If you have ever felt like giving in to the hate America rhetoric, that Islam attacked us because of how we treated them. Then you have not read your history book
By de Andréa
The hate America media preys on the ignorant, the sad news is, that the majority of people are ignorant. Or worse yet, they are brainwashed with a lie.
The U.S., all through history when it wasn’t defending itself against Islam, was actually defending Islam.
If you believe that 911 was the first time Islam attacked America and tha
t we deserved it, then this snippet of history is just for you.
The fallacy of grievance based terrorism
The fundamental premise of much scholarly examination and public discourse is that grievances with U.S. policies in the Middle East motivate Islamic terrorism. Such assumptions, thoroughly misunderstand the enemy and its nature. In reality, the conflict is sparked not by grievance but rather by Islamist ideology and the natural rights articulated during the “European Enlightenment” and the recent infiltration into U.S. political culture. Acquiescing to political grievances will not alter the fundamental incompatibility between the precepts of tolerance taught by the Philosopher Locke and current interpretations of Islam: Only Islam's fundamental reform or demise will resolve the conflict, and if one knows what the power is that drives Islam, then one also knows that the reformation of Islam is an oxymoron.
Many scholars mark the post-World War I partition of the Ottoman Empire as the origin of Islamist opposition to the West. The idea that the Middle East would be a tolerant, prosperous contributor to the global environment today if World War I victors had left intact the Ottoman Empire is a premise in the literature accompanying the rise of twentieth-century jihadism. Historian David Fromkin argued in his influential A Peace to End All Peace that present day Muslim unrest is the direct result of Winston Churchill's early twentieth-century decisions. British journalist Robert Fisk also holds British officials responsible although he prefers to blame Arthur Balfour, foreign secretary between 1916 and 1919.
Both authors are wrong, though, to base their theories of grievance on such arbitrary demarcation of eras. The roots of world jihadism date back to the 7th century AD and specifically its opposition to the United States as part of the non-Muslim West were cast long before World War I erupted. The interaction between the United States and Muslim states and societies dates back to American independence. Contemporary jihadism is not the result of accumulated grievance; rather it has for cultural reasons been an integral factor in Islamic societies' interaction with the United States.
The Die was Cast
Almost immediately after America’s independence, the U.S. government found itself in conflict with the Islamic Barbary sheikhdoms of Morocco, Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli. For centuries, these states filled their coffers by piracy, stealing cargoes, enslaving crew, and collecting ransom. European sea-going nations often entered into treaty and tribute arrangements with the Barbary leaders in order to buy immunity and curtail competition.
In 1784, Moroccan pirates hijacked the U.S. merchant ship Betsy in the Mediterranean and enslaved her crew. A year later, Algerian Muslim pirates seized two more vessels, the Maria from Boston and the Dauphin from Philadelphia. The U.S. ministers to England and France, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson oversaw a peace treaty with Morocco, but the Algerian leadership refused any accommodation. In 1796, President George Washington ordered construction of six warships to form a U.S. navy and to protect U.S. shipping from Barbary pirates.
In 1801, in the wake of an upsurge in piracy/jihadist terrorism, President Thomas Jefferson entered into war with Tripoli, bombarding the city three years later and winning the release of American hostages. Peace did not last. With the U.S. military embroiled in the War of 1812, Algerian pirates again began terrorizing American crewmen and disrupting U.S. trade. They miscalculated. In 1815, President James Madison dispatched a squadron of U.S. Navy frigates, which defeated the pirate fleet and won reparations from Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli.
Many historians consider the Barbary wars a sideshow relative to contemporaneous events such as the French Revolution, Napoleon's conquests, and the War of 1812, but the Barbary wars are significant to today's conflict. Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison each believed the Barbary wars to be a continuation of the American Revolution. The ground war in North America may have freed the United States from British tyranny, but the Barbary campaign was necessary to win the same freedom of action and commerce within the international community. The episode also crystallized perceptions of Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the American mind. While Americans did not perceive the Barbary wars as a conflict between Christianity and Islam per se, religion was an issue. More importantly the two sides fought, not over theological differences, but rather as a result of the divergent ideologies. Islam is more that a religion it is in fact a theocracy. Washington and Adams referred to the Muslim leaders as "nests of bandits" while Jefferson's and Madison's campaign literature called them "petty tyrants.” The "despotic Turk" became the antithesis of early American republican identity.
