Terrorists

On television I watched a U.S. Senator holding hearings. He ranted about terrorists infiltrating Muslim communities in the U.S. In the 1950's Senator McCarthy terrorized our country by accusing public officials of being Communists, even casting suspicion on President Dwight Eisenhower!

The news is so depressing that I want to ignore current disasters and retreat into the 18th and 19th Centuries. Read Jane Austen and enter a world of tea parties and dances where the main concern was finding husbands for all the young women.

Who would know, from those books about gentile life in that leisurely world, at the time Austen was writing her novels, her brothers were in bloody sea battles fighting Napoleon? Both became admirals in the British Navy. Austen, living in the peaceful countryside, knew nothing about fighting battles at sea. She wrote what she knew from personal experience. Or maybe, like me, she wanted to ignore the horrors of war.

Her brothers may have participated in the “first terrorist attack against a major European city in modern times.”

Who were the terrorists? The Brits!

Few will note in a few weeks the 210th anniversary of the Battle of Copenhagen. On April 2,1801, the British fleet under Horacio Nelson (then only a Vice-Admiral) met a Dano-Norwegian fleet at Copenhagen. (At that time Denmark and Norway were combined under the Danish king.) Historians call the Battle of Copenhagen, “Nelson’s hardest fought battle, surpassing even heavy fighting at Trafalgar.” The British sank most of their opponents’ ships and sailed away to fight in Spain. The Danes thought that was the end of the war for them.

Then in August, 1807, the British came back in a preemptive attack. This time their target was not the Danish Navy but the city of Copenhagen. Since the attack targeted civilians, it is rightly considered a terrorist action. The British ships bombarded the city with “Congreve rockets” containing phosphoreus, which cannot be extinguished with water, and many houses, which had straw roofs, burned to the ground.

Then the British landed 30,000 troops to surround the town of 60,000 people, including women and children. The city was destroyed. Over 2,000 civilians were killed.

Today the Danes and the British are allies in NATO. We need to take a long look at history and be careful whom we call an enemy. I remember when Germans and Japanese were real enemies. In my lifetime they became our friends.

We are angry about the Americans killed by radical Muslims in the attack on 9/11. Let’s not forget that those terrorists were 19 Saudis and one Egyptian. None were from Iraq. There was no Al Quedas in Iraq until we invaded. Also, none of the terrorists were from Turkey, Tunisia, Algeria, or Indonesia, all Muslim countries. If we blame all Muslims for 9/11, we are in danger of turning Muslim friends into enemies. Do we want that?