President Obama’s faulty view of radical Islam

When President Obama spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast last week, he decided once more to deny any relation between terrorism and radical Islam.

“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,” Obama said. “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.”

The president and many in our country hold this narrow view of radical Islam. In an attempt to equalize religions, crimes of medieval and historical Christianity are compared to radical Islam. There are a number of things wrong with the President’s blunder.

Firstly, the crimes listed by the president in his speech aren’t the best examples. The Crusades, although brutal, were in response to severe Islamic conquest. The Inquisition was an attempt to legally punish the anti-Christian “heretics,” rather than leaving justice to the mob.

Furthermore, Christians made up the majority of the abolitionists.

Although Jim Crow supporters often used scripture as a basis for their actions, Quakers, Northern Baptists, Methodists and many more found themselves on the forefront of the abolition movement.

Chief leaders of the civil rights movement, like Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., were Christian.

Even if we were to put historical ignorance aside and forget that any of this was true, do any of the president’s examples provide a reasonable explanation for Islamic terrorism?

Today, Christians and Buddhists are not hijacking planes and blowing themselves up, hanging gays and beheading journalists or raping and oppressing women. At best, one could identify Christian radicalism as extreme anti-abortion violence, which is uncommon.

The National Abortion Federation, an organization of abortion providers, reported 11 murders to date and hundreds of cases of arson and property damage among other acts of crime.

And this pales in both quantity and brutality to the horrors of radical Islam around the world. Iraq’s government noted nearly 2,000 deaths by ISIS only in last June. The statistics are many and massive in number.

Furthermore, mainstream Christians condemn anti-abortion violence while terrorism against infidels is often celebrated in the Muslim world. Polls taken by nonpartisan American think tank Pew Research display immense approval rates in Islamic countries for violence.

For example, 86 percent of Jordanian Muslims supported sentencing people to death for leaving Islam. Another 89 percent of Pakistani Muslims support stoning adulterous women. These high approval rates continue in the Middle East for the support of honor killings, terrorist groups, Sharia law, etc.

This isn’t to say that all Muslims are represented by terrorist groups and the like — quite the opposite. As Pew Research suggests in 2014, nearly a quarter of the human race is Muslim. Many Muslims publicly condemn attacks against non-Muslims and Muslims alike. But while ISIS, Hamas and Boko Haram do not represent the views of all Muslims, they still find their beliefs in scripture. The differing actions of other Muslims do not take away from the beliefs of these groups.

If we criticized eastern religions half as much as we do western religions, our views on religion would become far more learned and consistent. In wanting to be “nice” and “politically correct,” we dishonor the victims of terrorism and religious oppression everywhere. All we have to do is ask the right questions; instead of looking for the most loosely liberal interpretation of the Qur’an, we must understand how it is being read, understood and applied by its followers across the world.

Attorney and writer Matthew Hausman, J.D. sums it up well: “If the president were serious about confronting global terrorism, he would acknowledge the ideology motivating much of it and the historical antecedents that make it possible. This can certainly be done without impugning all Muslims, particularly those who wish to eliminate extremism in their own communities.”

In an interview with Vox last week, President Obama referred to the shooting at a kosher supermarket in Paris as “random.” After the shootings on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo two weeks ago, Democratic National Committee Chairman Howard Dean said on MSNBC that the killers weren’t Muslim. After the beheadings of Westerners in Syria, the president, in his prime-time speech on the eve of the 13th anniversary of 9/11, lectured the nation that ISIS was not Islamic.

All this effort taken to ignore the connection between these violent incidents and Islam needs to stop. We are dancing around the issue.

Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal probably has the best response: “The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President. Please deal with the Radical Islamic threat today.”