What Americans and Europeans saw as piracy, Barbary leaders justified as legitimate jihad. Jefferson related a conversation he had in Paris with Ambassador Abdrahaman of Tripoli who told him that all Christians are sinners in the context of the Qur'an and that it was a Muslim's "right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to enslave as many as they could take as prisoners. Islam gave great incentive to fighting infidels, Abdrahaman explained, because the Qur'an promised that making war against infidels ensured a Muslim paradise after death. Richard O'Brien, the imprisoned captain of the Philadelphia merchantman Dauphin and later the U.S. consul to Algiers, related similar conversations with ‘Ali Hasan, the ruler of Algiers. Ottoman leaders used the same rationale to justify the enslavement and trading of captives from the Balkans, Caucasus, and Ukraine.
The role that jihadi ideology played in the Barbary wars is documented with explicit references to jihad and holy war in the so-called treaties that U.S. officials finely entered into with Muslim rulers. Tunis and Algiers, as the western outposts of the Ottoman Empire, even described themselves to American envoys as the "frontier posts of jihad against European Christianity."
U.S. officials took a conciliatory attitude. Thinking that the North Africans were hypersensitive to the historic conflict between Islam and European Christianity, especially in the context of the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, U.S. officials bent over backwards to deny the religious and ideological nature of the conflict, especially to the Muslims themselves. They thought that religious conflict might jeopardize the commerce that the United States still hoped to find in the Mediterranean. In 1821, President John Quincy Adams was barely able to resist assisting the Greeks in their war of independence when both the American and European publics urged war with the Ottoman Empire. The founders possessed a deep conviction for religious tolerance and proudly explained in the short-lived 1797 treaty with Tripoli that the U.S. was not a Christian state at all but rather one which had no official religion and maintained laws forbidding the prohibition of religion. Perhaps their denial of the religious and ideological nature of the conflict foreshadowed the attitude many Washington policymakers adopt today. Then as now, it has become the basis of a fundamental misunderstanding of the root of the conflict.
The following, is a quote by John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States which clearly shows that in the 1820’s he had a handle on who and what Islam was.
“In the seventh century of the Christian era a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar [i.e., Muhammad] the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an imposter, proclaimed himself as a messenger from heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. Adopting from the sublime conception of Mosaic Law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE.... Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant… While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace on earth and good will towards men.” John Quincy Adams
The Barbary conflict was the beginning of continuous U.S. interaction with the Muslim Near and Middle East. While Jefferson and Madison believed that a continuous U.S. military presence in the Mediterranean was necessary to protect U.S. national interests, in 1831, President Andrew Jackson secured a treaty of amity and free trade with the Ottoman Empire leading the secretary of the navy to report seven years later that it was no longer necessary to keep a U.S. fleet in the Mediterranean. Three years after Washington withdrew the squadron; Ottoman privateers began raiding U.S. shipping, forcing the reconstitution of the fleet after the U.S. Civil War.
No longer, though, did the U.S. government feel content to view relations with Muslim governments only through a commercial lens. The Civil War interjected discussion of natural law and freedom into U.S. policy formulation. American missionaries increased their presence in the Muslim Middle East throughout the nineteenth century although Muslim prohibitions on conversion to Christianity led them to focus their efforts more on aid and education than on proselytization. Simultaneously, the Ottoman sultan and other Muslim rulers began to pursue more pronounced repression against both Christians and Jews. Intolerant, Islam gained ground on the Arabian Peninsula and in North Africa.
