Go become a fan of Treaty of Tripoli, Article 11 if you want to.

[swag]

http://www.facebook.com/#/pages/Treaty-of-Tripoli-Article-11/196370108387?ref=ts

[hobbit709]

1. Unaminously approved by the Senate after being read by Pres. John Adams

[ck4829]

2. Kick

[bigmonkey]

3. I'm aware of no record of contemporary complaints in the papers of the time. n/t

[dmallind]

4. Just to save the apologists' time

Yes - the translation differs. The Senate however ratified the version in English, which includes the explicit rejection of the US as being founded on Christianity (signed by one of the Founders and voted on by many more). That the version the powers in Tripoli received is not the same means there was poor translation control, not that the Senate somehow misunderstood the version they ratified.

It's about as trump as a card can be on the old "founding on Christianity" BS as can be imagined. Always has been. Always will be. Still the law of the land too.

[Igel]

6. This apologist asks why it was in there.

Oddly, the Arabic is the garbled version, and the Arabic was the original. So translation control isn't at issue in the least, not in the sense you mean. One could assume the translators looked at gibberish and decided to make sense of oddball Arabic. Possibly. Possibly not. I'd love to have the translators diaries and notes.

But it goes further. It's nice that it's America's first treaty to end a war. It's suitable for our age.

The ruler didn't honor the treaty but briefly. The ruler signed a peace treaty, but wasn't really officially able to provide peace. There were pirates that now the ruler claimed he didn't really control, now he claimed he could. Sound familiar? Moreover, the grounds for the pirates' actions were religious. In taking booty, captives and slaves, and demanding ransom and extortion money, they were simply despoiling the infidels. They viewed themselves as waging jihad. There's no way to understand the treaty, to understand why article 11 is in the treaty, without that understanding. America's first post-independence war was to stop pirates enslaving Americans, sinking ships, and asking for extortion money in the name of Islam. (Whether or not the official authority for determining what is Islamic and isn't Islamic agrees, they thought they were and the translators assumed they were. Oh. Wait. There is no central authority for determining "Islamicity.")

Now, had the treaty been fully on the up-and-up, both sides saying the same thing, jihad would be difficult. There'd be no obvious grounds for war. So the ruler fudged the difference in all likelihood: He pulled in his pirates to play nice for a few years and then unleashed them again when he felt powerful enough. The English copy yanked the obvious grounds for jihad out from under him. But it's not the official one for the Barbary side. The Arabic version--the one he'd have deemed binding, that *he* signed--didn't say that it wasn't a religious war and didn't yank the grounds for jihad out from under him.

My take is that the treaty was negotiated and translated--I can't imagine decent translators, even those not belonging to the ATA, wouldn't have pointed out the gibberish in the Arabic--and just as a fair copy was made of the English so a fair copy was made of the Arabic. Except that the Arabic fair copy was amended slightly--perhaps by command, but with the knowledge of the signatory. There's no way to prove this, but the fact that the Arabic is garbled while the English says something so clearly and to the point--a very important point of little importance to Americans at the time, I'd wager--begs an answer.

In any event, the Arabic treaty meant that he never gave a principled reason for stopping the fighting, just a practical one; it left him able to discount the validity of the treaty when it was to his advantage. It made sure there was no principled reason to not resume it because the principled reason for resuming it wasn't contradicted in a language the pirates read. So, after a few years, the treaty was broken and rendered effectively void (it was renegotiated but I can't find that it was re-ratified; perhaps that wasn't deemed necessary, given surrender).

However, for all the dragging out of negotiations and reneging on the deal by the N. Africans, the conflict, lic. jihad, was settled when the pirates were destroyed by having the ruler's city bombed and his ships sunk. The US built up a Navy. The ruler was then suddenly and oddly motivated to keep those not under his control on a leash. The problem ended--the extortion money, confiscation of ships, ransom and enslavement--for the Americans when the de facto ruler was sufficiently crushed and those waging jihad were sufficiently outgunned that they simply left the US ships pretty much alone.

The treaty, essentially negotiated and signed under compulsion and duress, yet not dissented with publicly among the reading citizenry of New York at the time, puts a point up for your team. I would argue your side in this, but on a different basis--I don't think that the federal government was founded on the Christian religion. The solution that finally achieved the ends of the treaty, however, rather puts up one for the freepers' team.

Le plus ca change. . .

[dmallind]

7. And where does any of that change the central fact that the US version is clear

in stating that we were not founded as a Christian nation, and that it was ratified and signed by people who knew that first hand? I frankly don't care in the context of this discussion if the Arabic version worked, was manipulated or was completely different (and by the way why does translation control mean anything different depending on which came first? This is another argument you seem to be answering that I never made).

The English version was the only version ratified and signed in the US. It is clear as clear can be that we are not and were not as a nation based on Christian religious beliefs. Why does anything at all to do with the Arabic version, or the treaty's efficacy, change that one iota? There is no "team" for me on what worked then or even what works now to combat such violence. My only concern with the Treaty of Tripoli is that it quashes any claim at all that the founders intended to establish a nation based on Christianity.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

5. You gotta problem with that?

Because, as an American citizen, I don't.