# Columbus Wasn't Just After Gold – He Wanted Jerusalem | Focal Point with Imam Tom Facchine **Author:** Tom Facchine **Series:** Imam Tom Live **Published:** 2025-10-08 **YouTube:** https://youtu.be/NO8p7rmsuak **URL:** https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/columbus-wasnt-just-after-gold-he-wanted-jerusalem-focal-point-with-imam-tom-facchine **Topics:** History, Politics & Practical Theology ## Description Christopher Columbus has long been praised as a symbol of the American immigrant dream. But how did a mass murderer, a genocider, and a barbarian come to be celebrated in such a manner? Imam Tom dissects the anti-immigrant sentiment that shaped the future of Columbus’s legacy, highlighting that he... ## Chapters - 0:00 Columbus: Hero or Mass Murderer? - 1:00 The Horrors Columbus Tried to Hide - 3:30 Genocide in the Caribbean - 5:30 Columbus the Crusader Against Muslims - 8:00 Why Columbus Became a U.S. Hero - 9:30 Lynching of Italians & Columbus Day - 13:30 When Symbols Outlive Their Usefulness - 17:00 Islam’s Lesson: Truth Over Identity ## Transcript **[0:00]** The Real Story of Christopher Columbus 32 towns and cities in America are named after a mass murderer. How can someone so widely celebrated be so guilty of such heinous crimes? In recent years, his legacy has become a flashpoint in the culture war, right? **[0:17]** There's people who are on the woke and anti-woke sides that are saying that, oh, he wasn't that bad, and this is tradition, and this is our history. And other people saying, no, he was a murderer, he was this, he was that. We need to peel back the layers on this one because it's actually much more interesting than you think. **[0:32]** The story of Columbus and how he's remembered in the United States is a story about belonging. It's a story about race and nationalism. It's also about surviving in the face of intense persecution. But the story of Columbus is also, beyond all of that, a story about taking pride in the wrong things **[0:50]** and what happens when symbols outlive their usefulness. Now, it's incontrovertible that Columbus is guilty of the crimes that he is charged with, and we've got the proof. But it's also true that Columbus is celebrated federally across the United States every year in the month of October. **[1:06]** How do these two things go together? How can someone so widely celebrated be so guilty of such heinous crimes? So, was Columbus really that bad? Actually, he was much worse. And I had to read a lot of stuff in preparation for this episode. There are some things that I cannot read in front of the camera that I will spare you from. **[1:24]** But suffice it to say, Columbus was, from his own admission, in his own diaries, he was a murderer, he was a rapist, and he was a genocider. He said in his diary, his first impression of the Arawak natives when he arrived in the Caribbean, he said, **[1:40]** they would make fine servants with 50 men. We could subjugate them and make them do whatever we want. On his second trip, he enslaved thousands of Arawak Indians, working many of them to death in a futile attempt to extract gold from ground that contained very, very little gold. **[1:56]** He would send the slaves back to Spain. Normally, hundreds, like up to 50 percent of the slaves that he would send back would die en route, basically left awake of destruction everywhere he went. One of his contemporaries, Bartolomé de las Casas, who was a Dominican priest, documented his experience in Cuba and elsewhere in a book that's called History of the Indies. **[2:17]** Listen to what he says. He says of the Arawaks who were enslaved to work in the mines, we hear, quote, Thus, husbands and wives were together only once every eight or nine months. And when they meet, they are so exhausted and depressed on both sides, they cease to procreate. **[2:34]** As for the newly born, they died early because their mothers overworked and famished, had no milk to nurse them. And for this reason, when I was in Cuba, seven thousand children died in three months. Husbands died in the mines. Wives died at work. Children died from lack of milk. **[2:50]** And in a short time, this land, which was so great, so powerful and fertile, was depopulated. My eyes have seen these acts so foreign to human nature. And now I tremble as I write. There's other stuff we cannot even mention on air when it comes to Columbus forcing himself on women, when it comes to the way that he attacked certain individuals and disemboweled them in front of others. **[3:17]** It's really, really gruesome stuff. As one historian by the name of Dyson wrote, any native caught without a copper token to show that he had met his quota of gold for the day was tortured, sometimes by having their hands or feet cut off. Or by being killed. **[3:34]** Those who fled were hunted with dogs. Thousands of people, Taínos, were driven to escape the Spaniard rule by poisoning themselves with a lethal plant root. So people were committing suicide just to get away from Columbus. And with all of the first wave destruction that he imposed, the second wave is always disease. **[3:54]** So if you treat people like this, they're going to be extremely susceptible to disease. Basically, the result was the virtual annihilation of Native American population in the Caribbean within 100 years. So check. I mean, there's two things here. There's the practices, like the gruesome stuff that he did. **[4:10]** And then there's the results, like the collapse of birth rates, the entire depopulation. Some estimates say that within 60 years after Columbus landed, only a few hundred natives were left of what could have been 250,000 Taínos. This is not conquest. **[4:26]** This is genocide. It's barbarity. And even the most sympathetic biographer of Columbus, Harvard's Samuel Eliot