using religious texts he ignores the fact that Christians, using those same texts, led the fight to end the slave trade, emancipate slaves, and give civil rights to former slaves. This is something that still has not been accomplished in the Islamic world. By the same token, holding up finite events that are 500 years old as a valid comparison to what is happening in Europe and the Islamic world today is just the worst sort of demagoguery.

Watch the whole thing. It is chock full of stupid.