Robert Spencer #fundie

Robert Spencer #fundie humanevents.com

[President Obama stated that "here in the United States, Ramadan is a reminder that Islam has always been part of America and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country.”]

Islam has always been a part of America? Really? Will Obama provide us with a list of the Muslim Founding Fathers, the Muslim heroes of the American Revolution, the names of the Muslims killed fighting in the Civil War, World War I, and World War II—surely the President will have no trouble coming up with all that, will he? And he could also throw in a list of those “extraordinary contributions” that Muslims have made to our country. Aside from being the impetus for some extraordinary innovations in airport security, I can’t think of any. But I sure Barack Obama must be way ahead of me.

And so for this Ramadan, Barack Obama gave U.S. Muslims a grand mosque at Ground Zero, and an American pedigree as sterling and impeachable as his own. Will this be enough to stop the jihad against the U.S.? Smarter bets would be on its instead growing bolder than ever.

77 comments

old comment by

Arabs and Muslims were in the Americas before Columbus, mingling with the Native American tribes and marrying them, leading to a great integration between Muslims and Native Americans. They were also on Christopher Columbus' ships when he "discovered" America, they came here after Columbus as explorers and they were brought here as slaves from Africa as well.

Spencer is one of the leaders of the Islamophobic movement in the US who would deny anything positive the Muslims did. When it was pointed out the huge number of Muslims that denounced terrorism and terrorist acts, he still wasnt satisfied and said that they didnt mean it. This ratfaced real life troll would deny the importance of Muslims during the discovery and exploration of America. He would deny the Muslims brought here as slaves and who fought during the civil war. He would deny the Muslims and their influence and support of the civil rights movement. He would also deny that one of the founders of Youtube was a Muslim... You canot win against this rat, best to let him crawl back into his hole before he spreads more disease. Hey Spencer: why are there cities in the USA called Medina and other Muslim names? Think before you opene your mouth.

And regarding the 0: yes, it was invented in India and was brought to the rest of the world by the Muslims and their empire, perfectly complementing their own numerals.

old comment by

@Gayatri:

Yes, Muslimwiki. Its meant to be a stepping stone towards other sources which you can find for yourself. Obviously, that's impossible for you.

I'm not talking about Spaniash conquistadors. I'm talking pre-Columbus events. I'm taking explorers after Columbus. I'm talking Muslim Native American tribes. I'm talking slaves brought here. And if you dont think slaves or Native Americans were a considerable part of society back then, there is no hope for you. Then you have slaves fighting in the civil war. Much closer, in the last century, you have the incredible contributions made by Muslims in the civil rights movements. Or did you think Malcolm X and his followers were Buddhist? Or if that's not mainstream enough for you, you have the likes of Muhammad Ali. Or what about the numerous musicians with record albums? Are they not mainstream? What about the professors, the innovators, the inventors? The policemen, the soldiers, the firefighters, the doctors? That's where I'll leave it by now because you are starting another argument about something being mainstream. How many cities have Muslim names in the US?

I'm afraid you yourself dont know what you want to talk about, but just dont want to acknowledge that Muslims have been in America way before Spencers ratfaced ancestors even set foot in America.

old comment by Anon

>>Anonymous at @Gayatri: I'm not talking about Spanish conquistadors. I'm talking pre-Columbus events. <<

Any claims of pre-Columbus trans-ocean contact beyond the Norse and possibly Polynesian should be viewed with deep suspicion, due to a lack of evidence. Do not make Anonymous look bad.

However, since Anthony Janszoon van Salee was a Muslim and one of the major landholders and merchants in New Amsterdam, Obama's statement that Islam has always been a part of America is right.

And given the importance of African-American Muslims during the Civil Rights movement, the statement that "American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to our country" is also supported. Two more examples of notable Muslim Americans:

*Fazlur Khan, designer of the Sears Tower and innovator of many standard construction elements for skyscrapers. Spencer could very well work in a building based on Khan's designs.

*Muhammad Ali. As every boxing fan knows, he was The Greatest.

So Obama is quite correct, and Spencer is the one who is bullshitting here.

old comment by

@Anon:

There are Arab sources and quite frankly: who would you ex[ect to have the sources on those encounters? The Arabs and the Native Americans, or post-Columbus historians?

@Lucilius:

My posts have nothing to do with a "firsties fairy tale" as you said. I couldnt care less who was where first. What I am saying is that people who say that Muslims and or Arabs have never been a part of American history and have never contributed anything are wrong.

