Democrat Keith Ellison, aka Hakim Mohammad, the first Muslim US congressman, is already talking Taqiyya. After pledging allegiance to the US on a Qur’an that belonged to Thomas Jefferson, he went on to burble something about America’s third president recognizing that wisdom can be gleaned from many sources, including “the Muslim book of Jihad.”

No, that was not quite how Ellison referred to the Qur’an; but Ted Sampley, editor of U.S. Veteran Dispatch, does. In the essay, “What Thomas Jefferson Learned from the Muslim Book of Jihad,” Sampley dispels the myth Ellison is trying to cultivate: Jefferson, a man of the Enlightenment, communed with Mohammad, his absolute antithesis.

“At the time Jefferson owned the book,” writes Sampley, “he needed to know everything possible about Muslims because he was about to advocate war against the Islamic ‘Barbary’ states of Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia and Tripoli.”

“Ellison’s use of Jefferson’s Quran as a prop illuminates a subject once well-known in the history of the United States, but, which today, is mostly forgotten – the Muslim pirate slavers who over many centuries enslaved millions of Africans and tens of thousands of Christian Europeans and Americans in the Islamic ‘Barbary’ states.” [Sic]

“When American colonists rebelled against British rule in 1776, American merchant ships lost Royal Navy protection. With no American Navy for protection, American ships were attacked and their Christian crews enslaved by Muslim pirates operating under the control of the “Dey of Algiers” —an Islamist warlord ruling Algeria.”

The rest of the column reminds Americans that Jefferson sent “American Marines and many of America’s best warships” to defeat the Muslim Barbary States. Being indeed a “visionary,” he sought first to learn about these pirates from their manual of war, the Qur’an.