What Americans Need to Know About Iran – Stunning Facts About Iran You’ve Never Heard Before

What Americans Need to Know About Iran (Washington’s Blog, July 12, 2014):

Stunning Facts About Iran You’ve Never Heard Before

Preface: I was born in the U.S., and have lived here my whole life.  I am a patriotic American, and put America first. I come from a Judeo-Christian background, and I am not a Muslim. I’ve never been to Iran, or anywhere in the Middle East or Northern Africa, or to any Muslim country. 

However, I believe that learning about other people and other countries builds bridges that prevent costly and unnecessary war.

If Americans knew the following facts about Iran, it would change their opinion:

Does Iran Have Much History Or Culture?

What Did the Founding Fathers Think of Muslims?

The Founding Fathers were not anti-Islam. Ted Widmer reported in the Boston Globe:

The Founders were way ahead of us. They thought hard about how to build a country of many different faiths. And to advance that vision to the fullest, they read the Koran, and studied Islam with a calm intelligence that today’s over-hyped Americans can only begin to imagine. They knew something that we do not. To a remarkable degree, the Koran is not alien to American history — but inside it.

No book states the case more plainly than a single volume, tucked away deep within the citadel of Copley Square — the Boston Public Library. The book known as Adams 281.1 is a copy of the Koran, from the personal collection of John Adams.

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They, like we, lived in a complicated and often hostile global environment, dominated by religious strife, terror, and the bloodsport of competing empires. Yet better than we, they saw the world as it is, and refused the temptation to enlarge our enemies into Satanic monsters, or simply pretend they didn’t exist.

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Why would John Adams and a cluster of farmers in the Connecticut valley have bought copies of the Koran in 1806? Surprisingly, there was a long tradition of New Englanders reading in the Islamic scripture.

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This theory was eloquently expressed around the time the Constitution was written. One of its models was the 1780 Massachusetts Constitution, which John Adams had helped to create, and which, in the words of one of its drafters, Theophilus Parsons, was designed to ensure “the most ample of liberty of conscience” for “Deists, Mahometans [i.e. Muslims] Jews and Christians.”

As the Founders deliberated over what types of people would ultimately populate the strange new country they were creating, they cited Muslims as an extreme of foreign-ness whom it would be important to protect in the future. Perhaps, they daydreamed, a Muslim or a Catholic might even be president someday? Like everything, they debated it. Some disapproved, but Richard Henry Lee insisted that “true freedom embraces the Mahometan and Gentoo [Hindu] as well as the Christian religion.” George Washington went out of his way to praise Muslims on several occasions, and suggested that he would welcome them at Mount Vernon if they were willing to work. Benjamin Franklin argued that Muslims should be able to preach to Christians if we insisted on the right to preach to them. Near the end of his life, he impersonated a Muslim essayist, to mock American hypocrisy over slavery.

Thomas Jefferson, especially, had a familiarity with Islam that borders on the astonishing. Like Adams, he owned a Koran …. Jefferson even tried to learn Arabic, and wrote his Bill for Establishing Religious Freedom to protect “the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and the Mahometan, the Hindoo and infidel of every denomination.”

Lynn Parramore – founding editor of the economic blog New Deal 2.0 – points out that this American tolerance of Islam continued for hundreds of years:

Muslims have been in America for so long they could almost have formed a welcoming committee to the Daughters of the Revolution.

Consider this: Anthony “The Turk” Janszoon van Salee, son of the president of the Republic of Salé in Morocco, was among the earliest and richest settlers of Manhattan island, a devout Muslim, and the ancestor of Cornelius Vanderbilt, the Whitneys, Humphrey Bogart, and, according to family lore, Jacqueline Bouvier [i.e. Kenney]. That’s right: the Lady of Camelot apparently had a mixed-race Muslim as an ancestor! One of van Salee’s first properties was a farm in lower Manhattan acquired in 1638 located on the north side of the stockade along present-day Wall Street, just blocks from the Park Place Islamic center characterized by Geller as a foreign presence on sacred American soil. A defender of minorities, van Salee became the first settler of Brooklyn. Coney Island, which abutted his property, was known as “Turk’s Island” until the 19th century.

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Followers of Muhammed were living here before the arrival of English in Spanish-controlled Florida and French Louisiana, where slaves were imported from the Senegambia region of Africa, home to a large Muslim population.

Influenced by the tolerance of the Enlightenment, America’s founders considered Islam’s place in the new republic despite widespread fear of Barbary pirates and a sense of European rivalry with the Ottoman Empire. As befitting a student of law in a religiously diverse land, Thomas Jefferson purchased a Quran to learn about the Islamic legal code – the same Quran that was used in the swearing in of Muslim Keith Ellison to the U.S. Congress. In 1776, John Adams published “Thoughts on Government,” which praised the prophet Muhammad as a “sober inquirer after truth.” Ben Franklin set up a non-sectarian meeting house in Philadelphia, declaring in his autobiography that “even if the Mufti of Constantinople were to send a missionary to preach Mohammedanism to us, he would find a pulpit at his service.”

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Islam is inextricably woven into the fabric of American history, from the distinctive service of Muslims in all American wars, including the Revolution….

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The real foreign presence is Islamophobia, which is completely at odds with America’s founding principles.

Is Iran a Warmonger?

  • Iran is fighting the worst terrorists on the planet: ISIS, the brutal murderers who have taken over large swaths of Iraq and Syria (admittedly, Iran backs Hamas and Hezbollah, which are Shia terrorist groups)
  • The CIA admits that the U.S. overthrew the moderate, suit-and-tie-wearing, Democratically-elected prime minister of Iran in 1953. He was overthrown because he had nationalized Iran’s oil, which had previously been controlled by BP and other Western oil companies. As part of that action, the CIA admits that it hired Iranians to pose as Communists and stage bombings in Iran in order to turn the country against its prime minister
  • If the U.S. hadn’t overthrown the moderate Iranian government, the fundamentalist Mullahs would have never taken over. (Moreover, the U.S. has had a large hand in strengthening radical Islam in the Middle East by supporting radicals to fight the Soviets and others)

Isn’t Iran On the Verge of Having the Bomb?

