Thomas Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates

Thomas Jefferson Versus the Muslim Pirates: America’s first confrontation with the Islamic world helped forge a new nation’s character.  (#Rashida #Jefferson #Quran #Irony )

America’s first and second foreign wars were against Muslim states. First under Jefferson and then Madison.

When Thomas Jefferson was inaugurated in March of 1801, he inherited the then ongoing terror by the Barbary Muslim states (the Ottoman Regencies of Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli, along with independent Morocco). The Europeans had staved off war with the Muslim powers through treaties that involved annual payments of tribute (jizya). Jefferson refused to be held hostage to Muslim rulers seizing American merchant ships, holding the crews for ransom, demanding the U.S. pay jizya to the Barbary rulers. Jefferson went to war and won.  Hence the resounding declaration in the Anthem of the United States Marines, the Marines’ Hymn, ‘From the Halls of Montezuma / To the Shores of Tripoli’ as in Libya.

The Barbary jihad piracy which confronted America soon after our nation was established (i.e.,  between 1786-1815), was an enduring, formidable enterprise. During the 16th and 17thcenturies, as many Europeans were captured, sold, and enslaved by the Barbary corsairs as were West Africans made captive and shipped for plantation labor in the Americas by European slave traders. Robert Davis’methodical enumeration indicates that between one, and one and one-quarter million white European Christians were enslaved by the Barbary Muslims from 1530 through 1780.

“Several muslim countries along the North African coast had established the tradition of plundering the ships of European and American merchants in the western Mediterranean and eastern Atlantic, capturing the crews and then demanding ransom from the respective governments for their release. In a joint message to their superiors in Congress, Adams and Jefferson described the audacity of these terrorist attacks, pirates leaping onto defenseless ships with daggers clenched in their teeth. They had asked the ambassador from Tripoli, Adams and Jefferson explained, on what grounds these outrageous acts of unbridled savagery could be justified: “The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of the prophet, that it was written in their koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their [islams] 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….”