As important as The Constitution.
Posted on 04/07/2009 5:11:44 AM PDT by SJackson
“We will convey,” said Barack Obama to the Turkish Parliament Monday, “our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world — including in my own country.”
Undeniably the Islamic faith has done a great deal to shape the world – a statement that makes no value judgment about exactly how it has shaped the world. It has formed the dominant culture in what is known as the Islamic world for centuries. But what on earth could Obama mean when he says that Islam has also “done so much” to shape his own country?
Unless he considers himself an Indonesian, Obama’s statement was extraordinarily strange. After all, how has the Islamic faith shaped the United States? Were there Muslims along Paul Revere’s ride, or standing next to Patrick Henry when he proclaimed, “Give me liberty or give me death”? Were there Muslims among the framers or signers of the Declaration of Independence, which states that all men – not just Muslims, as Islamic law would have it – are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, including life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness? Were there Muslims among those who drafted the Constitution and vigorously debated its provisions, or among those who enumerated the Bill of Rights, which guarantees – again in contradiction to the tenets of Islamic law – that there should be no established national religion, and that the freedom of speech should not be infringed?
There were not.
Did Muslims play a role in the great struggle over slavery that defined so much of our contemporary understandings of the nature of this republic and of the rights of the individual within it? They did not. Did the Islamic faith shape the way the United States responded to the titanic challenges of the two World Wars, the Great Depression, or the Cold War? It did not. Did the Islamic faith, with its legal apparatus that institutionalizes discrimination against non-Muslims, shape the civil rights movement in the United States? The Civil Rights Act of 1964 mandated equality of access to public facilities – a hard-won victory that came at a great cost, and one that Muslim groups have tried to roll back in the United States recently. One notable example of such attempts was the alcohol-in-cabs controversy at the Minneapolis-St. Paul international airport, when Muslim cabdrivers began to refuse service to customers who were carrying alcohol, on Islamic religious grounds. The core assumption underlying this initiative – that discrimination on the basis of religion is justified – cut right to the heart of the core principle of the American polity, that “all men are created equal,” that is, that they have a right to equal treatment in law and society.
Surveying the whole tapestry of American history, one would be hard-pressed to find any significant way in which the Islamic faith has shaped the United States in terms of its governing principles and the nature of American society. Meanwhile, there are numerous ways in which, if there had been a significant Muslim presence in the country at the time, some of the most cherished and important principles of American society and law may have met fierce resistance, and may never have seen the light of day.
So in what way has the Islamic faith shaped Obama’s country? The most significant event connected to the Islamic faith that has shaped the character of the United States was the attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September 11, 2001. Those attacks have shaped the nation in numerous ways: they’ve led to numerous innovations in airline security, which in generations to come – if today’s politically correct climate continues to befog minds -- may be added to future versions of the fanciful “1001 Muslim Inventions” exhibition. The Islamic faith has shaped the U.S. since 9/11 in leading to the spending of billions on anti-terror measures, and to the ventures in Iraq and Afghanistan, and to Guantanamo, and to so many features of the modern political and social landscape that they cannot be enumerated within the space of a single article.
Of course, it is certain that Obama had none of that in mind. But what could he possibly have had in mind? His statement was either careless or ignorant, or both – not qualities we need in a Commander-in-Chief even in the best of times.
His election?
Well, combatting Islamic piracy was responsible for the creation of the Marines...maybe that’s what he meant?
Islam had NOTHING to do with shaping our country........but his cowardice certainly will it seems.
Not to forget the part in history played by muslim slavers paying collaborating african chiefs to round up their own tribesman to sell to the white europeans for labor in their colonies
Muslims reshaped the skyline of NYC and are responsible for we, the sheeple, standing in long lines at airports with our shoes off. But I don’t think that is what BO was blathering about. If we had real journalists, one would ask him to name a contribution that Muslims have made to the founding of our country.
And he said this after he said that the United States is not a Christian nation.
