Posted on 01/05/2007 9:02:03 PM PST by smoothsailing
What Thomas Jefferson learned from the Muslim book of jihad
By Ted Sampley
U.S. Veteran Dispatch
January 2007
Democrat Keith Ellison is now officially the first Muslim United States congressman. True to his pledge, he placed his hand on the Quran, the Muslim book of jihad and pledged his allegiance to the United States during his ceremonial swearing-in.
Capitol Hill staff said Ellison's swearing-in photo opportunity drew more media than they had ever seen in the history of the U.S. House. Ellison represents the 5th Congressional District of Minnesota.
The Quran Ellison used was no ordinary book. It once belonged to Thomas Jefferson, third president of the United States and one of America's founding fathers. Ellison borrowed it from the Rare Book Section of the Library of Congress. It was one of the 6,500 Jefferson books archived in the library.
Ellison, who was born in Detroit and converted to Islam while in college, said he chose to use Jefferson's Quran because it showed that "a visionary like Jefferson" believed that wisdom could be gleaned from many sources.
There is no doubt Ellison was right about Jefferson believing wisdom could be "gleaned" from the Muslim Quran. At the time Jefferson owned 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.
Ellison's use of Jefferson's Quran as a prop illuminates a subject once well-known in the history of the United States, but, which today, is mostly forgotten - the Muslim pirate slavers who over many centuries enslaved millions of Africans and tens of thousands of Christian Europeans and Americans in the Islamic "Barbary" states.
Over the course of 10 centuries, Muslim pirates cruised the African and Mediterranean coastline, pillaging villages and seizing slaves.
The taking of slaves in pre-dawn raids on unsuspecting coastal villages had a high casualty rate. It was typical of Muslim raiders to kill off as many of the "non-Muslim" older men and women as possible so the preferred "booty" of only young women and children could be collected.
Young non-Muslim women were targeted because of their value as concubines in Islamic markets. Islamic law provides for the sexual interests of Muslim men by allowing them to take as many as four wives at one time and to have as many concubines as their fortunes allow.
Boys, as young as 9 or 10 years old, were often mutilated to create eunuchs who would bring higher prices in the slave markets of the Middle East. Muslim slave traders created "eunuch stations" along major African slave routes so the necessary surgery could be performed. It was estimated that only a small number of the boys subjected to the mutilation survived after the surgery.
When American colonists rebelled against British rule in 1776, American merchant ships lost Royal Navy protection. With no American Navy for protection, American ships were attacked and their Christian crews enslaved by Muslim pirates operating under the control of the "Dey of Algiers"--an Islamist warlord ruling Algeria.
Because American commerce in the Mediterranean was being destroyed by the pirates, the Continental Congress agreed in 1784 to negotiate treaties with the four Barbary States. Congress appointed a special commission consisting of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, to oversee the negotiations.
Lacking the ability to protect its merchant ships in the Mediterranean, the new America government tried to appease the Muslim slavers by agreeing to pay tribute and ransoms in order to retrieve seized American ships and buy the freedom of enslaved sailors.
Adams argued in favor of paying tribute as the cheapest way to get American commerce in the Mediterranean moving again. Jefferson was opposed. He believed there would be no end to the demands for tribute and wanted matters settled "through the medium of war." He proposed a league of trading nations to force an end to Muslim piracy.
In 1786, Jefferson, then the American ambassador to France, and Adams, then the American ambassador to Britain, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja, the "Dey of Algiers" ambassador to Britain.
The Americans wanted to negotiate a peace treaty based on Congress' vote to appease.
During the meeting Jefferson and Adams asked the Dey's ambassador why Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts.
In a later meeting with the American Congress, the two future presidents reported that Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja had answered that Islam "was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Quran, 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."
For the following 15 years, the American government paid the Muslims millions of dollars for the safe passage of American ships or the return of American hostages. The payments in ransom and tribute amounted to 20 percent of United States government annual revenues in 1800.
Not long after Jefferson's inauguration as president in 1801, he dispatched a group of frigates to defend American interests in the Mediterranean, and informed Congress.
