Mordecai Manuel Noah Quotes
What a pity that Christians should be hung.
Mordecai Manuel Noah, 1785-1851, Sheriff of New York City, Editor, The National Advocate, Co-founder, Democratic Party of Philadelphia, U. S. Ambassador to Tunisia, Response to a critic of his appointment who had said, “What a pity that Christians should be hung by a Jew.”
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The implication of a double moral standard for adherents of the faith and for others has been characteristics of many religions.
It is this verse that for some Muslims justifies terrorism against non-Muslims. See {584354} for a specific example. There are similar provisions in the Old Testament which a few extremely conservative Jews and Christians have used to advocate for blasphemy being a capital crime. Note that if an unbeliever repents and becomes a Muslim, he should be spared.
This sura has unfortunately been used by some Serbians and other Christians to justify ethnic cleansing against Muslims.
These kinds of inflammatory sermons are delivered with the approval of the king and royal family who crack down on any cleric who preaches what they do not approve of.
Sirhindi is a very important Muslim Imam and is credited with breathing new life and energy into the 2nd millennium of Islam. An irony of this quotation is that Sufi’s are often characterized as “moderate” Muslims. The quotation is extremely important in that there are some who attribute the anti-Semitism of the Muslims to the dispute over the State of Israel. However, it was the anti-Semitism that caused the problems with Israel. This quotation is from the 17th century—more than 300 years before Israel was established and over 200 years before the Zionist movement even thought about recovering Palestine for the Jews. Islamic anti-Semitism and anti-Christianity began in the Prophet’s lifetime and continued thereafter. It is as vicious today as it was 500 years ago, except for the fact that there is now an Islamic Reformation that despite the Koran’s statements regarding non-believers, they have a more modern view of the world and the people within it. Islamic cultures like Indonesia and Turkey do not have the same degree of anti-Semitism as Pakistan and the Arab Countries.
Toleration is a relative term. The Muslim Moors made Christians (and Jews) pay a special tax. At times they were forced to wear special clothing so that they could be readily identified. And they could not build churches larger or taller than the smallest mosque in the community. At times, their occupations were restricted but at other times Christians and Jews were appointed to the highest positions like Vizier. The Inquisition, in contrast, forced all Muslims (and Jews) to leave the country without any of their property or money or be tortured and killed—usually by burning at the stake unless of course that they converted to Christianity.
The Nazis did not create German anti-Semitism for the first time. Germany had a long brutal history of murder and torture. Luther was a virulent Anti-Semite. But he was not always such. See {629231} for totally contradictory writing earlier in his career. The Modern Lutheran Church does not currently follow any of Luther’s anti-Semitic dicta and has repudiated his views on murder for the glory of the religion, although many did support it in WWII. What is stunning about this quotation is that this religious leader was advocating burning houses of God, schools and people for the “glory” of God and Christianity. However all major religions had viscous and bloody pasts. Most adherents have rejected that past as being misguided, primitive and incompatible with the modern, more noble view of the religion while only a few religious extremist fundamentalist still adhere to the darker history and interpretation of the religion.
Odo of Chatillon-Sur-Marne. This is an amazingly distressing quotation for most moderns. Here we have the Pope preaching genocide and ethnic cleansing. This was one of the main triggers of the bloody Crusades and is not forgotten by Muslims in the Middle East Today. As Islam has not changed a great deal in 1000 years, most Muslims assume that the same is true of Christianity and especially the popes and the Roman Catholic Church. This is one of the reasons that the Islamic world reacts so strongly when a pope makes any statement negatve about Muslims and Islam.
The Alawites, always a Muslim minority in Syria, have been hated, distrusted, discriminated against, and physically persecuted by the majority Sunni Muslims as long as they have existed. When in Syria, the Alawites, although a minority, gained political control of the country and for the first time were secure in their own country. In the early 2000s, the Sunni majority tried to oust the Alawite leadership, but the Assad government put down the protests brutally. Most Western observers did not know of the anti-Alawite history of persecution in Syria. Returning to that position of victimization was so feared by the Alawites that they fought tooth and nail, murdering many civilians, to be sure that the historical position of the Alawites would not occur again. This makes talks and negotiations over the Syrian Civil War so difficult. The Alawites believe that if they do not control the nation, they will be massacred by the majority. The Christians and the Jews also believe that if the Sunni’s get control, their communities will be in great danger. Complicating the situation even further, is that fact that of the insurgent Sunni groups, the tolerant secular ones who started the revolution are no longer in control of the insurgents. De facto dominance has passed to the Jihadist, Islamic extremists who hold the view expressed by this quotation.
The French were governing Syria under a League of Nations mandate which was about to expire in 1936. The Alawites and other minorities feared for their future once the Sunni Muslims took over the government. The petition asked the French to continue to exercise their authority. The Alawite solution was to ruthlessly seize control of the Syrian government with the support of the Christians, Jews and other minorities. Al-Assad’s son and then his grandson took over as the President (de facto dictator) of Syria. In the 2012 Syrian revolution against the Alawites, al-Assad (the grandson) fought the insurgency so brutally that many nations ended up supporting and aiding the rebels. However, the fear of what would happen if the Alawites were again relegated to minority status, drove the Alawite brutality.
Vladimir Lenin. Despite Lenin’s abhorrence of anti-Semitism, there were any other Russians for whom it was normal. After Lenin’s death, Stalin and his henchmen used anti-Semitism to divert attention from the Communist Party’s failure to meet its economic and other goals.
Mordecai Manuel Noah was an American sheriff, playwright, diplomat, journalist, and utopian. He was born in a family of Portuguese Sephardic ancestry. He was the most important Jewish lay leader in New York in the early 19th century, and the first Jew born in the United States to reach national prominence. His negative reviews of black plays produced and hosted by William Brown at the African Grove have caused African-American studies and drama scholars to name Noah as the author of typical black archetypes employed in minstrel shows.
