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.

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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.

Can Islamic jihad be resisted simply on the basis of Western secular values? Some readers of my posts on the role of Christianity in resisting Islam have objected that bringing Christianity into the debate only muddies the water. As one reader wrote, “the anti-jihad movement can better be served if blatant theocons stay away.”

A number of important individuals in what might loosely be called the resistance movement do seem to believe that secular values are sufficient to rally citizens to a defense of Western civilization. A good example of this belief is the 2006 manifesto, “Together, facing the new totalitarianism,” which was signed by Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Ibn Warraq, Salman Rushdie, and others. The manifesto calls for “resistance to religious totalitarianism and for the promotion of freedom, equal opportunity, and secular values for all.” The document also speaks of “universal values,” “universal rights,” and “Enlightenment” with a capital “E.”

But how sturdy are Enlightenment values once they are cut off from their Christian roots? Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s own experience provides some perspective. In her autobiography, Infidel, she tells how, after escaping Somalia to the Netherlands, she fell in love with the thinkers of the Enlightenment. At the same time she became an atheist—rejecting not just Islam, but all religions (although she willingly admits that Jews and Christians have a more humane concept of God). Of Holland she wrote, “Society worked without reference to God, and it seemed to function perfectly.”

But the problem with substituting Enlightenment humanism for religion jumps out, if not from every page of Infidel, at least from many pages. On the one hand, Holland is “the peak of civilization,” and “no nation in the world is more deeply attached to freedom of expression than the Dutch.” On the other hand, her colleagues keep warning her to keep her thoughts to herself, and in the end, enlightened Holland forces her out of the Netherlands precisely for freely expressing her opinions about Muslim treatment of women. Ironically, Hirsi Ali’s next port of refuge was the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank which numbers quite a few traditionalist Christians among its scholars.

Others, such as Oriana Fallaci, Geert Wilders, and Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff have discovered that “enlightened” but post-Christian Europe is not nearly as friendly to freedom of expression as one might expect to be the case in the birthplace of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment was an important civilizational advance, but of late it seems to have gone a bit wobbly. Why is that?

One possible answer is that the core Enlightenment values are inextricably tied to Christian values. This view has been put forward most forcefully on the Continent in recent years by Marcello Pera (former President of the Italian Senate, and an agnostic) and by Benedict XVI (not an agnostic). They have argued that the Enlightenment grew out of Christianity organically, as a tree grows from its roots. Cut off from its roots the tree dies.

In this view the rights of man are based on a belief in the importance of man. The belief that ordinary individuals have a value and dignity of their own apart from their membership in a tribe or a society has its origin in the Judeo-Christian declaration that man is made in the image of God. Thus, if you take away God, you take away the foundation of human importance. As Thomas Jefferson undoubtedly discovered while composing the Declaration of Independence, it’s a bit difficult to establish the case for human rights without reference to the Creator.  Purely secular societies can only assume human dignity and human rights as a given. We tend to forget that these concepts are now a given because they were given to the world by Christians. Before Christianity, the idea that all human beings are endowed with intrinsic value was not considered “self-evident,” it was considered ludicrous. Espousing human equality was a good way to get yourself laughed out of polite pagan society. Human dignity may seem self-evident to us now, but that is because the Christian moral view became internalized over the centuries. Gladiatorial combats and slavery didn’t go out of fashion because societies evolved but because people began to see one another in the light of the Christian revelation.

Of course, not everyone sees it that way. Some seem to think that Enlightenment humanism came out of nowhere, thanks to spontaneous advances in science, reason, and ethics. In this view, Enlightenment values can get along fine on their own without reference to God. But then you’re still faced with explaining how it is that these values have fallen on hard times precisely in those places that might legitimately be called post-Christian. Freedom of speech and expression, freedom of the press, and freedom of religion are defended much more vigorously in still-Christian America than in post-Christian France or Holland. For that matter, there’s more freedom of speech in Bible-belt America than in your average American university. With their speech codes and “hate speech” rules and their habit of disinviting “controversial” speakers, universities are among the least free institutions in society. And it’s no coincidence that most of them can be described as post-Christian, and in some cases, anti-Christian. There is also, of course, an increasingly anti-Semitic climate on American campuses.

