Gee, why did my gov't school history book leave this out? I'm truly not baffled.
"The war in which we fight today is the longest conflict in human history."
And the other side has almost invariably been the aggressor- they only make peace when they need time to regroup.
Yup...appeasement never works...it didn't work with the Barbary Pirates, it didn't work with Hitler, and it's not going to work now.
We will only have true peace when our enemies are destroyed.
We need to take the terrorists and put them on an Alabama chain gang with female prison guards. And every time one of them tries to bow towards Mecca, spray him with pigs blood.
And before Jefferson, the British Empire should have taken care of the problem when they had the chance back in the 1600s.
This is the upshot to paying ransom, tribute, blood money etc. It just funds more of the same, over and over and over. You get weaker and the enemy gets stronger as he parasitizes you.
But the head in the sand types will insist that George
Washington or Adams signed a Treaty that declares the
United States was never a Christian nation. (Treaty of
Tripoli with it's bogus Article 11-not seen in the Arabic
translation -WHY?) I so agree this war began as Farah suggests before we became a nation. Washington and Adams
believed that appeasement or paying the Islamic Ransom was
the way to go.They pretended to see a "diplomatic" solution.
When one gets more of the behavior that is rewarded. The Muslims base their use of terror and human bondage upon the
teaching of their Holy Books. And America refuses to learn
Anything from either History -or Religion.
Today, the liberal Thomas Jefferson couldn't get himself elected Senator from Connecticut.
puhleeze, islam is a religion of pieces of eight.
One of the best essays I have found on the liberal intellectual abandonment of "Anti-fascism," of whom Winston Churchill and Dwight D. Eisenhower were among the greatest exponents,is viewable here. What an excellent primer to explain the "tom foolery" we must presently undergo in dealing with the Lebanon crisis:
Intellectuals and Anti-Fascism: For a Critical Historization
Enzo Traverso
[from New Politics, vol. 9, no. 4 (new series), whole no. 36, Winter 2004]
http://www.wpunj.edu/newpol/issue36/Traverso36.htm
Quote:
If we do not think of democracy as a simple procedural norm -- according to the vision of Hans Kelsen and Norberto Bobbio -- but as an historical conquest, we should deduce from this that it is impossible to be democratic, at this end of the twentieth century, without being at the same time antifascist. A "non-anti-fascist" democracy would be fragile indeed, a luxury that continental Europe, which was well acquainted with Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, cannot allow itself. That is a lesson that the history of the intellectual antifascist resistance should have taught us, clearly and definitively.
Unquote
Thank you for this post.
Farah does not have his history straight or is deliberately distorting the truth. Jefferson's followers in the Congress forced the Federalist administration to cut its plans for new warships in half which severely limited its ability to deal with pirates as well as the Frence and the British.
The Democrats were concerned that such a force might be used to fight their foreign allies, the Jacobins, and many were ready to fight a civil war here to prevent that.
Not only did Jefferson and his followers delay the founding of Military academies to educate officers it howled inanely about the dangers of a standing army and cut it. This ideological blindness weakened American military power and potential for the next decade. Consequently we entered the War of 1812 with little military power which allowed 5,000 British troops to burn the National Capital.
Jefferson opposed not merely a navy but American shipping carrying American goods. He wanted foreign ships to do it in a cowardly attempt to avoid problems with other countries. His idea of a navy was limited to gunboats which patrolled only our coasts. Navies produced foreign conflicts to his mind. He tried to withdraw America from trade with Europe through an embargo which brought the economy to its knees for several years resulting in massive unemployment and the collapse of our shipping industry.
Jefferson never fought a war without bending over backwards repeatedly and to paint him as militantly proposing using force against the Muslims is revisionism at its worst. He was truely the ancestor of today's Party of Treason and America's most overrated president.
I never knew the Barbary Pirates were religiously motivated, nor that they called themselves mujahadeen. I did know they were muzzies and that they took slaves. White slaves.
Jefferson would continue to pay tribute to other Barbary States to the end of his second term, and his successor, James Madison, would still be paying tribute up until 1816. In 1816, the British warship HMS Queen Charlotte, at the head of a combined Anglo-Dutch fleet, poured 500 tons of munitions into the town of Algiers, obliterating the Algerine navy and damaging or destroying every building in town and killing an estimated 5,000 - 8,000 citizens and soldiers. The Bey surrendered all the slaves he had (1,642), promised never to enslave Christians again, and handed over 382,500 Austrian thalers, in sacks of 1,000 each, which amounted to over a 1 million.