PETER SMITH: THE GUILT EDGED PRESIDENCY
No one cares if Christians, Hindus, Jews, Confucians, Sikhs, Zoroastrians or what-have-you committed foul deeds in the distant past. Islamists are committing them egregiously and everywhere right now, yet the alleged leader of the Free World blubbers about the Crusaders and the Inquisition.
Don’t keep too calm. Be, at least, somewhat alarmed. A feckless post-modernist (at best) is in the White House and medieval barbarians are at the gate. Make no mistake of underestimating the threat.
We face an implacable, religiously-inspired foe. There are Islamic terrorist militias stretching from North Africa, across the Middle East, to Asia and down to South East Asia, with growing fifth columns in all Western countries. Only the United States is capable of bringing to bear the moral authority, the leadership, the resources and the manpower to defeat them. And right now the Commander in Chief is fiddling away while urging us to remember the sins of our ancestors.
Apparently Christians must remember the Crusades and the Inquisition before being critical of ISIS. And, presumably, using the same logic, Churchill should have been mindful of Cromwell’s transgressions before taking on Hitler. FDR should have brought the treatment of American Indians into his calculations before responding to Tojo. If you can’t get to grips with that; if it confounds you, then join the club of the level-headed.
Hard on the heels of the United Nations carrying reports of children being beheaded, crucified and buried alive by ISIS, and the Jordanian pilot (Muath al-Kaseasbeh) being burnt to death in a cage, President Obama said this at the annual National Prayer Breakfast on February 5.
Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and 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. So it is not unique to one group or one religion. There is a tendency in us, a simple tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.
How offensive can you possibly be to innocent people, including many Christians, being brutalised, raped, enslaved and killed today? Just when you think President Obama’s foreign policy is as inept as it is ever likely to get, he shows that he has fresh depths to plumb. Imagine what the Jordanians think of his high school-level thesis on the moral equivalence of the Inquisitors and ISIS. Imagine what any of America’s allies think of it. Only ISIS will find comfort in being compared in their brutality with the infidel Crusaders.
The accuracy and balance of Obama’s sense of history is extremely suspect. For example, he might just once want to acknowledge that the Crusades were a response to Muslim aggression and conquest; and that Christianity was primarily responsible for getting rid of slavery — for which Muslims, as slavers and slave traders, bore most responsibility from the seventh century onwards. But this aside, what in the world has the happenings of so long ago to do with what is happening now? What point is he trying to make?
He was not elected as chief apologist for Islam; despite his paternity. No one cares whether Christians, Hindus, Jews, Confucians, Sikhs, or Zoroastrians committed foul deeds in the distant past. Islamists are committing them egregiously and everywhere in the present.
Obama invited fifteen Muslim leaders to the White House on Wednesday, the day before he delivered his National Prayer Breakfast speech. Tellingly, the names of those invited have not yet been revealed. Whoever they were, and whatever their real agenda, it would be nice to think that most of the conversation was about the maimed, abused and murdered victims of Islamists and what to do about it. What we can be sure of is that Islamophobia bulked large in the conversation. It was reported, for example, that Obama affirmed ‘his administration’s commitment to safeguarding civil rights through hate crimes prosecutions and civil enforcement actions’.
It is quite simply mind-boggling that anything connecting Islam with extremism or terrorism won’t pass his lips. Hence his upcoming: ‘White House Summit on Countering Violent Extremism’. What’s that Mr President, have those Baptists been at it again?
I want to go back to Churchill, though I think Ronald Reagan or Margaret Thatcher or, in fact, almost any previous American or UK leader would serve. Is it possible to imagine any of them giving comfort to the enemy and confounding allies by dwelling on national mea culpas for real and/or confected past sins? Is it possible to imagine them refusing to name the enemy in case it caused offence?
Two more years of this presidency gives a lot more time for the Iranians to build a bomb, for ISIS and their fellow travellers to spread their tentacles, and for the further internal enfeeblement of our peerless Judeo-Christian values. Times are tough. Our leaders are weak. And the one who should be the strongest is the weakest.
‘Cometh the moment cometh the man’, so it is said. No-one is yet in sight. Hopefully, the next US President will, at the very least, live in the here-and-now and be unmistakably patriotic.
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