Epigraph:
Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother’s eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me take the speck out of your eye,’ when all the time there is a plank in your own eye? (Matthew 7:3-4)
President Obama in the National Prayer Breakfast, 2015
Salon: Speaking before the National Prayer Breakfast on Thursday, President Obama denounced those “who hijack religion for their own murderous ends,” citing, for instance, the Islamic State militant group, “a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism.” Given the group’s gruesome executions of its hostages and its utterly horrific execution of children, including the mentally disabled, one could hardly dispute the president’s characterization of its fundamentalist adherents.
Nevertheless, the president’s speech rankled conservative critics. Obama, you see, committed the grievous error of pointing out that brutality and violence have hardly been the province of any one religion.
“[L]est 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,” Obama noted. ”In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ,” he added, referring to segregationists’ fondness for Biblical injunctions against interracial mingling.
The right-wing reaction was swift — and, at times, nothing short of hyperbolic.
Categories: Americas, Answers to Anti-Islam, Highlight, Islamophobia, United States
Thank you President Obama for pulling the rug under the feet of Islamophobes and some hate-mongers. We need all good statesman to do this to create genuine pluralism in the West.
Dear Al until we understand what are the reasons and needs for preventing anti-semitism and extend that courtesy to all people, we will not have a genuine and complete pluralism in the West.
What the West will create others will follow. I believe that is not only a secular reality, but, is actually predicted and prophesied in the Islamic tradition, the way I understand the prophecies about the Latter Days.
@ Zia Shah; You wrote: “We need all good statesman to do this to create genuine pluralism in the West.”
I reply: Yes… As there should be good statesman in the many regions elsewhere in the world where genuine pluralism does not exist. The examples of which are legion. It is not merely a problem in the West.
Nicht wahr?
So, we have all fought for centuries and there is enough blame to go around.
Here is the final resolution:
The only constitution the world needs is the Universal Declaration of Human Rights
@Zia Shah; Yes, I agree that would be the optimal solution. Sadly, though, I do not see the world wide adoption of that significant document happening in our lifetimes. However, that doesn’t mean that we stop striving towards its implementation. Someday humanity will come to its senses and realize that it’s the only way…