Dale K. Robinson
February 7, 2007
“Everyone is entitled to his own opinion, but not his own facts,” said the late statesman and Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan.
Fact: Nearly from the birth of the United States, U.S.-flagged vessels in the Mediterranean were preyed upon by the Barbary Pirates. The pirates were sanctioned by the governments of the Barbary States, Morocco, Tunis, Algeria and Tripoli.
Fact: The U.S. Congress sent Ambassador Thomas Jefferson to negotiate with the Barbary States. The result of that negotiation was that the United States would pay the Barbary governments an annual tribute for the safe passage of U.S. ships.
Fact: The Barbary pirates continued to prey on U.S. ships, capturing the ships and cargo, enslaving crews and demanding ransom for their release, in violation of the agreement between the United States and the Barbary States.
Fact: The Barbary States declared war on the United States when now-President Jefferson refused to pay additional tribute. The First Barbary War was fought between the United States and Islamic nations, which, according to their own ambassador, used the teachings of the Quran to justify their attacks on U.S. vessels.
Fact: The First Barbary War had absolutely nothing to do with the Knights of Malta, the Crusades or slavery in the United States. It had everything to do with Islamic nations justifying their attacks on U.S. vessels and citizens based on their interpretation of the Quran.
Opinion: Conservatives believe all Muslims are terrorists.
Fact: This conservative does not believe that. I believe that most Muslims want to raise their families in peace, worship God in their own way and not impose their beliefs upon everyone else by force.
On the other hand, there are plenty of Islamic extremists out there who “fight those who do not believe in Allah … nor follow the religion of truth, being among those who have been given the Book (the Bible and the Torah), until they pay tribute out of hand and have been humiliated. (Quran verse 9:29)” TheReligionofPeace.com reports there have been 7,333 terrorist attacks by Muslim extremists worldwide since Sept. 11, 2001.
As I write this, the following deaths and injuries are attributed to Islamic extremists around the world for Jan. 31, 2007: Afghanistan, 18 dead, one injured; Bangladesh, one dead; India, 14 killed and 25 injured; Iraq, 31 killed with 45 injured; Pakistan, 2 dead and 2 injured; Sudan, 250 killed and 30 injured; and finally, Thailand where Islamic extremists killed 1 person.
Again, as I write this, the big news of the day is the arrest of nine Muslims in Britain. The British authorities are accusing the group of plotting to kidnap and kill a British soldier who also happened to be Muslim. It was reported that the group wanted to film the torture and beheading of the soldier and post it on the Internet.
Opinion: It is ridiculous to judge Muslims today by what other Muslims did 200, 500 or 1,000 years ago.
Fact: I concur with that opinion. It is just as ridiculous to judge all Muslims today by the actions of Osama bin Laden or Mohammed Atta, just as it is to judge all Christians by Pat Robertson or all conservatives by Rush Limbaugh or all anti-war activists by Jane Fonda.
It is, of course, just as ridiculous to assume I favor slavery because I’m a white southern male whose greatgrandfathers fought in the Confederate Army. Slavery is an abomination.
Yet slavery is alive and well in this world. In the summer of 2005, three women from India came to work in the United States as domestic help for Kuwaiti Maj. Waleed Al Saleh and his wife. Al Saleh was an attaché at the Kuwaiti embassy in Washington, D.C. Al Selah and his wife are accused of violations of labor laws, anti-trafficking laws and the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery. The women allege they were subjected to physical abuse, threatened with death, had their passports seized and were paid only a fraction of their promised wages. One woman escaped in October 2005 after an alleged beating that resulted in her being knocked unconscious. The other two women escaped a few months later.
Slavery is illegal in Saudi Arabia, but in 2003, a member of Saudi Arabia’s Senior Council of Clerics, Sheikh Saleh Al-Fawzan, announced in a lecture “Slavery is a part of Islam. Slavery is part of jihad, and jihad will remain as long as there is Islam.” He called those who disagreed with his views “ignorant, not scholars. They are merely writers. Whoever says such things is an infidel.” Al-Fawzan is not on the fringes of radical Islam; he is a member of the Council of Religious Edicts and Research, Imam of the Prince Mitaeb Mosque in Riyadh, and is a professor at Imam Mohamed Bin Saud Islamic University, the main Wahhabi center of learning.
Prince Mohmed Bin Turki Alsaud’s wife must have been listening to Al-Fawzan. She brought two Indonesian servants to work in her homes in northern Virginia while her husband was undergoing medical treatment in the United States. Hana Al Jader was indicted in March 2005 on 10 counts of forced labor, domestic servitude and immigration charges. It was alleged that she hid her servants’ passports and work visas and threatened them with bodily harm. In the fall of 2006, she pleaded guilty and in December she was sentenced to two years of probation, deportation, to pay restitution of $206,000, plus a $40,000 fine and 100 hours of community service.
And more recently in the Sudanese state of Aweil, 102 black slaves were freed from government-sponsored Arab-Muslim militias. The slaves had endured physical and psychological abuse, as well as forced conversion to Islam. Sixteen-year-old Agor Deng was reportedly raped repeatedly by her master and his friends and had her fingernails pulled out by her master’s wife for failing to obey an order.
So we have Muslims committing murder and enslaving people in the 21st century. Certainly not all Muslims, not even most Muslims, but a large minority of radicalized Muslims. In an interview with BBC reporter Haroon Rashid, militant leader Baitullah Mehsud declared, “Allah on 480 occasions in the Holy Koran extols Muslims to wage jihad. We only fulfill God’s orders.” Mehsud operates out of the southern Waziristan region of Pakistan.
And few Muslims dare speak out against the abominations carried out in the name of their religion. When they do speak out, they are often treated like Imam Shaheed Satardien, who was ousted from his mosque in Dublin, Ireland, after speaking out against terrorists and terror tactics. “Young, impressionable Muslims in Ireland are being raised to think that suicide bombers are cool. I know for a fact that when the Americans killed Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, there were prayers for him in this city. This was for a man who slaughtered other Muslims. What I am trying to do is convince the young people that such practices are un-Islamic, that there is another way.” He claims that extremists have infiltrated Ireland’s 40,000 Muslims. Satardien says he has received death threats for his stand. “The truth is more important than being popular or living a quiet life,” he says. “Extremism has infected Islam in Ireland. It’s time to get back to the spiritual aspect of my religion and stop it being used as a political weapon.”
In England, Imam Usama Hasan says it makes him “furious” when Muslim extremists justify the killing of innocents by quoting the Quran out of context. “If you have the wrong intention, you can justify your criminal actions from any text — whether it is the Quran or Bible or Shakespeare,” he said. He asserts that it is only a tiny minority of Muslims with those beliefs, but adds, “It only takes a handful, of course, to create devastation.”
I’d imagine it must make Allah furious as well that his words have been taken out of context. I think I know how he feels. But that’s just my opinion.