This week’s guest was David Satter, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He has written three books about Russia: Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union, which has been made into a documentary film, Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State and, his latest book, It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past.

To listen to the program, click here.

See you next Tuesday night!

This week’s guest will be David Satter, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a fellow at the Johns Hopkins University School of Advanced International Studies. He has written three books about Russia: Age of Delirium: the Decline and Fall of the Soviet Union, which has been made into a documentary film, Darkness at Dawn: the Rise of the Russian Criminal State and, his latest book, It Was a Long Time Ago and It Never Happened Anyway: Russia and the Communist Past.

To listen to the program, click here.

Call in # is: (347) 857-1380.

See you on Tuesday night!

One caveat: Platforms are less important today than they used to be. While in the past, presidential candidates tended to reflect the party’s stances, modern presidential candidates tend to shape the party’s stances.

That said, platforms are still important in that they reveal what a party and its standard-bearer believe. In rummaging through winning GOP platforms dating back to 1860, a handful of large, enduring, recurring themes emerge.

Economic Freedom over Statism

The winning platforms of the past emphasize the importance freedom—and especially freedom from onerous and confiscatory taxation.

The 1924 platform, for instance, called for “progressive reduction of taxes of all the people.”

Parts of the 1952 platform could be used in the 2012 platform verbatim: “The administration has praised free enterprise while actually wrecking it. Here a little, there a little, year by year, it has sought to curb, regulate, harass, restrain and punish…Neither small nor large business can flourish in such an atmosphere.”

The 1968 platform urged “an expanding free enterprise system to provide jobs” and condemned the incumbent’s “economic mismanagement of the highest order.”

That charge certainly hits the mark in 2012. Compared to President Obama, LBJ looks like a miserly accountant. As The Wall Street Journal recently reported, President Obama’s term includes the highest spending years since 1946. During President Obama’s term, Washington has added $5 trillion in debt.

Noting that “private property ownership is the cornerstone of American liberty,” the 1980 platform derided the federal government as “an aggressive enemy of the human right to private property ownership.”

Again, that charge is just as true today—and so is the remedy put forth in 1980. “Our foremost goal here at home is simple: economic growth and full employment without inflation,” Reagan’s platform-writers explained.

In 1952, the platform concluded that Washington had “deprived our citizens of precious liberties by seizing powers…hampered progress by unnecessary and crushing taxation…violated our liberties by turning loose upon the country a swarm of arrogant bureaucrats.” That sounds exactly like the sentiment that unleashed the Tea Party in 2009 and then triggered the historic midterm chastening in 2010.

The 1980 platform made a “case for the individual” and offered an indictment of statism: “They believe that every time new problems arise beyond the power of men and women as individuals to solve, it becomes the duty of government to solve them, as if there were never any alternative…Our case for the individual is stronger than ever.”

A Rejection of Government Control 

Of course, liberty is about far more than property rights and taxation. “Because we treasure freedom of conscience,” the 2000 platform vowed, “we oppose attempts to compel individuals or institutions to violate their moral standards in providing health-related services…We oppose using public revenues for abortion and will not fund organizations which advocate it.”

That brings us to today’s debate over nationalized healthcare and the spinoff debate over ObamaCare’s alarming encroachment on religious liberty.

The president’s healthcare law required all employers offering health insurance to include coverage for “preventive health services.” HHS later defined this to include contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs like the morning-after pill. Many observers hoped the president would direct HHS to provide a broad exemption for religious employers—and for good reason: In 2009, the president spoke eloquently about the need to “honor the conscience of those who disagree with abortion” and said he was open to “a sensible conscience clause.”

But those hopes were dashed, as we now know. HHS initially exempted only those organizations that employ people of the same faith, serve people of the same faith and focus on religious teaching as their main mission. Universities, primary and secondary schools, hospitals, nursing homes, food kitchens and virtually all religious charitable organizations would not receive a conscience-clause exemption from HHS, which explains the firestorm that erupted in January.

“This is first and foremost a matter of religious liberty for all,” Cardinal Dolan explained. “If the government can, for example, tell Catholics that they cannot be in the insurance business today without violating their religious convictions, where does it end?”

Dolan wasn’t the only religious leader to come to that conclusion. The National Association of Evangelicals, Southern Baptist Convention, LutheranChurch (Missouri Synod) and the Union of Orthodox Jewish Congregations of America have all condemned the ruling. Federal lawsuits have been filed by numerous religious employers.

Reacting to the backlash, the president proposed a compromise that would allow religious employers not to include contraceptives and abortion-inducing drugs in their health-insurance plan as long as they make sure their employees have insurance alternatives that provide contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs and the like. The White House also offered “a one-year transition period for religious organizations while this policy is being implemented.”

Editor’s note: Yuri Glazov, Russian dissident and the father of Frontpage’s editor Jamie Glazov, died fourteen years ago on March 15, 1998. The editors felt it would be appropriate to mark this occasion by reprinting Jamie’s dedication to his father from our March 11, 2010 issue. We also hope readers will consider contributing to the Yuri Glazov Memorial Award to keep the memory of Yuri and his fight for freedom alive.  [See info at bottom of article for U.S. and international donations.]

One day, when I was nine years old, my father and I were on our way to Church. As we neared the entrance, I spat on the ground. Reflexively, my dad’s arm shot out across my chest like a railway barrier, blocking my motion forward. We stood there, frozen in time, for some three seconds until my father uttered, in a very serious but patient way: “It is ok to spit outside of KGB headquarters, but never in front of a place such as this.” I registered the message and indicated my understanding — and we proceeded on our way.

That was my dad’s moral clarity and sharp, quick-witted way with words; and the sacred values that spawned those words made a profound impression on me from the moment of my birth. I was born into a family of Russian dissidents — a father and a mother, Yuri and Marina Glazov, who put their clenched fists up and went toe-to-toe with the Evil Empire.

Throughout my youth, my dad shared many stories with me, which included how he had always been aware, even in his youth, that he existed in a slave camp masquerading as a country and that he perpetually dreamed of escaping it. He spent his young years studying maps, trying to decipher which body of water he could swim across to escape the communist paradise he languished in. But his life ended up going a different way: he confronted the slave masters, rather than escaping the prison they had built.

My father was a scholar at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a professor at Moscow State University. His main field of study concerned Oriental languages and cultures, with a specialty in the Chinese, Sanskrit and Tamil areas. Despite his rewarding career, my dad put everything on the line and began to attend human rights demonstrations in Moscow on behalf of political prisoners. He also started to sign letters of protest against the political repressions that were heightening in the country in the 1960s, connected as they were to the re-Stalinization of the Soviet Union after the Khrushchev thaw. The activities my dad engaged in could land a Soviet citizen in the gulag or a psychiatric hospital for decades.

On February 24, 1968, my father signed the Letter of Twelve, a letter written and signed by twelve Soviet dissidents to the Supreme Congress of Communist Parties in Budapest denouncing Soviet human rights abuses. He was immediately fired from his work for being “unprofessional” in his scholarly studies (even though he previously had received high praise for his academic studies).

The picture of my dad, shown above, was taken by a friend who had come to visit him the evening of the day he was expelled from the Academy. My father had been at a meeting at the closed section of the Supreme Soviet of Scholars. Before the committee announced his expulsion, he had delivered a strong speech about political repressions in the country and finished by talking about his hope that the days of freedom would one day come to his beloved Russia.

