from the Congress Action newsletter

A Question Of Survival

by: Kim Weissman
June 6, 2004


Today we commemorate the day six decades ago when American and allied armies, navies, and air forces launched an invasion of Nazi dominated Europe, to bring freedom to a continent. As we remember that event, and honor the bravery of those who sacrificed to bring freedom to others, we again find ourselves in a war confronting evil on a global scale. Yet we find the world a very different place than it was sixty years ago; the moral compass that guided past generations of Americans no longer functions. Our culture is in free-fall.

The left demands that non-citizen immigrants and felons be allowed to vote; they brand any attempt to assimilate immigrants into the America’s constitutional heritage as “genocide”; leftists who dominate our education system require students to practice the tenets of Islam while they vilify the religious roots that underlie the foundations of our nation; and they launch hysterical diatribes claiming that Bush, Ashcroft, and Rumsfeld are greater threats than terrorists who want to kill us all. With their dogma of multiculturalism the left seeks to destroy the common values and the reverence for a common heritage that unites us as a culture, and turn us into nothing more than what Theodore Roosevelt called “dwellers in a polyglot boarding house.”

A culture and a stable society require more than just a group of individuals who inhabit the same land-mass; a stable society requires shared values, aspirations, and the acceptance of a heritage rooted in shared ideals. Without such commonality, a society becomes a fractious collection of bitterly squabbling factions, in conflict over even the most basic concepts of right and wrong, good and evil.

Isn’t that exactly what we see today – radically contradictory visions of good and evil? This ranges from the philosophical (free market capitalism is advanced to improve living standards around the globe, and is damned by hooded anarchists and empty-headed Hollywood has-beens as “corporate imperialism”) to the deadly (both the global news organization Reuters and the American Boston Globe contend that one person’s terrorist is another person’s freedom fighter – Reuters did so within weeks of the mass murder of 3,000 civilians on September 11, 2001 – because we cannot even agree that deliberately targeting civilians as an act of war is evil, is terrorism). But because we no longer share a common system of values or reverence for a common heritage, we have become a non-judgmental society. Who is to say what is right and what is wrong? By what right do we view the actions of others through the prism of our value system?

Sixty years ago, we honored the men who sacrificed to bring freedom to others by defeating those who Winston Churchill called the purveyors of a new Dark Age. Today we are again engaged in a deadly battle to defeat new purveyors of a new Dark Age. But when we wonder what has become of our culture, we need look no further than those upon whom our modern culture bestows honors: A president who received sexual favors from an intern in the nation’s White House, who lied under oath, and was impeached, is declared an incisive statesman (and is a celebrated author), and is still the biggest “star” in Democrat Party circles; a teen who created a computer virus that caused emergency services around the world to grind to a halt is hailed as a hero for striking a blow against global capitalism, then sells his story for millions; a movie-maker, Michael Moore (who columnist Suzanne Fields calls “a celebrity propagandist puffed up by a culture of sycophants long on emotion and short on intellect” who uses “buffoonery” to vilify President Bush) is showered with awards and encomiums as an astute political commentator; Hollywood awards a Best Director Oscar to Roman Polanski – who could not accept because he is a fugitive from justice, having fled the country after pleading guilty to statutory rape.

There is no shortage of additional examples. And what does our culture consider of vital importance? The most fundamental battle in the confirmation of federal judges in the U.S. Senate is over whether we can preserve our legal right to massacre a million and a half unborn babies every year.

The differences couldn’t be more stark: one side of our culture war is fighting to preserve freedom and our way of life against fanatics who would destroy both; the other side is also fighting a battle, but solely for their own political self-aggrandizement, as though the foreign threat simply does not exist. One side believes the best way to defend the nation is through strength; the other side advocates weakness (look at Kerry’s repeated votes to cut defense and intelligence). One side is fighting to preserve our national sovereignty and our system of government elected by and answerable to the public; the other side seeks to subordinate our national sovereignty to unelected global bureaucrats and unaccountable global institutions (and to prepare us to accept the role of sheep, we are supposed to accept without question judges who rule by diktat rather than obeying legitimate and duly enacted laws).

