According to Vox’s Max Fisher, it’s impossible to refute President Obama’s statement at last week’s National Prayer Breakfast that “people [have] committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” Moreover, suggested Fisher, the ensuing uproar has made obvious the gulf between the Obama-led forces of reason and those who believe it’s “okay to hate Muslims.”
Fisher declared that Obama’s remark was “so banal it could be an after-school special. That it has provoked national controversy goes to show that there is still a mainstream thread of thought in America that Islam is an inherently violent religion, that the world's 1.6 billion Muslims are somehow different, and that non-Muslims are superior human beings…A number of Americans, it seems, are clinging desperately to their anti-Muslim bigotry and are furious at Obama for trying to take that away from them.”
From Fisher’s Saturday piece (bolding added):
Was Obama's comment downplaying the threat of violent Islamism? Drawing misguided parallels that reveal his worst biases? Unjustly (or justly) condemning religion itself? Hinting at the contours of a sophisticated counter-terrorism strategy?
Obama's point was actually pretty simple. Let's not pretend that Islam itself is to blame for ISIS or that Muslims are inherently more violent, he suggested, because the problem of religious violence is not exclusive to any one religion. In other words, don't oversimplify the problem of ISIS to "Muslims are different from the rest of us."
This point is so banal it could be an after-school special. That it has provoked national controversy goes to show that there is still a mainstream thread of thought in America that Islam is an inherently violent religion, that the world's 1.6 billion Muslims are somehow different, and that non-Muslims are superior human beings.
Obama challenged the bigotry of those ideas, and the backlash has been both furious and mainstream…
Many critics have described Obama's assertion that Christians are equivalent to Muslims as insulting to Christians. Whether this is because they believe that Christians are inherently superior or that Muslims are inherently inferior is irrelevant. It is not so different from, say, 1960s white supremacists who called Martin Luther King an anti-white racist for asserting that white and black people are fundamentally the same.
Other critics have charged that Obama is ignoring the real threat: that America is at war not just with extremists who happen to be Muslim, but rather with Islam itself…
Amazingly, some have tried to dismiss Obama's comparison altogether by arguing that, even during the Crusades, in fact Christians were the victims and Islam the aggressor.
To be crystal clear: this is not a fight over the fine-grain imperfections of Obama's historical analogy or over the implications for US foreign policy. It is a fight over whether it's okay to hate Muslims, to apply sweeping and negative stereotypes to the one-fifth of humanity that follows a particular religion. A number of Americans, it seems, are clinging desperately to their anti-Muslim bigotry and are furious at Obama for trying to take that away from them.
