a better answer..............................

     Although he now despaired of an easy solution, Adams wasn't ready to stop talking.  He could understand financial concerns, and he was already beginning to realize what O'Brien would later say of the pirates:  "Money is their god and Mahomet their Prophet."  Yet greed alone couldn't explain the madness and cruelty of the demands.  Unsatisfied, the famously blunt Adams wanted a better answer.  While maintaining the best diplomatic reserve he could muster - whatever their frustration, the American ministers could hardly leap to their feet and walk out of the negotiations - Adams asked how the Barbary states could justify "[making] war upon nations who had done them no injury."
     The response was nothing less than chilling.
     According to his holy book, the Qur'an, Abdrahaman explained, "all nations which had not acknowledged the Prophet were sinners, whom it was the right and duty of the faithful to plunder and enslave."
     Christian sailors were, plain and simple, fair game.
     Jefferson tried to make sense of what he was hearing.  He was familiar with the Muslim holy book.  He had purchased a copy of the Qur'an during his day of reading law in Williamsburg twenty years before but found its values so foreign that he shelved the volume with books devoted to the mythology of the Greeks and Romans.   This conversation left him even more perplexed.  The man who had written that all people were "endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights" was horrified at Abdrahaman's religious justification for greed and cruelty.
     Dashing Adams's high hopes, Abdrahaman refused to play the role of "benevolent and wise man."  Despite the Americans' horror, he wasn't apologizing in any way.  He showed no remorse or regret.  He believed the actions of his fellow Muslims fully justified.
     "Every mussulman," he explained, "who was slain in this warfare was sure to go to paradise."
     To Abdrahaman, this was not complicated.  In his culture, the takers of ships, the enslavers of men, the Barbarians who extorted bribes for safe passage, were all justified by the teaching of the prophet Muhammad.  "It was written in our Qur'an," he said simply.

-Brian Kilmeade and Don Yaeger,  Thomas Jefferson and the Tripoli Pirates:  The Forgotten War that Changed American History