What happened in the universities is essentially what happened in Europe. Both suffered a loss of faith (recall that many prestigious universities began as seminaries or denominational colleges), and in the process of losing their religion both became increasingly uninterested in cultivating or protecting genuine freedoms. Moreover, like post-Christian Europe, the post-Christian university has shown little ability to resist Islamization. Thanks to Saudi money and well-organized Muslim student associations, many universities are beginning to act like apologists for the Wahabbi faith.

Judging by the sorry records of the highly secularized European state and the highly secularized American university, it might not be a good idea to place all your bets on “secular values for all” as the main point of resistance to totalitarian Islam. Ayaan Hirsi Ali deserves the gratitude of all for calling attention to the abuse of Muslim women, but she’s wrong to think that a rootless Enlightenment is going to bring them liberation. Likewise, we owe a lot to Ibn Warraq for his penetrating critique of Islam, but he’s mistaken to think that the universal values enshrined in the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights would survive in the thoroughly secularized type of society he seems to favor. If these values are universal and self-evident, why is it that half the world doesn’t subscribe to them? Warraq seems not to have noticed that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights was composed for the most part by individuals who had grown up in Christian cultures, and had inherited a social conscience that had been formed by the Judeo-Christian tradition.

Two of the chief framers, Rene Cassin and Dr. Charles Malik, made no secret of the influence Christian and Jewish beliefs had on their thinking.  In a 1969 speech to the Decalogue Lawyer’s Society, Cassin, a Jew, outlined in detail how Jewish and Christian thought had paved the way for the Declaration.  It’s also telling that while drafting the final version of the Declaration he received advice and encouragement from Cardinal Roncalli (later Pope John XXIII), then the Apostolic Nuncio in Paris. Malik, who later served as President of the UN General Assembly, was a Greek Orthodox philosopher and theologian from Lebanon and the author of numerous commentaries on the Bible and on the early Church Fathers. While making his arguments to the drafting committee he was in the habit of quoting from Thomas Aquinas, the medieval theologian. Jacques Maritain, the eminent Catholic philosopher was also actively involved in the work of the committee, as well as the UNESCO committee which laid the groundwork for the Declaration. Eleanor Roosevelt, the Chairperson of the drafting committee later observed that the Declaration reflected “the true spirit of Christianity.” In short, although the Declaration of Human Rights makes no mention of God, the fingerprints of a certain religious tradition are all over it.

Western culture—indeed the whole world—owes a lot to the Enlightenment, but it’s important to remember that at crucial historical junctures it was Christian activists working on Christian principles who did most of the heavy lifting. Christian Evangelicals were at the forefront of the movement to abolish the slave trade; the Civil Rights movement was galvanized by the Reverend Martin Luther King and other Christian leaders; the end of Communism in Eastern Europe was brought about in large part by the work of the Catholic Solidarity Movement, of Pope John Paul II, and of numerous priests and pastors in Poland, Czechoslovakia, East Germany, and other countries who kept alive the spirit of resistance.

At the risk of oversimplifying things, it might be useful to think in terms of two Enlightenments: the Enlightenment which remained nourished by the Judeo-Christian tradition, and the Enlightenment which cut itself off from God. The former led to the American Revolution, the Declaration of Independence, the abolition of slavery, and the Civil Rights movement. The latter led to the French Revolution, to the Reign of Terror, to the suppression of church by state, to Marx and Nietzsche, to Socialism, and Communism, and more recently to the Alice-in-Wonderland world of cultural relativism where human rights are looked upon as relative rather than universal.

It’s unlikely that a pure secularism—even a humanistic, enlightened secularism—can be the foundation for resisting an aggressive Islam. It’s precisely “enlightened” secularism that produced the spiritual and population vacuum in Europe which is now being filled by Islam. John Lennon invited us to imagine “no religion”… “nothing to kill or die for.” In Europe they don’t have to imagine anymore. Having lost their religion, many are discovering that post-Christian values may not, after all, be worth fighting and dying for—all the more so for those who are getting on in years, and are hoping the really bad things won’t happen in their lifetimes. The new motto for many middle –aged Europeans seems to be “Apres moi le dhimmitude.”