After his expulsion, my father received a labor card with a special secret code that meant that he was blacklisted and could not receive employment anywhere in the country. He even tried to get a job cleaning streets, but was refused once an employer saw the poisoned markings. In a Soviet Catch-22, because of his “unemployment,” the KGB began to persecute my father for “parasitism” — a law in the Soviet Union that criminalized unemployed people and subsequently shipped them off to labor camps in Siberia.

Under these circumstances, my dad’s health broke down. He became very sick, came down with sepsis (blood poisoning) and was hospitalized. The Communist Party was as cold and unforgiving as the Siberian winter, and the KGB sharks waited for him to either die or to arrive home from his sickbed, upon which they would continue their persecution of him. Because of very brave friends like Dr. Anna Marshak who provided Western medication to my father, he survived. His sickness and several other developments threw the unfolding narrative down a different path:

During this time, a friend of our family’s told my dad that, under vicious harassment by the KGB (they had discovered an affair she was having and threatened to tell her husband), she had agreed to be a witness for them in a trial against my father that would charge (and convict) him of selling foreign currency and drugs on the black market (which she would place in our apartment). Upon hearing this, my dad knew the KGB was going for the jugular and that he only had one hand left to play. He immediately sent a letter to the Department for Exit Visas in which he said: give me a job or let me out of the country. Shortly afterwards, in April 1972, before Nixon’s visit to Moscow — and perhaps because of that visit — my father received the Exit Visa to emigrate from the Soviet Union. In escaping the Soviet hell, he was able to bring his family (my mom, my sister Elena, my brother Grisha and me) to the West.

[My family, after my father was expelled from the Academy. My mom is on the left and my older sister, Elena, is on the right. I'm the youngest, with my older brother Grisha behind me.]

My father never stopped fighting the Soviet system and the murderous, anti-human ideology that spawned it. He never fell into silence about the genocide and monstrous oppression communism engendered everywhere it set foot. He was always outspoken on behalf of political prisoners that languished in communist gulags around the world. I grew up in this spirit that my dad (and mom) nurtured in our family, and my heart and mind, from a young age, were preoccupied with the fate and sufferings of heroes like Russia’s Vladimir Bukovsky and Cuba’s Armando Valladares.

I am eternally grateful to my father, and to my mother, for having instilled in me one of the highest values in life, which we find in Hebrews 13:3: Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering. And that is precisely that value that explains why I am at Frontpage Magazine today, fighting on the front lines alongside a noble warrior like David Horowitz on behalf of freedom fighters everywhere, and in particular the brave Muslim dissidents, Christians, Jews, Muslim women, and all other minorities and peoples, who are being viciously persecuted under Islamist tyranny.

When my dad arrived in the U.S. via Italy, he first taught at New York University and then at Boston College as Professor of Russian Studies. He then moved to Canada in 1975 to teach at the Department of Russian Studies at Dalhousie University. He loved to teach Fyodor Dostoevsky and the history of Russian ideas.

[My mom and dad in Italy in 1972 when we first left the Soviet Union.]

In 1992, the Soviet Academy of Sciences apologized to my father for persecuting him earlier, and now invited him to re-establish scholarly contacts. In the mid-1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, my father received a document from the Sakharov Archives located in Boston. Dated February 19, 1971, it was a top secret letter written by Yuri Andropov, leader of the KGB at the time, to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Filled with obscene lies and clear self-induced lies, it accused my dad of terrorism and espionage, indicating the kind of trial the KGB was preparing for my dad in those horrifying years. This document proves how much the KGB hated dissidents and spread the most vicious lies about them (being CIA agents etc.).

Bugging the regular conversations of my father with Sakharov, mostly in Sakharov’s apartment, the KGB deliberately distorted the discussions, parts of which dealt with the history of terrorism in Russia. The so-called “espionage” of my father was based on his correspondence with international scholars in his field, which my father dared to conduct in those dangerous years. Naturally, his letters were perlustrated and listed in the KGB files.

My father published numerous books and articles in both Russian and English. The two books that became best known were, The Russian Mind Since Stalin’s Death and To Be or Not to Be in the Party: Communist Party Membership in the USSR.

My dad died of cancer on March 15, 1998. It was before the Vladimir Putin period, but my father already gauged, with great disappointment, what was happening in his beloved homeland. He understood the disaster and tragedy concerning the future moral health of his country when Nuremberg-style trials did not follow the collapse of the Soviet Union. The crimes and atrocities of Soviet communism – and the ideology that engendered the mass murder of 60 million people – were all supposed to be revealed and condemned. The secret KGB archives were supposed to be opened. The exposure and judgment of high ranking KGB officers and communist officials were supposed to take place in front of the whole world. Instead, these criminals and mafia figures remained in power — just in new clothing and using new language.

New school textbooks were supposed to be introduced – like those in post-war Germany that dealt honestly with the crimes of the Nazi era. It is impossible to imagine Hitler being praised in today’s German school texts or his glorified portrait being hung high in the streets of Germany. But in Russia, the mirror image of that horror happened and still continues today.

So, today, with Putin and his KGB thugs and murderers still in power, we witnessed, recently, the preparation for the 65^th anniversary celebration of the Soviet victory in WWII marked with portraits of Joseph Stalin as the country’s victorious war-time leader. This is no surprise, of course, since Putin has overseen a strong pining for Stalin in Russia, which manifested itself in a beverage plant in Volgograd releasing a series of soft drinks picturing the dictator on its labels and in the introduction of new textbooks in schools speaking of the mass murderer as, among other things, an “effective manager.”

What would my father have thought of all of these developments if he were alive today? So many dissidents sacrificed their lives fighting for freedom in the Soviet Union. For what? Russia was given the window of opportunity to choose freedom in the early 1990s, but it chose to turn its back on this historic opportunity. My father shared the same fate as many of his friends and other dissidents: if you avoided being murdered, you passed away early from cancer or other illnesses. One can only imagine what terrible stress these freedom fighters endured for the sake of bringing liberty to their nation. Was it all in vain?

I don’t think it was. What my father and the other courageous warriors did was meaningful in its own right. Moreover, the struggle my father’s life valiantly represented lives on. Indeed, we now see a sparkle of hope in the incredible scene of Russian people taking to the streets demanding the end of Putin’s regime. Though Putin successfully manipulated the recent elections to stay in power, many Russian protestors are now clearly saddened by this dishonest and cruel development and are ready to fight on and not give up.

And today, each of us can help keep the flame for Russian freedom alive and to help the brave Russian people fighting for justice and liberty.

My father’s career at Dalhousie lasted twenty years – until his retirement in 1995. To honor his memory, a memorial award was established in his name. But funding for this award has been insufficient and has not reached the necessary level to be effective. This memorial fund is really the only marker in existence that publicly keeps alive who my dad was, what he did, and what he represented. It symbolizes the struggle of all dissidents for truth and for freedom. If some funds begin to materialize, the memorial award for my father can remain in existence. I would like to put a request to all of you who care and who can help, to kindly click on this site at Dalhousie to read about the Yuri Glazov Memorial Award and to contribute in any way you can – and even the smallest contribution will count a lot.

Thank you, I am most grateful to all of you who will help to make sure that my dad’s battle – and the battle of so many freedom fighters and martyrs who rose and fell fighting Soviet communism – will not be forgotten.

To read about the Yuri Glazov Memorial Award, click here.

For U.S. and international donors, online donations are unfortunately not available.

