Obama summarily condemned the crusades, but the crusades weren’t only a persecution of Obama’s people. The crusades were instigated against many different target populations and places, only some of them Muslim. Moreover, crusading was presented to potential faithful fighters as a means to their spiritual salvation. See Riley-Smith’s description about the motivations for the crusades below.
When asked about jihad, however, Obama left the door wide open for jihad to continue as a religious practice, presumably under appropriate Islamic guidance.
From a purely spiritual point of view, the crusades were not substantially different than Obama’s holy jihad.
So, why won’t Obama summarily condemn jihad?
“It was the belief that crusades were collective acts of penance, repayments through self-punishment of the debts owed to God for sin, which distinguished them from other holy wars. Whereas most Christian holy war demanded the service of God in arms by a devout soldier responding passively to divine command, the crusader was invited to cooperate actively, because everything depended on his decision to undertake the penance of fighting in a campaign in which his obligations, at any rate if completed, would constitute for him an act of condign self-punishment. It is no exaggeration to say that a crusade was for an individual only secondarily about service in arms to God or the benefiting of the church or Christianity; it was primarily about benefiting himself, since he was engaged in an act of self-sanctification.
The power of this conception rested in the long term on the way it answered the concerns of the faithful. The remission of sins was as relevant to survivors as to those facing death, and it was offered to members of a society in which it was almost impossible for a layman of any substance, bound by responsibilities to kindred, clients, and dependants, to avoid serious sin. For hundreds of years Europe remained marked by anxieties about sinfulness and a consequence was the attractiveness to many of crusading, which provided the opportunity to make a fresh start.”
Jonathan Riley-Smith, The Crusades, Christianity and Islam, 2008, p. 33.