Unraveling the Fabric: The Muslim Contribution to the "Core of our Democracy"

At first I was confused.  Recently in a statement released on the White House website to commemorate Eid-Al-Fatr, the conclusion of Ramadan, the President praised the contribution of Muslims to "...building the very fabric of our nation and strengthening the core of our democracy."

It took me a while to figure that one out, but now I realize what he must have been talking about. Back during the Jefferson administration, a helpful bunch of Muslims called the Barbary pirates escalated their habit of preying on American trade in the Mediterranean. It finally became so bad that Thomas Jefferson, who notoriously disliked the idea of a standing military of any sort, was forced to dispatch the frigates that President Washington had ordered built for just such an emergency, to the Barbary coast to quell the Barbary pirates. 


Sadly, the delay in responding happened because the Congress was considering whether paying tribute to the Muslim Pashas of North Africa was cheaper than sending the Navy. Fortunately for the Navy, Americans tend to be generally averse to the idea of paying "tribute" (except of course for pant-waist liberals who held seats in Congress even back in those days). Over the next decade or so, the new U.S. Navy took on the Barbary States and their pirate strongholds several times in an effort to convince the pashas that meddling with Americans could have negative consequences.

So you could say that Muslims gave us the most powerful navy in the world (at least until Obama finishes putting it into mothballs). It's ironic that the very Muslim threat that have the US Navy a kickstart back in the beginning, seems to be inspiring another president who distrusts the military to stand the Navy down to it's lowest levels in a hundred years. 

Oh, yes, the Muslims have contributed to the very fabric of our nation all right.~ Near as I can tell they've been doing their best to unravel that fabric. I'm not sure I'd call that a "contribution", though.

© 2015 by Tom King

*And before you whip off an angry "How dare you hate on innocent Muslims" comment, I am NOT anti-Muslim.  I believe in the free exercise of any religion, so long as it doesn't advocate blowing up buildings and replacing the constitution with some religious law that allows for the stoning of gays, lesbians, rape victims and saucy feminists just because. I like the Constitution and would like to keep it thank you very much. I AM kind of anti-appeasement, though.  Given that the president seems to be trying to rewrite history and to do what the Congress back in the late 1700's and early 1800s did (appease the nations of Islam), I am rather concerned with regard to Obama's loyalties. Appeasement doesn't work. (see Neville Chamberlain, 1939). I thought we learned that lesson in WWII. Apparently not so much.

Looking at the President Through Different Eyes

Conservative Christians do not understand President Obama. He claims to be a Christian and to have America's best interests at heart and yet he does things that make no sense to us looking at it from a Christian perspective.

I'm not going to speculate on whether the president is a closet socialist or Muslim or member of the Illuminati, so all you conspiracy theorists calm down. I haven't been converted yet. My beanie with the propeller is still safely tucked in the garage next to my tin foil hat!

What I am going to challenge you to do is to look at this administration through the eyes of the Muslim world. Seen from their perspective, President Obama appears quite different than he does seen from an American or Christian perspective. Here are some things about this administration as they probably look to the nations of Islam.

• Immigration - The administration is busily releasing hardened terrorists from GITMO and has initiated a program to grant so-called "minor terrorists" admission to the United States. These include individuals who supported the Muslim Brotherhood takeover and who now are at risk from the military who stopped the takeover. Meanwhile, the Obama administration threatened to deport a family that fled here from Germany because they wished to homeschool their children and the German government (under a 1936 Nazi law that made homeschooling illegal) planned to take their children from them. If I were a Muslim, it would signal to me that the president was sympathetic to Muslim causes and unsympathetic to Christians. Also, this president has made no effort to grant emergency refugee status to Christians who faced systematic slaughter in Syria, Egypt and African Muslim states. As a Muslim, I would see this as an effort to open the United States in the same way that Europe has done, a move that will one day allow this country to be as thoroughly Islamicized as Britain, Sweden, France and other European nations..
• Foreign Policy - When Muamar Ghaddafi finally opened his borders and attempted to repair relations with the west, Islamic fundamentalists rebelled with aid from terrorist groups. The United States rushed into aid the pro-terrorist side of a conflict in which neither side was the side of the good guys. Then we stood aside on a second 9/11 and allowed an American ambassador and his security force to be brutally murdered. He's opened a dialogue with rogue states. bowed to Middle-Eastern kings and generally cast his own nation as the bad guy with his world wide apology tour. He has given lip service to our historic support for the nation of Israel while steadily distancing us from them. He has stepped back and let Russia begin the reconquest of Georgia, the Ukraine and other former Soviet bloc states with nothing more than a whimpered protest. Were
• Economic Policy - This president appears to be bankrupting his own country with his efforts to appease foreign nations through massive payoffs, to create a majority dependent class in America that can be depended upon to vote the status quo and to suppress the American economic engine through punitive taxation and over-regulation. Were I Muslim I would believe that Barak Hussein Obama was acting in the interest of the future worldwide Muslim State that is prophesied in the Koran, by weakening the nation that stands as the primary obstacle to the success of the coming jihad. His domestic policy appears to be intent on weakening the United States from within. At least that's what it would appear to me looking at it through the eyes of one who believes in the eventual world domination of Islam.
• Religion - None of what seems to be a pro-Islamic policy, would be possible if, as the president claims, he is a Christian. If he is a Christian, then, he has left the Islamic faith he claimed to embrace when he was training in Indonesian Muslim Schools. By all rights, as an ex-Muslim, he faces the death penalty for leaving the faith according to the tenets of the Koran. Yet, he gets a by from the Muslim world and there is a widespread belief that he is a Muslim in the Islamic world. Many believe he is a secret Muslim and see, in his actions, someone acting in the interests of the faith.Besides the Koran allows Muslims to lie to infidels for the sake of the faith, so it's easy for the Muslims to believe that his claim to being a Christians are all part of the plan.

