Orrin Judd interviews Joshua E. London’s about his new book on America’s Barbary Wars, Victory in Tripoli : How America’s War with the Barbary Pirates Established the U.S. Navy and Shaped a Nation, in America’s First War on Islamic Terror:
The United States encountered Islam very early in our history. America’s first diplomatic encounter with Islam, in the form of John Adams’ and Thomas Jefferson’s meeting with the Ambassador of Tripoli to Brittan in May 1786, explicitly revealed, over two hundred years ago, the religious nature of the conflict — the jihad — facing the United States. That was before what we call ‘Colonialism’ entered the lands of Islam, before there were any oil interests dragging us into the fray, and well before the founding of the State of Israel. America became entangled in that part of the world and dragged into a war with the Barbary States simply because of the religious obligation within Islam to bring belief to those who do not share it. From there, the other similarities and parallels become almost comically obvious — the hostage crises, the arms for hostage deals, the basic sociological communications divide between Americans and Muslims, the back-handed dealings, the political calculations and expediency, etc.