“the most offensive [comments] I’ve ever heard a President make in my lifetime”

President Barack Obama stirred outrage with his speech at the National Prayer Breakfast Thursday, comparing the atrocities committed by ISIS to those of Christians “in the name of Christ.”

“Unless we get on our high horse and think that this is unique to some other place, remember that during the Crusades and Inquisition, people committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ,” Obama said. “In our home country, slavery and Jim Crow all too often was justified in the name of Christ.”

“So it is not unique to one group or one religion,” Obama said. “There is a tendency in us, a simple tendency that can pervert and distort our faith.”

The comments drew swift reaction.

Appearing on “The Steve Malzberg Show” on Newsmax TV, conservative commentator Pat Buchanan fumed at Obama comparing the extreme barbarity of ISIS to the Crusades.

“He’s trying to give them all equivalence to what happened in the 11th century to what’s happening today? It’s astonishing,” Buchanan said.

“The whole idea of the Inquisition in Spain – I mean these things are hundreds of years ago. That was a 30-year war long, long ago.”

“I can’t think of any atrocities that have really been committed in the name of Christ … There’s no justification anywhere in all the books of the New Testament for any kind of violence on the scale of what we just saw with that Jordanian pilot.”

Buchanan said Obama has a “real problem with the cold hard truth and reality of our times” regarding terrorism. … “Can the president not see the reality of his own time that he’s got to retreat centuries to find what he thinks might be a moral equivalence?”

Buchanan also objected to Obama’s reference to racial segregation laws during the Jim Crow era during the same speech.

“To call it Jim Crow, which was a form of segregation of racists; to say that was rooted in Christianity, it seems to be an absurdity and injustice,” he said.

Former U.S. Rep. Allen West said: “President Obama is the gift that keeps on giving,’ “The Islamapologist-in-Chief attempted to find moral equivalency between the brutality of ISIS and Christianity.”

And in a statement on his website, Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, said “the president should apologize for his insulting comparison.”

Former Virginia Gov. Jim Gilmore, a Republican, said Obama’s remarks were “the most offensive I’ve ever heard a President make in my lifetime.”

Gilmore said it illustrated that “Obama does not believe in America or the values we all share. There is no moral equivalency for the horrific behavior of terrorists whose atrocities are shocking and reprehensible”

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