Newt Gingrich: We Are At War With Radical Islamism

Transcript

Newt Gingrich:

I wanted to come to talk about something that I think is extraordinarily serious and not political in any normal sense. It’s about America’s survival. And I want to say to you flatly that almost fourteen years after 9-11, the United States today is losing the war with radical Islamists. And we have to have the courage to confront how badly we are doing in this war. And not just as an anti-Obama comment, the State Department was about equally bad, frankly, under George W. Bush. The unwillingness to tell the truth about who our enemies are was equally bad because gradually all of these so-called experts kept saying, oh, you can’t really tell the truth about who they are because that might confuse other people and so why don’t you make up strange terms and, you know, it became bizarre. You see people all around the planet, this is a global war, and yet they insist on talking about it by geography. So we’re going to really focus on northern Syria. Well, there are thousands of jihadists who have come to northern Syria from all around the world. Over a thousand from France alone. So over six hundred from Great Britain. Over a hundred from the United States. This is a global war. In Nigeria, Boko Haram has ten thousand fighters. And last year, Boko Haram killed more people than Ebola. But the State Department for years under secretary Clinton wouldn’t even list them as a terrorist group, even though their initial base camp was called Afghanistan in honor of the Taliban. Now you would think somewhere in here people get a hint. You know, I look around the planet at suicide bombings, I look at beheadings, I look at all these different things going on. They don’t strike me as a Rotary Club conspiracy. Or, you know, the Kiwanians running amok. There is one common pattern occurring everywhere across the planet. And that is radical Islamists who hate our civilization, are prepared to cut off our heads, and are determined to impose their religion by force. Now, I’m not going to spend a lot of time talking about president Obama’s pathological incapacity to deal with reality. Because I think – I think that’s what it is, I mean, there’s no point in trying to get him to learn how to say the words radical Islamist because he has a speech impediment which blocks him from being able to say the words. I mean, he just, you know, it’ll be embarrassing. Watching John Kerry the other day, trying to explain all this. It’s not about religion, it’s about specific, unique, random individuals. So you end up with Fort Hood. With somebody who’s carrying a card that says Soldier of Allah. Somebody who now know was on the internet talking to an American imam in Yemen, who we later on killed with Predator. Somebody who jumps up, yells Allahu Akbar and kills thirteen Americans.

And even the institution of the US Army is so corrupted by the intellectual dishonesty we now live with, they described it as a workplace incident. This is as though in 1946 and 1947 and 1948 we’d had Henry Wallace instead of Harry Truman and we had a president said, you know, there is no KGB, there is no comintern, the Soviet Union is not a threat, communism is okay. I don’t think you should be worried about all these things. And that’s where we are. We have an elite – frankly, in both parties – unwilling to tell the truth. You’re not going to win this war if you can’t tell the truth. You’re not going to win this war if you can’t admit it’s a war. Now, let me be very clear, cause I can already hear some of our friends on the left and a few of our friends on the right who think Gingrich wants us to have an army of seven million and occupy everywhere. Baloney. This is a campaign that should be fought with the largest possible number of allies. It’s a campaign which should be fought wherever possible by surgically and methodically hunting down the people. And we can draw a clear distinction. If you were Muslim and you were willing to live in peace with your neighbors, and you have no problem with people converting in both directions, and you’d like to be allowed to have a mosque the way they can have a synagogue or a temple or a church, I have no problem with Muslims who are prepared to live in diversity. But if you were a Muslim who believes you’re going to impose shariah by cutting off my head, I have a desire to kill you before you cut off my head. I would urge all of you to go back and look at President George W. Bush’s magnificent speech to the joint session of congress shortly after 9-11. There he said, there’s an axis of evil. And he listed Iran, Iraq, and North Korea. Now he could have added a few more countries. I mean, several of them felt hurt that they weren’t on the list. But it was a good start. And there – that’s the speech in which he said, you’re either for us or you’re against us. But the State Department and others promptly began saying, well, you can’t really mean that. I mean, are you really prepared to go the Saudis and say to them you’re either for us or you’re against us? And cut off all of their funding for all the different elements that preach shariah? Are you prepared to take on the argument about shariah? Now you have a new leader in Egypt who is remarkably like Mubarak. Who is remarkably like Sadat. That is, he’s a military leader dominating a country by force because the alternative is a Muslim Brotherhood radicalized Egypt threatening to the United States and the entire world.

Now I will tell you flatly, while I would love to see the Egyptian people be prosperous and free and have a chance to live in a genuine democracy, I am not – just as I was not confused by communists, who were very eager to have one vote, one time, in Italy and France, I am not confused by the Muslim Brotherhood which would like to use our language to impose their way of life and never again have an election once they’re in charge. So I think we’ve got to recognize, this is as intellectually significant a fight as the development of anti-communism was between 1945 and 1950. You know, you may remember that Ronald Reagan was a Democrat. He had voted for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt and he actually, in 1948, did a commercial for Harry Truman. And did a commercial for Hubert Humphrey, but Hubert Humphrey in 1948 was the anti-communist liberal taking on the communist wing of the Democrat party. But Reagan in ’47 when he was active, he became president of the Screen Actors’ Guild. And one night in 1947, he’s sitting around, chatting with a guy, and this guy says to him, you know, I am a genuine Stalinist. And when we win, you are the kind of person we’re either going to put in jail or we’re going to kill. And Reagan went home and he thought to himself, gee, I wonder what that guy meant. And being a relatively simple person, I mean, not somebody who had been to Harvard Law School and been thoroughly educated in how to avoid reality. Reagan said to himself, gosh, I guess he meant if he wins, they will either put me in jail or kill me. And then Reagan in a totally selfish, narrow attitude, decided he didn’t want them to win. And it was just one of those acts that proved that Reagan was becoming a right winger. Because he was prepared for the Soviet Union to be defeated. Now it took, from that moment of awareness in 1947, forty-four years for the Soviet Union to collapse. And frankly, I thought it would take another twenty or thirty. But we calmly and methodically built a worldwide coalition. We calmly and methodically built the most powerful military in history. We calmly and methodically actually spied on people. We actually went out and did the things necessary to be safe. We had a clear notion that we were prepared to defend America and America’s allies. And we did that for forty-four years.

