Miracles and Massacres by Glenn Beck Page B

These words melded with Henry’s, creating a great, pounding prophetic cacophony of trepidation, as disturbing as any storm of thunder and lightning.
    Madison shook his head and took a deep breath. No , he thought, these things could never happen. The Constitution—and, certainly this Bill of Rights they’ve insisted on—would hold such tyranny at bay. Not even in three hundred years could these iron bulwarks we have erected fail to protect our hard-fought liberty .
    But Patrick Henry, unable to rise from his chair inside the hall, silent and speechless for once in his life, feared otherwise.

4
The Barbary War: A Steep Price for Peace
    Chambers of Abd al-Rahman
    London, England
    March 28, 1785
    The ambassador shifted in his seat. It had been twenty minutes and mysterious odors were beginning to waft into the waiting room from the kitchen. He impatiently glanced at the Arabic script and mosaic tiles covering the walls and heard his stomach growl. He missed his Virginia plantation and the meals his slaves cooked for him.
    The ambassador was a man of contradictions. He was a revolutionary, but he’d never fired a gun in anger. He was a profligate spender and chronic debtor, but he hated government expenditures and fought ferociously against a national debt. And he was a well-known slaveholder, who was also his country’s most eloquent advocate for liberty and equality.
    The only contradiction that currently mattered, however, was Thomas Jefferson’s attitude toward the ongoing hostage crisis in the Mediterranean. Hundreds of American sailors, the victims of pirates backed by petty dictators on the Barbary Coast, were languishing in North African prisons. These pirates had also confiscated thousands of dollars’ worth of ships and goods. Jefferson hated the Europeans’policy of ransoming their hostages and buying peace by bribing the marauders, but he was equally distrusting of the strong central government that would be required to build a navy strong enough to protect American commerce with force.
    At last, a figure approached, silhouetted against the arched hallway. Jefferson stood and turned his tall, thin figure toward Abd al-Rahman, the personal representative of the Pasha of Tripoli, Ali the First. Though nominally part of the Ottoman Empire, Tripoli was a quasi-independent state that, like Tunis, Algiers, and Morocco, had been harassing American ships.
    Rahman wore a flowing white robe and dark turban. His scarred and pocked face reflected the brutal land he’d left behind. After some brief pleasantries, Rahman turned to the matter at hand, alternating his language between Italian, Spanish, and French, depending on which word he remembered first as he struggled to translate from his native Arabic. “The United States is our enemy,” he said, with a candor Jefferson had not been expecting. “Peace is possible, but peace has a price. One hundred eighty-three thousand guineas, to be exact. Otherwise, we will extract our fee by continuing to pillage your ships.”
    Jefferson converted guineas to dollars in his head. The total owed to Tripoli and the surrounding Barbary States would approach $1 million. That was one-tenth the entire annual budget of the United States.
    â€œMonsieur Rahman, our countries are being drawn toward a universal and horrible war,” Jefferson replied in flawless French, speaking slowly to make sure the Pasha’s envoy understood him. “We have no interest in sending soldiers across the Atlantic to fight your men.”
    Rahman took a deep breath. He understood Jefferson’s words just fine but doubted that the young republic this man represented was really prepared to stand behind them. Far larger nations with far stronger militaries had chosen to pay for peace. He had no doubt that this one would as well.
    â€œIt is written in the Koran,” Rahman said, “that all nations without acknowledged Islamic authority are sinners.