Newt Gingrich, a serial adulterer and disciple of New Age futurists Alvin and Heidi Toffler, makes a singularly unlikely Crusader. Yet apparently at some point in the past year or so Gingrich looked in a mirror and saw Don John of Austria looking back at him.
An epiphany of that kind would explain Gingrich’s perverse determination to depict the contrived controversy over the “Ground Zero Mosque” as a contemporary Battle of Lepanto. A more reasonable explanation would be that Gingrich, one of the most penetrably insincere figures in American politics, is trying to distill irrational populist resentment into a propellant for a presidential campaign.
The contrived furor over the Cordoba House shows few signs of abating, and Gingrich used a recent interview with Christian Right activist David Barton to keep the GOP’s base riled up over an issue that most likely will disappear from view after the coming mid-term election — even though the rancorous residue will remain.
Gingrich is a statist down to his chromosomes, so it’s not surprising to see him breezily dismiss the concept of property rights. Even though those behind the proposed Park51 Muslim Community Center are peacefully and legally pursuing their designs, “There are a number of different steps that could be taken” to nullify their property rights, Gingrich told an approving Barton. “There’s no reason this has to occur and whether it’s city, state, or federal there are plenty of ways for America to stop it.”
For instance, “Congress has the ability to declare the area a national battlefield memorial because I think we should think of the World Trade Center as a battlefield site; this is a war.” Absent federal intervention, Gingrich continued, the New York State government could wage a war of attrition against the project: “The Attorney General of New York, Andrew Cuomo, could intervene because frankly he has the ability to slow it down for decades if he wants to.”
(Incidentally, when asked in the Barton interview about his presidential plans, Gingrich coyly replied that he would have to discuss the matter with Calista, the most recent future ex-Mrs. Gingrich, before making a decision early next year.)
Why is dramatic intervention against the Park51 project necessary? Gingrich’s July 21st statement on the “Ground Zero Mosque,” which is still being dutifully forwarded via e-mail by consumers of Republican-aligned talk radio, insists (on the basis of a studiously dishonest reading of Spanish history) that the supposed “mega-mosque” would be seen by Islamists as a “symbol of Islamic conquest.”
“America is experiencing an Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our civilization,” pontificated Gingrich. “Sadly, too many of our elites are the willing apologists for those who would destroy them if they could. No mosque. No self deception. No surrender. The time to take a stand is now – at this site on this issue.”
The supposed urgency of this refrain is dictated by Gingrich’s assumptions about how the “Ground Zero Mosque” would be perceived by radical Islamists rather than how the matter should be defined under our laws, traditions, and values.
This is to say that Gingrich, the supposed champion of American culture, is demanding that we play by their rules, rather than our own.
Rather than recognizing that we are strong enough to be indifferent to the delusions of Islamist radicals, Gingrich (like the deranged Pamela Geller and the deluded people organizing to oppose construction of Muslim houses of worship across the country) revels in our supposed weakness. They insist that we are so pitiable and helpless that permitting a Muslim YMCA to be built in Lower Manhattan would lead directly to dhimmitude.
All of this is an exercise in onanistic demagoguery — a lot of heavy breathing inspired by an imaginary threat.
If Gingrich actually gave as much as a gust of flatulence in a wind tunnel about the struggle against Sharia Law, he would have condemned the Sharia-compliant invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. The new constitutions of both Iraq and Afghanistan — which were written by Bush-era U.S. officials, not the minions of the Double-Secret Muslim Crypto-Marxist Kenyan Usurper currently in the White House — explicitly define Sharia as the fundamental laws of those countries.
Brutal and corrupt as he was, Saddam left Iraq’s Christians alone. Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi Christians have fled the “Sharia-compliant” regime inflicted on that country by American arms. Where was Newt “Charles the Hammer Martel” Gingrich when this tragedy was in its early stages? Oh, that’s right: Then, as now, he was enjoying a lucrative sinecure at the American Enterprise Institute, one of the neo-con “think-tanks” that agitated for the Iraq war.
Gingrich did nothing to oppose the 1999 U.S.-led NATO terror bombing of Serbia, which turned Kosovo over to the Islamist/Marxist Kosovo Liberation Army. He also supported earlier NATO interventions in Bosnia on behalf of Saudi-financed Jihadists, as well.
Since 1990, the Regime in Washington has done more to defend, promote, and expand Islamic rule than any world power since the era of Saladin. It sent a vast army of what a Saudi prince called “our white slaves” to defend the House of Saud and the Emir of Kuwait in 1990; it entrenched Islamic states in the Balkans; more recently it has overthrown Saddam’s relatively secular government, replacing him with a Sharia-based junta, and inflicted a centralized, Sharia-defined government on the clan-based Afghan society.
This is entirely in character for the Regime, which — chiefly through the CIA — has spent more than six decades weaponizing Islam for geostrategic purposes. Rather than urging a radical departure from the Establishment’s foreign policy, Gingrich now wants to promote an open-ended conflict with the entire Muslim world. After all, he told Barton to justify nullifying private property rights at Ground Zero, “this is a war” — a statement that, in context, makes sense only if “this” encompasses all Muslims everywhere.
