David Horowitz delivered the following speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center
retreat in Santa Barbara, which was held at the Four Seasons Resort May
30-June 1. -- The Editors.
Evan Sayet:
It's good to see a crowd like this, as usual. It's great that we, as
conservatives, are gathering to talk about the things that are important to
us and all the way across the country, the leftists are gathering to talk
about what's important to them. It's
called the premiere of Sex and the City.
I
know that we're going to be talking a little bit about immigration later
on. This is all I really want to see
happen.
David,
I want to thank you once again for having me be a part of this. Last night meant so much to me to see that
you don't hold grudges, that you had Andy Granatelli in the audience, that you
had Andy Granatelli here because I know back in the days when you were SDS and
he was STP --
At
any rate, I’m going to bring up your main speaker, your host for this
event. He's a gentleman who did me the
honor of naming me in the title of one of his books, Hating Whitey. I believe
that's in all of our kits, isn't that, David?
This is a gentleman, who, the first time I met you, and I thanked you
from the stage, I said he's a man who went from radical to radical. Everybody, Mr. David Horowitz.
David Horowitz:
Thank you, Evan. This is a nice
turnout for so early in the morning.
We're
in an election year where a hawkish presidential candidate should win in a
walk. Al Qaeda has been roundly defeated
in Iraq. It's on the run. Its leadership has been destroyed. Acts of terror these days are videos which it
sends to Al Jazeera. The Iraqi military
is more and more in control of the security in the country. What the Al Qaeda leaders have called the
central front in the War on Terror, which is Iraq,
has been denied to them and denied to Iran. And, yet, when McCain runs as a supporter of
the war, that's considered a tough argument for him.
I've
written this book Party of Defeat,
and I guess if you just saw the title, it might be about the Republicans. So, I want to talk a little bit about how we
got here but just to set the scenery first for a while on what exactly happened
in this war.
Sean
Hannity has given a nice blurb to this book, saying it's about the greatest
betrayal, political betrayal in American history, which it is.
The
first president to call for the violent removal of Saddam Hussein was Bill
Clinton, which he did in 1998. He authored and signed the Iraqi Liberation Act,
which basically said anybody who wants to overthrow Saddam Hussein by violence,
we will provide military and economic support.
The
entire Clinton national security teams -- State, Defense, CIA -- endorsed the war and the invasion of Iraq. The majority of Democratic senators voted for
the war in Iraq,
including, of course, Hillary Clinton and John Kerry and John Edwards. And, yet, within three months of the start of
the war, they had turned around 180 degrees and attacked the war.
Now,
we live in a democracy, and criticism of government policy is the air we
breathe. It's essential to a
democracy. And, of course, criticism of
war policy is also important because the stakes are so high.
But
criticism is one thing, and sabotage is quite another. In July 2003, that's three months after the
fall of Baghdad or the liberation of Baghdad, the Democratic
National Committee ran a national television ad which said, "Read his
lips. President Bush deceives the
American people." And the gravament
of the ad has been the theme of the Democratic attacks on the war for the last
five years. Bush lied, people died.
Iraq
was no threat. United States,
in other words, attacked a country that posed no threat to it and did so by
deceiving the American people. In other
words, the United States
is the aggressor in the war. In other
words, the United States
is a war criminal.
Never
in the history of this country have we faced a foreign adversary, let alone one
as monstrous as the regime of Saddam Hussein and had a major political party
accuse us of being the bad guys, of us of being the aggressor, of us being the
international war criminal. The
Democrats did this, said Bush lied. That
was the key to the argument because otherwise they'd have to explain why they
supported the war.
And
just to forecast what I’m going to say throughout this and in the end, they
were able to do this because of the ineptitude of the Bush administration
itself. The greatest failure of the Bush
administration has been the failure to provide political support to our troops
in Iraq and to the war in Iraq, and, of
course, then ultimately to the War on Terror.