Our country faces a unique and very dangerous time, in which sizeable numbers of Americans, including many in positions of power, are actively undermining our nation during war time. And as justification they cannot legitimately claim to be seeking a better way to protect and defend the nation. Their actions are motivated solely by their burning obsession to regain political power; and should they succeed, their ultimate goal is to submit the defense and even the governance of this nation to a foreign authority – to the United Nations.

Let us examine the recent history of that institution. The U.N. stood by as Serbs rounded up and murdered thousands of Muslims from a U.N. designated safe haven; it allowed half a million people to be slaughtered in Rwanda when U.N. peacekeepers were pulled out after a few of their troops were killed; U.N. peacekeepers retreated to their compounds, prohibited from intervening during a massacre of civilians in the Congo, despite desperate pleas from the French commander to U.N. headquarters to do something. The U.N. recently received a Human Rights Watch report about genocide now occurring in Sudan, and decided that the best response they could muster was to debate, in U.N. bureaucrat-eze, “to remain seized of the matter”. The U.N. allows Sudan, Cuba, and Libya to sit on its Commission on Human Rights; and was close to allowing Saddam’s Iraq to chair its committee on the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

The U.N. watches terrorism occur on a regular basis in Israel and blames the victims, its General Assembly actually sanctioning terrorism in a 1982 resolution that “Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and foreign domination and foreign occupation by all available means [emphasis added], including armed struggle” – and that resolution was reaffirmed by the U.N. Commission on Human Rights in 2002. Michelle Malkin reported on evidence showing Arab gunmen using a U.N. ambulance as a getaway vehicle following an attack in Gaza. A U.S. congressman has charged that the U.N. Relief and Works Agency “hosts summer school training camps where young students are taught tactics that further the cause of the Intifada”, another congressman charged that “UNRWA continues to use anti-Semitic textbooks that glorify martyrdom and deny the legitimacy and existence of Israel”.

The U.N. runs Palestinian refugee camps (such as Jenin) that are breeding grounds for terrorists. Law professor Alan Dershowitz wrote, “For more than a quarter of a century, the United Nations has actively encouraged terrorism by rewarding its primary practitioners, legitimating it as a tactic, condemning its victims when they try to defend themselves and describing the murderers of innocent children as ‘freedom fighters.’ No organization in the world today has accorded so much legitimacy to terrorism as has the United Nations.”

But even stoking the flames of terrorism and turning a blind eye toward the genocidal killers and human rights abusers in their midst still doesn’t tell the complete story of the United Nations. That organization is even now dissembling about its apparent involvement in what has been called the most massive fraud in history – Saddam Hussein’s theft of billions of dollars of oil revenues intended for food and humanitarian aid for his own people – the oil-for-food scandal. That diversion of wealth subjected the Iraqi people to great suffering under the U.N. sanctions, suffering for which hate-filled blame-America-first leftists blamed – naturally – America. Now that the truth is finally coming out and we learn the real cause of that suffering, the hate-filled blame-America-first leftists have fallen silent. No apologies for the baseless slurs which they leveled against the United States all those years. But they have the gall to demand that Bush apologize for 9-11.

Recently we have been hearing from western journalists and democrat politicians that the Iraqis may have been better off, or at least no worse off, under Saddam’s tyranny (Ted Kennedy: “…we now learn that Saddam's torture chambers reopened under new management – U.S. management”; Congressional Record, May 10, 2004). Maybe our journalists and democrats would like to spring Saddam from prison so that he can head the new Iraqi government. We can assume that so-called “human rights activists” would not object – they have opposed the liberation of Iraq from the very beginning, proving that all they care to do is yammer about human rights abuses at cushy conferences, especially when they can use the opportunity to vilify the United States (which is, in their minds, the worst human rights offender on the planet, mainly because we refuse to accede to their demand that we abandon our Bill of Rights in favor of their International Criminal Court; and refuse to surrender our self-governance to unelected U.N. bureaucrats).

So-called “human rights activists” never want to actually do anything to improve human rights – such as liberating 25 million Iraqis from the depravity of Saddam Hussein, or liberating 25 million Afghanis from the Taliban. Most on the left in this country think that we will be safer if we submit our national security to the veto power of the United Nations; and think we will be a better nation if we surrender our self-governance to the U.N. and other international organizations. The danger presented by the current virulence of the left is magnified because we are at war with an ideology that poses as great a threat to our existence as any we’ve ever faced, and they are actively undermining our resolve to win that war. The haters on the left are endangering our national security to advance their own political ambitions.

