Christian, Jewish & Muslim Contributions to the USA
I have avoided the contributions of other religious groups because I want to explore those of the so-called Abrahamic Religions in particular since they have had the most enduring and easily verifiable legacies.
Christians (Catholics):-
Beginning with the 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean and gaining control over more territory for over three centuries, the Spanish Empire would expand across the Caribbean Islands, half of South America, most of Central America and much of North America.
The systematic invasion and occupation of the Americas started with the Spanish colonization which began under the Crown of Castile and was spearheaded by the Spanish conquistadors; and incorporated into the Spanish Empire. The main motivations for colonial expansion were profit through resource extraction and the spread of Catholicism by forced indigenous conversions.
It is estimated that during the colonial period (1492–1832), a total of 1.86 million Spaniards settled in the Americas, and a further 3.5 million immigrated during the post-colonial era (1850–1950).
By contrast, the indigenous population plummeted by an estimated 80% in the first century and a half following Columbus’s voyages, primarily through the spread of disease, forced labour and slavery for resource extraction, and missionization. This has been argued to be the first large-scale act of genocide in the modern era..
In the early 19th century, the Spanish American wars of independence resulted in the secession and subsequent division of most Spanish territories in the Americas, except for Cuba and Puerto Rico, which were lost to the United States in 1898, following the Spanish–American War. The loss of these territories ended Spanish rule in the Americas.
While the Spaniards plundered and decimated the native populations of the territories they conquered, the next wave of foreigners arriving to the shores of the USA were immigrants who were escaping religious persecution in Europe and looking for a free life in America.
Christians (Puritans):-
The Mayflower was an English ship that transported a group of English families, known today as the Pilgrims, from England to the New World in 1620. After a grueling 10 weeks at sea, Mayflower, with 102 passengers and a crew of about 30, reached America, dropping anchor near the tip of Cape Cod, Massachusetts, on November 21, 1620.
Differing from their contemporaries, the Puritans (who sought to reform and purify the Church of England), the Pilgrims chose to separate themselves from the Church of England because they believed it was beyond redemption due to its Roman Catholic past and the church’s resistance to reform, which forced them to pray in private.
Starting 1608, a group of English families left England for the Netherlands, where they could worship freely. By 1620, the community was determined to cross the Atlantic for America, which they considered a “new Promised Land”.
The Pilgrims had originally hoped to reach America by early October using two ships, but delays and complications meant they could use only one, Mayflower. Arriving in November, they had to survive unprepared through a harsh winter. As a result, only half of the original Pilgrims survived the first winter at Plymouth.
Without the help of local Indigenous peoples to teach them food gathering and other survival skills, all of the colonists might have perished. The following year, those 53 who survived, celebrated the colony’s first fall harvest along with 90 Wampanoag Native American people, an occasion declared centuries later the first American Thanksgiving.
Jews:-
Three days after the expulsion of the Jews of Spain in 1492, Christopher Columbus set sail for India. His fleet of three ships instead landed on the shores of North America in what is now Cuba. Of the ninety sailors, historians have identified five as Converso/or Crypto Jews (Jews forced by the Spanish Inquisition to Convert to Catholicism yet practiced many Jewish rituals in secret). Speculation has it that they sailed in hope of finding a community more hospitable than Spain. There were no Muslims.
One crew member, Luis de Torres (a Converso), was a man who knew Hebrew, Arabic, and Spanish. He was the ship’s interpreter and was the first crew member to set foot on North American soil. Columbus’ journey was not a direct route to America for the Jewish population that had fled from Spain. For the next 162 years the Jews searched for an accepting community. Although a small handful of Jews did sail to North America many more fled to Portugal for safety.
The first group of openly Jewish settlers arrived in New Amsterdam (New York) in 1654. The Ste. Catherine brought a group of six families totalling twenty-three people, including thirteen children and two widows. These twenty-three Jews began what is now the largest, most prosperous, and most successful Jewish communities in the history of the Diaspora.
In the pantheon of American Jewish heroes, Haym Salomon (1740-1785) has attained legendary status. His life was brief and tumultuous, but his impact on the American imagination was great. The U.S. Postal Service issued a stamp hailing Salomon as a “Financial Hero of the American Revolution.” A monument to Salomon, George Washington, and Robert Morris graces East Wacker Drive in Chicago, and Beverly Hills, California, is home to an organization called the American Jewish Patriots and Friends of Haym Salomon.
