Obama's false analogy of Christianity to Islam

Dennis Prager:

In his National Prayer Breakfast speech last week, President Barack Obama said:

"And lest we get on our high horse and think that 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. ... So this is not unique to one group or one religion."

It is important to analyze these words -- because the president of the United States spoke them in a major forum, and because what he said is said by all those who defend Islam against any criticism.

Referring to Islamic violence, the president accuses anyone who implies that such religious violence "is unique to some other place" -- meaning outside the Christian West -- as getting on a "high horse."

Is this true? Of course, not. In our time, major religious violence is in fact "unique to some other place," namely the Islamic world. What other religious group is engaged in mass murder, systematic rape, slavery, beheading innocents, bombing public events, shooting up school children, wiping out whole religious communities and other such atrocities?

The answer is, of course, no other religious group. Therefore massive violence in the name of one's religion today is indeed "unique to some other place." To state this is not to "get on a high horse." It is to tell the most important truth about the world in our time.

Would the president have used the "high horse" argument 30 years ago regarding Western condemnation of South African apartheid?

Of course not. Because contempt for Western evils is noble, while contempt for non-Western, especially Islamic, evils is "to get on a high horse."

The president then defends his statement that religious violence is not "unique to some other place" by providing Christian examples: first the Crusades and the Inquisition and then slavery and Jim Crow.

Before addressing the specific examples, a word about the timing. The Crusades took place a thousand years ago and the Inquisition five hundred years ago. Is it not telling that -- even if the examples are valid (which they aren't) -- the president had to go back 500 and 1,000 years to find his primary Christian examples?

Doesn't going back so far in the past render the argument a bit absurd? Imagine if the president had said, "When the Jews conquered Canaan in 1,000 B.C., they committed terrible deeds in the name of Judaism." Anyone hearing that argument would have thought that the president had lost his mind....
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We seem to be getting more evidence everyday of Obama's overrated intellect.  This appears to be a combination of historical illiteracy and sloppy thinking in the service of down playing modern day mass murderers.