Stolen History<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I have Facebook \u201cfriends\u201d 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\u2019s 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.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
But sometimes I am dismayed by what they post. Yesterday while perusing Facebook I found a repost on a friend\u2019s site, that claimed the following:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cThomas Jefferson founded the Marine Corps, and used it to attack Muslims (in the form of the Barbary Pirates),\u201d and, \u201c\u2026the 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<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n The post goes onto state that Jefferson himself spoke out against \u201cRadical Islam.\u201d It claims:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201c\u2026The Quran (Koran) \u2013 the Muslim holy book not only condoned but mandated \u2013 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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\u2019s on the INTERNET doesn\u2019t make it true, and in this case my friend has chosen to absolutely distort history to support his current bias.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I was a history and government teacher for thirty-six years. While I haven\u2019t 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\u2019s 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 \u201c\u2026kill every man woman and child found,\u201d<\/em>was not uncommon. <\/p>\n\n\n\n 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:<\/p>\n\n\n\n \u201cWe 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.\u201d<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n 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 \u201cconsort\u201d (a great classical word) even though she was taken by him when she was fifteen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Americans are full of contradictions, even from our Founding moments. And the founding ideologue, Jefferson, was more apparent than most in his inconsistency. <\/p>\n\n\n\n But you can\u2019t make up your own history.<\/p>\n\n\n\n To start with, Jefferson didn\u2019t \u201cfound the Marines.\u201d 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 \u201c\u2026the shores of Tripoli\u201d to contest the Barbary Pirates, it wasn\u2019t about \u201cRadical Islam.\u201d 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 \u201cmight\u201d against them. <\/p>\n\n\n\n The US Navy and Marines were able to defeat the \u201cpirates\u201d 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 \u201cRadical Islam;\u201d it was about respect for the US Flag vessels on the high seas. And there was no massacre of women and children. <\/p>\n\n\n\n