Bush
lied, people died -- this is itself the biggest lie of the war, that Bush lied
to deceive the Democrats into supporting the war, let alone the American people,
because every Democratic senator, every single one who voted for or against the
war had on his or her desk a 100-page report called the National Intelligence Estimate summarizing all of our intelligence
on Iraq.
We
live in a democracy, and that means that the opposition party gets to see all
our secrets. The Senate Intelligence
Committee has oversight over the intelligence agencies. The head of the CIA reports to the Senate
Intelligence Committee. They're the
authority. John Kerry sat on that
committee, Diane Feinstein, Jay Rockefeller, and other Democrats. If any of them had any question about the
intelligence on Iraq,
all they had to do was ask it, and the answer would be on their desk within 24
hours. And this is only one of the big
Democratic lies about this war.
Another
lie is, of course, that Iraq
was no threat. Well, if Iraq was no threat in 2003, how do you explain
that Afghanistan
was a threat on September 10, 2001? Al
Gore has said Iraq, in his
recent book, The Assault on Reason --
which is a perfect description of the book -- he said, "Iraq
posed no threat because it was a fragile and unstable nation."
Well,
Afghanistan is a much poorer
country than Iraq,
practically just out of the Stone Age.
It is fragile and unstable, driven by tribal rivalries. Yet, it didn't invade two countries the way Iraq had. It didn't use poison gas on its own people
the way Saddam Hussein had. It hadn't
tried to assassinate an American president the way Saddam Hussein had. But it did provide refuge for Osama bin Laden
and Al Qaeda.
And
what 9/11 showed, and what the Democrats are in absolute denial over, is that a
very poor and fragile nation, because it has sovereignty, if it provides
protection, provides an operating base for an organization like Al Qaeda, it
can kill 3,000 Americans in half an hour, could've killed 100,000 in half an
hour, and was able to do what the Japanese and the Germans could not do
throughout six years of the Second World War, which is to attack America on its
mainland. That is the danger that we face. That's why we had to take down Saddam
Hussein.
Actually,
Al Gore was saying something quite different in 2002. On February 2, 2002, which was right after
the "Axis of Evil" speech, Bush -- the buildup to this war was a year
coming, and really, the first announcement that Bush made of his intentions was
the State of the Union speech in January 2002.
We went to war the following year in March.
What
Bush said was there's an axis of evil in the world, and America is not going to
allow itself to be attacked again as it was on 9/11, and he puts Saddam Hussein
on note that he'd better comply with the arms control agreements from the Gulf
War or else.
Al
Gore -- the Democrats, of course, a lot of them got all hot and bothered over
that the same way they got hot and bothered when Ronald Reagan said the Soviet Union was an evil empire because, of course, we're
the evil empire. That's what they
think.
But
Al Gore gave his first foreign policy speech after the 2000 election. By the way, has anybody noticed that the
Democrats -- remember they were all for the popular vote in 2000 as against the
electoral vote, and now Barack Obama is going to be nominated by what
essentially is an electoral vote? Enter the delusion that Democrats have any
principles whatsoever except power.
Al
Gore gave a speech in which he supported the notion that Saddam was evil, and
he specifically made reference to the "axis of evil" and said that
was a good way to describe these countries.
But he also said in that speech, and I quote, "Iraq was a virulent threat -- or is a virulent
threat in a class by itself, and the United States is justified in
pushing the limits in taking down or reining in Saddam Hussein."
The
third lie of this war is that you can support the troops but not the war. No, you can't. You cannot support the troops if you don't
support their mission. You cannot tell a
19-year-old who's risking his life in Iraq, surrounded by terrorists, that he's
with the bad guys, that he's the aggressor, that he's the occupier, that it's
the wrong war in the wrong place, he shouldn't be there, and not sap his
fighting morale, which means getting him killed. If you think that your cause isn't just and
you're out there, you take away from a soldier his main strength. You also deprive him of allies, and you also
encourage his enemies, and that's what the Democrats have done for the last
five years.
