The international program for the demonization of Israel known as Israeli Apartheid Week (IAW) is on the march. It’s the spearhead of the campaign to delegitimize the state of Israel and soften it up for annihilation. And right there to counter their pernicious influence is the David Horowitz Freedom Center (DHFC), distributing its hard-hitting pamphlets and launching educational events on campuses all across the United States.

IAW is an annual series of events held in cities and on campuses across the globe. It aims “to educate people about the nature of Israel” – by which it means to spread disinformation and propaganda – “and to build Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) campaigns” in order to delegitimize it. They demand full equality for Arab citizens of Israel (who already have it), an end to what they falsely call the occupation and colonization of all Arab lands, dismantling of the security wall that protects Israelis from Palestinian terrorist attacks, and the Palestinian right of return, which would essentially mean the end of Jews in Israel. IAW’s speakers, conferences, rallies, workshops, panel discussions, film screenings, protests, even “flash mobs” will help hammer home their monstrous lies about Israel.

To fight back with the truth, the DHFC is providing intellectual ammunition to pro-Israel and pro-freedom student leaders on campus in the form of its pamphlets, speakers such as David Horowitz, Raymond Ibrahim, Nonie Darwish, and David Meir-Levi, and free screenings of films such as Iranium, about the threat of a nuclear Iran, and The Case for Israel: Democracy’s Outpost, a defense of the Middle East’s only liberal democracy.

Among the pamphlets being distributed by the DHFC are Daniel Greenfield’s “Muslim Hate Groups on Campus,” which documents the radical origins and violent objectives of the main Muslim student organizations on our nation’s campuses, such as the MSA and Students for Justice in Palestine; “Stolen History” by David Meir-Levi, about the faux-history of the Palestinians created to delegitimize Israel; and David Horowitz and Robert Spencer’s “Islamophobia: Thought Crime of the Totalitarian Future,” which traces the U.N. campaign to criminalize defamation of religion (read: Islam), and exposes its role in the Muslim Brotherhood‘s campaign to destroy Western civilization from within. All of those pamphlets are absolutely essential primers of the global struggle against religious intolerance and totalitarianism.

The Freedom Center ad is published in full below this article.

Controversy is heating up over a David Horowitz Freedom Center advertisement published in an Ohio State University student newspaper.

Under the headline “Former Leaders of the Muslim Student Association (MSA): Where Are They Now?,” the ad in The Lantern simply lists, without comment, ten MSA co-founders and former presidents connected to terrorist entities such as al-Qaeda, Hamas, the Taliban, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad. Not all have criminal convictions, but among them are such terrorist superstars as Anwar al-Awlaki, the budding “bin Laden 2.0” taken out last year in a drone attack, and Abu Mansoor al-Amriki, spokesman for al-Qaeda in Somalia. The ad closes by promoting a new pamphlet by Daniel Greenfield at the Freedom Center, Muslim Hate Groups on Campus, which documents the radical origins and violent objectives of the main Muslim student organizations on our nation’s campuses, such as the MSA and Students for Justice in Palestine, which are sponsors of hate-fests like “Israeli Apartheid Weeks” or “Palestine Awareness Weeks.”

In fact, the Ohio State University branch of the MSA has had connections to terrorists itself, as noted in the 2008 FrontPage piece, “Terror-Funded MSA at Ohio State.” Kindhearts, the sponsor of a 2006 MSA conference, was closed by order of the Department of the Treasury for financing terrorism:

Kindhearts, however, was not the only terror-connected sponsor of the OSU MSA conference. Also supporting the MSA’s conference was its local parent organization, Masjid Omar Ibn El-Khattab, known affectionately in the Central Ohio area as “Masjid Al-Qaeda”. The mosque nearby the OSU campus was home to the largest known Al-Qaeda cell in the US.

After 9/11 the OSU MSA email list regularly published news releases by Islamic terrorist organizations and encouraged readers to buy videos from a terrorist support website. In 2003 the student organization helped host now-convicted Palestinian Islamic Jihad leader Sami Al-Arian. More recently, the OSU MSA jointly sponsored an event featuring notorious Muslim Brotherhood leader Jamal Badawi.

One of the Ohio State students who complained about the DHFC ad is International Studies major Jana al-Akhras, 18. “I am offended not only as a Muslim or as a general-body member of the MSA, but as a member of the OSU community,” she said. “We do not stand for discrimination, hate or intolerance here.” Nor does the Freedom Center – its ad has no hateful, intolerant, or discriminatory content, except perhaps an implied intolerance for terrorist activity. That’s enough for al-Akhras to dismiss it as “hate speech”; she claims that the ad constitutes a blanket statement labeling Muslim students as security threats. “It’s a blatant attempt at reinforcing stereotypes and causing widespread fear of Muslims on campus.” To imply that the MSA is responsible for international terrorism only “breeds hatred,” she insists.

Al-Akhras did not explain how merely identifying the names of ten MSA leaders and their demonstrable connections to terrorism breeds hatred; nor did she address the fact that it is the terrorists themselves and their supporters who are the ones consumed by hatred and “reinforcing stereotypes” about Muslims. She also did not contradict the factuality of the ad’s content; she only offered the excuse that there can be “bad apples” in any organization.

She believes “there’s a fine line between freedom of speech and hate speech.” Apparently the facts presented in the DHFC ad cross that line. OSU Undergraduate Student Government President Nick Messenger chimed in, calling the ad “false, bigoted and full of hate speech that doesn’t have a place on campus.” Neither he nor al-Akhras provided any evidence for their accusations; nonetheless, she said that The Lantern “had every right to deny [the ad] as hate speech.”

This coming Monday, May 16, 2011, Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors and the David Horowitz Freedom Center Present IS OBAMA OUR CHAMBERLAIN?

Come join the discussion and book signing with Bruce S. Thornton, the author of THE WAGES OF APPEASEMENT: Ancient Athens, Munich and Obama’s America.

The event is being held at 7pm (May 16) at the Skirball Cultural Center, 2701 N. Sepulveda Blvd., Los Angeles, CA  90049.  $15 per person, cash or check at the door, free parking. Register by email at RSVP@cjhsla.org or call (818)704-0523.

To mark the occasion, Frontpage is rerunning below Mark Tapson’s full interview with Dr. Bruce Thornton from our March 17th issue.

*

The Wages of Appeasement

British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain, who famously returned from a Berlin conference with Hitler and announced appeasement in our time, may be history’s poster boy for political impotence and naïveté. But in the new book, The Wages of Appeasement: Ancient Athens, Munich, and Obama’s America, Bruce S. Thornton notes that the temptation to placate an enemy seeking one’s destruction is “as old as conflict itself.”

The book assesses three notable examples of societies’ futile, disastrous responses to the aggression of determined enemies: the Greek city-states threatened by the shrewd Philip II of Macedon, England confronted by Hitler, and now the West’s clash of civilizations with “a renascent Islamic jihad and its most powerful state sponsor, Iran.” Its message couldn’t be more timely and vital.

Front Page contributor Bruce Thornton is a professor of classics and humanities at California State University in Fresno. A National Fellow at the Hoover Institution, he’s the author of Decline and Fall: Europe’s Slow-Motion Suicide, Greek Ways: How the Greeks Created Western Civilization, six other books, and numerous essays on Western culture.

Mark Tapson: Dr. Thornton, what was the inspiration for a book about appeasement? What prompted you to see timeless similarities in the different historical settings of ancient Greece, pre-WWII Europe, and America under Obama?

Bruce Thornton: The idea arose out of many conversations I’ve had with [fellow historian] Victor Hanson about the value of historical comparisons for illuminating our own times. I think we’ve been particularly struck by President Obama’s foreign policy philosophy, which in some cases eerily mimics the naive idealism not just of Jimmy Carter but of someone like Neville Chamberlain.

These three instances are interesting to compare because they are all constitutional governments faced with autocratic and illiberal aggressors. Thus appeasement is not just a consequence of this or that particular leader’s weakness, but also reflects the weaknesses of democratic governments, particularly in foreign policy.

MT: How does democracy itself put us at a disadvantage against such “illiberal aggressors”?

BT: The glories of representative government are the replacement of force with discussion and persuasion, and the holding of politicians accountable to citizens through audit, elections, laws, and the rest. However, the reliance on discussion and verbal process makes it easy to substitute words for action when action is needed. And when leaders are held to citizen scrutiny and have to face election or audit, they find it more expedient to kick problems down the road rather than call on the citizens to make unpleasant sacrifices.

Foreign policy particularly requires long-term strategies pursued consistently, but with a two-year election cycle (one year in Athens for most offices), and politicians held to intense scrutiny by mass media, instant polling, the blogosphere, and 24/7 news and opinion programs, it becomes more difficult to develop a consistent strategy and stick to it over time. Illiberal regimes, of course, don’t have many of those problems.

MT: You write that the causes of appeasement “arise from the limitations of human nature and from the failure of political ideals,” and that this is a tragic view of life that’s out of step with our times. Can you elaborate on that?

BT: We moderns believe that human nature can progress for the better, that material improvements in human life will remove the suffering and want that in the past drove people to irrational and destructive behavior. The ancients, particularly Thucydides in his masterpiece The History of the Peloponnesian War, in contrast believed that the irrational drove human behavior more often than not – things like fear, ambition, honor, power, revenge, religious fervor, or greed for wealth or territory.

War then is not an anomaly arising from poverty, etc., but a reflection of human nature. That’s a tragic view, because if human nature doesn’t change that much, then war and violence will always be part of our lives. That’s a hard truth for many of us, who like to believe that we can progress to an ideal world of peace, plenty, and prosperity, where disputes can be resolved peacefully with rational negotiation and bargaining.

MT: You identify the most important factor in the failure of societies to withstand an aggressor as “the decay of civic virtues.” “To be free,” you write about the Athenians, “citizens had to have characters worthy of freedom.” What kind of character is worthy of freedom?

The Center for Palestinian Studies (CPS) at Columbia University hosted an event on May 2, 2011 entitled “Gaza: Israel’s War and the Goldstone Report.” The panel of rabid anti-Israel academics included Norman Finkelstein, author of “This Time We Went Too Far: Truth and Consequences of the Gaza Invasion;” Rashid Khalidi, Edward Said Professor of Arab studies at Columbia, co-director of CPS, and author of “The Iron Cage” (and former professor of political science at DePaul University who was denied tenure and resigned); and Peter Weiss, vice president of the Center for Constitutional Rights.

I gathered a couple of defenders of Israel and attended the event in order to challenge the radical anti-Israel orthodoxy at Columbia. Before the event began, I handed out a printout of David Horowitz’s forceful and factual ad that ran in the New York Times last week, entitled: “The Palestinians’ Case Against Israel is Based on a Genocidal Lie.” I had the fortune to meet Danielle Reich, a Columbia undergraduate student, Hasbara fellow and campus Camera representative, who came to defend Israel as well. There were altogether 300 people, an assemblage of student activists, faculty and aging hippies with a handful of Israel supporters. Many people handed the flyer back to me after they saw the name David Horowitz Freedom Center. I engaged a few folks in debate over some of the points in the ad.

I reiterated the message in the Horowitz ad that the Palestinian claim that Israel “occupies Palestine” is an outright historical lie and that there has never been a “Palestinian” state or entity to occupy before the PLO was created in 1964 in order to obliterate the State of Israel. People asked why I am denouncing the Palestinian people. I said, “Because they are suffering,” echoing the message in the ad. But, I continued, the cause of their suffering is not Israel, but sixty years of Arab aggression. If we continue to blame and demonize Israel, we will never get to the core of the Israeli-Palestinian question, which is that Arab dictatorships have been using the Palestinian people as political pawns in their war against the State of Israel. This is the manner in which Danielle and I argued with some of the anti-Israel activists around us before the event began.

The speakers, Finkelstein and Khalidi, were venomous in their detailed demonization of Israel, and it was grueling to listen to their talks, but the audience was worse. The person I was sitting next to was mourning the death of Osama bin Laden. In fact, I think many in the audience were OBL sympathizers. I got into a vehement argument with one middle-aged lady who viciously attacked Israel, saying that Israel backed out of every deal and shortchanged the Palestinians and that I should read Dennis Ross’ book, whom she described as “one of your guys.” I said Arafat backed out of the deal which would have given the Palestinians a state and she kept hollering, “Bulls**t, Israel backed out, read Dennis Ross.”

I overheard one young woman praising Hezbollah and saying that Israel was the worst thing that happened since the Holocaust. I confronted her on her statements, asking her to repeat what she said about Israel and why she was praising a terrorist organization. She was startled to find a supporter of Israel in the midst of an otherwise compliant group of Muslims and left-wing activists and was speechless. Her friends chimed in saying, “One man’s terrorist is another’s freedom fighter,” making the point that they, too, are admirers of Hezbollah.

Before the lecture, people were passing out nefarious literature on “Nakba” (the Palestinian anniversary of the creation of Israel, “the catastrophe”) and the “Gaza Freedom Flotilla” to their activist friends and announcing upcoming events to excoriate the Jewish State. I spoke to a Palestinian Muslim sporting a 1960s beatnik goatee, who said the Palestinians have had a “culture” in the region for many past generations, after I confronted him with the fact that there was no Palestinian entity during the 400 year Ottoman reign and during the British rule after World War I. I mentioned the fact that Mark Twain said it was a desolate land with virtually no inhabitants. To everything I said, he answered, “Zionist propaganda.” He even claimed there was no Arab War with Israel in 1948. It is all Zionist propaganda. There was nothing further I could say to the deaf and dumb.

On April 3, at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s West Coast Retreat in Palos Verdes, California, Robert Spencer debated Muslim reformer Zuhdi Jasser on the prospects for reform in Islam. Andrew McCarthy, author of Willful Blindness, was moderating.

If the embedded video doesn’t show up on your screen, you can find it here.

They call our freedom "terrorism" - but they're using it against us

Editor’s Note: Diane Schrader attended the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s West Coast retreat this past weekend and will be filing several reports on the various speakers and panels. This is the third; the second, Separation of Mosque and State, is here; the first here.

What’s the definition of a “moderate Muslim”? Writer Andrew McCarthy addressed that question at this past weekend’s David Horowitz Freedom Center retreat, during a panel on “Jihad on the Home Front.” Author of Willful Blindness: A Memoir of the Jihad, McCarthy brought a little levity to the issue with these tongue-in-cheek questions: Is it someone who is not actually currently in the process of blowing something up? Is it someone who has run out of ammunition?

The reason for his sarcasm is the inordinately generous view of certain Muslims as “moderate” by the mainstream media, which has been quick to categorize certain Muslims as moderate, for example, because they condemned 9/11. But some of the same individuals who condemned that attack have since called for fatwas to kill American soldiers in Iraq.

McCarthy fully recognizes that many American Muslims are indeed putting American concepts of liberty and free markets ahead of the politics of their faith. These are the people who can be well characterized as moderates – the kind of people who wish to separate the violent, jihadist, terrorist and sharia aspects of Islam from their day to day lives. (Whether or not what they then practice is truly Islam is a discussion for another time.) And McCarthy is quick to note that were it not for such moderate Muslims, the United States would have not had nearly the success it has enjoyed in tracking down and capturing Islamic terrorists, especially in our own country. However, McCarthy thinks it’s important to differentiate between what we might call true moderates, and those the media portrays as moderate – because that difference reveals the covert nature of so-called stealth jihad.

Shaykh Yusuf Qaradawi is one who condemned 9/11 but has since called for attacks on American soldiers. Why the discrepancy? McCarthy says it’s because 9/11 actually was counterproductive to a more stealthy effort to infiltrate American society that had been in place for years already. (It certainly brought home the dangers of Islam; many of us were blissfully unaware up to that point.)

Jihad, according to McCarthy, exists to spread sharia to the world. By force is one method, but the West is too powerful for Islam to conquer at this point – unless it infiltrates and conquers from within. This, according to McCarthy, explains the otherwise puzzling collaboration between the hard Left and the Muslim Brotherhood. After all, on certain issues they do not see eye to eye (gay rights comes to mind). But as McCarthy points out, their commonalities are greater than their differences. They are both totalitarian, authoritarian, and cannot coexist with American-type freedoms. “Historically,” says McCarthy, “they have always collaborated.”

Berkeley law professor and former Department of Justice lawyer John Yoo, another “jihad on the homefront” panelist, discussed the Obama administration’s incompetent policies regarding terrorists. (Read my colleague Donald Douglas’ detailed discussion of Yoo’s comments here.) Because of Obama’s emphasis on killing them instead of capturing them, American intelligence has suffered. And the administration’s insistence on treating terrorism like regular law enforcement cases has had severely deleterious effects.

For one thing, processing terror suspects (even those from Iraq or Afghanistan) through civilian trials exposes sensitive intelligence to the disclosure laws of open court. Perhaps even worse – soldiers who do capture suspected terrorists are expected to collect evidence that would stand up in court. As Yoo points out, this puts our soldiers at greatly increased risk because now they not only have to get their man, they have to go back and interview witnesses and collect material evidence. This, of course, is utter insanity. But the terrorists are only happy to use our own legal system against us.

Obama would do well to consider Yoo’s commonsense suggestions, which include keeping terrorists in military courts, restoring operational flexibility to soldiers instead of police duties, and morphing the FBI into a counterterrorism organization. (Other agencies certainly can take over chasing down bank robbers and white collar criminals.)

Yoo and McCarthy both articulated how jihad threatens America; recognizing this threat on the homefront is crucial. But as panelist Karen Lugo can sadly attest, our system is being hijacked and used against us.

Elaborating on the nature of so-called “civilizational jihad,” Lugo, a prominent law professor, told of coming face-to-face with the anti-free speech component of American Islamists. She helped organize a protest against militant, anti-American Muslims holding a fundraiser in Yorba Linda, California. The protest drew hundreds of well-behaved people, but a few misbehaved and made hateful statements that were immediately “weaponized,” as Lugo reports, by the radical group CAIR (Council for American Islamic Relations). CAIR worked with a local “human relations commission” to push for her termination as a law professor, and organized a campaign to crash her campus email account – although her university connections were in no way used as part of the protest. Lugo points out the “chilling” effect of so-called human rights commissions to discourage people from their Constitutional right to express political opinion. She also points out the irony that the commission was not the least interested in the Muslim “hate speech” that she was there to protest – commission members instead focused merely on attempting to intimidate those who would object to the radical Islamist statements. This is our system – being turned on its head.

Special note: Of utmost importance to patriotic activists – Karen Lugo escaped from this unfair dilemma primarily because she’d arranged to have two different people videotaping the event, which proved she was involved in no wrongdoing. Do not underestimate the power – protective power – of video!

Editor’s Note: Diane Schrader attended the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s West Coast retreat this past weekend and will be filing several reports on the various speakers and panels. This is the second; read the first here.

I have to give props to David Horowitz – his recent Freedom Center weekend featured a significant diversity of thought. A particularly fascinating element was a debate between Jihad Watch director Robert Spencer, author of Stealth Jihad, and Dr. Zuhdi Jasser, a former U.S. Navy Lieutenant Commander who advocates the “separation of mosque and state.”

The crux of the debate is the million dollar question – are jihad, terrorism and sharia law inextricably linked to Islam itself, or can so-called moderate Muslims embrace American concepts of liberty and justice, independent of the political aspects of Islam?

Jasser, of course, believes that type of separation can indeed happen – that Islam on its own is not inherently violent or hateful. Part and parcel of this perspective is the whole concept of “radical Islam” being some type of extremist outworking of an overall less malevolent Islamic worldview.

Spencer, who unlike Jasser is not a Muslim, argued that anyone who studies the scriptures of Islam must come to the conclusion that so-called radical Islamists are merely acting on the actual tenets of their faith – in other words, that the Islamic worldview is indeed malevolent. And Spencer’s got me convinced that he’s a lot closer to the truth than Jasser.

History teaches that Islam has not always been aggressive, as Jasser pointed out, but Spencer noted that just because Muslims were not powerful enough to wage violent jihad at certain historical moments does not mean that their goal had ever changed.

Jasser also argued that how Muslims perceive Koranic teaching is somewhat affected by their particular imam (or teacher,) the implication being that radical imams produce radical followers. He drew a parallel between that and a Jew or Christian deferring to their rabbi’s or minister’s view of scripture. But the Bible urges followers to test any teacher’s interpretation against the scripture itself – effectively minimizing the danger of a teacher leading people astray. Not to say it hasn’t happened – virtually every cult is birthed by someone twisting the words of scripture – but therein lies the point. Jasser’s analogy falls apart because any “radical minister,” for example, is soon exposed as a teacher of anti-biblical thought. In comparison, the so-called radical imams are teaching a doctrine that is in fact what the Koran says.

Another implication of the argument that Muslims can separate some of the Koran’s teachings from their everyday lives is the idea that Islam simply needs to “grow up” – that it needs to evolve into something more compatible with modern values. An unspoken assumption behind this idea is that Judaism and Christianity have already gone through such an evolution, which is why those belief systems are compatible with Western thought.

This is nonsense. Judaism and Christianity are compatible with Western thought, all right, because Western thought owes much of its lineage – the concepts of individual responsibility, private property, and fallen human nature, among other valuable lessons – in part to Judeo-Christian thinking. But Jasser misunderstands the fundamental nature of both Judaism and Christianity. They have both maintained the same teachings for thousands of years. They have not “evolved” (although they have been bastardized, by some – but that’s a discussion for another day).

So quite frankly it seems kind of insulting to Muslims to imply that, if we just give Islam some more time, it will “grow up” and become a faith we can all learn to love. The only change that can happen and is compatible with our American system of government is when individual Muslims decide that living in liberty and freedom is of higher value to them than fully embracing Islam (which, although he might not characterize it exactly so, is indeed what Jasser has chosen to do).

Regarding sharia law in particular, Jasser says that any system of law that may be said to be “of God” becomes manmade law when humans implement it – but this is a very weak argument that somehow sharia itself can be separated from Islam. In another discussion during the Horowitz event, Jasser indicated that he thought a person could embrace sharia “just for themselves” – but this is illogical. No one can embrace any system of law all by themselves, because systems of law include such things as judgment and punishments. More than one person is required for a legal system.

In defending attacks against the prophet Mohammed, Jasser implied that other faiths look up to men who were flawed, like Abraham. Jasser of course entirely misses the point that neither Judaism nor Christianity hold Abraham to be equivalent to deity, or in any way impervious to criticism. (Nobody gets killed if you draw a picture of him, either.) And the Bible is fairly clear about Abraham’s personal failings. Spencer agreed, however, that calling Mohammed out for his pedophilia does not win over most Muslims.

Dr. Jasser, somewhat poignantly, asked what he was to teach his children if Islam could not be separated from its violent, anti-Western tendencies and political visions of conquering the world. I would argue, with great respect for Dr. Jasser and his noble but misguided mission of trying to fuse his faith with American values – that in fact Islam is not a faith that he wants to pass along to his children.

Other presentations throughout the weekend underscored that reality, as speakers like Andrew McCarthy and Karen Lugo brought home, again and again, the sobering reality of fatwas, terrorism and jihad. Watch the NewsReal Blog site for video of the Enemies Within panel, in particular.

As many as 10,000 protesters from across the country - including family members who lost loved ones on Sept. 11, 2001 - took to the streets in New York City Sunday to fight construction of a 13-story Islamic mosque to be built just steps from Ground Zero where Muslim terrorists murdered 2,751 people in the name of Allah.

Now the organizers plan to sue the federal government to designate the site as a war memorial....

As WND reported, the new Islamic mosque plans to open its doors on Sept. 11, 2011 - the 10th anniversary of that fateful day when time stood still as millions of Americans grieved the loss of loved ones, friends, family members, co-workers and strangers.

The group Stop Islamization of America, or SIOA, led by Pamela Geller, Atlas Shrugs blogger and columnist, hosted a "No 9/11 Mosque" rally at Ground Zero June 6 to protest the mosque construction. Geller hosted the event with SIOA Associate Director Robert Spencer, director of Jihad Watch, a program of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

"The only Muslim center that should be built in the shadow of the World Trade Center is one that is devoted to expunging the Quran and all Islamic teachings of the violent jihad that they prescribe, as well as all hateful texts and incitement to violence," Geller said in a release announcing the protest.

They noted that thousands of protesters came from Washington state, California, Texas, Ohio, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, New Hampshire, Maine, South Carolina, Florida and elsewhere.

"They were Christians, Jews, Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists, atheists, Muslims of conscience," Spencer wrote. "They were lovers of freedom."

He added, "Police estimated that 5,000 people were there, and other estimates ranged as high as 10,000. The crowd carried signs expressing their love for freedom, their contempt for Shariah, and their anger at Islamic supremacism and insult to the memories of those murdered on 9/11 that this mosque represents."

