Today, I hear a lot of cries for tolerance, especially of Islam. I’m told, “Stop the hating of Muslims.” Many of the very people I hear this from like to point to the Constitution and to the Founding Fathers and especially to the First Amendment and declare that Islam should be tolerated in America. However, I wonder if they have paid attention to either the Constitution or the Founding Fathers on this matter. Specifically, I wonder if they have even considered the words and actions of the third President of the United States, Thomas Jefferson, especially his sense of reading their own texts from the Qur’an and knowing just what his enemies thought. Let’s take a stroll down memory lane, shall we?
First, keep in mind that Islam and terrorism have gone hand in hand since its inception at the beginning of the 7th century. In fact, it’s founder Muhammad was a terrorist and used “religion” to band his merry men together to conquer, rape and pillage.
For nearly fifteen centuries the world has faced the disease of Islam, but our nation faced it head on when Thomas Jefferson, serving as the ambassador to France, and John Adams, servicing as the ambassador to Britain, went to London to meet with Ambassador Abdrahaman, the Dey of Tripoli’s ambassador to Britain. Of course they met with Abdrahaman to negotiate a peace treaty, but keep in mind that in Islam, the only peace is submission to Islam.
Islam requires jizya under Sharia law, you know that alleged “harmless law” they want to impose here in the West. Jizya is a per capita tax levied on a section of an Islamic state’s non-Muslim citizens, who meet certain criteria. The tax is and was to be levied on able-bodied adult males of military age and affording power. So as Adams and Jefferson met, they found out the price of peace was quite expensive.
Gary DeMar writes,
If America wanted “temporary peace,” a one-year guarantee, it would cost $66,000 plus a 10% commission. “Everlasting peace” was a bargain at $160,000 plus the obligatory commission. This only applied to Tripoli. Other Muslim nations would also have to be paid. The amount came to $1.3 million. But there was no assurance that the treaties would be honored. In vain, Jefferson and Adams tried to argue that America was not at war with Tripoli. In what way had the U.S provoked the Muslims, they asked? Ambassador Abdrahaman went on to explain “the finer points of Islamic jihad” to the Koranically challenged Jefferson and Adams.
Jefferson then wrote a letter to John Jay that read:
“The Ambassador answered us that it was founded on the Laws of their Prophet, that it was written in their Koran, that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as Prisoners, and that every Musselman [Muslim] who should be slain in battle was sure to go to Paradise.”
This is loosely based upon the Qur’an’s teaching from Surah 47:4 which reads,
“Therefore, when ye meet the Unbelievers (in fight), smite at their necks; At length, when ye have thoroughly subdued them, bind a bond firmly (on them): thereafter (is the time for) either generosity or ransom: Until the war lays down its burdens. Thus (are ye commanded): but if it had been Allah’s Will, He could certainly have exacted retribution from them (Himself); but (He lets you fight) in order to test you, some with others. But those who are slain in the Way of Allah,- He will never let their deeds be lost.”
So what happened? Though the US, along with Great Britain and France had paid a “tribute” for protection against piracy, once Tripoli increased the tribute following Jefferson becoming President, he refused to pay them the increase, though he did continue to pay until the end of his presidency. Tripoli then declared war on the United States on May 10, 1801. This was the beginning of the First Barbary War.
Interestingly enough, before becoming President, Jefferson had opposed funds be used for a Navy except to provide coastal defense. Gerard W. Gawalt writes concerning Jefferson and the tribute payment:
After the United States won its independence in the treaty of 1783, it had to protect its own commerce against dangers such as the Barbary pirates. As early as 1784 Congress followed the tradition of the European shipping powers and appropriated $80,000 as tribute to the Barbary states, directing its ministers in Europe, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams, to begin negotiations with them. Trouble began the next year, in July 1785, when Algerians captured two American ships and the dey of Algiers held their crews of twenty-one people for a ransom of nearly $60,000.