What
changed their attitude on Iraq? In 2003, March, they supported the war. In July, they were against the war and saying
that it was basically a rape of Iraq. That's basically what their line was. What changed?
Well, nothing in Iraq
and nothing in those three months. We
had a lightning war, we took down Saddam Hussein, and we were just beginning to
face the resistance after the war was over.
It was a time to rally around the president and call for more troops if
that was what was necessary or whatever other constructive criticism you could
offer.
What
changed for the Democrats was that a left-wing extremist named Howard Dean was
about to win the Democratic Party nomination.
He got 45% in the MoveOn.org poll.
That's what changed the Democratic Party. The anti-Vietnam left had powered the Howard
Dean campaign to a front-runner position, and that's when Kerry and Edwards
flipped.
And
if things in the world were right and we had a well-ordered society, John Kerry
and John Edwards, for flipping 180 degrees on a war vote, would have been
drummed out of public life forever.
Instead, this is the -- theirs is the theme now of the Democratic Party,
including Hillary, who voted for the war but now says it was George Bush's
war.
What
the Democratic Party has done for five years is conducted a psychological
warfare campaign against this country.
If you read the psychological warfare textbooks, the first task of a psychological
warfare team is to destroy the credibility and moral character of the opposing commander
in chief, to destroy the rationale, the justice of the opposing side's war, and
that's all the Democratic Party has done for the last five years.
And,
of course, they've been aided and abetted in this by the nation's press. The New
York Times, the Washington Post,
and the L.A. Times have destroyed at
least three major national security programs by leaking classified information
to the enemy. You're all familiar with
these. One was the NSA program -- the
NSA program for monitoring the calls. When
they captured Sheikh Khalid Muhammad, for example, the mastermind of 9/11, they
got his computer. They got Ramsey Youssef's
computer, and on the computer is a little phone book. So the -- our intelligence agencies were
putting the names of the contacts of Sheikh Khalid Muhammad and these other Al
Qaeda terrorists, just put it into a computer and you monitor all international
phone calls to see who they're contacting.
That's what the program was.
The
only way the program could work is if it were secret because once you tell
them, they take measures to avoid it, which is the same thing that happened
with the program to monitor the flow of terrorist money with the cooperation of
international financial institutions.
The
Bush administration, when they were told by The
Times' editors that they were going to
print these stories, begged them not to do it because it would jeopardize the
lives of 300 million Americans, and of course, our forces overseas. The New
York Times went ahead and printed this classified information.
The
government officials -- and we have a huge problem in our government in the
State department in the CIA of people like Valerie Plame and Joseph Wilson, who
are lifelong members of the Left, who want this country to lose -- certainly,
they want the Bush administration to lose the War on Terror and are prepared to
break this country's laws and commit acts of treason in order to sabotage our
programs. The CIA people or whoever it
was who leaked this information about these programs committed treason. The New
York Times aided and abetted that treason by publishing it. The Bush administration was so spineless in
fighting this domestic sabotage movement that it didn't subpoena the editors of
the New York Times. Why wasn't there a Justice Department
subpoena for the editors of The Times
and the Post that say give up the
names of these people who have violated our national security and committed treason.
They
did that with -- to protect Valerie Plame.
They put Judith Miller in jail, the Times
reporter, to get her to divulge who leaked the name of Valerie Plame. Of course, we now know that the leakage came
from a saboteur of the President's policy in the State Department, Richard
Armitage. And who did he leak it to? He
leaked it to a conservative journalist who happens to be an opponent of the war
in Iraq.
Now,
again, we live in a democracy, and that means we have a procedure for changing
policy. If you don't like a policy, you
argue, you persuade the American people, you elect a different government,
different representatives, and they change the policy. That's the way it's done. You don't publish national security secrets
on the front pages of your newspaper so that the terrorists can read it and
change their method of operation and go on with their bloody business, but
that's exactly what's happened.