Spencer, author of "Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs" and "The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam and the Crusades," said speakers included 9/11 family members, Egyptian ex-Muslim Nonie Darwish, Sudanese ex-slave Simon Deng, Hindu human-rights activist Babu Suseelan and 9/11 first responders.

Spencer said despite the crowd's size and the presence of media outlets from around the world, the U.S. mainstream media failed to show.

"ABC? NBC? CBS? CNN? Even FOX?" he wrote. "AWOL."...

Read it all.

[Editors’ note: This is a transcript of a speech delivered by Senator Jim DeMint at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s recent Santa Barbara Retreat. To watch the video of the speech, click here.]

Jim DeMint: David, thank you so much.  Gosh, it’s so encouraging to me to see all of you here.

I wish I could tell you how important it is when people come together, particularly conservatives.  David makes an excellent point — that conservatives are out there working, raising families — I mean, they don’t have time to do this kind of stuff.  It’s only people who want to control our lives who come together.  But when people do it, I know it’s a sacrifice.  And for you to come together, create that critical mass, it’s so encouraging to me.  I mean, so many of you have said thank you to me tonight.  But I’m really here to thank you.

One of the things I figured out long ago, after I came to the House, is I really have no power at all, unless the people on the outside are with me.  And what’s happened over the last year has helped me realize it doesn’t take a majority inside of Congress, if we have the majority outside.  And I’m really encouraged about what I’m seeing.

And I’m not really here to just talk to you.  I’m here to stand with you and to thank you.  David, thank you for your organization.  Thank you for all of you who support what he’s doing.  It’s great to see him when he’s in D.C., just continuing to rattle cages, get people’s attention.  It’s really important to be an advocate for the things that we’re working on.

I didn’t know he was going to introduce me before dinner; I thought I was going to get something to eat.

But on my way to the — back to L.A., I’m going to stop by McDonalds.  And I recommend it to all of you.

Because they’ve got a new Obama Value Meal that I hope you’ll all try.  It’s really great, really.  The new Obama Value Meal — you can order anything you want, and the guy behind you has to pay for it.

It’s a dream come true.

I know a lot of you are discouraged when David speaks — and I find myself doing it — kind of describing what’s happening in Washington.  People are really discouraged.  So we have to look for the silver lining and the good news.  And there is some good news.  As I left Washington this week, the global climate change scientists announced that they had found out how to lower global temperatures five degrees.  And all we have to do is to get Obama to stop talking for one week, — just one week, and the global temperatures go down.

But I’m really not all that partisan.

We shouldn’t have fun at Obama’s expense tonight.  And I hope you won’t do that.  Unless you think he’s having a whole lot of fun at our expense, right?

So I think we probably should.

But we can work together.  We can work together on things like the environment.  I’ve been trying to do that.  This week is Earth Day.  I felt a little guilty burning all the fossil fuels on the jet on the way out here to speak to you.  But I guess since Nancy Pelosi and Barbara Boxer do that every week, I shouldn’t feel that guilty.

But just to make up for things a little bit, I invited some endangered species to fly with me on the airplane on the way out here.  I invited all the Democrats who voted for that healthcare bill.

But it’s great to be in Reagan country.  I know some of you came with us today to the Reagan Ranch.  And I have to tell you, it was a profound experience for me.  I’ve never been there before.  We were at the Reagan Center in Santa Barbara in the morning.  Had a group come I got to speak to for breakfast, a lot of college students.  Really inspiring for me just to be around people, and realizing that even here in California there are people, likeminded, who really care about our country, love freedom.

So don’t underestimate any state.  It makes me mad when someone says, DeMint, you don’t understand that some states, you can’t elect a conservative candidate.  But I’m going to help do everything I can this election to prove that a good, commonsense conservative can be elected in any state in this country.  And I believe it’s going to happen.

But to be at the Reagan Ranch — and a lot of you were there today — and to see the simplicity that Reagan loved, and just to be outdoors, to work with his hands; to kind of sense his humanity, being there — it was a profound experience.  Because I never got a chance to meet him.  And so, all I know of Ronald Reagan is he was this incredible leader, a principled person with character and integrity.  He was focused and really changed the direction of our country.

Because, you know, the direction after Jimmy Carter, four years of Jimmy Carter, was not unlike what we’re looking at right now.  Except this is Jimmy Carter on steroids, that what we’re dealing with now.  But when Reagan came in with his optimism and his principled conservatism, you know, I just think of him as a leader that’s just so far out of the range of where I am that it’s — then to go to his ranch and to realize he loves the things I do.  I love to be alone with my wife.  I love to work with my hands, I love to build things, I love my workshop.  And you think, he was a man like us.  And it’s kind of hard to pull that together, that this person who changed the course of history in a lot of ways is like us.

I’ve heard a lot that there are really no great people in the world, there are only average people who do great things.  I still believe that Reagan is the exception to that.  But all of us can do great things.  And what I hope you’ll understand is that there are few of us in elected office.  But the real power in this country is outside of Washington.  And what we’ve seen over the last year is people really exercise that power.

And I keep telling people who thank me, I’m powerless.  There’s just a few people — David’s right — there are literally just a handful of people, if that many, in the Senate who are going to stand up and fight for the principles that they say they believe in.  But what happens when people come to Washington, or go to local rallies — Tea Parties, town halls — it emboldens those people who don’t have the courage but share the beliefs.  And they become more courageous, because the people are behind them.  And I think that’s what we’re seeing happen all across the country.

You know, Reagan began as an activist.  He was an actor, he was a Democrat.  In 1961 — a lot of us forget this; I didn’t really know this — he was leader of Operation Coffee Cup.  And the whole purpose of that was to stop the enactment of Medicare.  And he was warning people that people who believe in statism, believe in socialism, often use medicine.  And socialized medicine is a way to begin that process of totally socializing a country.  And he said we don’t want socialized medicine.  He made a 20-minute recording that he sent all over the country, to coffee shops, where it was played to explain to people how bad this was, what it would become.

Because it sounded benign — oh, let’s just help elderly people have healthcare.  Yeah, that sounds good.  But look what Medicare’s become.  It’s the only option anyone in this room is going to have when they retire.  And we’re not paying doctors enough to see Medicare patients.  They don’t want to see you coming if you’re on Medicare.  And we’re in a trap now, where we can’t buy our own health insurance for retirement.  Because now, everyone is on government healthcare when they retire.  It’s a little bit scary.

But Reagan was an activist before he was in elected office — ’61, almost 20 years before he became President.  And it’s pretty amazing; it should encourage all of you.

And it should sound familiar.  We want to stop socialism.  We’ve gone from coffee shops to Tea Parties.  But what we’re seeing is the same type of awakening in America that I think Reagan was stirring up even back in the 1960s.  We don’t want socialism.  And what we hear from the Tea Parties, what we hear from you tonight, what people are saying all over the country, is to stop the spending, stop the borrowing, stop creating more debt for our children and grandchildren, and stop the government takeovers.

It’s not real complicated.  It comes back to that limited-government, constitutional idea.  And people just keep saying, What about the Constitution?  This is not a radical idea.  It’s not a rightwing idea.  There’s nothing radical about don’t spend more than you bring in.  There’s nothing radical about honoring our oath of office.  The only oath of office that we take — as President, as congressmen, as senators, as judges — is, I swear to protect and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies foreign and domestic.

The greatest enemies to the Constitution today are domestic.  And most of them are in the United States Congress or in the White House right now.  And it’s not because they’re bad people.  It would be easier if they were bad people.  They’re good people, and they believe they’re doing the right thing.  But they have a very different worldview than all of us do, as far as what works.

You know, my perspective is not really political.  I didn’t ever run for anything in my life until I was 47 years old.  I had four children and a wife.  None of them liked politics or knew anything about it.  Two children in the high school, two in middle school.  I had my own business, which I had for 15 years.  I did marketing and strategic planning.  I was a volunteer in the United Way, the Chamber of Commerce, the School for the Deaf and Blind, — on so many boards that my employees at the company that I owned had an intervention and presented me with a T-shirt that said “just say no”.

Because that’s what I saw work, is people working together locally.  I didn’t know who was Republican or Democrat.  I thought there were normal people, and then there were politicians.  I didn’t want anything to do with politicians.  And I still feel that way.

So I’m kind of a fish out of water in Washington right now.  But I believe in the private sector.  And that’s the perspective I brought to Washington — a worldview that I had seen what works.  I had seen, if [you have] a commitment to family, a commitment to community and church — working together, volunteering, having charitable activities in all areas — that we could make a difference.

And a lot of the things we were working on were problems that were created by bad government policy — broken families from welfare, unwed births, juvenile delinquency, drug use, and a lot of drugs being bought with welfare money.

If you just follow the trail, a lot of the destruction of our society that the volunteerism was dealing with was caused by well-intended, but just lousy, federal policy, to a point when I was 47 years old, never running for anything, and I signed up to run for the United States Congress.  I’d been to Washington one time in my life.  And I didn’t expect to win; no one else did, either.  So it was one of those situations, after I won — now what do I do?

And you know, I found out I was a conservative after I got there.  But “conservative” to me is just believing in and remembering, preserving those things that work.

You know, we’re not on two sides of theoretical arguments here.  We’re not just arguing about a political theory, as conservatives.  This is facts about history, about what made this country great. There’s no question that America is unique, not because of our people — our people came from all over the world — not because of our geography, but because of the principles and the ideals — the principles of a limited government and a big people — individual responsibility, free markets, Judeo-Christian values, and just a private sector that works like Adam Smith talked about — that invisible hand that just is — Obama doesn’t understand.

He’s never been in a business.  None of his cabinet has.  They’ve never signed the front of a paycheck.  They don’t know what it means to take a risk and create jobs.  But they think they do.  They think they know it better than we do.  We have different worldviews.

You know, Reagan would be stunned today if he looked at where we are.  And while we don’t want to be pessimistic, it is important to recognize that we’re in a very different place in our country’s history than we’ve ever been.  And we have to have a sense of urgency.

In the world’s greatest bastion of freedom, today, the federal government owns the largest auto companies in America, the largest insurance company in America, the largest mortgage company in America.  They’ve just completed the takeover of healthcare.  They control our education system.  They control our whole energy sector.  They control our transportation infrastructure.  The federal agencies, like the EPA, are involved with almost every area of our economic activity.  There are people coming through my office every day saying, We can’t do business, because we don’t know what they’re going to do.

The FCC is trying to regulate the Internets.  The courts told them they couldn’t, and they’re still presenting rules to regulate an Internet that’s working without their help.  The Interior Department — we’ve intercepted memos where they’re trying to figure out how to take over more federal land.

I mean, it’s pretty amazing what they’re talking about doing.  And the judges are out of control.  You know, last week, a judge said that the National Day of Prayer is unconstitutional.  And Presidents since George Washington have been calling on our nation to pray.  And since our Constitutional Convention, it was clear that if a sparrow doesn’t fall without God’s notice, a nation is not going to rise without His help.

We can’t forget those principles that made this country great.  And we’re not talking theory.  We’re talking fact, and truth.  And that’s what’s on our side, and that we need to go boldly.

The problem we have now, as David’s pointed out — that in spite of the clear sense of urgency, even though it’s obvious, anyone who’s been in business, if you look at a balance sheet and see the kind of debt that we have as a country, and see that there is no foreseeable way to even pay the interest on that debt within the next 10 years; to see that we’re still dealing with congressmen and senators that almost every week are passing a new spending program, but then talking about our unsustainable debt — they’re saying, We’ve got to do something, but I still need $1 million for my local museum; I still need $500,000 for this bridge, or this pothole.  We’ve got challenges in Washington that we’re going to change this November.

I think I would go home and give up if it weren’t for one thing.  And that’s really you, and people like you, all over the country, who are not in elected office but are saying enough’s enough.  What can I do?  How can I help?  That’s what I hear everywhere.  Everywhere I go, people grab my hand, and they’ll just say, What can I do?  And they say, I’ve never been involved with politics.  And, you know, 40 percent of the Tea Party people are Democrats and Independents.  This is not a partisan thing; this is commonsense — we can’t keep spending more than we’re bringing in.  How can we stop it?

The exciting thing for me, the optimistic thing, is that I’ve never seen anything in my lifetime where Americans were so engaged, where they’re seeking more information, at a time when we can actually inform them.  Only a few years ago, if I was doing something like the immigration fight, I wouldn’t have had a chance.  Because I couldn’t convince my colleagues to fight this thing.  It makes no sense to have immigration reform without border control.  It’s just a bunch of nonsense, if people can come and go.

I had five people in the United States Senate who were helping.  Five people.  And only a few years before, the only thing I could’ve done is a press release and hope the New York Times or NBC would pick it up.  And they wouldn’t.  But now, we have an opportunity — in a free country, in a free media — to go to radio talk shows, to go to blogs, to go to Fox News, to use the whole web and websites that we create to get millions of people involved almost overnight, to — as Reagan said, if they don’t see the light, make them feel the heat.

And that’s what I’ve been doing the last couple years.  They won’t listen.  You can’t convince them.  But you can scare them.  And when people start calling and e-mailing, and the computer servers crash because of so many people e-mailing, and when the phone systems crash, you know, you just want to go out and rejoice in front of the Capitol — I’m not in a minority here.

I’m with millions of Americans who are going to take this place if we don’t  and one of the finest moments I’ve had in the Senate is — and this was a Republican, in one of our Republican conferences, the week of this big immigration vote — where they told me — Jim Bunning, who’s a friend of mine, said, Jim, you’re going to get run over like a train.  I mean, no way you’re going to win this thing.  And one of the Republicans stood up in conference.  He was so tired of local radio talk shows and everything just blasting him for being for this amnesty bill.  And he said, I will not be intimidated by the American people.

He did, he said it.  I won’t give you his name, but he is retiring this time.  But what happened to him?  I’ll tell you.

He was intimidated.  You know, when we pushed it over 41 votes, which meant they could not do what they were trying to do, he went down, and he voted against the thing that he said he would not vote against.  And we ended up getting a majority of something they told me I wouldn’t get 15 votes on.  And it wasn’t because of me.  It was because the American people stood up and said no.

And when you know that can happen, it emboldened us.  I mean, we’ve done the same thing with the moratorium on drilling.  I didn’t even bother to talk to my colleagues.  I just went straight to the media and the Internet and the blogs, and we got the moratorium lifted.  The Obama Administration’s still dragging their feet.  But what we’ve seen is the power of the people.  And that’s what this country was founded on — that we can have freedom if the people are vigilant.  This is a government of and for and by the people.  And if the people stand up, we can take it back.

But I can tell you this.  The Senate is the last place that’s going to change.  We’re not going to change the Senate until we change the people who are there.

And what I’ve tried to do over the last year — and this has not gone over real well with my colleagues — is to get involved with primary races all over the country.  We’ve had an established system where we have the Senate Committee — they go out and find candidates and recruit them, and give them money, and they bring them here.  But I’ve noticed that those candidates don’t share the same philosophy that I do.

They endorsed Arlen Specter when he announced he was going to run, when he was still a Republican.  I went to tell Arlen, man to man, Arlen, I’m going to support Pat Toomey in a primary against you.  Arlen didn’t take that really well.  And he left the party.  But I mean, I don’t think it was because of me.  It was because Arlen was not running on principles; it was about the numbers.  And he saw the numbers — that he could not win a primary against Pat Toomey, so he switched parties.  And now Pat Toomey’s ahead in the primary.  Because Pat Toomey is a principled conservative.

All of us have leadership PACs.  And the whole idea, [or] just to endear you to your colleagues.  You give money to them when they’re running, they give money to you.  I’m not using my PAC that way.  I’m using my PAC to go out and support people in primaries who are running against the establishment picks, using it to help Pat Toomey.

Our party went out and recruited Charlie Crist in Florida to run as a senator — most popular governor in the country, the one who they said could raise money.  And that would make it easier for the Senate Committee, because they wouldn’t have to spend as much money.  But Charlie had indicated, by a lot of his votes and actions, that he was not going to help us control spending and earmarks and debt.  He actually had a big embrace of Obama in supporting the stimulus plan.  And he’s a good guy.

But a young man named Marco Rubio came to my office.  He couldn’t get an appointment with the Senate Committee.  And he talked to me about his passion for our country and our freedom.  He talked to me about his parents, who lost their country.  They were Cubans; they lost their country.  And I sat there listening to this guy.

And I don’t fall for much after being in politics for awhile.  But, you know, I just felt my eyes [watering].  This guy wanted to fight for freedom.  He believed in our Constitution.  He was willing to stand up to Republicans.  I endorsed Marco Rubio and did everything we could to raise money, try to focus some attention on him, so that the people of Florida would know there was an alternative.  And it wasn’t me; it was the people of Florida, who are hungry to fight for freedom and to save their country.

And he started 30 points behind.  He’s 25 points ahead.

Now, Governor Crist is not going to win the primary.  The question — he’s going to drop out; is he going to run as an independent?  But Marco Rubio is going to be the next Senator from Florida.

But this is because America is engaged.  I tell you, I’ve endorsed people before.  It doesn’t make that much difference.  But I’m seeing now that if we can shine a little light on a good candidate, if we can help raise a little money — and what I’m doing with my PAC, instead of giving it to a bunch — 50 different candidates, I’m running some radio ads.  I’m running some blog ads to raise money.

We’ve raised over $300,000 for Marco.  And he’s now on the national stage. And he’s the kind of voice we need.  This guy’s 38 years old.  That’s the kind of person we need in the Senate right now.  You know, and my colleagues have not accepted it well.  They got mad at me after I endorsed Pat Toomey in Pennsylvania, but — and I said something that made it worse, which is kind of my tradition.  I said, I would rather have 30 Republicans who believe in the principles of freedom than 60 who do not believe in anything at all.

You know, to me, that sounds like a no-brainer.  But a lot of our leadership kept telling me it’s about numbers.  We’ve got to win.  But I know what winning does.

I came into the United States Senate with 55 Republicans, George Bush in the White House, a large majority of Republicans in the House.  And we did not do what we promised.  It was all about earmarks.  It was all about spending.  It was pretending about reform.  But the things we campaign on — a tax reform, a fix in Social Security, a fix in healthcare — there was no energy for that.  And you know, there’s only so long you can sit on the sidelines and watch that.

I’m not going to ask Americans to trust the Republican Party again until I’ve done everything I can to make sure that if we are given that trust, if we are given the majority, that we’re going to do what we say we’re going to do.  And I believe that we are.  What I’m seeing from the House of Representatives — they passed a — just in the Republicans, a one-year moratorium on earmarks.

Now that may seem like a small thing to you.  But after observing that for the 11 years I’ve been in the House and the Senate, I’ve realized that it is an inherent conflict of interest to come to Washington believing your job is to take money home to your state, to get as much money as you can out of that Federal Treasury and bring it home.

There’s a conflict between that idea and taking an oath of office to protect and defend the Constitution that prescribes a very limited federal government.

I have no righteousness, because I am a recovering earmark.  I followed Fritz Hollings and Strom Thurmond in South Carolina.  And the whole idea was, oh, we’re losing our seniority, we’re not going to get our money.  That’s not why we go.  I don’t go to get money for South Carolina.  South Carolina needs a lot of money; we’re a poor state.  But with over 500 congressmen and senators who believe it’s their job to get money for their states, the result of that is a country that is in debt so far that we’re about to destroy this gift that we’ve been given by previous generations, who’ve given so much blood and sacrifice for what we’ve got.  We’re nearly $14 trillion in debt.

And when I introduced a moratorium, one-year moratorium on earmarks in the Senate a few weeks ago, 15 Republicans voted against me.  They were appropriators.  They’re the ones who hand out the candy.  It’s the source of their power.

But I think you’re going to see some of them lose.  Some of them are being challenged.  Senator Bob Bennett in Utah — he’s a friend of mine, and this makes it hard.  But he’s been an opponent of stopping earmarks and stopping the culture of spending.  And he’s got an opponent in Mike Lee, in Utah, who’s running on constitutional, limited government.  He’s going to refuse to take earmarks.  He’s going to fight for those principles of freedom.  I haven’t gotten engaged officially in the race.  But it looks like we’re going to lose a senator because America is engaged.

The same thing happened — Kay Bailey Hutchison, the senator, went home and ran a governor’s race on bringing home the bacon.  She got 30 percent of the vote.

People have caught on, just as my grandson a few weeks ago held up a piece of bacon.  He held up a piece of bacon.  He said, This used to be a pig.

You know, and the first thing that came to mind is I want to hold up earmarks and say, This used to be a country.  I mean, something dies when you create that bacon.  And that’s what’s happening in Washington right now.

But the Senate Conservatives Fund, for those of you who want to help, is senateconservatives.com.  And it’s got candidates listed on there that — and some of you may pick other candidates.  But we’ve picked Ken Buck in Colorado.  He’s running against the establishment candidate, a good person, Jane Norton.  But she realized, because the grassroots got behind Ken, she couldn’t even go to the convention.  You had to get 30 percent to get on the ballot.  So she refused to go.  She’s going to try to get signatures to get on the ballot.

But Ken’s a guy who just refuses earmarks, believes in the Constitution.  He’s out talking about those basic principles.  People are coming to him.

You know, in Indiana, it’s hard for me again.  I’ve got two former colleagues — Dan Coats, a former senator; John Hostettler, former Congressman — great guys.  But I think America’s ready for new faces in Washington.  There’s a 32-year-old, fourth-generation farmer, businessman, who brought his wife and kids and sat in my office.  Pointed at his kids.  Said, I’m going to fight for my kids.  I don’t like this debt, I don’t like what they’re doing to my country.  Help me fight for these kids.

And I endorse Marlin Stutzman, in Indiana.  And the primary’s just 10 days away.  We put it on the Senate Conservative site.  Said help us help this guy who is third place now, in this five-way primary.  And we’ve raised about $135,000 in two and a half days from people all over the country, who said let’s try.  Let’s try.

And I know a lot of you in this room in California probably have different candidates.  But you know, I talked to Chuck DeVore.  Chuck DeVore believes in the Constitution.  He’s been part of the military, he’s fought for our — or believes in our freedom.  And we have other candidates, obviously, who are Republicans.  But I know one thing — he’s battle-tested as an assemblyman.  He’s fought spending here in California, which is very unpopular.  If he does win, I know he’s going to stand with me.

And that’s a chance I’d rather take.

And I’m not saying the other candidates aren’t fine.  But they’re saying the same thing about Chuck that they said about me when I was running for the Senate.  They said, DeMint, you can’t win.  You’re a good guy, believe the right — but you can’t win.

I’m not counting the people of California out.  We’ve got some congressional races, we’ve got some of those running for Congress here [tonight].  I don’t think the people of California want to bankrupt our country.  I don’t think they want to give up on freedom.  I don’t think they just want their handout for more from the federal government.  I think if we go out and tell them the truth, and appeal to them, that California will set the pace, like they do so many other times.  I think a conservative can win in California if they tell the truth.  Because more and more Americans know we can’t keep spending more than we’re bringing in.

So the Senate Conservatives Fund is just kind of my midlife crisis in the Senate.  And it’s making a difference.  We’re not going to win every race, because in every race, we pick an underdog.  But what I hope happens is that this November is going to be an earthquake election.  It appears to be happening, where Americans are looking for someone who will stand up and fight for what they believe is right — people who’ve never been involved with politics, people who are Democrats — we’ll call them Reagan Democrats — independents all over the country.  Let’s don’t count out any Americans.  We’ve got a big party if we really are willing to fight for freedom.

People criticize me because they say, DeMint, we need a big tent as Republicans.  And I say, Have you looked at the polls?  Forty percent of Americans sympathize with the Tea Parties.  Another 20 percent say they’re Republicans.  I think that’s 60 percent.  That’s a big enough party for me, in a country like this.

So let’s embrace the passion, the ideals of these.  Because Tea Parties are Americans.  And those who show up for rallies are just the tip of the iceberg.  You know, there are soccer moms and dads, who are never going to go to a rally.  But they’re just saying, Yeah.  Yeah, get those guys, yeah, stick it to ‘em.

They really are.  This a big movement in America.  This is an American awakening.  And I hope my party will embrace that.  And I know if we do that we will re-earn the trust of the American people, that we will take back the majority.  And when we do, we’ll prove that that trust was well-founded.

You know, Reagan said that freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.  And that’s true.  Every generation has to fight for freedom.  And many times, it’s on the battlefield, where we shed blood.  But many times, it’s at the ballot box.  In America, we settle our differences with our voices and our votes, and sometimes our feet.  And I think what we’re going to see over the next few months is Americans demonstrating that this is their government, that they have had enough, and that they are going to stand up.  The country does not belong to politicians; it belongs to the people.  And they’re going to show that this –

Let me end where I started.  Just remember, the power is in your hands.  You’ve thanked me for fighting.  But the fact is I have very little power, unless there are millions of people out across America.  And if you just share what you believe with others, you support organizations, like you’re doing here; tell a friend, tell a family member, get people registered to vote.  Just encourage people.  This is not about political ideology.  This is not about partisanship.  This is about the survival of our country.

