Hugh Fitzgerald: Obama, Islam, and History

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“Excellent article that refutes the revisionist history Mr. O, our liar in chief, put out recently at a mosque he visited.”  Admin

 

“‘Thomas Jefferson’s opponents tried to stir things up by suggesting he was a Muslim. So I was not the first,’ Obama said, sparking laughter. ‘No, it’s true. Look it up. I’m in good company.’” — From USA Today on Barack Obama’s visit to the Islamic Society of Baltimore, February 3, 2016

 

Barack Obama paid a visit — his first — to an American mosque today. He did so in the same feelgood spirit with which he held his first “Annual Iftar Dinner” in 2010. That dinner prompted a Jihad Watch post which, considerably modified and enlarged, is reprinted below.

 

“The first Muslim ambassador to the United States, from Tunisia, was hosted by President Jefferson, who arranged a sunset dinner for his guest because it was Ramadan — making it the first known iftar at the White House, more than 200 years ago.” — Barack Obama, speaking on August 14, 2010, at the “Annual Iftar Dinner” at the White House

 

Really? Is that what happened? Was there a “first known Iftar at the White House” given by none other than President Thomas Jefferson for the “first Muslim ambassador to the United States”? That’s what Barack Obama and his dutiful speechwriters told the Muslims in attendance at what was billed as the “Annual Iftar Dinner,” knowing full well that the remarks would be published for all Americans to see. Apparently Obama, and those who helped write this speech for him, and others still who vetted it, found nothing wrong with attempting, as part of the administration’s policy of both trying to win Muslim hearts and Muslim mind and to convince Americans that Islam has always been part of America’s history, to misrepresent that history. For the dinner Jefferson gave was not intended to be an Iftar dinner, and his guest that evening was not “the first Muslim ambassador…. from Tunisia,” but in using such words, Obama was engaged in a little nunc pro tunc backdating, so that the Iftar dinner that he gave in 2010 could be presented as part of a supposed tradition of such presidential Iftar dinners, going all the way back to the time of Jefferson.

 

But before explaining what that “first Iftar dinner” really was, let’s go back to an earlier but even more egregious example of Obama’s rewriting: the speech he delivered in Cairo on June 4, 2009. In that speech, he described Islam and America sharing basic principles:

 

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