Billionaire George Soros harbors a burning hatred for George Bush. He has the money and knowledge to engage in currency speculation and other manipulations to collapse the U.S. economy if that’s what he decides to do, and he has pledged as much of his fortune as necessary to defeat Bush. Economic chaos in the months before the election would seriously hurt Bush’s chance for re-election (and the suffering it would cause to millions of ordinary people would just be a minor inconvenience to self-righteous elitists). History is full of egotists who have tried to re-order the world to conform to their vision; and when they possess great power, devastation and ruin inevitably follow in their wake. Justice Louis D. Brandeis warned that “the greatest dangers to liberty” come from “men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.”

In an unprecedented tirade before the virulently Bush-hating MoveOn.org, former Vice President Gore spewed venom at President Bush (Boston Herald: “The real disgrace is that this repugnant human being once held the second highest office in this great land”). Gore, let us never forget, was Vice President during the period that al Qaeda repeatedly attacked this nation with virtual impunity, was Vice President while al Qaeda grew in virulence and planned 9-11, and was the chairman of the 1997 White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, charged with the task to “enhance and ensure the continued safety and security of our air transportation system”. On September 11 we all saw how well he did his work. Gore demanded the resignation of the leadership of virtually the entire war-fighting and intelligence apparatus of the nation, in a speech that undoubtedly gladdened the hearts of America’s enemies around the world, and touched a sympathetic chord among many in this country.

Korean War and Vietnam War veteran and U.S. Congressman Sam Johnson revived a too-little-used description – treason – for the hate-filled bile being spewed by so people in this country. Gore’s comments, he said, were “as close to being traitorous as I can think of”; our troops in Iraq, he said, “need to be commended and not slaughtered by traitorous remarks that I just heard.” Johnson compared Gore’s diatribe to the Vietnam-era rants of Jane Fonda, and to John Kerry’s 1971 testimony to the U.S. Senate. Johnson (a Vietnam POW for 6 years) said that his North Vietnamese captors “played her [Fonda’s] speech to the guys on the front line, where she talked through a loudspeaker and told them to lay down their arms and quit fighting. And John Kerry was part of that anti-war movement.”

But we all have freedom of speech to say anything we want, don’t we? And isn’t our freedom eternal – no matter what we say or what we do? Freedom is our entitlement, isn’t it?

Enjoying freedom for more than two centuries, and with our ignorance of history, we have come to believe that freedom is the natural state of mankind. The truth is that over recorded human history, freedom and individual liberty have been the rare exceptions rather than the rule. (This is akin to our belief that a benign, relatively stable climate is the norm, even though the climate record that scientists have been able to winnow out clearly proves the contrary). But the one thing that has been constant throughout human history is human arrogance – the ancient Greeks called it hubris – and that has clearly been the rule, rather than the exception, in the long recorded history of mankind.

We see that hubris continuing to manifest itself in the current presidential campaign. For the left, in Ann Coulter’s pithy phrase, “history always begins this morning”. What about the great issues that are at stake in this election? The left wants voters to ask themselves if they feel better off today than when George Bush first took office in 2001, and how they feel about our soldiers fighting and dying in Iraq. There is a studied amnesia about what happened on September 11, 2001 – “history always begins this morning” – those events never happened. Just as for the Clinton-Gore administration, the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center never happened, the 1995 attack on our soldiers in the Khobar Towers in Saudi Arabia never happened, the 1998 bombings of our embassies in Africa never happened, the 2000 attack against the USS Cole never happened, Osama bin Laden's 1996 declaration of war against America and his 1998 vow to massacre American civilians never happened.

Leftists call themselves progressives because they look to tomorrow, not backwards toward yesterday. So let’s look toward tomorrow, let’s ask the leftists to imagine a tomorrow with American forces withdrawn from Iraq. There are thousands of Islamic fanatics streaming into Iraq to confront coalition forces there now; and contrary to caricatures of statesmen like “Fritz” Hollings, who claimed that Iraq “didn't have terrorists there at the time” (before the invasion), Iraq and the Middle East were cauldrons of simmering hatred for America, havens and breeding grounds for terrorists long before our invasion in 2003 (“I do not doubt that there are some members of al-Qaida in Iraq.” – Senator Robert Byrd; Congressional Record, October 3, 2002).

