I particularly found the last paragraph interesting. (See 1 below.)
Our "Crusading" President. (See 1a below.)
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I recently suggested ISIS and Terrorist Jihadism, will eventually self-destruct but I also suggested, for it to occur sooner than later, it needs assistance. None will be forthcoming from Obama until something tragic forces his hand. (See 2 below.)
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This from a close relative:
=== My own sense is that comparisons are often odious and if Obama is suggesting civilization has made no progress and what was done thousands of years ago is comparative to what ISIS is doing today then Obama is sicker than I thought. === Obama's dangerous new alliance? (See 3 below.) === Dick ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
By Roger L. Simon
Addressing the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday, President Obama admonished his audience not to get on a “high horse” about Islamic terrorists (of course he did not name them) since atrocities had been committed in the name of many religions or, as he put it more specifically, “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.”
Well, that doesn’t mean me. As a Jew, I’m exempt from anything done “in the name of Christ.” But frankly I was appalled by what Obama said. Many faiths could be cited, including communism, obviously, also a kind of religion that was responsible for exponentially more deaths — via Stalin’s Gulag, Mao’s Cultural Revolution and Great Leap Forward, the killing fields of Cambodia, etc. — than all other belief systems combined, although none of them are doing it now. Right now it’s Islamic radicalism that just the other day placed a human being in a cage and burned him alive, an act not, to my knowledge, even performed by Dr. Mengele. And it was done in the name of Allah.
And yet Obama saw fit to lecture his audience on the Crusades and slavery, done “in the name of Christ,” subjects of which his audience was undoubtedly well aware and, needless to say, did not approve in the slightest. Yet still the president felt he had to hector them. Why?
To begin with, we can find some the answer in his criticism of ISIS, which Obama described as ”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.” Note the now unsurprising use of the word “religion,” not “Islam,” or the even more telling “Mohammed,” a warlord who married a little girl and a figure, one can safely say, not very much like Christ. Nevertheless, Obama can blacken Christians and name them in a speech, but not Muslims.
The reason is not complicated. Obama is not a religious person. He rarely appears in church, except for political purposes. He is titularly a Christian, but identifies emotionally, from his youth in Indonesian madrassas and from his ideological predisposition, with Third World Muslims. But now he is confronted with those same Muslims behaving like barbarians across Africa and the Middle East and sometimes into Europe and America.
What would be his reaction to that? Pretty much what it is for most throughout the Islamic world — shame. As many have noted, Islam is a shame culture (the kind of society that will go berserk over cartoons) and, like it or not, our president is part of it culturally. That does not mean he is stoning adulterers or cutting off the hands of thieves or treating women like chattel, but it does mean he is genuinely and quite deeply ashamed of the religion he, in part, came from. He cannot adjust to or accept the calamities it is causing. Unlike the president of Egypt, he cannot name it.
This also explains Obama’s determination to whitewash the behavior of Iran and make a deal with the Islamic Republic that will jeopardize the entire world. It also helps make more clear his ambivalent (at best) relationship to the state of Israel and its leaders.
It grieves me much to write this, because it is a horrible situation. Obama is not a Manchurian candidate and never was. He never had to be. He is just absolutely the wrong human being to be leading the West at this point in history. Heaven help us.
1a) Obama's Comparison of Christianity to Radical Islam Defies Logic
On Tuesday, the so-called Islamic State released a slickly produced video showing a Jordanian pilot being burned alive in a steel cage. On Wednesday, the United Nations issued a report detailing various “mass executions of boys, as well as reports of beheadings, crucifixions of children, and burying children alive” at the hands of the Islamic State.
And on Thursday, President Obama seized the opportunity of the National Prayer Breakfast to forthrightly criticize the “terrible deeds” . . . committed “in the name of Christ.”
“Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history,” Obama said, referring to the ennobling aspects of religion as well as the tendency of people to “hijack” religions for murderous ends.
"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."
Obama’s right. Terrible things have been done in the name of Christianity. I have yet to meet a Christian who denies this.
But, as odd as it may sound for a guy named Goldberg to point it out, the Inquisition and the Crusades aren’t the indictments Obama thinks they are. For starters, the Crusades — despite their terrible organized cruelties — were a defensive war.
“The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad — a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war,” writes Bernard Lewis, the greatest living English-language historian of Islam.
As for the Inquisition, it needs to be clarified that there was no single “Inquisition,” but many. And most were not particularly nefarious. For centuries, whenever the Catholic Church launched an inquiry or investigation, it mounted an “inquisition,” which means pretty much the same thing.
Historian Thomas Madden, director of the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at Saint Louis University, writes that the “Inquisition was not born out of desire to crush diversity or oppress people; it was rather an attempt to stop unjust executions.”
In medieval Europe, heresy was a crime against the state, Madden explains. Local nobles, often greedy, illiterate, and eager to placate the mob, gleefully agreed to execute people accused of witchcraft or some other forms of heresy. By the 1100s, such accusations were causing grave injustices (in much the same way that apparatchiks in Communist countries would level charges of disloyalty in order to have rivals “disappeared”).