By 1840, the final year of his administration, and again during his unsuccessful campaign for a second term in 1848, Martin Van Buren expressed concern for the plight of Jews in the Ottoman Empire, which he called "the most anti-Semitic of countries." In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, strife between Muslims and Christians in the Balkans and in Istanbul led President Ulysses Grant to dispatch six warships to the waterways around the city to ensure the safety of Americans. In 1882, President Chester Arthur dispatched the Mediterranean Squadron to Alexandria to help evacuate Americans and Europeans following anti-Christian violence in the city. President Grover Cleveland even proposed an Anglo-American intervention in the Ottoman Empire to assist Armenian Christians against Muslim violence. In 1903, an assassination attempt on the U.S. consul in Beirut amid anti-Christian rioting led President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt to dispatch marines to the city. A few months later, marines landed in Tangiers after the kidnapping of a Greek businessman from the U.S. consulate there. Behind each incident was Muslim violence toward minority Christian and Jewish communities.
The nineteenth century foreshadowed increasing conflict between the United States and Muslim Middle Eastern countries. The failure of effective Ottoman political reform coupled with the evolution of Islamic reform toward greater Islamism and less tolerance set up a conflict between the American notion that governments rule at the consent of the governed and the dominant attitude among Muslim potentates who subscribed to an intolerant, coercive, anti-Semitic, and anti-Christian ideology.
Twentieth-century Continuity
Into the early twentieth century, successive U.S. administrations sought to remain aloof from Arab and Ottoman politics. President Woodrow Wilson did not include the Ottoman Empire in the U.S. declaration of war against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an omission he said was to mitigate the risk of Ottoman retaliation against its Christian or Jewish populations, thereby implying his sense that the Porte saw the United States through a religious rather than just diplomatic lens.
The U.S. played on both sides
During the Cold War, "armed neutrality" could no longer protect U.S. strategic interests. Successive administrations and the State Department pursued a "pro-Arab" policy in the region to stymie the expansion of Soviet influence into those countries. In a January 1945 correspondence, Dean Acheson, secretary of state and chief architect of the U.S. Cold War Soviet containment policy, argued for a pro-Arab tilt to U.S. policy in order to deny the Soviet Union any possible inroads into the region. Successive administrations embraced the policy. Dwight D. Eisenhower sided with Gamal Abdul Nasser against Israel, France, and Great Britain during the 1956 Suez crisis.
While the U.S. government often stayed on the sidelines, in eleven of the twelve major Cold War and immediate post-Cold War conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims, Muslims and secular forces, or Arabs and non-Arabs, the U.S. government supported the former group. Washington, for example, backed the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet Red Army in the 1980s and supported Bosnian Muslims against Serbs and Croats.
U.S. administrations have even leaned hard on Israel, preventing the Jewish state's destruction of the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian armies in 1967; ignoring the Israeli government's pleas not to sell state-of-the-art weaponry to Saudi Arabia; and pressuring for concessions to the Palestinian Authority despite its embrace of terrorism. The only exception to Washington's pro-Arab tilt has been U.S. diplomatic intervention in support of Israel at the United Nations and White House commitment to maintain Israel's qualitative military edge.
During the six decades since Washington abandoned its "armed neutrality" policy in favor of deeper relations with Arab states, friction has increased between U.S. officials and Islamist ideologues. The pro-Arab tilt Washington pursued during the Cold War to stymie Soviet intrigues and maintain energy security, meant partnership with non-democratic regimes and often corrupt rulers in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and the Persian Gulf emirates.
Islamists and other opposition groups argued that Washington should support the people and not autocrats. But such rhetoric is laid bare by the antagonism that U.S. support for Israel engendered among many of these self-professed democrats. Israel is the only democracy in the region. Its citizens, 17 percent of whom are Muslim, enjoy basic civil liberties regardless of their faith and, even in the West Bank, enjoy a standard of living far superior to that of Egyptians and Jordanians.
Jihadi Antipathy
Both the United States and Israel have become the focus of Islamists' irrational enmity as Islamist thinkers and Arab demagogues deflect any internal responsibility for Muslim countries' woes. This was a common theme both of Sayyid Qutb, the leading Muslim Brotherhood ideologue and, later, Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden.
In Knowing the Enemy, Mary Habeck, a professor of military history at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, documents how Qutb and bin Laden spread a message that the decline of majority Muslim polities is not the result of flaws within Islam itself but is instead the deliberate effort of the United States and the Jews. Today Pakistani madrassas (Islamic schools) alone spin out more than one million graduates per year steeped in jihadi aggressive terror ideology.
