One World Trade Center, formerly the Freedom Tower before that name was deemed too showy and patriotic, is a faintly shiny presence on the skyline, glass slowly sliding over stories of naked steel, overshadowed by Frank Gehry’s strikingly surreal Beekman Tower with its rippling lines. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you would hardly notice it was there.

Now One World Trade Center will lose a radome enclosure due to budget cuts, which means very little except that the building’s ridiculous 400 foot spire risks being classified as an antenna and OWTC will no longer be recognized as the tallest building in the country. The death of the radome is one of the many redesigns to the building that have made it the forgettable structure that it is today. And the difference in those 400 feet is the difference between a 1,368 foot skyscraper and a 1,776 foot skyscraper.

Having lost the Freedom Tower designation, losing the symbolic 1,776 height seems almost an afterthought. The 1,776 number was an artifact of Daniel Libeskind, the original architect, and his vision for the site. That vision was mostly discarded, along with its “sky gardens” and windmills. The “1,776″ height is about all that remains of the German-Jewish architect’s proposal. And regardless of whether we count the antenna as a spire or not, it will not be the tallest building in the world. Those can be found in the places that funded the terrorists, Saudi Arabia and Dubai, which have used slave labor to build glass and steel pyramids to the glory of their own pharaohs.

The Empire State Building, the Grande Dame of New York skyscrapers, has a roof height of around a 100 feet or 30 meters lower. The difference between a skyscraper built during the Great Depression and one built during the 21st Century Depression is around 100 feet and about a century of aesthetics. Where the spire of the Empire State Building is an organic extension of it, the one atop OWTC is awkwardly placed, it’s just there making time and filling up the space.

In its defense, One World Trade Center is graceful enough compared to the Sears Tower or the Dubai Burj, which pile blocks and needles together in a cluster of alien geometry. It will be better looking than the New York Times Building and the Bank of America Tower, which both have that made- by-IKEA look. It will also be completely unremarkable and that is a feature, not a bug.

Its blandness of name and design convey that it is an apolitical structure. Its only ambition is to embody a post-American bigness made possible by a large antenna. Its unexceptional nature is an antidote to the American exceptionalism sparked after the September 11 massacre. Much like welcoming in a mosque near Ground Zero or incorporating Islamic elements into the Flight 93 Memorial, it says that there is nothing especially American here.

One World Trade Center will need to fill all that office space, and many international renters may do business in America, but they don’t like us very much. And ever since September 11, American political and business leaders have tried to be as inoffensive as possible, to avoid stepping on anyone’s toes with our jingoism and our flags so that next time we don’t get bombed.

Of course, it was never a war on “terror” anyway; as many have pointed out, terror is a tactic, not an enemy. We weren’t waging a War on Blitzkrieg in World War II. And terrorism was never the only threat posed by our Islamic enemy, which Obama limits to “al Qaeda and its affiliates.” In fact, our focus on violent jihad has left us vulnerable to the subversive Muslim Brotherhood’s more insidious “civilization jihad,” which continues apace.

Obama himself has been supportive of the Brotherhood’s rise to political power internationally and has opened the door for them at home. He has literally welcomed them into the White House (at least his predecessors made them work for such access by infiltrating), pretending that we are now partners in the political process instead of enemies. But while the Obama administration trumpets this and the waning influence of al Qaeda as the end of the ill-named War on Terror, Frank Gaffney declares that we are no closer to victory than we were on 9/11.

Gaffney runs the Washington D.C.-based Center for Security Policy (CSP), a nonprofit organization for national security research and policy advocacy founded in 1988. In 2010 Gaffney and CSP published Shariah: The Threat to America, a highly acclaimed report on the dangerous reality of political Islam. Now he and his team have rolled out a free, ten-part, online “video briefing” entitled “The Muslim Brotherhood in America: A Video Course,” designed to educate American citizens about “a threat most Americans are even unaware even exists within our country, let alone the peril it represents”:

The threat is the totalitarian, supremacist doctrine its adherents call shariah, and the organized, disciplined, and increasingly successful efforts such adherents – most especially the Muslim Brotherhood – to bring it here.

Gaffney describes the course as a “distillation of all we’ve learned” in the 24 years since the CSP’s inception. Narrated by the quietly intense Gaffney himself, the videos range from fifteen minutes to two hours in length (eight hours total), and define how and why our very civilization is in danger.

Part 1 lays the groundwork in “The Threat Doctrine of Shariah & the Muslim Brotherhood.” Part 2 elaborates on the Brotherhood’s plan to “eliminate Western civilization from within” in “The Brotherhood’s ‘Civilization Jihad’ in America.” In Part 3, the course takes a closer look at the Brotherhood’s penetration and manipulation of the Republican Party and the conservative movement in America – a development which will come as a shock to those who are concerned only about the complicity and naiveté of the left.

In Part 4, the course examines a case study in such infiltration, the story of a Brotherhood-linked conservative activist named Suhail Khan. Part 5 offers examples of the many ways in which Khan’s mentor, influential tax reform advocate Grover Norquist, and his team are actively promoting the Islamist agenda, and Part 6 scrutinizes how Norquist’s Islamist protégés are running for office as Republicans. In Part 7, Gaffney et al. examine how Norquist’s ongoing Islamist influence operation is advancing the agendas of the civilization jihadists.

But, after nearly a thousand columns and twelve years since my last book, I hope readers will forgive me for noting that today, April 24, 2012, HarperCollins is publishing the culmination of a lifetime of thinking and years of the most challenging writing of my life.

The book is “Still the Best Hope: Why the World Needs American Values to Triumph.” It is an argument on behalf of the moral superiority — and universal applicability — of American values.

There are three big ideas — or religions, if you will — competing for humanity’s allegiance: Leftism, Islamism, and Americanism. I argue that the American value system — what I call “the American Trinity” — is the best system ever devised for making a good society.

The problem is that most Americans cannot identify these values, and therefore cannot fight on their behalf. In the meantime, the alternatives, Leftism and Islamism, have been spreading like proverbial wildfire, largely because their adherents know exactly what they are fighting for.

I do not fault Americans for not knowing their distinctive values. No one taught them what they are. And the problem is not new. Even the so-called “greatest generation,” the World War II generation, had not been systematically taught these values.

I only came to realize what these values are in the way medical researchers sometimes happen upon a major discovery — by chance. One night, as I emptied my pockets, I stared at the coins I had removed, and, lo and behold, there they were: America’s values. The designers of all of America’s money — paper and coin — had been telling me and every other American for well over a century what America stood for. And I hadn’t noticed:

“Liberty,” “In God We Trust,” and “E Pluribus Unum” (“From Many, One”).

No other country has proclaimed these three values as its primary values.

Judging from the progress that anti-Israel “Lawfare” and pro-Shari’a movements have made in advancing the “Palestinian Cause” and Shari’a compliant programs in a distressingly vast array of our society’s institutions over the past decade, one must conclude that the Muslim jihadist forces working to infiltrate our society are winning.

The most obvious peril arises from terrorist infiltration. Terrorists identified as al-Qaeda, Hezbollah, Hamas and Iranian agents continue to enter our country via Mexico as illegal immigrants.  Yet, almost a decade ago the present writer and others published analyses of the danger posed to our country’s security by such infiltration.  If these agents were not bent on doing us harm, they could easily enter our country via normal ports of entry.  The fact that they disguise themselves as Mexicans and try to sneak past our border guards is a very good indication that they are here on jihadist missions and know that if they were to try to enter the USA via normal channels, they would be identified as wanted terrorists.  Once in the USA, they easily disappear into the American Muslim community, undocumented, untraceable, invisible and unstoppable.

The problem on our southern border has grown only worse since then, with continued jihadist entry via Mexico and the new alliance between Iran and Venezuelan dictator Hugo Chavez.  The Iran-Venezuela connection and Iran’s quest for deployable WMDs create the threat of a nuclear armed Venezuela under Iranian influence holding the USA hostage with nuclear-armed missiles having in their cross-hairs all of the southern USA from San Diego to Sarasota.

Expert witnesses reporting to congress have indicated that Iran has active agents, both Hezbollah and Iranian government operatives, in the USA:  sleeper cells awaiting orders while conducting surveillance in preparation for future attacks.  While some pundits are convinced that Iran does not plan to attack the USA on its home front, the operative word that they ignore is “yet.” Iran has successfully laid the groundwork for future terrorism inside the USA with Hezbollah and other Iranian terrorist agents primed, ready and invisible.

Less obvious, but no less perilous, is the quiet, gradual and peaceful infiltration of Muslim operatives and their supporters into our social, legal, educational and political systems under the guise of legitimate democratic activism in the form of the Divestment movement, the  BDS movement, the “One-State Solution” proponents, lawyers implementing “Lawfare,”  those who seek to legitimize Sharia law, and a host of socio-political organizations including “Jewish Voice for Peace” and other “Peace and Justice for Palestine” groups.

The Divestment movement, which sought to pressure institutions (mostly churches and universities) to divest their retirement funds from companies doing business with or in Israel, began more than twenty years ago and soon became a nation-wide phenomenon gaining support and followers in churches, on campuses, and in a variety of other institutions holding substantial retirement funds.  While few assets were actually divested, the real purpose of the movement was achieved: create a new podium from which to demonize Israel and by means of which to grab public attention and mainstream media coverage.  Over time interest in divestment waned, and presenters found themselves preaching to the choir.  So the movement morphed into” BDS,” boycotts, divestment, sanctions.  By including calls for boycott and sanctions, the proponents of this movement created a wider panoply of audiences, since boycotts and sanctions do not need investment funds that can be divested.  And as was the case with the divestment movement, the BDS movement cut a swath through college campuses enjoying large audiences on accommodating campuses with little opposition.  Later, as audience interest diminished and presenters found themselves again preaching to the choir, the forces waging the campus war against Israel re-organized to create the newest front, the “One-State Solution” movement.  Starting at the top, “One-State Solution” conferences were recently held at the University of Pennsylvania and at Harvard University, schools of international repute whose status lent credence and legitimacy to this new venue for Israel-bashing.   None of this could have happened were there not already on campuses a cadre of willing enablers, student and faculty activists and complicit or complacent administrative leadership, who energetically support these anti-Israel and anti-Jewish efforts.