We’re close to a tipping point.  We’re right on the edge of a cliff.  If we don’t have an earthquake election that turns things back, it will be too late.  I mean, this is not hyperbole; I’m not exaggerating.  You have to look at the balance sheet.  Unless we turn things around — unless we repeal this healthcare bill, it’s going to destroy healthcare, it’s going to bankrupt our country.  Unless we stop what they’re trying to do with cap and trade, with card check — it’s an agenda that is so radical that historians probably won’t be able to believe what we’ve allowed to happen, if we do.

My goal is to minimize the damage, until November, inside the Senate — hold, stop everything I can — until then.

But then, in November is when you speak, and when people all over the country like you speak.  And I hope it’s the loudest shout that we’ve ever heard in America — that people speak so loudly that the Democrats and the Republicans and everyone are stunned.  I hope Republicans are stunned in all the primaries.

And just this next month, in May, you’ve got a non-establishment candidate in Kentucky, Rand Paul, running.  You’ve got Marlin Stutzman in Indiana.  You’ve got a primary opponent against an incumbent senator in Utah.  I think the more we see a stunning display of American activism, the more opportunities we’re going to have in November.

I’m really thankful for the opportunity to speak to you, and the profound experience I had just looking at the Reagan Ranch today, in realizing that we never know who God has called to do something miraculous.  Reagan probably had no idea when he was acting that he would be President of the United States.  He was just an activist who cared.  And he became more and more informed.  And he realized what made this country great.  All of you in the room have done that.  And out of this room, I hope there’ll come congressmen and senators, and people who are active in all aspects of American life.  And you already are.  Many of you are, or you wouldn’t be here tonight.

I’m honored to be here.  You’ve made me more and more encouraged.  You’ve empowered me.  You’ve made me — you’ve given me the energy I need to go back in the fray next week.  And I’m hoping in November that we can see we’ve got an environment that we can turn this thing around and create the America, again, that we all love and believe in.  Thank you so much, [everyone].

[Editors’ note: This is a transcript of a speech delivered by Senator Jon Kyl at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s recent Santa Barbara Retreat. To watch the video of the speech, click here.]

Jon Kyl: Thank you.  Thank you very much.  Carol and I are delighted to be with you all here this evening.  And I begin by saying something that I know you all know.  But David Horowitz knows more about the threat from the Left, about its insidious capabilities — but what to do about them — than anyone else in America.  And all of us here owe him a debt of gratitude for devoting, literally, his life to the cause of defeating the Left in America.

We begin by supporting efforts such as this.  But if every one of us here devoted just a tenth of the energy and time that David has to this cause, there would be no doubt in my mind that it can be defeated.  So David, thank you for inviting me to be with you here this evening and for getting every conservative in California to be here in one room tonight.  I appreciate that.

I’ve been asked tonight to speak about Iran, Israel and nuclear weapons.  I’m going to do this from prepared text, quickly.  Because I’d really like to get to a conversation with all of you about what you think is most important.  What I need to know, and if there are questions I can answer, we can have a good discussion about these or any other subjects on your mind.  So I’m going to get through this relatively in quick order.

But these are the central issues of our time, of our national security. And of course, the recent foreign policy debate has been dominated by discussion about nuclear proliferation.  But despite the grand proclamations from President Obama, not much has really been accomplished in this area, if you stop to think about it.

But in my view, in fact, recent actions have been more than meaningless.  There’s a strong possibility that this new START Treaty — the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty that the President and President Medvedev signed — could actually hinder US missile defense efforts, could limit our advanced conventional weapons and weaken verification mechanisms.  The Senate will have to pay very close attention to these and other provisions, especially since the administration has repeatedly said that the treaty would not contain any limitations on US missile defense, which is plainly not true.  We can talk more about this, if you’d like.

And while President Obama has eagerly promoted the new START Treaty, he has yet to demonstrate a strong commitment to modernizing America’s nuclear arsenal.  When you reduce the numbers down to a much smaller number, you have to know that they will do what we threaten that they can do.  The President’s 2010 nuclear posture review appears to make modernization more difficult.  This is important, because experts agree that our deterrent has degraded over time, and it must be brought up to date.

Last year, Congress required the President to submit a plan to rectify the problem no later than when the START Treaty is sent to the Senate for ratification.  President Obama says that his agenda is designed to promote his long-term goal — a world without nuclear weapons.

Unfortunately, the President has not seriously confronted the world’s most immediate problem — the nuclear challenge, the threat of a nuclear Iran.  It’s typical of this President to make self-congratulatory statements and chalk up PR victories on the work that’s easy.  For example, the number of warheads in Russia’s arsenal has not been a major issue since the collapse of the Soviet Union, now 20 years ago.

But when the issue’s tough, when the stakes are much higher, as they are with Iran, the President has very little to say.  In fact, as The Wall Street Journal recently editorialized, the evidence increasingly suggests that President Obama believes a nuclear Iran is inevitable, even if he can’t or won’t admit it publicly.

Let’s imagine what would happen if Iran were to acquire nuclear weapons.  Some have argued that we could contain a nuclear Iran using conventional deterrence mechanisms.  After all, we lived with a nuclear armed Soviet Union for four decades.  Deterrence worked with Moscow, so why wouldn’t it work with Tehran?  Well, it all depends on your definition of “work.”  While the Soviets never used nuclear weapons, their possession of these weapons allowed them to subjugate Eastern Europe, foment Communist revolution around the world, and sponsor a range of international terrorist groups.

When the Soviets invaded Hungary in 1956 to crush a democratic uprising, they knew that the risk of a nuclear exchange would prevent the United States from responding with military force.  In other words, Moscow’s nuclear arsenal served it as the ultimate shield.  It allowed the Kremlin to undermine US interests across the globe without fear of American nuclear reprisal.  The Soviets didn’t need to use their nuclear weapons; the mere fact that they had them dramatically increased both strategic power and leverage over the United States, at least in certain situations.

The same would be true of Iran.  Even if the mullahs never actually detonated a nuclear bomb, their acquisition of nuclear capability would forever change Iran’s regional and global influence.  And it would forever change the Middle East.  If Iran went nuclear, its neighbors, particularly Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey, might well feel compelled to pursue their own nuclear arsenals.  Tehran could easily trigger a dangerous chain reaction of nuclear proliferation.

And once they had nuclear weapons, the Iranians would be more aggressive in supporting terrorist organizations such as those who are killing Americans in Iraq, as well as Hezbollah and Hamas; and possibly provide them with nuclear materials.  They would be emboldened to conduct economic warfare against the West, for example by disrupting oil shipments traveling through the [Straits] of Hormuz.

Iran would also be more confident about expanding its footprint in Latin America, where it has already established a close working relationship with Venezuelan strongman Hugo Chavez.  Governments around the world would lose faith in America’s reliability as a strategic partner.  The United States’  credibility would be irrevocably weakened.

And remember, this is not the worst-case scenario.  We are assuming that a self-preservation instinct would dissuade the Iranians from ever actually launching nuclear weapons against the United States or our allies.  Then again, is that really a safe assumption?  Iranian leader Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has repeatedly expressed his desire to destroy the State of Israel.  Given his radical millenarian religious views and viciously anti-Semitic ideology espoused by the Iranian theocracy, we can’t simply dismiss the idea that Iran would attack nuclear — or a country like Israel with nuclear weapons.

The Israelis certainly think it could happen.  I found it interesting, in a 2007 article in The New Republic, Yossi Klein Halevi and Michael Oren, who’s now Israeli Ambassador to the United States, cited two deeply alarming poll numbers.  First, 66 percent of Israelis said that they believed that Iran would use a nuclear weapon against Israel.  Second, in response to a separate poll question, 27 percent of Israelis said that they would consider emigrating abroad if Iran acquired nuclear weapons.

Think about that for a minute.  More than a quarter of Israelis would consider leaving their home country in response to Iran’s going nuclear.  Now, Israel only has about seven million people.  If 27 percent left, would the Jewish state be able to survive?  It’s a chilling question to ponder.  We must recognize that a nuclear armed Iran would pose an existential threat to Israel, even if it never used a nuclear bomb.

As Klein Halevi and Oren wrote in their article — and I quote — “If Iran manages to overcome US threats and UN sanctions and achieve nuclear capability, it will be seen throughout the Muslim world as unstoppable.” And that will unravel the President’s grand, global nonproliferation agreement.  Does the Obama Administration really appreciate that?  Does it understand the true gravity of the Iranian nuclear crisis?

Well, I think the administration was correct when the President stated in the Nuclear Posture Review that today’s most immediate and extreme danger is nuclear terrorism.  And today’s other pressing threat is nuclear proliferation.  Would that the President would do something about this, or try.

He held his recent summit of all the world leaders — 47 heads of state meeting in Washington.  There was a golden opportunity at this event to develop a strong international consensus on the number-one nuclear proliferation threat, Iran.  Fact, the very same week, two top military officials informed the Congress that Iran is about a year away from acquiring material that it needs to make a nuclear weapon.  And yet, despite two days of talks and much high-minded rhetoric, the summit did not move us any closer to tough sanctions or any other meaningful Security Council resolution or other action by willing parties.

It’s now been seven months since Barack Obama said that the Iranian regime would face sanctions; twice that long since he took office.  And yet, Russia and China continue to resist imposing tough sanctions, and US concessions have not changed their position.  In short, President Obama’s Iran policy is failing.

So what should we be doing differently?  Well, first one has to say that the situation would not be nearly as dire as it is today had we begun to do these things as much as five or six years ago.  So it’s not entirely the fault of the Obama Administration.  Second, we should recognize that Iran’s heavy dependence on imported gasoline makes it highly vulnerable to outside pressure.

That’s why Evan Bayh and Joe Lieberman and I wrote legislation, the Iran Sanctions Act, that would impose muscular sanctions on companies that export gasoline to Iran or invest in its energy sector.  Our bill has passed both the House and Senate and, just this week, went into a conference committee.  Our hope is that we can actually pass a bill by the House and Senate and send it to the President before the United Nations acts in some weak way that would give the President an excuse to suggest that once again we delay action on our legislation.  By putting a squeeze on Iran’s gas supplies and dissuading energy firms from investing in the country, we could force the Iranian regime to make difficult decisions about its finances and further increase the regime’s unpopularity.

Third, we should also lend moral and rhetorical support to the Iranian democracy activists, who poured into the streets last [September] to protest a fraudulent election.  The Iranian people are much more likely to accept the results of sanctions if they appreciate the fact that, at least in part, they are designed to embolden and empower the Iranian people to have greater say over their own governance.  Just as we had championed the cause of the Soviet and Eastern European dissidents during the Cold War, we should promote the efforts of the Iranian freedom fighters and shine a spotlight on that regime’s brutal repression.

To that end, I sincerely hope that a part of this conference committee of which I spoke would sanction Iranian officials who are actually guilty of committing crimes, human rights abuses against specific Iranians, as my colleague, John McCain, has proposed.  But clamping down on Iran must go beyond the introduction of US sanctions and support for Iranian democrats.  We’ve got to confront those governments that continue to help Iran evade punishment by the international community.  And everyone knows that we’re talking about Russia and China.  They’ve been blocking the imposition of sanctions.  And clearly, the United States has not pressured either one of them to come to the assistance of the civilized world.

Far fewer people, I think, realize the role that some other countries have played.  The Venezuelan regime of Hugo Chavez, for example, has become a key Iranian partner.  And it could have a direct impact on any kind of sanctions that we would try to impose.

Former Costa Rican diplomat, Jaime Daremblum, an expert on Latin American geopolitics, has written that the alliance between Iran and Venezuela represents the greatest threat to hemispheric stability since the Cold War.  The two governments have been cooperating on energy, banking and military issues.  And the implications of the relationship are quite unnerving.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, former State Department official Roger Noriega explains that this alliance — and I’m quoting now — “provides the Iranian regime with a clandestine source of uranium, helps it evade restrictions on trade and financing, and gives Middle Eastern terrorists access to weapons for Mr. Chavez’s growing arsenal.”  So even if the West is able to implement a sanctions plan with bite, Tehran’s partnership with Caracas might cancel it out.  And that’s the dilemma we face.

Iran and Venezuela have also joined petroleum and financial ties.  And that could also provide a benefit to Iran against both the banking system sanctions as well as the oil sanctions.

So these are problems that we’ve got to confront, sooner rather than later, if we’re ever to hope to stop the development of the Iranian nuclear program, and to prevent the ultimate sanction, which of course would be military action.

As I said before, had the United Nations imposed strong sanctions on Iran a long time ago, we might not be in the position we’re in today.  When it was first found to be in violation of the nuclear nonproliferation treaty, I’d be a lot more optimistic about our ability to succeed at sanctions than I am, of course, today.  Their economy would’ve been under severe strain for a long time, and the government would’ve had far fewer resources to fund its nuclear program.  Sanctions take time to work, which is why we can’t waste any more time.

In conclusion, I think the best way forward on nuclear security, in all of the situations that I’ve discussed here, is of course to follow the Reagan legacy.  He said, “We maintain the peace through our strength.  Weakness only invites aggression.”

Ladies and gentlemen, what I’d like to do now is to see what’s on your mind, to discuss issues that you believe are important for the few minutes that we have here.  And if I can respond to questions, I’m delighted to do that.  Thank you again, and thank you, David.

Audience Member: Well, what I took away from what you just said is that we’re — it’s all a bit like we’re fiddling while Rome burns.  And gosh, isn’t that too bad, and shouldn’t we do something about it.  And, you know, you mentioned the UN.  And I mean, I don’t know about the rest of us in this room — every time I hear that, I just want to go out and gag.  Because it just seems like nothing can be done there.

And, you know, this administration — and I will bite my tongue, I won’t say what’s really on my mind — but it’s a shadow play.  I don’t know what these people are up to, but this is the frustration that’s driving the Tea Party, that’s growing up.  And you know about this, because you’re listening, and you’re hearing it.  What’s next?  It’s all well to say we need to fight, and we need to get sanctions, and we should’ve prevented Iran from being able to have refined gasoline, and so forth and so on.  We’ve heard this a lot.

So what’s the path ahead?  What do you see?

Jon Kyl: Well, the primary point of my remarks tonight — I barely touched on the nuclear weapon issue, our nuclear deterrent, the START Treaty, and some of the other paths on which this administration’s going.  But the point of it was to try to demonstrate, at least in one very specific situation, the horrendous results of the feckless policy that our allies have followed and, to some extent, the United States has followed; with the implication being that obviously this sort of thing needs to change.

And my point was even if Iran were not to use the weapon, if it gets it, it can change world history.  And it will further diminish United States credibility.

So the question is whether or not the United States has the courage to develop a policy which will confront this kind of threat with strength, as Ronald Reagan said, rather than weakness.  We seem to have followed a path of confronting the easy problems — as I said Barack Obama tends to do — and kicking the can down the road on the really tough problems, because they are so tough.  So Barack Obama likes to talk about achievements in the nuclear area by getting people together and signing statements, or getting a treaty signed with Russia that means virtually nothing; and yet ignores the problem that is most on people’s mind.

I guess my point is to say — A, elections have consequences; B, this is not a good idea; C, we have to change what we’re doing, and we have to convince others likewise.  How do you do that?

Every day, there are things that we can do with both Russia and China that could put pressure on it.  China does this.  China wakes up in the morning and tries to figure out 300 ways in which it can apply subtle pressure to the United States.  And it’s not the elephant biting, as our colleague said earlier; it’s the bites of the fly and the mosquito, and they add up over time.  That’s the way they do it.  But the United States doesn’t do that.

And so I think we have to make some very big decisions here.  Are we going to begin doing that, or not?  Well, it could risk relations with these countries.  What has Obama done with all of our allies but risk relations with them?  Fact, he’s rubbed our allies’ nose in the dirt.  And I don’t quite understand the point of dealing with our potential adversaries as he has.  Because that hasn’t gotten us anywhere, either.

Just one thing about the United Nations — I like Barry Goldwater’s old saying about how he thinks that we should give a seat to the Red Chinese, as they were called then, in the United Nations.  And somebody said, Barry, what are you talking about, giving a seat to the Red Chinese?  He said yes, ours.  He didn’t have a lot of confidence in the United Nations, either.

But there are a lot of countries, especially our European allies, who have given up so much of their own sovereignty that they honestly believe that their actions can only be legitimate if the United Nations has blessed the action.  And so, they will not join us in sanctions unless they are UN Security Council-approved sanctions.  And if they are, then they will.

That’s why the United Nations is important here — not because I think it’s important or I have any respect for it, but because it’s one of the few ways that we can get some of our allies to go along with us.  But there too — there are things we could do with allies to get them to join us in a coalition of the willing, rather than relying on the very weak sanctions that would come out of the United Nations.

I guess I was trying to make a series of points here.  And your point is well taken — time’s a-wastin’.

Audience Member: As a conservative who has an incredible track record of bipartisan legislation, the question I have is — in this election year — where it is as charged, from a partisan standpoint, as I’ve ever seen it in Washington — yet you’d think the Democrats would want some sort of credentials — security-wise, terrorism-wise, foreign policy-wise, Iran-wise — to want to move legislation.  It’s encouraging to hear about the legislation you have with Lieberman and Bayh.  Is there any chance beyond that, this year, before the election, to do anything on the Hill that’s bipartisan that should or would have to get signed by President Obama?

Jon Kyl: I’m going to argue with the premise of your question just a little bit.  These are ideologues.  With them, the whole nuclear thing, for example, is theology.  If we would only get rid of our nuclear weapons, then everyone else in the world will do that, too.  They believe this stuff.  And they don’t, I think, see right now that there is a necessity for them to change their approach to this in the Congress in order to gain election victories.  Because they’re so tied up in their own little constituencies who believe this stuff, too.  So no, I don’t really think that they think that they need some kind of bipartisan cooperation, so that they can show off their national security commitment to their electorate.

You know, Nancy Pelosi’s electorate probably doesn’t care a whole lot about that.  And that would be true of several others in the House of Representatives.  In the Senate, there are some relatively moderate senators.  And those who are up for election are going to lose their elections because they haven’t done enough.  But there are too many others that aren’t up for election or, in the case of people like Joe Lieberman, people who are willing to come along with us.

But I don’t see any big, strong pull on the part of the Democrats to join us in reasonable things.  Now, they don’t dare vote against — senators, mostly — don’t dare vote against the supplemental appropriation bill to fund our military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan.  But you’ll see a bunch of House liberals voting even against that.  So the old business about well, at least we support our troops — even in that area, there are some liberals in the House that won’t even go that far.

The one thing that’s going to catalyze opinion is the START Treaty, when it is submitted.  And almost all Democrats will say, Oh, this is a great achievement of Barack Obama, we have to support him for the good of his Presidency, as we did with healthcare.  It’s a great way to show the Russians that we are able to work with them.  And it will make peace in our time.  Because these two great superpowers are reducing our nuclear arsenals.  Never mind that the Russians have to get there anyway, because they can’t afford — in fact, they are at about the level that the treaty calls for the numbers to come down to.  All it does is require the US to match what the Russians were going to do anyway.  So it doesn’t really achieve anything, it’s not a treaty that we need.

But this is the way that the Left looks at it.  And there are a few on the Republican side who will buy into this sort of thing as well.

So other than that issue, I don’t see any great pull to Democrats to have to come our way in a more moderate way, or in a way that emphasizes national security.  They just don’t see it that way, which is a testament to where we’ve gotten in this country.

Audience Member: Senator Kyl, for decades after the passage of the Federal Elections Campaign Act, the Republican Congressional Committees typically out-raise their Democratic counterparts by millions of dollars.  Starting in about 2000, the DSCC began to out-raise the Senate Congressional Committee.  That continues to this day.  And now the House Committee, the House Republican Committee, is being out-raised by the DCCC.  And now, unfortunately, the Republican National Committee is making headlines for all the bad reasons.

And in light of this, I wanted to ask whether you thought there was something wrong with the National Committee system as it is — whether it can be fixed, or whether it’s time for conservatives and people who are willing to contribute to Republicans to begin to look beyond the Congressional Committee system in some fashion.

Jon Kyl: Lot of different questions in that.

First of all, let’s separate out the sort of ad hoc situations like the RNC problem that exists today.  That’s a problem of leadership.  And people are not contributing to the RNC as they did, for obvious reasons.  And until that all gets cleaned up, they’re not going to do that.  But that is not a broad trend of any kind; that’s a problem of leadership as it exists right now.

The Senatorial Campaign Committee, which I help to raise funds for, is doing just fine.  And one of the reasons is because people are now energized.  They realize that we have a good opportunity to elect senators from all over the country, in places that we never dreamed we would have a shot — in California, in Nevada, in Colorado, in Illinois, in Delaware, in Pennsylvania, in many other places.  So we’ve been getting a lot of contributions.

And I can’t explain why Democrats have been out-raising us in some of these areas in the past, except to suggest that, first of all, a lot of it has to do with where the American electorate is at any given time.  In 2006 and 2008, Republicans weren’t doing so well.  And so it was harder for us to raise money.  Democrats were on the ascendency; it was easier for them to raise money.  Now we’re finding it a lot easier.

Another factor — there’s been a myth for a long time that the Republican Party is the party of fat cats, that all the money is with us.  You know that isn’t true.  Here in California, what is Hollywood?  There’s a lot of money in Hollywood, and it devotes almost all of its efforts to supporting Democrats.  Wall Street, interestingly, is comprised of a lot of very liberal people.  And despite the fact that if they voted their pocketbooks they would be supporting Republicans, they tend to support Democrats.  Obama got like 65-35 against McCain on Wall Street.  And I’ve seen a lot of them come to Washington now, lamenting the fact that they supported Obama.  Well, it’s a little bit too late now.

There’s another phenomenon.  That is that the other kinds of entities that are contributing to campaigns, like the independent expenditures of people like George Soros, like the labor unions who have been empowered to spend in campaigns, and the other 501 and various other kinds of organizations have cropped up.  And it really depends there on who’s willing to step it up.  The Swift Boat Veteran group, for example, was funded by a lot of very wealthy people that supported George Bush.  Obama had a lot of people that were very wealthy who supported him.

So there are a lot of different things that contribute to this.  I tend to think, though, that there’s nothing wrong with the committee structure per se.  As I said, the Senate Campaign Committee is doing very well.  There are also some conservative groups that are doing all right.

Just one little note of caution here — we need to be careful that in supporting conservative causes.  And I am, first and foremost, a conservative, and then I am a Republican — but in supporting conservatives, we need to be very careful, for reasons that David pointed out, to appreciate the fact that politics is always about two choices.  It’s always compared to what.  And you have to be pragmatic about these things.  And we should never get into a position where, in supporting a conservative, we know that we are defeating a Republican who can win against a Democrat.

Now sometimes you do that because you want to make a point.  You want to lay a foundation.  there’s too much difference between the conservative and the other person, the other Republican.  There are other times, however, when it’s a lost cause.  And the Republican candidate is a perfectly good conservative.  And in that case, you need to be a little more pragmatic about it, I would argue.

So I’m supporting some very conservative Republican candidates in primaries where they have other opponents.  And some of those opponents may be more conservative.  But I’m supporting the candidate who I know can win and I know, as Republican whip in the Senate, will be one of our team.  And to me, that’s the critical factor there.  A, can you win; and B, will you be a part of the team after you do win?

Audience Member: Senator Kyl, on a scale of one to 10, if we’re unsuccessful in stopping Iran from getting the nuclear bomb, what are the chances that Israel will let that happen and not strike them?  In other words, will it — on a scale of one to 10, will Israel do something about it?

Jon Kyl: I believe Israel will try to do something about it.  And the only reason I say “try” is that to some extent, the cooperation by the United States would be important.  However, I don’t think Israel would let that stand in its way.  And so for people who believe that this would be very bad for Israel — and it would — we owe our friends in Israel every ounce of support that we can generate –to oppose this and prevent it from happening in the first place.

Audience Member: Senator Kyl, what is your assessment on all this centralization of government that’s going on?  How long will it take to undo it, and is it possible?

Jon Kyl: First of all, I think it is a goal of the Obama Administration to centralize power in the government.  They believe that the people of the country are better off if government is making decisions on their behalf rather than having them make decisions.  And they believe they are smart enough to make the right decisions for all of Americans.  And therefore, the things that you see happening are not happening by accident.  They’re part of a design and a plan.  And these folks are true believers when it comes to those things.

The President has nominated, as head of CMS — which is the organization that runs Medicare, part of the Department of Health and Human Services — a man who’s written extensively and has said that he believes that the American people are not capable of judging for themselves what kind of healthcare to purchase, or insurance or doctors or hospitals, and so on — that this idea of posting prices and letting them decide what’s best for themselves is the worst possible idea; that they need to have the government make these decisions for them.