And
the deafening silence of the Bush administration over these acts is why we're
in the really troublesome position we're in because we have the possibility now
of electing as president of the United States a man who came out of the
communist movement. We have -- at
Discoverthenetworks.org, which is one of our websites, which is an encyclopedia
of the Left -- we have a feature called Barack's
World. If you just read the people
that he has been associated -- it's not like associated like he signed a
statement against capital punishment and a member of the Communist Party also
signed it. This is not what we're
talking about. These were his political
allies. These were the people who made
his career. And you will find among them
one state legislator in Illinois,
Alice Palmer, is a Stalinist. I mean
this, in the late '80s, was defending of the Soviet Union. This is very, very troubling. He had just made David Bonier his Middle East expert. David Bonier
is a radical. Throughout the '80s he
was supporting the communist guerillas in El Salvador,
and he was one of the three who went to Iraq to say that Saddam Hussein
isn't such a bad guy and our president is a liar right before the war, which
was another act of treason.
Democrats
say, "Oh, you're questioning our patriotism." Well, what else is one to do? I mean you
have a retched former president who is told by his own government not to
conduct a private foreign policy with the terrorists in Hamas, whom he's busy
apologizing for and legitimizing, and he goes and does it anyway. He takes a Nobel Prize that was designed --
a peace prize, so called -- designed by the Leftists who gave it to him to slap
his own president in the face, this, when we're in a confrontation with the
monster, Saddam Hussein, was an open defiance of international law.
And
this, of course, is what the war was about.
If you look at the authorization, the Congressional authorization for
the use of force in Iraq,
which the Democrats endorsed, there are 23 whereas clauses. That's why we went to war. Only two of them mention stockpiles of
WMDs. 12 of them are about U.N.
resolutions, and these U.N. resolutions are all resolutions to try to enforce
the Gulf War truce.
We
left Saddam in power, mistake number one, on the condition that he allow U.N.
inspectors into his country and with free access to go anywhere to make sure
that he didn't resume his programs to build weapons of mass destruction, which
he had already spent 40 or $50 billion on, and the U.N. inspectors went in in
the first place, catalogued the weapons that he had actually already built. Saddam threw these inspectors out, and, well,
we removed them when he made it impossible for them to do their work in
1998. That's why there was an Iraqi
liberation act. People forget there were
no U.N. inspectors there when Bush came to power.
Tonight,
you're going to hear from Doug Feith. He
was Undersecretary of Defense in the Bush administration and was Rumsfeld's Chief
Strategist at the Pentagon. He had 1,500
people under him to plan the War on Terror.
And Feith has written a book called War
and Decision, in which he explains how on 9/11 there were -- already, they
-- of course, they were discussing Iraq,
and they were discussing Iraq
in this context. If we just hit the
individuals who blew up 9/11, we would be ignoring the fact that there is a
global jihad against the West and against us, that it is not just based in Afghanistan. It is global.
This
is the -- another thing that, of course, the Democrats are in total denial
over. They want to think -- they want
people to believe that the War on Terror is about a couple of guys in a cave in
Waziristan that we need to hunt down. Well, Osama bin Laden has been effectively
neutralized in that cave. The fact that
he's in a cave in Waziristan tells you quite a
bit already. But the fact is that we're
facing a global movement. It could
include 10 million, 15 million, 150 million, 750 million people in its pool of
support, and its people that they can recruit from.
What
Feith said was that in their discussions, they said we have to hit, we have to
make a decisive blow against world terror.
We can't just pick the individuals.
We can't just go after Afghanistan. And, therefore, the confrontation with Saddam
Hussein was to avoid a purely defensive war.
That is, we needed to get a guy who had provided refuge for the people
who blew up the World
Trade Center,
who was holding terrorist conferences, who was in active defiance of these U.N.
resolutions, and who had shown that he wanted to build weapons of mass
destruction. We have to rein him in.
And
the reason was this. I think the chapter
is called something like, Our Way of Life. If you fight a defensive war, that is, you
got hit and you find the individuals who did it, then the only way to keep
Americans from -- America
from tremendous catastrophes is to fight defensively, and that means to give up
all of our liberties.