Iran announced Sunday that it was cutting off crude oil sales to France and England, a mostly symbolic act given that Iran provides England less than 1% of its crude, and France claims that it “practically stopped importing Iranian oil,”  according to the head of the Union of Petroleum Industries. A few days later, the head of Iran’s armed forces threatened to attack Israel preemptively through its terrorist proxies in Lebanon and Gaza. The Iranians are once again using bluster to counter the E.U. ban on Iranian oil slated to begin on July 1, and the threat of Belgium-based SWIFT to ban Iran from its system for facilitating transfers of payments among nations through its international network of banks. As a further provocation, the Iranians sent two warships through the Suez Canal in a show of support for global pariah Syria. This follows the Iranian-engineered terrorist attacks on Israeli targets in India, Georgia, and Thailand.

At the same time they threaten and foment terrorist attacks, the Iranians have told the “P5+1” nations (Permanent U.N. Security Council members and Germany) of its “readiness for dialogue” and its “new initiatives” concerning its nuclear program, and has allowed U.N. inspectors back in the country, even though President Ahmadinejad said last week that “Our nuclear program is not a subject for negotiations.” Consistent with this position, inspectors were denied access to military installations believed to house nuclear testing equipment. Validating Iran’s lie that its nuclear program is for domestic energy, Army General Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced that “we believe we know that the Iranian regime has not decided” to make a nuclear weapon, and that “it would be premature to exclusively decide that the time for a military option is upon us.” The ominous background to all this diplomatic chatter is the continuing speculation about when or if Israel will take military action, or whether Israel has the capacity to degrade Iran’s nuclear facilities enough to make an attack worth the risk and blowback.

It’s not hard to figure out what’s going on in this diplomatic two-step we’ve been dancing with Iran for years. We know that Iran is dead set on acquiring nuclear weapons, or at least “nuclear latency,” the ability quickly to create a weapon. Since its creation in 1979, the Iranian regime has been about more than Iran. As one ayatollah said at the time, the revolution was just “the start of the story. An Islamic and divine government, much like Iran and better, will be created” in other Muslim nations. And more recently, an editorial in the newspaper Kayhan, published by “Supreme Guide” Ali Khamenei, proclaimed Iran’s “fixed strategic goal”: “Our late Imam [Khomeini] openly spoke of raising the flag of Islam on top of the palaces of arrogant power, notably the White House . . . as the goal and purpose of the Islamic Revolution.” Seeing itself as a world-transformative power, Iran has been the foremost inspiration and supporter of jihadist violence, its prestige enhanced by its serial humiliations of the U.S., and by its genocidal aggression against Israel, the “little Satan” to America’s “great Satan.” Given its massive oil reserves, which mean it will always have a source of revenue, an Iran with nuclear arms will be virtually untouchable, and thus able to dominate the Middle East and damage our interests, whether by holding oil exports hostage, sparking a larger arms race in the region, attacking our ally Israel, or handing off nukes to one of its numerous terrorist proxies.

Equally obvious is the feckless response of the West to this threat, which seems to have followed a Micawberesque policy of hoping “something will turn up.” Unwilling to act, for years now we have substituted inspections, “talks,” and sanctions as toothless substitutes for action. At least we are consistent, for this is precisely how the West handled the embassy hostage crisis in 1979. Then too we tried sanctions, secret offers to negotiate, and trade embargoes in order to change Iranian behavior. But political, national, and economic self-interest rendered them all ineffectual. For example, the NATO countries were begged to impose a trade embargo, but threats by President Bani-Sadr to cut off oil to Europe––sound familiar?–– led to a weakened and hence ineffectual policy. As the Economist pointed out at the time, “The denial of material things is unlikely to have much effect on minds suffused with immaterial things.” The Iranians never have acted by the materialist calculus we have used in our dealings with them.

Moreover, today’s Iran has North Korea as the model for dealing with the West by using diplomatic and inspections processes to create time for achieving nuclear capability. And North Korea is an economic basket case that can’t even feed its own people, unlike Iran, whose oil somebody will figure out a way to buy no matter how many allegedly “crippling” sanctions the West imposes. Yet despite this history, Western leaders continue to assert that “sanctions are working” and that a bit more time will bring Iran to its knees, as Dennis Ross, who was Obama’s Middle East advisor, recently asserted. Meanwhile, Iran’s thousands of recently announced new-generation centrifuges will soon start spinning out even more enriched fuel necessary for weapons.

In a quickly changing world, it is important to ask which countries the United States can always count on in times of crisis.  Recent events have shortened that list considerably.

India has long claimed to be a reliable ally, but it is now undercutting American efforts to impose meaningful sanctions against Iran.  Its help cannot any longer be counted on in the struggle against the greatest danger faced by the United States—an Iran with nuclear weapons.  Japan, another ally, is dilly dallying on sanctions as well.  Brazil used to be a reliable partner, until it began to fall under the sway of Venezuela’s Chavez, who is closely allied with Iran and other American enemies.  The “new” Russia and China demonstrated their lack of reliability when they vetoed American efforts in the Security Council to help resolve the Syrian crisis.  Egypt, which has received billions of dollars of American aid, has defied American warnings not to put US citizens on trial on phony, trumped-up charges.  Jordan, Saudi Arabia and the Emirates are now playing footsy with Hamas and Hezbollah, also Iranian surrogates, as they worry about the contagion of the Arab Spring and the growing influence of the Muslim Brotherhood.

It turns out that other than Europe, Israel may be America’s only remaining reliable ally.  And even some European countries, such as France, Sweden and Norway, are in doubt.

Israel will always remain a strong American ally because it shares an American commitment to democracy, to freedom of religion, to freedom of expression and to an open market economy.  It also shares a common commitment to fight against terrorism and other threats to the security of the United States—a commitment that is less that vigorous among some European countries.

Some political scientists and state department officials, who call themselves “realists”, question Israel’s value as an American ally.  They are wrong, and recent events confirm how wrong they are and have been.

There is no doubt that America helps Israel enormously, as it should help those who share our democratic values. But there is also no doubt that Israel helps the United States considerably, by sharing its extraordinary intelligence-gathering capabilities, its military R&D, its computer know-how and other intangibles.  As other nations in the region debate whether American troops should even be allowed to set foot on their territory, Israel welcomes the American military to engage in joint exercises.  In its nearly 64 years of existence, Israel has never asked for a single American soldier to fight its battles.  It fights its own battles while assisting the American military in defending our country against terrorism and other threats to our citizens.

Since ancient Athens, politics in democracies has been brutal. That’s because the conflicts that a democracy empowers a great variety of ordinary people to debate are not about technical matters requiring specialized knowledge. Rather, they arise from questions about the fundamental principles, beliefs, and values that give people their identities and provide meaning for their lives. Such questions are not “scientific,” and the conflicts they raise will not be resolved by experts and technicians. And since these principles and beliefs are so fundamental to our self-identity and meaning, they raise intense passions, and so the public conversation about them is often emotional, at times even angry. Throw in personal ambition, the lust for power, and the vanity of politicians and office-seekers, and the fights can get bloody indeed. But that’s the price we pay for free political speech. As the Athenian playwright Sophocles once said, “Free men have free tongues.”

Consider the biggest domestic problem facing the nation: metastasizing debt that promises to explode because of exponentially increasing entitlement spending. If the problem were simply a technical one, accountants could solve it. Look at the math: our debt has surpassed $15 trillion, over 100% of GDP, and absent entitlement reform will reach 344% of GDP by 2050. Spending on Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, and Obamacare will devour 18% of GDP by 2050, consuming all federal tax revenues. Total federal spending is slated to consume one-half of GDP by 2056. These numbers point to a Greece-like collapse unless entitlement spending is reined in.

Likewise, simple math discredits the solution Obama presented in his State of the Union speech with generous helpings of class-warfare rhetoric. Obama wants to impose a 30% minimum tax on the “rich,” defined as those making over $1 million. The “rich,” however, simply do not have enough money to solve the ballooning debt and entitlement-spending problem––confiscating outright all the wealth of Forbes magazine’s richest 400 Americans would barely cover Obama’s 2011 deficit, let alone the cost of future entitlement spending. As for making the rich “pay their fair share,” reducing the deficit by raising taxes on the two top brackets would require preposterous tax rates of over 200% in 2050. Worse yet, raising the capital gains tax, which Obama’s minimum tax on millionaires perforce would do, constitutes what Larry Kudlow calls a “tax on seed corn,” one that would reduce the amount of capital needed for investment and economic growth. Finally, the sorry record of tax increases disconnected from spending reductions should make us all chary of giving more money to a spendthrift federal government that has increased spending per capita 166% since 1965. Simple math points us to the only solution: cut entitlement spending and reduce deficits to more manageable levels.

But of course, the problem isn’t about math and how to balance the books. The conflict is one of differing visions of the federal government’s role in achieving certain contested ends. Obama claims a solution to our economic crisis demands that the rich pay their “fair share,” and we create an economy in which “everyone gets a fair shot.” But what is “fair”? The Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development reports that the U.S. already has the most progressive tax system among industrialized economies. The top 10% of taxpayers in America pay 45% of all income taxes (personal income taxes and payroll taxes) but earn 33% of market income. In socialist heartthrob Sweden, by contrast, the top 10% pay a percentage of taxes equal to their income, 26.6%. Paying a greater share of taxes than one’s share of income might strike some people as more than “fair,” as would the simple fact that nearly half of Americans pay no personal income tax, while the top 10% pays 70%. But Obama has a different set of values and a different vision of what ends the government should pursue.

During the last few years I’ve often caught myself wasting – sorry, spending – precious moments of my life trying to think like a European intellectual.  Why?  Well, certainly not because I want to be like them.  No, it’s just that I’m possessed of a compulsion to figure out what makes them tick, because they exercise such outsized influence on the world I live in.

It’s a dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.

Alas, my effort has been largely in vain.  I do have my theories about these people, but even after all these years I can’t say that I fully understand what’s going in those heads.  I suppose it would be kind of scary if I did.

* * *

What am I talking about when I talk about intellectuals, European and otherwise?  I’m talking about men and women of the left.  Not “classical liberals”  – no, we’re talking hard left here – people whose philosophical pedigree leads straight back to Karl Marx.

Yes, there are non-leftists who are sometimes described, perhaps grudgingly, as intellectuals.  But when that label’s affixed to them, the people doing the affixing almost invariably feel a need to prefix “intellectual” with some word like “conservative” or “right-wing” – even if the person in question is somebody you or I might consider pretty middle-of-the-road.  Meanwhile a left-wing intellectual is typically prefix-free: a left-wing intellectual is just an intellectual, period.

To be sure, many people on the left dismiss the idea that anyone not on the left could be legitimately described as an intellectual. For them, intellectualism consists essentially of reiterating and fiercely defending their own lockstep ideology.  Google “right-wing intellectual” and the very first hit you’ll get is a snarky post at the Democratic Underground website asking “Is there such a thing as a right-wing intellectual?” Google “conservative intellectual” and the top hits include items about “conservative intellectual collapse” and “conservative intellectual bankruptcy.”