He is not alone.  That’s not an aberration in this administration.  They really believe it, and Barack Obama really believes it.  It is the central threat of this administration.  Because at the end of the day, that’s what most diminishes our freedom.

And that’s why this healthcare bill, in my view, was the single most damaging bill or piece of legislation in my entire 23 years in Washington, in terms of our lessening of freedom.  You can add up, in fact, all of the other legislation that, in one way or another, diminishes our freedom.  And I think that a case could be made for the proposition that, added up, they just about equal what this bill will do.  And then you add to it the regulatory reform that they’re talking about, the so-called cap and trade legislation; and a variety of other things, and you can see just how far the reach of these folks into our lives would really be.

But they believe that this is the right thing to do.  It’s not an accident.  We are finally waking up, as David was saying at the table earlier.  He’s actually quite optimistic these days.  Why would one be optimistic in this setting?  Because the American people have finally seen what this beast is really like.  You know, it had to get so bad that we would be scared to death of it.  And conservatives are now, as David says, scared to death about what they see.  And that has awakened us.  The Tea Party movement is a part of that.  Republican resurgence is another part of that.

And I believe, because of that, that David has a right to be somewhat optimistic, although I would say this.  And I tend to be optimistic.  But a friend of mine, who’s always pessimistic, said, you know, Jon — he said, Things are so bad they can’t get any worse.  I said, I’m optimistic — sure, they can!

But the point is that the more these people show what they’re really up to, I think the more the American people are really going to rebel.  And to this old idea that the march of the Left toward greater government control and our loss of freedom is always two steps forward and one step back — in other words, when they’re in power, they always take more, and when we’re in power, we don’t quite take it back to where it started from — that’s true.

But I see the potential here for the first time, at least in my lifetime, of actually beginning to roll things back.  And that’s the second part of your question.  It’s hard.  I’m not sure exactly how we’re going to do it with healthcare.  But if this movement of the American people, rebelling against this greater power-grab by Washington, is real — and I believe it is — it represents the beginnings of a new revolution in this country that will begin to decide that Washington cannot be given any more power, and indeed has to give up [much] of the power that it’s already extracted from us.  And as a result, we have the opportunity to turn it back.  This will require a long, sustained, dedicated effort, however.  And I can’t think of a group better able to help lead that charge than this group right here in this room tonight.  That’s your charge.

Jon Kyl: Okay, final comment?

Audience Member: Going back to the START (audio gap) and another type of missile crisis happening with them?

Jon Kyl: Well, that’s always a possibility.  For one thing, you have people around the world who are willing to share their technology with others.  The Pakistanis did this.  Russia has always done this — first with the Chinese, then with the North Koreans, then with countries like Iran and Iraq.  You know, the Scud missile — that’s originally a Russian kind of missile.  The nuclear technology that has proliferated — all of this could easily get to a country like Venezuela.  And on our sort of southern shores, this would be a very troublesome event.

We have ignored Hugo Chavez and what’s going on down there for far too long.  And by the way, he’s not the only country.  A lot of the South American countries and a couple of the Central American countries are going left fast.  And we ignore our own hemisphere at our peril.

Let me just close, though, with one little bit of note about the START Treaty itself.  You are absolutely right in the way you formulated it, in my view.  We give away our strengths.  The Russians like to give away their weaknesses.

This treaty was not necessary.  We get nothing from it.  We give up things as a result of it.  The only reason that we needed it is because Barack Obama needed to put another skin on the wall and say, Look what a great achievement I got here.  And except for that, it has no meaning, except in the ways that it might constrain us.

And as it is debated, I think you will find that we have reduced our ability to verify and to get intelligence from things that are important to us with respect to Russia.  We have undoubtedly reduced the number of our warheads down to a point where there is no more margin of error.  And the missile defense issue is a very real one.  They lied to us, because there are provisions in the treaty itself that constrain our actions with regard to missile defense.

For example, we cannot convert a Minuteman missile tube, that previously was used for our Minuteman missile, into a tube to contain a missile defense missile.  We did that with five of these silos at Vandenberg Air Force Base in the past.  They are now missile defense tubes.  We couldn’t do that in the future.  And the administration yet had the you-know-what to say that this treaty doesn’t constrain missile defense in any way.  The only reason they could say that is because they didn’t have any current plans to do that.  Well, maybe we should do it in the future.

And other, even perhaps more troubling, thing is that the preamble is viewed by the Russians as giving them a basis for withdrawing from the treaty if the United States develops missile defenses in such a way that Russia would consider an imbalance, or that they would be threatened by our missile defense.  Well, they could easily conclude that, and they could withdraw from the treaty.  They can withdraw from the treaty, anyway.

If George Bush were President, he would say fine, withdraw.  But Barack Obama is President.  And he’d do anything before he would allow the Russians to withdraw from the treaty, including, I believe, constrain our missile defenses.  Now, they’ll deny it, but I believe it.  So there are things about this treaty that aren’t good.

But having said all of that, the biggest threat that we have right now is that our nuclear deterrent has atrophied.  We’re the only declared nuclear power that doesn’t have a modernization program.  We can’t even remanufacture pits.  When one goes bad, we can’t replace it with a new one.  We need to reinvigorate our nuclear deterrent.  We need to get rid of the Manhattan Project era buildings and put new buildings up.  We need to create a manufacturing capability to regenerate our supply of good nuclear physicists, and refurbish these warheads.  We’re not going to build a new one, we say.  We’re not going to test.  So we have to make sure that the ones we have will work and are safe.

Doesn’t it make sense, for example, to replace vacuum tubes with a circuit board, or high explosive with insensitive high explosives that won’t go off if you shoot a bullet into, [or] drop it from a high altitude, and so on?  We need to change some of the things about our weapons.  And we can’t do that without a modernization program.

So Congress said the President had to submit one to us when the START Treaty is submitted.  If the administration is serious, if they devote an adequate amount of funding to this — and we’re only talking about, roughly, $1 billion a year to do this, for about 10 years.  And if it is not too constrained in terms of what our scientists are able to do, my belief is that reinvigorating our deterrent capability, modernizing that capability, may be worth more than what is lost in the START Treaty.

At the end of the day — and Jim Woolsey made this point to me earlier — he is absolutely right — it is more important what the President’s positions are, and what the United States’ positions are, backed up by the Congress, than is the language of this particular START Treaty between the US and Russia.  And therefore, in my view, it is possible that if the modernization program is really robust, if they are committed to it, and if the treaty turns out not to be any worse than what I think it is right now, that Congress could support the treaty, support the modernization program, and the US comes out ahead.

On the other hand, if the modernization program is not up to what it needs to be, I’m not going to support the treaty, no matter what.  So that’s part of the dilemma that the administration has right here.  Do you make the modernization program strong enough, so that you have a chance to get the START Treaty passed?

And finally, under no circumstances at all should the United States ever ratify the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty, the CTBT.  That would mean that forever the United States would give up the right to test weapons.  And weapons that were designed in the ‘60s and ‘70s cannot last forever.  They’ve either got to be modernized, and roll the dice; or tested, so that we know for sure that they work.  And at the end of the day, what’s a nuclear deterrent all about?  It’s the other side knowing that they work, and that you might use them.

Editors’ note: This is a transcript of a speech delivered by Victor Davis Hanson at the recent David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Santa Barbara Retreat. It was given without a prepared text. To watch the video of the speech, click here.

Victor Hanson:  As for that reference in the introduction to being a student of Greek and Latin: I would think about being a classicist a lot when I came home to farm at 26.  I just got my Ph.D., and my father and a brother (who was really a cynic) talked at length. And at one point, I said, “Well, I passed my exam; my thesis is finished.”

And one said, “What can you do with it?”  And I replied, “I think I can translate the San Francisco Chronicle into Greek now.”  And one replied — he was quoting, I think Johnson or someone, “You know, that’s sort of like a dog that can walk on two legs; it’s impressive, but what’s the use?”  So that’s that—I have an ambiguous relationship with classics.

This afternoon, I thought I would just walk through for 25, 30 minutes, very informally, the highlights of the Obama foreign policy— and then open it up for questions.  And one has to be very careful in criticism, because I think with Obama too often critique becomes an emotional response in that we sometimes lose concentration of the nature of the transformation that he’s actually doing.  And I know no one wishes to fall into that fallacy of Pavlovian opposition.   Sometimes it’s health care “reform” or the apology tour can become so aggravating that one doesn’t look at each issue empirically. That is always a danger, because there really is something called Obama derangement syndrome, and I would not wish to suffer from it.  We would not wish want to become the mirror-image of the Bush haters.

Anyway, what is the general philosophy that guides this President abroad?   I think there are four or five elements, and I’d like to just go briefly through them and then apply them to specific policies and countries—and see if we can spot their presence.  One, of course, is that he’s a post-modern President.  That’s a fancy word for saying a culture that arose after the modern period, the so-called the post- modern period.  And within it is a belief system that incorporates things like utopian pacifism.  He seems to believe that as a child of the Enlightenment that if very brilliant, smart, educated, technocratic people get together, they can adjudicate differences rationally and without rancor, and that we can leave our Neanderthal past of emotions behind—especially to the degree that we are led and enthused by people like himself that were properly educated, properly cool, properly charismatic with the less fortunate who sometimes cause trouble and are misunderstood.

Mr. Obama believes in a sort of moral equivalency; that is, morality cynically is to be adjudicated only by those who have power.  And just as there’s sort of a Mason-Dixon Line economically in the United States between those of, say, 200,000 in income and above and those below (and above at that divide, you become “them”), so too that applies to the world at large.  The United States is the $200,000 income winner, and all the other countries are, as is true in the U.S., in need of Obama’s sympathy and redistributive attention.  So we have an obligation to help the other countries because somehow we became wealthy at their expense.

And, of course, he’s a multiculturalist.  All of Europe, we in America, we are all burdened with an imperialistic, colonial past; in contrast, people of color, the downtrodden, the other are in need of special consideration by virtue of their poverty or lack of access to global power.  (Compare our respective attention toward a  Syria and Israel, and one learns that consensual government and freedom does not enter into the equation.) That’s part of his ideological background that he brings into his foreign policy.

Second, Obama does seem to like George Bush.  He believes that most problems abroad did not pre-date George Bush, and they didn’t post- date pre-George Bush—instead, they were exclusive to George Bush.  And that’s an important distinction because Obama will sometimes adopt Bush’s anti-terrorism policies, but he won’t dare say that he’s doing that,  because to do so would, of course, give some credit to George Bush.  That ambiguity makes clear a lot of things that seem contradictory, as we’ll get to in a minute.

Yet a third element in his foreign policy is omnipotent debt.  If you are going to borrow in the first 14 months three trillion dollars, and increase the aggregate US debt burden from 11 to 14 trillion dollars, and if you submit a long-term budget process that’s going to get us to 20 trillion in eight years, then you’re going to have less options abroad, in reference to defense, a sort of the weakening the sinews of war as Cicero talked about in the relationship of Roman preparedness to finance.

We simply are not going to have the capital to fund present defense and aid outlays, and people are already anticipating that overseas.  Obama is going to have to make cuts and we know where he won’t make cuts and where he will—another air squadron, yes to cuts; another health care addendum, no. China pays attention more than we do to that reality.

And then the fourth element in his foreign policy;  it’s sort of made up as he goes along, because, after all, if we had this present discussion in 2002, nobody in this room would know who Barack Obama is.  So he’s a late arriving phenomenon without a lot of foreign policy experience.  Indeed, we almost know nothing about his past.  We know nothing about his education at Columbia.  We don’t really know what he did at Harvard.  We don’t know much about him at all in the Senate. Much of what he promised in the campaign simply did not happen. In reference to his past intimacy with a Bill Ayers or Rev. Wright, he simply was not wholly truthful.

Well, let’s look at how these principles are presently guiding the U.S.  We had a very stimulating talk last night by Senator Kyl concerning Obama’s ideas about nuclear weapons.  None of us—in regard to Obama’s non-proliferation summit—none of us lose any sleep tonight that France or England is a nuclear power.  We understand that it’s not nuclear weapons, per se, but who owns them that is the problem.

Nobody loses sleep that Israel is going to preempt and nuke Pakistan. To the degree that a country is invested in the world, even an autocratic China (they don’t necessarily have to be consensual), is not an imminent nuclear threat.

There were two nuclear threats in the world when that summit took place, and they were North Korea and soon to be Iraq—and they were not there.  It reminds me of the old adage about bureaucrats; they always go after the misdemeanor of the law-abiding citizen, and neglect the felonies of the criminal, because the latter takes moral courage and effort, and the former is easy and trivial. So you bring all these leaders together to D.C. that aren’t threats, and you ignore for the most part the two things that would make you either not liked in the world or require a bad/worse choice scenario; that is, confronting Iran or North Korea.

The second thing to remember about nuclear weapons is that it’s always nice to say that we should have a world without nuclear weapons.  Yet more people have been killed by machetes since Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  We lost a million people in Rwanda.  Did we want to outlaw machetes?  If people wish to kill on a mass scale, there is always a mechanism to do it.  Nuclear weapons are one, one especially scary tool, but not the only one So how have we dealt with dangerous, brave new weapons in the history of civilization? The Greeks were horrified by missile weapons.  Strabo records an inscription to the effect, “Thou shalt not use missile weapons.”  Spartans were horrified by artillery.  Agisilaos, the King of Sparta, wept when he saw artillery.  He said in effect, “Manhood is gone.”

I could say something of the same thing about arquebuses, fiery weapons, poison gas—all of them.  Each time we have a frightening new weapon, there has been a righteous international effort to outlaw them.  Even poison gas was not outlawed in World War II, contrary to what we think; it lack of use on the battlefield was due only to deterrence.  In other words, all global prohibitions have all failed— not surprising without a global enforcer of utopian edicts.

Well then, what stops a dangerous new weapon from killing large numbers of people?  Two things: one is deterrence: one side usually— hopefully, a constitutional state or consensual society—has a greater stock of dangerous weapons and tells a would-be adventurous bad actor, “don’t do it or else!”  That’s worked pretty well in the post- Hiroshima age.  Or they’ve counted on technology for a defensive response—bigger walls, thicker armor, anti-missiles defense.  There’s no reason—given that human nature is constant throughout the ages— that won’t be true with nuclear weapons. We have both deterred their use and are working on counter-weapons, antiballistic missile systems to encounter a bad actor’s arsenal who might use them.

Obama seems rather clueless to that, especially the truism that countries that wouldn’t use a bomb would probably abide by an agreement and countries who would use it, would not.

If we look at terrorism, or I should say the War on Terrorism, it’s very interesting Obama is mimicking George Bush.  If we went back to Obama-2002 as a legislator, as a senator in 2006 and from 2007 onward, as a candidate, I could give you the locale and the date in which he serially did the following:  he criticized the Patriotic Act; he criticized tribunals; he criticized renditions; he criticized predator drone attacks; he criticized Iraq; he criticized the war in Afghanistan; he criticized Guantanamo Bay, and on and on.

But that outrage was all predicated on just two considerations — excuse me, I think three truths.  One, by 2006, these critiques resonated with the American people, and they were very, very important to waging a winning campaign, and, therefore, Obama would wholeheartedly embrace them.  Two, Obama sensed that the Bush protocols were of some utility to keep us safe (we hadn’t been attacked since 2001).  And, three he was utterly cynical in that he knew that both he and others on the Left had no real intrinsic objections about any of these protocols— other than the fact that they were connected with George Bush.

If you doubt such cynicism on my part, look what happened after January 20th, 2009.  Obama embraced almost every single protocol.  The Bush-Petraeus Plan now is in operation in Iraq.  He escalated in Afghanistan.  He has allowed as many renditions as Bush did.  He’s accepted the principle of tribunals.  Guantanamo is “virtually” closed.  In other words, it’s not closed, it’s just “virtually” closed.  There have been more predator assassinations in Afghanistan in one year than Bush approved in eight.  Think of that strange logic.  We’re going to beat our breast over three detained terrorists— mass murderers—because they were waterboarded; but we’re going to blow up a suspected terrorist, his wife, children, grandparents, and everybody around him as collateral damage—and that is defensible.

In other words, Barack Obama knew, A, that when he became President, these were necessary protocols that had kept us safe, and, B, that as soon as he became the author and his signature was upon them, Cindy Sheehan would be a distant memory, Michael Moore would be quite forgotten.  There would be no more Hollywood movies like Rendition.  There would be no films like Redacted.  There would be no more Toronto

Film Festival award-winning docu-dramas about killing a President.  Alfred Knopf would not publish a novel about how to kill the President.  All that would vanish.  And that’s pretty much where we are on the War on Terror.  It was quite brilliant in some sense, this cynical appraisal that the outraged Left was merely partisan not principled.

If we were to look at Iran, there was always only really one nonviolent way to stop Iran from becoming nuclear.  The only real way to do it without great tumult was to encourage the grassroots demonstrations of last spring and summer that might have led to some type of real rebellion against the Republican Guard.  Obama did not do that; he voted “present”.  Why?  Because such an idea of supporting grassroots, egalitarian, consensual reform perhaps is connected in his mind with an imposition of democracy in the Middle East, the so-called despised neo-con view: who are we, after all, as good multiculturalists, good moral equivalency proponents, to suggest that we know that our democracy, that Greek-based, Western word, would be any better or any worse than any other indigenous form of governance?  So suddenly when the president sees people embracing Western democracy in an almost pro-American fashion, it causes Obama to pause.

Any country that was suspicious of America, and did not like the United States during the era of Bush, was apparently right, and anyone that did, was suspect.  So Colombia, Israel, Britain—something’s wrong with those nations. Unlike Obama himself, they liked the United States under George Bush.   Iranians demonstrating are somewhat suspicious.

So we voted “present” on the demonstrations, as Obama is well equipped to deal with an anti-American strongman, but not so with pro-American, pro-Democratic reformers.

Remember in the Al Arabiya interview, the first one he gave, Obama said in effect that a charismatic person of nontraditional ancestry like himself—and he mentioned his middle name, Hussein—something had been absolutely taboo during the campaign—would resonate with people in the Middle East.  In his way of thinking, only a non-traditional, charismatic, rhetorician of African-American ancestry could deal with a revolutionary figure like an Ahmadinejad .So there was no utility, no singularity in supporting pro-American reformers; anyone could do that. But a Chavez? An Assad? Only an Obama is up to the task.

And again, Obama didn’t understand the danger of Iran.  (When you see administration flaks writing articles suggesting that we can deter Iran, you know that it’s pretty much a done deal that Iran is going to become nuclear.)  Yet the problem isn’t whether we can deter them or not (you can argue about whether the theocrats really want to find the missing imam and have paradise and thus are not subject to the laws of deterrence.)

No, the problem is that if they are nuclear, they will cause a collective, continual, non-stop sense of dread in Israel.  People will never know whether they can be deterred or not.  They’ll never know from one day to another what a theocrat will say. All that will have a cumulative effect, as we heard last night, quite presciently by the Senator—that more people will want to emigrate out of Israel, that more people live tense and unhappy lives.  It’s sort of putting a gun to somebody’s head, and saying, “I’m going to turn the six-bullet chamber and see whether the one bullet fires—maybe or maybe not.  It’s a form of nuclear Russian roulette, and it will have an emotional toll on Israel.  Obama doesn’t seem to get that.

Secondly, he doesn’t understand the historical role of the United States toward Israel.  The rules of the game were pretty much the same for the last 40 to 50 years, at least since the 1967 war.  The Arab world had oil.  The Arab world embraced terrorism.  The Arab world had numbers.  Therefore, most countries abroad made the necessary calculations and favored Israel’s opponents.  That included everybody from France to Germany to Turkey to the entire Middle East to the Russians.

The United States alone—being an exceptionally moral place— felt, given the Holocaust and given the propensities of some nations in the world, and given the ethnic cleansing of the Jewish community after the 1967 war from the major Arab capitals, that there was no one else to protect this tiny, quite special country.    Therefore, we, alone, will do something that, in terms of realpolik may or may not be in our national interests, but it surely reflects our values.  And, therefore, we won’t nominate partisans like Charles Freeman or Samantha Power to posts of key importance in the Middle East.  We don’t quibble over settlements in Jerusalem, since we know that in any two-state solution, that Arabs will be free to live in Israel while any Israeli who wants to become a citizen of Palestine and reside in the West Bank’s may have to have his head examined, because he’ll reside in mortal danger.

In short, an asymmetrical situation—we of good sense and good will, we all knew that.  Mr. Obama either does not know that or does not care, or believes there is a moral equivalence between a PA or Hamas strongman and an elected Israeli government.

So we witness the first time, I think since Harry Truman’s initial support, that we have an Administration that not only doesn’t appreciate the role of Israel, but pretty much has leaned toward its opponents.  And so far this is all academic.  We can quibble about settlements, or, who was snubbed today or that Biden blew his temper. All that is trivial and doesn’t matter, because none of these fissures will become apparent until the next war takes place.

But, but, when the next war takes place, watch out—and there will be another war. There’s always a war more likely when the United States distances itself a bit from Israel because it gives the green light to bad actors, whether they’re in Lebanon or Syria or on the West Bank or in the Arab world in general.  So, there will be another war, and then we will see Obama’s true attitude when questions come up like, “Are you going to immediately supply F16 replacement parts or delay a bit?”  “Are you going to give bunker busters now or next year?”  Are you going to supply patriot missile battery replacements or hold out for a concession?”  And that will be the make-or-break moment.  There will be 1973 hysterics over whether we should/should not supply quickly/slowly/not at all key points to an Israel at war.

Let us turn to the larger powers of the world, especially three—India, China, and Russia.  These same four or five principles in his foreign policy stand out once again.  Take India, for example. It saw over 60 percent of Indians express a positive view of the United States during the Bush Administration, which, after all, was supportive of free trade; India expanded its exports.  It did have a colonial past, but it’s a confident nation that wishes to take on anyone in a global free market.  It’s an English-speaking, pro-American ally—and therefore, it’s sort of now suspect, especially due to its rivalry with Islamic Pakistan.  So if you look at Indian-U.S. relations, they’re not as good as they were, as if we are troubled that Bush was once popular there.

In opposition to that, look at Russia.  Anybody in this room senses that it still has a 19th-Century sense of self, albeit empowered by oil. If it is not to recapture, at least it seeks to reestablish, a sphere of influence in the former Soviet Republics and perhaps even in Eastern Europe.

Again, Obama’s way of thinking seems to be that since Russia was recently anti-American, and anti-Bush, therefore, it’s somebody to reach out to, given their shared, mutual suspicion of the last eight Bush years. So we’re reaching out; that means that if you were in the Ukraine or if you’re in Georgia or if you’re in Poland or Czechoslovakia, you are a de facto neutral now.  We’re not interested in you as much as we are with the Russians. Please do not find yourself in a crisis, because we will not adjudicate it on the basis of shared democratic values, but rather realpolitik reach-out to Russia.

And then there is China, and here’s where we grasp the importance of the spiraling debt.  We don’t really know what Obama feels about pressuring China on Tibet or human rights.  On the one hand, they pose still a supposedly revolutionary regime.  Anita Dunn, after all, said a hero of hers was Mao.

But the Dali Lama, human rights, Tibet—all these questions play second fiddle to the one sword over our heads, and that’s U.S. debt.  When China holds over a trillion dollars of US bank notes, and, more importantly, anticipates very quickly to own another trillion, then America really has lost a lot of leverage or foreign policy options with China. I think it’s very telling that this administration is essentially saying to the Chinese, “I know that 400 million Chinese, of a billion person population, have no access at all to health care, and have never gone to a Westernized doctor, but we would still like to borrow another trillion dollars from you so we can have a socialized medical system for our own.”  That’s an untenable foreign policy—asking a rival to finance what we demand for ourselves, and what they would not consider for their own.

Among the first things the Chinese inquired about on their recent visit to Washington was about healthcare, because they’re starting to see that their citizens are supposed to work 12 hours a day and accumulate cash to lend us at low interest and to expand the entitlements that they themselves don’t have and have no plan on extending for their own population.  Again, I cannot stress enough that’s untenable.

If we look at Europe, it’s very fascinating what’s happened—summed up by “Be careful what you wish for.”  We all know that the Europeans, especially the proverbial European Street, are still in love with Obama, especially his efforts to adopt a European paradigm.  At least, they felt that he is now a partner in statism, and they the model.  He has become a Christian Democrat or a socialist Democrat, so all is wonderful.