I am not saying the president of the United States is a Muslim. Personally, I believe that it is the president's deep-seated belief in progressive socialism that drives him. I think he sees himself as leader of a world-wide socialist government one day. I don't think this man plans to ever step down from power and retire comfortably to his ranch in Texas to write his memoirs as his predecessors have done. I think he has ambitions for a larger role in the world once he's tamed and defanged the American Beast.  I believe his handlers find him useful and want to see him rise to such lofty heights.

If you search for those handlers, you will find them hiding in plain sight. They'll be on the boards of political action committees. They'll be donating billions to help get suitable politicians elected to high office. They'll help develop public relations and marketing strategies to support their chosen figureheads. They don't have a secret handshake or meet at secret mountain hideaways to plot the end of the world. They are not the Illuminati or the Bilderbergers. They laugh at the fools who fall for that distraction and make themselves look ridiculous in the eyes of their fellows.

They are people who crave power, but not the kind of fame or glory that the politician craves. They act together with other powerful men because they have interests that coincide with them. They believe they are smart enough to manipulate the leaders who manipulate the fools who make up the ignorant masses of the world. They pull their strings always from what they believe is a safe distance.

They do not look behind themselves. They do not notice the fine strings attached to their own limbs nor are they aware that there is a darker power than themselves at the other end of those strings, manipulating the manipulators who are manipulating the leaders who think they are manipulating the masses.

And those who disconnect from the strings are a threat to the whole nasty plan.

So how do you disconnect? How do you free yourself from the influence of all this manipulation and, to call a spade a spade, EVIL?  To escape, to see the world as it is, you must become free yourself. I, personally, believe that a daily walk with Christ will do that for you. Jesus said "The truth shall set you free." It will certainly open your eyes. Harry Nillson once said, "You see what you want to see and you hear what you want to hear. You dig?"  This is true if you see yourself as the center of your universe. And, in consequence of your ego-centric paradigm, you assume that everyone sees things the way you do.


But they don't! People who see things differently than you are not being deliberately oppositional. They truly see things from their own point of view. The more radicalized that point of view, the harder it is for you to see things through another man's eyes. It's little wonder our nation is so polarized. the fringes of opinion in our nation have grown so far apart that they are no longer able to see each other as human beings. We're so deeply inside of our own ideology that we can no longer empathize with anyone ourside the parameters of our deep-seated belief system.

The only way out of that trap is the simple rule that Christ articulated for his followers. Love God with all your heart and your neighbor as yourself.  As it turns out the act of bestowing love on others is the bit that teaches us to see things as they really are.  Rodney King whose beating by LA cops started a riot in LA saw the bloodshed and horror being perpetrated in his name and asked, "Can't we all just love each other?"

The horror that Rodney witnessed on television through the God's-eye view of helicopter mounted TV cameras, apparently shook him to the core. Perhaps he remembered his mom or grandma taking him to Sunday school. Whatever it was, it helped him see things as God sees them and he had to speak out; to call for the only thing that could end the hatred and bloodshed.