Which culture is more likely to protect human rights and freedoms against totalitarian movements? A thoroughly secular culture which has cut itself off from a transcendent reference point? Or a culture imbued with the Judeo-Christian belief that human beings possess an inalienable, God-given dignity? It’s one of those non-academic questions to which the wrong answer might prove fatal. And final exam time is fast approaching.

William Kilpatrick’s articles have appeared in Front Page Magazine, First Things, Catholic World Report, the National Catholic Register, Jihad Watch, World, and Investor’s Business Daily.

Iran has warned that it could send Revolutionary Guard naval units to escort humanitarian aid convoys seeking to break the Israeli blockade of Gaza - a move that would certainly be challenged by Israel....

"Iran's Revolutionary Guard naval forces are prepared to escort the peace and freedom convoys that carry humanitarian assistance for the defenceless and oppressed people of Gaza with all their strength," pledged Hojjatoleslam Ali Shirazi, Khamenei's personal representative to the guards corps.

The threat came as the Israeli prime minister, Binyamin Netanyahu, dismissed a UN proposal for an international commission to investigate last week's commando assault on aid ships, in which nine people died. Another aid ship, the Rachel Corrie, carrying Irish and other peace activists, was boarded peacefully by Israeli forces on Saturday, escorted to the port of Ashdod, and its passengers deported.

Netanyahu has defended Israel's right to maintain the blockade by arguing that without it Gaza would become an "Iranian port" and Hamas missiles would strike Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. Israel's undeclared aim is to weaken or bring down the Hamas government.

Iran continued to exploit the "freedom flotilla" affair to lambast Israel. Its foreign minister, Manuchehr Mottaki, told the Organisation of the Islamic Conference in Jeddah on Sunday that Israel's crime was "another instance of the Zionist regime's brazen and merciless treatment of Muslims, especially the oppressed Palestinian people."...

Now there's a fine example of projection.

Shirazi said Iran should encourage international efforts to break the blockade. "We should expose our enemies to spontaneous global action and not let them achieve their heinous goals," he was quoted as saying by the semi-official Mehr news agency.

Iran's Revolutionary Guards, which have a command structure separate from the regular armed forces, are fiercely loyal to the supreme leader. Khamenei has attacked the raid as a "mistake" that "showed how barbaric the Zionists are"....

Amir Abbas Fakhravar, 35, is a “graduate” of the infamous Evin prison in Tehran.  His friendly and youthful exterior hides a painful period of torture and isolation for five years – including 8 months in solitary confinement. When you ask Amir about his state of mind following his harrowing experience, he shrugs his shoulders saying “they broke my wrist, my knee, and few bones, but never broke my spirit.”

Fakhravar arrived in the U.S. four years ago and found no coherent voices speaking for the Iranian opposition movement.  “I thought that the Iranian opposition had an organization here, but nothing existed in 2006.” And when he gathered some of the opposition figures, he quickly learned that they had little information about the real situation in Iran.  Even more dismaying, according to Fakhravar, was the ignorance of U.S. policy makers regarding Iran.

With mentoring from Richard Perle, former Assistant Secretary of Defense in the Reagan administration (1981-1987), and currently a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and critical help from Philadelphia’s Craig Snider, who has dedicated himself to fight for freedom and democracy for the Iranian people, Fakhravar established the Iranian Freedom Institute (IFI).

The Iranian Freedom Institute – a Washington DC based think tank, has set its goal to inform and educate American policy-makers, and the public in general, on the real state-of-affairs inside Iran.  Utilizing the latest technology, the IFI hopes to influence U.S. policy towards Iran, and simultaneously, educate the freedom-loving people of Iran who are living under a brutal dictatorship.

