The Barbary Pirates Reject "Change"

By: Mr. Curmudgeon
mrcurmudgeon@inthepublicsquare.com

Selling “hope” and “change” was easy when campaigning before a gullible American electorate. Convincing the world’s despots, however, is proving more difficult, especially where Iran’s lunatic leadership is concerned. “We have serious differences that have grown over time,” said President Obama, stating the obvious in his video message to Iran’s ruling mullahs. “My administration is now committed to diplomacy that addresses the full range of issues before us, and to pursuing constructive ties among the United States, Iran and the international community…We seek instead engagement that is honest and grounded in mutual respect.”

Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei’s response was predictable. “'He [Obama] insulted the Islamic Republic of Iran from the first day. If you are right that change has come, where is that change? What is the sign of that change? Make it clear for us what has changed.”

Then, in what appeared to be a subtle request for some of Obama’s bailout money, Khamenei asked, “Have you released Iranian assets? Have you lifted oppressive sanctions? Have you given up mudslinging and making accusations against the great Iranian nation and its officials?”

Obama’s weak entreaties to Iran are the triumph of “hope” over experience. Back in 2006, Iranian President Mahmuoud Ahmadinejad outlined to the world his conditions for better relations with Iran in a speech broadcast on state television:

If you want to have good relations with the Iranian people in the future, you should acknowledge the right and the might of the Iranian people, and you should bow and surrender to the might of the Iranian people. If you do not accept this, the Iranian people will force you to bow and surrender.

Shortly after the United States achieved its independence, the Islamic Barbary states of Algeria in North Africa recognized our separation from Brittan by capturing our merchant ships in the Mediterranean Sea, seizing their cargos and impressing their crews into slavery. In 1786, our fledgling republic dispatched diplomats Thomas Jefferson and John Adams to London to negotiate with the Barbary state’s ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman. When the Americans inquired as to “the ground of the pretensions to make war upon nations who had done them no injury,” Jefferson and Adams recorded the Muslim ambassador’s reply and dispatched it to congress:

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; and that every Muslim who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise. He said, also, that the man who was the first to board a vessel had one slave over and above his share, and that when they sprang to the deck of an enemy's ship, every sailor held a dagger in each hand and a third in his mouth; which usually struck such terror into the foe that they cried out for quarter at once.

This undoubtedly made a profound impression upon Jefferson, who, after his inauguration as President in 1801, refused to pay the $225,000 annual allotment in protection money to the Barbary Pasha, sending instead a naval squadron with Marines to savage and bombard the shores of Tripoli.

The despotic Islamic regime that has ruled Iran since 1979 is not new to history, nor the barbarism perpetrated in order to fulfill the Koran’s edicts by the faithful.

Faith has a powerful transformative nature. Americans believe Obama’s nebulous doctrine of change and hope will magically conjure into existence a strong economy, brotherly national unity, and elevate America’s image around the world. Obama apparently believes in the power of his personality cult, hoping against hope for Islam’s strident faithful to see the light and join Americans in submitting to the power of his secular gospel.

“The United States wants the Islamic Republic of Iran to take its rightful place in the community of nations,” said the President Obama to the Iranians. What Obama and the secular international community fail to grasp is that Iran is not a traditional nation state longing for the respect of fellow nations, because Islam is not a political movement. It is a powerful and aggressive faith, and Iran’s mullahs are swayed by something more powerful than the senile West’s “community of nations” or President Obama’s animal magnetism.

The post-Christian secular states of the West are incapable of believing international Islamic militants mean what they say.  The reason is that Islam – all faiths in fact – come in direct conflict with the central tenant of secular faith: that all men are servants of the one true god – government. What is odd about governmental monotheism is that it has no heresy doctrine. Secular faith cannot conceive the existence of competing faiths. Therefore, they ignore Iran’s Islamic ravings and pursue pointless diplomatic overtures, even after thirty years of uninterrupted Iranian terror.

Obama said Iran’s “greatness is not the capacity to destroy, it is your demonstrated ability to build and create.” The President is right – and Iran seeks to build and create nuclear weapons. Possessing nuclear weapons is unremarkable in itself. Well-adjusted people do not feel threatened because the U.S., Brittan, France and India have nuclear weapons. Pakistan, North Korea and possibly Iran are another matter altogether. The most dangerous weapon they possess is not nuclear but a savage and hateful worldview. Should Iran eventually possess nuclear weapons, they will wield them – as Thomas Jefferson and John Adams once wrote – like a “dagger in each hand.” Iran is about to elevate piracy to a higher and much more dangerous level.

--Mr. Curmudgeon