Kindly make checks (with a short note on the check stating it is designated to the Yuri Glazov fund) payable to:

Dalhousie University Foundation, Inc.
c/o Todd Parkin, Foundation Secretary
P.O. Box 850
New York, NY, 10116-0850

Editor’s note: Yuri Glazov, Russian dissident and the father of Frontpage’s editor Jamie Glazov, died fourteen years ago today on March 15, 1998. The editors felt it would be appropriate to mark this occasion by reprinting Jamie’s dedication to his father from our March 11, 2010 issue. We also hope readers will consider contributing to the Yuri Glazov Memorial Award to keep the memory of Yuri and his fight for freedom alive.  [See info at bottom of article for U.S. and international donations.]

One day, when I was nine years old, my father and I were on our way to Church. As we neared the entrance, I spat on the ground. Reflexively, my dad’s arm shot out across my chest like a railway barrier, blocking my motion forward. We stood there, frozen in time, for some three seconds until my father uttered, in a very serious but patient way: “It is ok to spit outside of KGB headquarters, but never in front of a place such as this.” I registered the message and indicated my understanding — and we proceeded on our way.

That was my dad’s moral clarity and sharp, quick-witted way with words; and the sacred values that spawned those words made a profound impression on me from the moment of my birth. I was born into a family of Russian dissidents — a father and a mother, Yuri and Marina Glazov, who put their clenched fists up and went toe-to-toe with the Evil Empire.

Throughout my youth, my dad shared many stories with me, which included how he had always been aware, even in his youth, that he existed in a slave camp masquerading as a country and that he perpetually dreamed of escaping it. He spent his young years studying maps, trying to decipher which body of water he could swim across to escape the communist paradise he languished in. But his life ended up going a different way: he confronted the slave masters, rather than escaping the prison they had built.

My father was a scholar at the Soviet Academy of Sciences and a professor at Moscow State University. His main field of study concerned Oriental languages and cultures, with a specialty in the Chinese, Sanskrit and Tamil areas. Despite his rewarding career, my dad put everything on the line and began to attend human rights demonstrations in Moscow on behalf of political prisoners. He also started to sign letters of protest against the political repressions that were heightening in the country in the 1960s, connected as they were to the re-Stalinization of the Soviet Union after the Khrushchev thaw. The activities my dad engaged in could land a Soviet citizen in the gulag or a psychiatric hospital for decades.

On February 24, 1968, my father signed the Letter of Twelve, a letter written and signed by twelve Soviet dissidents to the Supreme Congress of Communist Parties in Budapest denouncing Soviet human rights abuses. He was immediately fired from his work for being “unprofessional” in his scholarly studies (even though he previously had received high praise for his academic studies).

The picture of my dad, shown above, was taken by a friend who had come to visit him the evening of the day he was expelled from the Academy. My father had been at a meeting at the closed section of the Supreme Soviet of Scholars. Before the committee announced his expulsion, he had delivered a strong speech about political repressions in the country and finished by talking about his hope that the days of freedom would one day come to his beloved Russia.

After his expulsion, my father received a labor card with a special secret code that meant that he was blacklisted and could not receive employment anywhere in the country. He even tried to get a job cleaning streets, but was refused once an employer saw the poisoned markings. In a Soviet Catch-22, because of his “unemployment,” the KGB began to persecute my father for “parasitism” — a law in the Soviet Union that criminalized unemployed people and subsequently shipped them off to labor camps in Siberia.

Under these circumstances, my dad’s health broke down. He became very sick, came down with sepsis (blood poisoning) and was hospitalized. The Communist Party was as cold and unforgiving as the Siberian winter, and the KGB sharks waited for him to either die or to arrive home from his sickbed, upon which they would continue their persecution of him. Because of very brave friends like Dr. Anna Marshak who provided Western medication to my father, he survived. His sickness and several other developments threw the unfolding narrative down a different path:

During this time, a friend of our family’s told my dad that, under vicious harassment by the KGB (they had discovered an affair she was having and threatened to tell her husband), she had agreed to be a witness for them in a trial against my father that would charge (and convict) him of selling foreign currency and drugs on the black market (which she would place in our apartment). Upon hearing this, my dad knew the KGB was going for the jugular and that he only had one hand left to play. He immediately sent a letter to the Department for Exit Visas in which he said: give me a job or let me out of the country. Shortly afterwards, in April 1972, before Nixon’s visit to Moscow — and perhaps because of that visit — my father received the Exit Visa to emigrate from the Soviet Union. In escaping the Soviet hell, he was able to bring his family (my mom, my sister Elena, my brother Grisha and me) to the West.

[My family, after my father was expelled from the Academy. My mom is on the left and my older sister, Elena, is on the right. I'm the youngest, with my older brother Grisha behind me.]

My father never stopped fighting the Soviet system and the murderous, anti-human ideology that spawned it. He never fell into silence about the genocide and monstrous oppression communism engendered everywhere it set foot. He was always outspoken on behalf of political prisoners that languished in communist gulags around the world. I grew up in this spirit that my dad (and mom) nurtured in our family, and my heart and mind, from a young age, were preoccupied with the fate and sufferings of heroes like Russia’s Vladimir Bukovsky and Cuba’s Armando Valladares.

I am eternally grateful to my father, and to my mother, for having instilled in me one of the highest values in life, which we find in Hebrews 13:3: Remember those in prison as if you were their fellow prisoners, and those who are mistreated as if you yourselves were suffering. And that is precisely that value that explains why I am at Frontpage Magazine today, fighting on the front lines alongside a noble warrior like David Horowitz on behalf of freedom fighters everywhere, and in particular the brave Muslim dissidents, Christians, Jews, Muslim women, and all other minorities and peoples, who are being viciously persecuted under Islamist tyranny.

When my dad arrived in the U.S. via Italy, he first taught at New York University and then at Boston College as Professor of Russian Studies. He then moved to Canada in 1975 to teach at the Department of Russian Studies at Dalhousie University. He loved to teach Fyodor Dostoevsky and the history of Russian ideas.

[My mom and dad in Italy in 1972 when we first left the Soviet Union.]

In 1992, the Soviet Academy of Sciences apologized to my father for persecuting him earlier, and now invited him to re-establish scholarly contacts. In the mid-1990s, after the collapse of the Soviet Union, my father received a document from the Sakharov Archives located in Boston. Dated February 19, 1971, it was a top secret letter written by Yuri Andropov, leader of the KGB at the time, to the Central Committee of the Communist Party. Filled with obscene lies and clear self-induced lies, it accused my dad of terrorism and espionage, indicating the kind of trial the KGB was preparing for my dad in those horrifying years. This document proves how much the KGB hated dissidents and spread the most vicious lies about them (being CIA agents etc.).

Bugging the regular conversations of my father with Sakharov, mostly in Sakharov’s apartment, the KGB deliberately distorted the discussions, parts of which dealt with the history of terrorism in Russia. The so-called “espionage” of my father was based on his correspondence with international scholars in his field, which my father dared to conduct in those dangerous years. Naturally, his letters were perlustrated and listed in the KGB files.

My father published numerous books and articles in both Russian and English. The two books that became best known were, The Russian Mind Since Stalin’s Death and To Be or Not to Be in the Party: Communist Party Membership in the USSR.

My dad died of cancer on March 15, 1998. It was before the Vladimir Putin period, but my father already gauged, with great disappointment, what was happening in his beloved homeland. He understood the disaster and tragedy concerning the future moral health of his country when Nuremberg-style trials did not follow the collapse of the Soviet Union. The crimes and atrocities of Soviet communism – and the ideology that engendered the mass murder of 60 million people – were all supposed to be revealed and condemned. The secret KGB archives were supposed to be opened. The exposure and judgment of high ranking KGB officers and communist officials were supposed to take place in front of the whole world. Instead, these criminals and mafia figures remained in power — just in new clothing and using new language.

