WHAT THE PRESIDENT SAID AT THE NATIONAL PRAYER BREAKFAST AND WHY IT RAISED A FIRESTORM!
To be candid, I am not one of those Christians with a visceral disliking of the President. I believe we can't “pray FOR rulers” and talk AGAINST them. That being said, when the President speaks on faith at a prayer gathering he engages a different kind of conversation…and response.
ENTER the President at the National Prayer Breakfast yesterday. In case you missed it, after condemning ISIS, the President in a bizarre transition, turned on the Christians: “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.”
PRAYER BREAKFAST ON A HIGH HORSE?
HERE is where the President went off. First, do American Christians need to “get off their high horse” in their response to Islamic barbarism? A week after ISIS covered a Jordanian Pilot with gas and filmed him burning alive like an animal In a cage the Christian world was horrified and outraged. It was not smug.
Obama is actually spiritually tone deaf. The people he spoke to didn't exist in that room. That prayer gathering Mr. President is worried. That's not a “high horse” its “high anxiety”!
Second, is it possible this President still believes Islam does NOT have a problem? From Nigeria to Paris all the way to Pakistan and even to the Philippines, violence is coming from ONE source, and that’s from inside ISLAM. It is not coming from the majority, just a sufficient minority to disrupt 20 nations. The President of Egypt sees it and says so. The leading Imam of France sees it and says so but our Harvard educated President does not see it and cannot say it.
For 6 years Obama has forcefully tried to separate Islam from what terrorists do, in the name of Islam. This week he joined the worst of Islam and the worst of Christian history and like a delirious mathematician attempted to cancel out the equation.
He has a problem with America and its “colonialism.” And he has a sweet spot for Islam and sees the Jihadists as frustrated extremists who have been made so largely because of America. To him the terrorists are giving beautiful Islam a bad name.
What did he have to gain by diminishing the faith of those attending? I can't help but wonder if he was not trying to impress the Dali Lama who was in the audience. You know, building rapport…leader to leader, deity to deity.
PRAYER BREAKFAST CHRISTIANS AND THE CRUSADES?
ENTER….the “Crusades.” Really? Didn't that happen 700 years before America even existed? Does not matter to the President. Lets explore this linkage in an Obama wired brain. The Islamic quest for a Caliphate is evidently what we did once also. In the same way ISIS is trying to create by conquest a unified Islamic State, those prayer breakfast Christians tried to do the same thing. Oh how you forget. You my friend are guilty of the Medieval Popes Crusades.
Bishop E.W. Jacksons response to the President: “I would remind the president that the Crusades began in 1096 as a RESPONSE TO ISLAMIC OPPRESSION, and the fact that they had conquered the Holy Land and they were oppressing eastern Christians. And there was a response to that, so if the president is even gonna cite that as an example, then he ought to get his history complete.”
The Crusades are a mythologized outrage perpetuated by Islam’s apologists. They were in fact only a two-century blip whose only practical legacies are a few ruined castles.
Ralph Peters of the National Review clarifies the Crusades as follows: “Responding to the conquest of Christianity’s birthplace and jihad’s westward thrust, the Crusades were an effort not at imperial conquest but at reclamation. By dumb luck more than strategy, the First Crusade reached the Holy Land amid local Muslim squabbles. The Crusaders took Jerusalem and made a bloody mess of it, then held the city for less than a century.” After that, Muslims fought Muslims over the same territory.
PRAYER BREAKFAST CHRISTIANS AND THE INQUISITION?
Obama said: “remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.”
This must have really hit home to the crowd, three-fourths of whom are Protestant and in fact would have been persecuted by the Inquisition.
Can you imagine how brain dead you would have to be to remind your Catholic co-worker about his culpability in the Spanish Inquisition? Or imagine a speaker reminding people that it was the Democratic Party that sided with slavery and they should get off their high horse about Republicans? Crazy. But THIS is the logic of the progressive left.
SO…WHAT ABOUT THE INQUISITION? It was inexcusable, like much of the stuff you can read in Fox's Book Of Martyrs where true Christians were hunted down by professing Christians. The Inquisition was driven by a religious demon in men who were probably not even Christian.
But all the centuries of death sponsored by the notorious “Inquisition” comes out to FEWER human beings killed than jihadis killed LAST YEAR!
