QOTW: President Obama
by digby
“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.”
This simple statement of fact appears to be extremely controversial. Because Islamic extremists are the worst of the worstest that’s ever been in the whole history of the world. Plus Jesus. or something.
Honestly, this latest round of mau-mauing about how everyone has to not only agree that Islamic extremism is bad (yes!) but that it’s uniquely bad, worse than anything. That’s where I get off the train. Our president just attended a funeral for the King of a nation that routinely uses beheading for execution and sentences people to a thousand lashes as punishment for writing something it doesn’t like. They are among the richest people on the planet and are also among the most barbaric. And yet it was widely celebrated that the first lady, like many female Western officials before her, refused to wear the veil at the funeral as if that was boldly defiant. (Pay no attention to the billions of dollars that American companies make because we choose to ignore the beheadings and the floggings.)
ISIS is composed of a bunch of monstrous cretins. But they are members of the human species and the human species has a long history of being monstrous cretins. Even some nice American people have been monstrous cretins, as the president pointed out. Some of our closest current allies are monstrous cretins in exactly the same way members of ISIS are monstrous cretins. Making them into supernatural villains of unique barbarity is well … stupid. Not that that will stop anyone from doing it.
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