[ April 24, 2024 ]
Since the month of Ramadan is drawing to a close, the Muslim period of fasting, when each night, Muslims hold what is called an “Iftar Dinner” to break the fast, this might be a good time to discuss the truth or falsehood of the claim, made by Muslims, that Jefferson held the first “Iftar Dinner” for a Muslim guest in the White House. Barack Obama was particularly fond of that story, but then, history has never been his strong suit. And it’s not a minor matter.
It has been important to Muslims to enroll themselves as early as possible in the American narrative, “as part of America’s story,” and to backdate, too, what appears to be the sympathetic recognition of their existence in American life. The idea is to convince Americans that Islam has always been here, is not some kind of exotic and recent import, insufficiently noticed until the day before yesterday. One such example is the claim that Jefferson held an “Iftar Dinner” for the Muslim envoy sent by the Bey of Tunis to Washington. It’s a tall tale that refuses to die. For Jefferson did no such thing.
The real story of that “Iftar dinner” is this:
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The envoy from Tunis came to Washington in 1805 just as Ramadan was already underway. And as it happens, during that time, President Jefferson invited that envoy, one Sidi Soliman Mellimelli, for dinner at the White House. This was not meant to be an “Iftar dinner,” but just a dinner like any other. It was originally set for three thirty in the afternoon (our Founding Fathers dined early in the pre-Edison days of their existence). Mellimelli responded that he could not come at that appointed hour of three thirty p.m. but only after sundown.
Jefferson, a courteous man, simply moved the dinner forward by a few hours. He didn’t change the menu, he didn’t change anything else, he did not see himself as offering an “Iftar Dinner” (the phrase never came up) and there are no records that suggest that he ever thought of it as such. He only knew that Mellimelli was observing a fast until after sundown. Barack Obama, 200 years later, tried to rewrite American history, referring to Jefferson as being the first President to give an “Iftar dinner,” in order to flatter or please his (Obama’s) Muslim guests. But in so doing, he misrepresented American history to Americans, including schoolchildren who are now being subjected to all kinds of Islamic propaganda in newly-mandated textbooks that both favorably depict Islam, and present it as an integral, and longstanding, part of American life.
Another tale that has been circulated by Muslims, that involves a similar rewriting of American history, is the claim that “30% of the African slaves who came to America were Muslims.” Historians have offered guesses as to the percentages — 5%, 10%, 15% — of the African slaves who may have been Muslims. Someone plucked out of the air the highest figure, 30%, that anyone (i.e., Prof. Sylviane Diouf) had dared propose, and decided to take that as historical truth without offering any convincing evidentiary basis for so doing. Furthermore, it is known that for those slaves who brought Islam with them, that faith was not retained, and usually did not last for more than a generation. Without Qur’ans, mosques, madrasas, in an overwhelmingly Christian and proselytizing environment, Islam could not last more than a generation or two. But the insistence that “30% of African slaves in America were Muslims” – instead of that “5% of African slaves came as Muslims and by the second generation almost all had lost that faith” — is repeated by Muslim apologists, who in turn are quoted by non-Muslims, and no one asks for the evidence that supports that “30%” figure instead of, say, “5%,” or that supports the idea that Muslim slaves continued to remain Muslims through successive generations. Thus does the exaggeration of Islam’s significance in our early history take on a life of its own, based not on fact, but on a tendentious guess. Surely, if 30% of the black African slaves who arrived in America were Muslims, someone – among all those slave-traders and slave-owners – would have noticed and recorded such a sizable number of Muslims. No one did. In fact, almost no one recorded the presence of any Muslim slaves, which leads one to suspect their numbers were far smaller than is now being claimed. Once this story got started, it became accepted by the credulous, and helped make “Islam even more a part of the American story.”
The most egregious fable told about American history by Muslims is when they attempt to convince us that Islam is no late arrival to our shores, but that – this is a constant theme — “the story of Islam in America is as old as America itself.” Perhaps your host will claim at this mosque outreach that “you probably did not know that there were Muslims travelling with Columbus– one even served as his navigator.” Many will not question this claim, but be pleased to be made aware of what they now believe is Islam’s real place in our history, one that had for so long had been kept hidden from us. Take that, Islamophobes!