The difference between the U.S. and continental Europe (Britain leans more our way) is that America has a vibrant network of non-left intellectual institutions –  think tanks, magazines, websites like this one – and electronic media that are receptive to their ideas.  In Europe non-left intellectuals are more on their own.  And they are almost never, ever referred to by anybody as intellectuals.

And why is this?  Because being an “intellectual,” at least in the European sense, isn’t about being intelligent.  It’s about belonging to a class of high priests whose role is to preserve and pass on its own sacred dogma.  It’s not about contributing to a free exchange of ideas in the expectation that the best ideas will rise to the top, but about trying to demonize and intimidate opponents and stifle dissent.  It’s about “speaking truth to power” – and the “power” is always democratic capitalism, and the “truth” always comes in various shades of red.

* * *

American and European intellectuals have a curious relationship.  The former envy the latter for the influence they wield.  And the Europeans envy them right back, for being, as they see it, at the heart of things, while they’re very aware of being big fish in small ponds.

Whatever you may think about American intellectuals, the European ones are worse.  They’re far more insufferable than ours – mainly because they’re used to being taken so much more seriously.  Newspapers across Europe publish not just 600-word op-eds but essays in political philosophy that go on for pages and pages and are written by members of the intellectual elite.  One reflection of the difference between the status of the left-wing intellectual in the U.S. and Europe is that essays written by people like Gore Vidal, Noam Chomsky, and Naomi Klein and first published in the U.S. In some place like The New York Review of Books routinely crop up, in translation, in big-circulation Scandinavian tabloids, where they are proudly promoted on the front page and spread over the entirety of pages two and three.  It’s an American intellectual’s wet dream: being read on the subway by the proletariat.  Is it any wonder left-wing American intellectuals look to Europe with such longing?

* * *

There was a time when, for a very brief period, I was suckered in by the line that American anti-intellectualism is a bad thing.  I snapped out of that one fast enough once I saw what this was all really about.  What it’s about is this: the spoon-feeding of the masses with the idea that being intelligent means looking at reality not plain but through ideology-distorted lenses.

The panel discussion below recently took place at David Horowitz’s Restoration Weekend in West Palm Beach, Florida (Nov. 17-20, 2011). The transcript follows. To view the question and answer session, click here.

Part I

Part II

Michael Wienir: We have a lot of things to talk about.  And in particular, we want to have enough time so you can ask questions of the panelists and interact with them, and they can interact with each other.  So, I still see stragglers back there.  It’s like herding cats trying to do this job.  It is not an easy job, for those of you that think it’s an easy job.

Come on, stragglers, pull up a chair.  Sit down, the doors are closing.  You don’t want to be outside anyway, the weather is not particularly good.

My name is Dr. Michael Wienir.  And it is my pleasure as chairman of the Board of Directors of the David Horowitz Freedom Center to welcome you to the 2011 Restoration Weekend.  And let me take this moment to simply thank all of you for your support in the past, in the present and, I know, in the future.

As David Horowitz has said, we are an effective battle tank, we’re not just a think tank.  And we have a general on the panel.  And the key is that the ammunition that this battle tank uses is generated by David and other members of the Center.  But the fuel to make this tank go is provided by your generosity and the generosity of over 90,000 people who across the country are contributors large and small to the David Horowitz Freedom Center.  We can’t wage this battle — we cannot fight, this tank will not run — without your support and without your help.

The mission of the David Horowitz Freedom Center is quite simply the defense of free society, whose moral and ethical and cultural foundations are under attack by enemies at home and abroad, both secular and religious.  And that’s what our mission is.  That’s what we do.  And we’re a unique organization.

David has defined the values of the Center, and there are a number of them — very similar to what Herman Cain had to say this morning — individual freedom, limited government, the rule of law, capitalism, free markets, and equal opportunity.  Not radical egalitarianism; equal opportunity at the starting line, not equal outcome at the finish line.  Not redistribution of wealth, but creation of wealth for all our citizens.  We work to create these opportunities in the private sector, and we support strong defense to preserve and protect these values.  And we reject surrender, appeasement, retreat and defeat.

Dennis Prager, who is not here this weekend but is a friend of the Center, points out what America really is, the trilogy — liberty — not what the Left wants, which is equality, and not individual freedom — E Pluribus Unum — out of many, one — not multiculturalism — and In God We Trust — not secularism.

This panel, then, is defined as the decline of the West — meaning these Western values — and the rise of the rest — secular socialism, Marxism, Islamofascism, and this Chinese model of — I didn’t know how to actually title it, but I guess it’s totalitarian mercantilism.

(Laughter)

So the questions for the panel that I’ve asked them all to address is — one, is the West really in decline?  Do you accept the premise of the title of the panel?  If the West is not in decline, I’ve asked them to defend their position and answer your questions.  Number two, if you agree that the West is in decline, what is the specific cause of that decline?  And if you agree that the West is in decline, what can be done to reverse the trend?  And finally, are you optimistic, or are you pessimistic?  Four simple questions.

Now, each panelist gets 10 minutes to do this.  It’s better than 30 seconds on that Presidential debate.  And then we should have about 20 or 25 minutes for the panelists to interact with each other and for you to ask your questions, which they will answer.

First panelist is Bruce Bawer, who I just had the pleasure of meeting — I’ve read his books.  Bruce is an American literary critic and writer and poet.  He received his undergraduate and graduate degrees, including a PhD in English from the State University of New York at Stony Brook.  He’s taught courses in literature and composition, in search of a tolerant society.  He moved to Amsterdam from New York in 1998, and then to Oslo, Norway — I believe it’s 1999 — only to confront the intolerance of Islam and their tolerance — European tolerance of intolerance.

Among his many books and writings are “While Europe Slept: How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within,” and, in 2009, “Surrender: Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom.”  Bruce is now a Shillman Fellow — and you’ll hear more about Bob Shillman’s generosity and the Shillman Fellowships later on during this weekend — and as such is a regular contributor to our website, which I hope you’re on every day, FrontPageMag.com.

Bruce?

(Applause)

Bruce Bawer: Thank you, Michael.  Thank you, everybody for being here.  Thank you to the David Horowitz Center for having me at this wonderful place.

First, I think it’s useful to step back and ask exactly what we mean when we speak of the decline of the West.  Do we mean a decline in raw military power, in freedom, in prosperity, standard of living, quality of life; in security,  in character, in civic virtue, in art and culture?  And when we speak of decline, are we speaking of decline relative to a decade ago, a generation, a century?  And if we are in decline, who is rising, and in what ways, and why?  And what does their rise say about the West?

For example, the rise of China as an economic power, and India as both an economic power and a fledgling democracy — maybe less a reflection of the innate qualities of Chinese or Indian civilization than of the powerful influence of Western ideas and values in those countries.  Indeed, Western civilization has become, in a very real way, world civilization.  And Western values have come to be recognized very widely as universal values.

Maybe it’s also useful to remind ourselves that people have been talking about the decline of the West for a long time.  Europe, which reached its zenith of power, [self-competence] and much else in the latter part of the 19th century, was traumatized by the First World War and, in a way, never really recovered.

During the Depression, a lot of supposedly smart people in both America and Europe thought democratic capitalism was finished and that they were faced with a choice between communism and fascism.  For awhile during World War II, things didn’t look good.  And for quite awhile afterwards, many people were betting on the USSR.

I was born into a prosperous, stable, self-confident America.  But by the time I was a teenager, the US seemed to be coming apart at the seams, frazzled by a new culture of protest that transformed American cultural values, mocked the idea of America as the arsenal of democracy and undermined American social stability.  Similar developments, of course, were going on all over Western Europe.

Then came Watergate, and we were told that American democracy was on the rocks.  President Ford reassured us, only to be replaced by Carter, who told us we were afflicted with a deadly malaise that was taking us down the tubes.  Reagan brought us Morning in America, though, at the same time, we were warned that Japan was about to leave us in the dust.

The fall of communism in Europe felt at first like a great triumph for the West.  But for many, it led to a crisis of identity.  We had to find ourselves in opposition to communism — what were we now?

Then came 9/11.  And after the initial and very brief feeling of Western unity, confusion and division set in.  And that’s something worth puzzling over.  After all, 9/11 was followed by attacks elsewhere in the West — Madrid, London.  We were all in it together.  The West should never have been more united in resolve.  But it wasn’t.  Why?  Because we’d been poisoned by a decadent thing called multiculturalism that made it impossible for many of us — especially our cultural elites — to even name our enemy.

Fear played a part too, of course.  Many European countries were already so heavily populated with Muslims, who they knew were sympathetic to jihadists, that the leaders of those countries didn’t dare talk honestly about the subject.  Our leaders sent soldiers off to fight but weren’t always honest with them about what they were fighting.

Meanwhile, Europe became increasingly accustomed to Muslim youth crime, so-called no-go zones, and fiery jihadist preachers.  But who was put on trial in Europe, in Canada and in Australia?  The few people who dared to speak bluntly and honestly about Islam.

No wonder, then, that we were plunged into confusion and division.  Not just division among Americans, but division between America and our Western allies.  During the Bush years, anti-Americanism in Europe swelled to unprecedented proportions.  Respected intellectuals equated Bush with Saddam and [Osama].  Then suddenly, China loomed as the world’s next great power, and the West became gripped by economic crises.

Today, the welfare states of Western Europe face demographic disaster.  The EU is a question mark.  And America consists increasingly — to quote Charles Murray — of two classes that don’t talk to each other.  The Tea Party grasps the importance of freedom to the West’s survival, while Occupy This-That-and-the-Other is ready to sacrifice freedom for an illusion of equality.

But what about the great majority of Americans who belong to neither movement?  To what extent do they exhibit what used to be known as civic virtues, and understand and respect the Constitutional values on which this country and the entire free West was built?  To what extent, on the other hand, are they the products of a relativist multiculturalism which has taught them that the West’s history is nothing but a litany of evils, colonialism, imperialism, exploitive capitalism; thereby twisting one of the world’s great strengths, constructive self-criticism, into a destructive self-hatred?

Instead of preparing to build on the West’s great heritage, young people are too often taught today to apologize for it.  This is no atmosphere in which to hatch new Dantes and Shakespeares, new Beethovens and Mozarts, new Rembrandts and Michelangelos.  Europe’s great cities are museums.