People
say Bush destroyed the Constitution; no, he hasn't. This is --, if anything, a too-free country,
where a major political party can commit treason and everybody's too polite to
mention that.
They
would have to lock down every major building.
You know, you get on trains now.
Of course, it worries me a little bit when I get on a train. There's no security on trains. You know, our
grids are probably not secure. They
would have to take away -- everybody would have to be fingerprinted. You'd have to -- and so forth and so on. It's bad enough what goes on in
airports. This would have to go on
everywhere.
And
they said, "We don't want to give up our way of life, and therefore, we
have to go on the offensive." And
that's why the confrontation with Iraq.
Now,
I've got news for everybody. There is no
peace movement in this country, and there was no peace movement on the war in Iraq. If there was a peace movement before the war
in Iraq,
why weren't they demonstrating at the Iraqi Embassy and saying, "Saddam
Hussein, you need to obey the U.N. Security Council resolutions, all 17 of
them." There was not a single
demonstration at the Iraqi Embassy.
There is an anti-American movement which sucks in well-meaning people,
some well-meaning people, to attack the United States and its
policies.
Feith
had an interesting article in The Wall
Street Journal, and it's about the way -- it's a milder criticism than I've
given this morning about the way the Bush administration has fought the
political battle over Iraq. And that is, what's the rationale for the
war? Rationale for the war became -- it
originally was this. It originally was
that Saddam Hussein disobeyed a U.N. Security Council resolution which said,
"You will do this or else," and gave him a deadline, which was three
months before we actually invaded, which he failed.
How
do I know that he failed it? Well,
because I've read Hans Blix's book. Blix,
as you'll remember, was the socialist -- Swedish socialist pacifist who was the
U.N. weapons inspector, but at least in his book, he's honest enough to say
that Saddam Hussein was given a war ultimatum by a unanimous vote of the Security
Council, which he defied. That's the
rationale for the war, but the only person that I heard consistently say that
is Sean Hannity on Fox. He's the only
one. That's why we went to war: because
Saddam Hussein defied a Security Council resolution which said, "Do this
or else."
As
soon as he did that, Britain
and the United States
said that he was in breach of the Security Council resolution, and that's when
the war decision was really taken, and that was in December. We went to war in March.
The
famous Colin Powell speech -- what's happened is that people sabotaged the
policy all along the way, and Colin Powell was one of the opponents of the Bush
policy, so in England,
the Left, the anti-American pro-Jihad Left turned out 700,000-strong. It's like having -- in the streets of London in January. That's like having four million Republicans
descend on Washington
to oppose a Bush policy.
So
Tony Blair begged the Bush administration to go back and try to get a second
U.N. resolution, and unfortunately -- and of course, Colin Powell was a strong
advocate of this -- and, unfortunately, Bush caved, and he went -- we went back
to the U.N., and that's when Colin Powell gave the famous speech where he
overstated the threat of weapons of mass destruction. So that when they weren't discovered because,
thanks to the Democratic opposition, we couldn't go into Syria and get
them, when they weren't discovered, that rationale for the war was gone, and
the Bush administration switched to the democracy rationale. Very, very hard to convince the American
people that the Iraqis are going to be Democrats in the near future.
Of
course, it's much better than having Saddam Hussein as a dictator, but when you
try to sell the war as a democracy movement and it goes on for five years,
people get tired, and they just don't -- and I think there's a lot of
conservatives who don't understand why we're in that war.
This
is not a minor failure of the Bush administration; this is a colossal failure
of the Bush administration in the selling of the war. This war was to protect the American people,
and it still is to protect the American people, and that's the only thing that
you're going to win a political battle on in this country. The Bush administration has collapsed totally
on the War on Terror in its second term except for the surge in Iraq.
