MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell criticized President Obama’s speech at the National Prayer Breakfast on Saturday’s “Up with Steve Kornacki.”
“The only comparable event in terms of religious war you can come up with is 800 years ago, and it is the Crusades, and that is correct it is a comparable event. And it is important that it was 800 years ago, and what is important about it is that Catholicism, which was running the Crusades, and Christianity, more broadly, grew out of that, and that’s what we’re looking for in terms of what’s happening with the Islamic State” he stated.
O’Donnell continued, “as far as the Jim Crow stuff is concerned, we’re talking about scale. We’re talking about numbers, and we’re talking about religion. The reason people were killed by the Ku Klux Klan was the color of their skin, not their religion…to include that in a reference to an army, an active army, that is out there in the tens of thousands and that has worldwide reach, that can assassinate cartoonists in Paris, you know, the Ku Klux Klan never assassinated a cartoonist in New York. We’re talking about a scale that makes these comparisons irrelevant.”
He added that the existence of Islamophobia “doesn’t mean that we have to absolutely be silent about the connective tissue that these people are bringing to what they’re doing, from religion, to what they’re doing.”
Follow Ian Hanchett on Twitter @IanHanchett