Islamic Muslims Helped Shape The New America

Obama has been bending over backward trying to convince us that Islam has played an important role in the founding and the fabric of our country.

"...Islam has always been a part of America’s story,” June 2009

"Islam has always been part of America," 2010 

"...(the holiday) also reminds us of the many achievements and contributions of Muslim Americans to building the very fabric of our nation and strengthening the core of our democracy," 2014

"Islam has been woven into the fabric of our country since its founding," 2015

Barack Obama

Well, technically, He is right; Muslims have been indirectly responsible for a great deal of the early development of the United States armed services.

What Obama fails to acknowledge is that over two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson led the United States in a declared war on Islam.

 

Early in the eighteenth century, pirates terrorized the Mediterranean Sea and large portions of the North Atlantic Ocean.  They attacked every ship they encountered and held the crews for exorbitant ransoms.  Those they took hostage were subjected to barbaric treatment and wrote heart-breaking letters home, begging their governments and family members to pay whatever their captors demanded. 

And guess who those Pirates of the Caribbean were?  They were not the glamorized, politically correct characters as portrayed by Disney (Disney's anti-traditional family, queer tolerant, Muslim loving, anti-Christian, history revisionist PC agenda is another topic for another blog post).  The pirates were Islamic Muslim terrorists.

Those Mohammadan extortionists of the high seas represented the Islamic nations of Tripoli, Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers – collectively referred to as the Barbary Coast – and presented a dangerous and unprovoked threat to the new American Republic.

Before the Revolutionary War, U.S. merchant ships had been under the protection of Great Britain.  When the U.S. declared its independence and entered into war, the ships of the United States were protected by France.  However, once the war was won,  America was faced with the need to protect its own fleets.  So, in a real sense, we can credit the Muslims with the birth of the U.S. Navy.

Beginning in 1784, seventeen years before he was elected president, Thomas Jefferson was appointed America’s Minister to France.  That same year, the U.S. Congress sought to appease its Muslim adversaries by following in the footsteps of European nations which paid bribes to the Barbary States, rather than engaging them in war.   It was a stupid idea then and it is a stupid idea now. Appeasement doesn't work.

In July of 1785, Algerian pirates captured American ships and demanded an unheard-of ransom of $60,000.  It was a plain and simple case of extortion, and Thomas Jefferson was vehemently opposed to any further payments.  Instead, he proposed, to Congress, the formation of a coalition of allied nations who together could force the barbaric Islamic states into peace.  A disinterested Congress decided to pay the ransom.

In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met with Tripoli’s ambassador to Great Britain to determine by what right his nation attacked American ships and enslaved American citizens, and why Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts.  The two future presidents reported that Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja had answered that Islam "was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Quran, 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 (Muslim) who should be slain in Battle was sure to go to Paradise."

Despite this stunning admission of premeditated violence against non-Muslim nations, as well as the objections of many notable American leaders, including George Washington, who warned that caving in was both wrong and would only further embolden the enemy, for the following fifteen years, the American government paid the Muslims millions of dollars for the safe passage of American ships or the return of American hostages. The payments in ransom and tribute amounted to over twenty percent of the United States government annual revenues in 1800.

Jefferson was disgusted.  Shortly after his being sworn in as the third President of the United States in 1801, the Pasha of Tripoli sent him a note demanding the immediate payment of $225,000 plus $25,000 a year for every year forthcoming.  That changed everything.

Jefferson let the Pasha know what he could do with his demand.  The Pasha responded by cutting down the flagpole at the American consulate and declared war on the United States.  Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers immediately followed suit. 

Until then, Jefferson, had been against raising an American naval force for anything other than our own coastal defense.  But having watched his nation be cowed by Islamic terrorists for long enough, he decided that it was finally time to meet force with force.

He dispatched a squadron of frigates to the Mediterranean and taught the Muslim nations of the Barbary Coast a lesson he hoped they would never forget.  Congress authorized Jefferson to empower U.S. ships to seize all vessels and goods of the Pasha of Tripoli and to “cause to be done all other acts of precaution or hostility as the state of war would justify.”

When Algiers and Tunis, which were both accustomed to American cowardice and acquiescence, saw the newly independent United States had both the will and the right to strike back, they quickly abandoned their allegiance to Tripoli. 

The war with Tripoli lasted for four more years and raged up again in 1815.  The presence and bravery of the U.S. Marine Corps in these wars led to the line “to the shores of Tripoli” in the Marine Hymn, and they would forever be known as “leathernecks” for the leather collars of their uniforms, designed to prevent their heads from being cut off by the Muslim scimitars when boarding enemy ships.

Islam, and what its Barbary followers justified doing in the name of Allah and the prophet, Mohammed, disturbed Jefferson quite deeply.  America had a tradition of religious tolerance.  Jefferson, himself, had co-authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, but fundamentalist Islam was like no other religion the world had ever seen.  A supremacist religion, whose holy book not only condoned but mandated violence against unbelievers was unacceptable to him.  His greatest fear was that someday this brand of Islam would return and pose an even greater threat to the United States.

It should bother every American, that Muslims have brought about women-only classes and swimming times at taxpayer-funded universities and public pools; that Christians, Jews, and Hindus have been banned from serving on juries where Muslim defendants are being judged.  Piggy banks and Porky Pig tissue dispensers have been banned from workplaces because they offend Islamist sensibilities.   Ice cream has been discontinued at certain Burger King locations because the picture on the wrapper looks similar to the Arabic script for Allah.  Public schools are pulling pork from their menus, and on and on it goes.

It’s death by a thousand cuts, or inch-by-inch as some refer to it, and most Americans have no idea of their history.  This battle is being waged every day across America.  By not fighting back, by allowing groups to obfuscate what is really happening, and not insisting that the Islamists adapt to our own culture, the United States is cutting its own throat with a politically correct knife, and helping to further the Islamists agenda.  Sadly, it appears that today’s America would rather be politically correct than victorious.

For further information, Google Thomas Jefferson vs the Muslim World here.

Edited and commented by Ralph M. Petersen

Most of the above content was accumulated and composed by either Sean Rose or 
Floyd Farar- Cold War Era, US Navy veteran Floyd Farar but I can't tell which for sure.