Obama's
modest critique of Christian hypocrisy suddenly has Republicans defending the
crusades.
By Donald Kaul
President Barack Obama committed the ultimate political blunder
the other day. He blurted out the truth.
Speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast, he warned his
Christian brethren against “getting up on our high horse” when condemning the
violence of Muslim terrorists.
“During the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed
terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” he said. “In our home country, slavery
and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”
Naturally, all hell broke loose.
The Rupert Murdoch army launched into full attack, supported by Rush Limbaugh air strikes. Rabid Fox News commentators, foaming at the mouth, fought each other for control of the mics to condemn the president’s remarks as “un-American” and, even worse, liberal. He was derided as irreligious, weak, and not a real American.
It was to be expected.
People will forgive a politician for telling lies. Sweet
deceptions, after all, are what politics are all about. But let him speak the
truth just once, even inadvertently, and he becomes the object of scorn,
ridicule, and contempt.
Running for president in 1967, he confessed that he had been “brainwashed”
by Pentagon propaganda into believing that the Vietnam War was winnable. And he
had been, of course, as had most of the American public at the time.
But as soon as Romney uttered this truthful statement, his
presidential hopes vanished in a blink — never to be seen again.
I’d like to note that this lesson wasn’t lost on George’s son.
As nearly as can be determined, Mitt Romney never told the truth once during
his 2012 campaign. He lost anyway, proving that it takes more than a lack of
honesty to fool the American people.
But back to Obama. What he was trying to say, at an inter-faith
event, was that we shouldn’t hold all Muslims responsible for the acts of a
relative few. Christianity also has a skeleton or two in its historical closet.
The Christian right, which includes most of the Republicans in
Congress, pounced.
The Crusades were a righteous response to Islamic aggression, they said.
The Inquisition? Highly overrated as an atrocity. And Jim Crow? That was “a thousand years
ago,” said Limbaugh.
To which one can only say, “Oh come on.”
The truth is, you can act as though terrorist violence against
the West is unprovoked. But it’s not. It’s the bitter fruit of the past 100
years of subjugation of the Arab and Muslim peoples by Western powers, thirsty
for the oil beneath the Middle East.
For a century the United States and its allies systematically
subverted any suggestion of democracy in the region in favor of vicious thugs
we could control through bribery.
And when a popularly elected politician would surface every once
in a while, we’d get rid of him and install our own puppet. Think of the
popularly elected Mohammed Mossadegh in Iran, whom the CIA overthrew in 1953,
replacing him with the brutal and corrupt Shah.
That’s the genesis of the mess we’re dealing with now. Not Islam,
not pure evil, but 100 years of Western domination.
In any case, it’s more than a little hypocritical for the
Christian right to be up in arms over the perversion of Christianity.
This is a group, after all, whose representatives in Congress
have sought to take health insurance from the poorest workers among us. They’ve
tried to deport young Americans because their parents brought them here without
papers many years ago. They’ve supported the use of torture and fought to cut
off unemployment insurance to the long-term unemployed.
Any of that remind you of Christianity?
OtherWords columnist Donald Kaul lives in Ann Arbor,
Michigan. OtherWords.org