This Day In History - 10 June: A Witch Is Hung, Socialism Is Born, & Alexander The Great Dies

Art: Anne-Louis Girodet De Roucy-Trioson, Ossian Receiving the Ghosts of French Heroes, 1802

1190 – The Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick I Barbarossa was one of the great figures of the Medieval Age. He fought in many campaigns throughout Europe, with the campaign to capture Milan seeing him excommunicated by Pope Alexander III in 1160. Their schism would end with the Peace of Venice in 1177 when Frederick, having failed to defeat the Lombard League in his Italian campaign, sued for peace. Frederick would answer the Pope's call in 1190 for the Third Crusade, but then drowned in the river Saleph on this date while leading an army to Jerusalem.

1619 – During the incredibly costly Thirty Years' War, on this date a Roman Catholic army of Karel Bonaventura Buquoy defeated a Protestant army of Ernst von Mansfeld at the Battle of Záblatí, marking a turning point in the Bohemian Revolt.

1692 – The Salem Witch Trials claims its first victim when Sixty year old Bridget Bishop is executed by hanging at Gallows Hill near Salem, Massachusetts, for "certaine Detestable Arts called Witchcraft & Sorceries."

1719 – Jacobite Rising - Jacobites, i.e., those who supported James VII, the last Catholic King of England, attempted several uprisings from about 1688 and 1746. One such uprising involved an alliance of Jacobite rebels and Spanish forces that was defeated by the English forces at the Battle of Glen Shiel on this day.

1770 – British explorer Captain James Cook, discovered Australia - or at least came close to it - when on this date he ran aground on the Great Barrier Reef.
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1793 – The Jardin des Plantes museum opens in Paris. A year later, it becomes the first public zoo.

1793 – Socialism, long tended in the womb by philosophers, was born on this day as part of the French Revolution when, following the arrests of Girondin leaders, the Jacobins gained control of the Committee of Public Safety and installed a revolutionary dictatorship. They became infamous for their the Reign of Terror and their war on the Church.

1805 – America's first war, the First Barbary War, begun in 1801, came to an end when the Bashaw of Tripoli, Yussif Karamanli, signed a treaty ending hostilities with the United States. He had warred against the U.S. because our ships made easy targets without naval escort and because, as the ambassador from the Barbary states said, "written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave.” That is a precept still being taught in Saudi schools and Madrassas around the world.

1871 – Sinmiyangyo refers to a first diplomatic attempt to establish trade with Korea that, through a series of misunderstandings, developed into a minor military conflict, one of whose battles took place on this date when Captain McLane Tilton led 109 Marines in naval attack on Han River forts on Kanghwa Island, Korea.

1898 – U.S. Marines land on the island of Cuba as part of the Spanish-American War. By August, 1998, a combined arms force of Marines and Army soldiers secured the island.
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1935 – Dr. Robert Smith takes his last drink, and Alcoholics Anonymous is founded..

1940 – Italy's facist dictator Il Duce declared war on France and the UK. FDR denounced Italy's actions with his "Stab in the Back" speech at the graduation ceremonies of the University of Virginia while Canada declared war on Italy. Also on this day, German forces, under General Erwin Rommel, reach the English Channel and Norway surrendered to Germany.

1942 – Nazis burn the Czech village of Lidice in reprisal for the killing of Reinhard Heydrich.

1944 – 642 men, women and children are killed in the Oradour-sur-Glane Massacre in France while in Distomo, Boeotia Prefecture, Greece 218 men, women and children are massacred by German troops.

1967 – Six-Day War ends as Israel and Syria agree to a cease-fire.

1973 – John Paul Getty III, grandson of billionaire J. Paul Getty, was kidnapped in Rome, Italy. His kidnappers demanded ransom and sent the boy's ear and some hair to his father, who finally agreed to pay $3 million. Getty was released and his kidnappers never found.

1999 - NATO suspends air strikes on Serbia after Milošević agrees to withdraw Serbian forces from Kosovo.