> But what on earth could Obama mean when he says that Islam has also “done so much” to shape his own country?
Well, thanks to the muslims you Yanks developed a superb Navy and a superb Marine Corps.
And thanks to the muslims, your Navy and Marine Corps are kept in constant practise.
That’s my best guess, anyrate.
ML/NJ
Obama is convinced he can sweet talk our enemies into being nice. He has absolutely no understanding of history.
Islam is the “religion of peace” you know, if they aren’t killing you.
“our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world — including in my own country.”
I think I’m gonna throw up!
and we’ve still got 45 more months of this clown...
Pandering, plain and simple. Obamugabe is incapable of not pandering to whomever he is speaking to. It's like klintoon was with lying.
“A nation can survive its fools, and even the ambitious. But it cannot survive treason from within. An enemy at the gates is less formidable, for he is known and carries his banner openly. But the traitor moves amongst those within the gate freely, his sly whispers rustling through all the alleys, heard in the very halls of government itself. For the traitor appears not a traitor; he speaks in accents familiar to his victims, and he wears their face and their arguments, he appeals to the baseness that lies deep in the hearts of all men. He rots the soul of a nation, he works secretly and unknown in the night to undermine the pillars of the city, he infects the body politic so that it can no longer resist. A murderer is less to fear. The traitor is the plague.”
~~Marcus Tullius Cicero
the enemy of my enemy is my friend..
Kareem scored lots of baskets. Has he apologized to N Korea yet?
Pray for America and Our Troops
Weren’t Muslims big slavers in north Africa?
“And he said this after he said that the United States is not a Christian nation.”
Yup. During Holy Week even. And he visited 2 mosques in Istanbul. But to any churches? At all?
Before anyone mentions it (like that bitch who did in her “question” to Bush at one of those graduation ceremonies he attended), the Medina Charter is NOT the first constitution in world history. Machiavelli, for instance, spends a great deal of time (in his Discourses on Livy) showing how it was the Spartans, of all people, who discovered the stability that a constitutional democracy brought people.
Islam has certainly shaped the NYC skyline.
Muslims were slave traders!
...technically, he's right..he was born where?
>>>> and we’ve still got 45 more months of this clown... <<<<
11 weeks down.
Only 197 weeks to go.
As important as The Constitution.
Weren’t Muslims involved in the slave trade sending African slaves to the U. S. for years leading up to the War Between the States?
That certainly shaped America significantly.
Islam helped shape the United States by:
At least Obama has consistency going for him. Just about every day there’s another dumba$$ remark from the teleprompter in chief.
Can we, as Americans, at least agree that ‘community organizer’ is not sufficient experience for the next leader of the free world????
I can’t wait until we’re able to impeach this son of a b*tch.
The “peace” that they refer to is the peace that will exist after their Koranic jihadi mandate is fulfilled -
all the world is Muslim,
enslaved to Muslims,
or dead.
IHMO, it was neither. Instead, it was calculated, deliberate. Obama knew exactly what he was saying....just another IN-YOUR-FACE to those in America who question his citizenship...his faith, knowing full-damn-well it would raise eyebrows and lead to endless chatter as to where his true allegiance lies.
If you’d like to be on or off, please FR mail me.
..................
It sure did one hell of a job shaping our country on 9-11
He’s a 7th grade girl saying anything to be popular at the moment.....I’m beginning to understand what th Prophet joseph Biden meant when he said we wouldn’t think Bambi was doing the right thing when he gets tested in the next, what, 3 months? We were guaranteed by Joey right?
Islamic terrorism has had a profound effect in shaping this country. It has caused us to give up much of our privacy rights and lead to the militarization of our law enforcement apparatus.
You are absolutely correct. He believes the words from his mouth are going to calm the Islamic monsters. Obama is delusional.
He has no understanding of history, because he knows so little history. Obama is not educated in the academics. He is the product of high-self-esteem/low-knowledge affirmative action education.