Let’s consider the claims made that Christopher Columbus included Muslims in his crew. Not only is there not a shred of evidence to support this, but what evidence there is goes the other way. Columbus undertook his voyages because he wanted to discover an alternate route for Europeans to Asia, i.e., India, with its spices, precisely because Muslims had, with the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, managed to seal off the old routes to the East from Christian Europe. Columbus would never have taken on members of the enemy camp (of Islam) for his crew, but especially would not have entrusted the critical job of navigator to a Muslim. But so effective has this Muslim rewriting of history been that, in 2004, a State Department employee put out a claim about Columbus’s Muslim crew members: in a press release entitled “Islamic Influence Runs Deep in American Culture,” Phyllis McIntosh of the State Department’s Washington File claimed: “Islamic influences may date back to the very beginning of American history. It is likely that Christopher Columbus, who discovered America in 1492, charted his way across the Atlantic Ocean with the help of an Arab navigator.”
Why did McIntosh make this absurd claim, even though “may date back” and “it is likely that” are weasel words providing an escape-hatch of deniability? How did she make the leap from no evidence to “may date back” and “likely”? And even if, which did not happen, one crew member had turned out to be an “Arab” and thus a Muslim, how does that translate into “Islamic influences run deep”? What kind of “Islamic influence” would a single crew member have had on the whole epic of Columbus’s voyages, and the subsequent discovery and settlement of the New World? McIntosh was pulling rabbits out of an ahistorical hat. She, and the State Department, either felt there was no harm in trying to curry favor with Muslims (history is silly putty to some; they shape it as they will), or were under pressure to rewrite history, possibly from Obama’s office (he was constantly prating about how “Islam has always been a part of the American story”) as part of a feelgood-outreach campaign to American Muslims. But where did this particular story, about Columbus’s “Arab navigator,” come from?
It came from Muslims themselves. And it is based on a case of mistaken identity. For it was Muslims who, when they learned of an “Arabic-speaking Spaniard” on Columbus’s first voyage, decided that this must refer to a Muslim Arab. In fact, the reference was to one Luis de Torres, a converso (a Jew who accepted Catholicism). Luis de Torres knew Hebrew, Spanish, and some Arabic, and was taken on not as a navigator but as an interpreter by Columbus, who thought Torres’s knowledge of Hebrew would be useful if they ran into any Jewish traders (who were known to travel far and wide) or members of the Ten Lost Tribes of Israel. But Muslims, in their eagerness to put themselves into the picture with Columbus, committed two grievous historical errors: first, they confused the interpreter, the “Arabic-speaking Spaniard” Luis de Torres, with the navigator (who was, incidentally, also a converso) and then they assumed that if someone on Columbus’s crew spoke Arabic, as Torres did, he must be an Arab and a Muslim. Wrong on both counts. But even more bizarre is that the only support for McIntosh’s remark about the “Arab navigator” supposedly accompanying Columbus comes from Muslims themselves, who made up the story on the sole basis of that “Arabic-speaking Spaniard.” If the State Department employs historians, as it surely must, those historians were not in evidence to put a stop to those wild stories about the “Muslim navigator” that were being bruited about. One wonders how many people have been led to believe this tall tale, not realizing that there is nothing to justify it. A tale even taller than that about Jefferson’s “Iftar Dinner,” (that is, a regular dinner simply postponed by a few hours, out of courtesy to the Muslim envoy) or the other tale, the one about those “30% of slaves who were Muslims” (though, strangely, no one seemed to notice them at the time). These claims will continue to be made but, it is my earnest hope, in the future may not quite be so readily believed.
The Truth Must be Told
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35 Comments
D
6 years ago
America waging war against Islam is almost as old as American history itself.
“From the Halls of Montezuma, to the shores of Tripoli …”
6 years ago
Reply to
AlgorithmicAnalyst
Agree. In the article above Muslims are claiming columbus had a muslim navigator to falsely claim they helped Columbus navigate to the new world !
Muslims have history of claiming credit where they deserve none. Did you know Taj Mahal was a hindu shiva temple Built by King of Jaipur and later it was usurped by the Mughal King Shah Jahan and converted into tomb for his dead wife !
And the world foolishly thinks its a symbol of love for his wife that made him build it ! Now the indian govt also wants to perpetuate the myth as it earns good money from dumb tourists wanting to come over and take pretty pictures without knowing the big Lie they are fed.
