The following is the final part of Paul Marshall’s speech:

Continued from last post . . .

The highly controlled media in Egypt and Jordan raised the cartoon issue so persistently that an astonishing 98 percent of Egyptians and 99 percent of Jordanians—knowing little else of Denmark—had heard of them. Saudi Arabia and Egypt urged boycotts of Danish products. Iran and Syria manipulated riots partly to deflect attention from their nuclear projects. Turkey used the cartoons as bargaining chips in negotiations with the U.S. over appointments to NATO. Editors in Algeria, Jordan, India, and Yemen were arrested—and in Syria, journalist Adel Mahfouz was charged with “insulting public religious sentiment”—for suggesting a peaceful response to the controversy. Lars Vilks’ later and more offensive 2007 Swedish cartoons and Geert Wilders’ 2008 film Fitna led to comparatively little outcry, demonstrating further that public reactions are government-driven.

Repression based on charges of blasphemy and apostasy, of course, goes far beyond the stories typically covered in our media. Currently, millions of Baha’is and Ahmadis—followers of religions or interpretations that arose after Islam—are condemned en masse as insulters of Islam, and are subject to discriminatory laws and attacks by mobs, vigilantes, and terrorists. The Baha’i leadership in Iran is in prison, and there is no penalty in Iran for killing a Baha’i. In Somalia, al Shebaab, an Islamist group that controls much of that country, is systematically hunting down and killing Christians. In 2009, after allegations that a Koran had been torn, a 1,000-strong mob with Taliban links rampaged through Christian neighborhoods in Punjab, Pakistan’s largest province, killing seven people, six of whom, including two children, were burned alive. Pakistani police did not intervene.

Throughout the Muslim world, Sunni, Shia, and Sufi Muslims may be persecuted for differing from the version of Islam promulgated by locally hegemonic religious authorities. Saudi Arabia represses Shiites, especially Ismailis. Iran represses Sunnis and Sufis. In Egypt, Shia leaders have been imprisoned and tortured.

In Afghanistan, Shia scholar Ali Mohaqeq Nasab, editor of Haqooq-i-Zen magazine, was imprisoned by the government for publishing “un-Islamic” articles that criticized stoning as a punishment for adultery. Saudi democracy activists Ali al-Demaini, Abdullah al-Hamed, and Matruk al-Faleh were imprisoned for using “un-Islamic terminology,” such as “democracy” and “human rights,” when calling for a written constitution. Saudi teacher Mohammed al-Harbi was sentenced to 40 months in jail and 750 lashes for “mocking religion” after discussing the Bible in class and making pro-Jewish remarks. Egyptian Nobel prize winner in literature Naguib Mahfouz reluctantly abandoned his lifelong resistance to censorship and sought permission from the clerics of Al-Azhar University to publish his novel Children of Gebelawi, hitherto banned for blasphemy. Mahfouz subsequently lived under constant protection after being stabbed by a young Islamist, leaving him partly paralyzed.

After Mohammed Younas Shaikh, a member of Pakistan’s Human Rights Commission, raised questions about Pakistan’s policies in Kashmir, he was charged with having blasphemed in one of his classes. In Bangladesh, Salahuddin Choudhury was imprisoned for hurting “religious feelings” by advocating peaceful relations with Israel. In Iran, Ayatollah Boroujerdi was imprisoned for arguing that “political leadership by clergy” was contrary to Islam, and cleric Mohsen Kadivar was imprisoned for “publishing untruths and disturbing public minds” after writing Theories of the State in Shiite Jurisprudence, which questioned the legal basis of Ayatollah Khomeini’s view of government. Other charges brought against Iranians include “fighting against God,” “dissension from religious dogma,” “insulting Islam,” “propagation of spiritual liberalism,” “promoting pluralism,” and, my favorite, “creating anxiety in the minds of … Iranian officials.”

Muslim reformers cannot escape being attacked even in the West. In 2006, a group called Al-Munasirun li Rasul al Allah emailed over 30 prominent reformers in the West, threatening to kill them unless they repented. Among its targets was Egyptian Saad Eddin Ibrahim, perhaps the best known human rights activist in the Arab world. Another was Ahmad Subhy Mansour, an imam who was imprisoned and had to flee Egypt, in part for his arguments against the death penalty for apostasy. The targets were pronounced “guilty of apostasy, unbelief, and denial of the Islamic established facts” and given three days to “announce their repentance.” The message included their addresses and the names of their spouses and children.

