In his message to Muslims on their holiday Eid al-Fitr, issued Sunday, Barack Obama asserted that “Eid also reminds us of the many achievements and contributions of Muslim Americans to building the very fabric of our nation and strengthening the core of our democracy.” He did not, unfortunately, provide even a single example of these “many achievements and contributions” that Muslims have made to “building the very fabric of our nation,” but he said that there were many, so they shouldn’t be hard to list a few, right?
You remember a few of them, don’t you? Remember the Muslim signers of the Declaration of Independence? With Yahya al-Hanqoq’s large signature front and center, so that the infidel King George III could read it without his spectacles? And then there was Ibrahim Clark of New Jersey and El-Bridge Gerry of Massachusetts. Remember also the Muslims who gave James Madison information about Muhammad’s Constitution of Medina – which, as we all know, granted equal rights to women and religious minorities, predating such documents in the West by 1,000 years. Madison, of course, used the Medina Constitution as a model when framing the U.S. Constitution.
Then there were the Muslims who fought so valiantly during the War of 1812 and the Mexican War. And in the titanic struggles over slavery, Muslims were front and center: remember the Muslim abolitionist Senators who faced down the South in the antebellum Senate, the Senate chamber ringing with their oratory about how the Qur’an says to free slaves and so the U.S. government should, too? Remember the Muslim regiments in the Civil War (all on the Union side, of course!)? Then in the aftermath of the Civil War came the Muslim industrialists who brought us railroads, the telegraph, the telephone.
Not to be forgotten are the Muslims who also fought courageously in the Spanish-American War, World War I and World War II, and the Muslim entertainers who kept us laughing on the Vaudeville circuit and on the home front during those terrible world wars with their jokes from the Hadith.
None of this rings a bell? Not to worry. Before too long it will be taught in all the textbooks. Absurd? Maybe – but no more than Obama’s statement itself...
Also--let's not forget the Muslims who wrote "God Bless America" and Goodbye, Columbus.
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