Obama the Theologian
by Ross Douthat
FEB. 7, 2015
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/08/opinion/sunday/ross-douthat-obama-the-theologian.html?comments#permid=14070568
This controversy about references to the Crusades and the Inquisition is just complete nonsense, and contrived by people like Douthat, with the sole purpose of adding to the flood of nonsense GOP heckling of Obama.
What Obama, like other responsible and thoughtful leaders in countries with Moslem minorities (like France, Germany and Great Britain) are doing is to mitigate against the tendency of "Conservative" elements in such multi-cultural and multi-religious countries to use atrocities committed by tiny but extreme minorities for the purpose of fanning racially motivated hate among their constituents.
There is indeed a very strong and troublesome tendency, especially among Americans, to discount our own shortcomings (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Enhanced Interrogation and Special Renditions to name just a few in our recent past) when dealing with terrible deeds by others.
It is indeed a very valid effort by a President, indeed any responsible leader, to use examples from the past to cause our own people to take a deep breath, pause and reflect, before summarily casting the blame of a terrible, extreme islamic minority like ISIL upon all Moslems. For that is the thrust of Obama's comment, and not, as Douthat suggest, to pose some sort of equivalence between past Christian atrocities and today's ISIL atrocities.
Don't always over-intellectualize, Mr. Douthat -- we got it, you graduated summa cum laude from Harvard...
What Obama, like other responsible and thoughtful leaders in countries with Moslem minorities (like France, Germany and Great Britain) are doing is to mitigate against the tendency of "Conservative" elements in such multi-cultural and multi-religious countries to use atrocities committed by tiny but extreme minorities for the purpose of fanning racially motivated hate among their constituents.
There is indeed a very strong and troublesome tendency, especially among Americans, to discount our own shortcomings (Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo, Enhanced Interrogation and Special Renditions to name just a few in our recent past) when dealing with terrible deeds by others.
It is indeed a very valid effort by a President, indeed any responsible leader, to use examples from the past to cause our own people to take a deep breath, pause and reflect, before summarily casting the blame of a terrible, extreme islamic minority like ISIL upon all Moslems. For that is the thrust of Obama's comment, and not, as Douthat suggest, to pose some sort of equivalence between past Christian atrocities and today's ISIL atrocities.
Don't always over-intellectualize, Mr. Douthat -- we got it, you graduated summa cum laude from Harvard...
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