The Fallacy of Grievance-based Terrorism

RELIGION OF PEACE?

SINCE WHEN?

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theneinblog.blogspot.com

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This article, taken directly from the Winter 2008 edition of the Middle East Quarterly, provides the reader a thoroughly researched historical and religious context to the current war that other authors have merely scratched the surface of in their combined works.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I believe this article is benchmark required reading for all, but particularly for the current generation of American political and military leadership.

Widest possible dissemination desired.

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EXCERPTS:

... 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.

... 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."[11] 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.[12]

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.[13] Ottoman leaders used the same rationale to justify the enslavement and trading of captives from the Balkans, Caucasus, and Ukraine.[14]

READ IT ALL HERE:

http://theneinblog.blogspot.com/2008/01/fa...-terrorism.html