Remember,
we went into Afghanistan
to deny the terrorists a sovereign base, a territorial base. That's why we did it. That's why we put the screws on Saddam
Hussein. That is our big victory in the
war in Iraq to deny Iraq to the
terrorists.
But
in the last two years, there have been two new terrorist states created, Lebanon and Gaza.
And the Bush administration, its response to this, well, it's nothing in
Lebanon, nothing in Gaza, but to prevent the West Bank from also becoming a
part of this jihad, they are propping up a terrorist named Mahmoud Abbas and
spending your dollars to do it, half a billion dollars to support a terrorist
army. So we are losing -- while we're
winning the battle in Iraq, we're losing the battle in the Middle East, and
the next president or maybe this president is going to face a huge crisis as
Iran moves to get its nuclear weapon.
So,
sorry to begin the morning with such a gloomy picture. I don't know what it is with Republicans. I don't understand why they [won't fight]. I mean there are really good people in the
Republican Party. One of them is here
today, Ed Royce. This is a really good man.
Those of you who can support party people, I hope you will support
Ed. There are good people. We don't have a visible national leader.
I
think for all his many faults, John McCain has been good on the war. There were two contrasting interviews that
appeared in the Atlantic Monthly by
Jeffrey Goldberg, who's an exceptionally good reporter -- one, an interview
with Barack Obama, and the other with McCain.
And when asked about the Middle East,
Barack Obama says it's a sore that's infecting American policy. That means that he accepts the rationale for
their movement for a new genocide of the Jews by the Arabs and the
Muslims. Iran, as you know, is not an Arab
country, but it is a Muslim country -- accepts their rationale. And, obviously, since we have no leverage
whatsoever with the terrorists, that means that Israel will be pressured to give up
more territory and bring itself closer to national suicide. That's the Barack Obama Middle East
policy.
McCain
understands. He says this is the
terrorist challenge. That is who we're
facing. When you're looking at Hezbollah
and Hamas and Iran,
you are looking at the Jihad.
And
people have somewhat forgotten Jimmy Carter.
Iran used to be our
greatest ally in the Middle East. Jimmy Carter made Iran the target of his human rights
campaign and caused the Shah's regime to topple. Jimmy Carter supported the Ayatollah
Khomeini, whose revolution was to create
the first Islamic radical -- Islamofascist state. Andrew Young, our Ambassador in the United
Nations in the Carter administration, called the Ayatollah Khomeini a
saint. That's how this all began.
Well,
although -- I'm open for questions. I
just wanted to give us a little optimism because, as Antonio Gramsci, the
Italian Stalinist, who was the darling of American faculty, once said that the
task of the revolutionary is to have pessimism of the intellect --
conservatives can understand that -- but optimism of the will.
This
is a very resilient country. We don't
wake up quickly. America is too
happy a country, and there are too many things to do in it.
If
you remember, Hitler occupied all of Europe. In April 1941, all of Western Europe was
controlled by Hitler except for England. The Japanese controlled all of Southeast
Asia, Manchuria. And Gallup
took a poll. In April 1941, 81% of the
American people wanted to stay out of the war.
We went to war because of Pearl Harbor. Unfortunately, I mean that's what it
takes. This atrocity that wakes
Americans up would be much greater. Our
task is to try to wake up the country before that happens.
I'll
take a few questions.
Q-and-A Session:
Unidentified
Audience Participant: Thank you, David. That was amazing. You mentioned there were three acts of
treason. One was the computers
thing. I know one was the cell phone
thing.
David
Horowitz: It's the CIA interrogations. Yeah, the rendition.
Unidentified
Audience Participant: The camps in Eastern Europe.
Unidentified
Audience Participant: If we are in a global movement of a war here,
where did the Saudis fit in? Where do
open borders fit in? Where does massive
Muslim integration on skids fit in? And
where does Steven [Conklin] -- fired from our State Department fit in?
David Horowitz: Yeah, if you can't name the enemy, to take the
last one, as the kind of template -- of the collapse of the Bush administration's
War on Terror -- they now have a policy of not using the word Islam in
connection with terror -- we are facing a fanatical religious global movement--
of course, whenever there's a genocide, Jews seem to be first in line, but the
Christians are close behind.
