{"id":1253,"date":"2015-02-17T21:33:45","date_gmt":"2015-02-18T02:33:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/?p=1253"},"modified":"2015-02-17T21:33:45","modified_gmt":"2015-02-18T02:33:45","slug":"obama-and-our-high-horse","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2015\/02\/obama-and-our-high-horse.html","title":{"rendered":"Obama and Our High Horse"},"content":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a sad commentary on our time that anyone, <\/em>to say nothing of the President of the United States of America, would so much as think, <\/em>much less publicly announce, that there is some sort of moral equivalence between the contemporary phenomenon of Islamic barbarity and such oft-cited examples of Western and American injustices as the Crusades, slavery, and Jim Crow.\u00a0 Some comments are in order.<\/p>\n

First, critics who make the \u201cThat Was Then, This Is Now,\u201d argument against Obama not only sorely miss the point; they actually legitimize <\/em>his contention that Christians are <\/em>guilty of the charge that Obama levels against them.<\/p>\n

The truth is that while individual <\/em>Crusaders, like individual soldiers in every war, were indeed guilty of some horrible things, the Crusades as such <\/em>were just.\u00a0 Obama typifies the Christophobe who can\u2019t resist treating the Crusades as an axiomatic instance of Christian villainy while conveniently refusing to mention that they were a response to centuries<\/em> of Islamic <\/em>aggression.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s right: For centuries <\/em>Islamic armies had been conquering <\/em>Christian lands generally and the Holy Land specifically.\u00a0 And the invasion into Europe was well underway by the time Urban II issued a call for the first holy war in 1095.<\/p>\n

\u201cFrom the confines of Jerusalem and from the city of Constantinople,\u201d the Pope exclaimed, \u201ca grievous report has gone forth [.]\u201d\u00a0 The word was indeed \u201cgrievous,\u201d for \u201ca race from the kingdom of Persians,\u201d what the Pope characterized as \u201can accursed race,\u201d \u201chas violently invaded the lands\u201d of Christians \u201cand has depopulated them by pillage and fire.\u201d\u00a0 These Persians\u2014Muslims\u2014\u201chave led away a part of the captives into their own country, and a part,\u201d he says, \u201cthey have killed by cruel tortures.\u201d\u00a0 Churches had been destroyed and \u201cthe kingdom of the Greeks\u201d has been \u201cdismembered\u201d and \u201cdeprived of territory so vast in extent that it could not be traversed in two months\u2019 time.\u201d<\/p>\n

Obama is right that the Crusades most certainly were conducted by Christians in the name of Christ.\u00a0 But unless defending one\u2019s person and property against those who mean to deprive one of them is immoral, the Crusades per se <\/em>amounted to an eminently just enterprise.\u00a0 That abuses and even atrocities occurred in the Crusades no more establishes the injustice of the Crusades as such<\/em> than does the fact that abuses, and even atrocities, occur within marriages and families establish the immorality of marriage and family as such.<\/em><\/p>\n

Second, slavery had been a global institution from time out of mind.\u00a0 In the Christian world, and in America, slavery was not conducted \u201cin the name of Christ,\u201d as Obama maintains.\u00a0 It\u2019s true that slave owners, including and especially Christian<\/em> slave owners, frequently alluded to the Bible to show that the fanatical<\/em> abolitionists\u2019 charge that slavery was a sin <\/em>was unsustainable.\u00a0 However, many of these same Christian slave holders nevertheless believed that slavery was<\/em> an evil that needed to be abolished.<\/p>\n

Even still, only a woefully impoverished moral imagination could fail to recognize the relevant differences between, on the one hand, the situation of slavery in which earlier generations of Americans found themselves, to say nothing of the situation of Jim Crow (!) that Americans eradicated more recently, and, on the other, the situation that ISIS and other Islamic jihadists are creating for their victims whenever and wherever they rear their beastly heads.\u00a0 Indeed, such is the sophomoric character of Obama\u2019s moral vision that it would be laughable if it weren\u2019t so damn offensive\u2014and dangerous: \u00a0In one and the same breath, he speaks of both<\/em> a white segregationist\u2019s refusal to associate with blacks and<\/em> an Islamic fanatic\u2019s refusal to grant mercy to a person who he instead cages and eventually burns to death<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Third, more galling than Obama\u2019s historical illiteracy and moral idiocy is his rank hypocrisy.\u00a0 Though he talks of \u201cwe\u201d when implying moral parity between Islamic violence and the violence perpetrated by Christians in the past, Obama most certainly does not <\/em>mean what he says.\u00a0 What he is really <\/em>saying is that you\u2014all<\/em> of you white Christians<\/em>\u2014must not shed any of that white guilt<\/em> that\u2019s paid off so well for the Barack Obamas of the world.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s be frank: Leftists like Obama have been able to perpetuate the fiction\u2014the invidious fiction\u2014that, to paraphrase one of his fellow leftists, the white race is \u201cthe cancer\u201d of the planet, by ignoring the evils committed by the world\u2019s peoples of color.\u00a0 For you see, when the historical conduct of whites is compared with, not contemporary Western standards, but the historical\u2014and present\u2014<\/em>conduct of all <\/em>peoples, it becomes crystal clear that the injustices for which whites, and white Christians in particular, are forever being blamed and for which they are forever atoning are common to the human species.<\/p>\n

