Thomas Jefferson Was Wrong
By Theodore Shoebat
When Jefferson and Adams were striving to solve the terrorism coming from the Barbary pirates, they apparently did not understand the religion of their enemies.
In their meeting with the Muslim ambassador of Tripoli, the two Founding Fathers were so oblivious to the religious aspirations of the pirates, that they actually felt compelled to ask as to why they were attacking innocent merchant ships:
We took the liberty to make some inquiries the Grounds of their pretensions to make war upon Nations who had done them no Injury, and observed that we considered all mankind as our friends who had done us no wrong, nor had given us any provocation.
The fact that they had to ask to understand the purpose for their violence indicates their absence of awareness of Islam at that time. The response of the ambassador was that it was written in the Quran that
all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it 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 who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.
In the letter in which this event was recorded, Jefferson and Adams responded not with indignation toward Islam, but with thoughts on how they were going borrow the money which the North African pirates demanded for peace. If they were our leaders today and they were doing such a thing before our eyes, it would be impossible not to hear the justified protests of the American people. We would continually hear about how traitorous the two founders are, and the blogs would have been all over it. Here are their words (1):
There is but one possible way that we know of to procure the money, if Congress should authorize us to go to the necessary expence, and that is to borrow it in Holland. We are not certain it can be had there. But if Congress should order us to make the best terms we can with Tunis, Tripoli, Algiers and Morocco, and to procure this money wherever we can find it, upon terms like those of the last in Holland, our best endeavours shall be used to remove this formidable obstacle out of the way of the prosperity of the United States.
John Adams actually preferred the giving of money to the jihadists rather than extinguishing them all together; he wrote:
The Interest of half a Million Sterling is, even at Six Per Cent, Thirty Thousand Guineas a year. For an Annual Interest of 30,000 £ st. then and perhaps 15,000 or 10,000, we can have Peace, when a War would sink us annually ten times as much.
The root of Adam’s mistake was a lack of knowledge on Islam; for if money really was the solution, then why did America ultimately have to suffer two wars with the Barbary pirates?
If Adams and Jefferson truly understood Islam, with all of its lying and deception, then they would have never trusted that their money would have bought sincere peace. It was an ideology that the pirates were fighting for; they were laboring and shedding blood for a heresy which denies the divinity of Christ, and to not comprehend this will only lead to the jihadists having the upper hand.
If only they had the knowledge at the time of Adams’ son, John Quincy Adams, who once said:
The precept of the koran is, perpetual war against all who deny, that Mahomet is the prophet of God. The vanquished may purchase their lives, by the payment of tribute; the victorious may be appeased by a false and delusive promise of peace; and the faithful follower of the prophet, may submit to the imperious necessities of defeat: but the command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it can be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force.
I assume that the younger Adams learned this from his father who witnessed the troubles which the jihadists had brought.
They were going against pirates who lived in North Africa, the ancestors of the same terrorists who attacked the US embassy in Benghazi. Jefferson and Adams made the mistake of trying to buy their peace, and the results were nothing good. But worse than their mistakes is the traitorous actions of Obama and his administration in working with the Muslim Brotherhood–the very enemy who attacked the US embassy in Sudan.
All of these mistakes and betrayals are the results of our toleration toward heresies and heretics. We have tolerated Islam–a unitarian heresy–and look at all of the trouble it has brought. 9/11, the Armenian Genocide, the Ottoman Empire, the Barbary Pirate Wars and the massacres of millions of Christians in the Muslim world–all are results of a heresy and the heretic Muhammad who composed it.
The root reason as to why we have an Islamic problem is because we have a general populace that is apathetic to heresy, and we have–in turn–a government which encourages heresy. Obama wants Zakat–or Islamic charity for jihad–to be tax exempt:
For instance, in the United States, rules on charitable giving have made it harder for Muslims to fulfill their religious obligation. That is why I am committed to working with American Muslims to ensure that they can fulfill zakat.
Thus is heresy.
If there was an inquisition in Arabia which prevented heresy from being promulgated, then Muhammad would have been undoubtedly stopped, and Islam would have never been able to raise its bloody head.
And for those of you whose stomaches turn sour and whose minds are seized with fear at the term “inquisition”, let me just give you potential antidote. Hitler was a heretic, he was apostate from Christianity. He once wrote:
I regard Christianity as the most fatal, seductive lie that has ever existed.
He adopted a heresy, quite similar to the Albigensian heresy of the Middle Ages. He referred to the conquest of Jericho by Joshua as an “uninterrupted mass murder of bestial cruelty and shameless rapacity and cold-blooded cunning,” a “Hell incarnate.” He referred to the Old Testament as “Satan’s Bible” or the “Book of Hate”. He considered Jesus an Aryan who went against the Jews when he drove the money-changers out of the temple and when he told them that “Your father is the devil.” (2)
He wrote in his Mein Kampf:
Christianity was not content with erecting an altar of its own. It had to destroy the pagan altars. It was only in virtue of this passionate intolerance that an apodictic faith could grow up. And intolerance is an indispensable condition for the growth of such a faith.
