Declaration of Independence

[Adopted in Congress 4 July 1776]

The Unanimous Declaration of the Thirteen United States of
America

When, in the course of human events, it becomes
necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected
them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate
and equal station to which the laws of nature and of nature's God entitle them,
a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare
the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all
men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain
unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of
happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men,
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any
form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the
people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its
foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to
them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence,
indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed
for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that
mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right
themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a
long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object
evinces a design to reduce them under absolute despotism, it is their right, it
is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for
their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these
colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their
former systems of government. The history of the present King of Great Britain
is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object
the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let
facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his assent to laws, the most wholesome and
necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his governors to pass laws of immediate and pressing
importance, unless suspended in their operation till his assent should be
obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other laws for the accommodation of large districts
of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of representation in
the legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable,
and distant from the depository of their public records, for the sole purpose
of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved representative houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly
firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to
be elected; whereby the legislative powers, incapable of annihilation, have
returned to the people at large for their exercise; the state remaining in the
meantime exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions
within.

He has endeavored to prevent the population of these states; for that
purpose obstructing the laws for naturalization of foreigners; refusing to pass
others to encourage their migration hither, and raising the conditions of new
appropriations of lands.

He has obstructed the administration of justice, by refusing his assent to
laws for establishing judiciary powers.

He has made judges dependent on his will alone, for the tenure of their
offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of new offices, and sent hither swarms of
officers to harass our people, and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, standing armies without the
consent of our legislature.

He has affected to render the military independent of and superior to civil
power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our
constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his assent to their acts
of pretended legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by mock trial, from punishment for any murders which
they should commit on the inhabitants of these states:

For cutting off our trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing taxes on us without our consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefits of trial by jury:

For transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses:

For abolishing the free system of English laws in a neighboring province,
establishing therein an arbitrary government, and enlarging its boundaries so
as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same
absolute rule in these colonies:

For taking away our charters, abolishing our most valuable laws, and
altering fundamentally the forms of our governments:

For suspending our own legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with
power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated government here, by declaring us out of his protection and
waging war against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burned our towns, and
destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large armies of foreign mercenaries to
complete the works of death, desolation and tyranny, already begun with
circumstances of cruelty and perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous
ages, and totally unworthy of the head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow citizens taken captive on the high seas to
bear arms against their country, to become the executioners of their friends
and brethren, or to fall themselves by their hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavored to
bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages, whose
known rule of warfare, is undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and
conditions.

In every stage of these oppressions we have petitioned for redress in the
most humble terms: our repeated petitions have been answered only by repeated
injury. A prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define
a tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have we been wanting in attention to our British brethren. We have
warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an
unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances
of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice
and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to
disavow these usurpations, which, would inevitably interrupt our connections
and correspondence. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which
denounces our separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind,
enemies in war, in peace friends.

We, therefore, the representatives of the United
States of America, in General Congress, assembled, appealing to the Supreme
Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the name, and by
the authority of the good people of these colonies, solemnly publish and
declare, that these united colonies are, and of right ought to be free and
independent states; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British
Crown, and that all political connection between them and the state of Great
Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as free and independent
states, they have full power to levey war, conclude peace, contract alliances,
establish commerce, and to do all other acts and things which independent
states may of right do. And for the support of this declaration, with a firm
reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each
other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor.

Magdi Allam is a leading Muslim commentator in Italy. He has written what I consider to be a major editorial for an Italian national newspaper, "Corriere della Sera". You will find below my probably flawed, non-professional translation of his editorial. The Italian original itself wasn't gramatically perfect. At the end is a link to the editorial (in the original Italian) on the web.

15 September 2006

THE TRUTH OF HISTORY

Muslims against the Pope, “He has offended us, let him ask pardon”
by
Magdi Allam

It is desolating and preoccupying to see Muslims who have given life to a unified international front to attack the Pope and demand public apologies. From Bin Laden to the Muslim Brotherhood, from Pakistan to Turkey, from Al Jazeera to Al Arabiya, there has risen anew the widespread and universal alliance that first emerged on the occasion of the events surrounding the cartoons about Mohammed. It testifies, in an unequivocal manner, that the root of the evil is a blind ideology of imperious hatred among Muslims, one that violates the faith and darkens the mind. Why is it that Muslims, especially the so-called moderates, never stand up with similar and as much enthusiasm against the true and perpetual profaners of Islam, the Islamic terrorists who massacre Muslims themselves in the name of the same God, the Islamic extremists who legitimize the destruction of Israel and inculcate faith in the so-called Islamic “martyrdom”, while in the meantime they feel themselves dutybound to promote a sort of Islamic “holy war” against the head of the Catholic Church who legitimately expresses his evaluations concerning Islam, with respect but with just as much clarity about the diversity that naturally exists between the two religions? The considerations referred to by the Pope, citing the Byzantine emperor Manuel Paleologus II, concerning the spread of Islam by the sword, whether on the part of Mohammed within the Arabian Peninsula or on the part of his successors in the rest of the world (with just a few exceptions), are an incontrovertible historical fact. Testimony to the fact comes from the Koran itself and from the reality that the entire Byzantine empire to the East and South of the Mediterranean passed to Islam, plus the successive expansion northward into Europe and eastward into Asia.

To deny the historical reality is simply foolish, and it can generate nothing but foolishness. I recall that one of the most notable contemporary Islamologists, the Egyptian Mohammad Said El Eshmawi, said to me in the mid-nineties that he simply did not sympathize with the military conquest carried out by the Arab tribes in the Christian lands of the Mediterranean, and that he would have preferred to have had Islam spread peacefully as came about in Southeast Asia. And now the Pope is being punished and threatened for having said what every honest and rational Muslim should accept: the historical reality. The lesson to draw is that the West and Christianity ought to stop considering themselves to be the cause of everything that followed, whether good or bad, within Islam and in the rest of the world. The ideology of hatred is an ancestral reality that exists in the heart of Islam from its very beginnings, because of the refusal to recognize and respect the plurality of the physiological religious communities, and given the subjectivity of the relationship between the believer and God, and the absence of a single spiritual reference point that incarnates the absoluteness of the dogmas of faith. And it is a reality that, beginning with the defeat of the Arab armies in the war of 5 June 1967, it [the ideology of hatred] has undergone an unstoppable upsurge parallel to the growth of the power of the Islamic extremists from Iran to Indonesia. It has ended up flowing into the current of globalized Islamic terrorism, that has transformed the West itself into a “kamikaze factory”.

This is the tragic reality of the ideology of hatred that is succeeding in solidifying the consensus among all those Muslims whose minds are clouded by being anti-American, anti-West, and by prejudiced hostility to the right of Israel to exist. The pretexts that can set off their fury change, from the Israeli occupation to the American war, from the Mohammed cartoons to the declarations of the Pope. But the problem is entirely internal to an Islam transformed by the extremists from a faith in God into an ideology bent on imposing a theocratic and totalitarian power upon all those who are not in their image and likeness. And it frightens me to note that even the so-called moderate Muslims have renounced the prudence of reason, and have aligned themselves with the “holy war” of which they will be the principal victims.