There are Arab records of journeys by Muslims to the West before Columbus. Captains of the ships on Columbus' journey were Muslims from Spain. And afterwards slaves were brought to the Americas from Africa and that also brought a number of Muslims over. Am I sayin that because of that Arabs and or Muslims are superior or have some sort of claim on American history? No.

I have never understood the thinking of people who always have to resort to some sort of "firsties fairy tale" and then ascribe some sort of superiority. So you can take that comment and shove it.

For anyone interested:

http://www.mediamonitors.net/youssefmroueh1.html

http://www.muslimsinamerica.org/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=14&Itemid=28

And so there are more sources.

old comment by Anon

>>Anonymous @Anon:

There are Arab sources and quite frankly: who would you expect to have the sources on those encounters? The Arabs and the Native Americans, or post-Columbus historians? <<

I would expect some tangible _evidence_ to be available to current historians and archaeologists.

For the Norse, we have the L'Anse aux Meadows settlements, and the sites in Greenland.

For the Polynesians, there is some evidence of ships island-hopping as far as Chile (sweet potatoes and chicken bones).

But the sites that you link provide no evidence beyond ambiguous interpretations of second-hand accounts. Thus they are viewed as unsupported by mainstream historians and archaeologists.

But this is entirely irrelevant to discussing the quote, so we should stop.

old comment by Lucilius

Oh, anonymous Muslim crackpot, you are very amusing. You've fallen for the same sort of loopy fables and tortuously "creative" reinterpretations of history that also posit alien astronauts in Peru and Atlantean airplanes in the Neolithic. If there's such vast evidence of ancient Muslim contact with the Americas, where's all the remains now? Where are all these great mosques and Muslim native tribes?

... Oh, right: They're all hidden by THE GRAND CONSPIRACY! The conspiracy that suppresses evidence about everything. Boogaboogabooga, blahblahblah. Heard it. But I don't doubt that you'll claim I'm just part of the plot myself. We're all in on it, you know.

And if you felt no need to claim primacy, you wouldn't have fallen for such nonsense in the first place. Unless you're just naturally gullible.

old comment by

@Lucilius:

Who says im a Muslim anyway? Who said anything about grand mosques being built? Who said anything about a conspiracy theory? Who said anything about Muslim Native tribes? Oh, you mean those Native American tribes where the Muslims integrated and became a part of the tribe?

If all you're going to do is make up stuff about me being some Muslim conspiracy theorist nut who believes that there is a vast conpiracy covering up Muslim history.... You'd be so wrong I could only facepalm. But you have already shown you dont actually care what actual historians have to say about the matter. And thats fine with me. You see: I dont care. All I'm doing is putting the information out there. Information I came across trying to find out just how far back Arab/Muslim relations with the Americas go. If people are interested in that, they can follow the links. If they arent, well, then they can just not follow them. I didnt post those links or "fall" for the information because I'm a sucker for primacy as you put it. Like I said, I dont really care who was where first.

Conspiracy? Nah. I dont believe in aliens in Peru. I also laugh at people thinking that Atlantis was a real place. But oh well, enjoy.

old comment by DevilsChaplain

Is it just me or does every fundie post bashing Muslims have to involve people agreeing with the nutcase speaker in question, leading to flame wars between two sides of people who don't know history? To say that Islam has not had a connection with the United States since its inception is patently false. To ignore the link between the final Abrahamic religion and U.S. history is to ignore the multitudes of Muslim slaves taken to work in the U.S. including Abdulrahman Ibrahim Ibn Sori, Omar Ibn Said, Peter Salem (who fought in the Revolutionary War) and Bilali Mohammed. Among the carvings on the U.S. Supreme Court building is Muhammad, sitting next to Hammurabi, Moses, John Marshall, Napoleon, Confucious and Sir William Blackstone. Islam and Muslims have always been a part of American life, though one must remember that they were and still are a minority religion which sometimes makes it easy to forget such things. And Robert Spencer is nothing but a hack pseudohistorian and xenophobe as can be evidenced by his claims about Islam and the U.S. as well as his little quip about airport security.

old comment by

@Lucilius:

You'll find you are the dimwit here. Mroueh only refers to one mosque and remnants and ruins in his article which have actually been found and with Quranic inscriptions.

Nothing about grand mosques or a conspiracy to cover everything up. You want to see what you want to see, and thats fine. Which historians are a joke? Are their sources wrong? How are they wrong? You're digging yourself into a deeper hole. But hey, maybe thats your fetish.

Keep building up that straw man, my friend.

