Obama Bombs American History 101

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Obama Bombs American History 101

SORRY, BARACK, BUT THERE WERE NO MUSLIMS ON THE MAYFLOWER

by

Paul L. Williams, Ph.D.

Thelastcrusade.org

Speaking at the University of Cairo, President Barack Hussein Obama said that Americans are indebted to Islam for the great contributions Muslims have made to the history and development of the United States.

“I know that Islam has always been a part of America’s story,” Mr. Obama told the throng of unenlightened Muslims. “The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. . . And since our founding, American Muslims have enriched the United States.”

Mr. Obama went on to say: “They [Muslims] have fought in our wars. They have served in our government. They have stood for civil rights. They have started businesses. They have taught at our universities. They’ve excelled in our sports arenas. They’ve won Nobel Prizes, built our tallest building and lit the Olympic torch. And when the first Muslim American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same holy Koran that one of our founding fathers, Thomas Jefferson, kept in his personal library.”

No one at the Egyptian University or the international media took issue with the President’s bizarre interpretation of American history, let alone his confusion of the Nation of Islam (the religion of Muhammad Ali and Malcolm X) that bears scant similarity to orthodox Islam. The Nation of Islam teach that Allah in the flesh was a bona fide nutcase named Wallace Fard and that Eli Muhammad, a conman with a tested IQ of 70 and not the Prophet Muhammad, was the true last prophet of Allah.

Let’s set the record straight once and for all.

Sorry, Barack Hussein, but there were no Muslims among the passengers on the Mayflower or the settlers at Jamestown. Muslims were conspicuously absent from the ranks of George Washington’s Army of the Revolution and played no role in the creation of the American republic - - save for the fact that the new country’s first declaration of war was against the forces of Islam in the form of the Barbary pirates.¹

Despite popular folklore, few Muslims numbered among the 12 million black Africans who were shipped to the New World from the 17^th to 19^th centuries. The Muslims, in fact, were not the slaves but the slave traders. Senegalese educator Amadou-Mahtar M’Bow has written that in 1587 a shipload of Moriscos (Spanish Moors) landed in a coastal area of South Carolina. The Moors, he contends, migrated to the mountains of eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina where they established colonies.² In reality, this is pure speculation. There is not a scintilla of archival or archaeological evidence to support this claim.

This is not to say that no Muslim slaves were transported to the colonies. Two such slaves - - Ayuiba Suleiman Diallo and Omar ibn Said - - were brought to America is 1731 but both were returned to Africa in 1734.³ In a Herculean effort to materialize at least one Muslim living in America before the Civil War, Muslims in America, an Islamic website, point to the name of Mahomet, the great grandson of Uncas, the founder of the Mohegan tribe, on a gravestone in Norwich, Connecticut.⁴ The name of this Native America, they argue, resembles that of the prophet, and, therefore, he must have been a convert to Islam.

In a similar example of straining at gnats, the compilers of The Collections and Stories of American Muslims, a non-profit organization, claim that Peter Salem, a former slave who fought at the Battle of Bunker Hill, must have been a Muslim since “Salem” bears an etymological resemblance to “Salaam,” the Arabic word for peace.⁵

For additional proof, the compilers turn to folklore, such as the story of Old Tom, a slave at a plantation in Georgia, who allegedly uttered, “Allah is God and Mohammed his Prophet” on his death-bed - - and the apocryphal tale of “Old Lizzy,” a slave from Edgefield County, who reportedly said, “Christ built His first church in Mecca.”⁶

Surprisingly, there is no record of any Islamic American among the enlisted and conscripted forces of World War I, let alone among the blue and grey armies of the Civil War. The great migrations that lasted from 1865 to 1925 brought 35,000,000 people to the New World: 4,500,000 from Ireland, 4,000,000 from Great Britain, 6,000,000 from central Europe, 2,000,000 from the Scandinavian countries, 5,000,000 from Italy, 8,000,000 from Eastern Europe, and 3,000,000 from the Balkans. But the number of Muslims who came here from the Middle East was statistically nil.⁷

In 1960, aside from the temples of the Nation of Islam, the only mosques in the United States were in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Dearborn, Michigan, and Washington DC (which opened in 1957) - - and all three professed less than 200 active members. Four other cities contained miniature mosques with less than fifty members.⁸

Oh, yes, Jefferson did possess a copy of the Koran which Keith Ellison, our first openly Muslim Congressman, used to make his oath of office. But what was Jefferson opinion of Islam? Did he believe the Muslim religion represented a salubrious influence in world affairs?

