Tripoli: The miscalculation about the role of Muslims in our nation’s history was mentioned previously in President Obama’s speech in Cairo on June 4, 2009 in which he said he was speaking “as a student of history.”

The Shores of Tripoli: The Libyan Tragedy

and Our Historically Challenged President

by Rev. George W. Rutler

In a frequently misquoted line from the Life of Reason, George Santayana said: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”  

Cultural amnesia, helpless or deliberate, does enable people to rewrite history without compunction, and it also makes it easy for others to believe the fiction as fact, or to suppose in a “nunc pro tunc” way that projects our assumptions onto the ways things were seen in the past.

I should guess that most of our leaders in government today could not pass the qualifying examination in history as was required for a high school diploma in the State of New York at the beginning of the twentieth century.  

I cite the example of a speech of President Obama at the fourth annual “Iftar” dinner, a feast at the end of a day of Ramadan fasting, for assembled Muslims in the White House on August 10 in this year of 2012:

As I’ve noted before, Thomas Jefferson once held a sunset dinner here with an envoy from Tunisia—perhaps the first Iftar at the White House, more than 200 years ago. And some of you, as you arrived tonight, may have seen our special display, courtesy of our friends at the Library of Congress—the Koran that belonged to Thomas Jefferson. And that’s a reminder, along with the generations of patriotic Muslims in America, that Islam—like so many faiths—is part of our national story.

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