Not quite. Note that the European leadership itself is very skeptical.  Karen mentioned that we went on a trip two years ago, and had a reception at a garden residence  in Versailles. It was there a French officer said to me, “Hey, everybody loves Obama, no problem.  But remember, we’re the Obama; there’s not room for two of us!”  And what he meant by that was that European leaders had understood the rules of the game, and they were essentially and cynically that the United States runs a raucous, wide-open, free-spending, capitalist, free-trading economy and that sucks in European goods, is very innovative, remains the fountainhead for western technology and innovation, western finance, and is also the key to the trans-Atlantic alliance. It’s really an American-dominated alliance, and we subsidize the defense of Europe.  And then in exchange for that somewhat embarrassing situation, out of envy the Europeans ankle-bite us in Der Spiegel or in Le Monde.

So this same French general went on to the effect, “Don’t you guys understand the relationship?  You’re supposed to take care of Iran, and we’re supposed to make fun of you the next day in Le Monde, and everybody’s happy.  And then we don’t get nuked.  That’s the story.  Does this Obama understand that?”  And this was before Obama was elected.

What we see now is that Obama didn’t understand that relationship, and the Europeans are getting their worst nightmarish dream come true. In other words, we’re going to have more of a static, controlled-economy that will not buy as much European goods; it will start to entertain something like the  state-aided Toyota, Citroen, or Mercedes-like auto industries—part government/part state—that will try to demonize companies like a rival Toyota.  We in America at last will start acting like European and Japanese state-subsidized partnerships between government and industry, and that’s not in the European’s interest.

We will also start, as these deficits start to climb, we will also start to question, why in the world, as true-blue statists and socialists, do we embrace so much military expenditure protecting Europe. That inevitably will come up.  As a corollary there is no more special trans-Atlantic relationship in general as it pertains to Britain.  A member of the Obama team put it something like this, “We don’t think there’s anything special in it.”  And that can be seen from the trivial—to the snubbing of Mr. Brown or sending back the bust of Churchill—to the profound.

But the Europeans really did get what they wanted, and they’ve now got somebody who does not believe that the Western tradition, in general, and the European role in it, in particular, are anything exceptional, other than we both have a questionable past plagued by racism and colonialism.  And so I think that we are going to have real divides between Europe and ourselves.

We could go on and on and on like this in tracing how the assumptions of the last thirty years in the academia and on the left have now been reified in the foreign policy of President Obama.  But let me just finish by suggesting that we’ve been here before.  I’ve been reading a great deal again about the administration of Jimmy Carter.  And what I was struck was this: while everybody tends to make fun of Jimmy Carter’s outreach and therapeutic foreign policy, that was not so, at least in the beginning. Go back and read what people were saying, not in 1979, but during 1977 and ’78.  Many were infatuated with Jimmy Carter.  His polls on foreign policy were running 55 to 60 in the positive percentiles.  He gave a heralded Notre Dame speech about the no “inordinate fear” of Communism.  He had warned the Argentines about human rights.  He had shown distance from the Shah.  I think it was UN Ambassador Andrew Young had said flattering things about Khomeini.  After Nixon, all that meant we were to be liked again abroad.

Indeed, everybody, except our enemies,  thought that the world was coming together and that there was no downside from all this ecumenicalism.   There wasn’t—at least for a while.

But what we didn’t realize in 1977 and 1978, was that the bad actors in the world were watching very carefully, and in effect saying, “Who is going to test this utopian fool first?”  Then suddenly, 1979 came along, and the Chinese decided they were just going to invade Vietnam and punish them as they saw fit.  And then we saw that the Russians had no fear of backing insurrections throughout Central America.  And then we saw how brashly they invaded Afghanistan.  And then we saw there was something called Radical Islam.  And then we saw that there was going to be hostages taken in Teheran, and we couldn’t really do something about this terrible year 1979— other than ration gasoline and boycott the Olympics.  And within about six to seven months, the entire world became chaotic.

I think that’s what the lesson is.  Most adventurers in the world today are in a holding pattern.  They’re watching very carefully the US policy on nuclear weapons, disarmament, our attitudes toward traditional alliances like NATO, our attitude toward Venezuela vs. Colombia, our attitudes toward domestic terrorist attempts by radical Islamists.  What will we do about the South Koreans’ worries? The changing scenarios that we see with Japan? And they’re coming to the conclusion that if one were a North Korea or a  China, vis-à-vis, Taiwan, or a Russia, vis-à-vis, the Ukraine, or you’re Mr. Chavez, vis-à-vis, Colombia, or you’re Turkey, vis-a-via, Greece and Cypress—in any of these traditional hotspots—gone now is the old fear that George Bush or his predecessors might be a little crazy and you never knew what they were going to do—except that aggression might earn you a firm and potentially catastrophic response.

And so we’re in a waiting game, for we have sowed a very dangerous crop, and now we’re waiting for a bitter harvest, in a fashion like the year 1979. I fear it is going to just take one gambler to call Mr. Obama’s bluff and in essence, call our hand, and say what you’re going to do about it?  And that choice will determine whether that’s the end of such a dangerous gambit or an invitation to many, many more.

Thank you very much.  I think if anybody has a question or two, I’ll be happy to answer them.

Audience Member: We have an alliance with non-Communist China. We are supposed to go to war with them and defend them if mainland China attacks them.  What do you think Obama will do in the case there is an attack by China?  Do you think we should get out of that alliance we have with Taiwan?  What is your advice on that?

Victor Hanson:  I think Obama would say to China, “this doesn’t make sense.”  Taiwan is heavily invested in China.  It’s counterproductive in theory.  And that argument is absolutely sound; it would make no sense, such aggression.  But it would be the same argument once made to Hitler of “you shouldn’t go into Poland.  There’s no need to go into Poland.  You have plenty of lebensraum.”  Look at, today— Germany’s got a larger population, and smaller territory.  They didn’t need then—and they do not need now, living room—as if reason had anything to do with September 1939.

But in Obama’s way of thinking, states go to war for logical purposes, they don’t go to war for the irrational, for age-old honor and fear and sense of stature and pride. Yet so often that’s what they actually do go to war for.  So in his rational world view, there’s no mechanism to account for the irrational other than the appeal to soaring rhetoric and legal logic.  So I think he would say to China, “This absolutely doesn’t make sense.”  And they would say, “Maybe it doesn’t, but we’re going to do it anyway for the pleasure of it, if we please.”

And I don’t think we have prepared the American people to say, “Are you willing to lose an  American life to protect Taiwan,” because, to do that, Obama would have to make this argument: if you do not support Taiwan, then you probably won’t support the Philippines, and you probably won’t support South Korea, and you probably won’t support Japan.  And what’s going to happen is that you’re going to turn a Democratic and capitalist sphere of prosperity and freedom into a Communist China sphere of influence.  And that is just one scenario.

The other is that Japan— which, if we don’t ensure deterrence, I predict could make 4,000 nukes tomorrow and they would work like Hondas, they would not work like North Korea’s. So you would have a nuclear Japan, a nuclear Taiwan, and a nuclear South Korea.  That could be good or bad, but that’s what you would have—a far more volatile region.

So every one of those places has enormous symbolic importance.  I think what Bush did was let people know not to do rash things, because we’re unpredictable and we might do something harsh if you try something stupid.  Obama in essence signals in advance, “The world is a logical place, we’re rational fellows, I’m going to talk to you the way I did my Harvard Law dean.”  And, unfortunately, so many people in the world that cause trouble simply think with their reptilian brains.  They don’t have a therapeutic view of the world or Obama’s refined sense of self.

Manny Klausner: When you cataloged a lot of the things that Obama has done since he came in and when you focused on his antipathy to Bush, but his pursuit of Bush policies. . . .

Victor Hanson:  Yes.

Manny Klausner: I’d like to ask if you could amplify a little bit your thoughts as to whether Obama is cynical, rather he’s ruthlessly devious and manipulative, how much does he exemplify of the Salinski approach to using the words of the other side that you don’t believe in, but you just try to seduce people or mislead them, and you lie through your teeth because the end justifies the means?

Victor Hanson:  I think he’s mostly cynical in terms of the War Against Terror.  I think he understood once he was President, at least, or maybe even in the campaign when he was briefed, that the reasons that we had not been attacked from September 11th onward, were  due to things like tribunals and renditions and predators and  elements of the Patriot Act. We inflicted a crushing defeat on Al Qaeda in Anbar Province.  We killed, off the record the military will tell you, we killed thousands of people in Iraq who had bad intent, not just in Iraq, but elsewhere.

So this policy of anti-terrorism, however it was character by the left, was actually working as we see.  So Obama came into office and informed people came to him and said, “You know what?  These predators are killing a lot of suspects who need to be killed.  And, you know what?  I don’t know what to do with Guantanamo.  Where are we going to put these guys?  All the people overseas who want it closed don’t want to take their own citizens.  They’re telling us off the record they don’t want them.  And you know what?  We’re doing renditions all over the world.  And you know what?  This Petraeus-Bush Plan in Iraq seems to be working.  There was almost nobody killed in December.  Can you imagine that?  There was lots of Americans killed in Chicago, but almost no Americans in Iraq.”

And so they came to him, and Obama said, no problem, that he would adjust the narrative.  I’m not saying he said this.  But he was thinking, no problem, I didn’t really mean all this stump shrillness anyway.  All I have to do is just adopt these protocols—never give anybody credit who created them, and then in some cases “virtually” close things.  I’ll virtually close Guantanamo.  I’ll virtually try KSM in New York.  And I will change the relevant names to overseas contingency operations against man-made disasters, and I’ll outlaw the term Islamic extremism.  And, he thought, the left is so bankrupt that they won’t say a thing.  And Hollywood will never make another Rendition or Redacted or Rendition. And Michael Moore and Cindy Sheehan will be ancient history. And they will not dare criticize me for doing what Bush did because they don’t want to lose universal healthcare, amnesty, or cap and trade or question my godhead. So he sized up the left perfectly.  He absolutely did.  I think that’s cynical.  Yet in some sense I’m glad he did.

And by the way, there’s a corollary for Republicans and conservatives— they’re bewildered.  They don’t know on the one hand, whether to get angry at him because he tarred and feathered George Bush on really key issues of national security.  We had over 200,000 people fighting in Afghanistan and Iraq, while that opportunist ran around the country declaring the surge was lost.  He droned on before Petraeus in the hearings.  He in essence made fun of all these things.  But on the other hand, he now as president has kept them and they’re working. That’s amazing.

So conservatives are really in a quandary.  I think that was cynical.

Audience Member: Do you foresee any consequences to Obama announcing that he will not use nuclear weapons even if we’re attacked with chemical and biological weapons?

Victor Hanson:  Yes, I think it’s unfortunate. And what I mean by that is, if I could reduce or distill the logic to, say an Iran, it seems to be something like: ‘there’s no need to get a nuclear weapon.  Even if you let some anthrax off or use nerve gas agents in an attack, we’re still not going to nuke you.  So why would you want a nuclear weapon?’

I think the problem with that logic is that if you start saying all that in advance when Iran does not have a nuclear weapon, Iran, rather than thinking, “Wow, these are really magnanimous people that are trying to reach out to us”, their attitude instead will probably be, “If he’s going to reach out and give us all this assurance before we have a nuclear weapon, just think what he’ll do after we have one.”

And that’s the danger.

So some of this is symbolic, rather than changing radically US policy.  But symbolic gestures are what can cause war so often.  Any other questions?

Audience Member: Towards the end of your talk, you were mentioning how we’d been here before and you were talking about Jimmy Carter.  And I was just wondering, do you think it’s the same?  Because it seems to me it’s much worse this time, you know.

Victor Hanson:  The same what?

Audience Member:  Well, do you think we’re facing the same level of danger or chaos in the world?  It seems like it’s much worse this time than what happened when Jimmy Carter let everything fall apart.

Victor Hanson:  Well, for all the talk about the end of the Cold War, what was dangerous about Jimmy Carter was he failed to grasp the rise of Radical Islam.  And you can talk about Lebanon.  You can talk about the East Africa bombings.  You can talk about the USS Cole, the first World Trade Center.  But all of those incidents in a strange sense go back to one incident.  Radical Islam came on the scene with the storming of the US Embassy and the rise of Khomeinism.

Had Jimmy Carter said privately to the Khomeini regime, “You’re going to release the hostages, and if you don’t do it, you’re not going to have a military, an Air Force, a Navy, or the Republican Guard in the next 15 days,” then I think the regime would have balked. We could have taken out their entire air force in a matter of hours in 1979.

But even if such defiance did not save the hostages (and I think it would have earned their release), it would have saved more lives than were lost in the subsequent three decades.  So most of our problems with Radical Islam came from the bad example of the Iranian hostage crisis—as the hostage-taker Mr. Ahmadinejad knew from the start.

There were other things that were stupid, the Iran Contra and all that.  But, nevertheless, that was a key moment.

And if you look Russia—Russia’s not supposedly Soviet-like in intent anymore—but if you look again, it still has nuclear weapons, it still has territorial ambitions, it still frightens Eastern Europe.  And you add China into the equation with all its capital and financial clout, and I think the world is just as dangerous as it was in 1979, if not more so, given U.S debt and tentativeness.

And there’s one other thing—I am not a big fan of Jimmy Carter, in fact, I think he perhaps proved to be one of the worst of American Presidents that we’ve ever had.  But, compared to Barack Obama, he came into office with executive experience.  He was in the Navy.  He was a one-term governor of Georgia.  Mr. Obama has no similar executive experience whatsoever.  We knew a little bit about Carter. We know in comparison nothing about Barack Obama.  It’s one of the most stealthy Presidencies I’ve ever seen.

If we asked John McCain, during the campaign, for information, he released his entire US Naval Academy transcript.  He released thousands of pages of his medical records, and on and on.  We got one paragraph of summation of the Obama medical records.  We got no transcript from Occidental, none from Columbia.  We don’t know anything about his undergraduate record.  He could be much smarter or much slower than we suspect, but we wouldn’t know and we’re not going to know.  We’re never going to know.  We do know that with Mr. Ayers and Rev. Wright what we don’t know was far greater than what we did know. Yes?

Audience Member:  Victor, I’m ashamed to say this.  But you write a lot faster than I read, and I haven’t, most especially, read the piece that Karen mentioned that might touch on this.  But one of the things you didn’t address, and I would really invite you to explore with us is one aspect of the threats that you have very well described otherwise that is, I think unique in history, though you would be able to better judge than I, is the internal threat in this country arising from the so-called stealth Jihad or civilization Jihad Dawal.

And to the extent that what we’re seeing in terms of the suppression of our understanding or even our ability to discuss this enemy of, I call it Sharia I think the best term, is, in part, at least, a function of the agenda of those promoting this kind of program.  Have we seen something like this before in history?

Victor Hanson: I don’t think so.

Audience Member:  And what do you think we should best be doing about it?

Victor Hanson:  No, I don’t think so.  In   2009, as you know, there were more terrorist attempts, plots uncovered, in any year since 9/11.  So we do know that all of the Al Arabiya interview, the myth making in Cairo in June where an Islamic pedigree was adduced for everything from the Enlightenment to the Renaissance, a General Casey saying that his big fear was that diversity would be a casualty of the Major Hasan assault—all of that stuff, the report from the former Secretary of the Army that Islamic terrorism was equivalent to other sorts of extremism.  All of that proved of no utility because we still had a plot uncovered to blow up a subway, the so-called panty bomber Christmas Day, the Ft. Hood killing, and more still to come.

Raymond Ibrahim was here yesterday, and if you look at his Al Qaeda Reader, what’s fascinating about Bin Laden and Dr. Zawahiri is that they list all the reasons that caused 9/11.  I counted them.  There were 19.  Yet they include things like the lack of campaign finance reform and the failure to sign Kyoto Treaty.  (Laughter)

So what I’m saying is that these people really do monitor what they think our response will be.  And whether it’s fair or not, a lot of them think that Obama is more than usual sympathetic to front-line states against Israel, that he bought into the argument that Israel weakens American security elsewhere.  That he bought into the idea that Islam was a catalyst for western achievement.  He bought into the idea that he wants to close Guantanamo. All that is very dangerous because it suggests to the unhinged that if you do something, you may not face the same kind of consequences that you otherwise would.  The  fact that you probably will, doesn’t matter; it’s the perception. That’s what scares me.

Audience Member:  Dr. Hanson, I think on a practical level, the issue I’d be most curious to hear you synthesize is your observation that Obama’s sort of multicultural narcissism rejection of Europe as an Anglo-Colonial type of system, how you reconcile that with his seeming infatuation with Europe economically, the growing welfare state collectivist continent.  How those things fit together.

Victor Hanson:  Well, it actually is not a dichotomy, or a polarity as we might think, and here’s why.  He does not embrace Europe, Churchill, the Anglo-American alliance that saved civilization in World War II, the uniquely European Enlightenment, the Renaissance,  all the things that made Europe so singular today and in the past.

What he instead embraces is a generation of 1968 in Europe, who  themselves have rejected their own past; the Schroder-type statists, the Green Party Movement in Germany, the hard left in Britain, the anti-American French elite. What he sees is that there is a western elite that has rejected the western tradition.  And, therefore, he can be like them.  He can be a state-socialist like them.  He can be an anti-American like them, and he doesn’t have to like them.

So yes, there is a contradiction, he’s pro-new Europe as anti-old Europe, and yet he rejects Europe as a historical force, he rejects the old Europe and he likes the socialist, anti-Europe new Europe.  Odder still, he flies around in this jet and he promises a hundred billion here and a hundred billion there. and he talks about this summit and everybody’s coming to him for advice, in all of that, he never makes the obvious connection: Why is it that I, Barack Obama, have the most influence in the world?  Why is it that I get to make the decisions?  Why is it that I have the most sophisticated military?  Why is it that my economy is what everybody’s looking to?

He never succeeds to make the connection that the reason is that we have a singular, exceptional Constitution.  The capitalist system produces goods and services like none other.  We have a civil society.  We solved the multiracial problem.  This is the most amazing contribution.  And all that has translated into all these prerogatives— wealth, leisure, opportunities—that Obama enjoys, both before and as President.  And, therefore, every time we go by a grave, we want to thank God for those people who died in Okinawa or thank God at for those who fell Shiloh.  And he doesn’t get that—that he is a beneficiary of a most generous successful tradition whose logic result is his own privilege.

So all that he does comes on the fumes of all these generations who did this. And our president of all people doesn’t have enough character or insight to at least acknowledge that he is a beneficiary of all this.  And I think that’s the most shameless thing about it, a sense of indifference to the very protocols and traditions that allow a U.S. president to have power and influence unrivaled in the word—all impossible if much of Mr. Obama own agenda had been enacted in the past. Thank you.

Editors’ note: At the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s Santa Barbara Retreat this past weekend, one of the panels featured John Yoo, Marc Thiessen, and Andrew McCarthy in a fascinating and candid conversation about the effort on the part of Left-legal activists and Democratic Party officials to weaken American security by trying to broadly define as “torture” many of the efforts undertaken by the Bush administration to extract information from captured terrorists that would keep the American homeland safe.  Each of the three was crucially involved in major, behind-the- scenes decisions about national security over the last several years.  Each has remained a steadfast witness to the dangers America faced from terrorists and continues to face from those who would try to punish those who kept us safe since 9/11 — and, by so doing, to make us vulnerable to another attack.

David Horowitz Freedom Center
Santa Barbara, California
April 23^rd – 25^th, 2010
Karen Lugo, John Yoo, Marc Thiessen, Andrew McCarthy
To watch the video, click here.

Karen Lugo: First, I’d like to do a quick little, proud and very shameless plug for Muffin and Paul Vallely’s Soldiers Memorial Fund.  If you have not yet purchased your Swarovski crystal for the ladies, or men’s lapel pin, please see Paul and Muffin Vallely over there.

This panel that is about to present some thoughts and ideas, first on the problem, and then second, hopefully, a little bit about the solution — we’ve changed our title for today.  Originally, we were going to be addressing something about America or terrorism in the courts.  And so, we’ve expanded the title so that our panelists will be able to address a broader range of issues within the age of Obama.  And the subtopic is — when foes are treated like friends, when allies are alienated, and when jihad is not a word.

I think that when many of us originally heard that President Reagan had said that democracy, potentially, is always just one generation away from extinction; it was kind of recognized as a profound truth.  But many of us have had an epiphany within the last year, in acknowledging that it will be our generation that will be challenged to respond to this truth.  It will be our generation that must educate our peers — and, importantly, educate our children — as to what it is that’s at stake, and how that within one generation, we do stand to lose treasured, fundamental and irreplaceable liberties if we do not act — and that is, act between now and the next election in November.

We that fight Obama’s statist agenda of domestic entitlement and international appeasement have surely first recognized what Obama and Congress are destroying.  As we are the great resistance, and a rising army of patriots, we have learned of our extraordinary heritage of Judeo-Christian-inspired consensual government and a culture that once inspired initiative and independence.  We know the importance of keeping commitments to our allies and commanding respect — and, yes, some fear — in potential enemies.  We will hold our President accountable for the common defense of the nation.

Today, our panelists will discuss where this age of Obama is taking us, both in terms of domestic national security and international foreign policy standing.  You are all undoubtedly very aware of their backgrounds.  You’ve seen many of them on Fox News and read them, probably, almost daily.

So what I’d like to do is especially recognize books that they’ve written and that two of the authors will have for sale here  at the conference this weekend.  These three books — if that was all one would read between now and the election — could serve as a blueprint for America’s awakening, if only we read, and share, and educate.

So today, our panelists will share insights as to the challenges we face.  They will also spend a few minutes talking about how they see solutions that may be brought to bear on these challenges.

First of all, I would like to introduce Professor John Yoo.  Professor Yoo joined the Boalt faculty at Berkeley in 1993.  He has clerked for Justice Clarence Thomas of the US Supreme Court and served as General Counsel of the United States Senate Judiciary Committee; also as Deputy Assistant Attorney General in the Office of Legal Counsel at the United States Department of Justice, where he worked on issues involving foreign affairs and, yes, also worked on the definition of torture.  His third book, in a trilogy, is called “Crisis in Command.”  It is just out.  And it describes the history of Presidents from George Washington to George W. Bush when faced with national security challenges, and what their Constitutional response was.

I’d also like to say very briefly about John Yoo — we talk a lot within this organization about education.  And I’ve been privileged to work with John Yoo and his students at Boalt on several projects where we have written amicus briefs to the United States Supreme Court.  He’s worked with students at Boalt, I’ve worked with students at Chapman.  And in fact, this last year, we submitted an important brief on national security issues.  So this is something that is not discussed much.  But to understand that most of these organizations that do such things are on the Left — and I think we’re one of two or three operations in the United States that uphold original understanding of the Constitution.  So I’d like to publicly thank John Yoo for that and introduce him now.

John Yoo: Well, I’d like to thank Karen, and David Horowitz, for the invitation to come spend the morning with you.  I welcome any chance to leave the People’s Republic of Berkeley and venture to more conservative places, like Santa Barbara.

It’s also a great honor to be here.  Because finally, for the first time in my life, I get to be the most liberal person on a panel. This will probably be the first and last time that’s ever going to happen to me.

Before I start, I’d like to address a question that pretty much almost everyone I met during the cocktail hour last night asked me about, which is how did I beat John Stewart on “The Daily Show?”  So for those of you who didn’t see my appearance — and I also have a lot of thoughts about Marc Thiessen’s appearance, too, which followed a little bit after mine.  But I went on at the beginning of the book tour, back in the first week of January.  I think I so befuddled and confused him — after 30 minutes of jousting about what the definition of torture was, and when enhanced interrogation methods, as I would call them, can be used on terrorist leaders to reveal information about pending attacks — that he just kind of gave up.  And then, on the next day’s show, he said that I had beaten him.  And my students told me that was the first and only time he’s ever said that a guest on his show had beaten him.

So I went back and looked at the tape, and I tried to figure out, how did I defeat the great liberal talk show host of our day?  And I thought about it for a little bit.  And I think it has to do with the fact he’s probably never had a law professor on his show before.  Because if you think about what my job is — and has been for the last 17 years — it’s I confront an audience of 100 25-, 26-year-old people three times a week who are very smart, very clever — sometimes, occasionally funny — but are utterly unprepared for class and have done no reading.

So I think if any of you have the misfortune of being on “The Daily Show,” just treat him like a 21-year-old student, and you’ll be fine.

So my job on the panel today is try to put what we’re going to talk about in a historical context, which is to talk about where Obama sits in the course of the history of the presidency.  And my basic theme is that President Obama has brought to office what I think of as an upside-down or an inverted view of the presidency, where his view was that the presidency should be fairly weak office when it came to foreign affairs and national security, that should defer to the other branches; but that he should be a leader of domestic change, and domestic revolution in terms of the economy and society.  And this is the exact opposite, I think, of not just the framers’ design for the office but what his greatest predecessors have done.

So just to start off, in writing this book and giving some context, it’s important to figure out what we mean by greatest Presidents.  So the views of scholars and regular people are quite different on this question.