Mimount Bousakla, a Belgian senator and daughter of Moroccan immigrants, was forced into hiding by threats of “ritual slaughter” for her criticism of the treatment of women in Muslim communities and of fundamentalist influences in Belgian mosques. Turkish-born Ekin Deligoz, the first Muslim member of Germany’s Parliament, received death threats and was placed under police protection after she called for Muslim women to “take off the head scarf.”

But the story gets worse. Western governments have begun to give in to demands from the Saudi-based OIC and others for controls on speech. In Austria, for instance, Elisabeth Sabbaditsch-Wolf has been convicted of “denigrating religious beliefs” for her comments about Mohammed during a seminar on radical Islam. Canada’s grossly misnamed “human rights commissions” have hauled writers—including Mark Steyn, who teaches as a distinguished fellow in journalism at Hillsdale College—before tribunals to interrogate them about their writings on Islam. And in Holland and Finland, respectively, politicians Geert Wilders and Jussi Halla-aho have been prosecuted for their comments on Islam in political speeches.

In America, the First Amendment still protects against the criminalization of criticizing Islam. But we face at least two threats still. The first is extra-legal intimidation of a kind already endemic in the Muslim world and increasing in Europe. In 2009, Yale University Press, in consultation with Yale University, removed all illustrations of Mohammed from its book by Jytte Klausen on the Danish cartoon crisis. It also removed Gustave Doré’s 19th-century illustration of Mohammed in hell from Dante’s Inferno. Yale’s formal press statement stressed the earlier refusal by American media outlets to show the cartoons, and noted that their “republication…has repeatedly resulted in violence around the world.”

Another publisher, Random House, rejected at the last minute a historical romance novel about Mohammed’s wife, Jewel of Medina, by American writer Sherry Jones. They did so to protect “the safety of the author, employees of Random House, booksellers and anyone else who would be involved in distribution and sale of the novel.”

The comedy show South Park refused to show an image of Mohammed in a bear suit, although it mocked figures from other religions. In response, Molly Norris, a cartoonist for the Seattle Weekly, suggested an “Everybody Draw Mohammed Day.” She quickly withdrew the suggestion and implied that she had been joking. But after several death threats, including from Al-Qaeda, the FBI advised her that she should go into hiding—which she has now done under a new name.

In 2010, Zachary Chesser, a young convert to Islam, pleaded guilty to threatening the creators of South Park. And on October 3, 2011, approximately 800 newspapers refused to run a “Non Sequitur” cartoon drawn by Wiley Miller that merely contained a bucolic scene with the caption “Where’s Muhammad?”

Many in our media claim to be self-censoring out of sensitivity to religious feelings, but that claim is repeatedly undercut by their willingness to mock and criticize religions other than Islam. As British comedian Ben Elton observed: “The BBC will let vicar gags pass, but they would not let imam gags pass. They might pretend that it’s, you know, something to do with their moral sensibilities, but it isn’t. It’s because they’re scared.”

The second threat we face is the specter of cooperation between our government and the OIC to shape speech about Islam. A first indication of this came in President Obama’s Cairo speech in 2009, when he declared that he has a responsibility to “fight against negative stereotypes of Islam whenever they appear.” Then in July of last year in Istanbul, Secretary of State Clinton co-chaired—with the OIC—a “High-Level Meeting on Combating Religious Intolerance.” There, Mrs. Clinton announced another conference with the OIC, this one in Washington, to “exchange ideas” and discuss “implementation” measures our government might take to combat negative stereotyping of Islam. This would not restrict free speech, she said. But the mere fact of U.S. government partnership with the OIC is troublesome. Certainly it sends a dangerous signal, as suggested by the OIC’s Secretary-General, Ekmeleddin Ihsanoglu, when he commented in Istanbul that the Obama administration stands “united” with the OIC on speech issues.

