Newt Gingrich at AEI Today: Freedom Will Prevail

At the American Enterprise Institute this afternoon former Speaker of the House of Representatives Newt Gingrich gave a truly Churchillian address about the most serious threat facing America today:  Shariah.  It deserves a place in the firmament of history’s most outstanding calls to arms, a number of which – from Thomas Paine and George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to Franklin Roosevelt to John F. Kennedy – Mr. Gingrich cited to powerful effect.

The past Speaker and likely future presidential candidate provided a detailed assessment of the nature of Shariah – the totalitarian theo-political-legal code that authoritative Islam seeks to impose worldwide, on non-Muslims and Muslims alike.  He discussed not only the violent means of jihad by which that supremacist program is advanced.  He also dealt at length with the phenomenon of “creeping Shariah” – what its principal champions, the Muslim Brotherhood, call “civilizational jihad” or dawa.

Newt offered numerous examples of the ways in which the latter, “stealth jihad” has achieved the “steady infiltration of truly destructive ideas” into this country.   Among those mentioned: a case of a woman’s sustained torture and rape at the hands of her husband excused in a New Jersey court as allowed under Shariah; the U.S. government’s ownership of the world’s largest purveyor of Shariah-compliant insurance products, AIG; the State of Minnesota’s offering Shariah-compliant mortgages; the use of Islamic textbooks that promote jihad against Christians and Jews; and the effort to establish a symbol of Shariah’s triumph by building a megamosque at Ground Zero.

Mr. Gingrich called the proposed mosque adjacent to the site of the devastating attack on the World Trade Center “stunningly outrageous” and a “political act, not a religious one.”  He observed that its Shariah-adherent promoters were so confident that we would “tolerate [such] an act of triumphalism” that they initially called the project “Cordoba House,” believing “half of us too ignorant” of the history of the Christian church that was turned into the world’s third largest mosque in Cordoba, Spain after the Muslim Moors conquered the city and made it the capital of their kingdom.  The other half, he added, they expected would be “too timid” to object – a testament to the cowing effect of even the hint of violent jihad.

Speaker Gingrich characterized this pincer movement as “a mortal threat to the survival of freedom in the United States and the world as we know it.”  After citing Lincoln’s distillation of the American republic as one of a “government of the people, by the people and for the people,” he warned that “the victory of Shariah would clearly mark the end of the government Lincoln described.”

Perhaps the most moving part of Mr. Gingrich address was his reminder that, as grave as today’s threats are, we have faced and risen to such challenges throughout our nation’s history.  He closed with a rousing reading of the immortal passage from JFK’s first inaugural in which the young President called on a new generation to carry forward the torch of freedom that had been passed to them.   Newt closed with the inspiring affirmation that, if we do indeed our part, “freedom will prevail.”

With this address, Newt Gingrich has called for – and precipitated – the sort of debate about the death struggle we are in that has for too long been overdue.  With his accurate depiction of the nature, purposes and progress of Shariah, he has set the terms of reference for that debate, and he has challenged those who have been too ignorant or too timid to engage in it heretofore to do so now.   For freedom’s sake, let it begin.