Who saw THAT coming? Looks like Obama's spiritual advisor was (W)right all along.../s/
Hope, Change and - - - Shape?
Please stop using this meaningless “Islam” term. They have been known as Mohammedans in the Western world since the inception of this cult of hate. Christians do not hide their following of Christ by changing their name to say, Mugwups.
Islam is a PC term; let’s drop it. As for the Mohammedan Pretender, he can say what he wants. I REFUSE!
"Back in 1784, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson had to decide whether to appease or stand up to armed Middle Eastern pirates. Sound familiar?
.... The Middle East, a term coined by Alfred Thayer Mahan, one of McCain’s boyhood idols, is where both American warfare and American diplomacy began in the late 18th century, as our infant republic faced its first post-Revolutionary struggle against the evocatively named Barbary States of the Ottoman Empire.
The regencies of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers (future homes of Muammar Qaddafi, Yasser Arafat, and the Islamic Salvation Front, respectively) had been hosting and sponsoring Islamic piracy since the Middle Ages. Scimitar-wielding corsairs would regularly interrupt the flow of trade and traffic along the coasts of North Africa, seizing European vessels and taking their crews into bondage. Cervantes wrote his first play, in the 16th century, about the dread corsairs, and by the 18th, the American colonies had a minor seagoing presence in the Mediterranean protected by the redoubtable British Navy. But the Crown was reluctant to war against so petty an antagonist, preferring to pay “tribute” to the Barbary States instead, as a shopkeeper would protection money to the mafia. After the U.S. broke away from England and became its own nation, however, the geopolitical dynamics changed, as did the American equanimity with doing business with pirates.
In 1784, corsairs attacked the Betsy, a 300-ton brig that had sailed from Boston to Tenerife Island, about 100 miles off the North African coast, selling her new-made citizens as chattel on the markets of Morocco. The U.S. was not free of its own moral taint of slavery, of course, but it would be impossible to hasten the industrial development that would eventually render the agrarian-plantation economy obsolete if merchant ships could not be assured of safe conduct near the Turkish Porte. Other vessels, such as the Dauphin and Maria, were also seized, this time by Algiers, and the horrifying experiences of their captive passengers relayed back home were the cause for outrage. James Leander Cathcart described the dungeon in which he was being kept as “perfectly dark…where the slaves sleep four tiers deep…many nearly naked, and few with anything more than an old tattered blanket to cover them in the depth of winter.”
In response, Thomas Jefferson, then the Minister to France, suggested a multilateral approach of what we would now term “deterrence.” He asked that Spain, Portugal, Naples, Denmark, Sweden and France enter into a coalition with America to dissuade the regencies from their criminal assaults on life, liberty and the pursuit of international commerce. As Michael Oren, in his magisterial history Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to Present relates, “By deterring, rather than appeasing, Barbary, the United States would preserve its economy and send an unambiguous message to potentially hostile powers.” Jefferson thought it would impress Europe if America could do what Europe had failed to do for centuries and beat back the persistent thuggery of Islamists. “It will procure us respect,” said the author of the Declaration of Independence. “And respect is a safeguard to interest.”
This sober judgment fused the cold calculations of latter-day “realism” with the morality behind revolutionary interventionism: not only would America protect its citizens from plunder and foreign slaveholding; it would ensure that other countries under “Christendom” were similarly protected.
Though Jefferson found a stalwart Continental ally in a former one, the Marquis de Lafayette, France squelched the idea of a NATO made of buckshot and cannon. While waiting for funds that would never come from Congress for the construction of a 150-gun navy, the sage of Monticello resigned himself to further diplomacy with the enemy. In 1785, he dispatched John Lamb, a Connecticut businessman, to secure the release of hostages in Algiers, held by its dynastic sovereign Hassan Dey. Lamb failed ignominiously.