The OIC’s charter commits it “to combat defamation of Islam.” Its current action plan calls for “deterrent punishments” to counter “Islamophobia.” In 2009, an official OIC organ, the “International Islamic Fiqh [Jurisprudence] Academy,” issued fatwas calling for speech bans, including “international legislation,” to protect “the interests and values of [Islamic] society.” The OIC does not define what speech should be outlawed, but the repressive practices of its leading member states speak for themselves.

The conference Secretary Clinton announced in Istanbul was held in Washington on December 12-14, 2011, and was closed to the public, with the “Chatham House Rule” restricting the participants (this rule prohibits the identification of who says what, although general content is not confidential). Presentations reportedly focused on America’s deficiencies in its treatment of Muslims and stressed that the U.S. has something to learn in this regard from the other delegations—including Saudi Arabia, despite its ban on Christian churches, its repression of its Shiite population, its textbooks teaching that Jews should be killed, and the fact that it beheaded a woman for sorcery on the opening day of the conference.

* * *
The encroachment of de facto blasphemy restrictions in the West threatens free speech and the free exchange of ideas. Nor will it bring social peace and harmony. As comedian Rowan Atkinson warns, such laws produce “a veneer of tolerance concealing a snake pit of unaired and unchallenged views.” Norway’s far-reaching restrictions on “hate speech” did not prevent Anders Behring Breivik from slaughtering over 70 people because of his antipathy to Islam: indeed, his writings suggest that he engaged in violence because he believed that he could not otherwise be heard.

In the Muslim world, such restrictions enable Islamists to crush debate. After Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab, was murdered early last year by his bodyguards for opposing blasphemy laws, his daughter Sara observed: “This is a message to every liberal to shut up or be shot.” Or in the words of Nasr Abu-Zayd, a Muslim scholar driven out of Egypt: “Charges of apostasy and blasphemy are key weapons in the fundamentalists’ arsenal, strategically employed to prevent reform of Muslim societies, and instead confine the world’s Muslim population to a bleak, colourless prison of socio-cultural and political conformity.”

President Obama should put an end to discussion of speech with the OIC. He should declare clearly that in free societies, all views and all religions are subject to criticism and contradiction. As the late Abdurrahman Wahid, former president of Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim country, and head of Nahdlatul Ulama, the world’s largest Muslim organization, wrote in his foreword to Silenced, blasphemy laws

. . . narrow the bounds of acceptable discourse. . . not only about religion, but also about vast spheres of life, literature, science, and culture in general. . . . Rather than legally stifle criticism and debate—which will only encourage Muslim fundamentalists in their efforts to impose a spiritually void, harsh, and monolithic understanding of Islam upon all the world—Western authorities should instead firmly defend freedom of expression. . . .

America’s Founders, who had broken with an old order that was rife with religious persecution and warfare, forbade laws impeding free exercise of religion, abridging freedom of speech, or infringing freedom of the press. We today must do likewise.

The following is the first part of Paul Marshall’s speech:

A growing threat to our freedom of speech is the attempt to stifle religious discussion in the name of preventing “defamation of” or “insults to” religion, especially Islam. Resulting restrictions represent, in effect, a revival of blasphemy laws.

Few in the West were concerned with such laws 20 years ago. Even if still on some statute books, they were only of historical interest. That began to change in 1989, when the late Ayatollah Khomeini, then Iran’s Supreme Leader, declared it the duty of every Muslim to kill British-based writer Salman Rushdie on the grounds that his novel, The Satanic Verses, was blasphemous. Rushdie has survived by living his life in hiding. Others connected with the book were not so fortunate: its Japanese translator was assassinated, its Italian translator was stabbed, its Norwegian publisher was shot, and 35 guests at a hotel hosting its Turkish publisher were burned to death in an arson attack.

More recently, we have seen eruptions of violence in reaction to Theo van Gogh’s and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s film Submission, Danish and Swedish cartoons depicting Mohammed, the speech at Regensburg by Pope Benedict XVI on the topic of faith, reason, and religious violence, Geert Wilders’ film Fitna, and a false Newsweek report that the U.S. military had desecrated Korans at Guantanamo. A declaration by Terry Jones—a deservedly obscure Florida pastor with a congregation of less than 50—that he would burn a Koran on September 11, 2010, achieved a perfect media storm, combining American publicity-seeking, Muslim outrage, and the demands of 24 hour news coverage. It even drew the attention of President Obama and senior U.S. military leaders. Dozens of people were murdered as a result.

