Stolen History
I have Facebook “friends” from all sides of the political spectrum. We look for lost dogs, discuss repairs on the local roads, and share birthdays and funeral announcements. We also confront each other’s politics from time to time, but no matter how opposed we are in political beliefs, we try to respect our differing views in order to maintain our friendship.
But sometimes I am dismayed by what they post. Yesterday while perusing Facebook I found a repost on a friend’s site, that claimed the following:
“Thomas Jefferson founded the Marine Corps, and used it to attack Muslims (in the form of the Barbary Pirates),” and, “…the orders of the Marines were to confront Muslim pirates in battleand follow them back to their villages and kill every man, woman, and child they found.”
The post goes onto state that Jefferson himself spoke out against “Radical Islam.” It claims:
“…The Quran (Koran) – the Muslim holy book not only condoned but mandated – violence against non-believers of Islam and that was totally unacceptable to Jefferson. (His) greatest fear upon leaving office was that someday radical Islamist (sic) would return. He believed Muslims would pose more threats on the United States and its citizens as time went on.”
In our time of polarization, many search history to find justification for their current political stands. A Google Search can find almost any information to back any political view. But just because it’s on the INTERNET doesn’t make it true, and in this case my friend has chosen to absolutely distort history to support his current bias.
I was a history and government teacher for thirty-six years. While I haven’t done an in-depth study of Jefferson and Islam, it seemed to me that a Muslim massacre by the United States Marines would have quickly come to mind. It’s not that massacres of different people would be so incredibly unusual in US History; the record of US treatment of Native Americans demonstrates that the orders of “…kill every man woman and child found,”was not uncommon.
And Jefferson, our brilliant Enlightenment founding father, was certainly capable of holding incredibly contradictory positions. The author of the Declaration of Independence, he wrote this:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”
But he owned hundreds of slaves who made up such a big part of his economic fortune that he could not and would not allow them to have freedom. He kept one slave as his “consort” (a great classical word) even though she was taken by him when she was fifteen.
Americans are full of contradictions, even from our Founding moments. And the founding ideologue, Jefferson, was more apparent than most in his inconsistency.
But you can’t make up your own history.
To start with, Jefferson didn’t “found the Marines.” The Marines were founded in 1775, when Jefferson was a delegate to the Continental Congress from Virginia. And when Jefferson did send those Marines to “…the shores of Tripoli” to contest the Barbary Pirates, it wasn’t about “Radical Islam.” It was about extortion: the pirates operating out of modern day Libya would force ships to pay tribute or be captured, and the new United States decided to flex its foreign policy “might” against them.
The US Navy and Marines were able to defeat the “pirates” in the First Barbary War in 1805 (there was a second War in 1815), paid a ransom for held American prisoners, and no longer paid the tribute. Neither of these conflicts had anything to do with “Radical Islam;” it was about respect for the US Flag vessels on the high seas. And there was no massacre of women and children.
Jefferson in the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom, stated:“…that all men shall be free to profess, and by argument to maintain, their opinion in matters of religion…”
In his unfinished autobiography, Jefferson further stated that he intended the Statute to protect:“the Jew and the Gentile, the Christian and Mahometan, the Hindoo, and infidel of every denomination.”In the language of the 1820’s, a “Mahometan” was a Muslim. Jefferson’s own copy of the Koran became a part of the Library of Congress.
We all have our political differences and opinions. But as Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan so famously said: “You are entitled to your own opinions, but not you are not entitled to your own facts.”
Particularly when you try to warp American History to make it fit your own political views.
