Analyst's note: Must read. Looks to me like we still have a need to know our history -- that would be our real history. History is not what someone wishes the events had been.
"Sorry, Mr. Obama, but there were no Muslims among the passengers on the Mayflower or the settlers at Jamestown. Muslims were conspicuously absent from the ranks of George Washington’s Army of the Revolution and played no role in the creation of the American republic - - save for the fact that the new country’s first declaration of war was against the forces of Islam in the form of the Barbary pirates.1
1 Michael B. Oren, Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present (New York” W. W. Norton & Company, 2007), pp. 17-40.
We can again return to the considered views of our Founding Fathers. It is only in recent times - as some try to turn away from our Constitution -- that "Islam is beginning to become a part of America." It was during the forced interaction with the Barbary Pirates (same group of thugs operating today) that we find the considered views of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams -- "[...] two future Presidents later reported the reasons for the Muslims’ hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts."
"[....] ”...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.”
