Militant Islam has a long pedigree, and 9/11 is not the first time that it has sunk its fangs into the United States.
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Walter Stahr, in his biography of John Jay, says of the early days of the United States under the Articles of Confederation, when Mr. Jay was Secretary for Foreign Affairs, that perhaps the most difficult foreign policy problem of that time was the Barbary pirates.
Islamic states of Algiers, Morocco, Tripoli, and Tunis were strategically positioned along the north African Barbary coast, bordering a main trade route in the Mediterranean Sea. Our vigorous and successful military actions to end their piracy account for the Marine Hymn’s “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli.”
A principal source of income for the Barbary sultans was seizing ships, confiscating cargo, and enslaving the sailors, who could be held for ransom or sold to African and Middle Eastern potentates. As with today’s Mafia, the Barbary rulers were also prepared to dispense ‘protection’ in exchange for ‘peace treaty’ extortion payments; not unlike Osama Bin Ladin’s ‘peace’ offerings to us and European nations in exchange for abject submission.
Mr. Stahr writes that the Ambassador of Tripoli explained to Adams and Jefferson, “.., it is written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every [Moslem] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise.”
That early 19th century assertion of Islamic religious prerogative is the same one employed by today’s Islamic jihadists.
It’s hard to square such firmly enunciated doctrine from 200 years ago with censure by today’s liberals like MIT’s Noam Chomsky, who say that we caused 9/11 by our ‘imperialistic’ and greedy capitalistic posture in international affairs. Or with the analysis of the state of Washington’s ultra-left-wing Senator Patty Murray, whom the Seattle Post-Intelligencer in its December 20, 2002, edition quoted as opining that the Middle Eastern nations have turned against the United States and support Osama Bin Ladin “.... because he and his supporters have spent years building good will in poor nations by helping pay for schools, roads and other infrastructure.”
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