Mr. President, Please Explain….

Mr. President, during your prayer breakfast speech, you addressed the issue of atrocities committed in the name of religion.

Please explain how it is that you have no trouble attributing the crusades, the inquisition, slavery and Jim Crow directly to individuals acting in the name of Christianity, yet you continue to insist that atrocities committed by muslim jihadis in the name of Islam and Islam are mutually exclusive.

It was a jihad - for all intents and purposes, a crusade - that lasted for over nine hundred years that left Islam in control of the middle east, northern Africa, and much of the Iberian peninsula.  It was atrocities committed against Jews and Christians - an inquisition, if you will - as well as the capture of the Holy Land in general and Jerusalem in particular that brought about the crusades.

Muslims are responsible for instituting their own version of Jim Crow - dhimmitude - against the unconverted living in their controlled areas, essentially relegating them to second class citizenship status.

It was muslim slavery and pillaging of American personnel and shipping traffic that led to the assault by US Marines on Tripoli on orders of President Thomas Jefferson, yes, the same president to whom you attribute the "celebration" of the first iftar at the White House.  You know it was nothing of the sort.  The dinner in question to which Libyan ambassador Mellimelli was invited was to have taken place at 3:30 pm.  The ambassador, however, was observing the ramadan fast, so the dinner was re-scheduled to after sundown as a diplomatic courtesy to accommodate his religious beliefs.  Jefferson had no reason to love Islam.  It was his earlier meetings, while US ambassador to France, with Ambassador Sidi Adja that taught him (as he reported to Congress), 

"...that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every muslim who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise." 

Some 1.5 million white slaves were taken by the Barbary (muslim) pirates.  To this day, muslims lead the world in the slave trade. 

Mr. President, you argument simply doesn't hold water.  Muslims have done all of these things in the name of their religion for millennia.  If you attribute guilt for similar atrocities directly to those who committed them in the name of Christianity, then you must also acknowledge and attribute the same atrocities to the muslims that commit them in the name of their religion to the present day.