Critics
pounce after Obama talks Crusades, slavery at prayer breakfast
The Washington
Post
Juliet Eilperin13 hrs ago
© Kevin Lamarque U.S. President Barack Obama speaks during the National
Prayer Breakfast in Washington, February 5, 2015.
President
Obama has never been one to go easy on America.
As
a new president, he dismissed the idea of American exceptionalism, noting that
Greeks think their country is special, too. He labeled the Bush-era
interrogation practices, euphemistically called “harsh” for years, as torture. America, he has
suggested, has much to answer given its history in Latin America and the Middle
East.
His
latest challenge came Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast.
At a time of global anxiety over Islamist terrorism, Obama noted pointedly that
his fellow Christians, who make up a vast majority of Americans, should perhaps
not be the ones who cast the first stone.
“Humanity
has been grappling with these questions throughout human history,” he told the
group, speaking of the tension between the compassionate and murderous acts
religion can inspire. “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.”
Some
Republicans were outraged. “The president’s comments this morning at the prayer
breakfast are the most offensive I’ve ever heard a president make in my
lifetime,” said former Virginia governor Jim Gilmore (R). “He has offended
every believing Christian in the United States. This goes further to the point
that Mr. Obama does not believe in America or the values we all share.”
Obama’s remarks spoke to his unsparing, sometimes
controversial, view of the United States — where triumphalism is often
overshadowed by a harsh assessment of where Americans must try harder to live
up to their own self-image. Only by admitting these shortcomings, he has
argued, can we fix problems and move beyond them.
“There
is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency, that can pervert and distort our
faith,” he said at the breakfast.
But
many critics believe that the president needs to focus more on enemies of the
United States.
Russell
Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Ethics and Religious Liberty
Commission, called Obama’s comments about Christianity “an unfortunate attempt
at a wrongheaded moral comparison.”
What
we need more, he said, is a “moral framework from the administration and a
clear strategy for defeating ISIS,” the acronym for the Islamic State.
Obama
spoke a day after meeting with Muslim leaders, in what participants said was
his first roundtable with a Muslim-only group since taking office. The Muslim
leaders who argued that they feel their community has faced unfair scrutiny in
the wake of terrorist attacks overseas. Although the White House released only
a broad description of the meeting — which touched on issues including racial
profiling — participants said it gave them a chance to express their concerns
directly to the president.
Farhana
Khera, executive director of the civil rights group Muslim Advocates, one of 13
participants, said the session gave Obama a chance to focus on Muslim Americans
the way he has done with other constituencies, such as African American and
Jewish groups.
“I
started off by saying the biggest concern I hear from Muslim parents is their
fear that their children will be ashamed to be Muslim” because of
discrimination, Khera said. “We are asking him to use his bully pulpit to have
a White House summit on hate crimes against religious minorities, much like the
summit on bullying reset the conversation around LGBT youth.”
Obama
emphasized the need to respect minorities in his speech Thursday, saying it was
part of the obligation Americans face as members of a diverse and open society,
“And if, in fact, we defend the legal right of a person to insult another’s
religion, we’re equally obligated to use our free speech to condemn such
insults — and stand shoulder-to-shoulder with religious communities,
particularly religious minorities who are the targets of such attacks.”
For
the president, the prayer breakfast represented a role he has played before:
explaining to Americans why others might see things differently. Joshua DuBois, who headed
the White House Office of Faith Based and Neighborhood Partnerships under Obama
and has served as an informal spiritual adviser, said the president is
conscious of the fact that Islam is an abstraction for much of the general
public.
“The
president, as a Christian, knows many American Muslims,” DuBois said.
“Unfortunately, a lot of folks in our country don’t have close relationships
with Muslims. The only time they’re hearing about Islam is in the context of
the foreign policy crisis or what’s happening with ISIS.”