@DevilsChaplain:

Hmm, come to think of it some people might take mypost to be something like what you described, while that was certainly not the intention. What I was saying was that Obama is not wrong when he says Muslims and Arabs have had a long connection with America. Not that they were intimately involved with the creation of the USA.

old comment by Wehpudicabok

"Barack Obama gave U.S. Muslims a grand mosque at Ground Zero..."

This is the pinnacle of language distortion. Right here! What really happened, of course, is that plans for a proposed Muslim community center two blocks away from Ground Zero have come under fire from conservative and anti-Muslim ideologies, leading to the President's endorsement of the project as a constitutionally supported sign of good faith between Muslim and non-Muslim Americans.

But instead of the truth, we hear people controlling the discourse, making sure everyone discussing a topic uses language that frames reactionary ideologies in the best possible light. There is no "Ground Zero mosque," certainly no "grand" mosque, and what is there, our president did not propose. (Not that it would have been bad if he had, beyond being something of a waste of the president's time.) I know this has been said before, but liberals need to work on taking back the political language. If we don't, we can look forward to even more domination by an extremist Republican party and a conservative Democratic "opposition," with no representation at all for supporters of the "radical" ideas of tolerance and secularism.

Edit @ Thinking Allowed:

It's called Park51, and it looks like a box. It's not actually a mosque, although I think there was a mosque in it.

old comment by Reckoner

From the Wiki:

Many of the slaves brought to colonial America from Africa were Muslims. By 1800, some 500,000 Africans arrived in what became the United States. Historians estimate that between 15 to 30 percent of all enslaved African men, and less than 15 percent of the enslaved African women, were Muslims. These enslaved Muslims stood out from their compatriots because of their "resistance, determination and education"

It is estimated that over 50% of the slaves imported to North America came from areas where Islam was followed by at least a minority population. Thus, no less than 200,000 came from regions influenced by Islam. Substantial numbers originated from Senegambia, a region with an established community of Muslim inhabitants extending to the 11th century.[35]

Michael A. Gomez speculated that Muslim slaves may have accounted for "thousands, if not tens of thousands," but does not offer a precise estimate. He also suggests many non-Muslim slaves were acquainted with some tenets of Islam, due to Muslim trading and proselytizing activities. Historical records indicate many enslaved Muslims conversed in the Arabic language. Some even composed literature (such as autobiographies) and commentaries on the Quran.

So there's that...

old comment by Lucilius

Bwahahaha! Check your sleeves for hay, anonynut. "If you only had a brain ...."

Ah, yes, your "Quranic inscriptions." And on whom does your esteemed source rely for this wonderful proof? Barry Fell, a biologist who went off the deep end and decided he was an epigrapher. He began seeing ancient inscriptions on every gravel he picked up - such as the Arabic inscriptions to which you refer, rejected by real epigraphers as forgeries or random scribbles and scratches.

But it was a crowded New World, according to Fell; he "found" inscriptions from Celts in West Virginia, Hittites in the Amazon and Phoenicians everywhere, in addition to your Imaginary Muslim pioneers. And guess who else swallows Fell's ramblings as eagerly as you do, claiming them as just as much proof for their own pet theories: acolytes of Atlantis.

So don't make too much fun of the whackos who rave about lost continents - you're in exactly the same league.

old comment by Brendan Rizzo

First of all, assuming that quote is real, he was obviously referring to the fact that freedom of religion has always been part of America, so in theory Muslims could have lived in this country since whenever. The fact that there was hardly any emigration from the Muslim countries to the U.S. until recently proves nothing. By that logic, any ethnic group which did not immediately move to the United States is barred from entry, which is un-American.

The Muslims who are not terrorists (which is the vast majority) should not be forbidden from entering the United States. The Christians who are terrorists should be forbidden from the United States, and the same goes for Muslim terrorists, or Hindu terrorists, or nationalist terrorists in the Balkans and Caucasus. The point is, how come it's only Muslims as a whole who are considered to be terrorists by your reasoning?

The stuff in the last paragraph has been refuted many times before, so I won't do more work than I have to.

old comment by

@Lucilius:

Yes, that's it! Continue with the logical fallacies. So far I've seen straw man and ad hominem. What will follow? If all you're going to do is focus on Fell's arguments and deny what he found because his critics were pissed about him not following procedure then, we'll, thats all fine with me. I'm more in the Kelly column regarding Fell myself, actually.

But Fell is not the only source. The sources it all started with are sources credited to genuine medieval Arabic and African sources by explorers and travellers. They have written about travels to the West from Africa and Spain. Starting with those, and then looking to certain discoveries from the Columbus era voyages provides us with a certain picture.