And speaking of culture, what about American popular culture?  I grew up in a great age of middlebrow culture which was a force for social unity that prepared young and undereducated people for the higher glories of high culture.  In the first half of the last century, American films and popular [song], at their best, were not only aesthetically meritorious but embodied admirable, even noble, values.

One of the much-discussed cultural topics in the last couple of weeks has been the disappearing taboo against the F-word in the titles of plays, movies and songs.  I don’t really care that much about the F-word.  Anybody who’s read Chaucer knows that vulgarity has been a part of English literature from the beginning.  But the kind of cultural products that have the F-word in their titles today might well have been created in order to demonstrate definitively that the West is indeed undergoing a profound decline.

Then again, these things may turn around.  We’ve faced economic and cultural setbacks before.  Plus the fact we must admit that there have been remarkable developments in our own lifetimes that we shouldn’t overlook.  Economic crisis or not, most of us are living better than ever.  We live longer than ever.  In America, many of the prejudices I grew up around have faded to a degree I never imagined possible, although the rise of anti-Semitism in Europe and its appearance among the Occupy This-and-That crowd is not too heartening.

But thanks to Western science and technology, we live in a world of marvels.  Whenever I’m bored and taking for granted the everyday wonders of contemporary Western life, I look around me and ask what Benjamin Franklin would make of television, cell phones, e-mail, YouTube, Spotify and Skype.

At this point, however, I suppose I should remind you all of the subtitles of my last two books.  The subtitle of “While Europe Slept” is “How Radical Islam is Destroying the West from Within.”  The subtitle of “Surrender” is “Appeasing Islam, Sacrificing Freedom.”

These subtitles describe not only decline but destruction — the destruction first of the first freedom, freedom of speech, at least speech about Islam — a widespread submission to the tenet that Muslims have a right to see their religion treated with respect, even deference; a tendency for the cultural and intellectual world, the media establishment, political leaders at every level, the police and military, and society at large, to give in to the demands of Sharia law in a variety of ways big and small; a deep-seated reluctance on the part of authorities to face up to social problems caused by Islamization, a readiness to surrender Muslim enclaves to autocratic government by local patriarchs who follow the dictates of Sharia law.

These developments worry me deeply.  A house divided against itself cannot stand.  And a native culture that doesn’t believe very much in itself and in its own values cannot survive for long against an imported culture whose members believe in their own cultural values so passionately that now a few of them are prepared to commit suicide or murder their own children in the name of those values.

To put it bluntly, I’ve seen what Islamization has done to Europe, and I’ve seen how Europe is responding, and I’ve started to see the same things happening here.  And I’m worried.

To answer the four questions with which we began directly, then — is the West in decline?  Well, I wouldn’t have written my last couple of books if I weren’t sincerely worried that it is.  At the same time, I couldn’t have written them if I didn’t think that there was hope, if we stop responding to Islam with deference and apology and appeasement.

What can be done to reverse the trend?  Educate our next generation to know Western history, to cherish Western liberty and appreciate the sacrifices of those who bequeathed it to us to practice Western values of discipline, hard work, economic responsibility, sacrifice, tolerance and intelligent self-criticism; to recognize that they are mere stewards of the treasure that is Western civilization, and to be prepared to defend it with their lives.

Finally, the last question — are you optimistic, or pessimistic?  Well, as I think I’ve made it clear, that varies.  When I’m attending a political debate in Europe, where everybody sounds as if they’re living on another planet than I am, I’m overcome with despair.  When I’m in a place like this, which is itself a reminder of the glories that America and the West are capable of, and where I’m in the company of people who obviously get it, I feel a spark of optimism.  So thank you for that.

(Applause)

Michael Wienir: Thank you very much.  The worst job trying to moderate is trying to keep people to 10 minutes.  But everybody has so many wonderful things to say, and [yeah, that stinks].  Have your questions ready for all these panelists.

Next panelist is Paul Vallely.  Paul is a retired United States major-general, a graduate of West Point.  His training includes — and you can look at his lapel, because he’s got a whole bunch of these buttons on there — infantry, Rangers, Airborne, jumpmaster, command, general staff schools — he’s been to all those.  He’s got experience at the Industrial College of the Armed Forces and the Army War College.  He was deputy commanding general of the Pacific Command when he retired in 1993.

In 2004, with our friend, retired Lieutenant General Tom McInerney, he wrote a book called “The End Game” — which he presented at one of our sessions — “A Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror.”  He has served as a senior military analyst for Fox News, Military Committee Chairman of the Center for Security Policy — Frank Gaffney is around here someplace to say hello to — he has supported Veteran Defenders of America.  And he founded a wonderful organization called Stand Up America, supporting the First and Second Amendments, strong national defense, secure borders, personal responsibility, individual liberty and limited government.

He’s been a contributor to FrontPageMag.com and has been a long-term friend of mine and a long-term friend of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Paul?

(Applause)

Paul Vallely: Thank you very much, Michael.  Good morning, everybody.  We came from Montana two days ago, it was nine degrees.

(Laughter)

So even if it’s raining outside, it’s wonderful.  And I’ve got my nurse’s assistant here, Muffin, who you’ll get to meet.

(Applause)

Michael Ledeen and I won’t cover with you all of our medical problems last year, but it really put us out of action for a while.  But we’re standing, Michael, and we’re here with all of you.  Wonderful friends, you know, we’ve known you for so long now.  Years.  And it’s always a pleasure, and appreciate when Michael and David invite us to be a part of this each and every year.

Stand Up America, just to tell you a little bit — we have 16 research intelligence analysts that work for us around the United States.  And that’s what’s the basis of us being able to produce and publish a lot of articles that are pertinent to the subjects that we’ll be discussing this weekend.

But specifically, let me try to address the decline of the West and answer the questions, Michael, as best I can.  But certainly, we really want to have a heavy question-and-answer period, where we can get more into the Middle East and more specificity of some of the major issues that we’re looking at today.

But you know, when you look historically back — and I learned as a cadet at West Point, when we studied all the great battles — all the revolutions that had taken place, the tactics and the strategies that were used to restore a society or a culture — we certainly have to look at what were the root causes of the decline.  And if you typically look back at revolutions and the demise of empires, the fall of empires over the centuries, you will see it comes back basically — something has happened in that culture with those people, from tyrannical governments, dictatorial governments.  And it comes down a lot to the economics, and what kind of pain that is placed on any kind of society.

So when we look at what’s happening around the world — and I’ll talk more specifically about it, and what I call a chessboard, the international global chessboard, to lay out exactly how we see things as the world exists today.  But examining the past again, and reflecting — yes, we have been in a decline.

If you track back culturally in America, I can track it back to the ’60s.  And then, when we look at the financial — the stability of our markets over a period of time.  But mixed in with that was the innovation of America, and the high-technology developments.  So as a decline occurred in certain parts of our structure, even the political decline of effective leadership over the years, effective government.

So you tie all of those things in together while you’re trying out there in the private sector, and those that do have common sense and are innovative, to be creating products, activities, corporations and organizations — really still today, that’s the glue that’s holding us together.

We did a strategic study — we completed it two months ago.  I’ll be happy to provide you a copy of it.  But guess what the four or five major threats to America are, when we look at this decline?  Number one, the greatest threat to America is an inept and a dysfunctional government.  Okay, think about that.  The second major threat in the decline — as we’ve seen, and we’re experiencing right now — is the financial collapse of the United States and the Western countries.  Third, the greatest threat was our southern borders and our borders.  The fourth was Iran and what’s happening in the Middle East.  And fifth was Afghanistan and Pakistan.  So when you analyze that, and you talk about the decline politically, when you look at a dysfunctional government that we have so bureaucratized, and we’ve so over legislated, then our hands are almost tied.

So the question is, as we come back — what are the solutions?  And I call it the restoration.  As we’ve seen a decline now with still a strengthening of the glue within the American society, still with many of us having what I call the warrior spirit, the ability to restore the Constitution, the ability to restore the republic, and get back to the basic values and traditions — that’s how you get after the root cause.

But let me tell you a little bit of difference. As you restore, and as countries, as societies, restore themselves after tremendous upheaval and tremendous pain, it all comes back to superb leadership.  But above that — I define it even further — is the warrior.  And the difference between warriors and leaders — warriors will fall on their sword.  I will die for you, I will die for your children, to restore this country and to make it what it should be today to deal with today and tomorrow.

So we all need to have that warrior spirit.  Because, as Herman Cain pointed out, we are in the battle for America.  It’s not business as usual.  This is a different situation in 2011, going into 2012.  And your neighbors, your local communities, have to realize they’ve got to get out of their bubble.

I talked to 60 corporate leaders yesterday.  Honest to goodness, I couldn’t believe it.  It’s like they’re all in their corporate bubble, except for a few.  And I find that amongst many intelligent, educated individuals.  So in this restoration, to go from the decline that we’ve seen across the board to restoration now, and coming back up — and Michael Ledeen and I talked earlier this morning — we want to be on a positive note.

Yes, we have to look at the threats out there.  We have to understand that we’ve got to have a government, we’ve got to have an organization within this country, that can meet those threats.  Because listen, you can talk about unemployment, you can talk about economics, you can talk about all those other issues out there.  They mean nothing, unless we can secure you and your families.  The security of you and your families is the utmost important thing we can do.  Because once we have the security of America, we have strong leadership and we have strong warriors leading our country, we can do anything.  And that’s the key to it all.

So within my 10 minutes, that’s it.  And very happy to address the Middle East and some other things.

(Applause)

Michael Wienir: That was exciting.  That’s less than 10 minutes.  So lots of questions.

I’m looking at my introduction to Michael Ledeen, which has just been edited, which is a good thing.

(Laughter)

Michael is a noted political analyst.  He was Freedom Scholar chair at the American Enterprise Institute, where he worked for over 20 years.  He’s now the Freedom Scholar chair at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies.  He was a founding member of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs.  He is a frequent contributor to the Wall Street Journal, National Review, Fox News; and was a consultant to the National Security Council, Department of Defense and Department of State.

His books include “Grave New World,” “Tocqueville on American Character,” “Machiavelli on Modern Leadership,” and, in 2007, “The Iranian Time Bomb: The Mullah Zealots’ Quest for Destruction.”

Michael Ledeen.

(Applause)

Michael Ledeen: Thank you, Michael.  It’s great to be on a panel with another Michael and two Bruces.

(Laughter)

When I was a teenager, the Bruce was one of my heroes.  There was a radio show in New York that was run by a DJ called Bruce, and I thought it was great.

Good morning. Happy Friday to all of you.

