Perhaps more than any other academic besides Edward Said, French philosopherMichel Foucault is responsible for today’s alliance between Leftists and Islamists. He died in 1984, but his misunderstanding of Islam lives on, influencing the way the West views Islam.
Islam and America
At the nation’s founding, American vessels and American citizens were being seized by Barbary Coast pirates on behalf of sheikhdoms of Morocco, Algiers, and Tripoli, who were enslaving them because the Koran gave them that “right and duty,” as the Ambassador of Tripoli told Ambassador Thomas Jefferson in 1786. But then President Jefferson defeated the Barbary pirates, and for most of the 19th and 20th centuries, Islam and the Muslim world was removed, distant, exotic, unfamiliar.