So one way to measure what regular Americans think — and I don’t have access to the sophisticated polling data of the last panel — but one way I approach such questions is to look at that great barometer of popular opinion, Parade Magazine.  So in January, Parade Magazine did a poll.  And they asked regular Americans — which President should be added to Mount Rushmore?

So I’d like to ask you all, who do you think the most Americans gave as the fifth President to be added to Mount Rushmore, after you correct for the fact that many Americans gave the names of Presidents who already were on Mount Rushmore?

Who do you think Americans, regular people, thought ought to be the next President added to Mount Rushmore?  Most people did not put Reagan.  I heard Obama.  Obama did make the list; he was number five.  I’ve always thought it would be hard for a sculptor to do the Nobel Peace Price on the stone, but yes.  Exactly right.  John F. Kennedy was ranked by Americans the next President who should be added, right?  Glamorous, young President, image of activity.

In 2005, The Wall Street Journal editorial page did a poll of 300 scholars — I was one of them — to rank every President in order.  Kennedy was below average.  In fact, if you think about it, the more we learn about Kennedy, the worse his reputation tends to get.

Reagan was on the list, FDR was on the list, Clinton was on the list and, as I said, Obama was on the list.  This is somewhat at odds with whom we think of as the great Presidents, or these scholars do.  There’s wide agreement on who the top three are — Washington, Lincoln and FDR.  As you know, Washington and Lincoln are already on the monument.  The fourth and fifth greatest Presidents are Thomas Jefferson and Teddy Roosevelt, who are also on Mount Rushmore.

Reagan made sixth.  And actually, that’s a remarkable change.  Because if those of you who can remember back to 1988, when he left office, and remember what academics and people in the media were saying about Reagan, he was widely considered a mediocre President by the intellectual elites.  And now, it’s stunning that a poll of academics rates Reagan the sixth greatest President in American history.

The seventh is someone I didn’t hear anyone mention — was Harry Truman.  Right?  He left office with his opinion poll ratings in the low 30s, in the middle of an unpopular war.  He could have run for reelection and chose not to.  But now, we appreciate Truman because he set the basic foundations for our long-term strategy in the war against the Soviets.  I won’t ask any of the smart people here whether that reminds you of anybody.

The eighth greatest President was Dwight Eisenhower — again, a President who was criticized in many of the same terms that Reagan had been criticized, as sort of out of touch, grandfatherly; we like him, but not his policies.  Eisenhower’s considered now the eighth greatest President in American history.

The ninth greatest President is someone I didn’t hear anyone mention.  But if it weren’t for him, we wouldn’t be enjoying our nice day here on the coast in Santa Barbara, James Polk, who deliberately triggered a war with the Mexicans in 1848.  He turned a border skirmish on the Texas-Mexican border between about 100 troops into a justification for launching an amphibious invasion of Mexico, capturing Mexico City and engaging in what we call regime change, and then taking away the one third of the best part of the country, and annexing it to the United States.  A guy who was so unpopular that when he ran for office, he had to go around promising he would not run for reelection.

Tenth greatest President — Andrew Jackson, whose face, of course, is on the $20 bill, who would be horrified at the idea that he would be on the $20 bill, since his great mission was to destroy the Bank of the United States at the time.

Let me ask you one more question.  In this ranking of great Presidents, who do you think was ranked the worst President in American history? Carter, no.  Carter, actually, is about average these days, among scholars.

Buchanan.  So I just want to be clear — when I speak in college audiences, and I say Buchanan, the students pause, because they think I’m talking about Pat Buchanan -that he might’ve been President when they were kids, they don’t really know.  But we are, in fact, talking about James Buchanan, who was the President right before Lincoln.  Right.  And that’s the basic message of the book, and the basic context I want to set out, is — why is Buchanan the worst President, by universal acclaim, among scholars?  And why is Lincoln almost tied with Washington for being our greatest President?  It has everything to do with emergency and the power of the office.

Buchanan and Lincoln were both Presidents during the worst emergency that we have faced — the Civil War.  And Buchanan responded to it by saying — many people don’t know this — Buchanan thought that secession was unconstitutional.  He actually thought that the states could not leave the Union.  But he said, As President, I have no constitutional power to stop it from happening.  The presidency is powerless.  And he actually said, I call on Congress to reach a solution.

Those of you who’ve worked with a legislature can guess what Congress did.  They formed a special commission to study the problem.  Lincoln comes into office a few months later.  The period between election and inauguration was much longer then.  Lincoln says, I agree with President Buchanan — secession is unconstitutional.  But I have the power as President to protect the country, to protect its security.  And he took extraordinary measures to do that.  He raised an army and a navy, he took money out of the treasury, without congressional permission.  He started offensive operations against the South.  He suspended the writ of habeas corpus through the country, all with the goal of protecting the United States during period of emergency.  His most famous act, and the one for which we as Republicans remember him the most — the Emancipation Proclamation — was what people today would call a unilateral exercise of executive power.

Does anybody remember what the Supreme Court’s opinion about emancipation was in 1863, at the time of President Lincoln’s order?  Supreme Court’s opinion still was Dred Scott vs. Sandford, which said no federal or state government law could eliminate slavery.  Lincoln brushed that aside.  He said, To win the Civil War, we have to free the slaves, which is actually why the Emancipation Proclamation only applied in the South, but not in the peaceful areas of the North.

So in the time I have remaining let me turn to President Obama.  Because the lesson, I think, that comes from the history of our great Presidents and their time during periods of emergency are twofold .  One is that the framers designed the presidency in the weird way they did.  They designed the executive branch with one person in charge, where all the power and responsibility goes to that one person, so that he could act quickly, swiftly, secretly, decisively, as the Federalist Papers talked about.

When it came to domestic policy, however, the framers thought that the presidency would be a modest office.  They were worried about Congress when it came to domestic policy.  Fact, they specifically gave the President the veto power, so that the presidency would moderate the legislative branch.  The framers were extremely worried about the idea that Congress, which had access to the power of the purse, would take money from one group of citizens and transfer it to another group of citizens.  Where would they have gotten that crazy idea from?  The President’s job was to stop Congress from enacting special-interest legislation and to pursue the national interest.

Just let me close by saying — and now set it up for Marc and Andrew, my good friends — look at what Obama did when he came into office.  Right?  He saw his job as pushing Congress to go farther.  And because of that, he’s undermining the legitimacy and power of the presidency, by combining it too closely with Congress, as we’ve seen with health care.  His job was to restrain Congress from passing health care, not to prod it to going farther.

At the same time, I’d say in national security matters, he has tried to retract the power of the presidency.  That’s the way to understand his decision to try Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the guy who thought up the idea of the 9/11 attacks in civilian court in New York City.  There’s a lot of crazy reasons why this is not a good idea, not the least of which is spending $250 million a year on security in downtown New York, when it only costs, I think — I checked — only $108 million to build the Guantanamo Bay base.

But if you think about it, when you transfer the trial of terrorists to civilian courts, you are, as President, giving up the power to set terrorism policy on a lot of matters to another branch of government, something Presidents Washington and Lincoln and FDR never would have done.  Obama doesn’t want the responsibility, he doesn’t want to make the decisions about the war on terrorism.  But at the same time, he’s, I think, damaging the presidency by pulling the powers of the institution back, and hoping someone else will make the hard choices.

Unfortunately, that’s why we have a President.  If these jobs, these decisions, were easy, we wouldn’t need the President to make them.  And I worry that because of his efforts to avoid these hard choices when it comes to the most important function of government, which is protecting the security of its citizens, that President Obama will not use the powers of his office, as his greatest predecessors did, to protect the security of the country.

So thank you very much, and I turn it over to Marc and Andrew.

Marc Thiessen: Thank you very much.

Actually, the subtitle of my book could have just as easily been “How John Yoo Kept America Safe.”  So I’m proud to be on a panel with John Yoo. And there are two other people who are responsible for my screed, who are here today.  And they are David Horowitz and Peter Collier.  And the reason is that back in the 1980s, when I was an aspiring young leftist at Vassar College, I was purged from the Student Coalition Against Apartheid for having raised a question about necklacing, which was a practice that the African National Congress used to punish — I won’t go into the details of it, it was horrific.  And I was informed one night that there had been a vote, and I had been purged.  Because that’s what communists do, they purge people.

And so I was a leftist without a home.  And a conservative friend said, You’ve got to read this book, “Destructive Generation,” by Peter Collier and David Horowitz.  And I got it, and I read it overnight.  I’ve been going to the right ever since, and never turned back.  So as a result, here I am, having written a book in defense of the enhanced interrogation program.

You’ve undoubtedly heard the myth that Barack Obama is continuing the national security policies of the Bush Administration.  Because he’s doing Predator strikes, he hasn’t eliminated the Patriot Act or the National Security Agency’s listening program, using the state secrets defense, supporting indefinite detention, keeping a responsible drawdown in Iraq that Bush had set in motion, and he’s launched a surge in Afghanistan.  And so he’s continuing these terrible policies, as the Left says.

Imagine, if you would, that in the midst of World War II, Neville Chamberlain had come to power, and in the middle of World War II.  And he continued to fight the war, and he continued the bombings of Germany, and he continued the battle in North Africa and Italy, and launched the D-Day invasion.  But he eliminated the Ultra program that had broken the German codes.  And he spoke out and said that this — but listening in to the Germans was against our values, and then released the secrets behind this program to the public, and thus to the Nazi leadership in Berlin.

We wouldn’t say that Neville Chamberlain was continuing the policies of Winston Churchill, would we?  This is essentially what Barack Obama has done, in eliminating the CIA interrogation program, and then releasing all the secrets of how we interrogated terrorists and got them to tell us their plans for new attacks to the enemy.  Today, we are in growing danger of experiencing another 9/11 attack.  Because we are no longer capturing, detaining and interrogating the senior leaders of al-Qaeda.

Think back for a minute to the period after 9/11.  We knew that al-Qaeda was behind the attacks, but we didn’t know who.  We didn’t know that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was the mastermind of 9/11 or the operational commander of al-Qaeda.  In fact, Mike Hayden, the former CIA director, says that he wasn’t even in our flowchart of senior al-Qaeda leaders at the time.  We didn’t know who his key accomplices were.

And unbeknownst to us, there were two terrorist networks out there, active, that we didn’t know the members of or what their plans were — the KSM network that had launched the 9/11 attacks, and the network called the Hambali network, which was a Southeast Asian terror network that KSM was working with to develop follow-on attacks against America.

We didn’t know who they were or what their plans were.  And in fact, we later found out that they had in fact set in motion plans for a series of terrorist attacks.  These included a plot to repeat the destruction of 9/11 in Europe by hijacking airplanes in Europe and flying them into Heathrow Airport and buildings in London’s financial district.  They included a plot to blow up our consulate in Western residences in Karachi, Pakistan in an attack that would have replicated the East Africa Embassy bombings in Pakistan.  They had set in motion a plot to blow up our marine camp in Jabuti using explosive-laden water tankers.  They had deployed a cell that was developing anthrax for attacks in the United States.

And most nefariously of all, they were working with Hambali.  KSM knew that after 9/11 we’d be on the lookout for Arab men.  So he developed a cell of Southeast Asians, thinking we wouldn’t be on the lookout for them, working with this terrorist Hambali, to hijack an airplane and fly it into the Library Tower in Los Angeles, which is the tallest building on the West Coast, just south of here.

We didn’t know any of this.  None of it.  And then, the CIA began capturing and interrogating senior leaders of al-Qaeda.  We captured Abu Zubaydah, who was a senior al-Qaeda facilitator.  And he gave us information that led us to Ramzi bin al Shibh, who was one of the senior key operatives in the 9/11 attacks.  And together, they gave us the information that led us to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  And then Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the rest of these terrorist gave us information that led to the roundup of dozens of members of these two networks, and put them — dismantled them both and put them out of business, and stopped the attacks that they had set in motion.

These people were captured.  In fact, it’s ironic — I know Andy’s going to talk about the trials in New York — every single one of the people that Barack Obama wants to put on trial in New York City were captured as a direct result of CIA interrogations.  If it had not been for the CIA program, Barack Obama would have no one to put on trial.

So this is one of the most important intelligence programs, probably — certainly in the war on terror, and possibly in the history of the United States.

Now, fast-forward to beginning of 2009.  Barack Obama becomes President of the United States.  And he, on his second day in office, eliminates this program.  Almost simultaneously, as he is doing this, there is a new terrorist network forming on the Arabian Peninsula, called al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, which is a merger between al-Qaeda in Yemen and al-Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, which were two local — small, local terrorist networks that were basically focused on killing — attacking Western interests there.  And they form a transnational terrorist network, who has the intent and capability of striking the United States of America, here in the American homeland.  And the Obama Administration admits, by its own admission, that we did not know that they were either capable or had the intent to strike us here at home.

But on Christmas Day, one of their operatives got through all of our defenses and was on a plane, circling Detroit, and almost blew that plane up in what would have been the most catastrophic terrorist attack on American soil since the 9/11 attacks.  Why were we caught blind?  Because we were not trying to capture, detain and interrogate the leaders of al-Qaeda, who could’ve told us about this new terror network.  We didn’t know anything about it.

In fact, not only were we not interrogating the senior leaders of al-Qaeda who could’ve warned us about this — when a high-value terrorist fell into our laps, like manna from heaven, we read him his rights and told him he had the right to remain silent, and gave him a lawyer.  It’s insanity.  It’s absolute insanity.

Christmas Day, we avoided disaster by pure luck.  Pure luck.  This was not a foiled attack.  The bomb malfunctioned.  If it hadn’t, he was planning to blow that plane up over Detroit.  So not only the couple hundred people on that plane but thousands of people on the ground would’ve died as a result of it.  You cannot keep this country safe unless you interrogate senior terrorist leaders.

Now, why is interrogation essential?  The failure to stop the Christmas Day attack was a failure to connect the dots.  You’ve heard that phrase.  In my book, “Courting Disaster,” I interviewed Mike Hayden, the former Director of the CIA.  And he explained it to me this way — why is interrogation important.  Intelligence, he said, is like putting together a puzzle.  And you got all the pieces laid out on the table in front of you.  And you have to connect the pieces, connect the dots.  But you’re not allowed to look at the cover of the box to see what the picture looks like.  That’s the challenge of intelligence.

There’s only one way to find out what that picture looks like — capture the people who know what the picture on the cover of the box looks like and get them to tell you.  When you capture Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, it’s not that he’s giving you pieces of the puzzle that you could get another way.  He’s telling you how the pieces fit together.  He’s giving you the picture on the cover of the box.

And today, this is the capability we have voluntarily given up — the ability to see the picture on the cover of the box.  And so this is why we’re in danger of another attack.

A few weeks ago, the Washington Post reported, on its front page, that the US had tracked down the leader of al-Qaeda in East Africa, which is a virulent terror al-Qaeda offshoot.  This was a big deal to find this guy.  And they knew where he was, and they were tracking him.  And so they went to the White House.  And they gave the President three options.  They said, We can capture him alive and interrogate him, we can kill him with a Predator strike, or we can send a helicopter in with commandos and kill him, and then repel down and get the DNA to confirm that he’s dead.  And the military said, We want to capture him alive.  The President said kill him.  And so they killed him with the third option, sending a helicopter team.  So we could’ve reached him, because the commandos went in and actually got his DNA to confirm that he was dead.

And think of the intelligence that was lost with that man, vaporized with that man being killed.  The information this guy had.  If President Bush had made that decision when we located Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, there would be a hole in the ground in Los Angeles to match the one in New York City.  A dead terrorist can’t tell you his plans for new attacks.  We have to capture these people alive and bring them in.

Now, why did the CIA interrogation program work so well?  All right, I’m winding down.  Former CIA Director Jim Woolsey is here.  He would probably have to report me to the CIA Security Office if I told you this story a year ago.  But now that Barack Obama’s released all the details, I can tell it to you.

The first guy that we captured was a terrorist named Abu Zubaydah, senior al-Qaeda facilitator.  And he was the first one who was waterboarded.  And after he was waterboarded, he said something remarkable to his interrogators.  I got to — one of the things about my book is it’s the first time you’ll hear from the actual interrogators.   I talked to them, the people who were in the room for these interrogations.  And Zubaydah — after he was waterboarded — they actually said to him, after he broke, you know, We don’t want to do this waterboarding.  Is there something else we can do?  He said, No, no, no.  You must do this for all the brothers.

Why would an al-Qaeda terrorist tell — he thanked us for waterboarding him, and said you must do this for the other brothers, you cannot stop waterboarding.  Why would an al-Qaeda terrorist tell us that?  What he explained was that the jihadi philosophy is that they — Allah is going to prevail, no matter what happens.  The victory is predestined.  His responsibility to Allah is to resist as far as he can.  And then, once he’s met the limits of resistance, he’s free to spill his guts and tell us everything he knows.

So if you know this, do you give him Snickers bars?  Do you try and develop a rapport with him?  No, you have to give him something to resist.

So what the CIA did was they developed this program, where they would give him — they gave him something that did not cross the line into torture — John, you made sure that was the case — with the least coercive technique first, escalating up to maximum of waterboarding, which is not torture, the way it was done by the CIA.  And they gave him a chance to resist something.  And almost — of the people who run the CIA program — there were 100 people brought into CIA interrogations — only 30 had any enhanced interrogation techniques used on them.  The rest said I’ll talk to you, CIA, I will tell you anything you want to know.  Thirty of them had enhanced interrogation techniques, and three made it to waterboarding.

And they developed techniques that were safe, that would not harm them, but got the information.  And it was the most successful program in — possibly in the history of the United States, in intelligence.  And Barack Obama has eliminated it.

Just in closing, a quick point -we are in danger because we don’t have this capability anymore.  And we’ve been asked to sort of give you the silver lining in the dark cloud.  It’s a pretty dark cloud, when it comes to the war on terror.  The silver lining is the American people are with us on this issue.  If you look at the polls — and I cite some of them in the book — 71 percent of Americans support enhanced interrogation.  Seventy-one percent.  Scott Brown, who they mentioned — Congressman Royce mentioned him in the early panel — campaigned as an open supporter of enhanced interrogation, and he won election in the People’s Republic of Massachusetts.  If that does not tell you that Americans are with us on this issue, then I don’t know what does.

But for some reason, Republican legislators and Republican lawmakers are afraid to talk about this.  Because they don’t want to be tagged as supporting torture.  Well, it’s not torture.

In my book — I explain it in great detail, why — what the laws are on torture, you can read the Yoo memos — it’s not torture.  And the Democrats are vulnerable on this, because they’re putting us in grave danger.  And we need to be able to speak out about this.  Christmas Day was a wakeup call.  We almost suffered another 9/11 in our midst.  And it was just four months ago.  It’s been forgotten.  When’s the last time someone mentioned it to you?  This almost happened.

I hope and pray that it does not take al-Qaeda succeeding in a mass-casualty attack on our country for us to wake up.  But hope and prayer are not a sufficient national security policy.

Thank you very much.

Karen Lugo: Thank you, Marc.

Andrew McCarthy is Senior Fellow at the National Review –

– “Willful Blindness.”  I highly recommend that.  His new one is coming out — unfortunately will not be here in time for him to sign this weekend.  But the new one, called “The Grand Jihad: How Islam and the Left Sabotage America,” I’m sure will be highly instrumental in educating people as far as what’s at stake for this next election.

So again, thank you very much for all of the work that you do, Andy.  And we welcome you to make comments this morning.

Andrew McCarthy: Thanks so much.  And thanks, Michael, for inviting me here.  Imagine being placed on the extreme right of this panel.

But I think, actually, John’s too kind.  Because I guess we could’ve sat anyone anywhere, on this panel.

What I’d like to talk about is this whole issue of the civilian trial of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and the 9/11 plotters.  And I think it’s important to talk about it.  Because what you’ve heard in the public domain about this is really, in my mind, a significant misrepresentation of what really is at stake, and what the position is of those of us who have opposed having a civilian trial in Manhattan — or, frankly, anyplace else — of these particular enemy combatants, or indeed of enemy combatants in general.

I don’t want to be presumptuous.  But I would suggest to you that if you’re being told that Eric Holder is more in favor of prosecuting bad guys than I am, you probably ought to check that, see if that makes a lot of sense.

We’re talking here about a very small category of — whether you would call it war criminal or defendant.  I hear the Attorney General say, Don’t take this tool away from us, we need this tool, prosecution’s an important tool.  Nobody — least of all, me — is saying that we shouldn’t be doing prosecutions in the civilian courts, or that prosecutions in the civilian courts are not part — and must not — or, not that they must be part of a total government counterterrorism strategy.  What we’re talking about is an approach to counterterrorism in the post-9/11 era that learns from the mistakes of the pre-9/11 era.

In pre-9/11 times, during the Clinton Administration, the Justice Department wasn’t just the tip of the counterterrorism spear; it was pretty much the entirety of the spear.  I mean, the intelligence community was doing some things.  But for the most part, the government’s national security strategy against terrorism during the 1990s was prosecution in the civilian system.

And what we learned from that experience, I think first and foremost, is that it is a provocatively weak response.  I’m not saying that we can’t prosecute people in the civilian system; we know we can.  We did it repeatedly in the eight years between the time the World Trade Center was bombed and when it was destroyed.

But think about what the bottom line of all that is.  Basically, in about nine trials, we took out 29 people, which is sometimes less than what our military does in a single day, in the post-9/11 era.  Most of the most important terrorists — bin Laden, Zawahiri, the rest of them — but for a very small number of those 29, the people that we took out by prosecuting were the lowest of the low-ranking players.  They were the low-hanging fruit, the most easily replaced terrorists in any of the cells or the organization.  I mean, there were a few differences — my guy, the Blind Sheikh, Ramzi Yousef, two or three others.  But of the 29, most of them were the most easily replaced.

And in fact, I think more than half of them were out of the 1993 Trade Center bombing itself.  There was no prosecution in connection with the Khobar Towers attack which killed 19 members of our air force.  There was no prosecution in connection with the Cole attack which killed 17 members of our navy.

So I think what we learned from that approach is that it is too limited, and it has too many downsides to it, to be a significant response to a national security challenge.  Osama bin Laden, for example, has been under indictment by the Justice Department since June of 1998.  That’s before the embassy bombings, before the Cole, before 9/11.  He’s still at large.  But the point is that obviously, the response of bringing al-Qaeda to court was not something that stopped al-Qaeda from not only continuing to attack but continuing to attack in a way that was much more — that became more aggressive and more audacious over time.

So how do we change after 9/11?  We don’t say no more prosecutions in the civilian court.  We say instead that the Justice Department has to have an appropriately subordinate role in what is a total government response to what is a national security challenge — a war, not a crime wave.  So there will be times, as we go forward in this struggle — and we will go forward for quite a long time, I think — but there will be times when it will be primarily a military task, an intelligence task.  There will never be a time, I don’t think, when our Treasury resources are unimportant, so that we’re tracking terrorism finances, not just to try to dry up the funding, but actually as a source of intelligence — to be able to follow the money, see where it goes, and try to figure out who is it who’s attached to the money.

After all, the only defense that we have in this war is really intelligence.  There’s never going to be a moment when we sit on a navy ship and sign a treaty with al-Qaeda.  Our defense in a war of this type, against a transnational enemy that attacks in stealth and that defies the laws and customs of war, is intelligence.  We have to know who they are, where they are, and what their plans are, what they’re next most likely to hit.

In that framework, the Justice Department still plays a crucially important role.  But it’s a subordinate role.  We heard a lot of debate, particularly in the three or four years right after 9/11, about the Patriot Act, and the powers that it gave to the — particularly the intelligence side of the executive branch, and, you know, whether that was appropriate, whether it was over the line.

Having actually had to deal with these cases, I think that the most important law that has been enacted with respect to counterterrorism is actually the 1996 overhaul of terrorism law, which gave prosecutors tools that were unavailable to me, for example, back in 1993, when the World Trade Center was bombed.  After 1996, they gave us, you know, a terrorism conspiracy statute.  They added some bombing conspiracy provisions.  Most importantly, they put in a new offense called Material Support to Terrorism, which became a staple of counterterrorism prosecutions after that.

After those laws were put in in 1996, you could still have a healthy debate about whether, philosophically, we ought to be approaching this challenge as a war or a crime.  But prosecutors could no longer complain, as we complained back in 1993, that the tools we had were not adequate to the task.

But why are these tools so important?  Because what Material Support to Terrorism allows you to do is to strangle terrorism cells and terrorism plots in the cradle, before they gain momentum and before they’re able to strike.  And that really has to be what the role is for the Justice Department in a post-9/11 era, when we’re trying to move from prosecution to prevention.

The idea is now that we want to stop these things from happening well in advance, rather than try to content ourselves with prosecuting people after Americans and other innocents have already been killed, which was the 1990s model.  We don’t want less prosecutions in the civilian courts.  We want more prosecution in the civilian courts.  But they’re not going to be the same kind of cases as they were before 9/11.