Underlying much basic jihadi Islamic thought is antipathy toward democracy. Both Qutb and bin Laden argued that democracy is not a solution to inequity and corruption in Islamic societies. In a video that marked the sixth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, bin Laden said, "It has now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of the democratic system and how it plays with the interest of the peoples and their bloody sacrificing of soldiers and populations to achieve the interests of major corporations."
While some Islamists—such as the Muslim Brotherhood both in Egypt and now infiltrated here in America or Muhammad Khatami in Iran—speak of their embrace of democracy, seldom do they include Enlightenment concepts such as tolerance, rule-of-law, and property rights. They do not accept, as did the U.S. founding fathers, that people are endowed with both the natural right to freedom from coercion and the liberty to improve their lives. In practice, then, regardless of their rhetoric, they not only eschew democracy they will overthrow it.
It is essential that the grand strategy of the United States addresses this basic conflict of interest. The present conflict is not new. And it is religious. Believing that only a few "rogue extremists" have misappropriated the religion is both naïve and counterfactual. U.S. and Western leaders must be cognizant of the reality that jihadist are a religious phenomenon that has grown popular and powerful enough to threaten the continued progress of the American experiment and the European Enlightenment, and we also recognize that it is commanded by the Quran, and therefore will always be the agenda of Islam.
In the new grand strategy to defeat Islamic jihadism, America may try to campaign, through its scholars and theologians if appropriate, to encourage and facilitate imams and other Islamic religious authority figures to reform Islam in a forward direction, one that breaks from the past and encourages tolerance, the rule of law, free inquiry, and free markets but it is an effort in futility, because Islam would not just have to reform, it would have to give up its entire religion.
How should the United States revitalize its strategy? At home, the U.S. government must first remove the Muslims from our country. Would we have allowed, or better yet, did we allow, Nazis in our country during the Second War? Of course not. Then we need to better educate and explain the conflict to the general audience. Education at all levels should inculcate U.S. citizens in the history, philosophy, mechanics, virtues, responsibilities, and achievements of the Western approach to freedom, liberty, and the free market. Tolerance and diversity does not mean the acceptance of oppression and tyranny. Such an effort would entail reinstalling the truth of this subject matter into the curricula of public schools and disallow the Muslim propaganda.
The strategic leadership of the nation should redirect the public education effort, much as the founders did in the eighteenth century. The Federalist Papers, generally attributed to James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, are prototypical examples of effective strategic communications that aimed, among other things, to create a government strong enough to defend itself against the Barbary pirates.
Washington should not apologize for supporting regional countries that seek peace, prosperity, and the improved well-being of their citizens. To do otherwise fuels the Muslim jihadi rhetoric that seeks to oppress people throughout the world.
Another requirement is for the West to embark on, is a radical program to redefine how its economies obtain and distribute energy. Former director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey argues that denying Jihadists the use of oil as a weapon against the United States and the West should be Washington's highest priority.
Finally, the history of U.S. interaction with Muslim politics shows military weakness and the inability to project. The sign of weakness has consistently led jihadist Muslim and kleptocrats to launch attacks against the U.S. and our interests.
THE BOTTOM LINE: If you were one of these Hate America hippies, I hope this little bit of factual history changes your course just a tad. If however you have been programmed by the academic hate America gurus then no amount of documented facts are likely to help.
By de Andréa
The hate America media preys on the ignorant, the sad news is, that the majority of people are ignorant. Or worse yet, they are brainwashed with a lie.
The U.S., all through history when it wasn’t defending itself against Islam, was actually defending Islam.
If you believe that 911 was the first time Islam attacked America and tha
t we deserved it, then this snippet of history is just for you.The fallacy of grievance based terrorism
The fundamental premise of much scholarly examination and public discourse is that grievances with U.S. policies in the Middle East motivate Islamic terrorism. Such assumptions, thoroughly misunderstand the enemy and its nature. In reality, the conflict is sparked not by grievance but rather by Islamist ideology and the natural rights articulated during the “European Enlightenment” and the recent infiltration into U.S. political culture. Acquiescing to political grievances will not alter the fundamental incompatibility between the precepts of tolerance taught by the Philosopher Locke and current interpretations of Islam: Only Islam's fundamental reform or demise will resolve the conflict, and if one knows what the power is that drives Islam, then one also knows that the reformation of Islam is an oxymoron.