At the same time, John Adams, then minister to England, agreed to receive the pasha of Tripoli, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Ajar, in his London quarters to discuss a possible peace deal. Adams described his interlocutor as a man who looked all “pestilence and war,” a suspicion that was soon confirmed by the pasha’s demand of 30,000 guineas for his statelet, plus a 3,000 guinea gratuity for himself. He also did Adams the favor of estimating what it would cost the U.S. to broker a similar deal with Tunis, Morocco and Algiers — the total price for blackmail would be about $1 million, or a tenth the annual budget of the United States.
Adams was incensed. “It would be more proper to write [of his meeting with ‘Abd al-Rahman] for the… New York Theatre,” he thundered. He agreed with Jefferson that a military response was increasingly likely, but Adams doubted his country’s economic ability to sustain it. For the short term, he thought it better to offer “one Gift of two hundred Thousand Pounds” rather than forfeit “a Million annually” in trade revenue, which the pirates were sure to disrupt. Not long thereafter, Jefferson joined him in London to prevent the “universal and horrible War” and reach an accord with the refractory envoy from Tripoli. Both gentlemen of the Enlightenment, and comrades in revolution, affirmed America’s desire for peace, its respect for all nations, and suggested a treaty of lasting friendship with the regency. ‘Abd al-Rahman listened well, but his reply was one that would shock modern ears less than it did those of the two Founding Fathers:
“It was… written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged [the Muslims’] authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon wheoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”
Though a period of paying tribute and douceurs (or “softeners” — expensive trickets and toys) to Islamic pirates would continue, the words of ‘Abd al-Rahman Adams were chilling enough to leave Adams and Jefferson in no doubt as to the sanguinary and messianic nature of their adversary. “An angel sent on this business,” lamented Jefferson, “could have done nothing” to placate such men. He called them “sea dogs” and a “pettifogging nest of robbers.” The episode preceded further acts of piracy against American vessels and the imprisonment and sale of its crews and passengers, and was enough to get Jefferson to overlook his wariness of federalism and agree to a Constitution with a strong central government capable of building and keeping a powerful navy. Adams, as it turned out, was more worried that American opinion wouldn’t rally for war, or accept its dire consequences. But the Philadelphia convention that drafted our national covenant in 1787 was hastened, and its welter of opinions unified, by the Barbary question. As the historian Thomas Bailey wrote, “In an indirect sense, the brutal Dey of Algiers was a Founding Father of the Constitution.”
Barbary Pirates torture western prisoners
America still sued for peace. The Betsy’s release had been negotiated, albeit abjectly, and to the accompaniment of America’s first diplomatic accord, the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Ship-Signals, signed with Morocco in 1786. But no sooner was the ship let go and its captives freed than it was recaptured by Tunis and renamed the Mashuda. Also, Washington at one point found itself spending 20% of its annual revenue in paying blackmail to a loose confederation of terrorists on the high seas. Under Jefferson’s presidency, the first era of American military predominance was inaugurated, with men like William Bainbridge, William Eaton and the Byronic swashbuckler Stephen Decatur, becoming folk heroes.
....Santayana got it backwards, in fact: even those who remember history are still doomed to repeat it."
Have to handed to him, he is brilliant in manipulation with a helping hand from the willing media to smooth out the playground dirt!
He’s a classic example of “the unconstrained vision”, and he applies the classification of “elite” to himself. Obviously, he must be morally and intellectually superior to everyone that has gone before, because he is president NOW. This is the mindset.
He and his supporters believe that he is capable of, through “reason” and diplomacy, to change human nature.
A funny thing about UC folks, though - they aren’t willing to use force to make outsiders conform, but woe to you if you are under their authority and refuse their superior vision.
Since 911 it has done much to shape our defense policy. Maybe that’s what he meant.
Me thinks he is a very uneducated person....even though he took up space at some fancy schools......along with his awful wife......poster boy and girl for the utter failure of affirmative action!
Islam sure reshaped NYC’s skyline.
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