Hindus
-- this is an imperial religion. It's
not a religion of peace. Of course,
there are lots of Muslims that want peace.
That's not the issue. The issue
is a religion whose prophet was not a carpenter preaching peace but a warrior
preaching the destruction of every other religion. That's what Muhammad was about.
There
was a saying of the prophet [Muhammad Ahadeef], which we have taken on in
college campuses. You can find it on the
University of Southern California website. The Muslim Students Association quotes the [Ahadeef],
which says, "Redemption will come when Muslims fight Jews and kill them,
when Jews hide behind the rocks and the trees, and the rocks and the trees cry
out, "Oh, Muslim, there is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him."
Now,
you will search the Old and New Testaments forever to find a genocidal
incitement like that. Of course, borders
are part of this issue. This is the only
country in the world which doesn't have borders that are controlled. Mexico has them, but we don't. And the fact that this is a political battle
is just again a sign of the problem.
Now,
it's, of course, one of the virtues of America to be a tolerant society
and to give everybody the benefit of the doubt, but we also suffer from that
virtue. And the -- you know, again, the
positive thing is that the American people are waking up on that issue and that
they stop this terrible immigration bill.
There is no immigration bill that is going to be a decent bill until
they start deporting illegals, and I don't know why the Bush administration
doesn't understand this, and I hope the McCain one will, and if it doesn't,
we're going to have to fight on that issue.
And
I forgot, Sandy, your other two.
Unidentified
Audience Participant: We have 50,000 Somali Muslims in Columbus, Ohio.
David Horowitz: Yes. I mean this is, again, this is the -- this is
connected to the border issues, the whole immigration issue. There was a soft jihad going on, which we are
finding on the college campuses, that needs to be fought. I mean you're absolutely right. That is a huge -- it's a huge problem. It's all part of the political problem. If you don’t know who your enemy is, you
can't defend yourself against them. And
the enemy is radical Islam, or Daniel calls it Militant Islam or Solafi Islam,
Mohabi Islam.
We
know exactly what it is, but there is a general problem in Islam. If they're going to come into our societies,
they need to accept our ways. We don't
accept -- we don’t have to accept their ways.
We're not having people wearing burkas getting drivers licenses. We're not going to change our ways because we
are a multi-religious, multi-ethnic society.
And
the first thing for American citizenship is will you accept the fact that this
is not a Muslim country and may never want to be one. If we did that, we would have organizations
like CAIR, which is an arm of the Muslim brotherhood, not have FBI heads come
to their dinners and legitimize them.
We
have an enormous political battle in this country, and the fact of the matter
is that it's not just our organization but Daniel's organization and others -- Steve
Emerson, and Frank Gafney. This is where
the battle is going to be taking place, the immigration organizations. [Chris Bergard] here is fighting the
immigration battle.
It's
going to be a grassroots battle because the minute somebody is running for
office, they have to think about their coalition they have to put
together. And our society is set up to
assimilate people and to bring them into our coalitions, but you can't bring it
to your coalition a group whose intention is to destroy you.
[Mike Cutler]:
Good morning. I'm Mike Cutler. You know, we're going to be talking tomorrow
about immigration, but what concerns me, and I've been around the country
talking to people, is that when you have 20 million people in your country
whose identities are unknown and unknowable, you have a major national security
risk, and we've been sending border patrol agents to secure the Iraqi border
and leaving our own border wide open.
And I think that this also -- and maybe you disagree with me -- but I
think this has led to the people that fight against the war in Iraq saying,
listen, if we were serious about terrorism, how can we have our borders wide
open, how do we naturalize people who wind up working for the FBI who are
really spying on us for Hezbollah and so forth?
So I think it's made it harder to sell the war and sell the other
aspects of the counter-terrorism movement.
