When President Obama mentioned the Crusades as an example of one of the times Christianity was a little less than a religion of peace, people jumped all over him because, as they claimed, those were the old days, and things have come a long way since then.

Only Muslims perform atrocities these days in the name of religion.

But.

Just last year Muslims in Banqui, Central African Republic were jumping on trucks to flee from Christians who had been persecuting them. As the trucks passed through Christian areas as they fled they were attacked.

Last year is not all that long ago.

Christian vigilantes attacked their Muslim minority neighbors killing scores of them, often with machetes. Thousands fled, hoping to get to the airport.

When the country’s first Muslim leader, Michel Djotodia, stepped down, the idea was that this would bring stability to the area. Instead, the Christian population turned on the Muslims.

When one man fell of a truck, according to Peter Bouckaert, emergencies director for Human Rights Watch, he was viciously slain by a mob that cut off his genitals and hands.

No statements of outage came from Christian leaders throughout the world.

Then there’s the Lord’s Resistance Army known for giving guns to children and forcing them to fight; abducting large numbers of civilians for training as guerrillas; abducting young girls and selling them as sex and labor slaves; and giving abducted children as gifts to arms dealers in Sudan.

Besides being beaten, raped, and forced to march until exhausted, children have been forced to kill other children who had attempted to escape.

The LRA rebels, led by Joseph Kony who inherited power from his aunt who had started the Holy Spirit Movement, and who believes himself to be a prophet sent from God, has the stated goal of the establishing a government based on the biblical Ten Commandments.

Between 1882 and 1968 there were 4,743 recorded lynchings in the United States. 25% of these were white people who had sympathized and spoke for Black people.

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There was the case of Jesse Washington in Texas, a very Christian place. He had been accused of murdering a White woman even though there were no witnesses, just a corpse. Mr. Washington, a U.S. Soldier, had his genitals cut off before he was raised and lowered over a bonfire for two hours before finally being burned alive.

One witness sent a picture to relatives with the note, “This is the barbeque we had last night. My picture is to the left with a cross over it. Your son, Joe.”

Washington’s body was cut to pieces and these given to spectators as souvenirs. People have passed these and similar souvenirs down to family members through the years, and they are still around.

But I guess that could be excused as it happened like way back in the days of the Crusades, 1916.

In 1964 three Mississippi civil rights workers were killed by members of the local White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan. The White Knights claim they are a Christian organization.

Southern Christians raped, murdered, beat, robbed, and burned blacks, and then went to church on Sunday assuring the lord that they were saving their biblically based way of life. Remember, the Southern Baptist Convention had begun in defense of slavery, and had opposed desegregation and racial equality until the very last minute

Considering that lynchings continued until 1968, at least where they were noticeable, who knows what surreptitious forms they have morphed into, those involved are still around, so it is not something from a distant past.

We have Christian politicians around today who in the name of Christianity are advocating the killing of Gay people, not just in the United States, but in foreign countries. Uganda’s “Kill the Gays” bill got a lot of help from American Christian pastors and politicians. Representative Sally Kern has stated publicly that Gay people are like cancer which needs to be removed.

This isn’t to minimize the atrocities of those who claim they do what they do in the name of the Muslim religion. It is to point out that people need to scrutinize the fear mongering by those who want war and feel that by presenting one religion, the “other”, as the only religion to commit atrocities, they can get support.

Remember, we weren’t at war with the Middle East until we went there. Before that we were dealing with a political movement whose members we had armed and trained, but who then turned on us.

Why shouldn’t they have the oil we were so wiling to have our young men and women die for.

We need to rectify that, and to do that we need an enemy people will blindly oppose. Hating an “other” is a good distraction.

And it is to question why people ask why the moderate Muslims are not speaking up against the atrocities (they are, by the way), yet do not ask why the moderate Christian leaders are silent about what their religion is doing beyond making excuses.

Besides hearing about ISIL, in the oil rich areas, by the way, why do we not hear about the Christian nuts in other, non-oil rich areas?