Such violence in response to purported religious insults is not simply spontaneous. It is also stoked and channeled by governments for political purposes. And the objects and victims of accusations of religious insults are not usually Westerners, but minorities and dissidents in the Muslim world. As Nina Shea and I show in our recent book Silenced, accusations of blasphemy or insulting Islam are used systematically in much of that world to send individuals to jail or to bring about intimidation through threats, beatings, and killings.

The Danish cartoons of Mohammed were published in Denmark’s largest newspaper, Jyllands-Posten, in September 2005. Some were reproduced by newspapers in Muslim countries in order to criticize them. There was no violent response. Violence only erupted after a December 2005 summit in Saudi Arabia of the Organization of the Islamic Conference—now the Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC). The summit was convened to discuss sectarian violence and terrorism, but seized on the cartoons and urged its member states to rouse opposition. It was only in February 2006—five months after the cartoons were published—that Muslims across Africa, Asia, and the Mideast set out from Friday prayers for often violent demonstrations, killing over 200 people.

Continued . . .

Case in point and it is not the first time they have done this: Stirring racial hatred in their reporting as is the case with the Florida incident where a neighborhood watchman killed a black teenager in late February of this year. Does the media membership not know of the right for all people to be considered “innocent until proven guilty”? It appears they selectively forget this when it suits their purpose or ideology. We remember how the media branded a few college students at Duke University as ‘criminals’ when they were alleged to have raped a black stripper. It took years before the students were vindicated and declared innocent and the stripper declared the culprit while lying about an event that never took place.

The liberal media is guilty of race-baiting in the Florida case and stirring emotions beyond the actual tragedy that took place there. Whenever there is a white versus black incident of a criminal nature, the liberal media pundits cannot wait to declare the white person guilty. This is shameful and there should be serious consequences for such behavior.

But the liberal media membership is constantly involved in such unethical behavior. They have simply taken their First Amendments rights way too far. Instead of just delivering facts and true stories about events of any nature, they have now assumed the roles of commentators and insert their personal biases into everything they are writing or reporting about. Their bias and complete ignorance of President Barack Obama’s background regarding his college education and the like made it possible for the country to elect this man without him ever being vetted by the media. On the other hand, anybody being conservative is being investigated and checked to the umpth degree and even smeared by innuendo and other hearsay character assassinations whenever possible.

We here at Common Sense University do not have the answer as to what to do about this major ‘WRONG’ in America but it is not good for the country to allow the media to have such power of influence over the general public. The only rational solution is possibly the minimization of the media by simply educating the public and to encourage them to stop reading or listening to this left-leaning liberal garbage. We hold firm that the media should remain free from government dictates but we should not accept their bias and we will hopefully develop a means of ignoring them altogether. The sooner this happens, the better our country will be in the future.

Hardly a day goes by where we are not hearing stories about people who abuse the system, one of the most glaring ones the woman who won one million dollars in the lottery. She decided to cash out and received after taxes over five hundred thousand dollars. She had been on food stamps prior to this time and had absolutely no shame to tell a reporter that she expected to continue to receive food stamps, after all, she was out of a job and had two houses.

Whatever logic there is, we cannot see it but the larger picture is clear. We have created in this country over many years a entitlement mentality where people believe they are entitled to free things when the government provides it, where people truly believe that the “Government owes me“. They cannot even comprehend nor do they care that this money comes from other citizens who are paying taxes to the government. This is the tragedy in that this mentality has developed over the years and we firmly believe it has its roots in the liberal ideology where liberal do-gooders see people as victims and feel compelled to help them with other people‘s money. It should therefore come as no surprise that currently over forty-six million Americans are on food stamps. They are easy to get and are free and why not take them.

To their ‘sponsors’, the liberals (Democrats), words like self-reliance and rugged individualism are heartless and mean-spirited and they will always rail against conservatives (Republicans) as being non-caring people. Yet, at the same time, there is not a single Democrat office holder in America when it comes to election time who does not complain against fraud, waste and abuse in government. What are they talking about? Why are they bitching about something that they created. The question should be: Why are they not being held accountable for this abuse?

