Obama cemented his Islamic credentials yesterday by visiting a mosque. America knows how important it is to recognize that our founding fathers were actually converted Muslims; like Obama, hiding their real beliefs in the Shroud of Christ. As Obama said, let us quote here, “Islam has always been apart of America.” For sure Obama knows this for he read the tea leaves in 1773 at the start of the American Revolution.
“Islam has always been part of America,” he said, detailing the beginnings of the religion among African slaves brought to America. He also pointed out that Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Virginia statute for religious freedom that the “Mohammedan” should have his faith protected in the United States. (READ EXCERPTS FROM THE ARTICLE BELOW TO SEE WHERE OBAMA TOOK THE “MOHAMMEDAN” OUT OF CONTEXT) This is another deceit implying that Muslims has anything to do with America. Obama does not mention that Black Slaves were forced to convert by the Ottomans or die. The guy is delusional.
Obama forgot to mention the Barbary Pirates who captured ,killed, kidnapped and murdered Christians in the sixteenth century and beyond. Their barbarism is still alive today where Imams preach hate during their daily sermons. We are not looking at a religion here, we are looking at a political agenda.
In 1786, Jefferson and John Adams met with Tripoli’s ambassador to Great Britain. They asked this ‘diplomat’ by what right his nation attacked American ships and enslaved her citizens and why the Muslims held such hostility toward this new nation, with which neither Tripoli nor any of the other Barbary Coast nations had any previous contact. The answer was quite revealing. Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja (the ambassador) replied that Islam:
“Was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Qur’an, 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.”
From Leviticus, “the stranger who resides with you … as one of your citizens.” It goes on to offer a chilling account of the anti-Islamic polemics popular among Protestant reformers in Europe—and by extension, among the early settlers in America. Spellberg cites German Protestant woodcuts from the sixteenth century depicting “Luther’s vision of Antichrist as a beast with two heads—one a mitered pope and the other a turbaned Ottoman Sultan.” In Luther’s vision, “Muslim souls were already forfeit, condemned to hell for all eternity.” Ironically, long before Luther, Catholics themselves had often dismissed Islam “as the summit of all heresy.” Luther, along with many earlier Catholic theologians, dismissed Islam’s holy book as nothing more than a repetition of the Bible and a form of “blasphemy.”
In the smear campaign before the election for the presidency of the United States, one candidate was accused by his opponents of being a closet Muslim. Some Christians “viewed all Muslims as agents of religious error and a foreign threat.” The United States faced a hostage crisis, as many Americans were taken hostage by Muslim powers and freed only after a ransom was paid. In one country alone, “more than one hundred Americans had been captured and imprisoned.” Accounts of these captivities, even forced conversions, were often bestselling books. Piracy off the coasts of North Africa was a major problem for American cargo ships. A “social Christian,” hoping to preserve “a purely Protestant Christian America,” was worried that aliens might take over the reins of power in the country and opined that “the few … Jews, Mahomedans, Atheists or Deists among us” must, in the name of prudence and justice, be excluded “fromour publick offices.”
The time was not the 2000s but the 1790s, and the presidential candidate was Thomas Jefferson, who was, in Denise Spellberg’s words, “the first in the history of American politics to suffer the false charge of being a Muslim, an accusation considered the ultimate Protestant slur in the eighteenth century.” And it was not Captain Phillips who was taken hostage by Somali pirates. Much of Spellberg’s book is an account of those troubled times, and the remarkable efforts by a colorful cast of characters—many of the Founding Fathers, activists, clergymen, and politicians—to create a constitution that would, at least in theory, allow anyone who swore allegiance to it to become not just a citizen of the United States but even its president.
Their efforts were particularly remarkable “given the dominance and popularity” of many contemporary ideas, books, and plays that were critical of Islam. The Ottoman Turks, still a serious challenge to Europe, were invariably thought to be the only Muslims in the world, and the Ottoman sultan was often depicted next to the Catholic pope as the essence of heresy. And yet, in words borrowed from John Locke, one of the philosophical architects of liberal democracy, Jefferson insisted on a constitution wherein “neither pagan nor Mahamedan nor Jew ought to be excluded from the civil rights of the Commonwealth because of his religion.” (It would take about a hundred and fifty years before the rights of full citizenship would be afforded to women and Jefferson’s words could be rephrased as “his or her” religion.)
By
Steve Stalinsly, President Obama on Wednesday will visit a U.S. mosque for the first time in his presidency. According to the White House, during this visit he will “celebrate the contributions Muslim Americans make to our nation and reaffirm the importance of religious freedom to our way of life.” Over the past two years, in the president’s efforts to counter violent extremism, he has emphasized the responsibility of Muslim “scholars and clerics” to help ensure that mosques are not used as a platform to preach Islamist extremism.
