This is the text of a speech delivered to the California Republican Jewish Coalition (RJW) on Saturday, 21 June 2008. The audio of the speech can be found here.

Let us begin where all things begin in this political era: on September 11th, 2001. Everyone in this room has a story of that day. Mine is set in Brooklyn, where I waited long hours for my wife to come home with the ash-covered refugee throngs from lower Manhattan. In the sky we saw a black plume that blotted out the sun. Upon our neighborhood fell the charred debris of the morning’s massacre: A manila folder. Nynex billing records. A burnt in-flight safety card from a Boeing 767.

In the subsequent 24 hours, we heard the President of the United States say two things of note: first, that “freedom itself” was attacked — and second, that Islam is a “religion of peace.” The first statement was widely derided as nonsensical… simplistic… or absurd. The second was lauded as an act of statesmanship… as a magnanimous gesture… and as a necessary conciliatory step.

My friends, I submit to you that the popular assessment of both phrases was precisely wrong — in fact, the opposite of the truth about each. By way of explaining this, I’d like to tell you a bit about where I’ve just been.

Last week, I returned from the Third International Conference on the Muslim World and the West in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The aim of the conference was to “bridge the gap,” as they put it, between the Muslim world and the West.

Now, this seems like a worthy thing. Surely we of the West ought to find our common ground with the Muslim world, and vice versa. Surely there is common ground to be found. Surely the problems between us are predominantly problems of understanding and comprehension… and surely they are solvable with a little goodwill.

I admit to having been a bit dismayed when, at a pre-conference interview, the chairman — a Columbia University alumnus named Imam Feisal Rauf — told me that Muslim violence was “predominantly” the fault of Westerners. Nonetheless, I soldiered on in the belief that we could — how to put it? — bridge the gap.

To say that the luminaries of the conference disappointed my hopes is to understate things. But to say that that were luminous is to be perfectly accurate. I’ll just name three of the most prominent and powerful:

•    Secretary-General of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, Ekmeleddin Ihsanouglu of Turkey.
•    Former Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz.
•    His Royal Highness Prince Turki bin Faisal al Saud, former director of Saudi intelligence, and until recently the Saudi Ambassador to the United States.

These men are educated… well traveled… experienced… wealthy… and Westernized. And each of them told the conference that for the West and Islam to reconcile, the West must abandon the principle of free speech.

Secretary-General Ihsanouglu declared that there is “a campaign of incitement under the guise of freedom of expression.” Therefore, freedom of expression must go.

Prince Turki bin Faisal al Saud, put it in more blunt terms: “I can never accept, in my personal view, that freedom of speech is morally right when it supersedes and offends my faith and my belief.”

Finally, former Pakistani Prime Minister Shaukat Aziz said, “Producing cartoons on religious leaders, where sensitivities are hurt, should be discouraged — and should be opposed and not be protected under the guise of freedom.”

For this, he received vigorous applause from the assembled delegates.

I will not bore you with a recounting of the remainder of the conference. Suffice it to say that it was all like this, and that the consensus was that the West need merely yield its freedoms in favor of a regime of enforcement that would quash any speech — and indeed, any thought — that Muslims find offensive. Once this was done, it was explicitly stated, Muslim anger would cool, and there would be no more violence… except, a Palestinian legislator in attendance reminded us, against the Jews, who have it coming anyway.

My purpose here is not to engage in yet another monologue on just how frightening and dismaying our conflict with the Muslim world truly is. After the events of this decade, those who do not already grasp this probably never will. There is a temptation to blame these people for moral blindness or frivolity. But we must be charitable.

Back in 2004, the Jewish News Weekly of Northern California quoted Ken Wornick of the Republican Jewish Coalition as saying, “Jews have this blind belief in negotiations. They believe in their heart of hearts that since we would rather settle almost anything peacefully, our enemies feel the same way. But guess what: They don’t.”

I am ill placed to comment on what Jews at large believe. But I can say that the tendency Ken identifies here is endemic to all people of basic goodwill — especially in America, and in the West, where we assume that our differences will be resolved through open debate and the institutions of democracy.

Our reflex to accommodation and discussion is mostly a healthy thing. But we must develop the wisdom and discernment to realize when our better natures become self-destructive. The tragedy of this war we’re in — and it is a war — is that if we lose, we lose because we are too good to win.

To take one example, the Third International Conference on the Muslim World and the West in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, did feature several Western luminaries. The deputy speaker of the French National Assembly was there, as was a Spanish ambassador, an Australian MP, and various other mostly European functionaries. Every single one of them accepted the demand for an end to free speech without complaint.

We might call this the mindset of the quisling. Or, to invoke the opposite side of that historical allusion, we might say that they merely adhere to Winston Churchill’s admonition that “it is better to jaw-jaw than to war-war.”

There is tremendous wisdom in Churchill’s statement — but to take it at face value is to ignore that the man himself would not “jaw-jaw” with simply anyone, on any terms. This, after all, is a man for whom Mohandas Gandhi was deemed a morally unfit interlocutor. (I believe Churchill was right on this, but that’s for another speech.) Churchill rightly understood that to talk with someone in the absence of conditions gives some measure of moral sanction to that person.

For Churchill, to sit down with Hitler on equal terms, conceding from the start the legitimacy of the Nazi’s desires, was to lose the battle before it began.