New school textbooks were supposed to be introduced – like those in post-war Germany that dealt honestly with the crimes of the Nazi era. It is impossible to imagine Hitler being praised in today’s German school texts or his glorified portrait being hung high in the streets of Germany. But in Russia, the mirror image of that horror happened and still continues today.

So, today, with Putin and his KGB thugs and murderers still in power, we witnessed, recently, the preparation for the 65^th anniversary celebration of the Soviet victory in WWII marked with portraits of Joseph Stalin as the country’s victorious war-time leader. This is no surprise, of course, since Putin has overseen a strong pining for Stalin in Russia, which manifested itself in a beverage plant in Volgograd releasing a series of soft drinks picturing the dictator on its labels and in the introduction of new textbooks in schools speaking of the mass murderer as, among other things, an “effective manager.”

What would my father have thought of all of these developments if he were alive today? So many dissidents sacrificed their lives fighting for freedom in the Soviet Union. For what? Russia was given the window of opportunity to choose freedom in the early 1990s, but it chose to turn its back on this historic opportunity. My father shared the same fate as many of his friends and other dissidents: if you avoided being murdered, you passed away early from cancer or other illnesses. One can only imagine what terrible stress these freedom fighters endured for the sake of bringing liberty to their nation. Was it all in vain?

I don’t think it was. What my father and the other courageous warriors did was meaningful in its own right. Moreover, the struggle my father’s life valiantly represented lives on. Indeed, we now see a sparkle of hope in the incredible scene of Russian people taking to the streets demanding the end of Putin’s regime. Though Putin successfully manipulated the recent elections to stay in power, many Russian protestors are now clearly saddened by this dishonest and cruel development and are ready to fight on and not give up.

And today, each of us can help keep the flame for Russian freedom alive and to help the brave Russian people fighting for justice and liberty.

My father’s career at Dalhousie lasted twenty years – until his retirement in 1995. To honor his memory, a memorial award was established in his name. But funding for this award has been insufficient and has not reached the necessary level to be effective. This memorial fund is really the only marker in existence that publicly keeps alive who my dad was, what he did, and what he represented. It symbolizes the struggle of all dissidents for truth and for freedom. If some funds begin to materialize, the memorial award for my father can remain in existence. I would like to put a request to all of you who care and who can help, to kindly click on this site at Dalhousie to read about the Yuri Glazov Memorial Award and to contribute in any way you can – and even the smallest contribution will count a lot.

Thank you, I am most grateful to all of you who will help to make sure that my dad’s battle – and the battle of so many freedom fighters and martyrs who rose and fell fighting Soviet communism – will not be forgotten.

To read about the Yuri Glazov Memorial Award, click here.

For U.S. and international donors, online donations are unfortunately not available.

Kindly make checks (with a short note on the check stating it is designated to the Yuri Glazov fund) payable to:

Dalhousie University Foundation, Inc.
c/o Todd Parkin, Foundation Secretary
P.O. Box 850
New York, NY, 10116-0850

In a recent TV interview, Hazim Abu Ismail, a candidate for Egypt’s presidency with affiliations to both the Muslim Brotherhood and the Salafis, made clear that the hijab, or veil for women, would be enforced under his leadership. More importantly, along the way he exposed his general views—that there is little freedom under Islam. Especially telling is the military analogy he used: being a Muslim is like being a member of the military; you must obey all its dictates, including dress codes. He fails to add, however, that, whereas much military service is voluntary, in Islam, if you are simply born to Muslim parents, then you have joined Islam—whether you like it or not. Hence, all the persecution of Muslim apostates. But, as Abu Ismail puts it, “This is Islam.” Translated excerpts of the interview follow:

Host: You have already begun to try to impose a particular dress code for us.

Abu Ismail: I’ve begun to? It’s the Lord of the Worlds [Allah] who said so. I have nothing to do with it!

Host: Allah left it for me to decide as a personal freedom.

Abu Ismail: Who said that? Where’d you get that from. See, that’s the whole point: If you claim that Allah considers it your personal freedom, show me your reference? Nobody has ever said that—except for people who have no understanding of Sharia.

Host: There is “no coercion in religion” [Koran 2:256].

Abu Ismail: This is concerning the creed, you don’t force someone to convert to Islam.

Host: So when Allah in the Koran mentions “religion,” it is synonymous with “creed”?

Abu Ismail: Exactly.

Host: So when He says “today I have perfected your religion for you” [Koran 5:3], He is only talking about the “creed.”

Abu Ismail: Yes; for example, when you say “no coercion to join the Military Academy,” it means that you are free to join or not—but if you do join, then you are obliged to wear their uniform, to attend their classes, to attend the training with them, and to obey their leader.

Host: There is a problem here—shall I say to the unveiled woman who wants to avoid hijab that she should change her creed?

Abu Ismail: Exactly, bravo. If she is a Muslim. You see, this is the difficulty; this is Islam. Does she want to be a Muslim and not obey Allah’s rules? Let them say so; that’s all I ask; let them be honorable and just speak up.

A bold challenge, considering that “speaking up” about not wanting to follow “Allah’s rules” in Muslim countries can get one attacked, hounded, imprisoned, and killed.

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

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

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

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

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Nina Shea, Director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute. She is the co-author (with Paul Marshall) of the new book, Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide.

FP: Nina Shea, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Tell us what inspired you to write this book with Paul Marshall.

Shea: We have been tracking and opposing the punishment of religious minorities and Muslim reformers in many Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries under apostasy and blasphemy codes for decades.  As religious freedom advocates, we saw a horrific and spreading pattern of human rights violations that is being ignored in US foreign policy and in the media – though particularly egregious individual cases have been sporadically reported without much attention to their overall effect.  This pattern of human rights violations should especially concern us because the practices and policies it evidences undermine the individual freedoms essential to liberal democracy.  Even our national security is compromised since apostasy and blasphemy codes are used by Islamic radicals to crush their opponents and thus pose obstacles to moderation within Islam.  So, it undermines a number of critical American interests.

FP:  What does Silenced do that no book has done before?

Shea: It does two things: It surveys in descriptive and overwhelming detail the limits coercively imposed in the name of Islam on fundamental freedoms of religion and speech in about twenty key OIC countries. It also links this phenomenon to a new trend in the West. The OIC is waging a campaign to have those same limits enforced by the West within its borders and that campaign  is making substantial headway, particularly through self-censorship in establishment organizations and through the adoption of hate speech laws in many countries.

FP: Tell us about the political effects in Muslim societies of blasphemy and apostasy laws.

Shea: One effect is that criticism of anything and anyone claiming Islamic legitimacy is essentially forbidden and, in the more Islamicized societies, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, northern Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan, those accused of apostasy and blasphemy sins can be punished by death.  Since Islam prescriptions reach into every realm of life—personal dress, social relations, arts and culture, science, politics, etc. — these codes preclude genuine democracy, shut down debate and intellectual inquiry, stifle scientific and economic innovation, and stagnate culture, as the late Indonesian President Wahid wrote in the Foreword to Silenced and as the UN Arab Development Report also documented.  Those who propose to abandon such codes, such as an Afghan journalist, an Iranian ayatollah, and a Pakistani governor and a cabinet minister recently did in their respective countries, are brutally crushed.  Muslim converts to Christianity and members of religions that come after Mohammed, such as the Bahai’s and Amadiyas, are viewed as de facto insulters of Islam and killed or harshly punished and discriminated against. These apostasy and blasphemy codes should be one of the main concerns posed by an Islamist takeover of Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, not the banning of alcohol and movies that our media tends to focus on.

