When Has Negotiating With Islamic Terrorists Ever Worked?
The track record for another Iran Deal is as bad as it gets
Nearly 250 years ago, the United States tried negotiating with Islamic pirate states to stop the capture of American ships and the enslavement of Americans. George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams all learned the painful lesson that the negotiations were a trap.
Treaties would be signed, agreements would be reached and would soon be broken because Muslims could freely lie to ‘infidels’ and had a religious obligation to wage war on them.
“The precept of the Koran is perpetual war against all who deny that Mahomet is the prophet of God,” Adams summed it up. “The command to propagate the Moslem creed by the sword is always obligatory, when it can be made effective. The commands of the prophet may be performed alike, by fraud, or by force.”
This isn’t ancient history, it’s current events as the United States once again conducts futile negotiations with an Islamic pirate and terrorist state to stop its attacks on international shipping.
Defenders of the negotiations have taken to hailing a deal with Iran as smart diplomacy while contending that Iran’s regime is moderate and critics of appeasing Jihadists are ‘warmongers’.
But if negotiating with Islamic terrorists is such a good idea, what is its track record?
The Carter administration negotiated the Algiers Accord with Iran to release the hostages. And having seen the success of taking hostages, Iran had Hezbollah and other Shiite Islamic front groups start taking hostages, torturing and killing them, and carrying out terrorist attacks.
That was our reward for negotiating a deal with Iran back then. It was our reward for negotiating a deal with Iran under Obama. And it’ll be our reward for negotiating a deal with Iran now.
Rewarding Iran for its terrorism just led to more terrorism. That’s happening all over again.
Iran’s only real card is closing the Strait of Hormuz so despite the latest agreement, it began opening fire on ships again. And we should expect that to continue until we put a stop to it.
Should we have seen this coming?
In its first term, the Trump administration also negotiated a deal through Qatar with Islamic terrorists. The Taliban quickly began violating the agreement and set out to seize control. While the Afghanistan withdrawal would probably not have been as disastrous under the Trump administration as it was under Biden, the basic outcome would have ended up the same.
In its second term, the Trump administration allowed the same people responsible for the Iran deal, Steven Witkoff and Jared Kushner, to negotiate a deal with Hamas that the terrorist group has repeatedly violated leading to smaller scale fighting and no actual progress. The Gaza ‘Board of Peace’ is set for a ‘reset’ summit in Cyprus after little to show for the last six months.
The Lebanon ceasefire has also been mostly fictional because Hezbollah has refused to stay behind the ceasefire lines (as it’s been doing for two generations) leading to more fighting, and to Iranian demands that the Trump administration provide political cover for Hezbollah attacks.
The fighting in Gaza is itself an outgrowth of the Clinton, Bush and Obama efforts to negotiate between Israel and various Islamic terrorist groups, most prominently the PLO, to create a ‘Palestinian’ terrorist state, but which only led to generations of escalating terrorist attacks.
Even a cursory history of our relationships with supposed Muslim allies like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan shows them seizing our assets, funding, harboring and planting Islamic terrorists in the United States and around the world while assuring us that they would never do such a thing.
The latest version of the Iran Deal is being negotiated through Qatar and Pakistan. Qatar had harbored 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed while Pakistan harbored Bin Laden.
The United States had been pleading with Pakistan to help with Bin Laden since 1998. In 1999, Pakistani officials assured us that their government was taking the Bin Laden ‘matter very seriously.’ And they were indeed. After 9/11, the United States directed at least billions in aid to Pakistan, hitting a high of over $800 million a year after the attacks, and reaching another high of $2.9 billion the year before the United States found him hiding in a Pakistani military town.
The Pakistani government claimed that we had ‘martyred’ him even while pretending it had no idea he was there. The Obama administration stepped down aid to Pakistan to a mere $1 billion a year.
15 years later, we’re trusting the people who harbored Bin Laden to help us with Iran. After a Pakistani massacre of non-Muslims in India, J.D. Vance pressured India to stand down. At the recent diplomatic meetings, Vance claimed, “we love Pakistan.” But Pakistan doesn’t love us.
No Islamic country does.
The track record of negotiations with Islamic terror states and even nations wouldn’t be so poor if there wasn’t a powerful underlying hostility and any lack of common values to build mutual trust and any lasting relationship around.
Vance may have to learn the same hard lesson that Jefferson and Adams did when they heard from the Tripoli ambassador that the aggression “was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that “it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged 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 Musselman who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”
But the history is already there and we should not need to be constantly relearning it.
Negotiating with Islamic terrorists has never worked. It’s not about to suddenly start working at this late date. The only thing that negotiating with Islamic terrorists leads to is more terrorism.
America’s Founding Fathers learned that nearly 250 years ago. We insist on forgetting it.
Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center’s Front Page Magazine.
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