Similarly, I posit that to seek to “bridge the gap” between the Muslim world and the West, conceding from the start that the suppression of a basic freedom may even be discussed, is not meaningfully different from total capitulation.

Remember the President’s statement on September 11th, 2001? The one derided by our chattering classes, about “freedom itself” coming under attack? We need only refer to the rational chain advanced by the Muslim luminaries in Malaysia last week to see how right the President was:

From the existence of freedom… comes the exercise of freedom… comes the outrage at that exercise… comes the violence from that outrage.

The logic is as unassailable as its implication is morally abhorrent. If this is wholly true — and I do not believe it is — but if it is, then we in the West have a stark choice before us: oppression and peace, on the one hand, or freedom and war on the other.

The great Jewish philosopher Martin Buber famously wrote, in “I and Thou,” “If I am not for myself, who will be for me?” This is the basic question of our age: if not us, who? Or, to invoke the logic that blames freedom for terror, do we have the strength… the resolve… and the confidence to choose freedom and war?

This, though, is not the whole of Buber’s famous quote: he went on to write, “If I am only for myself, what am I?” In that light, we must not believe that in defending our basic freedoms, we are solely serving our own interests. Indeed, if the Muslim world hates our freedoms and how we use them, then an absolute and uncompromising defense of those freedoms and their use is the single greatest act of charity and, yes, love we can offer the Muslim world.

I said I do not accept the logic that blames freedom for terror. I have traveled through the Muslim world, from Turkey to Jordan to Malaysia to east Africa, and yes, to Jerusalem itself… and I have yet to meet a Muslim who was not a human being, endowed by the Creator with the same basic faculties that our own Founding Fathers identified as providing the natural impetus to freedom.

Muslims are not psychologically and culturally inert, purely reactive to Western stimuli. They have the same capacity for moral choice, and the same independent existence, as all persons — even if their conference-going, globetrotting leaders pretend otherwise. We owe them that basic respect… rather than the infantilizing assumption that they are, as their leaders would have it, easily provoked savages, prone to violence lest we speak softly.

This is not to assert that there is a basic goodness in them that will pour forth upon the display of our own goodness. Here we come to the second of the President’s post-9/11 assertions: that Islam is a “religion of peace.” It is a sign of our own lack of self-confidence, and our own lack of moral bearing, that we largely accepted, and even praised, this trope within days of the slaughter of 3,000 fellow Americans in Islam’s name. What the President said may be defensible on grounds of realpolitik — but not on grounds of truth.

As a good Muslim friend of mine put it, “Islam is not a religion of peace. It’s a religion of justice.” It is incumbent upon us to understand and comprehend what that notion of justice entails — so we may defy it when it threatens ours.

Protecting and exercising our freedoms may cause them pain at points — though not less pain than their violence causes us — but in the long run, if we persist with the courage of our convictions, they will seek those freedoms for themselves.

My friends, whatever comes between now and that day is, I believe, a price worth paying.

At this point, some of you may be asking how the heck this relates to the Republican party. We’re here under the auspices of the Republican Jewish Coalition, after all, and no doubt I owe you a bit of partisanship.

Let me close, then, in the spirit of the greatest Republican of all time, Abraham Lincoln, who once said, “This reminds me of a story.”

I still remember the first time I knew I was a Republican. I even remember the date. It was November 7th, 1984. I was nine years old, and we all — my whole family — lived in Seoul, South Korea, where my father was stationed as a U.S. Air Force officer. Because of the time difference, we watched the election-night broadcast of Tuesday, November 6th on the morning of Wednesday, November 7th before school.

Now, I should tell you a bit about life in Korea in the 1980s. North Korea seems threatening now… but it was even more ominous then. I spent my elementary school years with monthly air raid sirens and evacuation drills. The military dictatorship that ruled South Korea never tired of reminding us of the hordes of Communists ready to sweep down and enslave us all.

And they were right.

Of course, at nine, I didn’t pay attention to politics. But I did watch television, and I did have some hazy sense that the North Koreans who made life so fraught with tension needed a hard man to stare them down. So, over Cheerios and orange juice, I asked my father whom the North Koreans wanted to win. My father is a confirmed conservative now, but then his memories of phone banking for Jimmy Carter were a bit fresh. He thought about it and said, “I suppose they want Walter Mondale to win.”

That was all I needed to hear. A devout love of Ronald Reagan sprang ex nihilo in my young heart. It has never gone away. If the slave state apparatchiks and gulag bureaucrats of Communism hated Reagan, then I was for him with every fiber of my being. And so were 49 of 50 states.

My friends, I’ve been a Republican since. And the reason for my youthful turn to our great party is as appropriate now as it was then. It is a dangerous world, and we Americans still live in what Reagan called the last, best hope of man on earth. When our enemies endorse a leader for us — be it North Koreans for Walter Mondale, or Hamas for Barack Obama — it befits us to pay attention.

In my lifetime, no enemy of the United States, the West, or our freedoms has ever endorsed a Republican. And that is the most powerful endorsement I can imagine. It is a credit to men and women like you, who keep us on the path charted by our Founders, over two hundred years ago — the path of, as Jefferson wrote, “eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.”

May God bless you, the Republican Jewish Coalition, and our great nation.