However, Salomon’s life was not all triumph. A successful financier in the early 1780s, he died in 1785 leaving a wife and four young children with debts larger than his estate. When his son petitioned Congress to recover money he claimed his father was owed by the government, various committees refused to recognize the family’s claims. In 1936, Congress did vote to erect a monument to Salomon in the District of Columbia, but funds for the actual construction were never appropriated.
Born in Lissa, Poland, in 1740, Salomon spent several years moving around Western Europe and England, developing fluency in several languages that served him well for the remainder of his life. Reaching New York City in 1772, he swiftly established himself as a successful merchant and dealer in foreign securities. Striking up an acquaintance with Alexander MacDougall, leader of the New York Sons of Liberty, Salomon became active in the patriot cause.
When war broke out in 1776, Salomon got a contract to supply American troops in central New York. In 1777, he married Rachel Franks, whose brother Isaac was a lieutenant colonel on George Washington’s staff. Their ketubbah (marriage contract) resides at the American Jewish Historical Society.
In the wake of a fire that destroyed much of New York City, British occupation forces arrested and imprisoned Salomon. He gained release because the British hoped to use his language skills to communicate with their German mercenaries. Instead, Salomon covertly encouraged the Hessians to desert. Arrested again in early 1778 for espionage and sabotage, Salomon had his property confiscated. A drum-head court martial sentenced him to hang. Salomon escaped — probably with the help of other Sons of Liberty — and fled penniless to Philadelphia. His wife and child joined him soon afterward.
In Philadelphia, Salomon resumed his brokerage business. The French minister appointed him paymaster general of the French forces fighting for the American cause. The Dutch and Spanish governments also engaged him to sell the securities that supported their loans to the Continental Congress.
In 1781, Congress established the Office of Finance to save the United States from fiscal ruin. Salomon allied himself with Superintendent of Finance William Morris, and became one of the most effective brokers of bills of exchange to meet federal government expenses. Salomon also personally advanced funds to members of the Continental Congress and other federal officers, charging interest and commissions well below the market rates. James Madison confessed that “I have for some time … been a pensioner on the favour of Haym Salomon, a Jew broker.”
Salomon helped lead the successful fight to repeal the test oath that barred Jews and other non-Christians from holding public office in Pennsylvania.
Within five years of his arrival in Philadelphia, Salomon advanced from penniless fugitive to respected businessman, philanthropist and defender of his people. He risked his fortune, pledged his good name and credit on behalf of the Revolution, and stood up for religious liberty. Despite financial setbacks at the end of his life, Salomon’s name is forever linked to the idealism and success of the American Revolution, and to the contributions Jews have made to the cause of American freedom.
Muslims:-
This part of the article specifically addresses Muslims in the USA to counter the enormous misrepresentations and mendacious articles put forth by Muslims and their apologists
“The Founders of this nation explicitly included Islam in their vision of the future of the republic. Freedom of religion, as they conceived it, encompassed it,” explains James H. Hutson, the chief of the Manuscript Division of the US Library of Congress.
Thomas Jefferson, who famously owned a copy of the Quran, had much to say about Islam’s place in America. According to Hutson, Jefferson, while campaigning for religious freedom in Virginia, demanded “recognition of the religious rights of the ‘Mahamdan,’ the Jew and the ‘pagan.'”
Article VI states that “no religious Test shall ever be required as a Qualification to any Office or public Trust under the United States.”
Jefferson’s copy of the Quran was not because he was admiring its contents but because he needed to comprehend the mind-set of the Muslim Pirate leaders of North Africa who were plundering, and enslaving American ships in the Mediterranean.
What Huston deliberately ignores are the following:
- a)The first people to declare war on the new Republic were the Barbary Coast Muslims of North Africa under the very Ottoman Empire which negotiated a ‘peace treaty’ with the USA.
- b)They held Americans hostage for many decades forcing them to pay exorbitant bribery and even then, like true Muslims, they broke their word.
- c)It was Jefferson in the end who went to war against the Muslims to stop their piratical activities once and for all.
- d)How many Americans know that perhaps 1.5 million Christian Europeans and Americans were enslaved in Islamic North Africa between 1530 and 1780?