And sometimes, frankly, they’re not going to be very attractive cases.  I think what we’re asking prosecutors to do now is, frankly, a lot harder than I was asked to do back in the early to mid-1990s.  I don’t mean to say that these cases aren’t difficult.  They present challenges that other sorts of cases don’t.  But it’s not the most difficult thing on the planet to prosecute even a bunch of terrorists after there’s been a mass-murder attack against Americans.  Even the New York Times could get behind a prosecution like that.

But what we’re asking prosecutors to do today is something that’s much more difficult.  Can you imagine what the New York Times would’ve said if the Justice Department had tried to bring a case against Mohamed Atta on the information that was known prior to 9/11?  Not only Atta, but any of the 9/11 hijackers?  They would’ve said it was overreach, they would’ve said it was profiling, they would’ve said that it was baseless.

What we’re actually asking prosecutors to do now, along with law enforcement and along with our intelligence community, is to anticipate what these guys will do next and stop them from doing it.  And those cases are going to have some ambiguity to them.  They’re not going to be as solid as the cases that we did in the ‘90s.  They’re not going to have the same kind of public support as the cases that we did in the ‘90s.  But it still is a very important role.  And it’s one that has to be done if we’re actually going to stop things from happening.

So I think that the important thing, from my perspective, that I’d like you to take away about this controversy over the civilian trial, is that what we’re talking about is whether it’s appropriate to bring into court actual war criminals who have either plotted to carry out or have actively carried out war crimes against the United States.  I would suggest to you that it’s not only a provocatively weak response, it not only is inappropriate, given the amount of intelligence that we have to turn over for due process purposes while we’re at war; it’s a betrayal of the very impetus for doing it, which is international humanitarian law.

The whole idea behind humanitarian law and behind the Geneva Conventions is to civilize warfare.  It’s not an automatic system, it’s an opt-in system.  You have to opt in by conduct.  You have to comply with the laws and customs of war.  And what we’re doing when we bring these particular offenders into civilian court is we’re taking the worst of the worst, the people who actually target civilians for mass murder, and carry out those mass-murder attacks.  And rather than handling them as military enemies, we are clothing them in all of the rights of Americans, in all of the rights of the people that they’re sworn to kill.

And let me just close by saying it’s not tripe; I think it’s a truism, to say that when you reward bad behavior, you’re only apt to get more of it.  And when we give this kind of a reward — the entrance into our own civilian justice system with all of the protections of the Bill of Rights — to people who are actively trying to make war — who are actively, actually, making war against the United States — we are inviting more of what we need to be preventing.

Thank you.

Karen Lugo: Thank you very much, Andy.

Andy mentioned the importance of being able to prosecute terrorist activity under this Material Support statute.  And in fact, the case that I worked on — the brief that my students and John Yoo’s students helped to draft, and Andy’s Center for Law and Counterterrorism cosigned — has to do with an attack on the statute under constitutional speech rights, in claiming that an individual who is supporting a charitable effort sponsored by a named terror organization has his speech rights infringed upon if he is not able to — if there is an ability to prosecute his activities in supporting the terrorist organization, but charitably.

So it’s going to be interesting to see how this one’s resolved.  Because from the line of questioning the day that the arguments were made, it’s hard to tell exactly what the split will be.  But the name of that case is Humanitarian Legal Project.  And there should be a decision on that within the next few weeks.

So I’m going to ask the panelists if they will talk for just a couple of minutes about what their solutions are — what they would advise that we do as citizens to see that national security is kept to the forefront, as far as on our national agenda.

John?

John Yoo: Thanks, Karen.

So, three ideas.  One is, even though I think that the presidency has this great power of national security, it’s not to say that it’s without check.  Even in wartime, when the President’s power is at its height, Congress is still in control of funding and the size and shape of the military.  And I think electing members to Congress who are going to take a much more pro-national security stance is one of the most important things we can do.

President Obama wanted to close down Guantanamo Bay.  He gave an order in his first week of office to do that within a year.  Congress prohibited the use of any funds to transfer prisoners into United States and has so far managed to block his efforts to do that.  Perfectly within Constitution.  This is a Congress with huge Democratic majorities.  So I think more of that would be possible.

Second thing is judges, which we don’t think about much when we think about national security.  But the greatest obstacle, I think, to the effective fighting of the war on terrorism, unfortunately, has been our own judges.  If you look at a lot of the policies in the war on terrorism, the presidency and Congress, at least under the Bush Administration, actually agreed on enhanced surveillance.  [Congressmen], actually — as Marc shows in his book — did approve of the interrogation programs, although they don’t want anyone to know about it.  The judges are the ones who first started trying to pull down the policies in the war on terrorism.

Just to give you a small anecdote — I wrote a piece in The Wall Street Journal last weekend about Justice Stevens, who announced his resignation from the Court.  When Justice Stevens was a young intelligence officer in the Pacific during World War II, he was allowed to listen in on the operation to shoot down Admiral Yamamoto, which was made possible by the breaking of the code secret — the Japanese naval codes.

Justice Stevens thought that it was wrong for the United States to specifically target and shoot down Admiral Yamamoto.  He later gave a speech, many years later, saying that he thought it violated humanitarian norms for the American military to specifically try to kill another member of the enemy.  And in fact, he then said, And that’s why I’m pretty much against the death penalty now, too.

Think about what Justice Stevens would think about the Predator drone program.  Justice Stevens has been the leader on the Court at trying to do what Andy has described would be the wrong answer, which is to give all terrorists the same constitutional rights as you and I would, if we were prosecuted for any garden-variety crime.

Last thing I’ll just say quickly is — aside from electing members of Congress, aside from pressing the Senate not to confirm judges who are weak on national security — third thing, I think, is that — collectively could do outside the arm of the government is to create some kind of [fund] organization to protect officers of the CIA.

Because — I think we probably would all agree to this, I don’t know — but there’s going to come a witch hunt against the men and women who are the subject of Marc’s book.  And I don’t think they’re getting a lot of support right now.  These people — I mean, they make $50,000, $60,000 a year.  And they’re going to come under the worst legal expenses and political harassment you can — I lived through this for the last year.  And luckily, I survived.  I was lucky to have one of the best attorneys in America volunteer to represent me for free.  Also, I made myself a real pain in the ass in the media.  And I think that actually scared them off a little bit.

But there’s going to be dozens of CIA officers who are currently, and will be, investigated for what they did to protect the country.  And I think that’s one thing we could all do that doesn’t involve the government, you know, would be to help defend those guys.

Marc Thiessen: I agree with all that.  Couple things — I would say the most important thing is for us as conservatives to speak out.  When the American people are with us as strongly as they are, speaking out works.  I mean, the fact is, there is no trial going on right now for Khalid Sheikh Mohammed in New York because of public opposition.  And so we have the power, if we speak out, to stop these things from happening.

Andy laid out a number of the reasons why the trial was a bad idea.  Those legal — I’m the only one who’s not a lawyer here.  I’ll give you a different reason.  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed disappeared from the face of the earth when he was captured in 2003.  He was in a CIA [black site], completely cut off.  Then he’s been Guantanamo ever since.  If he were to be put on trial, and suddenly emerge this heroic leader, with his flowing turbans, and all that, the effect that would have on the jihadi movement, the shot in the arm that would be, that after all — everything we did to him, that he’s still standing, and would put us on trial, it would make — that trial would make the O.J. Simpson trial look like a traffic court hearing.  So we know this is a bad idea.  We’ve stopped it so far, we got to keep the pressure on them.

Second thing is — push for the restoration of the CIA interrogation program — not the one that John approved, and that was in place in the first years of the Obama Administration; but the program that actually Barack Obama inherited.  There’s a myth out there that Barack Obama eliminated waterboarding.  Waterboarding had already been taken out of the CIA program when he came into office.

Mike Hayden — I told the story in my book, how Mike Hayden and Admiral McConnell, the head of — the Director of National Intelligence, scaled back the program, specifically to create a program that could be supported by even a Democratic administration coming in.  When Obama came into office, the techniques that were left were the tummy slap, the facial hold, a diet of liquid Ensure, which — I’m sure the makers of Ensure would love to know that their product was considered torture –and mild sleep deprivation, maximum of four days.  No one would consider that torture.  These were the techniques.  The program still worked.  Because the terrorists didn’t know that.

I’ll tell you another story that — Jim Woolsey’s going to be busy on the phones with the Security Office and the CIA.  When the program was scaled back, a terrorist named Abdul Hadi al-Iraqi was captured.  You probably never heard of him.  He’s one of the most — he’s a very, very senior al-Qaeda leader.  He was a major in Saddam Hussein’s army who joined al-Qaeda, interestingly enough, and was one of bin — he was a member of the Shura Council — very senior guy.  And he was being sent by bin Laden to Iraq to run al-Qaeda operations in Iraq, and he never made it.

And he was brought into a CIA interrogation site.  And they took off his hood, and they said, We’re the CIA.  And he said, I know, I’ll tell you anything you want to know.  And he did.  Why?  Because he didn’t know what he would face.  He didn’t know that all he was going to face was the tummy slap and liquid Ensure.

So the idea that this is torture, and that we can do — we have to follow the Army Field Manual, which is the manual — local police — district attorneys have more authority to interrogate terrorists than the Army Field Manual provides.  A district attorney, on a daily basis, will say to a criminal in an interrogation, I’m going to put a needle in your arm if you don’t give up your accomplices.  You’re going to see the death penalty.  You can’t do that under the Army Field Manual.  We can’t threaten a terrorist in any way.  It’s crazy that we’re following the Army Field Manual for all interrogations.  So we got to push for a restoration of this program that is absolutely — there’s no reason why Barack Obama and the most liberal Democrat administration in history couldn’t even support using this program.

And then, I agree wholeheartedly with John about standing by these CIA interrogators.  These people are not torturers; they’re heroes.  They don’t deserve subpoenas; they deserve the Presidential Medal of Freedom.  They kept this country safe and stopped the next 9/11.

One last story, just to tell you something about these people.  One of the interrogators who I spoke with — I tell the story in my book.  I call him Harry.  It’s not his name, but that’s the name I use for him in the book.  And he’s the guy who interrogated Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.  And one night, he went into KSM’s cell.  And after the interrogation part was over, he actually had a very good relationship with KSM.  KSM called him Emir, which is a title of great respect in jihadi ranks.  They’re seen as respected adversaries in war.

And he came in.  KSM greeted him warmly, said how are you.  And they were talking.  And he said, And then KSM turned to me.  And he said, Just so you know, if I ever get out of this hole, I’m going to kill you, I’m going to kill your wife, I’m going to kill your sisters, I’m going to kill your whole family.  Because that’s what I do.  And he said, You know, this job is hard.  And sometimes I get down about it.  But then I think back to those two people standing on the ledge of the 90^th floor of the World Trade Center, who held hands and stepped off into space.  I think of them, and I just go back to work.

This is the kind of people we have, who’ve been protecting our country.  And we’re threatening them with prosecution?  It’s insanity.  These people are heroes, and we need to stand up for them.  So I think that’s what [we should do].

Andrew McCarthy: I want to say one general thing, and then maybe one specific legislative proposal that I think is important.

The general comment is I think that we need to keep doing what we’ve been doing.  What I think has emerged, particularly in the last year, is that the Left badly misread the election not only of 2008 but, I think, also of 2006, in the sense that they took what I think they were entitled to take as a very ambivalent attitude of the American people toward the war in Iraq.  And they read into that a generalized ambivalence, or even opposition, to the war on terror, to the actual threat by al-Qaeda and its affiliates to the American people.

And I think that was a very bad misreading.  I don’t believe there’s ever been a time, particularly after 9/11, that the American people have been anything other than completely supportive of the idea that we need to take aggressive measures — whether they’re surveillance, prosecution, interrogation, what have you — to protect the American people from attack.

And because this war still resonates with the American people, look at where we are.  Despite everything that Obama said in the run up to the election, Gitmo is still open.  And it’ll be open for some time.  We’re still using military commissions.  They did a couple of cosmetic tweaks on them, but they haven’t changed them.  And in fact — think how crazy this is — actually, they’re using the military commissions to prosecute the bombers of the U.S.S. Cole, even though the Cole was attacked at a time when we didn’t have military commissions and President Bush hadn’t even issued the order yet for military commissions.

So you might ask yourself, you know, rationally, what’s the predicate, what’s the foundation, for trying those guys in a military commission?  You know, the answer to that is 9/11.  But of course, we’re taking the 9/11 guys, and we’re putting them in a civilian trial.  You can’t even wrap your brain around how crazy that is.

But my point is that the military commissions are still up and running.  Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is not getting a trial in Manhattan.  And if I were a betting man, I’d bet he’s not going to get a trial in a civilian court, either.  I think ultimately, just because of public support and public protest, those trials are ultimately going to take place in a military commission, which is exactly where they should’ve taken place in the first place.

Remember the issue a few months back of the CIA photos, the so-called prisoner abuse photos?  The Justice Department wanted to get those out into the public domain, even though everybody knew that they would be used by the enemy for propaganda and recruitment purposes.  Everybody knew it was a bad idea.  Justice Department wanted to put it out, anyway, in this ceaseless impulse that they have that there has to be a reckoning against the Bush Administration, which is something that Holder and Obama both talked about in the run up to the election.

Well, those photos never made it out.  They never saw the light of day, and they probably never will see the light of day.  And the reason is because there was very strong public protest.  Basically, the Justice Department had to back down.  Obama had to reverse Holder.  And despite the fact that you have very large Democratic margins in both houses of Congress, we managed to get legislation through that enabled the Secretary of Defense to sign a finding that made sure that those photographs wouldn’t see the light of day.

And the point is that even though the legislative numbers are daunting against us, this issue is still an issue that powerfully motivates the American people to make themselves heard, when they become aware that there is something to be heard about.  And we have managed, for that reason, to be able to stop them from doing a lot of things that they otherwise wanted to do.  So I think it’s very important that we continue to stay motivated and continue to do the things that we’ve done, which have stopped them from really acting on their worst impulses.

As far as a concrete legislative proposal is concerned, the worst thing about the Supreme Court’s Boumediene decision — and we could spend hours talking about how bad it was — is that it dumped all of these habeas corpus cases, these detention cases, onto the district courts with no guidance about the rules or procedures that would govern those proceedings.

And as a result, district judges have actually been releasing people who obviously ought to remain held, and doing it under circumstances where we know at least one in five are going back to the jihad.  And I suspect it’s a much higher number.  I think Congress has to get into the game here and prescribe some strong procedural rules to guide the courts in how these habeas proceedings are going to take place.

In the criminal — in the regular criminal civilian courts, we don’t let judges make it up as they go along.  They have to follow the federal rules of criminal procedure and the federal rules of evidence, and all sorts of prescriptions that Congress gives them.

This is much more important.  We’re dealing with people who, if liberated, want to mass-murder Americans.  And I think it’s really incumbent on Congress to act to stop the judges from doing what they’re doing, which is releasing a lot of people who want to go back to killing Americans.

Karen Lugo: We have time for three questions.  So I think I’m going to try to address one to each of the panelists.  And this one would be starting with Andy — what is the — what are the appropriate criteria to determine if alleged terrorists should be tried in federal courts or in military commissions?  And do you favor a national security court?

Andrew McCarthy: I do favor a national security court.  And I could go on at great length about why.  But let me just try to answer the first part of the question, which is — I think when we’re talking about military commissions, we’re talking about war criminals — people who have either carried out or been caught in the act of carrying out, or plotting, war crimes against the United States.  Those people need to be tried by military commission.  If I had my druthers, I would stop having the big fight about, you know, should it be civilian or should it be military court, and try to develop a court that was more tailored to the threat that we’re dealing with.

But given that that’s not in the cards right now, those people belong in military commissions.  And I think other people who are — particularly if they’re captured inside the United States, doing things like Material Support to Terrorism — presumptively, they belong in the civilian courts.  And those are cases that we not only should do; we should do as many of them as we can.

Karen Lugo: Thank you.

And to John Yoo, since you’ve already mentioned your brilliant column about Justice Stevens, and what Obama should do next as far as Supreme Court Justice — what do you think we can do, as far as influencing the decision on approval or confirmation of the next Supreme Court Justice?

John Yoo: That’s a great question.

You know, I think Obama is going to have to nominate, for his own base, someone who’s pro-abortion and pro-affirmative action.  You know, those are the hot-button issues of the last 20, 30 years in Supreme Court nominations.  I don’t think anything anybody can do is going to change that.  But I think he has a lot of flexibility in who he chooses, in terms of their views on national security.

And so, if Republicans press for that issue, and pick that out as the most important issue to fight about, I think you could push Obama into picking someone much more centrist on those, even though they might not share the views Republicans have on those other two issues.  That’s one.

The second thing is, Democrats, I think, in the last election — I mean, the last administration declared open season on judges.  I think there’s no longer any deference that the Senate provides to President’s choice of a judge, which used to be, I think, the unbroken practice for many, many decades, where Justice Byron White — who was appointed to the Court by President Kennedy — didn’t even have a hearing when he was confirmed  – he showed up at the Judiciary Committee doors, ready for his hearing.  And they said, You don’t need a hearing.  And then they voted him, and sent him on to the Senate.  Then they confirmed him, all in one day.

That’s all out the window.  And so, I think that if the Democrats have opened up the floodgates on this — as they first started with Judge Bork, I’m afraid, and then with my old boss, Justice Thomas; but then, even lower court appointees in the last administration — I think that judges — for good or ill, but this is the way it is now — are subject for normal political activity and campaigning, [like] any other issue.

And so I think as part of that, then, what you and I can do is place pressure on our senators.  Right?  We can put up a filibuster now.  And I think that if we thought there was going to be someone who was going to approve the kind of policies we’re worried about in the war on terrorism, I think that would be legitimate grounds for a filibuster.

Karen Lugo: Marc, I wish you had many more than a couple of minutes to address this — how do you feel President Obama’s speeches overseas have affected our national security?  In what way has his self-effacing tone of these speeches helped or harmed our national security?

Marc Thiessen: Depends on the speech.  His speech in Cairo was a debacle.  I don’t know how many people saw it.  But he stood before a Muslim audience, speaking to the Arab world, and said that we had tortured people.  I mean, in one speech, he confirmed all of the al-Qaeda propaganda and lies that have been spread to the Arab world.  The damage that is done in such a speech is irreparable.

So yeah, he’s done a great deal of damage to our national security in confirming this propaganda.  The United States didn’t torture anybody.  We did what was necessary to protect our country.

And on top of that, the other thing that he doesn’t talk about — the word that almost never passes his lips — is freedom.  Whether you’re for the Iraq war or against the Iraq war, — they now have had an election where they’re having debates over — a big political fight over who’s going to be the next prime minister.  I mean, it’s a messy, functioning, young democracy, in the heart of the Middle East.  And we’ve done great damage to al-Qaeda by helping the Iraqis stand up this young democracy.

The other day, they killed — the Iraqi military, which is trained by the United States, with the help of the United States — killed the top two leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq.  Wasn’t on the front page of the Washington Post, wasn’t on the front page of the New York Times.  And when the White House went and made a statement about it, the President sent Joe Biden out to make the statement in the press briefing room, announcing it.

I remember very well, when I was working for President Bush, getting the call late one evening that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi had been killed; not to tell anybody, but that I needed to draft a statement for him to deliver the next morning in the Rose Garden.  It’s considered a huge victory.  It’s a victory — the Iraqi people hated al-Qaeda.

I mean, think about what happened with the surge in Iraq.  Al-Qaeda came in to drive America out of Iraq and rally the Sunni masses against us.  And the Sunni masses joined with America to drive al-Qaeda out.  That’s a huge defeat.

And so the killing of a senior al-Qaeda leader in Iraq is a great moment.  The President couldn’t be bothered to even say something, or [issue a] paper statement on it.  He doesn’t care about freedom.  He doesn’t care about the war on terror.  He wants to be the Secretary of Health and Human Service. He was elected to be the Commander in Chief.  And being the Commander in Chief requires marshalling words.

President Bush always told us, when we were writing his speeches, that there were three audiences that he was always thinking about when he was speaking.  The first was the American people.  Actually, four audiences.  The first was the American people.  The second were our allies around the world, and what message they took from what he said, when we had troops around the world being contributed from all these countries — how they were going to take the message.  The third was the American troops — were they going to get a message of resolve from him.  That’s why he was always criticized for never acknowledging mistakes, or so on, so forth.  He wasn’t going to stand up — as he used to say, I’m not going to get up there as the Commander in Chief and wring my hands in front of our troops on national television.  And the last one was our enemies.  Our enemies are watching.

And so when the President doesn’t project resolve, when he’s apologizing for America, when he doesn’t talk about victory, or freedom, or the principles of our country, and this war, all of those four audiences are harmed, and are — their courage is undermined, and [he said] their morale is undermined.

So the President of the United States has the responsibility, as Commander in Chief, not only to run the war on terror but to rally the troops, rally our allies, and rally the American people to support the cause of freedom.

Karen Lugo: These men would all continue to pledge their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor on behalf of this country in doing what they do.  But let’s thank them for what they’ve done for our nation.

STAND IN SOLIDARITY WITH ISRAEL'S RIGHT TO BUILD AND LIVE IN ITS OWN COUNTRY.

A CLARION CALL FOR A UNITED JEWISH JERUSALEM, AND PROTEST AGAINST THE ADMINISTRATION'S SCAPEGOATING OF ISRAEL. DATE:

A Rally in Solidarity with Israel, Sun, April 25, 2010

TIME: 1 PM LOCATION: Israel Consulate, 2nd Ave between 42nd and 43rd St,

NYC Jewish Action Alliance and: Freedom Defense Initiative (FDI) and Stop Islamization of America (SIOA) Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer, Children of Jewish Holocaust Survivors, Doris Wise Montrose, President; Center for Policy Research in American Education (CPR);Christians and Jews United for Israel, May Long, President; Coalition for Israel, Howard Weber, President; Mallory Danaher, Director, David Horowitz Freedom Center; Hindu Human Rights Watch; Sarah N. Stern, Founder and President, Endowment for Middle East Truth (EMET); Global Security Council, Dr. Charles Jacobs, President, Americans for Peace and Tolerance; Dr. Herbert London, President, The Hudson Institute; Susan Rosenbluth, Editor, Jewish Voice and Opinion; Human Rights Coalition Against Radical Islam; Joan Peters, author, From Time Immemorial; Dr. Daniel Pipes; Glenn Richter; Unity Coalition for Israel, Esther Levens, President;; Lt. Col. Allen West; Jeffrey Wiesenfeld, CUNY Trustee; Zionist Organization of America, Morton Klein, President; Z Street, Lori Lowenthal Marcus, President; and many other leaders and organizations.

If you haven't joined Pamela Geller and me in the launch of Stop the Islamization of America, join here now.

As President of Florida State University College of Law's Federalist Society chapter, I wish to extend a note of sincere gratitude to Mr. Robert Spencer for coming to lecture our student body recently on the subject of Islamic Jurisprudence. I also wish to thank the David Horowitz Freedom Center for helping to fund the event with a very generous grant.

Several rumors have made their way around campus, and the Tallahassee community, since the publication of my last piece here in these pages. It is claimed that Mr. Spencer and I have declared the "death of free speech" at the law school, and that we have accused the administration of threatening to censor Tuesday's lecture.

Readers of FrontPage and of JihadWatch know how baseless these charges are. Neither Mr. Spencer nor I ever accused the deans of threatening to cancel his lecture, or to censor the event's controversial flier. We did report, accurately, that the Muslim Law Students Association had put pressure on the administration to have the event censored, that several of the fliers had been subjected to vandalism, and that the deans did put pressure on this writer to self-censor the offensive Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoon that was the fliers' centerpiece.

There were, however, some very real and serious misrepresentations made by one student organization, and it was not the Federalist Society. The Muslim Law Students Association (MLSA) decided to orchestrate, in lieu of a counter-rally or a protest, an alternative lecture on Monday afternoon, titled "The 1^st Amendment and Professionalism in a Republic." The official Facebook event announcement, before its first edit, included some very serious charges. After playing the typically mindless, and in this case irrelevant, "racist card", my colleagues at the MLSA made clear their frustration that the deans could not and would not force me to take down my flier, but assured their supporters that this type of scenario would not repeat itself in the future:

I spoke to Dean Weidner yesterday, and he assured me that after this very shocking, hateful, and disrespectful spur of events, the school is going to be developing a policy for regulating what goes up, so at least we’re growing out of it! Unfortunately though, [the deans] are not able to get the Federalist society to take down these fliers. {emphasis added}

These remarks were later edited: Out went the baseless charges of racial hatred, but there remained this assurance:

After speaking to Dean Weidner yesterday, it looks as though the school is going to be developing a policy for regulating what goes up on our campus. {emphasis added}

It was not until Monday afternoon, after their event went on as planned, that any reference to future censorship was removed completely, and this because I shared with one of the law professors my serious concerns over the reported "assurances" from the deans to my Muslim colleagues. I was assured that no such future restrictions on free speech were being countenanced, and that no revision of school policy on this matter is forthcoming.