2001 – Pope John Paul II canonizes Lebanon's first female saint Saint Rafqa

2002 – The first direct electronic communication experiment between the nervous systems of two humans is carried out by Kevin Warwick in the United Kingdom.

2003 – The Spirit Rover is launched, beginning NASA's Mars Exploration Rover mission.


Births

1933 – F. Lee Bailey, American attorney

1967 – John Yoo, American attorney and target of some serious left wing angst.


Deaths

323 BC – Alexander the Great, Macedonian king and conqueror of much of the known world. A student of Aristotle, he began his military career at age 16 when he led a force to crush the revolt of the Thracian Maedi. His campaigns finally came to an end when he died at age 32 in palace of Nebuchadnezzar II of Babylon.

1190 – Frederick Barbarossa, Holy Roman Emperor (b. 1122)

1967 – Spencer Tracy, American actor (b. 1900)

1973 – Erich von Manstein, German military commander (b. 1887)

1988 – Louis L'Amour, American author (b. 1908)

2002 – John Gotti, American gangster (b. 1940)

2004 – Ray Charles, American musician (b. 1930)


Holidays and observances

In the Roman Catholic Church, today is the feast day of St. Margaret, queen of Scotland. She was the wife of Malcolm III, King of Scots. Dying in 1093, Saint Margaret was canonised in the year 1250 by Pope Innocent IV in recognition of her personal holiness, fidelity to the Church, work for religious reform, and charity. She attended to charitable works, and personally served orphans and the poor every day before she ate. She rose at midnight to attend church services every night. She was known for her work for religious reform. She was considered to be an exemplar of the "just ruler", and also influenced her husband and children to be just and holy rulers.

And see Rougeclassicism's This Day In Ancient History.

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Obama's Cairo Address: The Dangerous Whitewashing Of History

I am a student of history . . .

. . . [T]hroughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality. I . . . know that Islam has always been a part of America's story. The first nation to recognize my country was Morocco. In signing the Treaty of Tripoli in 1796, our second President, John Adams, wrote, "The United States has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion or tranquility of Muslims." . . . And when the first Muslim American was recently elected to Congress, he took the oath to defend our Constitution using the same Holy Koran that one of our Founding Fathers -- Thomas Jefferson -- kept in his personal library.

President Barack Obama, Address From Cairo, 4 June 2009

Obama is a student of history like Karl Marx was a student of the philosophy of Adam Smith. If in fact he ever studied it, he got it all wrong.

Nowhere is this more apparent than in Obama's twisting of our history with the "Islamic world." Obama attempts to portray our relations as friendly from the start, and suggests that there has never been any reason for a clash between Islam and America. This is not mere whitewashing, it is historical revisionism with potentially real and dangerous ramifications.

Let's start with Morocco, an Islamic nation on the north coast of Africa ruled in 1784 by Sultan Muhammad Ben Abdullah. Morocco was not only a nation that engaged in piracy, but it was directly involved in the first war our country fought after Independence - The Barbary Wars. Morocco, in 1784, was the first of the Barbary nations to capture a U.S. merchant vessel, the Betsey, in the Mediterranean and hold its crew hostage. We were then without a navy to protect our merchant ships. Morocco only recognized the U.S. in 1787 because we paid them a huge sum of money as tribute to leave our ships alone. That is hardly the ringing endorsement of friendship and goodwill that Obama seems to be claiming. Indeed, the 1796 treaty to which Obama also refers was one involving all of the "Barbary" nations and was again a futile attempt to end by tribute the pirate jihad being conducted by those nations. As Gerard W. Gawalt of the Library of Congress wrote:

In 1795 alone the United States was forced to pay nearly a million dollars in cash, naval stores, and a frigate to ransom 115 sailors from the dey of Algiers. Annual gifts were settled by treaty on Algiers, Morocco, Tunis, and Tripoli.