Now, if there was an inquisition in Germany which dealt with these sort erroneous beliefs, and Hitler and his followers were burnt in the stake, and his maniacal book was also thrown into the flames, then they would have been no Third Reich, no attempted conquest of Europe by the Nazis, and ultimately–no Holocaust. But I am sure that the history books would not cease in complaining about the “tyranny of the church,” without the slightest idea that the death of the heretics prevented a tyranny from being established.
Stalin and all of the communists were heretics who apostatized from Christianity, and they made it their mission to establish an atheist utopia. British political philosopher John Gray in his article Don’t Write Off Religion Just Yet stated:
atheism was – according to the founders of the Soviet state, and in fact – always an integral part of the Communist project. Despite the vehement denials of Dawkins and Hitchens, terror in Communist Russia – and Mao’s China – was also meant to bring about a utopian society in which religion would no longer exist.
Look with your weary eyes at all of the millions who died because of the dreams of heretics! And if you think that my intolerance toward heresy is against the modern age or the enlightenment, I must say that even John Locke, one of the most prominent of the enlightenment thinkers wrote against tolerating atheism in, ironically, his famous letter on toleration:
Lastly, those are not at all to be tolerated who deny the being of God. Promises, covenants, and oaths, which are the bonds of human society, can have no hold upon an atheist. The talking away of God, though but even in thought, dissolves all. (3)
If heresy was prevented, there would be no Hillary Clinton with all of her insanity. She too is a heretic being a part of the predominantly left-wing United Methodist Church. She was influenced by the leftist Methodist magazine motive, which featured a birthday card to Ho Chi Minh. While she spreads her socialist poison and words with Islamist infiltrators like Huma Abedin, Clinton at one point taught Sunday school. In her graduation from the Methodist university Wellesley, she made her commencement speech in which she promoted human engineering, stating
We’re not interested in social reconstruction; its human reconstruction (4)
Here is a video of an abortion doctor stating that he is an ordained Baptist minister but now Unitarian:
If heresy is not squashed, the heterodox will dominate the orthodox. This is is what is currently happening, and it is why we find Christians in American usually complaining as opposed to engaging in victories over the Left on issues such as the murder of unborn children and the sodomite agenda.
To say that Christianity promotes the idea that “everyone can believe what they want to believe”, is rubbish. To say so would mean that opinions don’t matter, but in Christianity, ideas are taken very seriously. The entire Bible is men combating errors and false religions.
Jesus Christ believed in vanquishing error and heresy. When Jesus was asked by a scribe on which is the first of all commandments, He responded:
The first of all commandments is, Hear, O Israel; the Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy mind, and with all thy strength: this is the first commandment. (Mark 12:30)To this the scribe responded:Well, Master, thou hast said the truth: for there is one God, and there is non other but he (Mark 12:32)To say that there is “non other” explicitly means that all the other gods are not real, and therefore error has not rights. Christ did not chastisement as being intolerant, but saidThou art not far from the kingdom of God.Theodore ShoebatChrist was quoting the Jewish Shema, which is directly from Moses:Hear, O Israel: the Lord our God is one Lord: and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thine heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might. (Deuteronomy 6:4-5)In accordance with this focal statement, Moses says this on the treatment of false prophets and heretics, which hinges on the Shema of Christ:Thou shalt not hearken unto the words of that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams: for the Lord your God proveth you, to know whether ye love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul. [...] And that prophet, or that dreamer of dreams, shall be put to death; because he hath spoken to turn you away from the Lord your God, which brought you out of the land of Egypt, and redeemed you out of the house of bondage, to thrust thee out of the way which the Lord thy God commanded thee to walk in. (Deuteronomy 13:3, 5)Thus why St. Paul writes that those who “changed the truth of God into a lie, and worshipped and served the creature more than the Creator,” and women who “change the natural use into that which is against nature: and likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly,” are “worthy of death” (Romans 1:25-31).St. PaulTo worship God is a natural right, because God created the natural order a part of which lies the natural urge to worship Him. But as soon as man worships some false deities, made up by the imagination, then he is no longer in accordance with the natural order, and thus his religious opinion is exempt from natural rights. Error has not right.Theodore Shoebat is the author of the book, For God or for TyrannyREFERENCES(1) All quotes from Jefferson and Adams are from Thomas Jefferson, Travels, Selected Writings, ed. Anthony Brandt (2006)(2) See David Redles, Hitler’s Millennial Reich(3) Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Ian Shapiro, p. 246(4) See Jonah Goldberg, Liberal Fascism, ch. 6, p. 236; ch. 9, pp. 319-320
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