Many scholars mark the post-World War I partition of the Ottoman Empire as the origin of Islamist opposition to the West. The idea that the Middle East would be a tolerant, prosperous contributor to the global environment today if World War I victors had left intact the Ottoman Empire is a premise in the literature accompanying the rise of twentieth-century jihadism. Historian David Fromkin argued in his influential A Peace to End All Peace that present day Muslim unrest is the direct result of Winston Churchill's early twentieth-century decisions. British journalist Robert Fisk also holds British officials responsible although he prefers to blame Arthur Balfour, foreign secretary between 1916 and 1919.
Both authors are wrong, though, to base their theories of grievance on such arbitrary demarcation of eras. The roots of world jihadism date back to the 7th century AD and specifically its opposition to the United States as part of the non-Muslim West were cast long before World War I erupted. The interaction between the United States and Muslim states and societies dates back to American independence. Contemporary jihadism is not the result of accumulated grievance; rather it has for cultural reasons been an integral factor in Islamic societies' interaction with the United States.
The Die was Cast
Almost immediately after America’s independence, the U.S. government found itself in conflict with the Islamic Barbary sheikhdoms of Morocco, Tunis, Algiers, and Tripoli. For centuries, these states filled their coffers by piracy, stealing cargoes, enslaving crew, and collecting ransom. European sea-going nations often entered into treaty and tribute arrangements with the Barbary leaders in order to buy immunity and curtail competition.
In 1784, Moroccan pirates hijacked the U.S. merchant ship Betsy in the Mediterranean and enslaved her crew. A year later, Algerian Muslim pirates seized two more vessels, the Maria from Boston and the Dauphin from Philadelphia. The U.S. ministers to England and France, John Adams and Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson oversaw a peace treaty with Morocco, but the Algerian leadership refused any accommodation. In 1796, President George Washington ordered construction of six warships to form a U.S. navy and to protect U.S. shipping from Barbary pirates.
In 1801, in the wake of an upsurge in piracy/jihadist terrorism, President Thomas Jefferson entered into war with Tripoli, bombarding the city three years later and winning the release of American hostages. Peace did not last. With the U.S. military embroiled in the War of 1812, Algerian pirates again began terrorizing American crewmen and disrupting U.S. trade. They miscalculated. In 1815, President James Madison dispatched a squadron of U.S. Navy frigates, which defeated the pirate fleet and won reparations from Algiers, Tunis, and Tripoli.
Many historians consider the Barbary wars a sideshow relative to contemporaneous events such as the French Revolution, Napoleon's conquests, and the War of 1812, but the Barbary wars are significant to today's conflict. Franklin, Washington, Adams, Jefferson, and Madison each believed the Barbary wars to be a continuation of the American Revolution. The ground war in North America may have freed the United States from British tyranny, but the Barbary campaign was necessary to win the same freedom of action and commerce within the international community. The episode also crystallized perceptions of Islam and the Ottoman Empire in the American mind. While Americans did not perceive the Barbary wars as a conflict between Christianity and Islam per se, religion was an issue. More importantly the two sides fought, not over theological differences, but rather as a result of the divergent ideologies. Islam is more that a religion it is in fact a theocracy. Washington and Adams referred to the Muslim leaders as "nests of bandits" while Jefferson's and Madison's campaign literature called them "petty tyrants.” The "despotic Turk" became the antithesis of early American republican identity.
What Americans and Europeans saw as piracy, Barbary leaders justified as legitimate jihad. Jefferson related a conversation he had in Paris with Ambassador Abdrahaman of Tripoli who told him that all Christians are sinners in the context of the Qur'an and that it was a Muslim's "right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to enslave as many as they could take as prisoners. Islam gave great incentive to fighting infidels, Abdrahaman explained, because the Qur'an promised that making war against infidels ensured a Muslim paradise after death. Richard O'Brien, the imprisoned captain of the Philadelphia merchantman Dauphin and later the U.S. consul to Algiers, related similar conversations with ‘Ali Hasan, the ruler of Algiers. Ottoman leaders used the same rationale to justify the enslavement and trading of captives from the Balkans, Caucasus, and Ukraine.