David Horowitz: I mean the selling of the war has to do with why
are we fighting? You know, are we
fighting to create a democracy in a country which is Muslim, -- I mean the
president is a Jew-hating Shia of Iraq.
You
know, it's a total political battle.
It's not one or the other. And I
wouldn't pay very much attention to the arguments used by the Left because the
argument -- there was an SDS issue. It
was called, whatever, SDS notes, and somebody wrote, "The issue is never
the issue. The issue is always the
revolution." The issue is never the
issue. The issue is always defeating the
United States. We are the great Satan. That is -- the United States is the fount of evil
in the world. It's corporate America that is
the enemy. And every principle -- every
argument in the Left flows from that. I
mean they'll go on either side of any question if it serves that end. That's what guides them, so don't pay too
much attention to their arguments.
Unidentified
Audience Participant:
You used a word that's fallen out of favor, assimilation. The code word now is integration, which is
multi-culturalism. It's taking the
colored marbles and just shaking them up, but they're separate and distinct.
David Horowitz: This is part of the entire battle. Look, the battle is about America. That's what the battle is about. Assimilation meant you become an American,
which means you accept certain values.
One of them is tolerance.
Now,
you know, I've probably met all of the moderate Muslims. The issue is accepting American tolerance, and
that's part of this whole issue. Of
course, to say they should assimilate to America, what, to the beast? Come on.
This is what the Left is about.
You have to step inside the Left's mentality.
The
first principle of the Left is America
is wrong. You know, they'll say they
love America. You know, they love the prairies and the
purple mountains, and they also love t the America that they envision when
we're all socialists. This America, they
don't love.
Unidentified
Audience Participant: Well, one of the things you bring up, that the
Left is so clever in their tactics. For
example, the ACLU is behind this "recreate 68" to disrupt the
Democratic convention in Denver.
Unidentified
Audience Participant: They have asked -- they have had the audacity
to ask to sue the City of Denver
for the police to reveal their tactics and how they're going to deal with
dissidents. When they were told the
police wouldn't reveal their tactics, they backed up, and they said,
"Well, we don't want to know exactly what tactics they're going to use; we
want to know how the police are spending our taxpayer money, what are their
budgets being used for." So I mean
how do you counter such clever sabotage?
We're not there.
David Horowitz: Well, I don't know, in this particular case, I
like the sabotage. The Left is devilish in its arguments. I agree that it's a problem. Everything is specific.
We
need to protect the police. We need to
protect our military. If we can't protect our national security secrets, how
can we protect the local police in there?
It is a completely holistic problem that is all connected.
The
first issue is the political battle. Who
is the enemy? That's the first
thing.
And
the second is -- and I've written a book on this, Unholy Alliance -- who are our domestic enemies. And, yes, we have them.
When
the issue of patriotism comes up, you don't have to look into somebody's heart
and see what their true intentions are.
You see what their acts are, and if they're not respecting our
constitutional democracy, which means instead of electing people who disagree
with the policy, they sabotage the policy by leaking national security secrets,
they're not patriots. They're disloyal,
and they need to be treated that way.
Unidentified Audience
Participant: David, I read a book a few years ago called While Europe Slept. Did you read that?
David Horowitz:
Bruce Bawer's book.
Unidentified
Audience Participant: Yes. Thank you. I think that there's a lot to be
learned from what he said and what Europe has
learned is where they let the Sharia law in their communities.
David Horowitz:
Europe has historically, obviously, a
much more powerful Left. The Left in
this country is more powerful than it's ever, ever, ever been. It has totally infiltrated the upper echelons
of the Democratic Party.
Europe is worse. I was at a conference last year at
Pepperdine, where a European said Islam will never take over Europe because --
I mean there was a little bit of a, shall we say, paternalistic view -- but
because European societies are so complex, Islamists wouldn't be able to
understand them.
And
I pointed out that the whole European Left is their ally, and they certainly
understand the complexity of European societies and know how to subvert them. And that's what's happened in all these
countries.