BUT times have changed and so has the Catholic church. We've had the Reformation Islam never had. THIS SHOULD BE THE FOCUS OF THE ISSUE – Not attitudes of participants at a national prayer breakfast.
THE LEFT'S STRATEGY TO SHAME OPPONENTS
Obama and the Left have been shaming America and patriotic youth in particular through the University and education system for years.
The left points out everything wrong with America and nothing right. By shaming our history we lose our patriotic fervor for our country and forfeit the balanced truth about our history.
Leftists academics shame youth with distorted American history
Leftists special interest groups shame the whites about slavery.
Leftist Feminists shame men for wanting girls to be girls.
Leftists in government shame the productive people who prosper and brow beat them into giving back more and more “of their fair share” as Obama puts it.
And this week the Leftists try to shame Christians for launching the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition.
And now I am ashamed I didn't see this earlier
1. The left builds its following by creating a narrative of “resentment.”
2. The left neutralizes its opposition by “shaming” it into submission.
AND WHAT ABOUT JIM CROW and JIHAD?
Obama didn't stop with comparing today's Jihadis to Christian sins of 800 to 1,000 years ago. He spoke about Jim Crow laws. Jim Crow is government-sanctioned racial oppression and segregation. It is still around and exists today toward Christians in Muslim and Hindu countries.
Here are some facts. Slavery has been in existence since Bible times and even exists today in the sex slave trade. Slavery never was an institution unique to Christian experience or beliefs.
The Civil War was the terrible price we embraced to eradicate slavery. Lincoln's Inaugural Speech equated the national agony with the recompense due for the cruel act of slavery.
Or is this not still taught in Chicago?
True…
1. There were Christians in the South fighting to defend the abominable institution of slavery and they resisted Lincoln's post war Reconstruction.
2. BUT there were Christian abolitionists in the North who would deal with this issue all the way to war if necessary..
3. AND there was a Christian named Wilberforce who eradicated slavery in England.
4. A Christian black Pastor named Martin Luther King led the fight and was victorious because a white Catholic President named Kennedy said “enough is enough!” Thats how democracy and Christianity make progress.
5. THEREFORE rather than shame Christians let the next President say…
“Christianity on the whole is histories most civilizing agent and the greatest foundation for a free and prosperous society.”
Should THAT not be the message a Christian leader makes on an occasion such as this?
If you were a guest hearing this (as many world leaders were) would you be inspired by the presidents faith in the Gospel? I'd sooner have hired Jack Kevorkian as a wedding DJ than have this President marketing America or faith.
“As Joe Scarborough said today, Obama's comments are “the equivalent of FDR, when giving a speech against Nazi Germany, going, ‘Now, of course, what we did to the Indians…really bad….so we really have no room to talk about what Hitler is doing.”
By linking the worst of Christianity past with the atrocities of Islam today you get a glimpse into the Obama worldview regarding religion and faith and national policy.
See the problem? Forget theology. Forget the fact that Catholicism had a Reformation and Islam needs one. Does this President see the militant threat for what it is? No. He sees Islam in transition and Christian (right wing) America he sees as its haughty critic.
My writing about this isn't a right wing vs. left wing editorial response. Its a moment of clarity into how this President sees the worlds single greatest threat in a nuclear age.
To be fair to my President he did say this: “Our job is not to ask that God respond to OUR NOTION OF TRUTH — our job is to be true to Him, His word, and His commandments…. And that means we have to speak up against those who would misuse His name to justify oppression, or violence, or hatred with that fierce certainty. No God condones terror. No grievance justifies the taking of innocent lives, or the oppression of those who are weaker or fewer in number.”
Thats a good speech ending – but not entirely honest. This president DOES act on his “notion of truth” and has advanced it in the Gay agenda and policy toward not arming resistance to ISIS in Syria and Jordan. He exercised his “notion of truth” by overriding the advice of his generals and removing troops when they were needed in Iraq to keep ISIS from coming into existence! And his truth notions are at work with Iran and Israel right now. He manages our expanded budget and 18 trillion dollar deficit based on his notion of truth. If nothing else, this leader has very high opinions of his notions and relentless consistency in their pursuit.
It's “his notions” that are problematic.
May God give him great wisdom as he sets the stage for the next act of American history, and may we find a leader who can speak at a prayer breakfast and properly exalt Christ.
Hopefully someone that actually likes America.
– Lance Wallnau