Affiliated with the IFI is the Confederation of Iranian Students (CIS) – created by Fakhravar and Arzhang Davoodi, a teacher, writer and the co- founder of Confederation of Iranian Students (who also spent six years in Islamic Republic jails and still has nine more years to serve).  Earlier in 1994 while he was in medical school (he subsequently graduated from law school), Fakhravar helped in establishing the Independent Student movement in Tehran.  Fakhravar and Davoodi proceeded to form the nucleus of an independent worldwide student organization.  In 2002 they organized a student conference and three-years later, they launched CIS, which today has a membership of 6200 students.

The Confederation of Iranian Students should not be confused with the Islamic Republic’s student organization cautions Fakhravar, which was created by the mullah regime, paid for by them, and run by them, according to Fakhravar.

One of the CIS’s goals is to bring down the Islamic Republic dictatorship according to Fakhravar.  “We have a three step plan,” he says.  1. Show the Iranian people and the world that the ruling Iranian regime is not democratic but rather a brutal dictatorship.  “We have already succeeded on that part of the plan,” Fakhravar added.

The second goal is to “cut the lifeline of the mullahs in power” by pushing for a worldwide embargo on Iranian oil.  The $83 billion Iran earns from its oil sales is the only revenue that enables the Islamic Republic of Iran to pay for the nuclear program and provide the Revolutionary guards (RG) – the regime’s praetorian guards- with high incomes, which in turn insures their loyalty to the regime.

According to Fakhravar “if the regime fails to pay the RG salaries – which are three times the average, the RG, who have long lost their revolutionary fervor and have gotten used to the ‘good life,’ are more than likely to abandon the regime.”

Oil revenue is also used by the Islamic Republic to fund Hezbollah and Hamas operations against Israel, to subvert the Sunni-Arab Gulf regimes and, to build cells in Latin America. “Our aim is to request that the governments of the U.S. and Canada impose sanctions on North American and European companies who buy oil from the Iranian regime,” Fakhravar stated.  He added, “We also plan to present such proposals to the G-8 and the G-20 to place sanctions on their respective companies.”

The third part of the plan, as Fakhravar sees it, is to build a free, democratic, and secular Iran.  “We need in addition to our existing website to set up Internet, satellite TV, and radio stations in order to educate the Iranian people inside of Iran, and the opposition parties outside of Iran. “

According to Fakhravar, the Iranian opposition groups “are confused and they don’t know what they want.”  He quickly added, “We wrote a manifesto or call it a constitution for a new Iran.”  Fakhravar recruited lawyers from the Green movement as well as a number of judges to draft a new constitution for Iran.

The Green Movement in Iran brought 4.5 million demonstrators into the streets of Tehran last June and Fakhravar is confident that the people of Iran, especially the younger generation, want a change. He reminds those he speaks with that, “The Iranian people have been repressed for over 30 years, and they want freedom.”  Many of the young people in Iran are turned off by Islam as a result of the corruption and abuses by the Islamic regime.  In Iranian schools, Shiite-Islam is presented as superior to all other religions and they are taught that killing Jews, who are presented as sub-humans, is permitted.  Fakhravar has no doubt that the Khamenei/Ahmadinejad regime would test a nuclear bomb on Israel.

Iran is, however, a nation of young people.  70% of Iranians are under the age of 35 and these young people respect Israel and love America.   In recent demonstrations the young protesters used posters with a modification of the regime’s slogans – instead of “Down with Israel,” they crossed out the word Israel and replaced it with Russia.

During last year’s demonstrations in Tehran following the sham elections which gave Ahmadinejad a second term as President of Iran, the Green Youth shouted “Obama, are you with them (the regime) or with us.”  Obama’s decision to continue to negotiate with the Khamenei/Ahmadinejad Islamic regime gave this evil regime legitimacy, according to Fakhravar.

Asked about where he sees Iran in five years, Fakhravar replied, “We will have a free, democratic and secular Iran.  It will be a friend of Israel and an ally of the U.S. ”

(Photo courtesy Pamela Geller, who has many more here.)

They started showing up long before the rally began at noon today. They 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. They were lovers of freedom.

