Founding Fathers Supported Islam?
Founding Fathers Supported Islam?
by Bill Lockwood
President Obama has jumped the gun. He had hoped that by now his Common Core education standards would have already dumbed-down Americans to the point that they know nothing of our own history nor would they be able to read the Koran for themselves. So he lectured America this week from a Baltimore mosque that “Islam has always been a part of America.”
Visiting the Islamic Society of Baltimore on Wednesday, Obama eagerly assured Muslims that the dramatic rise in Islamic bloody terror against Christians and non-Muslims around the world should not in turn cause suspicion of Islam. Anti-Muslim bias and ill-feeling must be denounced, regardless of how much infidel blood flows at the hands of Muslims.
Within his remarks Obama showed what purposeful brainwashing can do to a mind. To support his thesis that Islam has always been woven into the fabric of America he pointed out (1) That the religion of many African slaves brought to America in the 17th century was Islam; (2) That Thomas Jefferson wanted the “Islamic” religion to be protected as was other religions, and; (3) That Jefferson and John Adams had their own copies of the Koran. It is difficult to believe that any person considers these sophomoric suggestions as proof that somehow “Islam has been woven into the fabric of America from the beginning,” let alone a president who was supposedly Harvard-trained. Stunning.
Regarding Jefferson’s view of Islam, consider that even Columbia-degreed Denise Spellberg, author of Thomas Jefferson and the Quran: Islam and the Founders, reminds us that the Founders believed both Catholicism and Islam were violent religions and that Jefferson himself had a “personal disdain” for Islam. Jefferson knew from his experience as Minister to France that Islam was spread by the sword.
In spite of his disdain, Jefferson urged “toleration” toward individual Muslims who may be in America. However, to equate this toleration to “Muslims being a part of the fabric” or “founding” of America insults intelligence. Further, that Jefferson and Adams owned a copy of the Koran does not mean they appreciated any of Muhammed’s teachings any more than owning a copy of Dreams From My Father means anyone likes the content.
Perhaps Obama, while he is on Thomas Jefferson—who launched America’s first war against Muslim Barbary Coast Pirates–will announce to the public what Jefferson himself reported to John Jay and to the Congress regarding Islam. He learned it directly from the Tripoli Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman. The ambassador answered us that [the right of piracy] was founded upon on the laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered 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 who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
Other Founders
What exactly did the Founders of America think of Islam? Not only did they eschew it, but were outspoken that CHRISTIANITY is the great basis upon our free republic rests. That the liberty to even be in America while believing Muhammad’s Koran is traceable solely to Christian concepts of freedom—it certainly does not work the other way around.
The Father of American jurisprudence, Justice Joseph Story, in his Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States, “Indeed, in a republic, there would seem to be a peculiar propriety in viewing the Christian religion, as the great basis, on which it must rest for its support and permanence, if it be, what it has ever been deemed by its truest friends to be, the religion of liberty.” Story went on to point out that not only did the Founders as a whole wish Christianity to receive “encouragement” from the state, but that the real object of the First Amendment “was not to countenance, much less advance Mahometanism, or Judaism, or infidelity by prostrating Christianity …”
James Iredell, a U.S. Supreme Court judge appointed by George Washington, made the same point in 1788. But it is objected that the people of America may perhaps choose representatives who have no religion at all, and that pagans and Mahometans may be admitted into offices … But it is never to be supposed that the people of America will trust their dearest rights to persons who have no religion at all, or a religion materially different from their own.
Samuel Johnston, governor of North Carolina and member of the Constitution ratifying convention in 1788, suggested that if Muslims ever became officials of the United States that it would be “an unfortunate” event and could only happen if people laid aside the Christian religion altogether. He likened this, as did other Founders, to having elected officials who were devoid of religion completely. Similar quotations could be multiplied many times over. The Founding generation, far from remotely supposing that Islam was “woven into the fabric” of our nation, disdained it as a violent religion.
Obama’s reminder that some of the African slaves brought to America is likely the truth. What he refuses to acknowledge, however, is that not one of those African slave came to America without the complicity of Muslim slave traders on the African continent. The Koran not only endorses slavery, but Muhammed himself, the epitome of what a Muslim should be, personally owned black slaves.
It is beyond sad to witness the occupant of the Oval Office so stultify his intelligence by re-writing history. But it is a forecast of what his Common Core standards have in mind for all students.