Please help me rebut this anti-muslim Email.

Great Debates
1

I got this email from an coworker of all people. The messege itself is bothersome but what really sticks in my craw is this person sent me this Email thinking I’m OK with this. I am not.

I know some of you may suggest that I turn this in to HR. I’m not going to do that for two reasons: 1) he has a family to support 2) Call me an optimist, but I have a glimmer of hope that if I give him an intelligent rebutal; maybe he’ll rethink his world veiws. (OK, probably not but still…)

[Mods: I’m putting this in GD because of the political savy in this forum. If you feel the need to move it please do so.]

*Barack OBAMA, during his Cairo speech, said: “I know, too, that Islam has always been a part of America 's story.”

AN AMERICAN CITIZEN’S RESPONSE:

Dear Mr. Obama:

Were those Muslims that were in America when the Pilgrims first landed? Funny, I thought they were Native American Indians.

Were those Muslims that celebrated the first Thanksgiving day? Sorry again, those were Pilgrims and Native American Indians.

Can you show me one Muslim signature on the United States Constitution?

Declaration of Independence ?

Bill of Rights?

Didn’t think so.

Did Muslims fight for this country’s freedom from England ? No.

Did Muslims fight during the Civil War to free the slaves in America ? No, they did not. In fact, Muslims to this day are still the largest traffickers in human slavery. Your own half brother, a devout Muslim, still advocates slavery himself, even though Muslims of Arabic descent refer to black Muslims as “pug nosed slaves.” Says a lot of what the Muslim world really thinks of your family’s “rich Islamic heritage,” doesn’t it Mr. Obama?

Where were Muslims during the Civil Rights era of this country? Not present.

There are no pictures or media accounts of Muslims walking side by side with Martin Luther King, Jr. or helping to advance the cause of Civil Rights.

Where were Muslims during this country’s Woman’s Suffrage era? Again, not present. In fact, devout Muslims demand that women are subservient to men in the Islamic culture. So much so, that often they are beaten for not wearing the ‘hajib’ or for talking to a man who is not a direct family member or their husband. Yep, the Muslims are all for women’s rights, aren’t they?

Where were Muslims during World War II? They were aligned with Adolf Hitler. The Muslim grand mufti himself met with Adolf Hitler, reviewed the troops and accepted support from the Nazi’s in killing Jews.*

/End Email.

2

Would you think twice about turning him in if he referred to you directly in interrogatory terms? This “man” is spreading bigotry and hatred, and I think you have a responsibility to put a stop to it if you can. Do you really think that the type of person who emails this kind of crap would respond favorably to an intelligent rebuttal?

3

Yes there are

4

Just delete it. Tell him that he’s got you wrong, you’re not interested in that stuff, and that sooner or later he’s going to get himself in trouble with HR if he keeps sending those emails around. Debating him is a waste of time.

5

As dangerous as it is using wikipedia as a source to debunk mass emails, this might be a decent starting point.

Or you could just point out that Obama may not have been speaking literally.

6

The Pilgrims weren’t Americans.

Bigots aren’t turned around by rebuttal. This is an inapproriate and unprofessional email. It’s harrassment and it needs to be reported to HR.

7

Sure, you can point out the facts to him.

  1. Yes, Obama was most likely wrong to claim that “Islam has always been part of America’s story”, depending on how you slice it. There probably were Muslims in America from a very early stage, but your coworker also has a point that it’s an exaggeration to claim that they were “always” part of America’s story. He’s right that, for instance, Muslims weren’t among the Pilgrims. He is almost definitely wrong that no Muslims at all worked as part of the civil rights struggle and you’d be able to conclusively rebut his claim more thoroughly if you can find evidence of some social action organization that self-identified as a Muslim organization took part in the struggle. I’m not aware if that’s the case or not… Of course, he’s still right that Obama’s statement was a bit of bluster designed to sooth relations, but that, in and of itself, doesn’t mean much.

  2. Suffrage, I honestly don’t know about, but I’d say that the same objection applies as to the civil rights struggle. And while fundamentalist Islam is often interpreted quite negatively where women are concerned, there are certainly some Muslim women who find their faith empowering.

  3. Slavery: I have no idea about that and I’ve never heard any reliable claims about modern human trafficking. I would point out, however, that even if it’s true that it is a fallacy to ascribe such behavior to an entire group due to the actions of some. IIRC, America is currently the fattest nation on the planet, but hopefully he wouldn’t argue that American = fat, and so his Muslim = connection to slavery should also fall by the same blade.

4.Point out that while he’s correct about the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, and that the Nazis did indeed have strong support in much of the Arab world, that equating the Arab nationalist community around WW II with Muslims as a whole is fallacious.

The real problem is that your coworkers is using grains of truth to build entire sandcastles. Point him to the fallacies of composition and division and explain why “some Muslims do thus and such” does not incriminate all Muslims and “fundamentalist Islam can be said to be thus and such” does not incriminate individual Muslims.

Happy hunting.

8

Shakes, I don’t even know you but with just your OP I can determine you’re above this.

Vote: Turn him into HR and move on.