The role that jihadi ideology played in the Barbary wars is documented with explicit references to jihad and holy war in the so-called treaties that U.S. officials finely entered into with Muslim rulers. Tunis and Algiers, as the western outposts of the Ottoman Empire, even described themselves to American envoys as the "frontier posts of jihad against European Christianity."
U.S. officials took a conciliatory attitude. Thinking that the North Africans were hypersensitive to the historic conflict between Islam and European Christianity, especially in the context of the expulsion of the Moors from Spain, U.S. officials bent over backwards to deny the religious and ideological nature of the conflict, especially to the Muslims themselves. They thought that religious conflict might jeopardize the commerce that the United States still hoped to find in the Mediterranean. In 1821, President John Quincy Adams was barely able to resist assisting the Greeks in their war of independence when both the American and European publics urged war with the Ottoman Empire. The founders possessed a deep conviction for religious tolerance and proudly explained in the short-lived 1797 treaty with Tripoli that the U.S. was not a Christian state at all but rather one which had no official religion and maintained laws forbidding the prohibition of religion. Perhaps their denial of the religious and ideological nature of the conflict foreshadowed the attitude many Washington policymakers adopt today. Then as now, it has become the basis of a fundamental misunderstanding of the root of the conflict.
The following, is a quote by John Quincy Adams, the sixth president of the United States which clearly shows that in the 1820’s he had a handle on who and what Islam was.
“In the seventh century of the Christian era a wandering Arab of the lineage of Hagar [i.e., Muhammad] the Egyptian, combining the powers of transcendent genius, with preternatural energy of a fanatic, and the fraudulent spirit of an imposter, proclaimed himself as a messenger from heaven, and spread desolation and delusion over an extensive portion of the earth. Adopting from the sublime conception of Mosaic Law, the doctrine of one omnipotent God; he connected indissolubly with it, the audacious falsehood, that he was himself his prophet and apostle. Adopting from the new Revelation of Jesus, the faith and hope of immortal life and of future retribution, he humbled it to the dust by adapting all the rewards of his religion to the gratification of the sexual passion. He poisoned the sources of human felicity at the fountain, by degrading the condition of the female sex, and the allowance of polygamy; and he declared undistinguishing and exterminating war, as a part of his religion, against all the rest of mankind. THE ESSENCE OF HIS DOCTRINE WAS VIOLENCE AND LUST: TO EXALT THE BRUTAL OVER THE SPIRITUAL PART OF HUMAN NATURE.... Between these two religions, thus contrasted in their characters, a war of twelve hundred years has already raged. The war is yet flagrant… While the merciless and dissolute dogmas of the false prophet shall furnish motives to human action, there can never be peace on earth and good will towards men.” John Quincy Adams
The Barbary conflict was the beginning of continuous U.S. interaction with the Muslim Near and Middle East. While Jefferson and Madison believed that a continuous U.S. military presence in the Mediterranean was necessary to protect U.S. national interests, in 1831, President Andrew Jackson secured a treaty of amity and free trade with the Ottoman Empire leading the secretary of the navy to report seven years later that it was no longer necessary to keep a U.S. fleet in the Mediterranean. Three years after Washington withdrew the squadron; Ottoman privateers began raiding U.S. shipping, forcing the reconstitution of the fleet after the U.S. Civil War.
No longer, though, did the U.S. government feel content to view relations with Muslim governments only through a commercial lens. The Civil War interjected discussion of natural law and freedom into U.S. policy formulation. American missionaries increased their presence in the Muslim Middle East throughout the nineteenth century although Muslim prohibitions on conversion to Christianity led them to focus their efforts more on aid and education than on proselytization. Simultaneously, the Ottoman sultan and other Muslim rulers began to pursue more pronounced repression against both Christians and Jews. Intolerant, Islam gained ground on the Arabian Peninsula and in North Africa.
