Some Response To Obama's Mosque Speech

On February 3, President Obama gave a speech at a mosque in Baltimore, in which he stated that Islam has "always been part of America".  Three websites have presented opinions on the speech.

In Frontpage Mag, Joseph Klein responds to some of Obama's points, in the process pointing out that the first mosque in America was built in 1929.

In National Review, Dennis Prager says:

If you seek to understand Barack Obama and his views, the best place to go is his speeches. But you have to read them in their entirety, not rely on hearing them or on the media’s summary of them. When you do, you come to realize how often what Obama says is morally and intellectually confused and even untrue.

And in Investor's Business Daily, Paul Sperry says that:

In the course of a 48-minute speech, Barack Hussein Obama whitewashed Islam’s dark history, sugarcoated its violent texts and rewrote America’s founding as one embracing Islam - all to mainstream Islam and pander to Muslim voters ahead of the presidential election.

Klein and Prager both recount the story of a meeting in London between Thomas Jefferson, then the America ambassador to France, John Adams, then the ambassador to the United Kingdom, and an envoy from a northern African state, one of the four state sponsors of Muslim terrorists known to history as the Barbary Pirates.  According to Klein, this envoy was from Algiers, while Prager says the man was from Tripoli.  Either way, the reason given by the Muslim envoy for the attacks on American ships was that their Koran had set forth their duty to make war on nations that had not acknowledged their authority.  Jefferson would obtain a copy of the Koran in order to understand the motivations of the Barbary Pirates, not because of any respect he might have had for Islam.

Ironically, not only has Islam not always been part of America, but some of its adherents made themselves America's first enemies after the country became independent.  To learn the details, read the three stories linked above.