9

Muslims certainly did fight for the Union in the Civil War- some slaves retained their African Muslim heritage. There are no Muslim signatures on the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution because the vast majority of Muslims in the U.S. in 1776 were enslaved. The glaring, obvious rebuttal to the claim that Muslims weren’t active in the Civil Rights movement is Malcolm X. And finally, any claim that “the Muslim grand mufti” did anything after about the 13th century is ridiculous- that’s the latest you can plausibly claim that there was a unified Muslim anything. Besides, even if there were a “Muslim grand mufti”, anything he did in WW2 can’t be applied to Muslims today any more than the Vatican’s actions at the same time can be applied to Catholics. (Funnily enough, only one Catholic signed the Declaration of Independence, and only two for the Constitution.)

Actually, Wikipedia lists only one Muslim state in the “Axis Power” page- Iraq, and they mostly just wanted to get rid of England. Turkey was the only significant Muslim state to fight in WW2, and they were with the Allies (though they didn’t get into the war until 1945.)

10

Read up on Mohammad Amin al-Husayni.

11

Well, he’s right that there were no Muslims who signed the Declaration of Independence or the Constitution. There were a few Muslims who fought in the American Revolution…escaped or freed slaves for the most part. For instance, Peter Salem, the soldier at the Battle of Bunker Hill who is credited with shooting the British Marine commander Major Pitcairn was possibly Muslim. We know of a few more…Joseph Benhaley, Bampett Muhammed, and Francis and Joseph Saba were all enlisted men in either the Continental Army or the colonial militia.

There was a slave in Georgia named Bilali Mohammed who participated in the War of 1812. Interestingly enough, when he died, he had in his possession one of the earliest recorded Muslim legal documents in America…a thirteen page treatise in Arabic on Muslim law.

Regarding the Civil War, there were some Muslim Civil War soldiers; for instance a man named Max Hassan, an immigrant from Africa who served as a porter in the Union army. There was also a guy named Muhammed Said, a freed slave who fought in the 55th Massachusetts Colored Regiment.

There was also, even though he might not count, Hi Jolly (Hajji Ali), who was a Bedouin from Jordan/Syria, who was brought over in the 1850s to manage the US Army Camel Corps, which was an attempt to use camels as mounts in the American Southwest. It failed utterly and he got involved in a bunch of other failed businesses, before signing back on as an army scout during the suppression of Geronimo and the Apaches.

And, more generally, there were Muslim slaves, Muslim slave holders and Muslim slave traffickers.

Regarding Muslim roles in the Civil Rights movement, there was of course, the quasi-Muslim Nation of Islam, and the Black Panthers, many of whom were Muslim. But most of the non-black Muslim community started coming here between the 1950s-70s, and were, as one might expect, more concerned with their own advancement than with social activism.

The guy who met with Adolf Hitler was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, not the “Muslim Grand Mufti”, and he was pretty much an anti-Semitic Fascist, and there were some Muslim units in the Bosnian SS, as well as pro-Nazi groups in the Middle East who were hoping for a German victory to kick out the British, like, in addition to the Grand Mufti, Rashad Ali, the Prime Minister of Iraq after his coup in 1941, but I don’t know if that reflects on the Muslim community as a whole.

12

Right, but he wasn’t the “Muslim Grand Mufti”. He was the “Grand Mufti of Jerusalem”, and only really spoke for the Palestinian Muslim community, and not even all of them.

13

Incidentally, here is the text of Obama’s entire statement in context, just to put it on the record:

That’s actually a pretty good defense of the sentiment right there in the speech.

14

To my knowledge (and I may be wrong), there never was a “Muslim Grand Mufti”. The title was always Grand Mufti of [region]. The Grand Mufti of Constantinople endured as long as the Ottoman Caliphate did, for example. I read the claim in the quoted email from the OP as a Muslim grand mufti rather than the Muslim Grand Mufti. It is a bit redundant calling him the Muslim grand mufti, just like it’d be weird to call someone the Catholic Pope, but it seemed to have been used for rhetorical effect and not as a proper name.

The GM who that email was referring to was pretty clearly the GMoJ from the early 20th century. I don’t think that arguing that he wasn’t the Grand Mufti of all Muslims would really address the guy’s point.

And I don’t disagree with you as I pointed out:

But that doesn’t mean that claiming there wasn’t a Grand Mufti after the 1200’s is a valid tack.

15

It’s actually not weird to refer to call someone the Catholic Pope if one nees to differentiate that individual from the Coptic Pope or one of the few other religious leaders whose office is termed pope.

16

Hah, well played. I had no idea that there was a Coptic Pope.
Perhaps we can switch that to “the Jewish rabbi”, then? :smiley:

17

Do you happen to have a cite for this? I’ve heard that some scholars are starting to do some research into this area but I’ve not heard much about it.

Odesio

18

Why would it be doubtful? Islam was established in West Africa in the 8th century and by the middle ages much of West Africa was ruled over by powerful Islamic empires every bit as organized and established as the Christian states in Europe- empires that still have political and social relevance today. While local practices persisted or were practiced side-by-side in some areas, a significant portion of West Africans were (and still are) practicing Muslims. For all practical purposes, West Africa is a Muslim area and has been for a thousand years. While being captured as a slave might be enough to make some people lose faith, it shouldn’t be surprising that people educated in Koran schools, raised by Muslim parents and having practiced Islam their entire lives might still identify with that after being enslaved.

The wikipedia article on the history of Islam in America has some good information.

19

Here’s another one.

20

Is the Nation of Islam now considered Muslim on the boards?

Regards,
Shodan