By 1840, the final year of his administration, and again during his unsuccessful campaign for a second term in 1848, Martin Van Buren expressed concern for the plight of Jews in the Ottoman Empire, which he called "the most anti-Semitic of countries." In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, strife between Muslims and Christians in the Balkans and in Istanbul led President Ulysses Grant to dispatch six warships to the waterways around the city to ensure the safety of Americans. In 1882, President Chester Arthur dispatched the Mediterranean Squadron to Alexandria to help evacuate Americans and Europeans following anti-Christian violence in the city. President Grover Cleveland even proposed an Anglo-American intervention in the Ottoman Empire to assist Armenian Christians against Muslim violence. In 1903, an assassination attempt on the U.S. consul in Beirut amid anti-Christian rioting led President Theodore (Teddy) Roosevelt to dispatch marines to the city. A few months later, marines landed in Tangiers after the kidnapping of a Greek businessman from the U.S. consulate there. Behind each incident was Muslim violence toward minority Christian and Jewish communities.
The nineteenth century foreshadowed increasing conflict between the United States and Muslim Middle Eastern countries. The failure of effective Ottoman political reform coupled with the evolution of Islamic reform toward greater Islamism and less tolerance set up a conflict between the American notion that governments rule at the consent of the governed and the dominant attitude among Muslim potentates who subscribed to an intolerant, coercive, anti-Semitic, and anti-Christian ideology.
Twentieth-century Continuity
Into the early twentieth century, successive U.S. administrations sought to remain aloof from Arab and Ottoman politics. President Woodrow Wilson did not include the Ottoman Empire in the U.S. declaration of war against Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an omission he said was to mitigate the risk of Ottoman retaliation against its Christian or Jewish populations, thereby implying his sense that the Porte saw the United States through a religious rather than just diplomatic lens.
The U.S. played on both sides
During the Cold War, "armed neutrality" could no longer protect U.S. strategic interests. Successive administrations and the State Department pursued a "pro-Arab" policy in the region to stymie the expansion of Soviet influence into those countries. In a January 1945 correspondence, Dean Acheson, secretary of state and chief architect of the U.S. Cold War Soviet containment policy, argued for a pro-Arab tilt to U.S. policy in order to deny the Soviet Union any possible inroads into the region. Successive administrations embraced the policy. Dwight D. Eisenhower sided with Gamal Abdul Nasser against Israel, France, and Great Britain during the 1956 Suez crisis.
While the U.S. government often stayed on the sidelines, in eleven of the twelve major Cold War and immediate post-Cold War conflicts between Muslims and non-Muslims, Muslims and secular forces, or Arabs and non-Arabs, the U.S. government supported the former group. Washington, for example, backed the Afghan mujahideen against the Soviet Red Army in the 1980s and supported Bosnian Muslims against Serbs and Croats.
U.S. administrations have even leaned hard on Israel, preventing the Jewish state's destruction of the Egyptian, Jordanian, and Syrian armies in 1967; ignoring the Israeli government's pleas not to sell state-of-the-art weaponry to Saudi Arabia; and pressuring for concessions to the Palestinian Authority despite its embrace of terrorism. The only exception to Washington's pro-Arab tilt has been U.S. diplomatic intervention in support of Israel at the United Nations and White House commitment to maintain Israel's qualitative military edge.
During the six decades since Washington abandoned its "armed neutrality" policy in favor of deeper relations with Arab states, friction has increased between U.S. officials and Islamist ideologues. The pro-Arab tilt Washington pursued during the Cold War to stymie Soviet intrigues and maintain energy security, meant partnership with non-democratic regimes and often corrupt rulers in Saudi Arabia, Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and the Persian Gulf emirates.
Islamists and other opposition groups argued that Washington should support the people and not autocrats. But such rhetoric is laid bare by the antagonism that U.S. support for Israel engendered among many of these self-professed democrats. Israel is the only democracy in the region. Its citizens, 17 percent of whom are Muslim, enjoy basic civil liberties regardless of their faith and, even in the West Bank, enjoy a standard of living far superior to that of Egyptians and Jordanians.