Morison, said, quote, The cruel policy initiated by Columbus and pursued by his successors resulted in complete genocide. **[4:42]** That Columbus was someone who was so evil that he was even too evil for the Spanish. Right. So the Spanish saw what he was doing and heard about what he was doing. They accused him of mismanagement. They took him away from his position. They had him shipped home. They took away his governorship and much of his prestige. **[4:59]** Right. So you have here, you have consensus from his friends and his foes that Columbus was a pretty evil dude. But there's a lot more to the story that people don't mention. And that's where it gets really, really interesting. **[5:15]** Why did Columbus, Bartolomé de las Casas, he says at one point, he says it was true. The Admiral Columbus was blind as those who came after him. And he was so anxious to please the king that he committed irreparable crimes against the Indians. **[5:31]** That's kind of interesting. Why did Columbus want to please the king so bad? We can tell later that the king was not even pleased by his antics. What was going on here? There's something more interesting at play. One of the things was the permissibility structure within which Columbus acted. **[5:48]** Columbus was not just like a rogue individual that did something wrong. He was acting upon guidance from the Catholic Church, that there were papal bulls as early as 1455. Of course, the more famous ones in the 1490s. You can look up Doctrine of Discovery, where the Catholic Church said that any Christian person exploring that he could, if he came across a pagan or a Saracen, meaning a Native American or a Muslim, **[6:17]** was entitled to take by force their property from them, that they had no rights. And in theological circles, these people were even debated whether they had souls or not. There's something going on here with the Muslim world that you've heard probably that Columbus was sailing for a different trade route. **[6:36]** You might, if you're in an upper echelon of informed, then you might have heard that Columbus was trying to find a way around the Ottomans because the Ottomans were controlling trade across the land. And he wanted to find a way that got away from the Ottomans. But you might not have realized what a big crusader Columbus was. **[6:53]** And we don't mean that in the normalized, desensitized sense of the word crusader. Columbus hated Muslims. He was someone who wanted to wage war against Muslims. In fact, before he sailed to the new world, quote unquote, to the Americas, the Western Hemisphere, he was fighting against Muslims in Spain, like part of the so-called Reconquista or the pushing out of Jews and Muslims from Spain, that he was somebody who was fighting against them there. **[7:20]** He was a zealot when it came to violence against Muslims. And when it came to his willingness or his desire to please the king, it wasn't just for his own personal glory. He had other plans in mind. One of the authors, he said, no matter how many people Columbus shipped to Spain for sale as slaves, with most of them dying on the way, no matter how many others were rounded up for the plantations, no matter how many tribes were conquered, no matter how many new lands were discovered, the wealth acquired was never sufficient to fund a new kingdom. **[7:54]** He wanted a Spanish armada to Jerusalem. That was what Columbus wanted. Columbus wanted Spain to recapture Jerusalem from the Muslims. And so he was trying to get all of this gold and scramble around and do all of these things in order to fund this campaign. **[8:11]** It says still Columbus would not give up the task that he believed that Allah had given him. So Columbus believed that Allah had put him on earth to fight against the Muslims and to push them out of Spain, check, and to fund a campaign against Jerusalem. **[8:28]** So in his will, listen to this, in Columbus's will, he stipulated that if the king would not use revenue from the Indies for the conquest of Jerusalem, Columbus's son, Diego, quote, should go to Jerusalem alone with the greatest force that he can possibly muster. **[8:45]** Can you think about that? Somebody who's so determined on this thing that he's going to put it in his will that if the king of Spain isn't going to do it himself, then I'm going, me or my progeny, even after I'm gone, I'm going to take care of it as well. This is Columbus. He's a horrible human being, an evil person, somebody motivated by extreme hatred and animus towards Muslims, towards native peoples. **[9:10]** The things that he did were unspeakable. That's incontrovertible fact. That's just history, whether you like it or not. How did he come to be so celebrated? How did his whole being become celebrated as a federal holiday in the United States of America? **[9:26]** It's not so straightforward as you might think. Columbus became a symbol of something and it started out as something pretty obscure, but then it ballooned and ballooned into something much greater. The first celebration in the United States of Columbus was actually way back in 1792, just after the United States became a nation. **[9:46]** The New York Society of Tammany, if you've heard of Tammany Hall, the old political machines, they held the first celebration. It's 300 years after 1492. That's the 300th anniversary of Columbus's voyage. But it was still a relatively obscure thing. Fast forward 100 years later to the 400th anniversary. **[10:04]** President Benjamin Harrison, a president you probably never heard of. He's not a very famous president. Proclaimed a one time national celebration of Columbus Day for the 400th anniversary. Why did he do it? Partly to ease tensions with Italy after the lynching of Italian immigrants in New Orleans. **[10:26]** Wait a minute. What? Lynching