What do leftists think those thousands of Islamic fanatics would do if there were no coalition military forces in Iraq? Do leftists think that those Islamic fanatics would simply go home and take up peaceful pursuits? Remember, they came here to kill us on September 11, 2001, when we were not occupying Iraq. They were attacking us around the world during the 1990’s while Bill Clinton was publicly embracing Yasser Arafat at the White House. But for leftists, “history always begins this morning”; to them, there were no Middle Eastern terrorists trying to kill us before George Bush was elected President, and terrorism is all his fault. The left is counting on the rest of the nation to share their memory loss at election time.

For those with historical amnesia, some perspective. Since the Iraq war began more than a year ago, critics have tried to use the casualties there for political gain. While every death is a tragedy, those who serve, and who gave the “last full measure of devotion”, have been serving a noble cause – the defense of freedom. In over a year, just over 900 members of the coalition forces have died. Today we remember the sacrifice of another generation who landed on the coast of France to free a continent. On that day sixty years ago – in one day – approximately 2,500 Allied troops were killed. Oh – and between 15,000 and 20,000 French civilians in the vicinity of the landings were also killed.

SOME SERIOUS QUESTIONS — It is long past time we began answering some very serious questions in this country:

The Iraq war became necessary because Saddam refused to come clean about his weapons of mass destruction and refused to dissociate himself from terrorists. Since the end of the first Gulf War, the left has shown sympathy for ending the U.N. sanctions against Iraq, and in the run-up to the current war the left displayed very vocal opposition to holding Saddam to account. How much did the fanatical, willfully blind, peace-at-any-price anti-war movement actually encourage Saddam into thinking he could stonewall the international community, because they convinced him that we would not go to war?

So the question is: How much did left-wing anti-war extremism actually make war more likely?

The insurgency in Iraq is aimed at fracturing American resolve to finish the war against terrorism. The left, fueled by their virulent hatred for George Bush, and the democrats’ obsession with regaining their political power, has convinced those viewing our politics from the outside – such as Islamic terrorists – that if Kerry wins the election, we will withdraw from Iraq, handing a huge victory to terrorism, and return to the prior administration’s policy of appeasement and self-flagellation. Media and democrat hysteria over Abu Ghraib only reinforces that perception; and Kerry has done little to dispel that view.

Left-wing rhetoric feeds enemy propaganda and encourages their attacks against our troops. And plans are being laid, we are told, to stage another massive terrorist attack in this country before the election in order to reprise the Spanish election upset, leading to a Kerry victory. How much does the irresponsible leftist rhetoric in this country actually encourage the Iraqi insurgency?

Recall that the North Vietnamese admitted to being encouraged to continue fighting by the anti-war rhetoric in the streets of America, knowing that they were winning the war of public opinion and morale even though losing on the battlefield. (Kerry was a big part of that back then; if he wins the election and we pull out of Iraq, his defeatism will have played a big part in his own country losing two wars.) How much does the leftist rhetoric encourage terrorists to believe that launching another attack in this country before the election will help their cause?

So the question is: How many dead soldiers in Iraq, and how many dead Americans here if we suffer another terrorist attack, can be blamed, not on Bush or Rumsfeld, but laid directly at the feet of the Bush-hating left?

The serious questions that must be posed to the left go far beyond the war on terrorism and the Iraq war. In 1998, a bipartisan commission concluded that a hostile state could acquire ballistic missile capability “with little or no warning”. The missile threat is urgent and growing, and weapons of mass destruction are spreading. Some very irrational leaders of hostile nations already possess both. Yet for years democrats, and scientists with a political agenda, have opposed the development and deployment of a national missile defense, even though that policy was mandated by Congress in 1999. So the question is: Why are leftists so desperate to keep our nation vulnerable to attack?

