America’s first War on Terror

Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, then serving as American ambassadors to France and Britain, respectively, met in 1786 in London with the Tripolitan Ambassador to Britain, Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja. [snip] …questioned Ambassador Adja as to the source of the unprovoked animus directed at the nascent United States republic. Jefferson and Adams, in their subsequent report to the Continental Congress, recorded the Tripolitan Ambassador’s justification:

… that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was 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 Musselman who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Thus as Joshua London’s Victory in Tripoli elaborates in lucid prose, an aggressive jihad was already being waged against the United States almost 200 years prior to America becoming a dominant international power in the Middle East. Moreover, these jihad depredations targeting America antedated the earliest vestiges of the Zionist movement by a century, and the formal creation of Israel by 162 years—exploding the ahistorical canard that American support for the modern Jewish state is a prerequisite for jihadist attacks on the United States.

Prevarications about history have the same results as those in science. The pinkies are wrong on global warming as well as history. Altering or deleting inconvenient facts fails to amend history. Adulterated positions may carry the moment, but never the day.

One neither can prove truth wrong, nor fallacy right; obfuscation of facts is merely a temporary position.

In Iraq, we are dallying with the future. As our gunboats crushed the Barbary Pirates, we shall have to repeat that confrontation again on a grander scale. The Marquis of Queensbury or the Geneva Convention rules will not be followed. Prepare thyself!

Archived in: Congress, France, Global Warming, Iraq, Israel, Middle East, Science, War on Terror