Thomas Jefferson was a Shriner?

By Daryl Montgomery and Jack Kemp

In debates on the Ground Zero proposed mosque on Fox News and Fox Business, Malik Shabazz, head of the New Black Panther Party and a Muslim, stated that Thomas Jefferson, as part of being a member of the Shriners, studied the Koran.

Now the Shriners are not an Islamic sect but a Masonic social group that uses some Islamic symbols. The Shriners were founded in 1870. Since Thomas Jefferson died on July 4, 1826, I doubt if he got to go to many Shriner meetings. I believe he did read the Koran years earlier. But Jefferson never got to drive one of those little cars in a Shriners parade while wearing a red fez.

Shabazz also mentioned in the Fox Business television debate that "Christians massacred Indians (Native Americans) in New York in the massive Trail of Tears." Now the deaths in the forced march of the Cherokee (ordered by the first Democrat president, Andrew Jackson) started in their territory in the Alabama region and went to Oklahoma, then known as Indian Territory. Ground Zero in New York was not on the route the Cherokee took, so the Twin Towers and churches in Manhattan were not an insult to the Cherokee.

Television news debates have to be very quick and stick to the main subject. Discussions of when Thomas Jefferson died, when the Shriners were created and the geographic route of the Trail of Tears are admittedly diversions from the moderator's job of bringing out the main points of a debate. The subject at hand for Fox, the mosque controversy, would have been sidetracked by a discussion of history under the time pressures of a television under twenty minute debate. However, what Malik Shabazz threw out seems like street talk jive, i.e., saying the first thing that comes to one's mind in order to sound important and have a strong posture, no matter what the content of one's words. By repeating the "Jefferson as Shriner" story on two shows, he was clearly making a calculated argument decided in advance. And it sure sounded a lot like takiya, lying to the infidels.

Hat tip: Pamela Geller, Atlas Shrugs