Roth swallowed the last of his wine and fixed Ben with intense eyes. ‘You talk about America like we’re always the instigators. Do you know when our country first had dealings with Islamic terror? It was in 1784, only just after we’d declared our independence. We were a completely new nation. Other than defending ourselves against British tyranny we’d never provoked anyone, attacked anyone, offended anyone, and all we wanted to do was get on our feet as a trading nation. That’s when Muslim pirates from Morocco captured an American ship, took its crew hostage and demanded ransom in return for no more hostilities. We paid over the money. And then they kept doing it, only the attacks got worse and the sums got bigger, until we were losing up to sixteen per cent of our federal revenue to pay them off. The demands were coming from the Bey of Tunis, who called himself “Commander of the Frontier Post of the Holy War”. In 1786 two of our Founding Fathers, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, met with his ambassador in London and asked him in all sincerity, “Why are you guys doing this to us? What did we ever do to you?” You know what the ambassador’s reply was? That it was based on the teachings of the prophet, that it was all written in the book, that all nations who didn’t submit to Islam were sinners, that under Islamic law it was their right and duty to make war on us, and that any Muslim killed in battle against us would find a place in Paradise. In the end it took two wars between the US and the Barbary states, in 1805 and 1815, to put a stop to the attacks.’

‘So America declared war on them.’