Such extremism isn’t limited to out-of-the-way mosques where radical clerics operate in the shadows. It is occurring in mainstream and leading mosques world-wide, including at one of the most important religious institutions in Islam, the Al Aqsa mosque in Jerusalem.
Consider a Jan. 16 sermon at Al Aqsa by Sheikh Abu Taqi Al-Din Al-Dari, a Palestinian cleric who called for jihad against the West and Europe, and for the burgeoning Islamic State to “conquer Rome, Washington and Paris.”
Despite Al Aqsa’s importance to Islam—it is considered the religion’s holiest site outside Saudi Arabia—few Westerners are aware of the content of the sermons, lectures and lessons offered there. Many of these sermons are posted on the mosque’s two official YouTube channels and have been translated from the Arabic by my organization, the Middle East Media Research Institute.
What we have found at Al Aqsa is a steady stream of calls for jihad and martyrdom, venomous attacks on Jews, Christians and other non-Muslims, and praise for al Qaeda, Islamic State, or ISIS, and other jihadist groups.
Calls for the destruction of the U.S. and the West, including promises that Islam will take over the world, are other common themes. On July 24 last year, Sheikh Ahmad Al-Dweik—a frequent lecturer at the mosque and Palestinian cleric, like the other religious leaders quoted here—said: “The caliphate will come to be, and the nuclear bomb will be produced,” adding that this future Islamic caliphate—will “fight the U.S. and will bring it down” and “eliminate the West in its entirety.”
On July 6, 2015, Sheikh Muhammad Abed, known as “ Abu Abdallah,” declared that from “the land of the Prophet’s nocturnal journey”—a reference to Jerusalem—“armies will set out to conquer Rome, to conquer Constantinople,” and then he added to the list “Washington and London.”
In an Oct. 27 address at Al Aqsa, Sheikh Khaled Al-Maghrabi called for the annihilation of the Jews all over the world, providing justification by quoting the well-known hadith (sayings of the Prophet Muhammad) of the stone and the tree: “Oh Muslim there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.” Earlier at the mosque, on May 29, Sheikh Al-Maghrabi explained why Jews were killed in the Holocaust. “On Passover,” he said, the Jews “would knead the dough for these matzos with children’s blood. When this was discovered, the Israelites were expelled across Europe . . . It got to the point where they were burned in Germany.”
Such anti-Semitism is familiar at Al Aqsa. In another sermon there, on Nov. 28, 2014, cleric Omar Abu Sara called the Jews—to whom he said “every single vile trait has been attributed”—the “most evil creatures to have walked this Earth.” He added that “it was the Jews whom Allah turned into apes and pigs.”
If incendiary sermons such as those at Al Aqsa were being delivered in any Western city, authorities would not tolerate them. Over the past year in Europe, several sheikhs have been prosecuted or expelled for similarly extremist rhetoric. In Germany, an imam from Denmark who spoke in 2014 at the Al Nur mosque in Berlin faced criminal charges after calling for the killing of Jews, saying: “Count them and kill them to the very last one.” Two months ago, he was fined €1,300 ($1,420). Italian, Spanish and Danish authorities have handled similar matters involving hateful sermons.
At Al Aqsa, support is also strong for jihadist groups. On June 26 last summer, Palestinian cleric Issam Amira praised an ISIS-inspired attack in the small French town of Saint-Quentin-Fallavier, southeast of Lyon, after an Islamist radical decapitated his employer and then crashed his vehicle, causing an explosion. “The Muslims have given rise to ISIS, and to vehicular attackers,” the cleric said. “They are courageous.” He added his wish that “Allah soon reward the Islamic nation with a second rightly guided caliphate.” Destroying “the Jewish entity”—Israel—could then be achieved, he said.
Al Qaeda also comes in for praise at Al Aqsa. The day Osama bin Laden was killed, May 2, 2011, an unnamed preacher eulogized him. In an Al Aqsa video uploaded to YouTube, the speaker vowed that despite bin Laden’s death, the “nation of one billion Muslims will give birth to hundreds of millions” of bin Ladens. Then came a threat to President Obama: “You personally gave the order to kill Muslims. . . . The day will soon come when you find yourself hanging from the gallows.”
Our research at Memri indicates that the hateful rhetoric on display at Al Aqsa is hardly unique to that institution—similar incitements can be found at prominent mosques and Islamic institutes throughout the world. Our video archive at memritv.org contains thousands of examples.
A year ago in Washington, D.C., at the opening of the Summit on Countering Violent Extremism, President Obama urged Muslims to “push back” against extremism in mosques. He will have an opportunity to restate that message on Wednesday in Baltimore. Acknowledging the Islamist threat, and those who support it, must be part of any realistic attempt at countering violent extremism.
Mr. Stalinsky is the executive director of the Middle East Media Research Institute (Memri
Obama doesn’t address any of the above because he is one of them. Not a Christian, but a Muslim. Sermons like this are common in every Mosque.