The president's equivocating radical Islam and Christianity

Goldberg has written about Obama's comparison of present day Islamic jihad with medieval Christianity. He finds it

amazing — and amazingly pathetic — that the president felt the need to chide a room full of religiously literate people about how they shouldn’t get too judgey about what the Islamic State is doing right now because Christians did bad things almost 1,000 years ago.

...How is it that the sins of Christianity are eternal but the sins of Muslim fanatics right now aren’t even Muslim? The Islamic State is enslaving people right now. America had slaves 150 years ago.

...This isn’t complicated. It’s really not. If you have to clear your throat for five minutes about the skeletons in our closet before you can feel comfortable denouncing barbarians who bury little boys alive and then go on to rape their little sisters, that’s is your hang-up, man. I’ve got my faults, all reasonable people can agree, but I don’t feel compelled to list them before I denounce rapists and murderers; “Hey man, I know, I drink too much scotch and I’m sometimes needlessly sarcastic, but you really shouldn’t rape little girls or set people on fire.”

...Nearly everything we revere about modernity and progress — education, the rule of law, charity, decency, the notion of the universal rights of man, and reason were advanced by the Church for most of the last two thousand years.

...Forget the Inquisition and the Crusades for a moment. Take slavery. It was an evil institution. It will always remain a stain on America’s honor.

But here’s the thing. America put an end to it at an enormous price. Moreover, slavery was a constant on every continent for thousands of years. Looking at America in the context of the great tide of human events, the remarkable thing isn’t that we had slaves, it’s that we ended slavery. We ended slavery because deep in the founding principles of this country were deeply Christian — or, if you prefer, Judeo-Christian — principles that eventually couldn’t be reconciled with slavery.

It’s entirely fair to argue that we shouldn’t get on a high horse with regard to how the French or the Canadians do things, no matter how much fun it may be. But the Islamic State? The Mullahs of Iran? Boko Haram? Please, we’re so much better than them by any objective moral or intellectual standard it’s insulting to be asked to make the case. That doesn’t mean we don’t have faults, but it does mean our faults are entirely irrelevant and one should not bring up such irrelevancies for fear that reasonable people will hear false equivalencies.

Read more here.