"Islam har vävts in i vårt vårt lands tyg sedan det grundades"

After President Barack Obama said this week that “Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding,” Glenn Beck asked historian David Barton to come on his radio program and share some examples of what the president meant.

“In all the reading I’ve done, thousands of books, there’s nothing there,” Barton said on Friday. “I mean, we know that Muslims were the folks who captured the slaves sent to America, largely out of Africa. … The Muslims did the slave hunting and the slave trading, et cetera. The first Muslims came to America as a result of the Muslims capturing them and sending them to the Dutch traders.”

Barton said that beyond their heavy involvement in the slave trade, America was at war with the Barbary pirates shortly after the founding of the country, but those were “the two biggest contributions.”

“This is the fabric,” Beck said with heavy sarcasm. “I mean, it’s practically the whole blanket.”

Sheik Yermami