Jihadi Antipathy
Both the United States and Israel have become the focus of Islamists' irrational enmity as Islamist thinkers and Arab demagogues deflect any internal responsibility for Muslim countries' woes. This was a common theme both of Sayyid Qutb, the leading Muslim Brotherhood ideologue and, later, Al-Qaeda founder Osama bin Laden.
In Knowing the Enemy, Mary Habeck, a professor of military history at Johns Hopkins University's School of Advanced International Studies, documents how Qutb and bin Laden spread a message that the decline of majority Muslim polities is not the result of flaws within Islam itself but is instead the deliberate effort of the United States and the Jews. Today Pakistani madrassas (Islamic schools) alone spin out more than one million graduates per year steeped in jihadi aggressive terror ideology.
Underlying much basic jihadi Islamic thought is antipathy toward democracy. Both Qutb and bin Laden argued that democracy is not a solution to inequity and corruption in Islamic societies. In a video that marked the sixth anniversary of the 9-11 attacks, bin Laden said, "It has now become clear to you and the entire world the impotence of the democratic system and how it plays with the interest of the peoples and their bloody sacrificing of soldiers and populations to achieve the interests of major corporations."
While some Islamists—such as the Muslim Brotherhood both in Egypt and now infiltrated here in America or Muhammad Khatami in Iran—speak of their embrace of democracy, seldom do they include Enlightenment concepts such as tolerance, rule-of-law, and property rights. They do not accept, as did the U.S. founding fathers, that people are endowed with both the natural right to freedom from coercion and the liberty to improve their lives. In practice, then, regardless of their rhetoric, they not only eschew democracy they will overthrow it.
It is essential that the grand strategy of the United States addresses this basic conflict of interest. The present conflict is not new. And it is religious. Believing that only a few "rogue extremists" have misappropriated the religion is both naïve and counterfactual. U.S. and Western leaders must be cognizant of the reality that jihadist are a religious phenomenon that has grown popular and powerful enough to threaten the continued progress of the American experiment and the European Enlightenment, and we also recognize that it is commanded by the Quran, and therefore will always be the agenda of Islam.
In the new grand strategy to defeat Islamic jihadism, America may try to campaign, through its scholars and theologians if appropriate, to encourage and facilitate imams and other Islamic religious authority figures to reform Islam in a forward direction, one that breaks from the past and encourages tolerance, the rule of law, free inquiry, and free markets but it is an effort in futility, because Islam would not just have to reform, it would have to give up its entire religion.
How should the United States revitalize its strategy? At home, the U.S. government must first remove the Muslims from our country. Would we have allowed, or better yet, did we allow, Nazis in our country during the Second War? Of course not. Then we need to better educate and explain the conflict to the general audience. Education at all levels should inculcate U.S. citizens in the history, philosophy, mechanics, virtues, responsibilities, and achievements of the Western approach to freedom, liberty, and the free market. Tolerance and diversity does not mean the acceptance of oppression and tyranny. Such an effort would entail reinstalling the truth of this subject matter into the curricula of public schools and disallow the Muslim propaganda.
The strategic leadership of the nation should redirect the public education effort, much as the founders did in the eighteenth century. The Federalist Papers, generally attributed to James Madison, Alexander Hamilton, and John Jay, are prototypical examples of effective strategic communications that aimed, among other things, to create a government strong enough to defend itself against the Barbary pirates.
Washington should not apologize for supporting regional countries that seek peace, prosperity, and the improved well-being of their citizens. To do otherwise fuels the Muslim jihadi rhetoric that seeks to oppress people throughout the world.
Another requirement is for the West to embark on, is a radical program to redefine how its economies obtain and distribute energy. Former director of Central Intelligence R. James Woolsey argues that denying Jihadists the use of oil as a weapon against the United States and the West should be Washington's highest priority.
Finally, the history of U.S. interaction with Muslim politics shows military weakness and the inability to project. The sign of weakness has consistently led jihadist Muslim and kleptocrats to launch attacks against the U.S. and our interests.
THE BOTTOM LINE: If you were one of these Hate America hippies, I hope this little bit of factual history changes your course just a tad. If however you have been programmed by the academic hate America gurus then no amount of documented facts are likely to help.
May God help us…
de Andréa
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