That is why we need to expose every muslim Lie just as Nethanyahu exposed Abbas the Liar after he tried to con Trump . And boy was Trump furious http://bit.ly/2svuNZ3
6 years ago
Reply to
Suresh
Didn’t knew that about Taj. It sounded too good to be true…
But they should talk a lot more how they murdered millions of Indians during the Islamic conquest of India. All I hear about that are crickets.
As for Sad dick Kahn, is just doing taqyaa. He has one speech for trump (f*** you), another for the British (I love getting you f***ed) and another for muslims (let’s f*** the kuffar). He’s just a wolf in sheep’s clothing, like mad moe was.
6 years ago
Reply to
Suresh
M.A.Khan( from India’s Hyderabad) has busted the myth of Islamic gifts to the world( art and architecture,astronomy,algebra) to the world in his Islamic Jihad .Yet we read a lot about such great contribution these days.Amir Khusrow gloated on massacre of Hindus and only his poetry is mentioned.Most Sufis served as scouts for invading sadists.They are held in high esteem by many.
D
6 years ago
Reply to
AlgorithmicAnalyst
Yeah that’s about all that Islam has done in US history. Thank you Marines for getting that rats nest cleaned out
6 years ago
Roflmfao….the Muslims are rewriting Australian history trying to say Indonesian Muslims settled Australia before the British…..lol What a bunch of culture usurpers these cretins are.
6 years ago
Reply to
Infedel48
Maybe that’s true – there ARE an awful lot of poisonous snakes in Australia.
6 years ago
Reply to
Recommended
all the taipans put together have less poison than a single muslim.
6 years ago
Reply to
Infedel48
Yeah, the natives arrived 50000 BMM (before mad moe), but they already had Islam in their minds and the Koran in their asses.
6 years ago
Every time there is an official or unofficial utterance from anything islamic, it is a lie. The only way they get away with it is because the education system is so dumbed down as to be essenccily useless, it does not even teach students how to think of ask questions, they simply all float along in the current of “no child left behind”. The dumb ones should be.
6 years ago
Muslims were of no significance to Americans other than their roles in piracy and terrorism. They were, and are, aliens to the West.
6 years ago
“Taqiyya” is the Koran-approved dissemination of lies in the furtherance of its evil religion.
6 years ago
No it isn’t.
6 years ago
A bigger tall tale is that muzzrats had the earliest contact with Aliens. You can not believe it but it is true. After the Alien contact with the muzzrats they thought (the Aliens) to leave those simpletons alone and move on. The Aliens said something like f.ck you all but the muzzrats understood pallah o akbar. That is quite a sad history.
6 years ago
I am an American Indian of more than one tribal affiliation. I am descended from both federally recognized and state recognized tribes. However, do to laws about enrollment; I can only be a registered citizen of one tribal nation. I also, have a “history discipline” background in education and employment; and have even worked in a museum setting. So, I can say I know some about USA and World History.
I’ve encountered muslims who insist that followers of islam were in the Americas before American Indians. Thought they can’t seem to grasp this would mean they were in The New World before islam even existed and before mohammed was even born.
Islam has tried to place themselves in points of history whether US or World history… when they simply were never there. They also, claim to invented things that Zoroastrians, Jews, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Pagans and other groups had come up with.
Strange…. they seem to forget that the muslim Ottoman Empire was part of the Central Powers in World War One. They forgot about The Grand Mufti supporting Hitler and demanding the murders of North African Jews… or the islamic SS troops in the Balkans. They forget about the slaughter of Hindus with the split of Pakistan from India… the bloody muslim take over of Lebanon… the centuries of muslim involvement in the African slave trade which continues to this day.
They forget to mention the original inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula were Jews and Pagans…. or how most terrorism around the world is caused by muslims.
And finally, as an American Indian…. when I was a youngster the stories the Elders told us about American Indian men and women…. never had anyone named Mohammed, Farouk or Fatima. Unless these are the islamic names for Chief Joseph, Squanto and Sacagawea. To this day I can’t understand muslims who truly believe that they came to America before the 1492 Europeans, the Scandinavian Vikings… and my fellow American Indian people.
Trust me…. I don’t think young Pilgrim / Puritan girls… young Viking men named Olaf or forebears of Cherokee, Shinnecock, Wampanoag, Narragansett and Catawba were muslim. But don’t expect a muslim into islamic supremacism to believe that.
6 years ago
Reply to
Arjay
In their supremacist agenda, they throw lies left and right.
Some naive ears will eventually listen to them, and those are potential future converts.
When the lies are repeated and grow big enough, eventually becomes the truth.
