Crusaders vs. ISIS. Are they comparable?

I'm a pretty liberal poster compared to most of y'all but the President made a comparison recently that really pissed me off so I'm going to vent.

In a recent speech on ISIS President Obama said:

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"During the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ"

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As if to equate the actions of the Crusaders to those of the Jihadists in ISIS and say see "Christianity can be just as bad as Islam!"

What a load of horse shite.

quote:

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In the name of

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The Crusades were as much political as they were religious. Begun in 1099 they were a response to centuries of violent Muslim expansion into Christian lands and an attempt to reconcile Western and Eastern Europe. On the face of it this all sounds religious but religious and civil authority were not separate in these days and the preeminent political leaders of the time and the leader of Western Europe were members of the church.

So yes, a Pope initiated the crusades and clothed them in a Christian veneer but they were as much about extending political power and protecting European culture as they were about religion. There were also important domestic concerns that fueled the crusades like the infighting between Christian leaders of the time that the Church wanted to quell so the Crusades provided an outlet. In this sense the President is right, the Crusaders did use Christianity, a religion that is overwhelmingly peaceful, as a false justification for a political war. Obama's error is in comparing that to what ISIS is doing.

ISIS on the other hand is almost purely religious. The only halfway political motivation you could point to is some kind of perverted Pan-Arabism and frustration with the Sykes Picot agreement that drew arbitrary borders across Arab lands. Other than that there isn't much. They have made it clear they want to establish a world caliphate. It's not a political movement with a religious cloak, it's about religion for them.

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committed terrible deeds

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The Crusaders didn't want to conquer the world, they didn't want to "kill all heathens", they wanted to reclaim the "holy land" for Christianity and for the safety of Christian Pilgrims. Did they kill some Jews in the Rhine? Yes, but that was as much economic (German/French frustration with usurious Jewish money lenders) as it was about religion. The Crusaders didn't kill every non-Catholic they came into contact with. ISIS on the other hand kills everyone that isn't a radical salafi. Shitte? Secular Sunni? Yezidi? Copt? Jew? Assyrian? Alawite? They all must die.

So to end my rambling I'm really annoyed with the President's shitty historical analogy:

Hijacking Religion...: The Crusaders did "hijack" Christianity in the sense that they justified their wars in the name of Christ. Wars that were largely political and economic and went against the teachings of Christ. ISIS isn't hijacking Islam. Their approach is straight out of Islam, its early days and the actions of Mohammad. It's not the same thing.

...to commit horrible acts The actions of the Crusaders were tame compared to ISIS. They committed some atrocities but they were largely the exception while they are standard procedure for the genocidal jihadists in ISIS.

\end rant