Just put this together:
Ignorance of Islam is Islam’s greatest weapon.
Cicero reminds us that to be ignorant of what happened before we were born, is to remain a child forever. Obama recently said: “Here in America, Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding. Generations of Muslim immigrants came here and went to work as farmers and merchants and factory workers, helped to lay railroads and to build up America”. Considering these statements, we must remember that only honest knowledge of historical facts will result in truth.
There is very little information on Muslim immigrants serving as farmers and merchants, but there is evidence that there may have been hundreds of Muslims in the United States in 1776—imported as slaves from areas of Africa where Islam slave markets flourished. There is no evidence that the Founders were aware of the religious convictions of their slaves. However it is clear that the Founding Fathers thought about the relationship of Islam to the new nation and were prepared to make a place for it in the new Republic because that is what Christianity and the Constitution teaches.
Shortly after America’s founding, the United States was dragged into the affairs of the Islamic world by an escalating series of unprovoked attacks on Americans by Muslim pirates, the terrorists of the era. These Muslims looted American ships and captured American sailors, holding them for ransom or selling them as slaves. The Muslim slave market had been flourishing for centuries and they captured and sold thousands and thousands of Europeans and sold them as slaves. Modern historians often overlook the magnitude of white enslavement by Africans that pre-dates the black African transatlantic slave trade. According to a study by Ohio State University history Professor Robert Davis and detailed in his book Christian Slaves, Muslim Masters: White Slavery in the Mediterranean, the Barbary Coast and Italy, 1500-1800 about 1.25 million Europeans were captured by the Muslim Barbary pirates and sold as slaves in North Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries. This number relates to the slave trade in Tunis, Algiers and Tripoli alone. These numbers do not include the European people which were enslaved by Morocco and by other raiders and traders of the Mediterranean coast, such as the Ottoman Empire. Captives from the Black Sea area appear to have been much larger. A compilation of statistics and historic estimates indicates that about 2 million Russians, Ukrainians and Poles were seized from 1468 to 1694. Additionally there were slaves from the Caucasus obtained by a mixture of raiding and trading. Sixteenth and seventeenth century customs statistics suggest that Istanbul’s white slave market from the Black Sea area alone totaled around 2.5 million from 1450 to 1700. The Muslim slave traders were also very active in Africa for many years. Historians estimate that between 10-18 million Africans were enslaved by the these slave traders between 650-1900.
The continued attacks on American ships lead to two wars with the Muslim raiders. The First Barbary War (1801–1805), also known as the Tripolitan War or the Barbary Coast War, was the first of two wars fought between the United States and the Northwest African Muslim States known collectively as the Barbary States. These were the Ottoman provinces of Tripoli, Algiers, and Tunis, which were enjoying independence, as well as the independent Muslim Sultanate of Morocco. The war was fought because U.S. President Thomas Jefferson refused to pay the high tributes, or protection money demanded by the Barbary States and because they were seizing American merchant ships and enslaving the crews for high ransoms or to be sold in the slave markets. It was the first military conflict authorized by Congress that the United States fought on foreign land and seas
Jefferson then wrote a letter to John Jay that read: “The Muslim Ambassador answered us 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.” This is based upon the Qur’an’s teaching from Surah 47:4
Jefferson believed that wisdom could be “gleaned” from the Muslim Quran. At the time Jefferson owned and studied the book, he needed to know everything possible about Muslims because he was about to advocate war against the Islamic “Barbary” states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Tripoli. It was not until the second war with Algiers, in 1815, that naval victories by the U.S. Navy and victories on the shores of Tripoli by U.S. Marines led to treaties ending all tribute payments by the United States.
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