Thomas Jefferson, United States minister to France, opposed the payment of tribute, as he later testified in words that have a particular resonance today. In his autobiography Jefferson wrote that in 1785 and 1786 he unsuccessfully “endeavored to form an association of the powers subject to habitual depredation from them. I accordingly prepared, and proposed to their ministers at Paris, for consultation with their governments, articles of a special confederation.” Jefferson argued that “The object of the convention shall be to compel the piratical States to perpetual peace.” Jefferson prepared a detailed plan for the interested states. “Portugal, Naples, the two Sicilies, Venice, Malta, Denmark and Sweden were favorably disposed to such an association,” Jefferson remembered, but there were “apprehensions” that England and France would follow their own paths, “and so it fell through.”
Paying the ransom would only lead to further demands, Jefferson argued in letters to future presidents John Adams, then America’s minister to Great Britain, and James Monroe, then a member of Congress. As Jefferson wrote to Adams in a July 11, 1786, letter, “I acknolege [sic] I very early thought it would be best to effect a peace thro’ the medium of war.” Paying tribute will merely invite more demands, and even if a coalition proves workable, the only solution is a strong navy that can reach the pirates, Jefferson argued in an August 18, 1786, letter to James Monroe: “The states must see the rod; perhaps it must be felt by some one of them. . . . Every national citizen must wish to see an effective instrument of coercion, and should fear to see it on any other element than the water. A naval force can never endanger our liberties, nor occasion bloodshed; a land force would do both.” “From what I learn from the temper of my countrymen and their tenaciousness of their money,” Jefferson added in a December 26, 1786, letter to the president of Yale College, Ezra Stiles, “it will be more easy to raise ships and men to fight these pirates into reason, than money to bribe them.”
With US merchant ships being attacked and Americans being kidnapped he finally issued letters of marque and reprisal, which sent a groups of privately owned war ships, that were approved by the government, to make war against the Barbary Pirates. He utilized this constitutional measure, which we are not using today.
In doing this he sent for the “privateers,” as they were referred to. The privately owned frigates USS Philadelphia, USS President, and the USS Essex, along with the schooner USS Enterprise was America’s first navy to cross the Atlantic. Others would also join and see action as well.
Ultimately, in 1805 United States Marines crossed the desert from Egypt into Tripolitania, forced the surrender of Tripoli and free those Americans that had been kidnapped and were made slaves.
Thus, this is where the famous line from the United States Marine Corps (Oorah!) comes from: “From the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli. Demar says it not only refers to the First Barbary War, but specifically to the Battle of Derna, which took place in 1805.
It is ironic the Rep. Keith Ellison, who became the United States’ first Muslim Congressman took his oath of office on Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an at a time when we continue to be at war with Islam. While Ellison has called Jefferson a “visionary,” what I think we could all learn is that Jefferson was wise enough to read and learn about the enemy from their own book of jihad. Sadly, many today would rather listen to the lies of Islamists rather than understand what the Qur’an actually teaches. After all, it’s been said “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
About Tim Brown
Husband to my wife. Father of 10. Jack of All Trades. Christian and lover of liberty. Residing in the U.S. occupied Great State of South Carolina. Follow Tim on Twitter.
Even as the White House strove last week to move beyond questions about the Benghazi attacks of Tuesday, September 11, 2012, fresh evidence emerged that senior Obama administration officials knowingly misled the country about what had happened in the days following the assaults. The Weekly Standard has obtained a timeline briefed by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence detailing the heavy substantive revisions made to the CIA’s talking points, just six weeks before the 2012 presidential election, and additional information about why the changes were made and by whom.
Reuters
As intelligence officials pieced together the puzzle of events unfolding in Libya, they concluded even before the assaults had ended that al Qaeda-linked terrorists were involved. Senior administration officials, however, sought to obscure the emerging picture and downplay the significance of attacks that killed a U.S. ambassador and three other Americans. The frantic process that produced the changes to the talking points took place over a 24-hour period just one day before Susan Rice, U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, made her now-famous appearances on the Sunday television talk shows. The discussions involved senior officials from the State Department, the National Security Council, the CIA, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, and the White House.