There remaineth three things, faith, hope and love, but the greatest of these is love. We may have faith that our ideology is correct. We may hope for change right down to our wishbones, but in the final reckoning, it will be love in action, not feelings or a vague sense of rightness  that will change the world. It will be love shown in our actions. You can't scream, "YOU MUST LOVE ME!" while burning down an appliance store or trashing a church.  You can't cry, "Love is all there is," while hounding anyone who disagrees with your lifestyle. You can't cry, "Jesus saves!" while spraying "God hates fags!" on an aids clinic wall.

Not if you don't want to be driven mad by the inconsistencies  between what you say you believe and what you actually do. If you believe in the Golden Rule, you really should practice it if you want to maintain your sanity. If you believe you should love everybody and you don't, your brain will make itself crazy trying to deal with the double bind you've placed yourself in.

We are living in an increasingly mad world. I don't know about you, but I'm ready to go home before the whole thing melts down.





Tom King © 2014

Why do Christians Hate Muslims?

I found this question on a Yahoo forum.  It was asked, apparently sincerely, by someone in Iran, who says she does not understand why Christians hate Muslims.  She says, " We respect all religions. All divine religions.Including Christianism.We don't want to kill you or anything ! Where did you get this rubbish from?"

Sadly we get it from Muslims.  Muslims on television, Muslims on radio in their own country, Muslim terrorists who blow themselves up on the outside chance they'll take a few of us with them and Muslims on the Internet who broadcast the beheading of a young American engineer live and in color and shouted "Death to America!"

Here is my answer to her question:

First, your question assumes a falsehood.  Christians do not hate Muslims. God forbids us to. Here's the problem.

Your faith seems to many Christian observers to have been co-opted by the Mullahs, fanatics and terrorists in your ranks. They have done a systematic and thorough public relations job over the past two decades to convince others that we must needs fear the wrath of Islam and have proclaimed "Jihad" against us.  It has, unfortunately, achieved its purpose. We fear Islam.  If by Christians you are talking about American Christians, we really don't hate the Muslim people. Our country is open to Muslims and they are allowed to worship as they see fit.  In the wake of 9/11, it was the main body of Christians who called for calm and asked people not to persecute Muslims in our midst. But there is a disconnect here.  There doesn't appear to be a corresponding call for tolerance from the Muslim community.  Terror and horror by Islamic fanatics is greeted with a resounding silence from the Muslim community, other than a few scattered spokesmen for Islamic "protection" organizations who seemed more frightened than outraged by the 9/11 attacks.

Were we not at risk of our very lives just by traveling to the Middle East, most of us would love to travel in the part of the world that was the cradle of Western Civilization. I'd love to see the pyramids, but I'd rather not be blown up or beheaded for my troubles.

As the bully on the playground soon discovers, if you make people fear you, they will not like you for it. I had a child in counseling once at a children's mental health center who wanted to be elected dorm captain by his peers.  He came to me complaining because nobody would vote for him. "I've beat up everyone in the dorm," he explained, "And they still won't make me captain." 

That's what the fanatic element of Islam has done. They want to be leaders of the Muslim world apparently (we've read about the Caliphate) and they go around blowing people up to prove their worth as leaders. Then, they cannot seem to understand why nobody, even their own people, like them very much. I know that ordinary Muslims deplore the violence and bloodshed.  So do Christians.

Unfortunately, we have members of the Christian community who are just as fanatic as your own terrorists. One blew up a building in Oklahoma and killed a bunch of people.  Isn't it odd how these folks do more killing of their own people than they do of the "infidels" and "pagans" they oppose?

Ultimately, no decent Christian hates Muslims, whatever we think of Islam as a religion. Christ forbids us to do so.  We disagree among ourselves as a faith and have fractured into dozens of denominations, as a result, so we can obey Christ's command and worship according to the dictates of our own consciences without fighting amongst ourselves.  We'd rather be smaller and peaceful than to have a massively large and powerful church that is at war with itself.  The opposite seems to be the case with Islam.

We, Christians, actually love peace.  It takes a whole lot of provocation to get us into a war most of the time - like attacking Pearl Harbor without warning or blowing up the World Trade Center (and even then we didn't start anything till the second attempt succeeded).  We got into it with Saddam Hussein because he attacked and conquered Kuwait, a sovereign nation and even then we restrained our hand from finishing Saddam once we liberated Kuwait, which is again a sovereign nation. If we hadn't feared he was trying to get weapons of mass destruction, we'd have probably let things go. Despite propaganda to the contrary, his unwillingness to let us freely examine his weapons programs was what led us to the second Iraq war. You don't walk around with your hand in your bulging pocket threatening people, unless you expect them to think you've got a gun. And you shouldn't be surprised if someone shoots you because they are afraid of you.  It's a lesson Iranian leaders should have learned.  Nuclear weapons in the hands of terrorists could start a nuclear holocaust and Iran's willingness to supply arms to terrorists gives us more cause to fear.