FP: What is happening in terms of the move toward new blasphemy laws in the West — and the trend to stifle truth-telling about Islam in the West?

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

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

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

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

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

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?

When reading through issue #1 of Bosch Fawstin’s long-awaited graphic novel The Infidel I try and take myself back to when I first encountered the artist’s work.

Bosch and I first connected in February of 2009. He got in touch with me to give me a pat on the back for a freelance article I’d written for FrontPage about comic book heroes called “Superhero Conservatism.” He told me about his own anti-Jihad superhero he’d created, a tough character named Pig Man. A few months later I sold another article to FrontPage, an interview with Bosch about his life, art, and philosophy.

Reading through some of my questions for Bosch readers more familiar with the kinds of things I tend to say about Islam these days might be taken aback. Fall of 2008 and Spring of 2009 were the turning point for me as I was making my shift from Left to Right. At the time I was still doing all I could to try and avoid wholly embracing conservatism. I labored under the illusion that I could be some kind of “New Centrist” and not have to stand wholly with “scary people” like Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, and Pamela Geller. I thought I could find some kind of gray middle ground between the supposed “extremes” of the Right and the Left. And of course part of this was my hope that people like Bosch (anti-Jihadist activists) were going too far in their critique of Islam. They weren’t seeing the “diversity” and “nuance” within Islam.

This was, of course, the arrogance that comes from being a leftist. Being a progressive means never bothering to read the Koran or a book about Islam’s history but KNOWING that you know more about it than ex-Muslims like Bosch.

Fast forward two years later and I’m now editing NewsReal Blog and after reading a stack of books on Islam and the Muslim Brotherhood, Bosch and I are more on the same page. And he’s emerged as one of the key forces at NRB and the Freedom Center, usually doing several cartoons a month while creating illustrations for our campus campaigns and pamphlets. He also was responsible for bring to life David Horowitz’s vision of a Palestinian Wall of Lies. Collaborating with Bosch on these projects has been one of my great professional joys of the past few years.

In spite of all these extracurricular activities, Bosch has still managed to find the time to release The Infidel as a digital download. (Hopefully someday a publisher will have the courage to print it in the nice edition it deserves.)

The Infidel is a multi-layered work with a comic-book-within-the-comic. The main character, Killian Duke, is basically a foil for Bosch himself, much as Ayn Rand’s protagonists were variations of her. Killian is the controversial creator of the anti-Jihad comic hero Pig Man and the first issue interweaves sequences from Killian’s life (getting into confrontations with a group representing CAIR, and appearing on FOX News) and also action scenes of an unapologetic Pig Man fighting Jihadists. The first issue concludes with the introduction of the graphic novel’s antagonist — Killian’s Muslim twin brother Mo who responded to 9/11 by going in the opposite direction by aligning with the Islamists. The next issue will likely be a confrontation between the two brothers over Killian’s provocative comic book.

What kind of response do leftists have to this material? The same as I did years ago. Here’s one example from Jason Wilkins at Broken Frontier:

Lacking balance but overflowing with belligerent swagger and clever storytelling tricks, The Infidel was a disappointing read from a past Eisner nominee. Somehow, despite Fawstin’s closeness to the subject matter, I was expecting a story that at least alluded to the many shades of grey permeating any discussion of religion and politics. What I received instead was a disappointing, if not disturbing, opening salvo in a petty game of name-calling.

Of course the reviewer was expecting “many shades of grey.” I’ll bet money right now that he’s never read a single book about Islam and the only verses from the Koran that he’s familiar with are the ones that CAIR has integrated into their talking points.

Gray is what leftists want because it provides them with a new utopia right now. If everything is just endlessly complicated and abstract then it means we can just argue about it forever without ever having to do anything. It removes our responsibility to take action against ideas that threaten our existence.

And that’s ultimately why so many people are going to have such a hard time with both Bosch’s work and the anti-Jihad movement. The Infidel is a challenge to all who think that we can just wallow in post-modernism and relativism. It presents facts about the nature of a threat facing us. And unfortunately for our leftist friends,  those facts cannot be separated from the moral response that follows them. Islam-as-it’s-written and Islam-as-it’s-practiced are a threat both to us and most of the Muslims caught up in it who likely care more about their families than Jihad. That’s a much tougher pill to swallow than the “grey permeating any discussion of religion and politics.”

One of the most profound conundrums of our time is the passionate love affair carried on by the young inheritors of the liberal and presumably enlightened West with the totalitarian specimens of the Arab Middle East. They tend to be meltingly soft on Islam—the “religion of peace”—and, obviously, the chief beneficiaries of their misplaced adoration are the Palestinians. Our fellow travelers arrive in the Middle East’s ideological swamp where the terrorists eagerly await them, like crocodiles passing the mustard. Why Western advocates for justice, peace and democracy, as they like to style themselves, believe it could be otherwise almost beggars comprehension.

Is it a case of chronic and pervasive brain cramp among a media-and university-indoctrinated class of adolescent donzels, fueled by the faux idealism of miseducated youth? Today’s youth, as is common knowledge, is mainly oriented toward the dreamscape of the utopian left, which sees reality as a binomial construct: evil here in the world we inhabit, good there in the world to come. And the glorious world to come is already prefigured in Gaza and the West Bank where revolutionary “heroes” fight against tyrannical oppression in the name of freedom and justice. Thus a cohort of our young people, accompanied in many instances by their stunted elders, cluster under the banner of a spurious humanitarianism and sail away or troop off to join their imagined partners in the quest for a better future.

Or does it go deeper than merely arrested development? Is Jamie Glazov right in his analysis of the constitutive factors of leftist utopian thinking, which he regards as predicated on the loss of a sustaining identity or, essentially the same thing in its effect, the repudiation of an unwanted self? According to Glazov, there arises as a result a compelling need to fill the vacancy by committing to a large and powerful collective that promises to restore a sense of meaning, purpose and value to the empty shell of an absconding or rejected self. “This psychological dynamic,” Glazov writes, “involves negative identification whereby a person who has failed to identify positively with his own environment subjugates his individuality to a powerful, authoritarian entity, through which he vicariously experiences a feeling of power and purpose.” As Erich Fromm points out in his definitive study of the integrals of self-abdication, Escape From Freedom, what we are witnessing is the “craving for power over men and the longing for submission to an overwhelmingly strong outside power.” The paradox is only apparent.

More likely, the various elements we are considering are not mutually exclusive but readily combine in an explosive mixture of immaturity, ignorance, and surrender of the will, leavened by the illusion of noble self-sacrifice to a higher cause. And today that cause is chiefly associated with the blatantly false Palestinian narrative of historical innocence, brutal victimization at the hands of Zionist irredentism, and the justification of terrorism under the name of “resistance.” A potent and ever-serviceable strain of antisemitism, cloaking itself as anti-Zionism, also plays into this malignant amalgam of righteous vindictiveness. The callowness of youth prolonged, the emptiness of the self and the ancestral hostility toward Jews together form the principal ingredients of this devil’s brew.

