By Elaine Magliaro

Do you remember how some conservatives freaked out a month ago because of remarks that President Obama made before the National Prayer Breakfast? Here’s a little refresher for you from Luke Brinker of Salon:

…President Obama denounced those “who hijack religion for their own murderous ends,” citing, for instance, the Islamic State militant group, “a brutal, vicious death cult that, in the name of religion, carries out unspeakable acts of barbarism.” Given the group’s gruesome executions of its hostages and its utterly horrific execution of children, including the mentally disabled, one could hardly dispute the president’s characterization of its fundamentalist adherents.

Nevertheless, the president’s speech rankled conservative critics. Obama, you see, committed the grievous error of pointing out that brutality and violence have hardly been the province of any one religion.

“[L]est we get on our high horse and think this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and the Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama noted. ”In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ,” he added, referring to segregationists’ fondness for Biblical injunctions against interracial mingling.

Brinker noted that the “right-wing reaction was swift — and, at times, nothing short of hyperbolic.”

Well, this morning on CNN, Timothy Cardinal Dolan–the Archbishop of the Archdiocese of New York and “one of the most conservative and outspoken Catholic leaders in the U.S.”– “echoed President Barack Obama by drawing a ‘parallel’ between ISIS and Christian terrorists.”

Dolan told Chris Cuomo, the co-host of CNN’s New Day, “These extremist do not represent genuine Islamic thought. Even the majority of temperate, peace-loving Muslims would say, ‘I’m afraid they have a particular strand of erroneous Islam.’ But I do think they are. They are distorting it.” Dolan added, “You know the parallel I’ve drawn?…And enough people have been kind enough to tell me they think the analogy is accurate. Remember 30-35 years ago with the IRA in Ireland? The IRA claimed to be Catholic. And they were baptized, they had a Catholic identity. What they were doing was a perversion of everything the church stood for.” The Cardinal continued by saying, “The analogy I think is somewhat accurate. These are not pure — these are not real Muslims.”

Cardinal Dolan: Comparing ISIS to Christian terrorists is an ‘accurate’ analogy

SOURCES

Cardinal Dolan finally makes sense: Comparing ISIS to Christian terrorists is an ‘accurate’ analogy (Raw Story)

Wing nuts’ latest meltdown: Conservatives go nuts over Obama’s remarks on Christianity and Islam (Salon)