An hour before the rally began, they numbered 1,000. Zuccotti Park's owners sided with the Islamic supremacists and withdrew their permit to allow us to gather there, and so the police repeatedly requested that people leave the park and move into the pens that the police had set up at Church and Liberty streets. Before noon, however, the pens were full -- and so, with free citizens having every legal right to be in the park, the park became a site for the rally despite the best efforts of its clueless dhimmi owners.

By the time the rally was in full swing, the crowd filled the pens, the park, and the other side of the street. 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 Sharia, and their anger at Islamic supremacism and insult to the memories of those murdered on 9/11 that this mosque represents.

And we had a full spectrum of top quality speakers. There were 9/11 family members, including C. Lee Hanson, who lost his son, daughter-in-law and granddaughter on 9/11. There were people who experienced the oppression of Sharia firsthand, such as the Egyptian ex-Muslim Nonie Darwish, the Sudanese ex-slave Simon Deng, and the Hindu human rights activist Babu Suseelan. There was Dennis McKenna, who worked recovering remains from the ruins of the World Trade Center; Alan T. DeVona, the patrol sergeant on duty on September 11, 2001; and Keith LeBow, an ironworker who was one of the first responders on the scene on September 11. There was Herb London of the Hudson Institute and Beverly Carlson of the Band of Mothers -- and a host of other speakers, all lovers of America and lovers of freedom.

The theme among all the speakers was common: the mosque is an insult to the Americans who were murdered there. It is a manifestation of a radically intolerant belief system that is incompatible with the freedoms guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution. And even with all the political elites against us, and the mainstream media indifferent or compromised (5,000 to 10,000 people at the rally, and no mainstream media coverage!), we will prevail. All we have on our side is the truth.

Pamela Geller did interviews with Al-Jazeera, AP, Chilean television, Italian television and many others; I was interviewed by Italian television and TV Asia. ABC? NBC? CBS? CNN? Even FOX? AWOL.

And the truth is powerful. The forecast had called for rain, but it didn't start raining in New York until after the rally had broken up. Many took it as a sign that we represented the cause of right and justice. And even with all the indifference of the politicians and the media, we sent a signal today: we will not let this injustice stand. We will be rallying again in September, and again when construction begins on the mega-mosque. We will be filing suit against the Federal Government, asking that the Burlington Coat Factory site where the mega-mosque is going to be built be designated a war memorial, a la Pearl Harbor, Gettysburg, etc., because of the part of one of the 9/11 airplanes that crashed into the roof there, and that is in the makeshift mosque that Muslims are using there now.

And above all: we will never give up.

The former speaker of Iran's Parliament, Gholam-Ali Haddad-Adel, says the Israeli assault on the Freedom Flotilla is "just the beginning of the end for Israel."

He made the remarks on Saturday during a meeting with Press TV correspondent Hassan Ghani, a Freedom Flotilla activist who was recently released by the Israelis.

Haddad-Adel said the attack "opened a new horizon to the world" and that the world can now see the true nature of the Israelis.

He added, "The Israelis showed that they are enemies of humanity, not only Arabs or Muslims, but every human being." [...]

"I believe that tomorrow will be another day for Israelis. They are condemned by the whole world. One of the results that we can gain from what happened is the point that before this massacre, the Israelis, the Americans, the British government, and the French government were claiming that Iran is the most important danger for the Middle East and for the whole world, although, they knew that we don't want to make bombs. After what happened to the Freedom Flotilla, everybody is asking whether Israel is the real danger for the world and for peace. Which is the real danger?

In the Family Way is our sub-blog devoted to bringing the Freedom Center’s messages to parents and families.

Rhonda Robinson is the associate editor in charge of it and she needs a few more people on her team who are concerned about families and eager to write about politics. The sub-blog also focuses on examining the intersection of religion and politics. Its writers will frequently challenge the so-called “Religious Left” who have hijacked religion for political purposes.

If you would like to apply to blog for In the Family Way then please contact us below. Tell us about you, your writing, and what you’d like to bring to the publication. High-potential contacts will be given the opportunity to apply