Replies

And the Muslims? By 1800, the annual tribute and ransom payments first agreed in the mid-1780s amounted to about $1 million--20% of the federal budget. (For fiscal year 2007, 20 percent of U.S. revenues would equal $560 billion.)

In May, 1801 Yussif Karamanli, the Pasha of Tripoli, declared war on America by chopping down the flagpole in front of the U.S. Consulate. Seventeen years after appeasement and tribute payments had begun, President Thomas Jefferson led America into the First Barbary War.

From May of 1801 to June 10, 1805, sailors and Marines of the young American nation fought battles immortalized in a line of the Marine Hymn: “to the shores of Tripoli.”

As American forces approached Tripoli on land threatening to capture it, Karamanli suddenly became interested in negotiations. The war ended with a treaty exchanging prisoners, Americans giving Karamanli another $60,000 in ransom and an agreement from the Muslims to cease attacks on U.S. ships.

But for a Muslim to keep his word to an infidel at the expense of opportunities to expand Islamic power is the Islamic equivalent of a mortal sin. In 1807, Muslim pirate attacks on American ships began anew.

As a result Americans led by President James Madison fought Algerians in the Second Barbary War in 1815, leading to another treaty under which the Muslims paid American $10,000 for damages.

The Algerian ruler almost immediately repudiated the new treaty after the U.S. departure and again began piracy and the enslavement of captured Christian sailors necessitating an 1816 Anglo-Dutch shelling of Algiers and ultimately the colonization of Algeria in 1830 and Tunisia in 1881 by France and Libya in 1911 by Italy.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=26295