Obama Compares ISIS Brutality To The Crusades, Sparks Outrage
President Obama compared the Crusades to the barbaric actions of ISIS, after the terrorist group killed a Jordanian pilot by burning him alive earlier this week.
ISIS released a video showing the horrific death the young man suffered at the hands of his captors, which has sparked universal condemnation from the free world. As King Abdullah of Jordan is getting ready to retaliate for the death of one of his citizens, Obama is referencing the Crusades, in which murders were committed in the name of Christ.
While the president is correct in his assertion that many crimes have been committed throughout history, his critics are asking what he plans to do after ISIS stepped up their antics with the unthinkable killing of the Jordanian pilot.
At the same time, Mr. Obama used the strongest language to date to describe ISIS and their unspeakable crimes, AOL reports.
“We see ISIL, a brutal vicious death cult that in the name of religion carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism… claiming the mantle of religious authority for such actions.”
Obama has gone out of his way not to call ISIS an Islamic terrorist group, which has enraged his detractors. Many experts believe that unless the president recognizes what the western world is up against, it has no chance of defeating one of the biggest threats in recent memory.
The statement that garnererd almost an instant firestorm of criticism was his comparison of ISIS to the Crusades — a holy war sanctioned by the Roman Catholic Church during the Middle Ages — in which countless horrific methods were used to kill victims.
“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. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
However, many on social media are reminding Obama that ISIS is killing their own ilk, as their latest victim — the Jordanian pilot who was killed in the most horrific way — was also a Muslim.
Dan MacLaughlin of RedState has a detailed account of how and why the Crusades came to be, and why they are usually mentioned out of context.
“…when Islam first arose, much of what we think of today as Islamic ‘territory’ in Anatolia, the Levant and North Africa was Christian until conquered by the heirs of Muhammad, such that speaking of one side’s incursions into the others’ territory requires you to ignore how that territory was seized in the first place. That entire region had been part of the Roman and later Byzantine empires, and was culturally part of the West until it was conquered by Muslim arms – Rome is closer geographically to Tripoli than to London, Madrid is closer to Casablanca than to Berlin, Athens is closer to Damascus than to Paris.”
“All that said, it’s worth remembering that the Crusades arose in the late Eleventh Century only after four centuries of relentless Islamic efforts to conquer Europe, and the Christians of the Crusading era cannot be evaluated without that crucial context.”
Take a look at what is being said about Obama’s comparison between ISIS and the Crusades on social media
[Image via Ground Report, Mykhaylo Palinchak / Shutterstock.com]
