View From a Height

Cliff May Speaks

I had a chance to hear Clifford May, of the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies speak this evening, and the Allied Jewish Federation of Colorado's annual Men's Event fundraiser. (Yes, there's a women's event, too, but I don't get to go to that.) He's an eloquent speaker in defense of the notion that freedom is the best antidote, or even prophylactic, for terror.

For someone who follows the war in all its phases fairly closely, he probably added little directly, but that doesn't mean it wasn't worth hearing. For instance, the most alarming part of his speech was in Arabic: captioned videotapes of Hezbollah propaganda, now airing in France courtesy of that country's government.

In the event that anyone thinks anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, and anti-Semitism aren't inextricably linked, one of the videos literally showed a rotating coin, with engravings of President Bush and Prime Minister Sharon on opposite faces. Another juxtaposed President Bush and Adolf Hitler, and WWII footage with stock images of the US military in desert action. "History Repeats," says the closing caption, an irony coming people who have found inspiration in the Nazis.

May was in Moscow in 1978 to cover Anatoly (now Natan) Scharansky's trial, and stated that his new book, The Case For Democracy: The Power of Freedom to Overcome Tyranny and Terror, organizes and restates many of the ideas that power the Bush Administration's radical foreign policy. Stability can always be temporarily bought, but only free societies can produce a broadly stable society. The struggle is between what free societies, and "fear societies." (Those aren't scare quotes, they're attribution.)

Towards the end, he also made the point that while Islamofascists have a foundational and historical militarism to draw on, Islam doesn't have to be violent or terrorist. My poor digital recorder wasn't able to pick up all the names of those trying to fix Islam and the Muslim world, but you can see some of them here.