The exchange of emails is laid out in a 43-page report from the chairmen of five committees in the House of Representatives. Although the investigation was conducted by Republicans, leading some reporters and commentators to dismiss it, the report quotes directly from emails between top administration and intelligence officials, and it includes footnotes indicating the times the messages were sent. In some cases, the report did not provide the names of the senders, but The Weekly Standard has confirmed the identities of the authors of two critical emails—one indicating the main reason for the changes and the other announcing that the talking points would receive their final substantive rewrite at a meeting of top administration officials on Saturday, September 15.
The White House provided the emails to members of the House and Senate intelligence committees for a limited time and with the stipulation that the documents were available for review only and would not be turned over to the committees. The White House and committee leadership agreed to that arrangement as part of a deal that would keep Republican senators from blocking the confirmation of John Brennan, the president’s choice to run the CIA. If the House report provides an accurate and complete depiction of the emails, it is clear that senior administration officials engaged in a wholesale rewriting of intelligence assessments about Benghazi in order to mislead the public. The Weekly Standard sought comment from officials at the White House, the State Department, and the CIA, but received none by press time. Within hours of the initial attack on the U.S. facility, the State Department Operations Center sent out two alerts. The first, at 4:05 p.m. (all times are Eastern Daylight Time), indicated that the compound was under attack; the second, at 6:08 p.m., indicated that Ansar al Sharia, an al Qaeda-linked terrorist group operating in Libya, had claimed credit for the attack. According to the House report, these alerts were circulated widely inside the government, including at the highest levels. The fighting in Benghazi continued for another several hours, so top Obama administration officials were told even as the fighting was taking place that U.S. diplomats and intelligence operatives were likely being attacked by al Qaeda-affiliated terrorists. A cable sent the following day, September 12, by the CIA station chief in Libya, reported that eyewitnesses confirmed the participation of Islamic militants and made clear that U.S. facilities in Benghazi had come under terrorist attack. It was this fact, along with several others, that top Obama officials would work so hard to obscure.
After a briefing on Capitol Hill by CIA director David Petraeus, Democrat Dutch Ruppersburger, the ranking member of the House Intelligence Committee, asked the intelligence community for unclassified guidance on what members of Congress could say in their public comments on the attacks. The CIA’s Office of Terrorism Analysis prepared the first draft of a response to the congressman, which was distributed internally for comment at 11:15 a.m. on Friday, September 14 (Version 1 at right). This initial CIA draft included the assertion that the U.S. government “know[s] that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in the attack.” That draft also noted that press reports “linked the attack to Ansar al Sharia. The group has since released a statement that its leadership did not order the attacks, but did not deny that some of its members were involved.” Ansar al Sharia, the CIA draft continued, aims to spread sharia law in Libya and “emphasizes the need for jihad.” The agency draft also raised the prospect that the facilities had been the subject of jihadist surveillance and offered a reminder that in the previous six months there had been “at least five other attacks against foreign interests in Benghazi by unidentified assailants, including the June attack against the British Ambassador’s convoy.”
After the internal distribution, CIA officials amended that draft to include more information about the jihadist threat in both Egypt and Libya. “On 10 September we warned of social media reports calling for a demonstration in front of the [Cairo] Embassy and that jihadists were threatening to break into the Embassy,” the agency had added by late afternoon. And: “The Agency has produced numerous pieces on the threat of extremists linked to al Qaeda in Benghazi and Libya.” But elsewhere, CIA officials pulled back. The reference to “Islamic extremists” no longer specified “Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda,” and the initial reference to “attacks” in Benghazi was changed to “demonstrations.”
The talking points were first distributed to officials in the interagency vetting process at 6:52 p.m. on Friday. Less than an hour later, at 7:39 p.m., an individual identified in the House report only as a “senior State Department official” responded to raise “serious concerns” about the draft. That official, whom The Weekly Standard has confirmed was State Department spokesman Victoria Nuland, worried that members of Congress would use the talking points to criticize the State Department for “not paying attention to Agency warnings.”
