[ April 16, 2024 ]
The political and media elites are doing everything they can, in every possible context, to convince Americans that Islam is peaceful, benign, and tolerant, and that Muslims are here to stay, have always been here, have contributed a great deal to America, and that only racist-islamophobic-anti-muslim-bigots are worried about how its texts and teachings incite violence and terrorism. This rewriting of history is part of that project. Joel Pollak’s article here utterly destroys the idea that Islam was a significant presence in America at the Founding, but the enemedia will, true to form, keep on pushing this lie.
“CNN’s W. Kamau Bell: Islam Part of America’s Founding,” by Joel B. Pollak, Breitbart, May 29, 2017:
CNN’s W. Kamau Bell devoted a recent episode of his series United Shades of America to exploring Muslim and Arab communities.
Story continues below advertisementAside from some interesting vignettes, the program is left-wing, anti-Trump propaganda that firmly establishes the network’s political bias. Bell also serves up some historical distortions of the sort spoonfed to undergraduates on politically-correct campuses, such as the claim that Islam has always been present in the U.S.
“Islam has always been part of the American fabric,” one Muslim man in Detroit tells Bell at an anti-Trump event. “A lot of people think that Islam is from a foreign country, or is a foreign religion. It’s not — it’s very American.” He goes on to criticize “those more violent voices in our society” — and he does not mean radical Islamists. Bell is so impressed that he asks the man, “When are you running for mayor?”, comparing him to a “young Barack Obama.”
It was Obama who told the Muslim world in his Cairo speech in 2009: “Islam has always been a part of America’s story.” He offered a dubious proof: “The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco.” He also cited the Treaty of Tripoli, which was essentially an agreement to pay a bribe to Muslim pirates who had made a practice of kidnapping Americans.
For CNN, the argument that Islam has “always” been present in the U.S. rests largely on the claim that a significant minority of black slaves were Muslim. On Saturday, CNN correspondent Dean Obeidallah claimed that “Islam has been here since the time of slavery, because ten to fifteen percent of the African slaves brought were Muslim. So Islam was here before the creation of the United States. It was actually part of the creation of the United States of America.” Bell’s interviewee raises the estimate, claiming that “during the slave trade, up to about 25 to 30% of the slaves came from areas where there were predominantly Muslim populations.”(Note that these claims leave out the role of Muslims in the slave trade itself, casting Muslims purely as victims.)
There is some basis for some of the claims CNN cites. As Daniel Pipes noted in 2000, “Muslims constituted a significant percentage of the Africans brought to the Americas in servitude; and that, as the most educated and resistant of the captive peoples, they exerted a disproportionate influence on slave life in the Americas.” But the faith did not survive among these populations; few of their descendants knew their forefathers’ Muslim origins.
While Muslims were present at America’s founding, Islam — as a coherent, self-conscious religious and political civilization — was not. Had it been present, one would have expected the Founding Fathers to be more aware of it, and one would have expected to see an American version of the faith emerge, one more comfortable with ideas of tolerance and individual liberty, much as different reformist versions of Judaism flourished in the United States.
To the extent that Islam was a part of early American history, it was a negative force, an external enemy. The predations of the Barbary pirates prompted the U.S. to build a world-class navy and deploy the fledgling Marines. As Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger recall in Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates: The Forgotten War That Changed American History, Jefferson was shocked when, at a meeting in London with the Tripolitan ambassador and John Adams in 1786, the Muslim envoy declared that American Christians were fair game for piracy: “… all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of faithful persons to plunder and enslave.”
There are echoes of that Islamic supremacism in the public statements of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), whom Bell interviews jovially on CNN. After the San Bernardino terror attack in December 2015, CAIR not only ensured an Islamic burial for the terrorists and represented their family in court, but blamed the murder of 14 Americans and the wounding of 22 more at a Christmas party on U.S. foreign policy.
(CAIR has been declared a terrorist organization by the United Arab Emirates, and was named by federal prosecutors as an unindicted co-conspirator in a Hamas terror-funding operation — none of which Bell mentions.)
Bell offers one additional argument to defend the idea that Islam is intrinsically American: “America has always had heroes who were Muslims.” He cites Muhammad Ali, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, and Malcolm X — none of whom were active in public life before the 1960s. Amazingly, he also praises the Nation of Islam and its leader, Louis Farrakhan. Bell cites Farrakhan’s “Million Man March” — and ignores his vicious racism and antisemitism.
