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Something to consider
By Ted Sampley

What Thomas Jefferson learned from the Muslim book of jihad

U.S. Veteran Dispatch
January 2007

Democrat Keith Ellison is now officially the first Muslim United States
congressman.
True to his pledge, he placed his hand on the Quran, the muslim book of
jihad and pledged his allegiance to the United States during his
ceremonial swearing-in.

Capitol Hill staff said Ellison's swearing-in photo opportunity drew
more media than they had ever seen in the history of the U.S. House.
Ellison represents the 5th Congressional District of Minnesota.

The Quran Ellison used was no ordinary book. It once belonged to Thomas
Jefferson, third president of the United States and one of America's
founding fathers. Ellison borrowed it from the Rare Book Section of the
Library of Congress. It was one of the 6,500 Jefferson books archived in
the library.

Ellison, who was born in Detroit and converted to Islam while in
college, said he chose to use Jefferson's Quran because it showed that
"a visionary like Jefferson" believed that wisdom could be gleaned from
many sources.

There is no doubt Ellison was right about Jefferson believing wisdom
could be "gleaned"
from the Muslim Quran. At the time Jefferson owned the book, he needed
to know everything possible about Muslims because he was about to
advocate war against the Islamic "Barbary" states of Morocco, Algeria,
Tunisia and Tripoli.

Ellison's use of Jefferson's Quran as a prop illuminates a subject once
well-known in the history of the United States, but, which today, mostly
forgotten - the Muslim pirate slavers who over many centuries enslaved
millions of Africans and tens of thousands of Christian Europeans and
Americans in the Islamic "Barbary" states.

Over the course of 10 centuries, Muslim pirates cruised the African and
Mediterranean coastline, pillaging villages and seizing slaves.

The taking of slaves in pre-dawn raids on unsuspecting coastal villages
had a high casualty rate. It was typical of Muslim raiders to kill off
the "non-Muslim" older men and women so the preferred "booty" of only
young women and children could be collected.

Young non-Muslim women were targeted because of their value as
concubines in Islamic markets.

Islamic law provides for the sexual interests of Muslim men by allowing
them to take as many as four wives at one time and to have as many
concubines as their fortunes allow.

Boys,as young as 9 or 10 years old,were often mutilated to create
eunuchs who would bring higher prices in the slave markets of the Middle
East. Muslim slave traders created "eunuch stations" along major African
slave routes so the necessary surgery could be performed.
It was estimated that only a small number of the boys subjected to the
mutilation survived after the surgery.

When American colonists rebelled against British rule in 1776, American
merchant ships lost Royal Navy protection. With no American Navy for
protection, American ships were attacked and their Christian crews
enslaved by Muslim pirates operating under the control of the "Dey of
Algiers"--an Islamist warlord ruling Algeria.

Because American commerce in the Mediterranean was being destroyed by
the pirates, the Continental Congress agreed in 1784 to negotiate
treaties with the four Barbary States.
Congress appointed a special commission of John Adams, Thomas Jefferson,
and Benjamin Franklin, to oversee the negotiations.

Lacking the ability to protect its merchant ships in the Mediterranean,
the new America government tried to appease Muslim slavers by agreeing
to pay tribute and ransoms in order to retrieve seized American ships
and buy the freedom of enslaved sailors.

Adams argued in favor of paying tribute as the cheapest way to get
American commerce in the Mediterranean moving again. Jefferson was
opposed. He believed there would be no end to the demands for tribute
and wanted matters settled "through the medium of war." He proposed a
league of trading nations to force an end to Muslim piracy.

In 1786, Jefferson, then the American ambassador to France, and Adams,
the American ambassador to Britain, met in London with Sidi Haji Abdul
Rahman Adja, the "Dey of Algiers"
ambassador to Britain.

The Americans wanted to negotiate a peace treaty based on Congress' vote
to appease.

During the meeting Jefferson and Adams asked the Dey's ambassador why
Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with which they
had no previous contacts.

In a later meeting with the American Congress, the two future presidents
reported that Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja had answered Islam
"was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their
Quran, that all nations who didn't 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."

For the following 15 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 20
percent of United States government annual revenues in 1800.

Not long after Jefferson's inauguration as president in 1801, he
dispatched a group of frigates to defend American interests in the
Mediterranean, and informed Congress.

Declaring that America was going to spend "millions for defense but not
one cent for tribute," Jefferson pressed the issue by deploying American
Marines and many of America's best warships to the Muslim Barbary Coast.

The USS Constitution, USS Constellation, USS Philadelphia, USS
Chesapeake, USS Argus, USS Syren and USS Intrepid all saw action.

In 1805, American Marines marched across the dessert from Egypt into
Tripolitania, forcing the surrender of Tripoli and the freeing of all
American slaves.

During the Jefferson administration, the Muslim Barbary States, as a
result of intense American naval bombardment and raids by Marines,
finally officially agreed to abandon slavery and piracy.

Jefferson's victory over the Muslims lives on today in the Marine Hymn,
with the line, "From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli, we
will fight our country's battles on the land as on the sea."

It wasn't until 1815 that the problem was fully settled by the total
defeat of all the Muslim slave trading pirates.

Jefferson had been right. The "medium of war" was the only way to put an
end to the Muslim problem.
Mr. Ellison was right about Jefferson. He was a "visionary" wise enough
to read and learn about the enemy from their own Muslim book of jihad.
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