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| These millionaires, (average salary $US 2 million p.a.) know not wherefore they kneel |
This is a post by a Christian pastor, Father George Rutler in the Pewesitter blog, so not my cup of tea, as an atheist.
But Father Rutler gives some useful history of the "Star Spangled Banner" for which so many pro-footballers are "taking a knee". And also of the Muslim slave traders. "Jefferson's Koran", which apologists claim Thomas Jefferson bought because of his admiration of Islam, he actually bought so he could study his enemies, the barbary pirates of Tripoli.
It's a curiosity and slight irony that the US Navy was established because the new United States needed to fight the Muslim Barbary Pirates who had been preying on their merchant shipping.
Quote:
The current mania for tearing down statues and stifling free speech by cultural ingénues ignorant of history and logic, has reached a stellar absurdity in demands to censure "The Star Spangled Banner" on lame claims that it is racist. If ignorance is bliss, then those who indulge their revisionism must be in Nirvana.
Key's poem "The Defence of Fort McHenry"—which, re-named "The Star-Spangled Banner," became the national anthem in 1931—was based on verses he composed in 1805 to celebrate the victory over the Muslim slave-trading pirates on the Barbary coast ("the shores of Tripoli"). "And pale beam'd the Crescent, its splendor obscured / By the light of the Star-Spangled flag of our nation. . . . And the turban'd heads bow'd to its terrible glare . . ." John Langdon was a Founding Father who, as the first President pro tempore of the Senate, administered the vice-presidential oath of office to John Adams. In 1805 as governor of New Hampshire, he set aside a day in thanksgiving "for the termination of our contest with one of the African powers; the liberation of our fellow-citizens from bondage…"Islam, which means "submission," has never had abolitionists like the Christians Bartolomé de las Casas and William Wilberforce. Muhammed was a slave trader, and the Qur'an devotes five times as much space to regulating labor slavery and sex slavery as it does to prayer. Nearly 200 million slaves, white and black, were sold by Muslim traders over fourteen centuries, and almost all the Africans sold to European traders for export to America were enslaved by Muslims. Muslim slavers even raided Ireland in 1631. So many Eastern Europeans were enslaved that the word "slave" itself comes from "Slav." While lip service is given to abolition in Islamic lands, slavery today is blatant in Sudan, Niger and Mauritania and was not abolished in Saudi Arabia and Yemen until 1962 under Western pressure. Where is the indignation of protestors here?
