In one of the more appalling moments of his presidency, Barack Obama demonstrated last Thursday an unprecedented level of moral bankruptcy, a breathtaking ignorance of history, and utter contempt for a country that twice elected him to the highest office in the land.

The scene was the National Prayer Breakfast, which took place exactly two days after ISIL released a 22-minute video showing captured Jordanian pilot Lt. Muath al-Kaseasbeh being burned alive. And in one of the most ham-fisted attempts by any politician to downplay the connection between a group of bloodthirsty thugs operating under the self-professed banner of Islam and Islam itself, Obama decided that putting Christianity on the same footing as ISIL was the right thing to do.

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

Once again, Obama feels the need to belittle or apologize for America in a pathetic attempt to produce moral equivalency. And even then, he gets it wrong or omits half the story. As noted Islamic historian Bernard Lewis writes, “The Crusades could more accurately be described as a limited, belated and, in the last analysis, ineffectual response to the jihad – a failed attempt to recover by a Christian holy war what had been lost to a Muslim holy war.”

As for the Inquisition, there were several, spanning the 12th and 13th centuries, including some that were secular in nature. In 1998, the Vatican granted 30 scholars access to the archives of the Holy Office, the modern successor to the Inquisition. These scholars produced an 800-page report concluding the barbarism attributed to them was vastly overstated. “The Inquisition was not born out of desire to crush diversity or oppress people; it was rather an attempt to stop unjust executions,” notes historian Thomas F. Madden.

As for slavery and Jim Crow, Obama neglected two things: Slavery was universally practiced by all cultures for centuries, and Christians led the charge in abolishing slavery in the West. Moreover, millions of Christians opposed the institutionalized segregation of Jim Crow that was ultimately undone by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

None of this is meant to excuse abuses, or those who used Christianity as an excuse to perpetrate them. But note the president had to reach at least 50 years into America’s past – and nearly a thousand years into Church history – to find behavioral and cultural comparisons with what Islamist barbarians are doing right now. Furthermore, Christianity and America have engendered something most Muslim nations and Islam have not: genuine reformation.

Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal aptly addressed that reality. “It was nice of the President to give us a history lesson at the Prayer breakfast,” Jindal said. “Today, however, the issue right in front of his nose, in the here and now, is the terrorism of Radical Islam, the assassination of journalists, the beheading and burning alive of captives. We will be happy to keep an eye out for runaway Christians, but it would be nice if he would face the reality of the situation today. The Medieval Christian threat is under control, Mr. President. Please deal with the Radical Islamic threat today.”

And let’s not forget part of the Islamic threat includes enslavement – again happening right now. In December, ISIL published a pamphlet entitled “Questions and Answers on Taking Captives and Slaves.” Nigeria’s Boko Haram has also sold young girls into slavery, apparently unfazed by the fierce #BringBackOurGirls Twitter campaign launched against them.

Atrocities Jindal listed as well as the ongoing slave trade were all done in the name of Islam, even as our president has fought tooth and nail to avoid using that term. That is, until Obama finally admitted at the same National Prayer Breakfast that the world’s foremost terror threat is being engineered by those who “profess to stand up for Islam but instead betray it” – followed immediately by his denigration of Christianity. Moreover, it is interesting to note that when Obama was illuminating Christianity’s shortcomings he referred to them as being perpetrated “in the name of Christ.” Would he ever speak of the Islamist’s current depredations being perpetrated “in the name of Muhammad?”

Robert Jeffress, pastor of First Baptist Church of Dallas, gets to the real bankruptcy behind the president’s invidious comparison. “When Christians act violently they are acting in opposition to the teachings of their founder, Jesus Christ,” he told Fox News’ Todd Starnes. “They cannot cite a single verse in the New Testament that calls for violence against unbelievers. On the other hand, radical Islamists can point to a number of verses in the Koran calling for Muslims to ‘crucify the infidels.’”

Perhaps Obama could point to a group of Christians currently engaging in savagery similar to that of ISIL, denounced by the UN last Wednesday for engaging in “the systematic killing of children belonging to religious and ethnic minorities … including several cases of mass executions of boys, as well as reports of beheadings, crucifixions of children and burying children alive.”

How tone deaf is Obama? He made his inflammatory remarks at a breakfast commemorating the 100th anniversary of the 1915 Armenian Genocide – during which more than a million predominantly Christian Armenians were exterminated by Muslim Turks.

It appears there is something profoundly lacking in the mental makeup of Obama. This is a man who spent more than two minutes at a Tribal Nations Conference in 2009 making introductory remarks and offering a “shout out” to a Medal of Honor recipient – before mentioning that Maj. Nidal Hasan, a Muslim, had just killed 13 and wounded 31 soldiers at Fort Hood. When Muslims murdered ambassador Christopher Stevens, Sean Smith and Navy SEALs Glen Doherty and Tyrone Woods in Benghazi in 2012, Obama handed off the crisis to then-Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, not to be heard from again until he turned up at a fundraiser in Las Vegas the following day. Literally minutes after announcing Muslims had beheaded American journalist James Foley, Obama went golfing – and blamed the ensuing firestorm on the press and “bad optics.”

All of those were appalling moments as well. And perhaps what Americans should fear most is what this president is capable of doing “in the name of Obama.”