Take for example the “martyred” 23-year-old Rachel Corrie, a member of the antisemitic International Solidarity Movement, who threw herself in front of an Israeli bulldozer in Gaza where she was protesting the demolition of a terrorist’s house. Corrie, recently the subject of a venomously anti-Israeli play co-written by Guardian editor Katherine Viner, has become the antisemite’s answer to Anne Frank, the new suffering heroine who, as the putative victim of the Jewish state, cancels out the Jewish claim to the world’s sympathy and understanding. The fact that Corrie’s death was self-inflicted in the service of a dubious and ill-considered cause, and under circumstances that have been cleverly manipulated to appeal to the uninstructed “morality” of a gullible public, is of no account to the antisemitic left. In fact, it is its modus operandi.

The left’s response to the fate of Corrie’s successor was equally “correct” and opportunistic. When, on August 10, 2006, 24-year-old Angelo Frammartino was stabbed to death by a Palestinian Arab in East Jerusalem, the NGO he worked for, ARCI (or Active Citizenship Network), issued a statement describing the incident, not as “a terrorist attack, or a manifestation of ethnic hatred” but as “a worrying symptom of the ever-worsening socioeconomic crisis in the marginalized areas of East Jerusalem.” The idiocy of this whitewash was only enhanced by the irony of a letter Frammartino had sent to an Italian newspaper several months earlier in which he regretted, among other things, “the blood of Palestinian youths from the first intifada.”

Similarly, a group going by the name of The Palestinian Civil Society Organizations exonerated the killer by laying the blame on Israel, rehashing the usual boilerplate of “massacres against Palestinian and Lebanese civilians” and “grave human rights violations committed by the Israeli Occupation.” The killer was plainly so upset by the Israelis that he decided to murder an Italian. These muddled equations constitute standard reasoning in the minds of the Palestinians’ besotted suitors.

So far, the analysis of President Obama’s deficit speech has focused largely on its vagaries, obfuscations, and outright lies.  Charles Krauthammer rightly blasted Obama’s speech as “shallow … hyper-partisan … intellectually dishonest.”  He cited Obama’s “numbers suspended in mid-air with nothing under them with all kinds of goals and guidelines and triggers that mean nothing.”  Krauthammer wasn’t alone – many commentators ranging from David Limbaugh to Larry Kudlow have targeted Obama’s woefully un-mathematical statistics, his fiscal magical thinking, and his utter inability to move to the center with regard to deficit reduction.

But the true heart of Obama’s speech wasn’t the faulty budgetary analysis or the demagoguery of attacking Paul Ryan personally.  It was Obama’s soaring rhetoric.

Obama is an odd politician.  Most politicians see the cloudy phraseology of their speeches as mere throwaway stuff, cotton candy for the simple-minded.  Obama sees such gibberish as the soul of his agenda.  If we want to examine where Obama truly stands, we must delve into his soaring rhetoric.

And the soaring rhetoric is unvaryingly drawn directly from Saul Alinsky.

As Andrew Breitbart makes clear in his fantastic new book, Righteous Indignation, the father of the contemporary  left is Saul Alinsky.  Alinsky was an intensely clever fellow with no compunction about exploiting popular sentiment to achieve his ends.  One of his favorite methodologies was to use America’s founders to back his own Marxism.  As Breitbart writes, “Alinsky’s clever merging of fake founding philosophy with his own Marxism led him to internal contradictions that would have sunk a lesser ego.  While championing ‘freedom,’ for example – he hated the idea of individual freedom the Founders loved – he [pushed for] ‘communal freedom,’ which is to say tyranny led by the government.”

Obama was raised in the Alinsky tradition, and he speaks with Alinsky’s forked tongue.  Thus, for example, Obama opened his speech by stating that Americans have historically “put our faith in free markets and free enterprise as the engine of America’s wealth and prosperity … we are rugged individualists, a self-reliant people with a healthy skepticism of too much government.”

So far, so good.  But Obama continues: “But there has always been another thread running throughout our history – a belief that we are all connected; and that there are some things we can only do together, as a nation.”  This is un-American, and it is a lie.  American unity doesn’t occur in opposition to free markets, but in defense of them.

This is typical Alinsky.  By purposefully confusing principled individualism with principled communitarianism, suggesting that Americans are characterized by both, Obama begins the slow march to fascism.  In this section of his speech, Obama essentially turned Americans into corporatists – free marketeers ready, willing, and able to turn over that free market to a well-organized state.

The Left has been atwitter in the wake of President Obama’s Libya speech, seizing upon his assertion of America’s “responsibility to protect” as evidence of a heartfelt belief in American exceptionalism. Of course, what has made America exceptional has been its political and economic liberty, not some esoteric calling to police the world. That said, the topic prompted Salon’s Glenn Greenwald to question whether America is exceptional at all.

The pervasiveness of this exceptionalism isn’t really surprising. It’s a common human desire to believe that one is special, unique, better than all others. Few people aspire to ordinariness. We view the world — physically and mentally — from our own personal perspective, and are inherently situated at the center of it. As tribal beings, we naturally believe that our customs and the beliefs with which we were inculcated from childhood are superior to Theirs. Personally, I’ve never understood how the following thought doesn’t obliterate — or at least severely dilute — the conviction of one’s exceptionalism:

The probability that I happened to be born in the greatest country on Earth — or, even more so, the greatest country ever to exist on Earth in all of human history — is minute. Isn’t it far more likely that I believe this because I was taught to, rather than because it’s true?

Consider the premise. Greenwald speaks of probability, as if the assertion of American exceptionalism were a bet before the flop, as if we don’t know whether the country we live in is any different from any other. This is reminiscent of the infamous Obama quote where the notion of American exceptionalism was compared to British or Greek exceptionalism, a tribal conceit, like the boasting of dueling sports fans.

Such comments are indicative of a troublesome worldview which ought to be rejected and shunned. It includes social constructionism and moral relativism. According to these notions, there is no objective truth, and therefore no inherent or absolute value. America is not exceptional among nations. Its people merely feel that way. So too do the people of Britain, Greece, and every other nation. None have any higher claim to greatness than another.

The reason this view is troublesome should be obvious. It does not regard the liberty and prosperity which result from the American way of life as greater than the despotism and stagnation which result from many others.

The notion of American exceptionalism is not a boastful romantic hope or ill-informed bet subject to probability. It is an analysis of results. It’s looking at your hand, once the betting is done and the cards are flipped, and knowing it is the best.

The perversion of objective American exceptionalism into some sort of esoteric higher calling, now termed the “responsibility to protect,”  has visited us before under another name – manifest destiny. Then, as now, it was used to justify war and propagate the notion of an American mission to enforce our values through might.

If this sounds similar to claims from the Left, take note. There is a crucial difference between condemning America in the Reverend Jeremiah Wright sense, pointing to expansionism absent any context as evidence of an overriding evil, and acknowledging it as a thread in a much larger tapestry. Frankly, the Left’s tendency to focus upon America’s history of expansion highlights the hypocrisy of this moment. After all, what is the “responsibility to protect” if not a modern retooling of the old expansionist claim. They are savages, and we shall force them to be like us.

We must untangle the truth of American exceptionalism from the notion that we must remake others in our image. It is not a conceit to look at cultural results and judge ours objectively superior. It is a conceit to imagine we may or can coerce those results from others. More, it presents a cogitative dissonance. The results of liberty cannot be forced. Is that not obvious?

Last week, The Heritage Foundation’s second annual “Protect America Month” came to a close.  The program was designed to express commitment to America’s national security, advocate for increased defense spending, point out the constitutional basis for government’s role in protecting America, and to examine the threats to the United States.  John Ashcroft, former Attorney General of the United States, delivered the closing speech.