In an attempt to address those concerns, CIA officials cut all references to Ansar al Sharia and made minor tweaks. But in a follow-up email at 9:24 p.m., Nuland wrote that the problem remained and that her superiors—she did not say which ones—were unhappy. The changes, she wrote, did not “resolve all my issues or those of my building leadership,” and State Department leadership was contacting National Security Council officials directly. Moments later, according to the House report, “White House officials responded by stating that the State Department’s concerns would have to be taken into account.” One official—Ben Rhodes, The Weekly Standard is told, a top adviser to President Obama on national security and foreign policy—further advised the group that the issues would be resolved in a meeting of top administration officials the following morning at the White House.
There is little information about what happened at that meeting of the Deputies Committee. But according to two officials with knowledge of the process, Mike Morrell, deputy director of the CIA, made broad changes to the draft afterwards. Morrell cut all or parts of four paragraphs of the six-paragraph talking points—148 of its 248 words (see Version 2 above). Gone were the reference to “Islamic extremists,” the reminders of agency warnings about al Qaeda in Libya, the reference to “jihadists” in Cairo, the mention of possible surveillance of the facility in Benghazi, and the report of five previous attacks on foreign interests.
What remained—and would be included in the final version of the talking points—was mostly boilerplate about ongoing investigations and working with the Libyan government, together with bland language suggesting that the “violent demonstrations”—no longer “attacks”—were spontaneous responses to protests in Egypt and may have included generic “extremists” (see Version 3 above).
If the story of what happened in Benghazi was dramatically stripped down from the first draft of the CIA’s talking points to the version that emerged after the Deputies Committee meeting, the narrative would soon be built up again. In ensuing days, administration officials emphasized a “demonstration” in front of the U.S. facility in Benghazi and claimed that the demonstrators were provoked by a YouTube video. The CIA had softened “attack” to “demonstration.” But as soon became clear, there had been no demonstration in Benghazi.
More troubling was the YouTube video. Rice would spend much time on the Sunday talk shows pointing to this video as the trigger of the chaos in Benghazi. “What sparked the violence was a very hateful video on the Internet. It was a reaction to a video that had nothing to do with the United States.” There is no mention of any “video” in any of the many drafts of the talking points.
Still, top Obama officials would point to the video to explain Benghazi. President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton even denounced the video in a sort of diplomatic public service announcement in Pakistan. In a speech at the United Nations on September 25, the president mentioned the video several times in connection with Benghazi.
On September 17, the day after Rice appeared on the Sunday shows, Nuland defended Rice’s performance during the daily briefing at the State Department. “What I will say, though, is that Ambassador Rice, in her comments on every network over the weekend, was very clear, very precise, about what our initial assessment of what happened is. And this was not just her assessment, it was also an assessment you’ve heard in comments coming from the intelligence community, in comments coming from the White House.”
It was a preview of the administration’s defense of its claims on Benghazi. After pushing the intelligence community to revise its talking points to fit the administration’s preferred narrative, administration officials would point fingers at the intelligence community when parts of that narrative were shown to be misleading or simply untrue.
And at times, members of the intelligence community appeared eager to help. On September 28, a statement from ODNI seemed designed to quiet the growing furor over the administration’s explanations of Benghazi. “In the immediate aftermath, there was information that led us to assess that the attack began spontaneously following protests earlier that day at our embassy in Cairo. We provided that initial assessment to Executive Branch officials and members of Congress, who used that information to discuss the attack publicly and provide updates as they became available.”
The statement continued: “As we learned more about the attack, we revised our initial assessment to reflect new information indicating that it was a deliberate and organized attack carried out by extremists. It remains unclear if any group or person exercised overall command and control of the attack, and if extremist group leaders directed their members to participate. However, we do assess that some of those involved were linked to groups affiliated with, or sympathetic to al Qaeda.”
