The More Things Change, The More They Stay The Same
About the (Muslim) "Barbary Pirates," Christopher Hitchens writes at Slate that Jefferson went to ask Tripoli's envoy to London, Ambassador Sidi Haji Abdrahaman, why the Muslims were hijacking ships and why more they had sold more than a million Americans and Europeans into slavery. As Jefferson told Secretary of State John Jay, and to the Congress:

The ambassador answered us that [the right] was founded on the Laws of the Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Mussulman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.

Yes, this is what the Quran says. And this is why there are Muslims leaving their baby with grandma so they can go gun themselves down some infidels -- unarmed co-workers at a holiday party who'd just thrown a shower for their child.

As Hitchens puts it about Jefferson's statement above:

Medieval as it is, this has a modern ring to it. Abdrahaman did not fail to add that a commission paid directly to Tripoli--and another paid to himself--would secure some temporary lenience. I believe on the evidence that it was at this moment that Jefferson decided to make war on the Muslim states of North Africa as soon as the opportunity presented itself. And, even if I am wrong, we can be sure that the dispatch of the U.S. Navy and Marine Corps to the Barbary shore was the first and most important act of his presidency. It took several years of bombardment before the practice of kidnap and piracy and slavery was put down, but put down it was, Quranic justification or not.