Obama Backing Mosque Defies Religious Freedomby James Zumwalt08/19/2010
Excerpt:
http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=38613As the emotional debate over building the Ground Zero Mosque continues, President Obama announced his support for the Muslim initiative.
On August 13, at a White House dinner celebrating the Islamic month of Ramadan, he emphasized that “Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country… This is America and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable. The principle that people of all faiths are welcome in this country, and will not be treated differently by their government, is essential to who we are. The writ of our Founders must endure.”
In citing the need to preserve “the writ of our Founders,” Obama ignores history and a major concern about Islam cited by two of our Founding Fathers. He also fails to grasp the concept that religious tolerance does not mean embracing religious intolerance.
Two of our Founding Fathers—Thomas Jefferson and John Adams—serving as America’s ambassadors to France and Britain respectively—met in London with Tripoli’s ambassador to Britain in 1786. Their mission was to negotiate a peace treaty to end unprovoked attacks against American ships that were being launched by pirates from various Muslim countries along the Barbary Coast and their enslavement of captured American crewmen.
Jefferson and Adams queried the Tripoli ambassador as to why our ships were being attacked. His response sufficiently concerned the two Founding Fathers that they felt compelled to report what was said to the Continental Congress:
“That it was founded on the laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Muslim who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”
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