The statement strongly implies that the information about al Qaeda-linked terrorists was new, a revision of the initial assessment. But it wasn’t. Indeed, the original assessment stated, without qualification, “we do know that Islamic extremists with ties to al Qaeda participated in the attack.”
The statement from the ODNI came not from James Clapper, the director of national intelligence, but from his spokesman, Shawn Turner. When the statement was released, current and former intelligence officials told The Weekly Standard that they found the statement itself odd and the fact that it didn’t come from Clapper stranger still. Clapper was traveling when he was first shown a draft of the statement to go out under his name. It is not an accident that it didn’t.
The revelations about exactly how the talking points were written, revised, and then embellished come amid renewed scrutiny of the administration’s handling of Benghazi. Fox News spoke to a Special Ops soldier last week who raised new questions about what happened during the attack, and the State Department’s inspector general acknowledged that the office would be investigating the production of the Administrative Review Board report on the attacks because of concerns that investigators did not speak to a broad spectrum of individuals with knowledge of the attack and its aftermath. On May 8, the House Oversight and Government Reform committee will hold another hearing on the matter. And Republicans in Congress have asked the administration to release all of the emails, something that would further clarify how the changes came about.
Stephen F. Hayes is a senior writer at The Weekly Standard.
Ed Lasky
Stephen Hayes of the Weekly Standard has a must read column regarding the Benghazi cover-up by White House officials.
CIA career officials clearly and repeatedly identified Al Qaeda and Al Qaeda-linked Islamic terrorists as the culprits behind the murder of four Americans.
Of course, this would cause embarrassment for the Obama team, especially in the few weeks before the election. They had been boasting for years that Al Qaeda had been decimated, the "tide of war" was receding; they had been on a mission to whitewash the prospect of Islamic terrorism as a threat to America (see Lauri Regan's superb column ("Can a President who has promised to stand with Muslims protect America? ). Obama's Cairo speech before an audience that included Muslim Brotherhood officials that he compelled Egypt to include, was a paean to Islam. It was also, to a great extent, a work of fiction that included grandiose and subsequently disproven claims about the positive contributions Islam has made to America and the world.
That speech was written by Obama's foreign policy speechwriter and now National Security Council team member, Ben Rhodes.
That is the man who Hayes "outs" as a key person behind the Benghazi cover-up.
He reportedly altered the CIA talking points to delete references to Islamic terrorists, "attacks" (they became "demonstrations") and other negative references to Islamism. Also, someone at the White House level apparently dreamt up the idea of blaming an inconsequential video for triggering a spontaneous protest, that in the frenzy of events, led to the murder of Americans. These CIA talking points were eviscerated to whitewash the role of Islamic terrorism.
There was a White House whitewash that should not be dismissed over events that occurred a 'long time ago;" contrary to Hillary Clinton saying that responsibility for the deaths of Americans serving their nation does "matter." And despite Secretary of State's John Kerry's dismissiveness towards the Benghazi murders - "we got a lot more important things to move on to" - justice for the America's dead demands we find who is responsible.
Ben Rhodes should be called to account for trying to divert blame away from Islamic terrorists and the Obama team members whose feckless negligence led to the Benghazi massacre.
I have previously written about Ben Rhodes and his role in the Obama White House. It is shameful that this "kid" (he is all of 35) has been given any responsibility at all in our government.
In "Does it bother anyone that this person is the Deputy National Security Adviser?" I noted his problematic background for someone given so much power by Obama. But then again he does specialize in fiction-writing.
He earned a master's degree in fiction-writing from New York University just a few years ago . He did not have a degree in government, diplomacy, national security; nor has he served in the CIA, or the military. He was toiling away not that long ago on a novel called 'The Oasis of Love" about a mega church in Houston, a dog track, and a failed romance.
Carol Lee of Politico wrote in May, 2009, that
Not long ago, Rhodes was one of the obscure guys who wrote Obama's campaign speeches in Starbucks and played video games into the early morning hours. Now he attends national security meetings and takes writer's refuge in a secret office on the third floor of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building.