“The Catholic Church’s response to this problem was the Inquisition,” Madden explains, “first instituted by Pope Lucius III in 1184.”
I cannot defend everything done under the various Inquisitions — especially in Spain — because some of it was indefensible. But there’s a very important point to make here that transcends the scoring of easy, albeit deserved, points against Obama’s approach to Islamic extremism (which he will not call Islamic): Christianity, even in its most terrible days, even under the most corrupt popes, even during the most unjustifiable wars, was indisputably a force for the improvement of man.
Christianity ended greater barbarisms under pagan Rome. The church often fell short of its ideals — which all human things do — but its ideals were indisputably a great advance for humanity. Similarly, while some rationalized slavery and Jim Crow in the U.S. by invoking Christianity, it was ultimately the ideals of Christianity itself that dealt the fatal blow to those institutions. Just read any biography of Martin Luther King Jr. if you don’t believe me.
When Obama alludes to the evils of medieval Christianity, he fails to acknowledge the key word: “medieval.” What made medieval Christianity backward wasn’t Christianity but medievalism.
It is perverse that Obama feels compelled to lecture the West about not getting too judgmental on our “high horse” over radical Islam’s medieval barbarism in 2015 because of Christianity’s medieval barbarism in 1215.
It’s also insipidly hypocritical. President Obama can’t bring himself to call the Islamic State “Islamic,” but he’s happy to offer a sermon about Christianity’s alleged crimes at the beginning of the last millennium.
We are all descended from cavemen who broke the skulls of their enemies with rocks for fun or profit. But that hardly mitigates the crimes of a man who does the same thing today. I see no problem judging the behavior of the Islamic State and its apologists from the vantage point of the West’s high horse, because we’ve earned the right to sit in that saddle.
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2) Whether a Civilization Endures is Determined by How it Confronts Evil
On Monday, I read about a Syrian woman who was accused by ISIS of adultery and sentenced to death by stoning. The barbarians carried out the punishment until they thought she was dead. She miraculously survived and attempted to flee. As one of the savages turned to shoot her, an Islamist jurist intervened and declared that it was God’s will and let her go. This was an anomaly.
On Tuesday, I read about a Syrian man that ISIS threw off the roof of a building for being a homosexual. He too survived his initial punishment. But rather than invoke God’s will, the cheering mob of barbarians waiting for him on the ground proceeded to stone him to death.
Shortly thereafter, we learned that ISIS burned alive the Jordanian pilot being held captive. And while the civilized world experienced feelings of disgust, sadness, and anger, the animals responsible for the atrocity set up movie screens across the city for cheering crowds to view and celebrate.
Civilized human beings are incapable of fathoming these atrocities. Some of us, however, are wondering why the Commander-in-Chief of the world’s policemen (formerly known as the United States military) has enabled this cancer to metastasize, and now is allowing the violence to occur over and over again with little intervention.
Where is civilized man in response to terrorist brutalities and violence not seen since the Holocaust? Michelle Obama’s reaction to the kidnapping of hundreds of Nigerian girls by Boko Haram was to promote a photo of herself holding a sign with the tweet #BringBackOurGirls. ISIS found this so amusing that it photo-shopped the image and retweeted the photo with Michelle holding a sign that read #BringBackOurHumvees. (ISIS was making fun of their successful seizure of a shipment of U.S. Humvees in Iraq.)
Iraq is the country that Obama handed over to ISIS and Iran to fight over. In doing so, he abandoned the Iraqi people who had helped us win that war before he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory. The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies’ Thomas Joscelyn observed that ISIS’
mass executions of Iraqi soldiers undoubtedly helped convince Iraqi forces to retreat form the fight during the summer of 2014, when the Islamic State overran Mosul and other areas. The result was that the jihadists got stronger – until, that is, the U.S. and its allies decided they had to act.
Joscelyn observed that while Obama’s air strikes will not defeat ISIS, ISIS uses these grotesque executions to scare off coalition participants. Joscelyn also observed that the “sadistic videos” might actually backfire in terms of garnering support for their cause.
But is it possible that these videos -- of beheadings, stonings, tossing people off of buildings, and burning prisoners alive -- will have an anesthetic effect as well? Will those of us in the civilized world become numb to these horrific acts and human suffering that the wicked cause?
For decades after the Holocaust the phrase “Never again!” emanated from the lips of people of nations all over the world. Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, cries of “Go back to the Ovens!” “Hitler was right!” and “Death to Jews!” are commonplace on the streets of the world’s most civilized cities from London and Paris to Sydney and New York.
U.S. college campuses have become breeding grounds for anti-Semitism. Most recently at University of California, Davis, as they voted on a resolution in support of a boycott of Israel, activist students shouted “Allahu Akbar” at Jewish students. Swastikas were painted on the Jewish AEPi fraternity house and tweets were sent declaring, “Hamas & Sharia law have taken over UC Davis” and “Israel will fall insha’Allah.”