And Obama's citation to the words of John Adams is equally disingenuous. True, we had no inherent animus then or now against Islam. But just because we didn't does not mean that the reverse wasn't true. To the contrary, the other half of the story from the 1796 meeting of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams with an envoy from Tripoli was recorded by Jefferson, who wrote:

“. . . [Adams and Jefferson] ‘took the liberty to make some inquiries concerning the ground of the pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury.’ The ambassador [from the Barbary States] replied that it was written in their Koran, that all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave.” He claimed every one of their guys who was “slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise."

Directly related to that, and another critical point Obama neglected to mention, is that Thomas Jefferson did not own a Koran because he desired to study Islam for its merits. Jefferson bought and read a Koran because our major foreign policy challenge from 1786 to 1812 was our war with Barbary Pirates who used the Koran as justification for attacking American ships and enslaving American citizens. Jefferson's ownership of a Koran comes under the heading of "know thy enemy."

Obama does neither us nor the Islamic world any favors by twisting history and whitewashing Islam. It only strengthens those who seek to prevent Islam from evolving and it gives the West a distinctly unrealistic view of Islam when the reality is that an ever increasing proportion of Muslims are still today being taught that it is "right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave" non-Muslims. It is part of the curriculum being taught in Saudi financed madrassas and schools around the world:

A twelfth-grade Tawhid (monotheism) textbook states that “[m]ajor polytheism makes blood and wealth permissible,” which in Islamic legal terms means that a Muslim can take the life and property of someone believed to be guilty of this alleged transgression with impunity. (Tawhid, Arabic/Sharia, 15) Under the Saudi interpretation of Islam, “major polytheists” include Shi’a and Sufi Muslims, who visit the shrines of their saints to ask for intercession with God on their behalf, as well as Christians, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists.

To put that into context, our first war in America was with Islamic nations because they believe their Koran justified it. That war came to a close only because the U.S. soon became powerful enough as to threaten those nations with destruction if they continued. Between 1776 and today, it would appear that nothing else has changed in dynamic of that relationship. The Salafists are still teaching that it is a precept of their religion that they can kill and enslave us as part of their faith. That is the reality that Obama needed to address. Not the feel good whitewash and historical revisionism he engaged in during his Cairo speech. People all around the world need to understand the reality. Perhaps then the weight of public opinion might begin to force a change.

Summary - Obama's Cairo Address: What We Needed, What We Got
Part 1 - Obama's Cairo Address: Hiding From The Existential Problems Of The Muslim World
Part 2 - Obama's Cairo Address: A Walk Back From Democracy & Iraq
Part 3 - Obama's Cairo Address: Obama Calls For Women's Rights While Glossing Over Discrimination & Violence
Part 4 - Obama's Cairo Address: Nukes, Iran & Weakness Writ Large
Part 5 - Obama's Cairo Address: Israel & Palestine – A Little Good, A Lot Of Outrageousness
Part 6 - Obama's Cairo Address: Islam's Tradition Of Religious Tolerance?
Part 7 - Obama's Cairo Address: The Dangerous Whitewashing Of History

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History, War and Diplomacy In The Middle East

I've blogged before (see here) on the first and longest of America's foreign wars in a post that also includes Winston Churchill's first hand, non-p.c. observations of Islam and the Wahhabis in Saudi Arabia. Michael Weiss at PJM has a great post on that first foreign war against the Islamic pirates of the Barbary Coast and its relationship to politics today.
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This today from Michael Weiss:

John McCain and Barack Obama are now engaged in a long-distance dispute over whether talking to America’s enemies is integral to America’s security . . .