- e)We are constantly regaled with the alleged “Covenant of Muhammad” with the subjugated Christians under Islam, but remarkably, no one addresses the most enduring and actively implemented “Charter of Omar” which abrogates every article of Muhammad’s ‘Covenant’.
In the early years of America’s founding, the vast majority of Muslims weren’t citizens but slaves. What escapes the limited intellect of most historians is the anomaly of African converts to Islam were selling African Muslims into Christian slavery.
Historian Kambiz GhaneaBassiri, whose book A History of Islam in America is one of the most comprehensive on the subject, states, “Muslims in colonial and antebellum America came from a variety of ethnic, educational, and economic backgrounds. In America, their experiences varied depending on when, where, and how they were transported to these shores. There was no singular interpretation nor practice of Islam. In some instances, Islamic beliefs and practices were means of self-identification that distinguished, and at times even isolated, African Muslims from other enslaved Africans or white Americans.”
Conversion to Christianity was arguably the most widespread method by which African Muslims reconfigured their religious practices and beliefs to adapt to their new context and to form new communal relations. Thus, despite the massive influx of Muslims from the Atlantic slave trade, by the end of the 19th century Islam had all but disappeared among these communities.
At the same time that Islam was fading among communities of slaves and former slaves, millions of immigrants began arriving on America’s shores toward the end of the 19th and especially the early 20th centuries. They included tens of thousands from Muslim-majority countries in the Middle East, South and Central Asia, and Eastern Europe. They were spurred in part by the Industrial Revolution that erupted once America finally emerged from the ashes of the Civil War and Reconstruction era.
The early 20th century saw Muslim immigrant communities in America beginning to establish small, local community organizations across the country.
At the same time, African Americans also “began to embrace Islam in the 1920s and 30s partially in response to the radical dislocations and racism they experienced prior to and during the Great Migration (the movement of disenfranchised southerners to industrial regions in the North).”
It is remarkable how totally Quran and Islam African Slavery’s ignorant Black Americans started embracing the Cult belief system of Muhammad, the very same that systematized and institutionalized on an industrial scale, the genocide of about 140,000,000 pagan Africans so that the surviving 14,000,000 were sold to the White slavers anchored in the ports of West Africa. Whites did not go into darkest Africa to enslave Africans. This they left to the Muslim racist Arabs and their black converts to Islam.
Several of these African-American Muslim associations would go on to have significant impact on the face of Islam in America by promoting the idea of Islam as a lost part of black African heritage.
But as the 20th century progressed, Muslim immigrants who had already arrived on America’s shores, as well as the African Americans who had connected with the religion (or, in perhaps some cases, reconnected with long-lost Muslim roots), began playing a much more active role in American politics and society.
Within African American Muslim communities, the chasm between the realities of discrimination and the democratic ideals through which America self-identified after World War II was a powerful example not only of hypocrisy but also of the fact that nearly a century after the Civil War, black Americans still remained outside America’s national narrative. In this context, black nationalist Muslim movements’ critique of Christianity as a “white man’s religion” and their appropriation of Islam as the national religion of African America proved very appealing.
It attracted numerous converts and ensconced Islam in black America as a religion of liberation. During the Civil Rights Movement, it Islamized a significant segment of African Americans.
Interesting how Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam and almost every Black and Muslim American leader, never address this subject but condemn Christians and Jews – who were instrumental in ending the Islamic slave trade – of slavery.
By the way, most Muslim scholars do not view adherents of the Nation of Islam and similar movements to actually be Muslims, as many of their beliefs are contrary or even downright blasphemous to many of the core tenets of Islam.
Projection was used by the Islamic mentor Muhammad 1400 years ago and will continue to be used by his followers for as long as Islam exists.
After their arrival in 1960’s, the treatment of Muslim Americans was shaped largely by a series of geopolitical encounters between the United States and various Muslim nations. In 1967 the Six Day War, a significant event in the ongoing Arab-Israeli conflict, brought truthful and therefore negative portrayals of Arabs into the American media showing how millions of Arabs and their leaders were publicly screaming their blood curdling intention to exterminate the Jews of Israel. Not a single Arab or Muslim ever thought they were going to fail so catastrophically.
Things would only get worse as the years moved forward. At the end of the decade, the Iranian Revolution and the US hostage crisis would captivate the world and provide yet another instance of the true “violent” faces of Muhammad and Islam, as well as Islam’s clash with the West for the last 1400 years.