Am I saying that Muslims were the majority? No. Am I saying they built grand mosques and buildings? No. But to say that an empire that big famous for it's explorers and expansions was not in the least enticed to see what was on the other side of the sea is not something I can accept.

@Gayatri:

I'm indifferent about people accepting or denying Muslims being in the USA for a long time. I dont really care whether people believe they were here before Columbus or after Columbus, as I believe a lot of groups, from Chinese Buddhists to Europeans had already been to the Americas way before. If people dont want to accept that, that's fine with me.

What I am not indifferent about is people on this site using the same argument you see on RR, namely that if somehow you try to give some information on Muslim history that isnt all doom and gloom and violence that somehow you are a crackpot Muslim who believes in grand conspiracies.

old comment by Shifty Eyes

Obama said two ideas:
1) Islam has always been a part of America,
2) American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions to out country.

1) Depending on what we mean by America, that's likely true. There were likely Muslim slaves and a free Muslim minority in America since the 18th Century at the latest, as shown by other posts. However, apparently the oldest mosque in the USA is less than 100 years old, meaning it's harder to find solid evidence of the religion having always been practiced in America. Additionally, Morocco was the first country to formally recognize the USA as a sovereign nation.
2) Various activists, scientists, entertainers, and athletes that wikipedia can list for you.

Now, Obama is kind of wrong that in the US, Ramadan is a reminder of that. But perhaps it ought to be and he was reminding us of such facts. That so many of us were unaware shows the need to remind us.

old comment by LadyJafaria

@anon: You don't need to prove Muslims/Arabs discovered America to prove this guy is an asshat. He does that all by himself.

@non-anons calling B.S.: Obama doesn't need to prove they discovered America either. The idea that a group of people can't be here unless they were "always" (by whose definition?) here or have made "extraordinary" (again, by whose definition) contributions is profoundly un-American.

There are probably Muslim doctors, nurses, lawyers, policemen, firefighters, engineers, teachers, social workers, et cetera, making more of a difference in one day than Spencer here has made with his whiny bigoted tirades in his whole life. And that's an extraordinary contribution EVEN IF they're not famous people you can namedrop when you have to, as if you should have to.

old comment by Darth Vader

Spencer is partially correct - at least in his first few sentences. While I have a deep respect for Muslim-Americans, the quote from Obama overstates the case. The Islamic community did not play a significant role in founding this country, and what few token Muslims can perhaps be identified from early American history are the exceptions that prove the rule. Islam has not "always" been a part of America any more than Buddhism or Zoroastrianism have been; it is a relatively recent development in America that was introduced with new waves of immigrants. That is not to say that Islamic Americans haven't made a contribution to this country; it's just that Obama is overstating the case from a historical perspective.

old comment by John Robert

Muslims have made extraordinary contributions??? JESUS what NONSENSE!!! I think the contribution of other minorities is much greater then muslims like that of Hinduism or budhism!!! With out Hinduism you would'nt have the Beetles!!!! Islam may have given 2 or 3 nice things but they have taken MORE THAN THREE THOUSAND LIFES OF AMERICAN PEOPLE ON (9/11!!!!!!!!! AND MANY MANY MANY MORE IN THE IRAQ WARS!!!!! All the people here supporting muslims dont know muslims. They think YOU are INFIDELS and DESERVE to be STONED to DEATH and if you ask them if that is true they say no because they are not stupid but you are stupid for trusting them..

@ Gayatri : You rockn,roll buddy!!!!b:Dd

old comment by Amadaun

John Robert, you are at least as bad as Robert Spencer. Especially bringing up those wars as sins of Islam. Do you know how many civilians we have killed there? Innocent and, yes, Muslim civilians? Do you know what we've done to the cultural stability of Iraq? Can you even imagine living in Afghanistan where you've had to rebuild after the foreign armies rolled through every couple of decades all century?

Lucilius, stop being a total asshole.

Everyone complaining about exaggeration: Good god, he's in politics. If he can get by without telling bald-faced lies his morality is in the 'impeccable' range, and if he doesn't make sweeping generalizations no one will notice he said anything. It's a nasty game, but flattery isn't even one of the nasty parts and he's getting flogged for it?

He didn't even say "always an important part," because that's too close to the edge of maybe-too-far. He said they've always been here--verifiable--and that American Muslims have made extraordinary contributions--not verifiable due to the vague nature of the word 'extraordinary,' but perfectly defensible.

Suns and stardust! We're regular jackals. Eesh.

Robert Spencer #fundie humanevents.com

77 comments

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