I’m a historian.  I have a doctorate in history from the University of Wisconsin, about which you’ve all heard.  And it was great to get a doctorate from the University of Wisconsin because there was real debate.  We fought with each other every day about almost everything.  And I think everybody who came out of that program in those years came out toughened by it.

But I stress to you that I’m a historian, not a prophet.  So I will say to you what I say to the young kids that I work with at the Foundation for Defense of Democracies — that we don’t know.  We don’t know if America is in decline or on the rise.  Nobody knows.  Most things that people talk about — that we talk about, that pundits write about, and on which they pronounce all the time — are unknowable.  We won’t know for quite awhile whether we’re rising or falling, how our enemies are doing, and so forth.

There have been — if you go back and read cultural history, the conviction that America has been in decline starts the day after Plymouth Rock.  Europeans said about Americans from the beginning that America was created by failed people and biological rejects –

(Laughter)

– that America — no, really.  Scientific essays on how Americans were shorter than Europeans and weaker than Europeans, and more prone to disease than Europeans, and so forth — we’ve always been written off.  And there’s a whole strain in American intellectual history that of course rewards this point of view.  And intellectuals in particular love it.  Because the real secret about American intellectuals is that they’re miserably unhappy because they’re not Europeans.

(Laughter)

And European intellectuals are on top of the status heap.  They get good salaries, they get high prestige, they’re on television all the time.  People bow to them, people respect them, pretty women run after them — or pretty men, depending.

(Laughter)

And it’s a great life.  And over here, you know, Americans by and large really don’t give a damn about intellectuals.  And the way the — the adjectives we applied to them, as in pointy-headed, et cetera –

(Laughter)

– show all of this.  And when I was in college, there was a very famous book emerge by Professor Hofstadter at Columbia University, called “The Anti-Intellectual Tradition in American Life,” which went through all of this stuff.  And that book was obviously intended to show us how terrible all of this was.  And it’s only later in life that I came to realize that it was a very good thing, this anti-intellectual tradition.

So I say all this in order to stress — we don’t know.  We don’t know how it’s all going to turn out.  However, if you look at it from the standpoint of global conflict — us against them — there’s every reason to be not only optimistic, but even wildly optimistic.

The first important point is the basic fact of American history in the world.  We have always been [saved] by our enemies.  We have never intervened in a global matter because we figured it out, because we thought we were at risk, and we acted to save us, our values, our allies, et cetera.  Never.

We were torpedoed into the First World War in the North Atlantic by the Germans.  We were providentially bombed into World War II just in the nick of time by the Japanese.  We were dragged kicking and screaming into the Cold War by Stalin, who just couldn’t wait to get his fangs into Greece and Turkey at the end of the war, and to gobble up all the satellites in Central and Eastern Europe, at which point we had to do something.  So the Cold War — we were a reluctant, very reluctant, participant.  And the so-called war against terror — the evil phrase we are not even permitted to pronounce anymore — was famously something that we didn’t choose; they chose us on 11th of September, 2001.

So we rely on our enemies.  And on this you can be prophetically sound.  Because our enemies will attack us, they have to attack us, they will continue to attack us.  And so eventually, some American President will get up one day and say — you know, we really have to do something.

And I will say only one line about that.  We are — Barbara and I have three children, all of whom have served in this war, two of whom are male marine officers, one of whom is in Afghanistan today.  And on the subject of Iran, where the entire debate involves around nukes — should we let them have nukes, can they be permitted to have nukes, is it acceptable, tolerable, et cetera — the fact of the matter is that the Iranians kill Americans every day.  Let me say it again — Iranians kill Americans every day.  Nobody cares.  Only the military guys care.  And for the most part, they’re muzzled by the politicians.  So I just want to put that out there.

So what are we facing, and what is the threat to us?  We’re facing a corrupt elite here at home, both political and intellectual.  The theme of universities, as Bruce Bawer said, is absolutely central to the success of the United States.  And success of universities means — the word they use but don’t mean, which is “diversity” — intellectual diversity.

The really great thing about David Horowitz, who I’ve known for very long time — but I mean, the greatest thing about David Horowitz is that he has gone onto university campuses and fought for intellectual diversity.  That is to say you have to have debates on campus.  Our children have to hear every issue argued out.  They have to hear why people believe things that we don’t, and why people believe things that we do.  They have to hear the full range of debate.  They’re not getting it.

College campuses are boring today.  Their monolithic, they’re heteronomic, and they [hand to] the left.  And so they don’t hear the range of discussion.  That’s stultifying.  That’s bad for what America needs most of all, which is creativity, energy, self confidence and so forth.

I have an answer to — was it Paul’s remark — what is China?  Totalitarian mercantilism, which is a great phrase that I’m going to steal and plagiarize and use often in the future.  I never heard it before, but I love it.

(Laughter)

China is the world’s first mature fascist dictatorship.  It’s what happens when the ideology burns out, and you’re left with this kind of structure, with the remnants of a kind of traditional racism.  That’s what China is today.  China now has legitimized private property, certain amount of private business, a lot of what we would call crony capitalism.  But China certainly no longer has any vestige of communist state, nor do they talk about revolution anymore, communist or otherwise.  It’s now an imperial power trying to expand its outreach.

And I will tell you, without taking any particular pleasure in it, that that system, as all [subsystems], are in a terrible crisis.  Because as Machiavelli said, quite rightly — almost everything accurately said was quite right — but one of his central themes is that tyranny is the most unstable of all forms of government.  Tyranny is the least likely to last a long time.  The most likely to last a long time is what we’ve got — a mixed system, a mixed Constitution.

There is one thing that Americans in particular have to be thankful for, not just this Thanksgiving but every Thanksgiving.  It is not just our heritage of freedom, but something more: the fact that many of us – if not, alas, all of us – have a proper appreciation for that precious inheritance.

Americans are used to being told that every human heart longs for freedom.  “Freedom is the deepest need of every human soul,” said George W. Bush.  This may be so; it is nice to think that it is.  But in some souls that need for freedom would appear to be so deeply buried a need that the individuals in question have no awareness of it whatsoever.  In living memory, after all, there have walked on this earth millions of convinced enemies of freedom – devout Nazis, devout Communists, and devout believers in the all-encompassing law of submission, the very opposite of freedom, which is sharia law.

Americans have always been prepared to think the best of others.  And one aspect of this is that when we see Arabs revolting against dictators, many of us are quick to embrace the belief that they are acting in the name of individual liberty.  What we don’t realize is that it is not just American freedom, but the American love of freedom, that is a rare and precious thing.  For the fact is that while there are indeed souls that yearn for freedom in every tyrannical society, there are also souls everywhere that yearn to be tyrannized.

In his profound and beautiful new book, A Point in Time, David Howoritz reminds us of a line from The Brothers Karamazov: “So long as man remains free, he strives for nothing so incessantly and so painfully as to find someone to worship.”  The great American blessing is that we have, as a people, tended, to a remarkable degree, to be an exception to this otherwise ironclad rule of humankind.  There is nothing genetic about this (Americans do not share a common ethnicity) and there is nothing about this for which we have any right to congratulate ourselves.  To the extent that we are an exception to this rule, it is because we are – or, at least, used to be – brought up on values rooted in our Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

Those documents were written by a group of rare and brilliant men.  And one of the rare things about them was that they did not long for someone to worship, for a ruler to look up to, for a state to make decisions for them.  They were men of learning and science, curious about the world and the human condition and unafraid of their own curiosity.  For them, the world, however fearful it might be, was also a place in which one could seek knowledge and pursue happiness, all the while following one’s own lead.  They saw men as creatures who were, by nature, free, and who owed it to themselves to overcome their fear of that freedom, to embrace it with courage and dignity, and to cherish the right to lead their lives with a minimum of interference.  Well brought-up Americans are – or at least in living memory were – raised on those men’s philosophy.  It was a devotion to those ideas that made generations of young Americans not only willing but eager to fight in foreign wars for the freedom of foreign peoples.

Imagine your child’s school teaching him how wonderful dictatorships are by having him and his friends model their very own group of dictatorships as part of their education. Like so many other Orwellian nightmares in the American educational system, this one is very real and takes place through the Model UN program.

The Model UN program teaches American students that global government is better than national government and that the corrupt kleptocracy on Turtle Bay is the ideal state of mankind. Finally it trains them to put American presidents on trial for violating United Nations laws.

Twenty-two Model UN events are scheduled to take place in November alone and many more are set to follow month after month throughout the school year as the advocates of global government exploit the school system to indoctrinate a new generation in their roles as servants of the conclave of totalitarian regimes.

The Model UN program teaches students to act out roles as representatives of different UN nations, but its real goal is to teach them to reject American exceptionalism in favor of multilateralism by convincing them that countries vary in interests, not in character, and that the People’s Republic of China and Saudi Arabia are no different than the United States in their legitimacy or their form of government.

The great lie that the United Nations was built on is that the voices of all nations are equally valid, regardless if they are banana republics, brutal Islamic theocracies, Communist tyrannies or nations with free and open elections that offer human rights to all. The United Nations is a democracy, but it is a democracy of dictatorships.

The vast majority of the world’s population lives in the thrall of tyrannies and the Model UN program models the farce that this great collective of the oppressed is legitimately represented by the lackeys of tyrants who speak in their name under the United Nations flag. There are 26 full democracies to 55 authoritarian regimes with the latter outnumbering the former in population three to one. The average UN representative is not representing a people or a nation, he is there as the personal representative of an Assad, a Kim Jong Il or a Khaddafi.

The democracy of dictatorships is why global multilateralism does not work and can never work, but the Model UN program helps embed the lie that it can and should into the growing minds of the leaders of tomorrow.

“You may be playing a role, but you are also preparing for life,” UN Secretary General Ki Ban Moon said in an address to the students of a Los Angeles classroom, “You are acting as global citizens.”

Global citizenship under the auspices of the United Nations is incompatible with American citizenship. It violates the United States Oath of Allegiance which states, “I absolutely and entirely renounce and abjure all allegiance and fidelity to any foreign prince, potentate, state, or sovereignty” and it sets aside the national sovereignty of the United States and its open system of government in favor of a closed global system ruled by foreign princes and potentates.

What is not taught to students at the Model UN is that while American, Canadian and Australian leaders can be changed through national elections, and they can then recall their representatives, the majority of the UN’s representatives answer to rulers who cannot be recalled or removed except through revolution, civil war or death. That makes the UN a closed system whose charade of democracy disguises its core undemocratic and unrepresentative nature. Instead students are tricked into admiring its oppressive edifice and acting out their parts in its global tyranny.

