Monday, February 02, 2015

Islam war against the United States -- an old war.

Most Americans are unaware of the fact that over two hundred years ago, the United States had declared war on Islam and Thomas Jefferson led the charge!
 
At the height of the eighteenth century, Muslim pirates were the terror of the Mediterranean and a large area of the North Atlantic. They attacked every ship in sight and held the crews for exorbitant ransoms. Those taken hostage were subjected to barbaric treatment and wrote heart breaking letters home, begging their government and family members to pay whatever their Mohammedan captors demanded.
 
These extortionists of the high seas represented the Islamic nations of Tripoli, Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers – collectively referred to as the Barbary Coast – and presented a dangerous and unprovoked threat to the new American Republic.
 
Before the Revolutionary War, U.S. merchant ships had been under the protection of Great Britain. When the U.S. declared its independence and entered into war, the ships of the United States were protected by France. However, once the war was won, America had to protect its own fleets. Thus, the birth of the U.S. Navy.
 
Beginning in1784, seventeen years before he would become president, Thomas Jefferson became America’s Minister to France. That same year, the U.S. Congress sought to appease its Muslim adversaries by following in the footsteps of European nations who paid bribes to the Barbary States, rather than engaging them in war. In July of 1785, Algerian pirates captured American ships, and the Dey of Algiers demanded an unheard-of ransom of $60,000. It was a plain and simple case of extortion and Thomas Jefferson was vehemently opposed to any further payments. Instead, he proposed to Congress the formation of a coalition of allied nations who together could force the Islamic states into peace. A disinterested Congress decided to pay the ransom.
 
In 1786, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams met with Tripoli’s ambassador to Great Britain to ask by what right his nation attacked American ships and enslaved American citizens, and why Muslims held so much hostility towards America, a nation with which they had no previous contacts.
 
The two future presidents reported that Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdul Rahman Adja had answered that Islam "was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Quran, that all nations who should not have 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."
 
Despite of this stunning admission of premeditated violence on non-Muslim nations, as well as the objections of many notable American leaders, including George Washington, who warned that caving in was both wrong and would only further embolden the enemy, for the following fifteen 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 over twenty percent of the United States government annual revenues in 1800.
 
Jefferson was disgusted.. Shortly after his being sworn in as the third President of the United States in 1801, the Pasha of Tripoli sent him a note demanding the immediate payment of $225,000 plus $25,000 a year for every year forthcoming. That changed everything.
 
Jefferson let the Pasha know, in no uncertain terms, what he could do with his demand. The Pasha responded by cutting down the flagpole at the American consulate and declared war on the United States. Tunis, Morocco, and Algiers immediately followed suit. Jefferson, until now, had been against America raising a naval force for anything beyond coastal defense, but having watched his nation be cowed by Islamic thuggery for long enough, decided that it was finally time to meet force with force.
 
He dispatched a squadron of frigates to the Mediterranean and taught the Muslim nations of the Barbary Coast a lesson he hoped they would never forget. Congress authorized Jefferson to empower U.S. ships to seize all vessels and goods of the Pasha of Tripoli and to “cause to be done all other acts of precaution or hostility as the state of war would justify.”
 
When Algiers and Tunis, who were both accustomed to American cowardice and acquiescence, saw the newly independent United States had both the will and the might to strike back, they quickly abandoned their allegiance to Tripoli. The war with Tripoli lasted for four more years and raged up again in 1815. The bravery of the U.S. Marine Corps in these wars led to the line “to the shores of Tripoli” in the Marine Hymn. They would forever be known as “leathernecks” for the leather collars of their uniforms, designed to prevent their heads from being cut off by the Muslim scimitars when boarding enemy ships.
Islam, and what its Barbary followers justified doing in the name of their prophet and their god, disturbed Jefferson quite deeply. America had a tradition of religious tolerance. The fact that Jefferson, himself, had co-authored the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, but fundamentalist Islam was like no other religion the world had ever seen. A religion based on supremacism, whose holy book not only condoned but mandated violence against unbelievers was unacceptable to him. His greatest fear was that someday this brand of Islam would return and pose an even greater threat to the United States.
 