But more than this, remarkably, it is only among whites, and especially among white Christians, that a genuine moral revulsion of these perennial practices arose.\u00a0 Whites, especially white Christians, though the majority and the wielders of power in the West, made enormous sacrifices to rectify not just those wrongs that were done to fellow white Christians; <\/em>but as well those wrongs suffered by non-whites and non-Christians<\/em>, both in the West and beyond<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Obama and his ilk in the Racism-Industrial-Complex have too much to lose if this dirty little secret gets out.<\/p>\n

It is this, more so than anything else, that explains why, in the light of the Islamic savagery on display in the fatal burning of a Jordanian pilot, Obama had <\/em>to warn us against getting on \u201cour<\/em> high horse.\u201d \u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

It\u2019s a sad commentary on our time that anyone, to say nothing of the President of the United States of America, would so much as think, much less publicly announce, that there is some sort of moral equivalence between the contemporary phenomenon of Islamic barbarity and such oft-cited examples of Western and American injustices as…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":399,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1253","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nObama and Our High Horse<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2015\/02\/obama-and-our-high-horse.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Obama and Our High Horse\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"It\u2019s a sad commentary on our time that anyone, to say nothing of the President of the United States of America, would so much as think, much less publicly announce, that there is some sort of moral equivalence between the contemporary phenomenon of Islamic barbarity and such oft-cited examples of Western and American injustices as…\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2015\/02\/obama-and-our-high-horse.html\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"At the Intersection of Faith and Culture\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2015-02-18T02:33:45+00:00\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Jack Kerwick\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","yoast_head_json":{"title":"Obama and Our High Horse","robots":{"index":"index","follow":"follow","max-snippet":"max-snippet:-1","max-image-preview":"max-image-preview:large","max-video-preview":"max-video-preview:-1"},"canonical":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2015\/02\/obama-and-our-high-horse.html","og_locale":"en_US","og_type":"article","og_title":"Obama and Our High Horse","og_description":"It\u2019s a sad commentary on our time that anyone, to say nothing of the President of the United States of America, would so much as think, much less publicly announce, that there is some sort of moral equivalence between the contemporary phenomenon of Islamic barbarity and such oft-cited examples of Western and American injustices as…","og_url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2015\/02\/obama-and-our-high-horse.html","og_site_name":"At the Intersection of Faith and Culture","article_published_time":"2015-02-18T02:33:45+00:00","author":"Jack Kerwick","twitter_card":"summary_large_image","schema":{"@context":"https:\/\/schema.org","@graph":[{"@type":"WebPage","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2015\/02\/obama-and-our-high-horse.html","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2015\/02\/obama-and-our-high-horse.html","name":"Obama and Our High Horse","isPartOf":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/#website"},"datePublished":"2015-02-18T02:33:45+00:00","dateModified":"2015-02-18T02:33:45+00:00","author":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/#\/schema\/person\/6832222998cc14717ded1849531201c5"},"breadcrumb":{"@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2015\/02\/obama-and-our-high-horse.html#breadcrumb"},"inLanguage":"en-US","potentialAction":[{"@type":"ReadAction","target":["https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2015\/02\/obama-and-our-high-horse.html"]}]},{"@type":"BreadcrumbList","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/2015\/02\/obama-and-our-high-horse.html#breadcrumb","itemListElement":[{"@type":"ListItem","position":1,"name":"Home","item":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture"},{"@type":"ListItem","position":2,"name":"Obama and Our High Horse"}]},{"@type":"WebSite","@id":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/#website","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/attheintersectionoffaithandculture\/","name":"At the Intersection of Faith and Culture","description":"Beliefnet Voices - 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