I’m here today to ask you to talk to your members of congress and to send whatever device you use, Twitter, Facebook, email, telephone, snail mail, personal visit, to friends around the country. I wrote a piece the other day in the Wall Street Journal, in which I outlined – and you can see it if you go to gingrichproductions.com, I outlined the hearings the US congress should have. In my mind, intellectually, I have written off this administration. It’s hopeless. And frankly, unless there’s some great conversion experience by Hillary Clinton, I would write her off. I think she is part – she is part of this world view. She is with Obama. She can’t hide from it. It is a fact. [APPLAUSE] But I would ask your help in getting the congress to understand both in the House and the Senate that we need probably six months or more of hearings. We need hearings that start at the beginning. Why are there radical Islamists? What are their values? What’s the world they seek to accomplish? And don’t kid yourself. This is a very pervasive problem. There’s the blogger in Saudi Arabia who was for liberalizing Saudi Arabia. He has been sentenced to one thousand lashes delivered in public, ten per week. Now the United States government should be angrily protesting. This is nonsense. We don’t have to tolerate the Saudis living in the middle of the 6^th – the 8^th Century or the 9^th Century. And we actually should be saying to them, we find this abhorrent. The Iranians have locked up a Washington Post reporter just to remind us that they have such contempt for the Obama administration that they are confident the Obama administration will keep talking to them no matter what they do. The Iranians probably were the people who were funding and training and equipping the rebels who took over Yemen this week. And remember, Yemen was the example cited by the president in October of proof that his strategy was working. Now, we haven’t heard from him since Yemen fell this week. But then, he’s busy. The Superbowl’s coming up. There are a number of other important things and you can’t expect him to notice random countries being lost to the West. But we need to really have – I’m not here today to tell you that I have an answer, I have a direction. But the first part of that direction is to lay out for the American people the facts about the scale of the problem. When you see the number of Islamists around the world, when you see what they say – and I’m a historian, look, the general rule is, if somebody tells you that they are prepared to cut off your head unless you convert, and the other day, four teenage Christians had their heads cut off because they wouldn’t convert, now I take that to be a sign that they probably mean they will cut off your head if you don’t convert. But I think the American people need to see the whole picture and only once we have the whole picture out can we start talking about strategies.

One of the strategies, frankly, is to drive them off the internet. And whatever it takes to drive them off the internet, we should do. And we should be very clear about that. And one of the strategies should be to insist that everybody who’s getting money from people like the Saudis have to have it noted. And when I see an expert on TV telling me the Saudi version of reality and then you learn that they’re a professor at a major American university or a major American think tank, but they’re totally funded by the Saudis, we should all know that. Because it’s absurd. The apologists for these people are all involved in total intellectual dishonesty, undermining and weakening the survival of the United States. In addition we should make it very clear that we are not going to tolerate any kind of advocacy from here on out of shariah, we’re not going to tolerate any kind of advocacy of violence against the West, we’re not going to tolerate any recruiting, we’re not going to tolerate any fundraising, and we’re not going to tolerate people who leave this country in order to go fight somewhere else. And frankly, we should make it a condition of losing your passport and not being able to come back to America. In the middle of the 1930s, as the British leadership showed total cowardice and were terrified of dealing head on with Adolf Hitler, one man actually read Mein Kampf. His name was Winston Churchill. And he said, you know, I think this guy actually means what he’s saying. And he began giving speeches and he was a very lonely voice. At one point, he was down to four members voting with him out of 635. But he said, the truth is so important. And finally, day by day, Hitler proved that Churchill was right and the entire elite was wrong. Now I believe we are in that kind of environment. I believe our government lies to us everyday about this. I believe our State Department lies about it. I think our intelligence community has been co-opted intellectually. I think our military is frightened to tell the truth. And I think starting with the congress, we have to demand that we deserve to know the truth and we the people deserve the right to defend our civilization.

And I just want to close with this thought. I’ve been deeply involved for many years, my dad was an infantryman for 27 years, I grew up in the Army, I believe that the number one obligation of a government is to protect its people. And if you don’t do that, everything else is put at risk. Over the next year, you’re going to be visited by many candidates. Those of you who are Iowans have been through this before. I just ask you to demand that every candidate who comes through here everyday from now to the caucus has to answer, what are they prepared to do to help defeat radical Islamists so that America and its allies can go into the future in freedom and in safety. And if you do that, by about the sixth or seventh visit, every one of them will have a pretty good answer. Cause they’ll be afraid to come back. So you can play a major decisive role in getting America back on the right track and with your help, I have no doubt that the American people will defeat those who would cut off our heads, we will defeat those who would force us into forcible conversion of religion, we will defeat those who have such contempt for us that they think they can send us videos and we will do nothing. Thank you, good luck, and God bless you.