Wow - what a meteoric rise! What qualifies him to have been given such power to lie to the American people? Why does he have so much influence with Barack Obama ?
Maybe it is just his avid willingness to do the bidding of his bosses, regardless of truth.
Why do I make this claim? Well, for one reason, Hayes notes he did it regarding Benghazi. But there is a pattern here that he puts his education as a fiction writer to work for political purposes.
Years ago, Democratic Senator and Obama-mentor Lee Hamilton plucked him from obscurity to write what became the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group report. That report was rightly criticized for many reasons, among them was the stacking of its "expert list' with various pro-Arab apologist. Incidentally, the commission ignored its mandate to focus on Iraq and instead devoted a lot of words to attack Israel. Some of the experts who were interviewed were appalled by the final written report because they felt it did not reflect facts, their testimony, or reality.
Who wrote this whitewash? Who was responsible for hitting the delete button of some of the expert testimony? Who tried to divert responsibility for terrorism away from where it belongs?
None other than Ben Rhodes - a man who has finally found a use for his fiction-writing education (since he failed as a novelist); to whitewash Islamists and the Obama administration.
One hopes the House calls Rhodes as a witness in this week's hearings regarding the Benghazi massacre and the miscarriage of justice in Washington. Will his fiction-writing on behalf of Obama come to light?
He bears responsibility for a great deal of what has gone wrong in American foreign and national security policy for the past few years.
SDI at 30, Part I - Jay Nordlinger - National Review Online
Saturday, March 23, was the 30th anniversary of President Reagan’s famous “SDI speech” — the speech in which he announced our missile-defense project, which soon came to be known as the “Strategic Defense Initiative,” or “SDI.” I have a piece on this subject in the current National Review. I thought I would do an online series this week, blowing it out — expanding on this piece and this topic. There are not many more important topics, frankly. A defense against nuclear missiles ought to rank pretty high in the world’s priorities, and those of the United States.
Reagan gave his speech on March 23, 1983. Thirty years is a long time in modern scientific terms. Thirty years before the speech, Dr. Salk announced his polio vaccine. And when was the moon landing? In 1969, fourteen years before Reagan’s speech.
Think of that: We are now more than twice as distant from the SDI speech as we were then from the moon landing.
And what have we accomplished in the last 30 years? We have accomplished a fair amount, but not as much as we could have, and not as much as we should have. We have had four presidents since Reagan. Two of them — father and son — have been strongly supportive of missile defense. The other two, including our current president, much less so, to put it mildly.
Missile defense is not a national priority, and why this is so is a puzzling, vexing question.
On October 16, 1986, Reagan wrote to his friend Larry Beilenson. He related a bit of history:
When I finally decided to move on what has become SDI I called a meeting of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. I said that until nuclear weapons there had never been an offensive weapon that hadn’t inspired a defense all the way back to the spear and the shield. Then I asked them if in their thinking it was possible to devise a weapon that could destroy missiles as they came out of their silos. They were unanimous in their belief that such a defense system could be developed. I gave the go-ahead that very day.
He gave the SDI speech from the Oval Office — it started at 8:02 p.m. Much of the nation saw it or heard it, on television or the radio. The president said he had “reached a decision which offers a new hope for our children in the 21st century, a decision I’ll tell you about in a few minutes.”
In fact, most of the SDI speech was about matters other than SDI, though related: He talked about what America needed to do in the very near term, militarily. He talked about the defense budget. Have a taste of the speech, in the early going:
The defense policy of the United States is based on a simple premise: The United States does not start fights. We will never be an aggressor. We maintain our strength in order to deter and defend against aggression — to preserve freedom and peace.
In due course, he got to the momentous question of missile defense:
. . . I’ve become more and more deeply convinced that the human spirit must be capable of rising above dealing with other nations and human beings by threatening their existence.
The United States, like every other country, was defenseless against nuclear attack. All we had was MAD, which is to say, the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction: If you kill millions of ours, we’ll kill millions of yours. This did not sit well with Reagan.