CNN’s effort at historical revisionism is not just aimed at encouraging Americans to adopt more tolerant attitudes toward Muslims, but to discourage awareness or criticism of aspects of contemporary Islamic political thought that clash with liberal democratic principles and that, in extremis, pose an active terrorist threat….
The Truth Must be Told
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32 Comments
6 years ago
Well I don’t know about colonial America, but Islam was certainly a part of the history of the United States from the early days of the republic. Surely people on this site know that the infant republic established a regular navy at the end of the end of the 18th century in reaction to the Barbary Pirates imprisoning and enslaving American sailors to ventured into the Mediterranean Sea. One of Thomas Jefferson’s first acts as POTUS was to refuse a demand for ransom from the Moslem pasha holding Americans. Said pasha then declared war on the USA, which turned out to be a dumb move.
6 years ago
Reply to
Liatris Spicata
You nailed it, we had to fight and defeat Muslim pirates from attacking, capturing and enslaving our sailors.
6 years ago
Reply to
Liatris Spicata
To the shores of Tripoli! Modern history rewriters want to say Thomas Jefferson was looking into Islam, well, yes he was. They made claims that taking captives was within their holy texts and he got a Koran to find out. Sure enough he found said passages and found them repugnant enough to mobilize against them. Islam’s contribution was the founding of the Navy. We’ve been fighting them for over 2 centuries.
6 years ago
Reply to
Bradley Lexvold
Bradley, may I suggest you deduct eight years, from 2009 to 2017, from your time duration estimate?
It is odd, though, how the very people most anxious to tarnish Jefferson’s legacy with his acceptance of slavery seem equally anxious to gloss over Islam’s close association with, and religious embrace of, “the peculiar institution.”
6 years ago
Reply to
Liatris Spicata
If I recall correctly, Jefferson’s slaves were part of his wife’s property, and he was never in a financial position to free them. Sometimes we just get into positions where we can’t do the things we’d like to do.
6 years ago
Reply to
Liatris Spicata
Liatris…if you are living in my country, the USA, you should be deported immediately as a mentally undesirable. The crap that you spew forth is beyond ridiculous. I’ve spent three years researching Islam, reading the Q’uran, reading Hadiths and fatwas. If Islam is a religion of peace, how do you justify the Q’uran’s 109 references to Jihad? How do you deny Muhammed’s command to kill Jews where you find them, that Jews are swine?
You have no factual leg to stand on…Muhammed was a suicidal, megalomaniacal, pedophilic lunatic that actually took his brother’s wife for himself under the pretext that Allah told him that he was permitted to do this. Islam is a collection of the ravings of a psychopath that claimed to have a direct line to God. How can any rational person subscribe to that Bullshit?
6 years ago
What a load of propaganda BS.
6 years ago
lol!
D
6 years ago
What BS
6 years ago
Hmm, I find it very strange and troubling that Islam, the Quran, hadiths, sunnah’s or Muhammad were NOT named anywhere in our founders document. The Barbary Coast pirates showed up later, but NO Muslim names appear in the Declaration of Independence, or Constitution as a founder. So where exactly and what part have Islam played in the historical shaping of America?
The short and long answer…NONE! Islam have NOT contributed one iota to the betterment of mankind,,,NOTHING!
6 years ago
Reply to
JacksonPearson
Islam have NOT contributed one iota to the betterment of mankind,,,NOTHING!
Not for the first time, I cannot agree with you, and I think, through your baseless allegations, you undermine the cause you purport to support.
The Islamic world has significant cultural achievements to its credit. Building on its Christian and Jewish base in the Middle East, it lead the Western world in learning for centuries. For example, I believe astronomy in the Islamic world was more advanced than in Europe until about 1400. Moslem mathematicians contributed significantly to the development of algebra (a branch of knowledge they learned from India as they marched through the subcontinent murdering millions of Hindus and Buddhists). I think the case can be made that Islam treated its Jews at least as well as the Christian world did … before the rise of the Nazis. Moreover, the Islamic world arguably has a better record than the Christian West of allowing vast numbers of people to live in reasonably peaceful circumstances (of course, it did so by imposing its own harsh discipline).
Nothing I have said is intended to exculpate Islam from its very clear historical and theological deficiencies. But your mindless posturing, ignoring the achievements of Islam, are, I would say, an impediment to understanding and peacemaking. “You’re horrible” is simply not the basis for any kind of intercultural understanding or even tolerance.
