Why did I have to dig to find out that South Ossetia has a large muslim population? The wussie media cowards are obfuscating as usual.
COULD IT BE THAT THE RUSSIANS DON'T WANT ANOTHER ENCLAVE OF ACID THROWING AT WOMEN, SADISTIC, SOCIOPATHIC, SUPREMICIST, OUT OF CONTROL BUTCHERS WHO SPREAD DESTRUCTION WHEREVER THEY GO???
Book Review: The Last Patriot
Written by Cisco Book Review: The Last Patriot. Written by Brad Thor. Published by Atria Books, 2008.
The American prisoners were pushed and shoved through the surging, boisterous crowd that had gathered in the city. As they were paraded towards the palace, they could hear shouts, exclamations of joy, and clapping of hands. They could hear their captors thanking Allah “for their great success and victories over so many Christian dogs, and unbelievers...”
The Americans were paraded before the Muslim leader, who began berating them, saying that he would never make peace with their country, finishing by saying “now I have got you, you Christian dogs, you shall eat stones.”
The forgoing story of American imprisonment sounds as though it may have occurred in present-day Somalia, Iraq, Afganistan, Iran, or Pakistan. But the story is actually taken from an account written by an American seaman, John Foss, and it tells of his experience with Algerian pirates in 1793. Foss was on the brig Polly out of Newburyport, Massachussetts, bound for Cadiz, Spain when his brig was captured off the coast of Spain.
In 1793, the United States had no navy, and the independence gained just ten years earlier had stripped the fledgling country of the protection of the British navy. And so, the response of the United States Congress in dealing with the Algerian pirates who captured the Polly and who made slaves of American citizens followed the pattern set by European countries: pay a ransom for the release of the prisoners and pay an annual tribute to secure immunity from seizure for American ships. In the fifteen years from 1785 to 1800, Congress made payments of close to $1 million per year to Tripoli, Tunis, Morroco, and Algiers.
The United States agreed to this national extortion while building the navy that would eventually, in 1815, provide the respite from our first taste of Isalmic terrorism (The use of the words “Isalmic Terrorism” are properly considered. By 1800, any seizure of a ship owned by Christians was, by Islamic law, part of jihad against non-believers. For more on this, see Frederic C. Leiner's well-documented book, The End of Barbary Terror). It is interesting to note that, even with the constant threat of Islamic terrorism in the form of the Barbary pirates that faced the Americans in 1793, there were citizens who questioned America's need for a navy, were adverse to the expenditures associated with building the navy, and even went so far as to question the effect that the navy may have on civil liberties. Whether these concerned citizens were the actual founding members of the ACLU could not be confirmed.
In his new novel, The Last Patriot, Brad Thor provides an interesting story that, in a unique way, ties the Islamic terrorists of the late 18th and early 19th century Barbary states to the Islamic terrorists of today. In order to make this unique connection, Thor creates a fictional “lost revelation” of Mohammed. In Thor's fictional account, this final but lost revelation has been puposefully hidden by the terrorists who wish to control the religion of Islam, because it abrogates all of the Qur'an's exhortations to violence and calls upon the adherents of Islam to be peaceful in word and deed.
The connection between the lost revelaton of Islam and the Barbary pirates comes in the person of Thomas Jefferson. Prior to becoming president in 1801, Jefferson also held positions as the United States Minister to France, the Secretary of State, and as Vice-President, and in each of these positions he was called upon to assist in dealing with the terrorism of the Barbary States. Indeed, as Thor recalls in The Last Patriot, in 1786, while Jefferson was Minister to France, he met with the Tripoli ambassador to Great Britain and asked him “by what right his nation attacked American ships and enslaved American citizens.” The ambassador responded that “the right was founded on the laws of their prophet and that it was written in the Qur'an that all nations that did not acknowledge their authority were sinners, and that it was not only their right and duty to make war upon these sinners wherever they could be found, but to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners.”
They payment of the extortion money to the Barbary States ceased when Thomas Jefferson became the third President of the United States in 1801. Even though Jefferson had previously thought of the navy only as a means of coastal defense, he did not hesitate to send the navy into the Mediterranen when the pasha of Tripoli demanded an immediate payment of $225,000. And so, Thomas Jefferson became the first president to fight Islamic terrorism.
If this book review of a novel that is supposed to be a spy-thriller is beginning to sound as though it is actually a boring history lesson, then you are experiencing the problem that I have with The Last Patriot. Thor makes an attempt at combining an historical novel with a spy-thriller novel and the result is something less than what might be referred to as a “page-turner.” The problem is that the plot is so convoluted – involving historical characters as diverse as Miguel de Cervantes, Thomas Jefferson, Mohammed, Al-Jazari, and two Muslim teens who died prior to the Muslim riots in Paris in 2005 – that Thor fills page after page with historical detail in an effort to fit everything together. This historical detail is usually served up as conversation between the characters in the novel, but it still causes the novel to take on more of a historical lesson quality than one would normally care for in a spy-thriller.
I admire Thor's effort, but I doubt that even the most brilliant and seasoned writer could pull together all of these diverse historical characters without leaving some majors holes in the story. I will not take the time to go into all of these in detail, but I will just note here that Thor never provides a beleivable explanation as to why Jefferson chose to hide the lost revelation, rather than proclaiming it to the world. The novel has a hint of the plot of the movie National Treasure, with those crazy old founding fathers running off and hiding things. One must admit that in National Treasure the plot is downright moronic – the founding fathers hiding millions in treasure when they were in the middle of fighting an expensive war that they could not afford – but the comparison between the movie and book does ring true on the strict event of a founding father mysteriously hiding something that was badly needed.
While concentrating on pulling together all of the loose ends of his plot's historical timeline, Thor loses sight of his characters. There are two instances of Thor's character blindness that I find bothersome. His rogue CIA agent is astoundingly indiscriminate in his killing, both in those he chooses to kill and in those he chooses not to kill. In one instance he makes an effort to kill three people, when he would have been much better served by slipping off into the night, and then later on, he chooses to merely render uncounscious an individual that he should have killed. Additionally, Thor has his protagonist, Scot Harvath, being out-stealthed by a senior pentagon official, and this is totally inconsistent with the character of Harvath as it is developed earlier in the book.
Predictably, the half-wits at the Chicago-Tribune have made the obligatory comparison of Brad Thor to Robert Ludlum, saying “Quite possibly the next coming of Robert Ludlum.” I guess that is true, inasmuch as I, quite possibly, will be the next husband of Christie Brinkley. Thor cannot legitimately be compared to Ludlum at this point, but I do see some promise in his writing. I will purchase his next book, as I believe that there will be improvement. As for The Last Patriot, when it comes out in paperback, you would not be wasting $7.00 if you picked it up to entertain yourself on a long flight. If nothing else, you will get a fairly decent history lesson.