If the Soviet Union will join with us in our effort to achieve major arms reduction, we will have succeeded in stabilizing the nuclear balance. Nevertheless, it will still be necessary to rely on the specter of retaliation, on mutual threat. And that’s a sad commentary on the human condition. Wouldn’t it be better to save lives than to avenge them?
He further said,
What if free people could live secure in the knowledge that their security did not rest upon the threat of instant U.S. retaliation to deter a Soviet attack, that we could intercept and destroy strategic ballistic missiles before they reached our own soil or that of our allies?
Nearing the end of his address, he said,
. . . I call upon the scientific community in our country, those who gave us nuclear weapons, to turn their great talents now to the cause of mankind and world peace, to give us the means of rendering these nuclear weapons impotent and obsolete.
Reagan wanted something like a shield — “a shield, not a sword,” in a phrase of the day. Edward Teller, the great physicist, titled a book of his “Better a Shield Than a Sword.” He was an adviser to Reagan, and in fact was in the White House on the night Reagan gave his speech. One of our missile-defense systems today is known as Aegis, a name borrowed from Greek mythology, denoting the shield or breastplate of Zeus or Athena.
For many years, peace-minded people had been crying against MAD. Only when Reagan cried too did many on the left warm to MAD. We were better off vulnerable, they said — this “strategic vulnerability” was too precious to be upset. But, again, they used to talk differently in peace circles.
This was certainly true of Nobel peace laureates. Take Lester Pearson, the Canadian diplomat (later prime minister) who won in 1957. In his Nobel lecture, he said,
. . . there is no effective defense against the all-destroying effect of nuclear missile weapons. Indeed, their very power has made their use intolerable, even unthinkable, because of the annihilative retaliation in kind that such use would invoke. So peace remains, as the phrase goes, balanced uneasily on terror, and the use of maximum force is frustrated by the certainty that it will be used in reply with a totally devastating effect. Peace, however, must surely be more than this trembling rejection of universal suicide.
And how about Philip Noel-Baker, the British diplomat, politician, and writer who won in 1959? He was a Quaker and a pacifist. In his Nobel lecture, he said,
. . . governments are constantly asserting that if they or their allies are attacked, they will instantly reply with weapons that will wipe out tens of millions of men and women and little children, who may bear no shadow of personal responsibility for what their government has done.
What is left of the morality on which our Western civilization has been built?
Funny, but that is exactly what Reagan said — to no applause from famous lovers of peace.
I will leave you, in this first part of our series, with some words of John Lewis Gaddis, in his history of the Cold War. He says that Reagan’s “most significant deed came on March 23, 1983, when he surprised the Kremlin, most American arms control experts, and many of his own advisers by repudiating the concept of Mutual Assured Destruction.”
In Gaddis’s view, SDI did this:
It challenged the argument that vulnerability could provide security. It called into question the 1972 Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, a centerpiece of SALT I. It exploited the Soviet Union’s backwardness in computer technology, a field in which the Russians knew that they could not keep up. And it undercut the peace movement by framing the entire project in terms of lowering the risk of nuclear war: the ultimate purpose of SDI, Reagan insisted, was not to freeze nuclear weapons, but rather to render them “impotent and obsolete.”
Thanks for joining me, friends, and we’ll resume tomorrow.
To order Jay Nordlinger’s book Peace, They Say: A History of the Nobel Peace Prize, the Most Famous and Controversial Prize in the World, go here. To order his collection Here, There & Everywhere, go here.
NYC Mayor Bloomberg: Government has right to ‘infringe on your freedom’
By Cheryl K. Chumley-The Washington Times Monday, March 25, 2013
New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg said on Sunday: Sometimes government does know best. And in those cases, Americans should just cede their rights.
“I do think there are certain times we should infringe on your freedom,” Mr. Bloomberg said, during an appearance on NBC. He made the statement during discussion of his soda ban — just shot down by the courts — and insistence that his fight to control sugary drink portion sizes in the city would go forth.
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