6 years ago
Reply to
Liatris Spicata
Facts and history are NOT your best friend, because The only thing Islam have contributed or achieved is darkness, hate, death and destruction. Your religion have successfully slaughtered over 270 million of the earths population, and counting…WHY? And once more WHY? The short answer is, a blithering delusional idiot that sat in a cave listening to we’ve been told of fact less, made up murderous revelations. The Qur’an is a book of murder and hate. There’s nothing peaceful about Islam, or ever will be, when you internalize those facts, then YOU”LL understand who our enemy is…
Are these false or factual?
6 years ago
Reply to
JacksonPearson
Your religion have (sic) successfully slaughtered ….
I have to wonder if you are intellectually capable of understanding my utterances. Notice you didn’t bestir yourself to address my points in any kind of meaningful way.
6 years ago
Reply to
Liatris Spicata
Thise advancements were already in place in this country before Islam and Muslims invaded those lands. If what you say is true then what went wrong?? How come you are not still advancing in technology and science and the medical field. How come Muslims come the the USofA to learn these things??? All Muslims majority nations are backwards now and primitive. No advancements in technology anywhere. Only in the west and where freedom is allowed are those achievements still continuing. Islam does nothing to advance man’s ability to think critically because in Islam you are to just accept what is taught and not question anything. By doing so Islam as a collective destroys advancing cultures and promotes savagery and barbaric behavior…
6 years ago
Reply to
zahbudda
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6 years ago
Reply to
Liatris Spicata
I take it you are also aware of the case that writers such as Serge Trifkovic, Douglas Murray and Bill Warner make for the myth of the Golden Age of Islam?
D
6 years ago
Was a mistake to let Muslims into the country, from the beginning.
6 years ago
cnn is a failing lame stream media vendor, it is desperately trying to retain an audience and the financial rewards of having one. Right now, only the dimmer members of society who for the most part are on welfare, pay any attention to cnn. Rewriting history is a lie that the united nations and arab organizations attempt all the time, only the weak minded even look at that drivel.
6 years ago
The Caliphate News Network?
6 years ago
“and deploy the fledgling Marines”
Hahahah. Yes indeed.
Commodore Preeble, on the USS Constitution – at that time busy bombarding the Pasha’s palace in Tripoli – gave Jefferson’s envoy Eaton SIX Marines, including their commander, Sergeant Presley N. O’Bannon.
They turned out to be enough.
6 years ago
Taqiya – Islamic Deception. Muslims are taught to deceive the kuffar (non-Muslim) about their true beliefs in order to defend the cause of Islam and Jihad. This deception called – taqiya.
6 years ago
Reply to
Mal M
Aside from deception and lies they have a very ridiculous belief that the world and the universe was created by their allah so that everything in it belongs to islam. Muslim refugees in non-muslim countries are demanding welfare benefits as these are in the form of tax or jizya from the infidels.
6 years ago
CNN = Crescent News Network
D
6 years ago
The only thing Islam contributed to the Early United States was to give our Navy and Marines good Combat Training over in Tripoli. Other than that they had nothing to do with America until our first Muslim (FAKE) President started hauling them over here by the plane load.
6 years ago
Sounds like something Goebbels would say.
D
6 years ago
Those that don’t remember and study history are destined to repeat it. Looks to me that we’re heading down the road to a world war, AGAIN because of stupid journalist or commentators like the Bell guy.
6 years ago
I suggest “The Muslim Discovery of America,” by Frederick William Dame, a book that exposes the many lies of Muslims – who claim they own, discovered, and invented just about everything. I wrote the book’s Commendatory Preface and Pamela Geller wrote the Forward.
6 years ago
the libyan imam in Jefferson’s day (tripoli pirates debacle) actually set foot on our soil and asked what religion the Indian’s were…
6 years ago
Islam has been at war with the world since it’s birth. These animals want nothing more than total control, a global caliphate and will not stop their atrocities until they achieve this. The most abhorrent part of this goal is that world leaders in their quest for one world government, globalism, support these animals thinking that by giving their support they will achieve their goal. Both want the same thing, world wide dominance. Both are using each other to achieve their goal.
6 years ago
they did bring us slaves, Why blacks don’t admit muslims enslaved them is beyond me
