President Barack Obama tried to justify the terrorism of the Islamic State (ISIS) by "demeaning and degrading the Christian faith," Dallas Pastor Robert Jeffress said Friday.
"It's kind of like a verbal slight-of-hand trick," Jeffress, who heads the First Baptist Church in Dallas, told Bill O'Reilly on his Fox News program. "Instead of focusing on ISIS burning people alive and burying kids, let's focus instead on these Christians and the terrible things that they have done.
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"He knew exactly what he was doing — and he should be ashamed of himself," Jeffress said.
In his speech Thursday at the National Prayer Breakfast, President Obama compared 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," he added. "There is a tendency in us, a sinful tendency that can pervert and distort our faith."
The comments drew widespread outrage, with conservative commentator
Pat Buchanan fuming on "The Steve Malzberg Show" on Newsmax TV: "He's trying to give them all equivalence to what happened in the 11th century to what's happening today? It's astonishing."
Jeffress told O'Reilly that Obama's "real goal" with the remarks was to "deny the relationship between terrorism and Islam."
Jesus, he said, "would be outraged that the president would willfully mischaracterize a movement like Christianity that bears Christ name.
"I believe that Jesus, who said it would be better to be cast into the sea than to harm a child, would be incensed that Obama would dare link Christianity to ISIS, an organization that tortures children, buries them alive and crucifies them."
Jeffress further noted compared the number of deaths during the Inquisition to how many Americans died in the 9/11 attacks, for instance.
"The Inquisition lasted 450 years," he began. "There were 2,200 people who died. That's about five a year. More people died on 9/11, in one day, at the hand of Muslim terrorists than in all of the Inquisition."
A total of 2,996 people died — including 343 firefighters and 72 law-enforcement officers — in the assaults on New York City, at the Pentagon and in a plane crash in near Shanksville, Pa.
Osama bin Laden later claimed responsibility for the attacks.
"I hear people talk about Christians who commit these abortion clinic bombings," Jeffress told O'Reilly. "Do you know how many people have died in abortion-clinic bombings? A total of eight. Why that's not even a good day's work for a Muslim terrorist.
"There have been millions of people slaughtered by Muslim extremists," he concluded. "What I'm saying is there is no moral equivalency here."