Wednesday, August 10, 2016

Islamic Paradise and Fanatical Jihad

 Mulay_Ahmed RS   


For centuries, pirates sponsored by the Muslim Ottoman Empire’s four provinces on the North African (Barbary) coast of the Mediterranean had preyed on European shipping. These Barbary Pirates from Tripoli, Algiers, Tunis, and the Sultanate of Morocco had begun capturing American ships and ransoming their crews in 1784. Because the new American nation had no Navy, the Spanish advised the American Minister to France, Thomas Jefferson, to pay the Barbary Pirates tribute as economic protection. In fact, the Tripoli Pirates threatened war against the United States unless they paid tribute. In March 1786, Jefferson and John Adams met with Tripoli’s envoy to London. They asked him by what right Tripoli and the other Barbary Pirate provinces had to make war on nations that had done them no injury. His answer, according to Jefferson, was a classic brief on the Islamic doctrines of Paradise as a reward for Jihad:

“The right was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered 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 Mussulman [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”

Jefferson and Adams recommended against paying a tribute, rightly reasoning that it would only encourage more piracy. Congress, however, did not feel they had the means to resist. When Jefferson became President in 1801, he rejected paying tribute to pirates. He won the war with a strengthened U.S. Navy and Marine Corp in 1804, remembered ever after with the Marine Corp Hymn celebrating victory on “the Shores of Tripoli.”

More @ The Tribune

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