The most widespread UN Model program is conducted through the Global Classrooms program of the United Nations Association of the United States of America. The UNA-USA’s National Council is chaired by none other than former president, Jimmy Carter, who did more than any previous leader to undermine America’s national sovereignty.

In the first in the series of articles analyzing US foreign aid to Israel, the present writer posed five questions:

1.) Why is there an Israel-USA “special relationship,” an alliance which includes generous American aid and political support at the UN and other international venues?

2.) What is the real number of US dollars in US aid to Israel?

3.) How do we know that the critics offer galactic exaggerations of the dollar amount and spurious claims regarding its political valence and liabilities?

4.) What is the value to the USA of its generous financial support to Israel, compared to the value of similar aid to those countries which are Israel’s avowed enemies?

5.) What is the real impact of the USA’s “special relationship” with Israel upon America’s position in the Middle East and in the broader Muslim world?

The first article addressed question #1 and the first half of question #4 (Israel’s value to the USA).  The second article addressed the second half of question #4 (USA aid to Israel’s enemies hurts the USA). The third article addressed questions #2 and #3.

This article, last in the series, will address question #5.

In order to assess accurately and objectively the real impact of the US-Israel “special relationship” upon America’s position in the Middle East and in the broader Muslim world, one must consider three principles which may be alien to the thinking of some western analysts and commentators regarding Israel and the Middle East.

The first involves adherence to the belief system that requires utmost fidelity to the data.

In his ground-breaking book Thinking Fast and Slow, reviewed recently in the Wall Street Journal, Daniel Kahneman examines why otherwise clear minded and intelligent people sometimes make drastically wrong decisions.  He shows that even when analysts have all the information needed to arrive at correct decisions, and even when the logic is simple, they still all too often arrive at incorrect or even disastrously erroneous conclusions. The problem, according to Kahneman, seems to be related to “belief systems.”  It seems that humans tend to be of two minds—one deliberative and rational, the other quick and intuitive. The quick and intuitive one, influenced by emotion and ideology, is all too often too willing to abandon, disregard, or even manipulate data in order to achieve conclusions that are consistent with the emotion or the ideology.  Such conclusions, inconsistent with, or contradictory to, the data, may be erroneous at best and mendaciously misleading at worst. Kahneman warns that

“All scientists, not least social scientists, should be wary of adhering to any belief system in their professional lives other than the one that requires fidelity to their data.”

If the analyst or commentator has a cause, then there could be a conflict of interest between the cause and the data. Analysts who, due to an ideological pre-disposition, belief system, or emotional commitment to a cause, fall prey to such a conflict of interest, may offer conclusions about whatever issue is under discussion that are grossly divergent from the data, and hence from reality.

In light of Kahneman’s insights, and given the enormous divergence between the reality of the amounts of US foreign aid to Israel and the astronomically exaggerated numbers proffered by those using the “kitchen sink” methodology, it seems logical to conclude that the latter are possessed of a predisposition motivated by some belief system, some emotional commitment to a cause, which drives them to inflate, distort, decontextualize, cherry pick, misrepresent and even falsify data in order to arrive at conclusions that are congruent with the predisposition.  This being the case, with fidelity to the data utterly abandoned, their conclusions are worthless at best.

The second is the principle of the “strong horse.”

Osama bin Laden stated this principle several times in his public speeches:  “When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse.”  The role of this “strong horse” principle in Arab society and politics has been explored and analyzed by author Lee Smith in his book The Strong Horse: Power, Politics, and the Clash of Arab Civilizations (Anchor Books, January 2011).  Smith concludes that in Arab politics from at least the onset of the era of the Caliphs following Mohammed’s death, political transfer of power has always been either through violence or dynasty.  Thus violence and the struggle between “strong horses” (the dynastic inheritor vs. his competitors for the throne) has predominated.  Mohammed himself and the Caliphs after him all ruled by violence and coercion, and most were assassinated.  In short, “…the strong horse is the person, tribe, country, or nation that is best able to impose its will upon others, the weaker horses, through the use of force.” This rather dark view of Arab political history was promulgated first by none other than the famous Arab historian and philosopher, ibn-Khaldun in the 14^th century.

This “strong horse” principle, active for more than a millennium in Arab politics, plays out today in the international arena as well.  The strong horse on the international scene is a deterrent to aggression; and, conversely, a weak horse invites attack: hence the stronger the horse, the greater the deterrence.

The significance of this principle for the US-Israel “special relationship” is immediately obvious.  As long as America is perceived as a global “strong horse” by the leaders in the Arab world, and the American strong horse is closely aligned with its proxy strong horse in the Middle East, Israel, then there is a strong deterrent to Arab leadership initiating war.  If a strong America abdicates its role as the strong horse, then its proxy, Israel, is weakened; and this weakness is likely to invite aggression.  Conversely, a strong Israel is a stabilizing force in the Middle East, and a strong relationship with the global strong horse, America, strengthens Israel.  Moreover, American leadership that abandons Israel is likely to be seen as an untrustworthy ally, or a weak horse unable to uphold its side of the alliance.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is John Fonte, a senior fellow and director of the Center for American Common Culture at the Hudson Institute.  His analysis of “lawfare” was listed among the most noteworthy ideas of 2004 in the New York Times Magazine’s “The Year in Ideas: A to Z.” He is the author of the new book, Sovereignty or Submission: Will Americans Rule Themselves or be Ruled by Others.

FP: John Fonte, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Fonte: Thank you delighted to be here, and hats off to the great work you do.

FP: Thank you.

What inspired you to write this book?

Fonte: I closely observed the march of multiculturalism through our educational institutions. Multiculturalism and the ethnic-racial-gender group consciousness of the so-called “diversity” project are antithetical to core American principles based on individual citizenship and equality of opportunity. Many conservatives and center-right thinkers were claiming that with the fall of communism we had “won the war of ideas.” Francis Fukuyama famously declared that liberal democracy had triumphed and would never again face a serious ideological foe with universal appeal.

Yet right before my eyes, I could see multiculturalism-diversity gaining many adherents among American elites. The multiculturalists repudiated  traditional liberal democratic principles such as individual (rather than group) rights, free speech, equality before the law and equality of opportunity. They favored a new form of “corporatism” based on ethnic-racial-gender group consciousness and rejected Lockian liberalism. The multiculturalists were also contemptuous of America’s role in the world;  American history; and American patriotism. In the mid-1990s I worked with Lynne Cheney at AEI against the multiculturalist “National History Standards” devised by radical historian Gary Nash at UCLA.

At some point I realized that the leading multiculturalists had become “transnationalists.”  The same elites in education, academia, law, media, and government, that formerly had promoted a “multicultural society” now talked about “global society,” global education,” “global citizenship” and “global governance.” By 2009-10 the world’s leading political actors keep repeating the mantra that “global problems require global solutions.” Thus, today the forces of global governance are a major actor in world politics and a serious adversary of our constitutional regime. My book is a moral and intellectual defense of democratic, or what I call “Philadelphian” sovereignty.

FP: Specify for us a few of the incompatibilities that exist between democratic ideals and the agendas of the global governance movement. How are American sovereignty and constitutional freedoms threatened?

Fonte: It is important to emphasize that the main threat to American sovereignty comes, not from the UN or other international institutions, but  from American globalists themselves. The UN and international law per se, can not force us to do anything, but many, among our elites, are promoting American subordination to global authority.

I’ll give you a few examples. Leading American “human rights” groups including Human Rights Watch, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), Arab-American Institute, La Raza, Mexican American Legal and Education Foundation (MALDEF) and the Leadership Conference on Civil Rights have called for the United States to accept all UN human rights treaties without any reservations (including First Amendment, Second Amendment and Tenth Amendment, i.e., federalism, restrictions on international law) This would  effectively subordinate the American constitution to UN-made “global rules”  The “global rules,” these American human rights groups demand include: racial and gender preference quotas in all aspects of public and private life; official multilingualism; the ending of any serious border enforcement; the abolition of capital punishment; the payment of U.S. reparations for slavery; and much more.

These are not legitimate global human rights norms, but the policy preferences of elements of the American progressive left. Wade Henderson, the head of the Leadership Council on Civil Rights told the UN Human Rights Commissioner that these American groups had tried but failed to enact their policies through the states and federal government “so in our frustration we now turn to the United Nations.” In other words, having failed to enact their leftist agenda through the normal process of American constitutional democracy they would attempt to impose their policy  preferences though “transnational politics” with the use of UN treaties.

In practice, this means the transnational progressives will file lawsuits declaring the US in violation of international law. They will call on sympathetic judges to implement their left-wing globalist agenda. As former Yale Law Dean and current Obama State Department Legal Advisor Harold Koh has stated, American “courts must play a key role in coordinating U.S. domestic constitutional rules with the rules of foreign and international law.”  Ed Whalen of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, pointed out, this means subordinating American constitutional law to global law.

FP: What are the key arguments of American globalists? Where are they wrong? What is it they are really trying to perpetuate?

Fonte: There are two types of American globalists. The first are the ideological leftists that I just described, whose argument is simply that the broad leftist agenda represents real substantive rights (equality of result), as opposed to the individual rights of a capitalist democracy.

The second group of American globalists, are often foreign policy specialists, who believe that America is in decline. This group of globalists, argue in Orwellian fashion that the United States should exercise “leadership” and “engagement” by promoting a new global governance system over national sovereignty. They maintain, unrealistically, that if Americans agree to limit their own sovereignty and submit to global rules, the Chinese will be persuaded to do the same, thus “protecting American interests” in the future as China becomes stronger. This reveals the global governance project to be both naïve and dangerously suicidal, placing American security in the hands of an untested and unaccountable global system.

President Obama thinks all kids should go to college (94 percent of citizens agree, according to a May 2011 poll by the Pew Research Center). But this great American educational miscalculation is behind much of the nation’s massive unemployment.

Disturbingly, we don’t have enough skilled workers to make America work effectively today. Companies across America are literally begging for workers, offering well paying, high-skilled work just to stay in business, according to a Daily Caller article earlier this year.

People of every political persuasion are demanding a cure for unemployment. But the administration and Congress have failed, mainly because of Obama’s misguided insistence on green jobs and subsidized projects in “renewable” industries. (Think Solyndra scandal.) The Obama $474 billion Jobs Act is a bust. It is a mix of unworkable provisions and tax hikes that make even many Democrats turn up their noses.

As for higher education, the Obama administration is behind a tax credit that lowered the college tuition cost for more than 12 million students last year, an Oct. 13 CNNMoney.com story said.