McCain has not so subtly assailed Obama as an “appeaser” for his stated willingness to sit down with the Iranian leadership about its nuclear weapons program and sponsorship of jihadism in Iraq — and never mind for now if that leadership consists of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad or Ali Khamenei. Meanwhile, Obama has repeatedly labeled McCain a kind of hyper-Bush militarist of the shoot first, sign treaties later school of foreign policy. McCain has hinted at Chamberlain and Munich, always a histrionic conversation-ender in matters of these sort, and Obama has sheepishly downplayed the Iranian threat by contrasting it against the Soviet one, and, without any hint of irony, indicating Kennedy’s talks with Khrushchev in Vienna, and Reagan’s momentous mini-summit with Gorbachev in Reykjavik as proof that toughness and diplomacy are not mutually exclusive concepts. (One witty editorial in The New York Times reminded Obama that Camelot’s finest hour was not its Austrian kibitz with the Russian premier, an event that laid all the psychological bricks, so to speak, for the erection of the Berlin Wall and the Cuban missile crisis.)

Oddly though, in their rush to analogize by way of chivvying each other, neither candidate has actually pulled an example relevant to the region of the globe now under discussion. The Middle East, a term coined by Alfred Thayer Mahan, one of McCain’s boyhood idols, is where both American warfare and American diplomacy began in the late 18th century, as our infant republic faced its first post-Revolutionary struggle against the evocatively named Barbary States of the Ottoman Empire.

Jaw-jaw competed with war-war, all right, with the latter eventually winning out.

The regencies of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers (future homes of Muammar Qaddafi, Yasser Arafat, and the Islamic Salvation Front, respectively) had been hosting and sponsoring Islamic piracy since the Middle Ages. Scimitar-wielding corsairs would regularly interrupt the flow of trade and traffic along the coasts of North Africa, seizing European vessels and taking their crews into bondage. Cervantes wrote his first play, in the 16th century, about the dread corsairs, and by the 18th, the American colonies had a minor seagoing presence in the Mediterranean protected by the redoubtable British Navy. But the Crown was reluctant to war against so petty an antagonist, preferring to pay “tribute” to the Barbary States instead, as a shopkeeper would protection money to the mafia. After the U.S. broke away from England and became its own nation, however, the geopolitical dynamics changed, as did the American equanimity with doing business with pirates.

In 1784, corsairs attacked the Betsy, a 300-ton brig that had sailed from Boston to Tenerife Island, about 100 miles off the North African coast, selling her new-made citizens as chattel on the markets of Morocco. The U.S. was not free of its own moral taint of slavery, of course, but it would be impossible to hasten the industrial development that would eventually render the agrarian-plantation economy obsolete if merchant ships could not be assured of safe conduct near the Turkish Porte. Other vessels, such as the Dauphin and Maria, were also seized, this time by Algiers, and the horrifying experiences of their captive passengers relayed back home were the cause for outrage. James Leander Cathcart described the dungeon in which he was being kept as “perfectly dark…where the slaves sleep four tiers deep…many nearly naked, and few with anything more than an old tattered blanket to cover them in the depth of winter.”

In response, Thomas Jefferson, then the Minister to France, suggested a multilateral approach of what we would now term “deterrence.” He asked that Spain, Portugal, Naples, Denmark, Sweden and France enter into a coalition with America to dissuade the regencies from their criminal assaults on life, liberty and the pursuit of international commerce. As Michael Oren, in his magisterial history Power, Faith, and Fantasy: America in the Middle East: 1776 to Present relates, “By deterring, rather than appeasing, Barbary, the United States would preserve its economy and send an unambiguous message to potentially hostile powers.” Jefferson thought it would impress Europe if America could do what Europe had failed to do for centuries and beat back the persistent thuggery of Islamists. “It will procure us respect,” said the author of the Declaration of Independence. “And respect is a safeguard to interest.”

This sober judgment fused the cold calculations of latter-day “realism” with the morality behind revolutionary interventionism: not only would America protect its citizens from plunder and foreign slaveholding; it would ensure that other countries under “Christendom” were similarly protected.

Though Jefferson found a stalwart Continental ally in a former one, the Marquis de Lafayette, France squelched the idea of a NATO made of buckshot and cannon. While waiting for funds that would never come from Congress for the construction of a 150-gun navy, the sage of Monticello resigned himself to further diplomacy with the enemy. In 1785, he dispatched John Lamb, a Connecticut businessman, to secure the release of hostages in Algiers, held by its dynastic sovereign Hassan Dey. Lamb failed ignominiously.

