American Elephants

In yesterday’s post, I noted a Professor at U. Wisconsin’s agonizing quote about a quiz he gave to college juniors and seniors. It’s worth repeating:

I started giving quizzes to my juniors and seniors. I gave them a ten-question American history test… just to see where they are. The vast majority of my students – I’m talking nine out of ten, in every single class, for seven consecutive years – they have no idea that slavery existed anywhere in the world before the United States. Moses, Pharaoh, they know none of it. They’re 100% convinced that slavery is a uniquely American invention… How do you give an adequate view of history and culture to kids when that’s what they think of their own country – that America invented slavery? That’s all they know.

Today, The Islamic State, in a digression from their usual tirades against Christians, claimed in the latest issue of their propaganda magazine Dabiq that if Muslims had been running things in countries like the United States, “the lucrative African slave trade would have continued, supporting a strong economy.”

As usual, the Islamic State supports its position with theological arguments, suggesting that Allah is pleased with slavery, as long as the slaves are infidels.

“The Islamic leadership would not have bypassed Allah’s permission to sell captured pagan humans, to teach them, and to convert them, as they worked hard for their masters in building a beautiful country,” the article reads.

Trading in black African slaves, the magazine notes, would not be done for racial reasons but religious ones.

Along with African slavery, the IS authors said that “if it were Muslims instead of Christians who had fought the Japanese ad Vietnamese or invaded the lands of the Native Americans, there would have been no regrets in killing and enslaving those therein.”

This charming diatribe from ISIS calls to mind Victor Davis Hanson’s column from last week: “The Dream of Muslim Outreach Has Become a Nightmare”

When President Obama entered office, he dreamed that his hope-and-change messaging and his references to his familial Islamic roots would win over the Muslim world. The soon-to-be Nobel Peace Prize laureate would make the U.S. liked in the Middle East. Then, terrorism would decrease. …

The new message of the Obama administration was that the Islamic world was understandably hostile because of what America had done rather than what it represented.

Accordingly, all mention of radical Islam, and even the word “terrorism,” was airbrushed from the new administration’s vocabulary. Words to describe terrorism or the fight against it were replaced by embarrassing euphemisms like “overseas contingency operations,” “man-caused disaster,” and “workplace violence.”

In apology tours and mythological speeches, Obama exaggerated Islamic history as often as he critiqued America. He backed the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. He pushed America away from Israel, appeased Iran, and tried to piggyback on the Arab Spring by bombing Libya. He even lectured Christians on their past pathologies dating back to the Crusades.  (Do read the whole thing)