Obama and Biden “will make college affordable for all Americans by creating a new American Opportunity Tax Credit.” This refundable credit will ensure that the first $4,000 of a college education is completely free for most Americans, and will cover two-thirds of the cost of tuition at the average public college or university and make community college tuition free for most students. Recipients of the credit will be required to conduct only 100 hours of community service. This should bring plenty of young voters to the polls for Obama next year.

Thirty percent of college and university students drop out after their first year. Half never graduate, and college completion rates in the United States have been stalled for more than three decades. “The record is quite bad, especially for African-Americans and other minorities,” says Kati Haycock, president of the Education Trust. “The colleges want us to think everyone graduates, but a huge number don’t, and many leave with significant loan debts and job skills totally inadequate in the 21st century.”

Others leave school brainwashed by leftist professors, which brings joy to the Obama people. A study for the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching used the categories “liberal” and “conservative.” It found that 70 percent of the professors in major liberal arts colleges and universities considered themselves liberal. Fewer than 20 percent identified themselves as conservative. (Of course, “liberal” here means left-liberal or socialist, not classical liberal.)

David Horowitz also makes the case in his book, “The Professors: The 101 Most Dangerous Academics in America.”

To look at one important area of study, only 8 percent of 376 surveyed companies rate the information technology (IT) graduates coming out of universities as “well trained and ready to go.”

Economist Robert Samuelson has said about American education:

“Theories abound as to what’s gone wrong. For skilled blue-collar jobs, high schools have de-emphasized vocational training, community colleges often aren’t well-connected to local job markets and union apprenticeship programs have withered, according to Anthony Carnevale, director of Georgetown’s Center on Education and the Workforce.” Another theory, says Samuelson, is that Americans are less willing to move to take jobs.

Nearly two-thirds of college presidents in the May 2011 poll by the Pew Research Center said it is unlikely that the U.S. will achieve the goal set by Obama that by 2020 we will have the largest share of young people with college degrees of any country in the world.

This popular post was originally published on April 28, 2011

It’s the Arab Spring and love is in the air.   After a torrid on-and-off affair, rival terrorist political factions Hamas and Fatah are on again.  According to mutual best-friend Egypt, things are red-hot.

On Wednesday, Hamas and Fatah engaged in forming an interim government while promising to decide on a date for general elections.  According to Egyptian intelligence, “The consultations resulted in full understandings over all points of discussions,” including the color for the bridal party: blood red.

A traditional reception will follow the political nuptials, the highlight of which will be the “beginning anew of the Palestinian struggle,” hosted by Deputy Hamas politburo chief Abu Marzouk.

While details of the guest list have yet to be announced, Fatah Central Committee Member Azzam Ahmad declared that “non-partisan elements that will represent the Palestinian people” will be encouraged to attend.  However, analysts speculate that one name will be notably absent from the list: Gilad Shalit, the Israeli Army soldier currently being held captive by Hamas for 1,767 days and counting.

Not surprisingly, the recently liberated Egyptian government played a strategic role in reuniting the former lovers.   Bored with their decades-old union with the Jewish state, the newer, fresher Egypt is seeking to re-brand its image; according to 54% of Egyptians, this means de-friending Israel.

Scoring mutual “Likes” in the process, the interim Egyptian military government and Hamas dictatorship used the opportunity to do a little bonding of their own; relationship-building that was initiated with the release of “scores” of Palestinian prisoners from Egyptian jails over the past few weeks.  It is expected that Egypt will play best man to Hamas in the upcoming union.  Planned pre-wedding activities include the re-opening of the Rafah border crossing between Sinai and the Gaza Strip.  A rumored bachelor party promise: The establishment of Hamas’s “unofficial embassy” in Cairo.

But, the military government can’t take all the credit.  Love, in more ways than one, drew the rivals together.  The popular uprisings in the Arab world rekindled feelings of mutual hatred; Egypt only needed to ignite the flickering sparks during ceremonies honoring the beloved late Terrorist-in-Chief Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat.

Speaking on behalf of Israel (the scorned woman in the scenario) Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu issued a desperate plea for mediation, lest her already shaky union with Fatah truly comes to an end.  “It’s either us, or Hamas; you can’t have us both!” the prime minister declared.

Citing the violent behavior of their “peace partner’s” ex-lover, Netanyahu warned that missiles and rockets being fired into Israel at both ends would put the nation in the middle of an intolerable situation.

Prospects for reconciliation between the disgruntled partners look dim.  For example, Fatah has already declared a desire to dump the couple’s mediator:  “An aide to Mr. Abbas stated recently he would sacrifice US financial assistance if this was the price of unity.”

It would seem that Fatah is following the lead of their reconciled lover.  Declaring a strong desire for independence Hamas, it would seem, wants the other woman out of the picture completely: “The agreement is the beginning and we shall take quick steps to end the occupation and establish an independent Palestinian state.”

Israel, it would seem, is fooling herself if she thinks her mediator will step in to save the day.

According to Ha’aretz’s Zvi Bar’el, “Even the United States will not be able to object to a united Palestinian government, in which Hamas is a partner. After all, it had agreed to accept and even support, economically and militarily, a Lebanese government in which Hezbollah was partner. Nor will the United States and Europe be able to object to general elections in the territories, or deny their results, when the West is demanding Arab leaders implement democratic reforms.”  In short, “Israel could find itself isolated yet again if it objects to the reconciliation or the election.”

Could a Hamas-Fatah union reveal the true nature of her abusive lover for the world to see?  If so, would that make a difference to the 100 nations now on his side?  Or will the international community continue to turn a blind eye to what has become the obvious truth in the melodrama: The violent partner wants his victim dead, for good.

For advocates of the abused woman, only one adage can offer any reassurance:  “Hell has no fury like a woman scorned.”

When is the left pleased with a character who’s known for fighting for “Truth, Justice & The American Way”? When that character has forsaken that fight.

There is now a trend of American comic book icons being de-Americanized in order to make them more palatable to a foreign — even anti-American — audience. In some foreign markets, Marvel studios is leaving the name “Captain America” off of the title of the upcoming film starring the patriotic superhero, and even the director of the film has made comments designed to placate non-American audiences.

The left was also pleased when Batman recruited a Muslim as his French counterpart, in a storyline that ignores the very reason we even began talking about Islam on a large scale, 9/11.

Superman was created and published by Americans. He crash-landed in America, was raised by Americans, lives in America, works in America, is married to an American. But D.C. Comics has just made him renounce his U.S. Citizenship. I keep reading about how Superman belongs to all of us. Well, my Superman would Never quit America. He might be critical of a particular policy of the American government, but he would never stop fighting for Truth, Justice & The American Way.

It’s the Arab Spring and love is in the air.   After a torrid on-and-off affair, rival terrorist political factions Hamas and Fatah are on again.  According to mutual best-friend Egypt, things are red-hot.

On Wednesday, Hamas and Fatah engaged in forming an interim government while promising to decide on a date for general elections.  According to Egyptian intelligence, “The consultations resulted in full understandings over all points of discussions,” including the color for the bridal party: blood red.

A traditional reception will follow the political nuptials, the highlight of which will be the “beginning anew of the Palestinian struggle,” hosted by Deputy Hamas politburo chief Abu Marzouk.

While details of the guest list have yet to be announced, Fatah Central Committee Member Azzam Ahmad declared that “non-partisan elements that will represent the Palestinian people” will be encouraged to attend.  However, analysts speculate that one name will be notably absent from the list: Gilad Shalit, the Israeli Army soldier currently being held captive by Hamas for 1,767 days and counting.

Not surprisingly, the recently liberated Egyptian government played a strategic role in reuniting the former lovers.   Bored with their decades-old union with the Jewish state, the newer, fresher Egypt is seeking to re-brand its image; according to 54% of Egyptians, this means de-friending Israel.

Scoring mutual “Likes” in the process, the interim Egyptian military government and Hamas dictatorship used the opportunity to do a little bonding of their own; relationship-building that was initiated with the release of “scores” of Palestinian prisoners from Egyptian jails over the past few weeks.  It is expected that Egypt will play best man to Hamas in the upcoming union.  Planned pre-wedding activities include the re-opening of the Rafah border crossing between Sinai and the Gaza Strip.  A rumored bachelor party promise: The establishment of Hamas’s “unofficial embassy” in Cairo.

But, the military government can’t take all the credit.  Love, in more ways than one, drew the rivals together.  The popular uprisings in the Arab world rekindled feelings of mutual hatred; Egypt only needed to ignite the flickering sparks during ceremonies honoring the beloved late Terrorist-in-Chief Palestinian leader Yassir Arafat.

Speaking on behalf of Israel (the scorned woman in the scenario) Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu issued a desperate plea for mediation, lest her already shaky union with Fatah truly comes to an end.  “It’s either us, or Hamas; you can’t have us both!” the prime minister declared.

Citing the violent behavior of their “peace partner’s” ex-lover, Netanyahu warned that missiles and rockets being fired into Israel at both ends would put the nation in the middle of an intolerable situation.

Prospects for reconciliation between the disgruntled partners look dim.  For example, Fatah has already declared a desire to dump the couple’s mediator:  “An aide to Mr. Abbas stated recently he would sacrifice US financial assistance if this was the price of unity.”

It would seem that Fatah is following the lead of their reconciled lover.  Declaring a strong desire for independence Hamas, it would seem, wants the other woman out of the picture completely: “The agreement is the beginning and we shall take quick steps to end the occupation and establish an independent Palestinian state.”

Israel, it would seem, is fooling herself if she thinks her mediator will step in to save the day.

According to Ha’aretz’s Zvi Bar’el, “Even the United States will not be able to object to a united Palestinian government, in which Hamas is a partner. After all, it had agreed to accept and even support, economically and militarily, a Lebanese government in which Hezbollah was partner. Nor will the United States and Europe be able to object to general elections in the territories, or deny their results, when the West is demanding Arab leaders implement democratic reforms.”  In short, “Israel could find itself isolated yet again if it objects to the reconciliation or the election.”

Could a Hamas-Fatah union reveal the true nature of her abusive lover for the world to see?  If so, would that make a difference to the 100 nations now on his side?  Or will the international community continue to turn a blind eye to what has become the obvious truth in the melodrama: The violent partner wants his victim dead, for good.

For advocates of the abused woman, only one adage can offer any reassurance:  “Hell has no fury like a woman scorned.”

“If the United States allows the United Nations to dictate that there will be a Palestinian state, then all the democratic nations of the world are at risk …if we allow that democracy [Israel] to be dictated to by the UN, why do we think as Americans that the UN will not try, in turn, to dictate to us?”