At the same time, John Adams, then minister to England, agreed to receive the pasha of Tripoli, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Ajar, in his London quarters to discuss a possible peace deal. Adams described his interlocutor as a man who looked all “pestilence and war,” a suspicion that was soon confirmed by the pasha’s demand of 30,000 guineas for his statelet, plus a 3,000 guinea gratuity for himself. He also did Adams the favor of estimating what it would cost the U.S. to broker a similar deal with Tunis, Morocco and Algiers — the total price for blackmail would be about $1 million, or a tenth the annual budget of the United States.

Adams was incensed. “It would be more proper to write [of his meeting with ‘Abd al-Rahman] for the… New York Theatre,” he thundered. He agreed with Jefferson that a military response was increasingly likely, but Adams doubted his country’s economic ability to sustain it. For the short term, he thought it better to offer “one Gift of two hundred Thousand Pounds” rather than forfeit “a Million annually” in trade revenue, which the pirates were sure to disrupt. Not long thereafter, Jefferson joined him in London to prevent the “universal and horrible War” and reach an accord with the refractory envoy from Tripoli. Both gentlemen of the Enlightenment, and comrades in revolution, affirmed America’s desire for peace, its respect for all nations, and suggested a treaty of lasting friendship with the regency. ‘Abd al-Rahman listened well, but his reply was one that would shock modern ears less than it did those of the two Founding Fathers:

“It was… written in the Koran, that all Nations who should not have acknowledged [the Muslims’] authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon wheoever 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.”

Though a period of paying tribute and douceurs (or “softeners” — expensive trickets and toys) to Islamic pirates would continue, the words of ‘Abd al-Rahman Adams were chilling enough to leave Adams and Jefferson in no doubt as to the sanguinary and messianic nature of their adversary. “An angel sent on this business,” lamented Jefferson, “could have done nothing” to placate such men. He called them “sea dogs” and a “pettifogging nest of robbers.” The episode preceded further acts of piracy against American vessels and the imprisonment and sale of its crews and passengers, and was enough to get Jefferson to overlook his wariness of federalism and agree to a Constitution with a strong central government capable of building and keeping a powerful navy. . . .

Read the entire article. It is exceptional.

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The Barbary Wars, Islam in American History & Churchill on Wahhabism

One historical perspective of Islam concerns the very first war America fought after its Independence from Britain. It was a 32 year war against the Muslim Barbary pirates who believed their religion justified attacks on the shipping of non-believers and enslaving all Christians they could take prisoner. A second perspective that we get is through the eyes of Winston Churchill, who wrote of his observations of Islam in the Sudan and Afghanistan, and warned against the Wahhabi Islam of the Sauds. Had we but listened to Churchill, our world would be very different today.

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There are a couple of fascinating posts that I have stumbled across today. The first, with a hat tip to Red Alerts, is a very good article on the history of Islam in our nation and the first war that our nation ever fought against the Muslm pirates of the Barbary Coast. This from Wallbuilders:

. . . The Barbary Powers (called Barbary “pirates” by most Americans) attacked American civilian and commercial merchant ships (but not military ships) wherever they found them. Prior to the Revolution, American shipping had been protected by the British navy, and during the Revolution by the French navy. After the Revolution, however, America lacked a navy of her own and was therefore left without protection for her shipping. The vulnerable American merchant ships, built for carrying cargoes rather than fighting, were therefore easy prey for the warships of the Barbary Powers, which seized the cargo of the ships as loot and took their seamen (of whom all were considered Christians by the attacking Muslims) and enslaved them.

In 1784, Congress authorized American diplomats John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Jefferson to negotiate with the Muslim terrorists. Negotiations proceeded, and in 1786, John Adams and Thomas Jefferson candidly asked the Ambassador from Tripoli the motivation behind their unprovoked attacks against Americans. What was the response?

The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of their Prophet [Mohammed] – that it was written in their Koran that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners; that is 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.