Attorney General Ashcroft began by asserting his belief that “the defense of America is tantamount to the defense of freedom.  And freedom is worth defending.”  He astutely reviewed his understanding of the definition of freedom, and how American exceptionalism plays a vital role in contributing and sustaining freedom around the globe.

He rejected the common argument that freedom and national security must be balanced.  Rather, freedom is the highest value with no parallel.  However, in order to maintain it, it must be secured.  Therefore, the two are not counterweights to each other.  Rather, national security protects America’s freedom, and ensures that freedom stays intact.

Ashcroft explained that the ability to engage in the pursuit of happiness increases freedom, while the provision of happiness by the government impairs freedom, and often comes at a high cost.  In other words, when needs are converted into rights, freedom shrinks.  Most importantly, the imposition of that which is not wanted constitutes the denial of freedom regardless of the virtue of that which is being imposed.

Freedom is under attack.  Nine years after September 11, 2001, Americans have become complacent.  Many have a false sense of security.  But the former Attorney General encouraged the audience not to surrender to the terrorist threat, and always be mindful of those who sacrificed their lives for the cause of freedom.

Ashcroft believes that the number one responsibility of the federal government is to protect its citizens.  The way he believes national security is enforced is through the rule of law, so that people are on notice of what they can and cannot do.

In analyzing habeas corpus doctrine, the use of military tribunals and indefinite detention, Ashcroft reviewed numerous Supreme Court cases including Hamdi, Quirin, and Eisentrager.  He also discussed the DC Court of Appeals case, titled Maqaleh v Gates.

When asked about his positions on specific policy and legal matters, he emphasized the reasoning process that should support these decisions.  They included the following:

• Be aware that policies send a message that can deter behavior or invite behavior;
• Determine if the conduct in question constitutes a war crime or merely violates a domestic criminal statute;
• Ensure that all three branches of government are acting within their appropriate constitutional limits;
• Know that the executive branch can make faster decisions to ensure the protection of America’s national security than can the legislative branch;
• Acknowledge the fact that military tribunals, while operating under different rules than federal courts, still result in outcomes that are fair and respect the true facts;
• In deciding whether a defendant should be tried in a military tribunal versus a federal court, determine your objective.   If national security information in involved, minimize the release of this information to our enemies;
• If a person with US citizen status is fighting against the US with America’s enemies, perhaps he should be treated as an enemy;
• Laws should be clear and certain.  If the geographical location of the occurrence doesn’t provide clear rules, then look to the circumstances surrounding the case;
• America should make sure that she runs prisons only in locations where she can maintain control of what occurs within them;
• Finally, Americans should distinguish between detention for the purpose of punishment and detention for the purpose of removing enemy combatants from the stream of battle.

The former Attorney General also noted that America’s reckless financial conduct will have grave national security implications for future generations who might be unable to finance their defense.  Moreover, if America reveals a lack of self-sufficiency to the world by becoming a debtor to the world, it signals America’s weakness.  Funding national security should be one of government’s main priorities.

America’s current Attorney General, Eric Holder, appears to have no clear rules guiding his decisions in reference to which defendants go to a military tribunal versus a federal court.  His decisions appear to be arbitrary and capricious.  Though he is the head of the Department of Justice, national security does not seem to be his paramount priority.  He refuses to acknowledge the Islamist ideological threat, favors the closing of the Guantanamo Bay Detention Center, opposes the Patriot Act (responsible for disrupting numerous terrorist plots in the US) and is critical of enhanced interrogation techniques.  Instead, he has stated that engagement in “dialogue” with the Muslim community is a priority for his Department, as is the prosecution of so-called “hate crimes.”  Though he is not an expert in Islamic theology, he nevertheless asserts with seeming authority the claim that that those who commit terrorist acts in the name of Islam behave in a way that is “un-Islamic” and contrary to Islam’s actual teachings.

By contrast, John Ashcroft led America through its toughest times after the largest terrorist attack on US soil following September 11, 2001.  He made fighting terrorism his number one priority.  He reorganized DOJ to ensure that suspected terrorists were prosecuted when the evidence warranted it.  Under his leadership, DOJ dismantled numerous terrorist cells throughout the US and over 150 plots throughout the world.  Ashcroft’s role in the execution of the War on Terror was one of the most difficult of any cabinet member.

Ashcroft’s speech at the Heritage Foundation expressed a love of freedom, an appreciation of American exceptionalism, an understanding of the threats to liberty, respect for the law, Judeo-Christian values, and a deference to “we the people.”  The Left, of course, has consistently expressed its venom toward John Ashcroft and the entire War on Terror. But Ashcroft’s speech reminded me of the time after September 11, 2001, when, however briefly, the country came together to face our common enemies.  Our government united us in the cause for freedom and our shared American values.  My, how things have changed.

The Freedom Party of the anti-Islam MP Geert Wilders emerged as the third force in Dutch politics last night, more than doubling its number of seats in Parliament in the country's general elections.

Exit polls predicted that Mr Wilders would command 23 seats, up from 9 -- pushing the Christian Democrats, led by the outgoing Prime Minister Jan Peter Balkenende, into fourth place.

With the Dutch Labour Party running neck-and-neck with the cost-cutting right-wing Liberal Party (VVD), it was unclear who would form the next government.

A late rally by Labour, led by the former Mayor of Amsterdam, Job Cohen, saw them forecast to win 31 seats in the 150-member Parliament -- the same number as Mark Rutte's VVD party.

The VVD was expected to gain nine seats, not enough to claim the victory forecast by opinion polls in the run-up to an election that has left the complexion of the new Dutch Parliament split almost exactly between the Left and Right.

Mr Wilders, who wants to ban Muslim veils and the building of new mosques, is constitutionally bound to take part in coalition talks. He could be offered a place in a Cabinet chosen by Mr Rutte, who has said that the Freedom Party is "just another party", but Mr Cohen has ruled out on moral grounds sharing power with the controversial critic of Islam....

That should be "immoral grounds," but in any case, the dhimmis will not be able to ignore him. Congratulations, Geert!

Last weekend, the feds popped two more US citizens who yearned to kill their fellow Americans for Allah.  They hoped to join al-Shabab, Somali’s ruthless jihadis, but fantasized about slaughter right here at home.

And, once again, any mention of Islamist extremism was absent from government statements, as if these guys were just angry about parking tickets.

The would-be Times Square car bomber, the guess-what’s-in-my-knickers Christmas Day airline bomber, no end of got-‘em-in-time apprehensions, plus the Ft. Hood butcher, Major Nidal Hasan…and even the media barely hint at what all these fanatics have in common.

Dare to suggest that radical Islam might be to blame, and you’re a bigot.  Just as pointing out that Palestinian terrorism led to Israel’s hard line stand makes you a fascist.  But those who reject radical Islam’s role as the driving force behind today’s terrorism must answer one obvious question:

Where are the Christian terrorists?

The ignored persecution, deprivation and massacres aren’t in Gaza, the global left’s favorite petting zoo.  The cover-up victims are the Middle East’s Christians.

Set aside for now the vast Christian communities that once thrived between Morocco and Mesopotamia.  The multiple holocausts they suffered for over a thousand years at Muslim hands doesn’t fit the White-House-approved narrative.

Let’s concentrate on today—when the only country left in the Middle East in which Christians enjoy complete freedom of worship, freedom from secret police surveillance, forced conversions, pogroms or civil strife, is Israel.

