We are, or at least we were, all guilty. The Crusades massacred Muslims 800 hundred years ago, and so as we blame Islamic terrorists for their brutalities today, let’s not forget to reflect upon our own. President Obama’s equating of the atrocities committed by ISIS to the acts of the Crusades has offended the American public. His politically correct and clinically impartial moral views point fingers at the west. The British burned Joan of Arc on the stake—for God’s sake, she was just a 17-year-old teenager. The French continued to carry out its capital punishment by guillotine as late as September 1977. Their last victim was an immigrant worker from North Africa accused of raping and murdering a French woman.
Has this background information not helped you reduce your “prejudices” against ISIS and construct a more balanced and all-round perspective of the guilt of mankind as a whole? But Obama missed out Chinese atrocities, which upset me a bit as I, a Chinese person, felt excluded from the civilized world as Obama’s vision appears limited only to Europe.
And no, I am not talking about the Mongolians under Genghis Khan, who were alleged to have massacred up to 100 million civilians and soldiers across the Gobi and Eastern Europe in the 13th century.
In 1934, a young American missionary couple named John and Betty Stam arrived in China with their 3-month-old baby, Helen. They preached the gospel in a town in the eastern province of Anhui. They were warned by local Chinese officials, under Chiang Kai-shek’s pro-Western Nationalist government, that the Chinese communist Red Army led by Mao Zedong were coming for them.
The Stams were captured by the communists as they hurried to escape. Imprisoned in a damp cell, young baby Helen started crying, which annoyed the communist guard. The guard wanted to kill the baby for a moment of peace. A Chinese prisoner offered to exchange his own life to save the baby’s. So he was hacked to pieces in front of the Stams, and Helen was allowed to live.
As Mao’s communist army lacked the money to drag out their fight with Chiang Kai-shek’s government in their quest to build a red empire—the same problem ISIS faces today—they asked the American couple to pay a ransom. John Stam refused. As a result, the couple was beheaded by the communists. It was a crime that Stalin’s Comintern—if one compares that relatively august body to Al-Qaeda in this analogy—found too barbaric. But not Mao and his Chinese comrades.