Far from it. In 1786 Thomas Jefferson, then US ambassador to France, and John Adams, then US Ambassador to Britain, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the Dey’s ambassador to Britain, in an attempt to negotiate a peace treaty with the Barbary Pirates based on Congress’ vote of funding. To the US Congress these two future Presidents later reported the reasons for the Muslims’ hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts.

• “…that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.”

Jefferson had it right.
Obama has it wrong.

[Beetle]

Horsehockey!

[Malsua]

Sorry, Barack Hussein, but there were no Muslims among the passengers on the Mayflower or the settlers at Jamestown. Muslims were conspicuously absent from the ranks of George Washington’s Army of the Revolution and played no role in the creation of the American republic - - save for the fact that the new country’s first declaration of war was against the forces of Islam in the form of the Barbary pirates.

Bears repeating. I've read the full history of US and Islam and it's almost always been at some level of conflict. In the past, the English, French, and other western countries simply paid off the pirates. It was until the US took them out the their reign of terror ended. It's very much as it is today. In all aspects of our relationships with Muslims be they terrorist in Iraq, pirates of Somalia or invaders in our cities. Western Europeans cave in, pay ransom and encourage the next attack and it's left to us to ultimately end the problem.

[American Patriot]

The only Muslims of American history that *I* remember were those we were dealing with when Jefferson sent the Marines to Tripoli...

Barbary Wars anyone?

[American Patriot]

Lessons From the Barbary Pirate Wars
By JEFFREY GETTLEMAN
Published: April 11, 2009

NAIROBI, Kenya — An American skipper in the hands of seafaring rogues. Some of the world’s busiest shipping lanes under attack. Tough men from a messy patch of Africa eluding and harassing the world’s greatest powers.

Mansell/Time & Life Pictures — Getty Images
PAST/PRESENT A Barbary Wars fight in 1804.


Paul Farley/U.S. Navy — Reuters

The destroyer Bainbridge, now on rescue duty off Somalia.

Sound familiar? Well, it’s not last week’s drama on the high seas we’re talking about, when Somali pirates attacked an American freighter in the Indian Ocean and took its captain hostage, then made off with him in a lifeboat. We’re talking about the Barbary Wars, about 200 years ago, when pirates from the Barbary Coast (today’s Morocco, Tunisia, Algeria and Libya) hijacked European ships with impunity and ransomed back the crews.

“When I first read about the Somali pirates, I almost did a double take and turned to my wife at the breakfast table and said, ‘This is déjà vu,’ ” recalled Frank Lambert, a professor at Purdue who is an expert on the Barbary pirates.

Dr. Lambert explained how those brigands, like today’s Somalis, usually kept their hostages alive. It wasn’t out of any enlightened sense of humanity. It was simply good business. They only hanged captives from giant hooks or carved them into little pieces if they resisted. The Barbary pirates used small wooden boats, often powered by slaves chained to the oars, to attack larger European ships. They were crude but effective, like today’s Somali swashbucklers, who in November commandeered a 1,000-foot-long Saudi oil tanker from a dinghy in the Gulf of Aden, a vital shipping lane at the mouth of the Red Sea.

But the Barbary pirates’ bravado became their demise — something the Somalis might keep in mind.

The pirates’ way of doing business was described this way at the time: “When they sprang to the deck of an enemy’s ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth, which usually struck such terror in the foe that they cried out for quarter at once.” The quote is from Thomas Jefferson, then America’s ambassador to France, after he and John Adams, the envoy in London, got the description from Tripoli’s envoy to Britain in 1786.

And that underscores a key point. The Barbary pirates actually had an ambassador — who met with Jefferson and Adams, no less. The pirates worked for a government. The Barbary rulers commissioned them to rob and pillage and kidnap, and the rulers got a cut. It was all official. And open. It was truly state-sponsored terrorism. And the Western nations’ response was to pay “tribute,” a fancy word for blackmail.

If a country paid tribute, the 18th-century pirates would leave its ships alone. Today, shipping companies fork over as much as $100 million in ransoms to the Somali pirates, a strategy that saves their cargoes but also attracts more underemployed Somali fishermen into the hijacking business.