It is not just the barbarians in the deserts of the Middle East who are a danger to civilization, propagating evil and dangerous messages of murder and hate. This “bankrupt” ideology as Obama calls it is finding a home in the United States. No, we are not seeing people burned alive -- yet, but the occasional honor crime is perpetrated and sporadic terrorist attacks are attempted on these shores. Are Americans becoming complacent to the violence in our midst?
Obama certainly appears to be. In the fight of good versus evil, he is siding with evil. From Turkey’s Erdogan to Venezuela’s Chavez and Syria’s Assad, Obama came into office with a bevy of new BFFs who were very bad men. And we just learned that on the heels of chumming up to the Castro brothers in Cuba, he is beginning a reach out to North Korea.
But the icing on the cake is the nuclear negotiations taking place with Iran. Ensuring that the world’s largest state sponsor of terrorism will acquire nuclear weapons despite promises of annihilating Israel, encouraging hatred of America on its streets, and threatening every Sunni Arab in the region, Obama is perpetuating evil rather than fighting it.
There is a reason that the vast majority of Americans support Israel. She is on the frontlines of the war against fundamentalist Islam, she is the sole democracy in the region and a strategic ally, and she represents all of the good in God’s world. She is, in fact, a miracle, and her citizens recognize and appreciate their responsibility in ensuring her survival.
And that includes her prime minister who is being attacked from the left in the media and in Washington for accepting an invitation from Speaker Boehner to address Congress regarding the existential threat posed by a nuclear Iran. One of the reasons that the attacks are so abhorrent is that they are based on a trumped up lie that the White House was not consulted about the invitation. But they are also wrong because Netanyahu is leading the fight against evil in the face of an American president who is bowing to it.
The left is suffering a serious psychosis that has resulted in its inability to distinguish right from wrong. As Democrats consider boycotting Netanyahu’s speech, they are jumping on the BDS movement’s pro-terrorist agenda. While the left has led this movement, will mainstream Democrats also boycott Israel while allowing Iran to go nuclear?
The dichotomy between Obama and Netanyahu does not just go to leadership skills. It goes to the very core of the fight for the survival of the Western world – civilization versus barbarism, good versus evil. And Obama has chosen the wrong side basically arming the barbarians with the most lethal weaponry known to mankind, giving them free rein to infiltrate the region and expand their hegemonic intentions, and writing the death sentences of untold numbers of human lives.
Netanyahu’s speech before Congress is timed to overlap with his speech before AIPAC’s annual policy conference in March. Three years ago, Netanyahu spoke to that group and proclaimed
Israel must always have the ability to defend itself — by itself — against any threats... My friends, we deeply appreciate the great alliance between our two countries, but when it comes to Israel’s survival, we must always remain the masters of our fate.
He went on to invoke the remembrance of the Holocaust as he stated, “Never again will … the Jewish people be powerless and supplicants for our fate and our very survival. Never again.”
The Jewish people who live in Israel (as opposed to those who live in America and who voted for Obama en masse twice) understand the enemy in their midst. They also understand that after millennia of persecution, torture, slavery, and murder, complacency in the face of evil is dangerous and fatal.
On the other hand, Obama and the leftists beating the anti-Israel, kumbaya, give peace a chance mantras are clueless as to the threats to the survival of Western civilization. And shockingly, the videos that the barbarians thrive on presenting to an elitist populace of irrationally tolerant infidel disbelievers are not shaking them out of their comfortable slumber. Ignorance may be bliss -- but it’s dangerous.
While Obama and Secretary of State Kerry claim that ISIS has nothing whatsoever to do with Islam, the group that titled their video of the burning of the Jordanian pilot with a quote from the Qur’an just beheaded an Iraqi priest under Sharia law. The murderous savages who crucify, burn, and bury women and children alive do so in the name of Allah. From ISIS and al Qaeda to Hamas and Hezb’allah, these 7th century barbarians celebrate death by handing out candies and cheering in the streets, by training their children to become mass murderers, and by screaming Allahu Akbar as they kill.
Thankfully, we have some leaders willing to fight. In addition to Netanyahu, Jordan’s King Abdullah carried out his first airstrike on ISIS on Wednesday evening. Perhaps a Jordan/Saudi/Israel alliance will stop a nuclear Iranian hegemon from forming. We can only hope and pray, for we know that the president who compares himself to Abraham Lincoln, a wartime president, keeps running as far as he can from confrontation with radical Islam. And his failure to recognize this evil is beginning to define us as a civilization.
Albert Einstein surmised, “I do not believe that civilization will be wiped out in a war fought with the atomic bomb. Perhaps two-thirds of the people of the earth will be killed.” Future civilizations that rise up from the ash heap of history will look back in wonderment analyzing how we allowed evil to win. The answer to that puzzle begins with Barack Obama and his Democrat colleagues.
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