Declaring that America was going to spend "millions for defense but not one cent for tribute," Jefferson pressed the issue by deploying American Marines and many of America's best warships to the Muslim Barbary Coast.
The USS Constitution, USS Constellation, USS Philadelphia, USS Chesapeake, USS Argus, USS Syren and USS Intrepid all saw action.
In 1805, American Marines marched across the dessert from Egypt into Tripolitania, forcing the surrender of Tripoli and the freeing of all American slaves.
During the Jefferson administration, the Muslim Barbary States, crumbling as a result of intense American naval bombardment and on shore raids by Marines, finally officially agreed to abandon slavery and piracy.
Jefferson's victory over the Muslims lives on today in the Marine Hymn, with the line, "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we will fight our country's battles on the land as on the sea."
It wasn't until 1815 that the problem was fully settled by the total defeat of all the Muslim slave trading pirates.
Jefferson had been right. The "medium of war" was the only way to put and end to the Muslim problem. Mr. Ellison was right about Jefferson. He was a "visionary" wise enough to read and learn about the enemy from their own Muslim book of jihad.
Thanks for posting this. Just sent out in email.
Wow. Never seen this comparision before. Thanks for the link.
Yep. Now how do we get everyone else to see that?
I just copied this article & sent it out to everyone on my email list. If we all did this, the word would get out to quite a lot of people. We can't depend on the media to tell it.
Bill O'Reilly would do it. Send this to him.
You may be right, while reading this I can remember learning of it in grade school....which was long before PC educators rewrote history books. I could not have given this history lesson though, I needed the refresher.
Solidarity with white Christians has not statistically been as important to them as solidarity by skin color. This is not racsim. /sarc
Sen. Ellison and Sen. Obama.
Let me correct that, Rep Ellison and Sen Obama......do you think they meant two Congressmen?
Good post. Thanks. Too bad these changes in text only apply to the translations from arabic to english or whatever. If the muslims themelves had newer editions of the Quran where those changes were made that would be a good thing.
What a disgrace that most Americans (including me) are unaware of the history of islam in THIS Country and how Ellison and the ENEMEDIA have twisted this story to imply Jefferson had respect for islam!
"There is no doubt Ellison was right about Jefferson believing wisdom could be "gleaned" from the Muslim Quran. At the time Jefferson owned 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."
Woe to those who call evil good, and good evil; Who substitute darkness for light and light for darkness; Who substitute bitter for sweet, and sweet for bitter!
Isiah 5:20
Thanks for ping, Justa!
Everybody here needs to send a copy of this article to every Christian pastor they know, black or white.
Here is a "History of a Musslelman family" from Lancaster County, PA who say the following on their web site: "One theory supported only by family stories is that the Musselman surname is derived from the word Meuse as in River Meuse, which runs between Holland and Germany. Meus-el-man i.e. the man from the River Meuse gradually changed into …Meusselman…then to Musselman. In our family Bible, it is written Muffelman with a 1799 entry. The double "ff" is an old style writing of "ss". Research indicates a name change occured when leaving the old world."
Thanks!
Wow! Great article.
In 1794, Congress authorized the building of a new U.S. Navy (the Navy of the Revolutionary War had been dissolved at the war's end). If you were to ask Americans "Troubles with what country led Congress to form a new Navy?", I doubt that one in a hundred could give the correct answer, which is: Algeria.
At 18, I was unofficially engaged to an Iranian exchange student 8 years my senior, with an MBA degree. His father had been one of the Shah's ambassadors, he said.
After 6 months of studying NOTHING but Iran and the Middle East, and reading the Qu'ran/Koran, I, who had been brought up in the Presbyterian Church, U.S.A., determined that I was NOT to marry this man and go to Iran to be a teacher. And, I can thank God I never did. "Not Without My Daughter" starring Sally Field, could have been my story. I wanted nothing , ABSOLUTELY NOTHING, to do with that religion!!! Any intelligent, well-read, 18 y.o. Christian ought to be able to figure that out!
Blurtha the prophet of doom.
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