Illinois Muslim Speaker Repeats Barack Obama’s Big Lie

In a prayer to Allah at the Illinois General Assembly, a hijab-wearing woman said:

Bismillah al-rahman al-raheem. We turn to you in gratitude and remembrance. O Lord, remind us that the history of Islam in America is not a story that began in 1965, nor one that arrived upon distant shores in the twentieth century. It is woven into the very tapestry of this nation. It is part of black American history. A story not only of bondage, but of spiritual emancipation, a freedom of the soul that existed long before its material counterpart was realized. Let us honor that truth with fortitude and clarity. O sustainer, remind us that this story is stitched into the fabric of our land, and carried in the sacred inscriptions…

Whatever this woman was, she was not original. What she said was nothing new. Barack Obama said it ten years ago during his visit to the Muslim Brotherhood-linked Islamic Society of Baltimore “Jefferson and John Adams had their own copies of the Qur’an,” without bothering to mention that they had them in order to understand the ideology of the enemy the new nation faced in the Barbary Pirates, and that it faces today, even after Obama’s relentless attempts to appease the jihadis in Iran and elsewhere.

“Islam,” Obama declared, “has always been part of America.” Really? There were Muslims at Jamestown? In the Massachusetts Bay Colony? At Roanoke? Obama’s statement is so wildly ridiculous that it doesn’t just invite parody; it pleads for it. Remember the Muslims among the Founding Fathers, Yahya al-Adams and Iskandar Hamilton? Remember the Muslims who told James Madison about Muhammad’s Constitution of Medina so that he could lay out the foundations of a republic in the U.S. Constitution?

Remember the Muslims who fought so valiantly in the Revolutionary Jihad, and the Jihad of 1812, and the Mexican Jihad, and the Civil War, aka the Jihad Between the Caliphates? Remember all the controversies about whether Muslim soldiers in the Civil War could make sex slaves out of the wives and daughters of Confederate commanders? The jihad suicide attacks that broke the Germans’ will to fight on during World War I?

Burrowing deeper into fantasy, Obama proclaimed: “Generations of Muslim Americans helped to build our nation.” He didn’t mention the real contributions Muslims have made to our nation: you know, like rearranging the New York skyline, transforming government buildings into grim, nervous fortresses, making air travel into exercise in annoyance and humiliation that it is today, and draining the American economy with two futile wars and hundreds of billions spent on security and counterterror initiatives.

In detailing the contributions that Muslims have made to the U.S., Obama said: “Muslim Americans keep up safe. They are our police. They are our fire fighters. They’re in (the Department of) Homeland Security.” And remember: none of them were screened for jihadi sympathies. To have done so would have been “Islamophobic,” and transgressed against the prevailing dogma that Islam is a Religion of Peace that non-Muslims are wrong and bigoted to be concerned about.

In a similar vein, the speaker at the Illinois General Assembly claims that the history of Islam in America didn’t begin in 1965 (when immigration laws changed, allowing for an inundation of migrants particularly from non-European countries) or anytime in the 20th century. Like Obama, she claims Islam is “woven into the very tapestry of this nation.” But again, where is it?

The speaker was actually basing her claim upon the false assumption that a large number, if not all, of the black slaves in pre-Civil War America were Muslims. This is an oft-repeated claim among leftists who insist that “black and brown people built this nation,” but like so many things leftists say, it isn’t true. Muslims in Africa often captured non-Muslim Africans and sold them to the Atlantic slave traders; as a rule, they didn’t capture or sell their fellow Muslims, as that would have been against the Qur’an’s injunction to be “ruthless to unbelievers, merciful to one another” (48:29).

A few Muslims, however, were caught and sold to slave traders who brought them to the United States, likely for fighting against the Muslims who sold them into slavery, or simply by mistake. But there was no more than a handful of known Muslims among the slaves in the early United States. Also, to attribute the nation’s economic foundations to slave labor ignores the fact that half the country outlawed slavery from the beginning, and there was only a small percentage of people owning slaves in the areas where slavery was legal.

The purpose of making fanciful claims of this kind is to hamstring efforts to resist Sharia or end Muslim migration into the U.S. The United States has always been home to Muslims, and Sharia is as American as baseball, hot dogs, and apple pie. Yet the bitter irony is that Islam in power is not interested in being part of a tapestry. It wants the whole thing, and will get it.