An important corrective to Mr. D’Souza,’s wild claim that Muslim pirates “weren’t attacking America,” but rather, once “Thomas Jefferson found out that there were these Barbary pirates in the Middle East,” he decided to “clobber them,” solely because they were “hurting our position in the world.” (See chapter 8 of Sword and Scimitar for the full scoop on the Barbary Wars — America’s first violence encounter with Islam — which began before it could even elect its first president.)