Italians in New Orleans? Absolutely. Let's get into it. So the context in the late 19th century is the late 1800s. The United States is at peak immigration from Europe and from Asia. The numbers of immigrants is the largest it's ever going to be. **[10:44]** An anti-immigrant sentiment is at an all time high. At the same time, there's an economic depression. And you know what happens when there's an economic depression and there's a lot of immigrants. The immigrants are blamed for taking, quote unquote, American jobs. **[11:00]** Late 1800s, by the way, were full on Darwinism, were full on social Darwinism. There's racialist theories circulating in the press and in the academy advancing pseudo scientific theories saying that Mediterranean peoples are inherently inferior to northern Europeans. **[11:20]** Right. Anglo-Saxon race, all this sort of thing. And in popular culture, drawings and songs, they caricature new immigrants, making them seem childlike, criminal and subhuman. There's one cartoon from a newspaper in 1891 that said, quote, if immigration was properly restricted, you would never be troubled with anarchism, socialism, the mafia and such kindred evils. **[11:46]** That's basically targeting the Italians right there. It's saying that Italians are either anarchists, socialists or the mafia. This is not just rhetoric. OK, so there were physical attacks against Italian Americans from the late 1880s. Anti-immigrant society sprang up all across the country. **[12:02]** The KKK was in its heyday. All right. They had a spike in membership around that time. Catholic churches and charities were vandalized and burned. And Italian Americans or Italian immigrants were attacked by mobs. In the 1890s alone, more than 20 Italians were lynched. **[12:18]** And one of the bloodiest episodes, and this gets back to Columbus Day, took place in New Orleans in 1891. The chief of police named David Hennessy was found shot dead on the street one night. The mayor of New Orleans blamed Sicilian gangsters, rounded up 100 Sicilian Americans. **[12:35]** Eventually, 19 of them were put on trial. And you can imagine the Italian Americans everywhere watching nervously. They were eventually found not guilty. There was no evidence. But before they were freed, this is how much anti-immigrant and anti-Italian sentiment there was. **[12:52]** Before they could be freed after having been announced not guilty, a mob formed. Some estimate says 10,000 people formed a mob to break into the jail. They dragged 11 Sicilians from their cells and lynched them in front of everybody. **[13:08]** This anti-immigrant sentiment continued throughout the early 1900s up until the 1920s. That's when severe restrictions were finally put on immigration by U.S. Congress. So that period ended in the 1920s. **[13:24]** But by that time, the immigrant generation, you know, had started to become more acclimated. And this is really interesting to me because I'm an Italian American and my family came from Italy in 1905. So right in the middle of all this stuff, my family came in. And some of the things that I learned about in the preparation for this video are things that I've heard **[13:43]** anecdotally from relatives, especially the older generation. By the 1920s that you have more assimilation happening, that the second generation of Italian Americans, they're now more Americanized. They've been through the public school system. **[14:00]** They've been given their patriotism, their new language, their symbols, etc., U.S. culture. Sometimes they're even renamed. And that happened with my family. The spelling and the pronunciation changed completely when we came to the United States. And certainly when my great grandfather, who was the first one to come, he spoke obviously he spoke Italian, **[14:20]** probably Venetian as well. And then my grandfather can understand it or could understand it. But he lost the ability to speak it later on. And my father never spoke it. And so this is kind of an interesting, I have a personal history that matches up with the history going on here. **[14:37]** Interesting to see is that the persecution that Italian Americans faced, it wasn't just popular sentiment, but it was also public policy as well, especially when World War II started. So, you know, there are stereotypes, there's wartime propaganda. Italian nationals are interned. **[14:54]** OK, we know a little bit about Japanese internment. Less discussed is the internment of Italian. This is really interesting. When I went back into my family history, I noticed something as well. **[15:14]** That even though my great-grandfather came in 1905, he didn't naturalize as a citizen until the 1930s. And it's possible that he just didn't get around to it, but it's also possible that he realized that there was a lot of anti-Italian sentiment going on and that he better become a full citizen. I also noticed that his children, like all of my grandfather and my great-uncles, almost all of them enlisted in the armed forces of one type or another. **[15:37]** And if I had to guess, I would say that that was also an attempt to try to be more American and recognized as American and to not be seen as a fifth column or something of that nature. So where does Columbus Day come in? You can imagine where this is going with all of this hatred and persecution and even like persecution from the government, surveillance and control that Italian Americans were looking for something to rally behind in order to prove that they belonged within American society and to be treated equally or at least relatively so. **[16:12]** And the Italian Americans rallied behind Columbus Day. Columbus Day became a way to celebrate Italian heritage and Italian American contributions to the United States, of course. And there were certain societies that were