GAFFNEY: Our enemies sense weakness

President Obama's stewardship of the national security portfolio to date amounts to a wrecking operation, a set of policies he must understand will not only weaken the United States but embolden our foes. After all, the communist agitator Saul Alinsky, a formative influence in Mr. Obama's early years According to this logic, the various steps Mr. Obama is taking with respect to the armed forces, the foreign battlefields in which they are engaged, our allies as well as our adversaries will not only diminish our power. They will encourage our enemies to perceive us as less powerful - with ominous implications. Consider some illustrative examples:

• The Obama administration is cutting the defense budget by 10 percent. The result will preclude much, if not virtually all, of the modernization that will be required to prepare the U.S. military to contend with tomorrow's wars. Most of what the Pentagon spends goes to fixed - and growing - personnel-related costs (pay, bonuses, health care, etc.) and operations. As a result, at Obama funding levels, there will not be much available even to “reset” today's forces by refurbishing the equipment being used up in present conflicts.

• The president is on a path to denuclearizing the United States by refusing to modernize the arsenal or even to fund fully the steps necessary to assure the viability of the weapons we have. He hopes to dress up this act of unilateral disarmament by seeking to resume arms-control negotiations with Russia, as though such throwbacks to the old Cold War and its bipolar power structure apply today - let alone that there are grounds for believing the Kremlin would adhere to new treaties any better than the previous ones it systematically violated.

Communists and other such fanatics desperately seek to be seen as non-fanatical, as cover for their extremism. It is a weakness found in a free society that the freedom of debate seeks to include the widest possible amount of “reasonable” argument. This desire for reasoned argument is the cover used by the unreasonable.

In 19th Century India, the Thuggee cult (”the stranglers”) were murderous bands of armed robbers that would infiltrate, gain the confidence, then slaughter entire caravans to rob them. While not a religion, per se, they had unique religious beliefs, even to some extent honoring the goddess Kali, the goddess of death.

So imagine if the Thuggee cult were still around today, and in the United States, and proclaiming themselves a “persecuted religion”, because they were not permitted to practice their “faith” of robbery and mass murder.

They would not be that different from American communists, who assert their legitimacy in the political debate, even though their ends and means are much the same as those of the Thuggee, if on a far grander scale.

And they, much like these imaginary American Thugs, would always have to assert that they were somehow “different” or “reasonable”, so that they could participate in the debate, in hopes of subverting it.

So while Americans profoundly support freedom of speech, it has to be tempered with the recognition that despite a veneer of reasonableness, if the underlying axiom of the advocate is that, when in power, he and his kind will rob and murder everyone else involved in the debate who is not one of them, their arguments, no matter how sweet sounding, are *not* reasonable.

In practice, the moment someone like Saul Alinsky, or others of the far left, let slip how much they admire Kali, and are willing to dispatch millions of human beings they don’t like in her honor, that is pretty much the end of free speech. Nothing else they can say in their entire lives should again provide them a place in the debate, any more than a Thuggee, asserting his “civil right” to befriend, stalk, rob an murder people at random.

Free speech should not be accorded communists, even if they want to talk about sports.

http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=10762676-5947-4591-B733-98291C6BE75D

“The Obama Administration and Radical Islam”
By Jamie Glazov
FrontPageMagazine.com | Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Alex Alexiev, vice president for research at the Center for Security Policy.
FP: Mr. Alexiev, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

During the last election campaign you wrote that if Barack Obama emerges victorious “the loudest cheers could come from the sworn Islamist enemies of our civilization.”

What are your views of President Obama’s policies with respect to radical Islam so far and do you still believe that the Islamists have a reason to be happy with the new administration?

Alexiev: With a caveat that it is still too early in the new administration’s tenure to form a definitive opinion, I’d have to say that the Islamists, foreign and domestic, have every reason to be happy with the direction in which the president is taking the country. This is particularly clear in the realm of foreign policy, but is also manifesting itself in domestic policy.

FP: Give an example. Start with the domestic situation.”

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