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Up to the minute notes on the current state of free thinking and free living: Kentucky moonshine - original analysis and reporting from MoreThings, and all round pop culture museum of sight and sound - photo galleries, mp3 and video downloads.
Al Barger and MoreThings - getting people's goats since 1998.
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April 21, 2007
Thomas Jefferson vs Muslim Pirates
For a little broader perspective on current issues we face with the Muslim world, I highly recommend this article "Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates" by Christopher Hitchens. Adherents of the Religion of Peace have been a pain in the ass from the beginning, though I for one barely remember any hint of such conflicts in my history classes. The Marine Corps was first being formed during the Adams administration though to fight "from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli." They would have been going to Tripoli specifically to fight Muslim piracy.
Right after the British, Barbary pirates were the big military challenge. They were seizing ships and making slaves of crews, demanding protection money, and pretty much anything they could get, with the complicity of corrupt governments and justifications from the Koran. From Hitchens' story:
Jefferson would perhaps have been just as eager to send a squadron to put down any Christian piracy that was restraining commerce. But one cannot get around what Jefferson heard when he went with John Adams to wait upon Tripoli's ambassador to London in March 1785. When they inquired by what right the Barbary states preyed upon American shipping, enslaving both crews and passengers, America's two foremost envoys were informed that "it was written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise." (It is worth noting that the United States played no part in the Crusades, or in the Catholic reconquista of Andalusia.)
Ambassador Abd Al-Rahman did not fail to mention the size of his own commission, if America chose to pay the protection money demanded as an alternative to piracy. So here was an early instance of the "heads I win, tails you lose" dilemma, in which the United States is faced with corrupt regimes, on the one hand, and Islamic militants, on the other - or indeed a collusion between them.
This has a modern ring to it, doesn't it?
Another angle of this that's a little less direct and thus harder to tease out of the historical record is the impact of all this on domestic American arguments about slavery. Besides money and murder, they were making slaves of passengers and crew. Besides the abstract idea of it, the stories of the torture and misery of fellow citizens in chains were obviously pretty incendiary with the American public. But of course, how much could we complain of such things when we're holding slaves ourselves? Such arguments would obviously have been potent for the early American abolitionists.
Hitchens lays out a fine basic historical outline, and has several book recommendations for further reading. His whole story is highly recommended.
posted by Al at 4/21/2007 10:17:00 AM
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