***How does this pare the Treaty of Tripoli, 1796? ***
If I remember correctly, someone here at FR posted an article showing those words WERE NOT in the version given to the Arab rulers there at that time.
That’s interesting; and it would nullify the argument made in the article by Chuck Norris posted above.
Treaty with Tripoli 1796 Avalon Project Yale Edu
As even a casual examination of the annotated translation of 1930 shows, the Barlow translation is at best a poor attempt at a paraphrase or summary of the sense of the Arabic; and even as such its defects throughout are obvious and glaring. Most extraordinary (and wholly unexplained) is the fact that Article 11 of the Barlow translation, with its famous phrase, "the government of the United States of America is not in any sense founded on the Christian Religion," does not exist at all. There is no Article 11. The Arabic text which is between Articles 10 and 12 is in form a letter, crude and flamboyant and withal quite unimportant, from the Dey of Algiers to the Pasha of Tripoli. How that script came to be written and to be regarded, as in the Barlow translation, as Article 11 of the treaty as there written, is a mystery and seemingly must remain so. Nothing in the diplomatic correspondence of the time throws any light whatever on the point
See: Avalon Project - The Barbary Treaties at: http://avalon.law.yale.edu/subject_menus/barmenu.asp