Given this “spiritual” incentive to enslave and make war, the Muslim attacks against American ships and seamen were frequent. In fact, in the span of just one month in 1793, Algiers alone seized ten American ships and enslaved more then one hundred sailors, holding them for sale or ransom. Significantly, when Adams and Jefferson queried the Tripolian Ambassador about the seizure of sailors, he explained:

It was a law that the first who boarded an enemy’s vessel should have one slave more than his share with the rest, which operated as an incentive to the most desperate valor and enterprise – that it was the practice of their corsairs [fast ships] to bear down upon a ship, for each sailor to take a dagger in each hand and another in his mouth and leap on board, which so terrified their enemies that very few ever stood against them.

The enslaving of Christians by Muslims was such a widespread problem that for centuries, French Catholics operated a ministry that raised funding to ransom enslaved seamen. . . .

This is a long article and there is much more. Do read the whole article. It is footnoted, though I have deleted them in the section quoted above.

And as long as we are speaking of historical perspectives on Islam, one should never forget the observations of one of the greatest men of the West, Winston Churchill. As a young man, Churchill served in the military in the Sudan, eventually writing his first book about his experiences, The River War:

"How dreadful are the curses which Mohammedanism lays on its votaries! Besides the fanatical frenzy, which is as dangerous in a man as hydrophobia in a dog, there is this fearful fatalistic apathy. The effects are apparent in many countries.

Improvident habits, slovenly systems of agriculture, sluggish methods of commerce, and insecurity of property exist wherever the followers of the Prophet rule or live. A degraded sensualism deprives this life of its grace and refinement; the next of its dignity and sanctity. The fact that in Mohammedan law every woman must belong to some man as his absolute property, either as a child, a wife, or a concubine, must delay the final extinction of slavery until the faith of Islam has ceased to be a great power among men.

Individual Moslems may show splendid qualities. Thousands become the brave and loyal soldiers of the Queen; all know how to die; but the influence of the religion paralyses the social development of those who follow it. No stronger retrograde force exists in the world.

Far from being moribund, Mohammedanism is a militant and proselytizing faith. It has already spread throughout Central Africa, raising fearless warriors at every step; and were it not that Christianity is sheltered in the strong arms of science, the science against which it had vainly struggled, the civilisation of modern Europe might fall, as fell the civilisation of ancient Rome."

The River War, first edition, Vol. II, pages 248 50 (London: Longmans, Green & Co., 1899). And later, Churchill would write specifically about the Wahhabis and Ibn Saud:

"A large number of Bin Saud's followers belong to the Wahabi sect, a form of Mohammedanism which bears, roughly speaking, the same relationship to orthodox Islam as the most militant form of Calvinism would have borne to Rome in the fiercest times of [Europe's] religious wars.

The Wahhabis profess a life of exceeding austerity, and what they practice themselves they rigorously enforce on others. They hold it as an article of duty, as well as of faith, to kill all who do not share their opinions and to make slaves of their wives and children. Women have been put to death in Wahhabi villages for simply appearing in the streets.

It is a penal offence to wear a silk garment. Men have been killed for smoking a cigarette and, as for the crime of alcohol, the most energetic supporter of the temperance cause in this country falls far behind them. Austere, intolerant, well-armed, and blood-thirsty, in their own regions the Wahhabis are a distinct factor which must be taken into account, and they have been, and still are, very dangerous to the holy cities of Mecca and Medina.

Read the entire article. Unlike our modern Nero's, Churchill spoke the truth about what he saw. How prescient and clearheaded was Churchill? In 1919, he wanted to fully invest the White Revolution and end Boshevism before it took hold and became the communist state of the Soviet Union. In 1933, he wanted to threaten military force against Nazi Germany to stop their rearmanent. In between, he argued against backing Ibn Saud to take over Arabia. Amazing, that this one man clearly saw the three greatest threats to civilization of the past century, and had we but listened to him at any of those junctures, how many tens of millions of lives would have been spared?

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