formed, such as the Knights of Columbus was formed in 1882. The Sons and Daughters of Italy were formed in 1905. **[16:29]** And many of these societies lobbied for the recognition of Columbus Day. And they tried to paint this story of Columbus was really a story of determination against the odds. It's an underdog story. It's his ambition. It's him against the world. **[16:44]** People didn't believe in him. And this was something that connected both to American mythology of American work ethic and also to the Italian immigrant experience. Finally, in 1937, FDR officially designates Columbus Day as a national holiday, partly due to the lobbying of groups like the Knights of Columbus. **[17:05]** It's only been in later years where people have become more familiar with the crimes that Columbus was guilty of. And even though these things, unfortunately, get siphoned into or shoehorned into the culture war of left versus right, of conservative versus progressive, it really doesn't have to be that way. **[17:24]** You don't have to be a progressive or a Democrat or someone on the left to recognize that Columbus was a bad guy, that he was an evil person who did very, very evil things. And Italian Americans should probably own up to that fact and recognize that and find a different role model or find a different symbol of their contributions and their heritage. **[17:44]** Certainly, Italian Americans are not discriminated or persecuted against in the same ways that they used to be. And so this is also a story of a symbol outliving its worth. What do Italian Americans have to lose by giving up and confessing that this particular individual is not someone that anyone would strive to be like? **[18:04]** But there's a really interesting angle here as a Muslim and as an Italian American Muslim, I stand at the intersection of all of these identities and experiences and histories. That as Muslims, we are called to take pride in the right things and to be aware of taking pride in the wrong things. **[18:22]** And I'm going to tell you a story from the Qur'an. In Surah Al-Qasas, Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala, He tells the story of Musa alayhi salam, of Moses. And Moses is part of the children of Israel. And the children of Israel are oppressed and they're persecuted. And at one point, Moses sees a fight happening between someone from his own tribe and someone from the tribe of Pharaoh. **[18:44]** Now, the person from his own tribe, from the children of Israel, calls out to Moses and asks Moses to come and intervene, to help. And Moses does. And he assumes from the situation that his own guy is the one who is in trouble. He's the victim here. **[18:59]** And so he fights against the person from Pharaoh's tribe. And he accidentally kills him. This is a case of manslaughter. He comes to find out that the real troublemaker was his own. That the person who started it and who was the oppressor was actually the person from Bani Israel. **[19:16]** Even though Bani Israel was oppressed as a class. And even though they were in a very hard situation being persecuted and whatnot. Moses had a moral dilemma that he had to face. Moses had to stand up for what was right even if it was against one of his own. **[19:31]** He didn't let the fact that it was one of his own stand in the way of the truth. And so we have to take this opportunity with Columbus to notice, I think, a very, very similar thing. That, you know, you can take pride in a certain symbol. **[19:46]** But if you take pride in the wrong things, right? Whether it's your identity or a symbol that you've concocted. You have to be able to have maturity to abandon it when you're shown the truth. And one of the many, many virtues of Malcolm X, rahimahullah, was his ability to change himself when he was presented with the truth. **[20:05]** Taking pride in your identity, it doesn't really do anything for you. There's people that have your identity that are horrible people. There's people who have your identity that are great people. Your real allegiance has to be to your values and to your truth. And I think if you were to boil down Islam, after tawhid, of course, to one ethic or to one proposition, that might be it. **[20:27]** That your allegiance should always be to the truth. Should always be to what is right and to what is just. Whether it's for you or against you as an individual. Whether it's for you or against you as a collective. **[20:42]** That, in the words of Yasiin Bey, we're not concerned what type of brand you are. We're concerned what type of man you are. 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| Imam Tom Weekly](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/the-ummah-or-the-natio-imam-tom-weekly.md) - [How Islamic History Was Frozen and Forgotten | Imam Tom Weekly](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/how-islamic-history-was-frozen-and-forgotten-imam-tom-weekly.md) - [The Secret Cost of Individualism | Imam Tom Weekly](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/the-secret-cost-of-individualism-imam-tom-weekly.md) - [The Dark Truth About Secularism | Imam Tom Weekly](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/the-dark-truth-about-secularism-focal-imam-tom-weekly.md) - [Muslims Are a People of Principle | Imam Tom Weekly](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/muslims-are-a-people-of-principle-imam-tom-weekly.md) - [When Did Ramadan Become a Festival | Imam Tom Weekly](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/when-did-ramadan-become-a-festival-imam-tom-weekly.md) - [Why Don't Muslims Just Leave? | Imam Tom Weekly](https://yaqeeninstitute.org/watch/series/imam-tom-live/why-dont-muslims-just-leave-imam-tom-weekly.md) - [Will Celebrity Muslims Save Us? 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