During his November 1 Friday mosque sermon at the North Hudson Islamic Center in New Jersey, CAIR official Ayman Aishat made a seemingly starting claim:

We live in America, the United States of America. Brothers and sisters, those who do not know history, not too long ago, the USA was paying the jizya to the Ottoman Caliph.

Could this be?

First, let us define jizya. In brief, it is the monetary tribute that conquered or cowed infidels pay their Islamic overlords in exchange for peace, according to Koran 9:29:

Fight those among the People of the Book [Christians and Jews] who do not believe in Allah, nor the Last Day, nor forbid what Allah and his Messenger have forbidden, nor embrace the religion of truth [Islam], until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.

And yes, Aishat is correct: once upon a time, in its fledgling youth, the United States succumbed to paying jizya to appease Muslim terrorists. That story is instructive -- not least as it includes the genesis of the U.S. Navy.

Between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries, the Muslims of North Africa (“Barbary”) thrived on enslaving Europeans. According to the conservative estimate of American professor Robert Davis, “between 1530 and 1780 there were almost certainly a million and quite possibly as many as a million and a quarter white, European Christians enslaved by the Muslims of the Barbary Coast.” (With countless European women selling for the price of an onion, little wonder by the late 1700s, European observers noted how “the inhabitants of Algiers have a rather white complexion.”)

As Barbary slaving was a seafaring venture, nearly no part of Europe was untouched. From 1627 to 1633, Lundy, an island off the west coast of Britain, was actually occupied by the pirates, whence they pillaged England at will. In 1627 they raided Denmark and even far-off Iceland, hauling a total of some 800 slaves.

Such raids were accompanied by the trademark hate. One English captive writing around 1614 noted........

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