Newt Gingrich: Threats to America

http://homelandsecurityus.com/node/1384

By Sean Osborne, Associate Director, Military Affairs
16 MAY 08: In the current "Inside the Ring" column by Bill Gertz the lead-off segment focuses on a speech given yesterday (15 MAY) by former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich to the Business Executives for National Security.

In his speech Speaker Gingrich concurred with something I wrote as a comment the day before in the "Iranian Nuclear-Capable Cruise Missile Threat" entry of the NEINblog:

"It's not just the bleeding heart liberals who are sabotaging America from within. It is now the established policy of the whole of the United States Government to deny any link between Islam and Terrorism. Period. It's true, Republicans and Democrats alike hold dual responsibility for this absolute insanity. What's even worse... the apparent majority of U.S. citizens don't give a flip about it either. This is a combination of bald-faced negligence, willful ignorance and, quite probably, official malfeasance on a grand scale."

I quote Bill Gertz who quotes Speaker Gingrich (emphasis added):

"Threats to America


Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich warned in a major speech yesterday that the United States is facing the danger of defeat today similar to Britain in the early days of World War II.
U.S. military, economic and intellectual power is eroding as threats are growing and both Republican and Democrat leaders are deficient, Mr. Gingrich said. The five "greatest strategic threats" to the country, he said, are China's rise, a resurgent autocratic Russia, radical Islam, rogue regimes seeking weapons of mass murder, and the growth of an anti-democratic system led by a "bureaucratic international elite."
The U.S. needs a grand strategy to confront and outmatch all five threats, but noted that "current American efforts are too small, too unimaginative, and too timid."
"Faced with these large, systemic challenges, the current generation of leaders in both parties are refusing to deal with the scale and the urgency required for continued American prosperity, safety, and freedom," Mr. Gingrich told the Business Executives for National Security.
Ideologically, "we find ourselves crippled by political correctness and incapable of having honest conversations about meeting the threats around the world," Mr. Gingrich said.
Recent guidelines by the Department of Homeland Security and National Counterterrorism Center instructing government officials not to use "Islamic terms" to describe terrorists is "enormously self-destructive," he said.
"If we cannot have an honest discussion about the nature of the threats against us, we cannot develop strategies to meet those threats," he said. "It is simply suicidal to treat the al Qaeda network as simply 'an illegitimate political organization, both terrorist and criminal' while ignoring the radical religious foundation underpinning this and other groups that constitute an Irreconcilable Wing of Islam. Anyone blind to this should be dismissed from working in national security.""

These articulate words from Speaker Gingrich reiterate explicitly what we at the Northeast Intelligence Network and this NEINblog have been saying about these things for quite a few years now. They are so enduring and consistent because they resonate with core American Conservative thought, which itself is wholly based upon indisputable real-world facts. We American Conservatives see things are they really are, not as we hope or wish them to be. We understand American vital interests, we know a threat when we detect one and we spell it out point blank, sans the political correctness nonsense so prevalent in electronic or print media.
America as we have known her is in very grave danger. From within and well as from the outside. As watchmen we can only sound the warnings as the danger approaches. All of us, all of you, have to recognize these warnings for what they are - deadly existential threats - and act upon them. Without such action it may be that our best efforts may well turn out to be for naught.
_________________
"The conversion of the entire population to Islam and the extinction of every form of dissent is the ideal of the Muslim State - This is Islamic Peace"

A moderate Moslem is one who sends others blow themselves up.