Michael Oren "comes close to claiming that the Barbary pirates were forerunners of Al Qaeda and were driven by the same jihadi ideology. The implication is that we have been in civilizational conflict with Islam since the early days of the U.S. Oren takes this argument a step further and explicitly states his "objective is to enable Americans to read about the fighting in Iraq and hear the echoes of the Barbary Wars." A more plausible interpretation is that the Barbary pirates were motivated by the same profit motive that drove American privateers and slave owners in the early 19th Century. The primary purpose was economic gain, enslaving and trafficking innocent human cargo simply to get rich. Those who pursued this type of activity--in both cases--would surely have invoked sacred scripture (the Bible or the Koran) as a way of giving moral sanction to their behavior. This does not mean, however, that they were primarily motivated by religious zeal rather than by the likely prospect of material gain." (thanks Nader)