THE PRESIDENT’S MANGLED HISTORY: Please Stop Thinking He’s a Genius
Seriously, people. This man appears to have gotten his world history from the Castro brothers, his understanding of Judaism from Josef Goebbels, and his American history from Howard Zinn (actually, that last is not at all improbable; the anti-American hack is all the rage in the Ivies, I’m told.) If this is what Harvard has been teaching, it should be closed down, and the earth upon which it sat salted so that nothing will ever grow there again.
Let’s start (and, perhaps, finish—I don’t have much room allotted here) with the abysmal word salad of nonsense he spewed out at the National Prayer Breakfast. Speaking to a few thousand people who know their way around both religion and history, the President of the United States phenomenally beclowned himself by drawing a twisted moral equivalence between ISIS (which he calls “ISIL,” either because he doesn’t realize it insults the nation of Israel–or, perhaps, because he does) and both the Christian crusades and America’s history of slavery:
“And 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. In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
Setting aside that the “Inquisition” was a series of different events, most of which were directed by heads of state, not solely the Church, let’s focus on Muslim aggression, the Crusades, and slavery.
Of those three events, the Muslim jihad against the Christian West has lasted the longest, with slavery a far, far distant second (by about 1000 years) and the Crusades barely a blip in world history, occupying 200 years to the Jihadists’ whopping 1400. However, for Obama, all meanness is the same—unless you are objecting to violations of your religious freedom, in which case, he expects you to just suck it up.
When the alleged leader of the free world has the same understanding of Middle Eastern history as the insurgents and tyrants of the still-not-free-and-convinced-it’s-the-fault-of-the-Jews-world, we have a real problem. Moreover, the Crusades were not an aggression, but a response to aggression, as Christian soldiers sought to defend Jerusalem pilgrims from being kidnapped, enslaved, and murdered in the midst of the Muslim march toward dominance of the Holy Land and most of the formerly Christian world. Muslim invaders of the Middle East and Europe behaved just like Islamicists do today—badly.
So let us understand that the Crusades were small potatoes compared to the behavior engaged in by the same people the president is trying to say are not as bad as Christians—and he takes this position, even though they are doing the same things today. Defending Islamic murderers who target Jews in a deli, massacre cartoonists at work, and behead Americans unlucky enough to be grabbed up by them by comparing them (favorably!) with Christians defending themselves a thousand years ago from the same people is staggeringly inappropriate. It’s like defending Jeffrey Dahmer’s cannibalism by saying cannibal tribes in other parts of the world were once killed by missionaries and explorers trying not to be eaten. (Were they? Who knows? It’s as good as the president’s grasp of history, I’ll wager.)
And let’s talk about the 400 years of slavery in America (only a scant 80 of which were under the auspices of the United States as a nation). The president seems blissfully unaware of the role of religion in the eradication of slavery, preferring to simplistically blame the peculiar institution itself on Christianity, despite the fact that the abolition movement was fundamentally Christian—and completely missing that it was his own beloved party that fought to maintain slavery and fought a war to do so.
Tsk, tsk, he scolds. We used to be awful to people, too. We should not be too judgey of others just because they haven’t yet figured out that reveling in spilling the blood of innocents based entirely on their religion is a bad thing. One wonders what the world would have been like if Churchill and Roosevelt had been so sensitive to the delicate sensibilities of the Nazis. Instead of the Newsreels screaming about the atrocious behavior of the Nazis, no doubt Walter Winchell’s reedy voice would have warned us not to be too harsh on them, since, after all, we were pretty mean to each other not so long ago during the Civil War.
Barack Obama’s hubris knows no bounds. It’s not his hope that is audacious—it’s his audacity that seems hopeless. It is offensive that the president presumes to lecture us about history when his grasp of history is so weak. It is astonishing that he still claims to be a Constitutional scholar when he is so frequently slapped down by the Supreme Court for overreaching his power and misunderstanding the law. Most of all, it is nauseating that no one in Congress has the testicular fortitude to impeach this imperial tyrant.
The winner of the Nobel Peace Prize is about to go to Congress to ask permission to pursue yet another war-ish adventure in Ukraine, without ever apologizing for his scathing invective against his predecessor who got us into fewer armed conflicts and got fewer people killed in them.
So, after we stop pretending he’s smart, could we stop pretending he’s principled, too?
Image: http://yespolitical.com/2010/11/22/noam-chomsky-e-la-delusione-obama-un-presidente-dimezzato/