Ratification of the International Criminal Court is another big issue for the left, even though the ICC would negate important provisions of our Bill of Rights. The ICC, for example, provides for the issuance of search warrants at the request of the prosecutor, without requiring “probable cause”; nor must an arrest or seizure of evidence be “supported by oath or affirmation” before an independent magistrate prior to the issuance of a warrant. The Fourth Amendment of the U.S. Bill of Rights requires both probable cause and oath or affirmation.

The Fifth Amendment of our Bill of Rights prohibits double jeopardy; that is, trying a person twice for the same crime. The ICC provides that a person can be brought to trial again before the ICC for the same alleged crime, if he was acquitted in an American court and the ICC is dissatisfied with that acquittal; if the ICC arrives at the totally subjective conclusion that the original prosecution was “conducted in a manner which, in the circumstances, was inconsistent with an intent to bring the person concerned to justice.”

The Sixth Amendment of our Bill of Rights requires “a public trial, by an impartial jury of the State and district wherein the crime shall have been committed”. Among the “long train of abuses and usurpations” set forth in our Declaration of Independence that justified our Founders taking up arms in our Revolution, were “depriving us…of the benefits of trial by jury; for transporting us beyond seas to be tried for pretended offenses.” The ICC can waive public trials to “protect the safety, physical and psychological well-being, dignity and privacy of victims and witnesses.” No jury renders judgment under the ICC, and trials are to take place, not at the locale of the alleged crime, but at the seat of the Court at The Hague.

Appeals of criminal convictions in the U.S. can span years and multiple levels of judicial review, state and federal. But the ICC is an authority unto itself, the only appeal of its decisions is solely to the Appeals Chamber of the ICC itself, and appeals cannot be taken at all without permission of the Trial Chamber that rendered the verdict being appealed. The denial of an appeal by the Trial Chamber, and decisions by the Appeals Chamber, are final. There is no provision for any independent review of the decisions of the Trial Chamber or the Appeals Chamber.

Despite all this, many of the same leftists who vehemently oppose the USA Patriot Act, a law duly enacted by the elected United States Congress and containing all of the safeguards of the American justice system and our Bill of Rights, are equally vehement in their demands that the United States subscribe to the International Criminal Court, a statute created by unelected foreign bureaucrats, which contains none of the safeguards of our Constitution and Bill of Rights. So the question is: Why is the left so eager to abandon our Bill of Rights in favor of foreign laws?

Even the staunchest proponents of the Kyoto Protocol admit that even if fully implemented, it will have a negligible effect on global climate; and virtually everyone agrees that complying with the Protocol will cause major harm to the U.S. economy. It would be all pain for no gain, for a problem that increasing numbers of scientists say simply does not exist. Yet the left continues their frantic demands for Kyoto, resorting to increasingly hysterical tactics to scare those they can’t convince with science. So the question is: Why is the left so insistent on the ratification of a treaty that will do nothing to address the issue they claim to champion, yet which will certainly do enormous damage to our economy?

For decades radical environmentalists have fought to restrict our domestic supply of fossil fuels, they have obstructed the construction of oil refineries, they have blocked the use of our abundant supplies of clean-burning coal, and they have virtually eliminated the possibility of expanding our use of nuclear power. Now leftists complain about our dependence on foreign oil, and rising prices due to a restricted supply coupled with turmoil in the Middle East. A serious disruption of our foreign supplies will have a devastating economic impact, yet leftists deny their own central role in creating the conditions about which they complain, and ignore the inevitable consequences of their agenda. So the question is: Why is the left deliberately setting up conditions that could do severe harm to our economy?

The fundamental question prompted by all of this is: At what point do we stop ascribing the motives of the left as misguided but nevertheless well-intentioned; and recognize that the left is actually motivated by a loathing for, and a burning desire to tear down, the constitutional foundations of this country?

The hatred that the left is now spewing at Bush reveals what so-called kind-caring-compassionate leftists really feel towards anyone who stands in the way of their totalitarian agenda, anyone who still reveres this country’s traditional heritage and values. Collectivism is their watchword; socialism is the god to which they pray; global government by diktat from unaccountable elites is their long term goal; and shameless lies, cover-ups, and a slick, well-oiled media/Hollywood propaganda machine are their tools.


The above article is the property of Kim Weissman, and is reprinted with his permission.
Contact him prior to reproducing.

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16 jun 2004