This should bother every American. That the Islamists have brought about women-only classes and swimming times at taxpayer-funded universities and public pools; that Christians, Jews, and Hindus have been banned from serving on juries where Muslim defendants are being judged, Piggy banks and Porky Pig tissue dispensers have been banned from workplaces because they offend Islamist sensibilities. Ice cream has been discontinued at certain Burger King locations because the picture on the wrapper looks similar to the Arabic script for Allah, public schools are pulling pork from their menus, on and on in the news papers.
 
It’s death by a thousand cuts, or inch-by-inch as some refer to it, and most Americans have no idea that this battle is being waged every day across America. By not fighting back, by allowing groups to obfuscate what is really happening, and not insisting that the Islamists adapt to our own culture, the United States is cutting its own throat with a politically correct knife, and helping to further the Islamists agenda. Sadly, it appears that today’s America would rather be politically correct than victorious.
 
If there’s any doubt, just Google “Thomas Jefferson vs the Muslim World.”


Monday, December 01, 2014

MY SON, THE HERO

This is a reposting of an old post from Friday, August 6, 2006, about my deceased son. Miss you Chane.

After the shitty 12 hour shift at work I drove home, downed a cold beer or three while soaking my cares away in a hot bath and crashed across my bed early. Things seemed much better until I sat straight up in bed at midnight, heart pounding and straining to hear what had disturbed some well earned slumber.

I could hear the booms of thunder & lightening, the drum of heavy rain on the roof and a high wind shrieking around the corners of the house loud enough to drown out the comforting whirl of my window air conditioner; it seems that the drought was over. But those familiar sounds weren't what jerked me out of a sound sleep. There was another noise, one that made the hair on my arms stand up and a shiver run down my spine. It sounded like a tortured soul crying from the depths of hell.

I staggered outside in my nightgown, half asleep and wondering what the hell was going on. I was expecting a tornado but what I found was a hysterical Mama Dog frantically trying to drag puppies out from under the deck where a river of water was running across the yard and filling in the den she had excavated for her new family.

She had 2 babies in the dog house on our carport and was running back and forth with soggy little bundles of fur, dropping one and running back for another. Small bodies were scattered all over the yard and in her panic she couldn't decide whether to pick up the ones lying in the rain or go back for the others floating in the runoff under the deck.

My son, Chane, and I stood in the downpour and tried to decide the best way to help. I was all for getting a crowbar and ripping the floorboards off the deck but Chane volunteered to crawl underneath it and carry the puppies out.

Now this deck is 12' wide, only a few feet off the ground and has 2X12s turned on edge as cross braces. The cross braces have only about 4" between them and the ground. Chane made it about half way under and got stuck, unable to move forward or backward and nowhere near close enough to reach the puppies. So in desperation I got my grandson's butterfly net and a square-tipped shovel and passed them under the deck so Chane could rake the babies close enough for him to reach them.

I crouched at the edge of the deck in a foot of Alabama red-clay mud, rain soaking through my nightgown, holding Mama Dog while Chane lay wedged under the crosspiece and pushed icy-cold fur balls back to me. Mama Dog was going crazy with the cries of her babies, but I was afraid that if I turned her loose she would attack Chane while he lay helpless and there would be no way I could get her off of him. In the middle of all this, Chane was swarmed and bitten all over by an army of fire ants. I guess he disturbed a nest when he crawled under there.

We managed to get all the babies out and then I had to grab Chane's legs and help drag him out. I was starting to think I'd have to tear the deck apart to get him out! We're both covered in red mud, dripping wet from the downpour, Chane's swatting fire ants off of him and we're both wandering around the yard until 5AM with a flashlight locating puppies in the dark by their pitiful whimpers and cries.

They're all warm, dry and safe in the dog house now. When I said before that there were 10 puppies, I miscounted. Mama Dog had 13! We saved 12, one poor soul didn't make it but it wasn't for lack of the 3 of us trying.

Yep, my son's a hero.