  • Contrary to widespread claims, there is that Iran is building a nuclear weapon.  Even Israel  that Iran has not decided to build a nuclear bomb.  And the former that Iran is 10 years away from having a nuclear bomb
  • that Iran poses very little threat to the West or Israel . Top American and Israeli military and intelligence officials say that – even if Iran did build a nuclear bomb – it would not be that dangerous, because Israel and America have so many more nukes. And see this

Who Started the Recent Confrontation with Iran?

  • The U.S. armed and supported Iraq after it invaded Iran and engaged in a long, bloody war which included the use of chemical weapons. Here is former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld meeting with Saddam Hussein in the 1980?s, several months after Saddam had used chemical weapons in a massacre:

  • Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh says that the Bush administration (and especially Dick Cheney) helped to fund terrorist groups within Iran (see confirming articles here and here)
  • The New York Times, Washington Post and others are reporting, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, former Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge, former national security adviser Fran Townsend and former Attorney General Michael Mukasey – who all said that the terrorists were going to get us if we didn’t jettison the liberties granted under the Bill of Rights – are now supporting terrorists in Iran

Who’s Pushing War?

  • The people pushing for war against Iran are the same neocons who pushed for war against Iraq based on false statements that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. See this, this and this
  • Some say that the war against Iran has already begun. See this, this and this

What Would the Consequences Be If We Attack Iran?

3 thoughts on “What Americans Need to Know About Iran – Stunning Facts About Iran You’ve Never Heard Before”

  1. Cutting off oil supplies to the rest of the world would indeed cause a world economic depression. So would pulling any of the weak fibers holding the east with the west. Anything with Rumsfeld involved has war mixed in; that guy has caused more disruption, and shifting of wealth to the few at the cost of the many since he ever showed his ugly face. He is a friend of the Greedy Guts, nobody else.
    Why they have worked so hard to demonize Iran regardless of the true bad guys can be explained in one word…….Greed.
    Wars are always fought for profit, and it takes years to develop them. Regardless of how hard they have tried, it has been difficult to sell, many Iranians live in the US, so many Americans know better.
    The biggest lie is that the nonsensical sanctions against Iran has been hurting them…….nothing could be farther from the truth. Iran is a rich nation today thanks to the Iraq war, and they already accept most currencies, including gold. When Hugo Chavez introduced the first electronic currency, the Sucre, into use with his small organization, the South American Trade Alliance in Spring of 2010, an entire new way of buying and selling was introduced to the world. All member nations could buy and sell with each other using their own currencies, the Sucre evaluated the value of each currency at the time of transaction, so all sides were happy.
    Their use of the Sucre was so successful that Russia and China adopted a similar method with each other in November of 2010, using their own currencies, leaving the dollar out. They went on to recruit Turkey, Iran, much of the middle east (except Saudis), many emerging African nations, much of Central and South America. When the US put more sanctions on Iran, India and Japan joined them. Over half the world has abandoned the dollar for the new, but far more efficient, electronic currency.
    Now, the US still has the title of World Reserve Currency, but less than half the world uses it, it has become obsolete. Technology has left it in the past, and nothing can enliven a practice already obsolete. This has caused them great pain, the endless printing press has become a danger.
    This is one reason, QE has been cut to $45 trillion a month from $85 trillion a month far quicker than forecast. The FED (a private bank) is now carrying over 85% of the national debt to keep it current. The US is carrying most of it’s own debt very quietly…….but it is sitting on piles of paper currency suddenly nobody wants.
    The danger I ranted about is upon us. We are in deep trouble, and it isn’t going to go away. It is going to get worse.
    The financial stations that maybe a dozen people listen to these days are pitching the lie that higher interest rates are a “good sign” of our “recovery” that never happened.
    Most mortgages in the US are ARMs. For every point the rate goes up, the payment rises by 13%. Americans have been riding on 2% interest rates for years, now, they confront 5-6%……and that is for those with no mistakes on their records. Anyone with a late payment anywhere will be facing even higher rates.
    The US government has ZERO control over the banks, or their rates………and that is the dirty little secret they are being so quiet about…
    Jumbo rates (for those with mortgages and houses over $600K) have kissed 6% several times this past month.
    Many Americans have been holding on to these properties with their fingernails, awaiting the “recovery” that always happened before. This is the last pile of money the Greedy Guts can steal…….high interest rates on these houses……..it can account for billions before property owners realize the dollar will collapse first, and the value of their properties will never have such value again……at least, not in American money.
    None of us have ever experienced a world economic collapse. Even the real estate collapse in 1926, followed by the crash of 1929…..they were national, not global. We have no roadmap for what is coming, and it isn’t pretty.

    Reply
  2. What chance is there, that even if the average American even takes these details on board, processes them, and decides to act accordingly, that any efforts to rectify the problem will reap anything but obstruction and ridicule?

    Reply
  3. In reply to friend Squodgy: Absolutely none. They will deny this right into the grave yard. They will continue to insist on a recovery that has never happened, and lie about the skyrocketing prices of food and water………..propaganda is the one tool they rely upon. Propaganda needs some truth to go with it in order to sell credibility……but they seem to have missed that part of the course, maybe they were sick that day it was taught. As a result, they look and sound like total fools, and nobody believes a word they say. They probably got a C- for the course…………that is what happens with group rule.

    Reply

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