(Gatestone Institute) Amir Taheri - No major power in recent history has gone out of its way as has the U.S. to help, respect, please and, yes, appease Islam. And, yet, no other nation has been a victim of vilification, demonization, and violence on the part of the Islamists as has the U.S. Both Presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson tried to appease the Islamist pirates of North Africa in the hope of persuading them to cease their raids on U.S. commercial ships and stop capturing Americans and selling them as slaves. They sent peace missions laden with gifts and cash. In the end, however, they had to take military action to cut the head off the snake. It was President Woodrow Wilson who insisted at the end of World War I that the main European imperial powers of the day, Great Britain and France, publicly commit to respecting the right of self-determination for nations freed from the Ottoman yoke. The Americans invented the idea of "mandates" under the League of Nations to prevent the European imperialist countries from turning their Muslim conquests in the Middle East into a new colonial galaxy. It was President Harry Truman who in 1946 used eyeball-to-eyeball diplomacy against Soviet despot Josef Stalin to force him to take Russian occupation troops out of Iran's northwestern provinces. In the 1956 crisis, it was President Dwight Eisenhower who went against American's oldest allies, Britain and France, to let the Egyptians assert their national sovereignty. After 1961, President John F. Kennedy exerted immense pressure on France to accelerate progress towards Algeria's independence. In the October 1973 war, U.S. intervention helped restrain the Israelis, and in the Camp David talks, intense pressure by President Jimmy Carter forced the Israelis to abandon "security enclaves" inside the Sinai Peninsula, thereby helping President Anwar Sadat recover all of Egypt's lost territory. With the disintegration of Yugoslavia, the U.S. under President Bill Clinton helped save the lives of many Muslims in Bosnia. Later, it was also U.S. military power that helped Kosovo's Albanian majority, overwhelmingly Muslim, achieve independence. During the past six decades, the U.S. has been by far the largest donor of aid to more than 40 of the 57 Muslim-majority nations.
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