We delinked Joachim Martillo because of his endless Jewbashing. But he’s smart. Here he is on Israeli ambassador Michael Oren‘s hogwashian scholarship in Power Faith and Fantasy, which says the US has been Zionist from jump street:
Prior to the Revolution, the only major threat to America’s vital Mediterranean trade came from the Middle East. Styling themselves as mujahideen — warriors in an Islamic holy war — Arabic-speaking pirates preyed on Western vessels, impounding their cargoes and enslaving their crews. These corsairs, as early Americans called them, sailed from the independent empire of Morocco and the semi-autonomous Ottoman regencies of Tripoli, Tunis, and Algiers, an area of the Middle East known collectively in Arabic as al-Maghrib, "the West." Westerners, though, had a different name for the region, one that evoked its Berber location but also its ferocious reputation. They called it Barbary.
Here is another example from page 32.
Jefferson was typical of the Americans who later viewed the region as the repository of despotism and backwardness, a kind of inverse mirror of their own democracy and enlightenment. Certainly, to his mind, a band of Muslim holy warriors bent on enslaving innocent American sailors was far more deserving of whiffs of grapeshot than bags of hard-earned gold. But with much of the American opinion still opposed to using force, Jefferson had no alternative other than to continue negotiating with North Africa for the hostages’ eventual release.
