America's war with Islam -circa 1784

The war with Islamic Fundamentalists continues on, Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Iran, Syria all play a role in our daily threats. To a lesser extent, at least on the surface, Saudi Arabia worries us too, even though they are on our “friends” list. These are all things you know if you even scan the newspapers. You also may know that we have now been at war with these so called Radical Islamic Fundamentalists for about 10 years, or have we?

You see we have been at war with these radicals for as long as our country has been around.

Huh?

Time for a little history lesson.

You see on October 11, 1784 Moroccan pirates seized the brigantine Betsey. This was the precursor to the Barbary wars. Spain helped our new nation out and negotiated a release of the ship and crew. Spain also gave us some advice, pay tribute to the Barbary States. Enter Thomas Jefferson, you know the creator of separation of church and state guy, third president of the United States. Well obviously he wasn’t president yet, he was merely a minister in France for the United States.  He, and future second president John Adams went to London to negotiate with a representative of the Barbary States from Tripoli, now Libya, Sidi Haji Abdrahaman. When our ambassadors asked the representative why there were hostilities between our country and theirs his answer was chilling, at least to me. Why? The message hasn’t changed much in 200 years. What he basically said was it is our duty as Muslims to go to war with countries who were not Muslims. Jefferson himself wrote an account of the ambassador’s reply:

It was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave; and that every mussulman who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy's ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once.

Thomas Jefferson was a man who neither cared if his neighbor worshiped 20 gods or none so long as they did him no harm. What Jefferson saw in radical Islam however bothered him greatly. Here was a group of territories where there wasn’t separation of Church and State, but rather the Church was the State, and people who did not worship at that Church were the enemy. Jefferson was against paying tribute to the Barbary States from the very beginning. Our congress decided to pay the tributes anyway, even when George Washington was against paying it.

Jefferson, when he became president in 1801, got a present from Tripoli, a demand for tribute of $225,000. Jefferson stuck to his guns and refused to pay the demands going against what congress wanted. Jefferson dispatched our relatively new Navy to the North African region to protect our citizens and vessels in the area. The USS Enterprise (Not the one with James Kirk) did battle with the 14 gun Tripoli and defeated her on August 1^st 1801. The United States Marines saw action on the shores of Tripoli, and even a song was written about it. The term “Leatherneck” it has been said was brought about by the Marines wearing leather around their neck to protect them from sword blows by the Muslim pirates. It’s a romantic but not entirely true story though. But any way you slice it Semper Fidelis guys!

Jefferson even at the end of his days was still interested in the Islamic threat; he knew that one day it would return. Boy was he right. Jefferson even owned his own Koran, a book on which he studied to get to know the mindset of the people he was dealing with. Centuries later Democrat Keith Ellison used that same Koran to swear him into our Congress, Ellison saying Jefferson was a true “visionary” of his time because he owned a Koran. What Jefferson really was trying to figure out was why a group of people half a world away felt they had the right to go to war with those who didn’t worship the same way they did. I did find it somewhat disappointing that one of Jefferson’s sticking points towards the Barbary States was his horror that the pirates often sold our citizens who were captured into slavery and that somehow Jefferson didn’t see the problem with our own slave trade as equal in fault.

Regardless of that glaring fault it was the beginning of America’s war with Radical Islam, and people those same people are back at our doorstep. They hate us, not for our perceived liberal ways, but for our freedom to worship who we choose, or to not worship. The radical Islamists wish to change that. That is not to say that 99% of Muslims out there wish to do that, they don’t they wish peace. It’s that 1% that Jefferson was so worried about way back in 1784, that same 1% is the problem we face today.