Ahh yes… I remember the history books in middle school and high school. Now, CNN is trying to CHANGE history. On CNN, Walter Kanau Bell was “exploring” the ideas that muslim and Arab people were a part of the American history of building this fine nation.
First of all, this guy is a “Comedian” by trade, not a serious reporter nor agent of news.
This is a distortion of our history! You millennials and younger generation better watch out!
The same CRAP came out of former president Obama.
It was Obama who told the Muslim world in his Cairo speech in 2009: “Islam has always been a part of America’s story.” He offered a dubious proof: “The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco.”
CNN sites the reason for this history “change” is that a small percentage of black slaves were muslim. Joel Pollak from Breitbart says it best:
For CNN, the argument that Islam has “always” been present in the U.S. rests largely on the claim that a significant minority of black slaves were Muslim. On Saturday, CNN correspondent Dean Obeidallah claimed that “Islam has been here since the time of slavery, because ten to fifteen percent of the African slaves brought were Muslim. So Islam was here before the creation of the United States. It was actually part of the creation of the United States of America.” Bell’s interviewee raises the estimate, claiming that “during the slave trade, up to about 25 to 30% of the slaves came from areas where there were predominantly Muslim populations.”(Note that these claims leave out the role of Muslims in the slave trade itself, casting Muslims purely as victims.)
There is some basis for some of the claims CNN cites. As Daniel Pipes noted in 2000, “Muslims constituted a significant percentage of the Africans brought to the Americas in servitude; and that, as the most educated and resistant of the captive peoples, they exerted a disproportionate influence on slave life in the Americas.” But the faith did not survive among these populations; few of their descendants knew their forefathers’ Muslim origins.
Walter Kanau Bell
While Muslims were present at America’s founding, Islam — as a coherent, self-conscious religious and political civilization — was not. Had it been present, one would have expected the Founding Fathers to be more aware of it, and one would have expected to see an American version of the faith emerge, one more comfortable with ideas of tolerance and individual liberty, much as different reformist versions of Judaism flourished in the United States.
To the extent that Islam was a part of early American history, it was a negative force, an external enemy. The predations of the Barbary pirates prompted the U.S. to build a world-class navy and deploy the fledgling Marines. As Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger recall in Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates: The Forgotten War That Changed American History, Jefferson was shocked when, at a meeting in London with the Tripolitan ambassador and John Adams in 1786, the Muslim envoy declared that American Christians were fair game for piracy: “… all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of faithful persons to plunder and enslave.”
Comments:
Bitter AZ Clinger –
Yeah, Mohammed Crossing the Delaware is one of my favorite paintings from that era.
In reality, they STILL export violence for a living or as a way of life.
The Muslim world has made violence an industry.
John1966-
The only good news about Islam is FAKE news. They have to tell lies in order to have ANY semblance of credibility. But is isn’t working. Islam proves every day that it is nothing but a cult of violence