As
a result, many Americans have an increasingly hostile view of Islam. A Pew
Research Center survey last fall found that half of Americans think the Islamic
religion is more likely than others to encourage violence, while
39 percent said it does not. The view that Islam is more apt to encourage
violent acts rose 12 percentage points from the beginning of 2014 and was
double the number who said so in March 2002 — less than a year after the Sept.
11 attacks.
In
the past, Obama has used stark, personal terms to describe ongoing tensions
between African Americans and America’s white majority. When discussing the
acquittal of George Zimmerman in the February 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin,
a black teenager, he spoke ofbeing trailed while shopping in a
department store and hearing the locks
on cars click as he walked down the street.
But
he has also framed the most incendiary aspects of race relations — whether it’s
the moment when his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright, thundered “God damn
America” from the pulpit or the shooting of another unarmed young black man,
Michael Brown — as an opportunity to test the concept of American
exceptionalism.
He
titled the 2008 speech he delivered in
Philadelphia about Wright “A More
Perfect Union,” a phrase he echoed 6½ years later when he addressed the United Nations
General Assembly.
“We
welcome the scrutiny of the world — because what you see in America is a
country that has steadily worked to address our problems and make our union
more perfect,” Obama said. “America is not the same as it was 100 years ago, 50
years ago or even a decade ago. Because we fight for our ideals and are willing
to criticize ourselves when we fall short.”
But
each of these admissions of fault — whether it is Obama’s acknowledgment during
his2009 Cairo speech that the United States was involved in the
1953 coup overthrowing the government of Iran Prime Minister Mohammad Mossadegh
or the suggestion that America has “a moral responsibility to act” on
arms control because only the
United States had “used a nuclear weapon” — has drawn sharp criticism from
opponents.
Obama
has argued that United States is exceptional because it is strengthened from citizens’
frank assessments of how it is faring. And he has defended the exceptional role
it plays in the world given its military power and political traditions, like
when Obama decided to intervene in Libya on the grounds that it is not in
America’s nature to stand by while a civilian population is threatened.
But
he has always argued that straying from those values, as he believes happened
during the George W. Bush administration, weakens the United States. “We went
off-course,” he said early in his presidency of the detention and interrogation
practices of his predecessor, and he pledged to end torture, close the military
prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and correct what he defined as mistakes
America made during the country’s “season of fear.”
Critics
say that Obama is chastising the wrong people.
“The
evil actions that he mentioned were clearly outside the moral parameters of
Christianity itself and were met with overwhelming moral opposition from
Christians,” Moore said. He added that while he understood Obama’s attempt to
make sure “he is not heard as saying that all Muslims are terrorists, I think
most people know that at this point.”
Michelle Boorstein and Scott Clement
contributed to this report
Here is the full opinion commentary from Journal Nouveau on Facebook.
In all the
years spent covering Presidents, this marks a moment in time to truly reflect
on what a president is supposed to be, and this moron isn't it. Barack Obama is
beyond question the worst excuse for a president in human history. The
disgusting remarks made against America at the National Prayer Breakfast go
beyond disgusting, they are an insult to the founding fathers, all religions,
and most of all THE MEN AND WOMEN WHO HAVE FOUGHT AND DIED FOR OUR COUNTRY,
essentially its spitting on their ultimate sacrifice. They gave their lives for
a president who spits on who we are as a people? Obama has without question
proven his disloyalty to our nation, our people, and our history (which by the
way read his speech, his references to Christians and the crusades ) Christians
were put to death not the other way around. Obama you are a disappointment and
a disgrace. sympathizing with our enemies and having not education in history
before you stand up in front of the world and humiliate the very country that
wasted our efforts to give you the job as our leader. Please tell us again how
bad and most of all how stupid we were for electing you while you shame us this
way, you're a disgrace to those who served and died, you're a disgrace to Dr.
King and his true definition of civil rights, you're a disgrace to America. One
day you will grasp the full understanding of Christianity as you're rotting in
hell.
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