But that won’t do, either.  Can’t make Israel the good guy.  So how about those “suffering Palestinians?”  You know, the folks that chick-lit Che Guevara, Rachel Corrie, sought to rescue from an Israeli bulldozer…

Well, the Palestinians who’ve suffered the most have been Christians. And it hasn’t been the Israelis who’ve been persecuting them.

Take the West Bank city of Bethlehem, the literal cradle (or manger) of Christianity.  A half century ago, its Arab population was 80% Christian.  Today, Christians make up no more than 15% of the locals, and their numbers continue to shrink.

Throughout the Palestinian territories, the once-vibrant Christian population is estimated to have collapsed to a mere 25,000.  Muslim rapes, murders, kidnappings, extortion, death threats and property theft are to blame.

Where are the Christian terrorists?

In neighboring Egypt, Christianity’s intellectual center in its formative centuries, centuries of Islamization reduced, but failed to eliminate the Christian faith.

Coptic Christians, with their ancient traditions, still make up as much as 15% of Egypt’s population, which is nearing 80 million.  But the faith is under siege again.  The Mubarak regime appears to have decided to let its mortal enemy, the Muslim Brotherhood, have some leash in the persecution department.

Copts suffer village pogroms, ghettoization in cities, and kidnappings and forced conversions (often of marriage-age girls).  They’re prevented from constructing new churches and suffer general discrimination.  Killings of Copts go uninvestigated by Egypt’s police.

Where are the Christian terrorists?

Then there’s Iraq, where a tragic unintended consequence of the removal of Saddam Hussein–the region’s worst mass murderer–has been the destruction of ancient Christian communities.

Prior to 2003, there were about a million Christians in Iraq.  Most are now refugees.  Successive Iraqi governments have shown little interest in protecting those who remain.  Leading churchmen have been assassinated, Christian families have been slaughtered, churches have been bombed and burned.  And we’ve done nothing—to avoid irritating Muslims.

Where are the Christian terrorists?

Given the excuses made for Islamist terror, shouldn’t we have seen a violent response by now?

Of course, none of this is an issue in Saudi Arabia, where the Christian (and Jewish) communities that thrived at the dawn of Islam were wiped out centuries ago.  Even Lebanon, long a state where Christians enjoyed religious freedom, suffers from the grim Islamist contagion.

The absence of Christian terrorism in the savagely anti-Christian Middle East goes beyond Christ’s call to “turn the other cheek.”  It further highlights extremist Islam as the source of today’s terror.

But Washington will continue to shut its eyes and bluster about the “legitimate aspirations of the Palestinian people,” etc., etc.  Dead Arab Christians are even less important than dead Jews.

Ralph Peters’ latest book is “Endless War.”

[Editor's note: This article was translated from Spanish into English by Mario from the website Portal of Ideas.]

Why don’t we see demonstrations in London, Paris and Barcelona against Islamic dictatorships? Or demonstrations against the Burmese dictatorship?

Why aren’t there demonstrations against the enslavement of millions of women who live without any legal protection?

Why aren’t there demonstrations against the use of children as human bombs where there is conflict with Islam?

Why has there been no leadership in support of the victims of the Islamic dictatorship in Sudan?

Why is there never any outrage against the acts of terrorism committed against Israel?

Why is there no outcry by the European Left against Islamic fanaticism? Why doesn’t it defend Israel’s right to exist?

Why confuse support of the Palestinian cause with the defense of Palestinian terrorism?

Finally, the million dollar question: Why is the Left in Europe and around the world obsessed with the two most solid democracies, the United States and Israel, and not with the worst dictatorships on the planet? The two most solid democracies, who have suffered the bloodiest attacks of terrorism, and the Left doesn’t care.

And then, to the concept of freedom. In every pro-Palestinian European forum I hear the Left yelling with fervor: “We want freedom for the people!” Not true. They are never concerned with freedom for the people of Syria or Yemen or Iran or Sudan, or other such nations. And they are never preoccupied when Hamas destroys freedom for the Palestinians. They are only concerned with using the concept of Palestinian freedom as a weapon against Israeli freedom. The resulting consequence of these ideological pathologies is the manipulation of the press.

The international press does major damage when reporting on the question of the Israeli-Palestinian issue. On this topic they don’t inform, they propagandize. When reporting about Israel, the majority of journalists forget the reporter code of ethics. And so, any Israeli act of self-defense becomes a massacre, and any confrontation, genocide. So many stupid things have been written about Israel, that there aren’t any accusations left to level against her. At the same time, this press never discusses Syrian and Iranian interference in propagating violence against Israel; the indoctrination of children and the corruption of the Palestinians. And when reporting about victims, every Palestinian casualty is reported as tragedy and every Israeli victim is camouflaged, hidden or reported about with disdain.

And let me add on the topic of the Spanish Left. Many are the examples that illustrate the anti-Americanism and anti-Israeli sentiments that define the Spanish left. For example, one of the leftist parties in Spain has just expelled one of its members for creating a pro-Israel website. I quote from the expulsion document: “Our friends are the people of Iran, Libya and Venezuela, oppressed by imperialism, and not a Nazi state like Israel.”

In another example, the socialist mayor of Campozuelos changed Shoah Day, commemorating the victims of the Holocaust, with Palestinian Nabka Day, which mourns the establishment of the State of Israel, thus showing contempt for the six million European Jews murdered in the Holocaust. Or in my native city of Barcelona, the city council decided to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the creation of the State of Israel, by having a week of solidarity with the Palestinian people. Thus, they invited Leila Khaled, a noted terrorist from the 70’s and current leader of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine, a terrorist organization so described by the European Union, which promotes the use of bombs against Israel. And so on and so on.

This politically correct way of thinking has even polluted the speeches of president Zapatero. His foreign policy falls within the lunatic Left, and on issues of the Middle East, he is unequivocally pro-Arab. I can assure you that in private, Zapatero places on Israel the blame for the conflict in the Middle East, and the policies of foreign minister Moratinos reflect this. The fact that Zapatero chose to wear a kafiah in the midst of the Lebanon conflict is no coincidence; it’s a symbol.

Spain has suffered the worst terrorist attack in Europe and it is in the crosshairs of every Islamic terrorist organization. As I wrote before, they kill us will cell phones hooked to satellites connected to the Middle Ages. And yet the Spanish Left is the most anti-Israeli in the world.

And then it says it is anti-Israeli because of solidarity. This is the madness I want to denounce.

Conclusion:

I am not Jewish. Ideologically I am Left and by profession a journalist. Why am I not as anti-Israeli as my colleagues? Because as a non-Jew I have the historical responsibility to fight against Jewish hatred and currently against the hatred for their historic homeland, Israel. To fight against anti-Semitism is not the duty of the Jews, it is the duty of the non-Jews.

As a journalist it is my duty to search for the truth beyond prejudice, lies and manipulations. The truth about Israel is not told. As a person from the Left who loves progress, I am obligated to defend liberty, culture, civic education for children, coexistence and the laws that the Tablets of the Covenant made into universal principles. Principles that Islamic fundamentalism systematically destroys. That is to say that as a non-Jew, journalist and lefty I have a triple moral duty with Israel, because if Israel is destroyed, liberty, modernity and culture will be destroyed too.

The struggle of Israel, even if the world doesn’t want to accept it, is the struggle of the world.

Pilar Rahola is a Spanish politician, journalist and activist. She is a passionate defender of the United States and Israel and an indefatigable fighter against anti-Semitism. All of this despite being ideologically from the left. Her articles are published in Spain and throughout some of the most important newspapers in Latin America. She is the recipient of major awards by Jewish organizations.