With apologies, the Captain doesn’t normally
publish two blog posts on the same day.
In fact, it sometimes takes
several days for a post to come together the way I want it.
You can decide which ones those are.
But something a friend posted on
Facebook ticked me off last night and I decided I needed to rant vent
respond.
The focus of the Captain’s ire is
an article written for “Conservative
Tribune”, a self-proclaimed defender of Western Civilization and the internet
voice for “everything conservatives need
to know about what’s happening in the world”.
The website provides no
information about the sponsoring organization – if there is one – or who the
writers are. From what I could see in scanning the website, it is mostly about
finding things to complain about against “our
current Islamist-sympathizing president, Barack Obama”.
And most of the time, that would
be enough to make me click out of the site.
The article my friend shared is
titled “How Thomas Jefferson Responded to
Islam in 1801 Puts Barack H. Obama to Shame”. And in the spirit of psedo-historian
David Barton, the article is a blatant attempt to rewrite history.
After opening with inflammatory remarks
about “radical Islamic jihadists”, the unknown author of the article suggests
that
“Obama should really pick up a history book sometime and read about how one of his predecessors, and one of our nation’s Founding Fathers, handled the threat posed by radical Islamic jihadists, way back in 1801.”
In short, the article suggests
that when American merchant ships were being harassed by pirates off the Barbary
Coast, Thomas Jefferson refused to pay either ransom or tribute to the Pasha of
Tripoli, instead sending the U.S. Marine Corps to route the lot of them.
This reference to the Barbary Pirates
is what naturally caught the Captain’s attention. Captain Dave knows about
pirates!
If the writer of this article had
picked up a history book himself – or even checked it out on Wikipedia – he would
have discovered that many of the so-called Barbary Pirates were Dutch
opportunists, as well as some Englishmen, Frenchmen, and Spaniards.
Captain’s Note: For what it’s
worth, these pirates were considered “Christians”.
For the most part, the Barbary Pirates
would capture merchant vessels, loot the hold, and sell the crew and passengers
to the Muslims who held them for ransom or sold them into slavery.
The captured sailors were not, as
the article purports, forced by threat of death to convert to the Islam faith.
Yes, as an ambassador, Thomas
Jefferson was opposed to paying tribute to the Islamic leaders. Beginning in
1785, the U.S. government was paying as much as $1 million per year in tribute payments
to the Pasha of Algiers – approximately 1/10th of the U.S. government
annual revenues.
And yes, when Thomas Jefferson
became President Jefferson, he established the first U.S. Naval force (in 1797)
to engage the pirates. But despite the Conservative
Tribune’s glowing proclamation about this being the origins of the U.S.
Marine Corps, the Marine Corps had been in existence since 1775.
And while we are lifting up the heralded
beginnings of the Marine Corps (no offense to any Marines living or dead) the
first Barbary War was engaged in 1801 and lasted until 1805 when Tripoli fell –
to a force composed of only eight U.S. Marines and 500 mercenaries from surrounding
nations.
President Jefferson then ratified
a peace treaty with Yusuf Karamanli that guaranteed that Yusuf’s deposed
brother would be returned to power in Tripoli.
Also as part of that treaty,
President Jefferson agreed to pay $60,000 in “ransom” for the American
prisoners held in Tripoli – a tidy sum in 1805.
And piracy resumed two years
later. But because the U.S. was involved in the lead-up to the War of 1812,
Jefferson “kicked the can” down the road to President James Madison, who
finally ended all tribute payments.
So much for President Jefferson being
tough on those “radical Islamist jihadists”!
Here’s one more thing that needs to
be clarified, because the Captain knows a little bit about religions too.
The word “Berber” is a reference
to a geographical area of origin. As such, in Thomas Jefferson’s day there were
Jewish Berbers and Christian Berbers as well as Muslim Berbers.
Probably the
most famous of the Christian Berbers is Augustine of Hippo, one of Roman
Catholicism’s greatest bishops!
And finally, the Captain would
suggest that what Muslims were doing in the 18th century was really no
different from what European Christians – and even Americans – were doing in
the 18th century: attempting to establish a homeland.
On this continent, in pursuit of our "manifest destiny", we were murdering the
indigenous people and stealing their homelands, as well as kidnapping and
enslaving Africans to build our fledgling nation.
I wonder: do you think the indigenous people
of America ever spoke of the “radical Christian jihadists”?
To the “Conservative Tribune” I would simply say, instead of defending
your shallow understanding of Western Civilization, you might try cracking open
a [real] history book yourself.
You never know what you might
learn.