The United States tried to play nice with the Barbary pirates and even inked a few treaties. That language, too, has a striking ring. The Barbary States were Muslim, as is Somalia. And America stressed that this was not about God.

“The United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion,” a 1796 treaty reads. “It has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Musselmen,” which is how Muslims was spelled back then.

Eventually, though, Americans felt humiliated paying off a bunch of knife-sucking thugs in blousy pants. That’s what led to the Barbary Wars, first in 1801 when Jefferson became president, and again in 1815, when James Madison sent the United States Navy to shell the Barbary Coast. The battles became the stuff of legend — “the shores of Tripoli” in the Marine Hymn — and were critical in developing the nation’s young Navy.

They also figured early in the naval career of one William Bainbridge, an officer who was sent to pay tribute to the dey of Algiers in 1800, was later captured during the war along with his ship, and went on to become a hero of the War of 1812. Last week, in an irony probably lost on the Somalis, it was a destroyer named after him that the United States Navy sent rushing to help the skipper in the lifeboat.

The Barbary pirates were finally brought to their knees by their encounters with the Americans, and by the French invasion of Algiers in 1830.

Will this happen in Somalia? Last week — even before a French effort to rescue a family in a separate hijacking ended with the death of one hostage — Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton urged the world to “end the scourge of piracy.” But Somali piracy is not an isolated problem. It’s the latest symptom of what afflicts an utterly failed state — a free-for-all on land that has consumed the country since the central government imploded in 1991. As any warlord there can tell you, the violence is almost always about cash. “We just want the money” is their mantra.

If that sounds like the 1800s, it also invites talk of solving the problem the same way: pound the bravado out of the pirates by taking the battle to them where it hurts most — on shore. But any effort to wipe out Somali pirate dens like Xarardheere or Eyl immediately conjures up the ghost of “Black Hawk Down,” the episode in 1993 when clan militiamen in flip-flops killed 18 American soldiers. Until America can get over that, and until the world can put Somalia together as a nation, another solution suggests itself: just steer clear — way clear, like 500 miles plus — of Somalia’s seas.

[Aplomb]

Rick said:

The only Muslims of American history that *I* remember were those we were dealing with when Jefferson sent the Marines to Tripoli...

Now I ask you, who should I believe, some blogger named Rick Donaldson or the president of the United States of America? It's a frightening thing that history can end up being a matter of faith. It can and has been altered, recorded, and passed off as truth.

[Beetle]

Rick said: Now I ask you, who should I believe, some blogger named Rick Donaldson or the president of the United States of America?

I would look at it like Rick is a All Star Center Fielder in the Major Leagues, and Obozo is in Little League still running to thrid base after he hits the ball (when he hits the ball).

[American Patriot]

Um... I would like to point out a couple of things...

I might "blog" but I am not a "Blogger".

I am an American. I am an American that has served in the United States Air Force, US Army ROTC, the Missile Defense Agency, as a government contractor. I've served as a Senior Radio Tech to President Reagan and President Bush (Sr). I've also served as trip officer for Carter, Nixon, Ford, various first ladies.

I graduated HS with a pretty good GPA. I passed all my history course in both HS and College with A's.

I am a student of American and world history, a scholar if you will.

But, I am no "Blogger".

I routinely write the White House and the President(s) who are in office at the time. All the way back to Nixon, I started writing letters to the White House. I have emailed or handwritten letters to various Congress members since I was in High School and continue to do so today.

But, I am NOT a Blogger.

Am I to be "believed" over the President of the United States?

Certainly in some cases, the answer is yes to that question and the reason is simple. I'm right, he is wrong.

In some other circumstances you might believe him over me - since I happen to know for a fact that the President of the United States (whomever he or she might be) is privy to things that the rest of us might not be.

Thus - sometimes you might believe a President might have more knowledge on a subject than a lowly "blogger" or even an American Patriot...

But make NO mistake about it. Most "normal" "average" "joe Sixpacks" know more than the President of the United States.

There are well studied, educated people out there - me among them - who spend their free time LEARNING and STUDYING.... then there are people like Presidents who merely get their information from others around them.

Whom would YOU believe?

Rick "I am Not a Blogger" Donaldson