Thomas Jefferson, Patron Saint of American Liberals, would not recognize his spiritual offspring in today’s liberal President Obama and his handling of the Middle East.
Jefferson, as a trade commissioner and then ambassador in Paris for six years (1784-90), faced almost daily the tragedy of American hostages enslaved by violent Muslims and his own frustrating inability to liberate them.
However, what he learned served him well as the leading hawk for war a decade later when he became president and went to war against belligerent Islam.
In May, A.D. 1784, immediately after America’s Continental Congress, gathered in Annapolis, had signed the final draft of the treaty with England that formally ended the American Revolution, Congress appointed Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson as “trade commissioners” in an effort to open European markets to American commodities -- not an easy mission with Europe’s traditionally closed, mercantile economic system.
But when Jefferson reached Paris in August 1784 to join the other two already there, he discovered that one unanticipated reality posed the greatest and most immediate threat to their fledgling United States. Every state was swamped in Revolutionary War debt and the way to pay it off would be shipping to European markets their great natural wealth, e.g. lumber from their endless forests, the produce of their fertile soil, the skins of animals for clothing, etc. But with the thirteen ex-colonies now independent of England, when their merchant ships crossed the Atlantic Ocean now, they would no longer be protected by the Royal Navy, the greatest in the world and by the “tribute” that the King of England paid to the pashas of Tripoli, Tunis, Algiers, and the Sultan of Morocco. This was basically protection money given to North Africa’s so-called “Barbary Pirate” states to keep them from preying on British shipping.
When Jefferson boarded his friend Mr. Tracy’s private vessel in Boston Harbor in July 1784 for the month-long voyage, he took along for reading Don Quixote, Cervantes’s classic novel in which several central chapters take place in the slave dungeons of Algiers episodes based on Cervantes’ own five years as a Christian slave to the Muslims, so the subject of Barbary piracy could not have been wholly foreign to Thomas Jefferson, principle author of America’s Declaration of Independence.
But what surprised him was that, contrary to popular usage, these North African predators were not common pirates out for loot -- who when ashore liked to hang out in taverns, get drunk, sing “yo ho ho” and paw at wenches. No, these “Barbary Pirates” were in fact just normal Middle Eastern Muslims -- or Mahometans or Mussulmen as they were then called -- who did not drink alcohol at all. Unlike real pirates, they also prayed to Allah several times a day. Not at all venal, independent freebooters, they were simply the crewmen in the official cruisers of the Mediterranean Sea’s Islamic city-states. While their livelihood was capturing cargo and passenger vessels, their rationale for doing so was religious. They saw themselves engaged in a jihad and called themselves mujahidin/soldiers in the jihad. In the late 18th century, one man’s pirate was another man’s holy warrior.
Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2015/04/jefferson_and_the_jihad.html
No comments:
Post a Comment