It is testamentary to the respect I had for my colleagues at the MLSA that I (along with Mr. Spencer and hundreds of concerned citizens around the nation), that I took seriously and at face-value their representations of what the administration had told them. I do not know which to find more disturbing: a) That in such sensitive circumstances the MLSA would so blatantly and disgustingly impugn the integrity of their law school's administration, calling into serious question the commitment of the faculty to principles so fundamental to a liberal-democratic polity; or b) that the MLSA considered the prospect of future involuntary censorship to be something salutary!

It goes without saying that no organization speaks for all its members, but their reaction to this entire incident cannot but call into question the commitment of the Muslim Law Students Association, its officers and its members, to the principles which undergird the United States Constitution, and explicated in the Declaration of Independence. This is a textbook-case of just the kind of tactics Mr. Spencer documented and expounded upon in his Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam Is Subverting America Without Guns or Bombs. I do not accuse any one of my colleagues of being willing "stealth jihadists," but I do believe it important to call attention to behavior that is consistent with, and plays into the hands of, those who would like to see our constitutional system subverted and changed for the worse.

Which is precisely what our flier's Danish Muhammad cartoon was intended to call attention to: no group of persons is beyond criticism, and no organization is without its institutional flaws and deficiencies. In Islamdom, this seems to be a consistent and suffocating oversensitivity to criticism, whether artistic, literary, or scholarly. The controversial cartoon in question truthfully satirizes the barbarities of sharia law, truthfully satirizes the justifications its proponents put forward for implementing it, and truthfully satirizes the origins of these barbarities: the life and teachings of Muhammad, as they are contained in the Koran, the hadith, and the sira, as they were implemented by Muhammad’s immediate successors the Rightly-Guided Caliphs, and as they have been codified in every major school of Islamic jurisprudence.

Yes, our Federalist Society chapter clearly intended that the cartoon be provocative. But any student reaction should have been informed not only by what the original artists intended by their satire of five years ago, but by the international reaction to these cartoons: the fact that the artists now live in fear for their lives, that violent riots were sparked all over Europe and the Islamic world, that over 100 people died as a result of these, and that plenty of media outlets refused to reproduce the cartoons for fear of violent reprisals. As I wrote in my earlier piece, this is what should offend the sensibilities of any truly "moderate" human being who sees these cartoons, especially those who reap the benefits of a liberal-democratic constitutional system by studying at a public law school.

I am grateful for all who wrote me, and the law school, to express their support for Mr. Spencer's lecture. His talk was such a rousing success that many of my colleagues are doing their best to downplay this victory for free speech and education of the dangers of Muslim radicalism. About 100 students and supporters showed up for Mr. Spencer's lecture, which was sponsored by our Federalist Society chapter alone. About 30 students attended the follow-up Q&A session.

By contrast, despite having been sponsored by seven student organizations, a Halloween-coalition of Muslims and committed leftists (including, rather ironically, the school ACLU and homosexualist OUTLaw chapter), Monday's rival lecture only brought in some 220 students, a paltry 30 for every sponsoring organization.

One hopes the success of Mr. Spencer's lecture is a sign of things to come: Americans everywhere are challenging politically correct orthodoxies, and these challenges are forcing ideologues of all political stripes to engage one another, and fine-tune the public discourse. In stimulating some much-needed discussion on such a taboo subject, the conservatives and libertarians of the Federalist Society have once again shown themselves to be the legal profession's true vanguard of diversity, dialogue, and open-mindedness.

Cartoon-jihad intimidation is so 2009!

As President of Florida State University College of Law’s Federalist Society chapter, I wish to extend a note of sincere gratitude to Mr. Robert Spencer for coming to lecture our student body recently on the subject of Islamic Jurisprudence. I also wish to thank the David Horowitz Freedom Center for helping to fund the event with a very generous grant.

Several rumors have made their way around campus, and the Tallahassee community, since the publication of my last piece here in these pages. It is claimed that Mr. Spencer and I have declared the “death of free speech” at the law school, and that we have accused the administration of threatening to censor Tuesday’s lecture.

Readers of FrontPage and of JihadWatch know how baseless these charges are. Neither Mr. Spencer nor I ever accused the deans of threatening to cancel his lecture, or to censor the event’s controversial flier. We did report, accurately, that the Muslim Law Students Association had put pressure on the administration to have the event censored, that several of the fliers had been subjected to vandalism, and that the deans did put pressure on this writer to self-censor the offensive Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoon that was the fliers’ centerpiece.

There were, however, some very real and serious misrepresentations made by one student organization, and it was not the Federalist Society. The Muslim Law Students Association (MLSA) decided to orchestrate, in lieu of a counter-rally or a protest, an alternative lecture on Monday afternoon, titled “The 1^st Amendment and Professionalism in a Republic.” The official Facebook event announcement, before its first edit, included some very serious charges. After playing the typically mindless, and in this case irrelevant, “racist card”, my colleagues at the MLSA made clear their frustration that the deans could not and would not force me to take down my flier, but assured their supporters that this type of scenario would not repeat itself in the future:

I spoke to Dean Weidner yesterday, and he assured me that after this very shocking, hateful, and disrespectful spur of events, the school is going to be developing a policy for regulating what goes up, so at least we’re growing out of it! Unfortunately though, [the deans] are not able to get the Federalist society to take down these fliers. {emphasis added}

These remarks were later edited: Out went the baseless charges of racial hatred, but there remained this assurance:

After speaking to Dean Weidner yesterday, it looks as though the school is going to be developing a policy for regulating what goes up on our campus. {emphasis added}

It was not until Monday afternoon, after their event went on as planned, that any reference to future censorship was removed completely, and this because I shared with one of the law professors my serious concerns over the reported “assurances” from the deans to my Muslim colleagues. I was assured that no such future restrictions on free speech were being countenanced, and that no revision of school policy on this matter is forthcoming.

It is testamentary to the respect I had for my colleagues at the MLSA that I (along with Mr. Spencer and hundreds of concerned citizens around the nation), that I took seriously and at face-value their representations of what the administration had told them. I do not know which to find more disturbing: a) That in such sensitive circumstances the MLSA would so blatantly and disgustingly impugn the integrity of their law school’s administration, calling into serious question the commitment of the faculty to principles so fundamental to a liberal-democratic polity; or b) that the MLSA considered the prospect of future involuntary censorship to be something salutary!

It goes without saying that no organization speaks for all its members, but their reaction to this entire incident cannot but call into question the commitment of the Muslim Law Students Association, its officers and its members, to the principles which undergird the United States Constitution, and explicated in the Declaration of Independence. This is a textbook-case of just the kind of tactics Mr. Spencer documented and expounded upon in his Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam Is Subverting America Without Guns or Bombs. I do not accuse any one of my colleagues of being willing “stealth jihadists,” but I do believe it important to call attention to behavior that is consistent with, and plays into the hands of, those who would like to see our constitutional system subverted and changed for the worse.

Which is precisely what our flier’s Danish Muhammad cartoon was intended to call attention to: no group of persons is beyond criticism, and no organization is without its institutional flaws and deficiencies. In Islamdom, this seems to be a consistent and suffocating oversensitivity to criticism, whether artistic, literary, or scholarly. The controversial cartoon in question truthfully satirizes the barbarities of sharia law, truthfully satirizes the justifications its proponents put forward for implementing it, and truthfully satirizes the origins of these barbarities: the life and teachings of Muhammad, as they are contained in the Koran, the hadith, and the sira, as they were implemented by Muhammad’s immediate successors the Rightly-Guided Caliphs, and as they have been codified in every major school of Islamic jurisprudence.

Yes, our Federalist Society chapter clearly intended that the cartoon be provocative. But any student reaction should have been informed not only by what the original artists intended by their satire of five years ago, but by the international reaction to these cartoons: the fact that the artists now live in fear for their lives, that violent riots were sparked all over Europe and the Islamic world, that over 100 people died as a result of these, and that plenty of media outlets refused to reproduce the cartoons for fear of violent reprisals. As I wrote in my earlier piece, this is what should offend the sensibilities of any truly “moderate” human being who sees these cartoons, especially those who reap the benefits of a liberal-democratic constitutional system by studying at a public law school.

I am grateful for all who wrote me, and the law school, to express their support for Mr. Spencer’s lecture. His talk was such a rousing success that many of my colleagues are doing their best to downplay this victory for free speech and education of the dangers of Muslim radicalism. About 100 students and supporters showed up for Mr. Spencer’s lecture, which was sponsored by our Federalist Society chapter alone. About 30 students attended the follow-up Q&A session.

By contrast, despite having been sponsored by seven student organizations, a Halloween-coalition of Muslims and committed leftists (including, rather ironically, the school ACLU and homosexualist OUTLaw chapter), Monday’s rival lecture only brought in some 220 students, a paltry 30 for every sponsoring organization.

One hopes the success of Mr. Spencer’s lecture is a sign of things to come: Americans everywhere are challenging politically correct orthodoxies, and these challenges are forcing ideologues of all political stripes to engage one another, and fine-tune the public discourse. In stimulating some much-needed discussion on such a taboo subject, the conservatives and libertarians of the Federalist Society have once again shown themselves to be the legal profession’s true vanguard of diversity, dialogue, and open-mindedness.

Cartoon-jihad intimidation is so 2009!

[Note: The Federalist Society for Law and Public Policy Studies does not necessarily endorse the contents of this article, or of Mr. Spencer’s lecture.]

Eric Giunta is a Juris Doctor Candidate at Florida State University College of Law, where he serves as President of that school’s premier conservative-libertarian debate society. He has written for LifeSiteNews and RenewAmerica.com. He maintains a blog, “Confessions of a Liberal Traditionalist,” at lexetlibertas.wordpress.com

This past week NRB’s bloggers have been embroiled in a debate about the alleged existence of a moderate Islam. Strongly influencing this discussion ha been the scholarship of Robert Spencer who is the director of Jihad Watch, another publication of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

To educate yourself on these issues check out some of Spencer’s books on Islam:

• The Politically Incorrect Guide to Islam (and the Crusades)
• The Complete Infidel’s Guide to the Koran
• The Truth About Muhammad: Founder of the World’s Most Intolerant Religion
• Stealth Jihad: How Radical Islam is Subverting America without Guns or Bombs
• Religion of Peace?: Why Christianity Is and Islam Isn’t
• Islam Unveiled: Disturbing Questions About the World’s Fastest-Growing Faith
• The Myth of Islamic Tolerance: How Islamic Law Treats Non-Muslims

This story at Newsweek made my day today. (How often do we say that at NewsReal Blog?) But as soon as you begin reading the post at the publication’s Declassified blog you’ll understand why:

Senate Intelligence Committee Chair Dianne Feinstein and other prominent Senate Democrats have accused spies at the Homeland Security Department of basing official intelligence reports on dubious open-source material. Inquiries by Declassified indicate that at least some of the data that Feinstein and her colleagues deemed “questionable” came from a website set up by outspoken conservative activist David Horowitz to catalogue negative information about the political left.

You can read the letter — much of it redacted — here in PDF format.

Gee, I wonder which site it was? “Catalogue negative information about the political left”? Whatever could that be?

In the age of Google it doesn’t matter if the name of the site was redacted:

The letter goes on to note that the Homeland report used “certain questionable” source material to glean “derogatory” information about the Muslim leader, including information from an unidentified source “with obvious political motivation whose stated purpose is to ‘identif[y] the individuals and organizations that make up the left’.”  The senators added that the source also included information on “numerous members of Congress and two former Presidents of the United States.” While details identifying the alleged dubious source have been censored out of the Senators’ letter, a Google search by Declassified for data sources purporting to identify “individuals and organizations that make up the left” led to a single website, Discoverthenetworks.org. The website is one of a number of anti-left and anti-Islamic websites operated by the David Horowitz Freedom Center, a Los Angeles-based assortment of conservative political organizations founded and headed by David Horowitz, a 1960s-vintage far-left organizer who migrated sharply to the political right.

Glorious.

Our Editor-In-Chief had this to say:

Horowitz tells Declassified he has no knowledge of the Homeland Security paper the senators complained about. But he says he hopes intelligence officials are consulting his website. American left-wingers, including some members of Congress, have a “long history of … actively working with and collaborating with America’s enemies,” he warns. And he insists that the material on his Web site is “factual,” “not inflammatory” and that his group is “very careful about what it posts… All we do is connect the dots.” He adds that his Web site is regularly consulted by “a lot of TV talk-show producers.”

According to Democratic Senators Russ Feingold (Read his Discover The Networks Profile HERE, btw) and Jay Rockefeller the unknown material from DTN was “clearly inappropriate” and “derogatory.” But it does not matter to Feingold and Rockefeller that the report declared the Islamic leader in question was not an “extremist.” Senate Democrats just want to try and intimidate Homeland Security analysts to stay away from Horowitz and not ask uncomfortable questions about the Stealth Jihad perpetuated by many so-called “moderate Muslims.”

According to the letter, the Homeland report specifically went on to conclude that the Islamic leader in question was a “mainstream voice” and that information on him “points to politically controversial statements but not to extremism”  — conclusions that Rockefeller and Feingold declared to be “political assessments that are outside of the bounds of the authorities granted U.S. law enforcement and intelligence entities.”

This is how effective the Freedom Center’s publications have become. We’re being cited by Homeland Security, and leftist Democrats in the Senate cannot stand it.

If you appreciate the work we’re doing then please consider supporting us. And you can learn more about this bizarre practice of leftists running interference for Islamists in DTN’s companion book, Horowitz’s Unholy Alliance: Radical Islam and the American Left.

What’s the easiest way to support NewsReal Blog and the David Horowitz Freedom Center? By making your Amazon purchases through us. Every day NRB will be highlighting books its bloggers have read or are reading now.

Here are several of David’s favorite books that he’s been reading recently:

In a culmination of his controversial first year in office, President Obama will deliver the State of the Union address this evening. Front Page magazine turned to a panel of experts for their advice on the speech that the president should give and the political priorities that he must address in 2010. — The Editors

Brian Riedl

Life After Debt

New budget estimates show that – under current policies – the national debt would triple to $22 trillion over the next decade. This additional debt, which is overwhelmingly driven by rising spending, would total $130,000 per household.

In a perfect world, President Obama would announce:

1) specific reforms to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid

2) a repeal of TARP and the stimulus

3) a plan to devolve much of the federal government to the state and local governments closer to the people they serve

4) an abandonment of his massive health care bill.

Alas, this is not going to happen.

Perhaps more realistically, the President should back up his proposed three-year freeze on some discretionary spending with statutory spending caps – and promise to veto any spending that exceeds the cap. He should follow a bipartisan recommendation to take Social Medicare, Medicare, and Medicaid spending off autopilot, and force Congress to budget for these programs. He should restore his campaign promises to reduce earmarks down to 1994 levels, scour the federal budget line-by-line for wasteful spending, and produce a health plan that truly bends the cost curve downward.

Brian Riedl is a Senior Policy Analyst and Grover Hermann Fellow in Federal Budgetary Affairs at The Heritage Foundation.

David Horowitz

Nowhere Left to Turn

In my view, the problem for Obama is that no matter what he says, no one’s going to believe him — not the right, not the left, not the center. In a year in office has acquired a massive credibility problem, which is not helped by the way by his overexposure. Consider his problem. To go forward with his leftist agenda is political suicide as every poll since August has shown. But what will he gain if he tacks right? He will further alienate his base but will he persuade any conservatives that he is not an incompetent menace? Or reassure the independents who have deserted him that he just made a mistake, and is not fundamentally dishonest (which even Newsweek’s Evan Thomas, who recently thought of him as a “God,” now believes) and not to be trusted? I almost think it would be better for him to skip the State of the Union, and spend the evening firing most of the people around him, which would be the first step in convincing everybody that he’s serious about changing course.

David Horowitz is editor-in-chief of Front Page magazine, the author of numerous books, and the president and founder of the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Peter Collier

A Teachable Moment

I’d like to hear Obama say that he is going to go back to the drawing boards with health care and will work consensually to solve this complex problem incrementally rather than through some arrogant holistic solutions that will make us sicker and poorer in one gesture.

I’d like him to hear him admit that the stimulus plan was a bust and that, contrary to his mendacious spokesmen, his administration has failed utterly in the effort to create jobs.

I’d like to hear him tell the nation to read his lips on no new taxes.

I’d like to hear him acknowledge that the way voters came forth in elections in Massachusetts, New Jersey and Virginia to show that while they want to be intelligently governed they refuse to be ruled represents a quintessential American moment.

I’d like to hear him tell the democracy activists in Iran that he is deeply ashamed by his failure to support their cause and that he no longer harbors fantasies that his contemptible silence will bring talks in which he will be able to use his overrated eloquence to turn their mullah tormentors away from their desire to get the Bomb.

I’d like to hear him say that he is disillusioned with the Palestinian thugocracy his policies see as morally superior to the Israelis.

I’d like to hear him say that he has rethought his negative take on American exceptionalism and now, after a regrettable apology tour, sees that the US is a shining example for the world rather than just another country.

I’d like, in other words, for an admission, however oblique, that he has learned something in his first year in office.

But I’m not holding my breath.

Peter Collier co-authored seven books with David Horowitz, including the widely read Destructive Generation: Second Thoughts About the ‘60s. He is also the author of many other books including, biographies on the Fords, Rockefellers, and Kennedys. He works at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.

Alan Dowd

The Pride Before the Fall

If someone had told President Obama that one year after his inauguration his party would lose statewide races in Virginia and New Jersey, fumble signature initiatives like health care and cap-and-trade, surrender the seat Ted Kennedy had held since 1962—to an unknown state senator—and give the once-demoralized Republican Party an opportunity to win back Congress, he would have laughed at that someone. One thing is certain: He’s not laughing right now as he prepares for his first State of the Union address.

The smartest course of action for the president may the most difficult for him to take, because it would require him to learn from, and listen to, his predecessors. That, of course, would presuppose that he believes he can learn something from his predecessors. The Clinton model of retreating from an ideological crusade and “pivoting” to practical and politically palatable policies could be helpful to Obama’s sinking administration. But don’t count on him to embrace that model. Obama seems far more ideological than President Clinton and has yet to convey the appearance of humility, which Clinton so effectively used to his advantage as a candidate and president. I actually hope Obama keeps listening to the “full speed ahead” mantra of the far left. If he does, by this time next year there will be a Republican Congress in place to check his statist agenda.

Alan Dowd writes on U.S. politics and U.S. foreign policy.

James Carafano

Time for Return of the Straight Talk Express

It used to be said “politics should stop at the water’s edge.” With the threat of global terrorism, where security is concerned politics should stop at our “doorstep.” Sadly, none of that is happening in Washington. In his first year in office, on security issues, Obama never switched from campaigning to governing. All of his initiatives were “political calculations” to try to show he was not weak on national security, but at the same time didn’t lose the “base.”

That has to stop. Obama has nothing to show for a year in the world. His foreign policies have not been shrewd and pragmatic. They have been laughable. He dithered on Afghanistan. He lost the bubble on homeland security. He caved to the Russians and Chinese.

Stop the insanity, Mr. President.

Here are five commitments he could make to turn things around.

1) State flatly terrorism is job #1.

2) Declare we are in Afghanistan to win and winning is more important than arbitrary deadlines.

3) Admit we are living in the margin of error of when Iran will detonate a nuclear weapon. We need unilateral US sanctions–now. We need robust missile defense–now. We need to highlight the regime’s horrific human rights record–now. We need to draw red lines–now.

4) Call for adding $50 billion a year to the defense budget to buy the equipment our men and women in uniform need to protect this generation of Americans and the next.

5) Forget about immigration “amnesty.” Granting amnesty would just make the challenge of securing the border worse. We need security, enforcement, and legitimate worker programs. That has to be Obama’s priority—now.

Dr. James Jay Carafano is the deputy director of the Kathryn and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Studies and director of the Douglas and Sarah Allison Center for Foreign Policy Studies at The Heritage Foundation.

Ariel Cohen

A Reset on Russia

President Barack Obama’s Russia policy is defined by the Administration’s view that America is overstretched globally, and that without assistance from a major power, such as Russia or China, Washington cannot achieve its goals. Some in the Administration believe that America is in decline and their job is to manage it. The policy of “outstretched hand” toward Russia (as well as other unfriendly powers) follows from this notion. So far, President Obama has failed to achieve any impressive results.

Russian officials say that the Obama Administration listens better [than that of George W. Bush], but “did not offer anything substantive.” Others compared Obama with Gorbachev – in terms of presiding over a great power in decline and referring to his naïveté. A senior Russian official half-jokingly said the U.S. concessions were “birthday presents for President Medvedev and Prime Minister Putin.”

Sure, the Kremlin will pocket the U.S. concessions and ask for more. It was blatantly clear to this author as early as September 2009, (after spending ten days with the leading Russian foreign policy experts), that the Obama Administration did not – and will not — receive any quid-pro-quo for the significant concessions it provided to Russia as a part of its “reset button” policy.

Another systemic problem Obama faced in Russia is the duopoly of power. Obama spent many hours talking to Medvedev, whereas the real decision making lies with Putin. Talking to the wrong guy is a bad negotiating strategy.

It is too expensive to have a U.S. president learning on the job. Misreading Russia’s great power agenda, overestimation of one’s own negotiating capabilities, misplaced and idealistic faith in the merits of arms control, and dialogue at all costs all this brought Barack Obama’s Russia policy into dangerous shoals. One hopes that the President will learn his lessons and that his second year in office will benefit the United States in the Administration’s dealings with Putin & Co.

Ariel Cohen, Ph.D., is Senior Research Fellow in Russian and Eurasian Studies and International Energy Policy at the Katherine and Shelby Cullom Davis Institute for International Policy at The Heritage Foundation.

Andrew Klavan

Here is my suggested text for the State of the Union in its entirety:

“My fellow citizens of the world. I come before you today to gaze into the middle distance and speak in ringing phrases.  For make no mistake:  the time for phrases that do not ring is past.  Already, in only the first year since I have fulfilled my awesome destiny, I have created millions of jobs—not just ordinary jobs that you have to work at for pay, but jobs beyond your wildest imagination, over the mountain of your deepest desires, and down the hallway of your fondest dreams.  I have sent many troops to Afghanistan—many, many troops who are running here and there with serious faces, shouting “Let’s go,” and firing their rifles so that the isolated extremists who have gathered together in great numbers to attack us will know that I am become Shiva, destroyer of worlds.

“But there is much still to do.  Even as we speak, a child is crying—a little, sad, pitiful child with big eyes, crying enormous tears that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to dry.  So let me be very clear:  the bridge from yesteryear leads to the cloudbanks of a golden perfection where the prospect of a horizon awaits a mighty century.  At this, we must not fail.  Thank you—and God bless us, every one.”

Andrew Klavan is the author of best-selling novels True Crime, Don’t Say a Word, and Empire of Lies. He blogs at AndrewKlavan.com.

The International Free Press Society hosts an online symposium on Dutch MP Geert Wilders, who goes on trial tomorrow for “insulting Islam.”

As one of the prosecutors “explained”:

It is irrelevant whether Wilder’s witnesses might prove Wilders’ observations to be correct. What’s relevant is that his observations are illegal.

At the IFPS website, Daniel Pipes comes to Wilders’ defense, as do Clare M. Lopez, Bat Ye’or, Diana West, Nidra Poller, David B. Harris, David Yerushalmi, and Mark Steyn, who faced similar charges in a Canadian tribunal not long ago.

He observes:

Behind this disgraceful prosecution lies a simple truth that the Dutch establishment cannot tell its people – that, unless something changes, their nation will become more and more Muslim and, very soon, slip past the point of no return. They understand the tensions between their ever more assertive Muslim population and an aging “native” working class, but they believe that the problem can be managed by placing “the European conversation” – the non-subterranean conversation – within ever narrower constraints, and criminalizing any opinions outside those bounds. Some of them are blinkered and stupid enough to think that they need to do this in order to save the tolerant multicultural society from “right wingers” like Wilders. In fact, all they are doing is hastening the rate at which their society will be delivered into the hands of the avowedly intolerant and unicultural. In its death throes, Eutopia has decided to smash the lights of liberty.

Tomorrow night, I’ll be speaking at a Toronto rally in support of Geert Wilders, which — if all goes well — will be streamed live on the internet.

On April 4, 2009, Geert Wilders spoke to an audience in Beverly Hills about freedom of speech. The event was co-sponsored by the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the International Free Press Society. Here’s the video:

Related posts:

1. In Honor of Geert Wilders: Fitna
2. Open Thread
3. Pipes: “Why I Stand With Wilders”