After all, in middle east some kids are thought that Jews descend from pigs and dogs.
6 years ago
Outside the Arab world Islam historically means jacks***, so they must find a way to infiltrate the western history, values, culture (specially pop culture). So:
*Jesus was really Muslim and just a man (conveniently found evidence, BY muslims, supports that)
*Jedis should be Muslims ASAP, cultural jihad demands it.
*Converted western drug whores like Lindsay Lohan are useful for the islamic cause, because they’re famous. They can say the most stupid stuff supporting islam, that idiot fanboys/fangirls will buy it.
*Columbus found inspiration in the Arab world.
*Muslims were never racists/nor slave traders (Barbary pirates are just a fabrication from the west)
*Jews are evil and bad, because…..well because they are evil and bad.
(maybe the real reason was the fact that they were the first ppl mad moe couldn’t play with his lies, so he resorted to violence)
“Muslim contribution to our history is immense” – Basic all leftards world leaders from Obama to Fuhrer Merkel.
And the list of historic lies goes on, with the single goal of establishing Islamic supremacy.
6 years ago
Maybe we should start making up our own history in regards to Islame! Ya see Christopher Columbus was only giving the Muslim a ride. He stopped by the next dirt mound he found at sea and dropped him off. The Muslim was so happy that he said I’m gonna name this dirt mound after you sir, Saudi Arabia (he had very poor English)! Arabia ( Columbus) was so touched that he decided to let him in on a secret. You see the religion was spelled Islame and pronounced the same! Arabia (Columbus) told him of how the spelling sounded out and the Muslim man realized what that meant so he made a decree to change it to Islam so everyone didn’t think the new dirt mound was founded by someone lame. So there you have it. Saudi Arabia founded by Chrstopher Columbus just a misunderstanding on his name of course and Islam had its name fixed and all in one day! Your welcome Islam.
6 years ago
Thanks for an incisive analysis of the Muslim myth in American history Hugh. There is one solitary fact that sets Muslims apart from other humans- their compulsive lying. Lies are their way into the hearts and minds of the ignorant. It was Muhammad’s special ‘gift’ when he converted Medina. They, like the liberals, use lies as a means of usurping power. Liberals and Muslims are Satanic.
6 years ago
me thinks they confuse Moby Dick with Christopher Columbus lol . A sailor called Ishmael was main character..Only way Islam could be with Columbus-(1492) when Mohammad was born around 1600’s is if the whole world was indeed at one time Muslin, as the Koran claims. Natives say NO! thanks Arjay.- beneath the fold.
6 years ago
The only reason african slaves were muslim is because they were enslaved by conquering invaders , either arabs or other africans who had previously been given the ever attractive islamic choice of death or conversion. Just look at the world today and where islam exists as a majoroty. Spread by the sword, today it has a new sword, the sword of welfare
6 years ago
I’ve posted this story on my Facebook page.
6 years ago
I appreciate this great article from Pamela Geller. the State Dept. has long been the tip of the spear for the Progressive Movement. Many, and likely most of its employees have no respect for the concept of objective truth. The Spirit of Truth, the Holy Spirit is not in them. Therefore, words and facts and history are re-purposed to serve their current meme. To them, the end always justifies the means. I would love to see the State Dept completely gutted and replaced with a lean staff of intelligent people with real world accomplishments.
6 years ago
6 years ago
“We are at war with islam. We have always been at war with islam” islams tenants of deceit and corruption, Taquiyya, Kitman, etc. have made their propaganda in the pursuit of world domination very powerful.
6 years ago
Its true.. They attacked our ships in the 1700s and brought us our black slaves, which the democrats bot.
6 years ago
What did Columbus need a navigator for when no one knew where they were going?
6 years ago
Arjay, Nicely said, and you call yourself an American Indian. Up here in The Great White North, Liberal politicians would be demanding that you say oppressed Aboriginal or oppressed First Nation Member.
6 years ago
Another reason there were no Muslims on Columbus voyages, he was sponsored by Ferdinand and Isabella, they finally put down the Muslim invaders to Spain in 1492, after 700 years fighting them. They would certainly not have gone along with muslim crewmembers!
6 years ago
We can thank Muslims for our first Navy and the Marines Andrew Jackson had to put together to kick their tails and stop them from demanding jizzah from our merchants and our country and to stop them from kidnapping our crews and selling them into slavery.