- Pastor John Hagee, CUFI

Last Friday night, Glenn Beck (the “Jew-loving anti-Semite”) kicked off the pre-Passover party with an episode dedicated to Standing for Israel, something that he wants to see become a global movement.  Along with Dore Gold, Rabbi Joseph Potasnik, and Pastor John Hagee, Beck discussed the possibility that Israel is being “set up as the fall guy” by the US in the current war against the Radical Islam/Radical Left unholy alliance.

The cultural perspectives were telling.  Gold’s argument focused on the historical relationship between America and Israel, transcending the anti-Israel politics of certain un-named officials.  (Beck was the one who had to fill “Obama” in the blanks.)  For this former Israeli ambassador, the problem wasn’t in the Oval Office, but in Europe, among a “Quartet” of nations including Great Britain, Germany, and France who are seeking to force Israel back to its pre-’67 borders.  For Gold, this European union is the “other woman” trying to lure America away from its otherwise faithful relationship.

A relationship that, according to Pastor John Hagee, founder of Christians United for Israel (CUFI) is mutually beneficial from a Biblical perspective.  To Hagee, the problem is simple: Americans don’t recognize Israel’s relationship to history, to the Word of God, and what the nation means to America as a democracy.  Israel is our greatest ally in the Middle East — moreover, God promises that if we bless Israel, we will be blessed, a perspective with which Beck agrees.

Contrary to Gold’s theory, Hagee and Beck also agree, Europeans aside, that the Obama Administration is doing everything in its power to destroy America’s relationship with Israel:

Hagee:  “I think that what Israel would appreciate from America is a President that would be vocally and visibly firm that they have the right to exist, the right to defensible borders, and the right to defend themselves against their enemies.”

Beck:  “Well, a lot of people are working on that, but it’s going to take about 2 years.”

Today, Israeli newspaper Yediot Ahronot reports that, contrary to the image Gold projects, America is a part of the Quartet putting pressure on Israel to cede post-’67 territories, including East Jerusalem, to a Palestinian state.

God and politics aside, Rabbi Potasnik put the responsibility of young Jewish support of Israel (or lack thereof) on the shoulders of Jewish American leadership.  “We have done a bad job in terms of exciting our young people about Israel.  If all we talk about is victimhood, pain, and suffering kids will ask ‘Why should I be Jewish?  Is there any joy in being Jewish?’”  The key to Jewish pride, it would seem, is Israel.  And the key to supporting Israel, apparently, is Jewish pride.

I wonder if the Union for Reform Judaism’s youth movement will pass a resolution on that one.

So, Beck and the audience asked, “what can we do to support Israel?”

Potasnik’s answer was benignly simple: Teach good versus evil and the importance of standing up for good.

Hagee’s reply combined faith with politics:  Pray for Israel and join CUFI in lobbying American politicians to take a pro-Israel stance.

Gold’s response was slightly more complicated: “We don’t need to have the territories of the Bible or the Bible as our source of our inspiration.  It is the source of the inspiration of the pioneers who established Israel.  But we are entitled to defensible borders to keep our country safe.  We need a firm commitment on that.  And I believe that our protection of Jerusalem is not just good for the Jewish people or the people of Israel, it is good for the world.  Let’s keep Jerusalem whole.”

In other words, thanks for the political support, but please keep your religion out of it.

Was the response strategically wise on Gold’s part?  After all, isn’t it a good thing to have someone use their religion to support Israel for a change, instead of using it as an excuse to blow up our buses, murder our families, or “drive us into the sea”?  Choosing to agree with the religion of your supporters is one thing, but outright rejection traverses to the opposite end of a longstanding divide, one thats gap is thankfully growing smaller by the day for the sake of a greater good that includes Israel’s survival.  What is the harm (or should I say, the fear) in encouraging good willed support?

Moreover, from a strictly PR perspective, why not give the Bible a level of credence in public discourse?  It is, after all, the text that gave us the land in the first place. Israel may have been re-established, but it was not birthed with Herzl’s dream.  In an era that questions Jewish ownership of Israeli land, why not use every weapon in your arsenal, even the ideological ones, to keep your enemies on their toes?

The goal of Beck’s episode was to lay out his thesis, provide some facts and opinions, and encourage his audience to decide.  For hardcore, battle-hardened Israel lovers, the facts weren’t new, but the support was refreshing.  If anything, this signals a turning-tide in the dynamics of pro-Israel politics.  Just as the bulk of new immigrants to Israel are increasingly right-wing politically (and religiously) so, too, are Israel’s supporters in America.  They may have their points of contention, but finally, it seems, Jews and Evangelicals have found a cause that binds them together in a politically powerful way.

Will Standing for Israel become a global movement?  With an eye on flotillas and protests in May, along with a possible unilateral declaration of Palestinian statehood in September, the answer seems fairly simple:  Do Israel and her supporters have a choice?

In his presidential speech to the nation, Obama defended American use of military force as part of the coalition to protect Libyan civilians, yet as Vanity Fair fittingly described, Obama’s Speech on Libya Leaves Big Questions Unanswered, amounting to “an oddly belated effort to explain the obvious.” A pertinent question about Libya is this: what is the Western alliance backing?

According to analysts of the Combating Terrorism Center at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, the rebel forces opposing Gaddafi– and yes the same ones that America is backing– are comprised of young Al-Qaeda jihadists.  Forget the premature liberal utopianism that peace, human rights and democracy as we know it, is on the horizon in the turbulent Middle East.

Most analysts are hailing the wave of pro-democracy movements in the Arab world as a boon for the Islamic Republic.Indeed, if Egypt can create a democratic model that combines political tolerance, economic prosperity and adept diplomacy, Iran’s model of intolerance, economic malaise and confrontation will hold little appeal in the Arab world.

Israeli Deputy Foreign Minister Danny Ayalon (also former Israeli ambassador to the United States and foreign policy advisor to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) had more realistic thoughts about the Middle East uprisings:

The fear is that they will be hijacked, (following the) the model of Iran, the model of Hamas in Gaza, the model of Hezbollah in Lebanon.

The region is crawling with Islamists—from the most violent to the so-called moderate adherents to the Muslim Brotherhood, the latter being confused with democratic freedom fighters by misinformed Westerners.

Take Libya for example where Darnah is one of the most significant towns in the east for the Islamist uprising against Gadaffi.  Its defenses are being led by rebel Abdul-Hakim al-Hasadi,who admitted to fighting against American forces in Afghanistan and also to recruiting Libyans to fight against American forces in Iraq.

According to the French daily newspapaer Le Figaro, al-Hasadi is not only described as the “voice of Libya’s Islamists” but he also holds so much power that any transitional government must pass his approval. America’s enemies are bountiful with a dithering administration at the helm during a trying time for even the most decisive.

Barack Obama rose to prominence as a ferocious opponent of the war in Iraq. With barely any objection from either the left or the right, he is now deploying American military power to support some of the very same forces — in all likelihood some of the very same fighters — who were just recently fighting and killing American troops in Iraq.

A quick glance back will remind us that the Taliban swiftly emerged as a so-called reformist force from the Mujahideen warriors that fought the Soviets in the late 90s.   Its founder Mullah Mohammad Umar served as a Mujahideen warrior before advancing to create his own fundamentalist ‘vision’ for Afghanistan, the current menace America faces at war.  While we cheer the fall of tyrants in the Middle East there is no predictability on who or what will replace them at this stage.  With the powerful Islamist influence, this vacuum is ominous and brings with it potential complications to Western interests, particularly with America governed by a vacillating president who needs to focus more on the menace of Iran, while showing greater support for Israel.

Pop culture’s hip new trend is to fight back against bullying, but nothing much is new in the Jewish world.  Perhaps that is why a video of a kid beating up a bully can go viral while the story of five tragic murders of innocent Israeli civilians is passed off rather quietly.  After all, where’s the news in the story of another family of Israeli settlers being murdered in their home?  It isn’t as if they belong there anyway–they were asking for it.  So, let’s move on to more important topics, like talking about how bad bullying is.  Right?

The truth is that the worst and most blatant case of bullying on a worldwide scale happens every day, right under America’s collective nose.  The worst part of it is that the ones being bullied are so punch drunk they don’t even realize what is happening anymore.  They’ll just do whatever it takes to make the beating stop.

American news outlets like the LA Times described the Fogel family as “Jewish settlers” murdered in their “tightly guarded compound.”  Explaining to their readers that, “Most of the international community…views Israel’s settlements as illegal,” as if international opinion is justification for cold-blooded, anti-Semitic-fueled murder.  Caroline Glick smartly contrasts this report with the bulk of European coverage that simply began with the aggravating fact that the Netanyahu government permitted 400 more homes to be built in Judea and Samaria, remarking, “at least [The Times] mentioned the murders.”

And, at least the Times–unlike Israel’s own Ha’aretz–did not go so far as to use the horrific nuclear events in Japan as a metaphor for the supposed “threat” of a few thousand Israelis risking life and limb to live in desert outposts.

The coverage, or lack thereof, of the murder of a family of Israelis by bloodthirsty anti-Semites sends a clear message to Israel and Jews everywhere: If you’re being bullied, don’t expect the international community to be on your side.

The real news, however, comes from the Jewish American reaction.  According to the New York Jewish Week, the newly formed opinion of the Israel Action Network (a joint effort of the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and the Jewish Federations of North America) is that:

“One can support a targeted boycott of Israeli settlements and even a cultural ban against the West Bank settlement of Ariel–as long as one also supports Israel as a democratic Jewish state.”

In other words, in an attempt to have their cake and eat it, too, the American Jewish community has effectively decided who is and isn’t an Israeli in their Playbook of International Politics.  Ironically, it all boils down to who does and doesn’t acknowledge the idea that Israel should be a Jewish state.  By dealing from the “Jew/Not a Jew” deck they are playing into the hands of the same “international community” that justified, for all intents and purposes,  the murder of innocent Jewish Israelis because they dared to walk on the wrong side of the world-drawn line in the sand.

And I thought the IDF was the organization responsible for enacting apartheid policies.

This takes the culturally Jewish in-fighting over who does and doesn’t count at the bema to a new and dangerous level.  In the world of bullying there are bystanders and upstanders, yet this unspoken acquiescence to the BDS movement by two major Jewish American organizations signals their election of the dirtiest role of all: the sellout. Abraham Lincoln once warned a warring nation that a house divided against itself cannot stand.  It was a warning first given from an Israeli king to his son, one that was published for his nation to hear.

The real question is:  Amidst all the infighting, have we lost the ability to listen?