Words Fail Me Dept.

I was about to turn away from the Web and concentrate on other pursuits when I noticed this unbelievable obscenity:

How do we, as people of faith, reconcile these realities --the profound good, the strength, the tenacity, the compassion and love that can flow from all of our faiths, operating alongside those who seek to hijack religious for their own murderous ends?

Humanity has been grappling with these questions throughout human history. 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.

Yes, Gentle Reader: those words were uttered by Barack Hussein Obama, at the National Prayer Breakfast, held today.

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Allow me to quote an essay written in 2003 by a gentleman named Claudio Salvucci:

For centuries, the Middle East had been under the control of moderate Muslim leaders, and those leaders had respectfully allowed Christian pilgrims to come and go as they pleased to visit the holy places of their religion. A sizable and flourishing Jewish community had finally returned to its homeland after having been banished for centuries.

Then, just after the turn of a new millennium, something happened that would change the course of history forever.

A man came to power in the Middle East who could best be described as a murderous and fanatical madman. Hundreds of years of moderate Islamic rule gave way to strict sectarian laws and intense persecution of Jews and Christians. Peaceful travelers were attacked, robbed, and killed.

Then one autumn Tuesday, this fanatical madman destroyed some of the most powerfully symbolic buildings in all the world. They were the ideological heart and soul of Western civilization, standing in a great city that enshrined everything that civilization believed in.

The news spread like wildfire around the known world.

Outraged, the Western powers galvanized with a unity that had seldom been seen in their long and bloody history. Warring, squabbling countries suddenly sensed a larger, common purpose that extended far beyond their own borders.

After praying and holding religious services in the rubble of these once proud buildings, the leaders of the West began to put together a military coalition that would prevent such outrages from ever happening again. A renewed sense of long-dormant unity was awakening and a new generation of brave warriors made preparations for a long struggle to preserve freedom. They would, not out of desire but of necessity, take up arms against the people who were threatening their way of life.

It would be a defensive war against terror and oppression.

It would be known as the Crusades.

Claudio’s essay, which first appeared in the 2003 issue of The Tarpeian Rock, from Arx Publishing, goes on from there. (Back issues of the magazine are available through the Arx website.) I’ve reproduced his opening because it highlights the similarities between the events that triggered the Crusades and the events of Black Tuesday: September 11, 2001. I’ll add one bit more:

Christians are more than willing to condemn Crusader excesses, and assign blame where blame is due. They always have been. The devout 12th Century pilgrim Ekkehard of Aurach observed how evil men were infiltrating the Crusaders’ ranks and sorely lamented how the “armies of Christ were defiled.” Pope Innocent III, who himself called the Fourth Crusade, upon hearing of the senseless and deplorable sack of Constantinople in 1204, angrily upbraided his own papal legate for scandalizing the Church with, in his words, “an example of perdition and the works of darkness.”

Find me a Muslim satrap who will unequivocally condemn all jihadist violence, regardless of the identity, locale, religion, or statements of the victims.

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Christianity is founded upon the teachings of Jesus of Nazareth, the Christ, the Son of God and the Redeemer of Mankind. Nothing in His teachings as they’re recorded in the Gospels justifies the atrocities committed upon Jerusalem and Constantinople. Nor was there any attempt, even by the perpetrators, to justify them as Christian deeds. Any professing Christian should know that – and Barack Hussein Obama claims to be a Christian.

By the words he allowed to fall from his own lips, Obama has put his claim of Christian devotion in the toilet. Let the news be sounded far and wide, that he might never, ever again be allowed to get away with that claim.