Our country has made mistakes in the Middle-East, no question, but that's our nation, not our faith. Nations are run by men and men make mistakes. Our faith says treat all men as you would have them treat you and the majority of Christians do that.  Please do not blame the hate speech that gets reported on endlessly by the media on all Christians. These people are our particular fanatics and we oppose them up front and loudly.

If Islam would proclaim that we have the right to live and worship as we see fit, I promise you Christian America will support the same for you - in fact, WE ALREADY DO.  If we were to stop having to rescue Arab Christian converts from Middle-Eastern countries who have a death sentence on them for converting, maybe we wouldn't be so afraid of Muslims. We grant Muslims freedom to worship in our own homeland even to the extent that nobody really wants to force the Imam in New York to move the mosque elsewhere - we'd rather he just respect our feelings and move it voluntarily. When is Christianity and Judaism ever going to be tolerated to the same extent by Islam?

We do not pretend to understand the endless squabbles you guys get into over patches of dirt, holy and otherwise.  We do not understand why so many Muslims want the Jews dead and pushed into the sea and the nation of Israel eliminated from the face of the Earth. Christians have not demanded that you to return all the ancient Christian and Jewish holy sites over which your faith has built mosques (St. Sophia, The Church of Job and the temple mound in Jerusalem are all Christian holy sites where conquering Islamic nations have erected mosques to celebrate victory over the infidels. The Christian faith sprang from the Middle-East. We count Abraham as our father just as Jews and Muslims do. Why can we not share access to the holy ground we all share in common?

I will tell you why.

Islamic leaders call us infidels and deny us access for that reason alone. According to even tolerant Muslims, a Christian or Jew would, by mere presence, pollute those holy places.  Now, a Muslim could freely walk into almost any Christian church or cathedral in the world so long as he or she is respectful without fear.  You cannot say that is true for any mosque - at least that is not the impression I have been given by your leaders, apologists and by tourist guidebooks which warn Christians sternly against "violating" Muslim sacred sites.

If you treat people like they are unclean, how can you expect them to love you for it? There are certain Christian churches I have no patience for because of attitudes like that.  I stay away from them. I publicly disagree with them if they spew such venom in the press or on-line.

The only hope of friendship between Christian and Muslim is for the mass of believers to come together to oppose evil on both sides.  As a Christian I do. When a terrorist claims to be a Christian, the true Christian community rises up and denounces their evil deeds.  We do that because in our country, we will not lose our heads for doing so.

One of the things we Christians do not understand is why Muslims do not publicly oppose the fanatics that you claim are not true Muslims, but some kind of fringe group that we should not judge you by.  And yet the silence from the Muslim community in the wake of their continued outrages is deafening.

Why is that, if I may ask a question myself? If it is fear of terrorists? Your leaders? The disapproval of your neighbors?  I do not understand why the body of Islam remains silent and the mullahs do not speak against such evil-doings. In my country and in my faith, we believe that to see injustice in your own house and in your own neighborhood and to remain silent is to condone that injustice.

There are plenty of times that Christians have remained silent because of fear. We think it's shameful when they do.  There are also plenty of Christians who have died or suffered persecution for standing against evil too.  It's a hard world and not one in which you can have principles without risk.

Maybe if Muslims and Christians who believe every man has a right to worship as he pleases were to join forces, we could stop some of the foolishness.  We shouted down the misguided Preacher who wants to burn the Koran - Christians did that!  We do not believe it is right to intentionally offend people of other faiths.

So when do we hear outrage from Muslims about the proposed Mosque that overlooks the site of the World Trade Center?  It offends many Americans, Christians or otherwise, not because we hate Muslims, but because, like the construction of the Mosques at the Dome of the Rock, St. Sophia and the Church of Job, this Mosque cannot help but look like another incidence of Islam celebrating a victory over the infidel (us) - especially when so many Muslims danced in the street throughout the Middle-East in celebration on 9/11.  How can it hurt to move the site as a gesture of peace to Americans whose lives and families were shattered by a group of madmen flying the flag of Islam?  Out of respect.....

We went first and raised our voices against the Koran burning and persecution of Muslims.  It's your turn. We love you guys.  It's what Christians do.

Tom King - Tyler, Texas