I’ve been meaning to write about Rep. Keith Ellison’s silly stunt ever since I learned that he would have his ceremonial swearing-in picture taken while holding a Thomas Jefferson’s copy of the Koran. I found a piece that saves me the trouble of composing the details:
What Thomas Jefferson learned from the Muslim book of jihad
There is no doubt Ellison was right about Jefferson believing wisdom could be “gleaned” from the Muslim Quran. At the time Jefferson owned the book, he needed to know everything possible about Muslims because he was about to advocate war against the Islamic “Barbary” states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Tripoli.Ellison’s use of Jefferson’s Quran as a prop illuminates a subject once well-known in the history of the United States, but, which today, is mostly forgotten - the Muslim pirate slavers who over many centuries enslaved millions of Africans and tens of thousands of Christian Europeans and Americans in the Islamic “Barbary” states.
Our troubles with Islam are as old our nation. Those educated by our government schools in the last half-century are unlikely to know this, so they have an incorrect or incomplete contextual framework from which to consider what we are up against. I question why our “leaders” have not taken the time - it really isn’t that hard to outline - to educate Americans about the long history of this war.
In essence, those who wage jihad against us are fighting the same war as has been waged, sometimes quietly and sometimes not, since our founding. The intent of killing or making dhimmi those who are not “true believers” is still the same. The words and themes used to incite hatred of us remain the same. Jefferson knew that the only way to deal with these types is to thoroughly defeat and humiliate them. It makes no sense for us to play the role of social worker by trying to impose the boilerplate of our centuries-in-the-making system of mores, values and laws upon peoples whose cultural pathways are so divergent from those that inform Western thought.
It is my understanding that the culture with which we’re dealing considers our displays of compassion to be a sign that we are weak and can be easily defeated if they just keep doing what they’re doing for long enough. It all makes me wonder if we have allowed political correctness dictate our considerations so completely that we cannot muster the will to win.
I hope not.
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