Nonstop media coverage of the crisis brought the plight of the hostages and the revolutionary religious fervour of their Muslim captors into the homes of millions of Americans.
The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, were a watershed moment in the history of Islam in America. The largest attack on American soil since the bombing of Pearl Harbour in 1941 had been carried out by Muslim fundamentalists acting in the name of Allah.
It changed the nature of Muslim relations in the United States, and it opened a debate that is rarely acknowledged but is still milling over, whether Muslim Americans are accepted as equal citizens.
Since the Constitution is very clear that Muslims should be free to practice their faith like all other Americans, the question should be the other way round.
Can Sharia compliant Muslims ever be part of the American fabric?
The answer is a most definite NO since it is impossible, and I repeat impossible, for any Sharia compliant Muslim to be BOTH a Good Muslim and a Loyal American Citizen. Allah’s Sharia forbids them from combining the two. The loyalty of Sharia compliant Muslims is only to the ‘Ummah’, the Muslim world.
Not a single ‘expert’ on Islam in the Western world ever brought to the attention of peoples the following facts:
Of all the hundreds of different religious, ethnic, political and cultural groups that came to the shores of the USA and Europe, seeking a better and freer life, only Sharia compliant Muslims who escape their abysmal Sharia controlled dysfunctional, illiberal countries, seek shelter and freedom in the USA and Europe intending – with obscene degrees of stupidity, perfidy, duplicity and mendacity – to bring with them and implement the very Sharia that they were escaping from to undermine the host countries of Christian Europe and the Americas.
The foremost and worst victims of the Islamic belief system are the followers of Muhammad who have been indoctrinated for the last 1400 years – by Muhammad’s Quran and Sunna – to believe that they (Muslims) must be the Eternal and Mortal enemies of every human being on Earth who is not a Muslim called Kuffar/Infidels (currently 80% of humanity; Christians, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, Pagans, etc.) until such time that all ‘others’ are either subjected to Allah’s Sharia or be exterminated.
To cover up their disloyalty, Muslims accuse all those who point out the TRUTH about Islam, of bigotry, racism and the asinine oxymoronic Islamophobia. The most egregious liars and treasonous entity in this field, is CAIR (Council on American Islamic Relations) who invariably use lawfare to silence the Truth especially since most American Judges and lawyers have never bothered to read let alone study Muhammad’s Quran or Sharia and hence they get away with murder.
On Thursday Nov. 5, 2009, a day that had dawned chilly but bright in Killeen, Texas, quickly turned bloody as a U.S. Army psychiatrist walked into an on-post resiliency centre while shouting “Allahu Akbar” (the Muslim terror verse) and began shooting.
Nidal Malik Hasan – a Muslim US officer of Palestinian parents – fatally shot 13 people and injured more than 30 others, before Fort Hood civilian police Sergeant Mark Todd shot him, ending the rampage. He is still alive and not executed.
The tragedy in the USA and Europe, is the wilful total denial by almost all the leaders in politics, media, clergy and academia to connect the crystal clear dots between Islamic terror and Muhammad’s Quran even when officer Nidal and every Muslim terrorist shouts takbir “Allahu Akbar” before slaughtering non-Muslims and even when ISIS, al Qaeda, BokoHaram and al Shabab recite Quranic verses justifying their horrendous deeds to prove the validity of their actions to please their demonic god, Allah.
Americans already have perfect examples of what I am pointing out in the Sharia compliant Muslims such as Ilhan Omar and Rashida Tlaib who show no respect or appreciation for the Constitution or for the USA, insult Christians and Jews and they do so in public, with impunity and without any repercussions. Imagine the nightmare when Congress will have dozens more like them.
In both Europe and the USA, most Muslims would rather have Sharia than the European law or the US Constitution. There have been many polls conducted on this subject by independent bodies asserting this. In many European cities, there are NO Go zones where only Muslims are allowed and not even the Police, Ambulance or Fire Brigades can dare go in. These are mini states within the State and are growing in numbers and spreading in size.
Unless and until Americans and Europeans wake up very soon to the existential threat posed by Sharia compliant Muslims in their midst, Islam will most assuredly replace Christianity in the next 20 to 30 years in both Europe and the Americas.