Obama Administration--Condescending On Islam, Omitting The Facts

Powerline draws attention to a speech by Jim Leach, chairman of the Obama administration National Endowment for the Humanities. In a speech earlier this month, Qur'an-Burning and Mosque-Bashing Are Not the American Way, Leach supports his point with a reference to Thomas Jefferson, John Adams and the Barbary pirates:

Two centuries ago our fledgling Republic rubbed up against problems in the Muslim world when the Barbary pirates plundered the shipping lanes off North Africa. Instead of burning Qur'ans, both Thomas Jefferson and John Adams studied Islam, and each had a Qur'an in his personal library. Jefferson, in fact, was a student of comparative religion and argued that what mattered most was not where the major faith systems differed but where they conjoined.

What could be a more uplifting way of looking at the world than Jefferson's emphasis on the conjunction of religious values rather than the contrasting nature of religious practices?

What indeed--apparently Leach doesn't know the actual history of what happened.
You see, Jefferson and Adams did not just study Islam, that also took action when Islam posed a threat. And what could be a more uplifting way of looking at the world, than Jefferson's standing up for the US against the Islamic threat of the time--

Scott Johnson fills in what Leach forgot to mention:

One senses that Jim Leach learned everything he "knows" about America's struggle with the Barbary pirates from the boss. Americans actually interested in the long and involved story of America's encounter with the Barbary pirates would do better to consult the first and third chapters of Ambassador Michael Oren's outstanding history Power, Faith and Fantasy: America in the Middle East, 1776 to the Present. It is a story that goes back the first days of the republic and that illuminates our current struggles, though not as Leach instructs.

Oren reports, for example, on the March 1786 meeting of Jefferson and Adams with the pirate warlord of Tripoli in London. The Tripoli warlord "voiced a credo that would someday sound familiar to Americans, but left these founding fathers aghast." Oren quotes the report of Jefferson and Adams to John Jay:

It was...written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged their [the Musims'] authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find and to make Slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

America's response to the Barbary pirates unfolded over several years and four administrations, ultimately leading to the termination of the practice of tribute. The response included the framing and adoption of the Constitution, the founding of the United States Navy and a naval war on the pirates. It was not exactly a venture in multicultural understanding.

Oren writes that George Washington's request for the funds necessary to build a navy prevailed over substantial opposition in Congress because Congress "could no longer bear the disgrace of kowtowing to Barbary." In the administration of James Madison, Commodore Stephen Decatur finally vindicated American honor as the Conqueror of the Barbary Pirates.

Read the whole thing.

Left unanswered is whether the US is willing to start kowtowing again.

Technorati Tag: Jim Leach and Barbary Pirates and Islam.