Can you spell hypocrisy? That’s what it is. Liberals and therefore Democrats have created this problem by presenting themselves as the guardians of the poor and suppressed people and promising them at every election cycle they will continue to take care of them. And it is an easy promise to keep since it is not their money but comes from unlimited public funds. And in all fairness, there are many Republicans who play the same game, they promise ‘freebees’ to their constituents when they are up for re-election.

We believe this to be wrong and are left to wonder if this will ever change in that we are getting back to people having more pride than to just take what’s for free. The way go these days, we doubt it very much.

            It is truly amazing that more than eleven years after the 2000 Presidential election we have not been able to cure the ills of voter fraud as well as correct voter registration. Remembering the more than month-long recount of ballots (checking for dimpled and hanging chats and other stupid things) in Florida who were rejected by machine counting and therefore questionable if not outright illegitimate, the country has not done anything to prevent such recurrences and it is shameful.

            As we are now in the primary season of the 2012 Presidential Election in America, we read almost daily of the vast variances the States have and adopted when it comes to voting in general and the voter registration and the casting of ballots in particular. Just one quick example: When the caucus votes in Iowa were counted, Mitt Romney was declared the winner with Rick Santorum placing second. Then we found out that some ballots had gone missing from a few caucus places. Several weeks later, surprise, surprise, the new counting of ballots showed that Rick Santorum had won Iowa caucuses. In other States, the rules allowed Democrats to vote in Republican primaries and some States allowed voting to go on for several weeks prior to the actual election day.

            This is absolutely crazy to our way of thinking and makes no sense whatsoever. But the people accept it and so it continues. In an age where we have the latest technologies available in terms of databases, the rules are archaic.

            Now then, when it comes to the general election in November of this year, vast entities are busy for months registering voters incredibly sloppy ways that beg for fraud. When a person can sit in front of a supermarket and ask shoppers if they want to register to vote and gets people to sign registration forms, its asking for trouble and mischief.

            We know from the past that at best fifty to sixty percent of eligible voters cast their ballots by different means (absentee and actual voting on Election Day) and it shows us that forty or more percent of voters do not care to participate in this ritual.

We propose a simple solution to deal with this from now on. If a person wants to vote in November then it should be up to that person to make sure he or she is registered with the respective Registrar and has shown evidence of citizenship, residency and photo I.D. that this is the truth by signing the forms under penalty of law, then we would eliminate thousands if not even millions of fraudulent votes being cast. Absentee balloting should be changed to prevent fraud by simply having the person dropping off his or her ballot at the Registrar’s office and not by mailing it in.

            This could make a major difference in the accuracy of future elections in our opinion and it should be seriously considered by all parties. Let us remember that voting is a right and a privilege that individuals should really want to exercise. It should not be forced on people who otherwise do not give a hoot and could not care less who wins or loses. Let us be realistic when it comes to voting in our elections, especially the one picking the President of the United States.

It is a sad commentary when the President of our country celebrates the 39^th anniversary of the Supreme Courts decision in 1973 to legalize abortion, the infamous Roe vs. Wade decision. This law is falsely heralded as a victory for women’s rights to choose! It is estimated that between 15 and 20 million abortions have taken place since then. The exact number is not important, but what is important to our way of thinking is the incorrect reason for this law. It is NOT to give women the right to choose but instead to give women a means to correct a prior mistake.

Had a woman not gotten pregnant in the first place, an abortion would not have been needed. And how did she get pregnant? By spreading her legs and having sex! Those of us understanding how a woman gets pregnant should not have to explain anything more on that subject. The abortion law is nothing else, it’s that simple.

Again, this deceitful way of stating something falsely, i.e. calling abortion a women’s choice is a part of what’s wrong in America. To add insult to injury, the people who oppose abortion are being ridiculed by the opposite side, being called terrible names and belittled. And that is definitely wrong! At the same time, we are being lectured that actions (even just words) have consequences. We ask: Is abortion not a consequence of an action taken place prior to it?

To us here at Common Sense University, the strongest argument against abortion just could be stated in two words: STEVE JOBS. As we know, Steve was not aborted by his birth mother but given up for adoption and we all know what he contributed to the world. This brings us to the next question: How many geniuses like Steve Jobs were aborted as a result of ‘a woman’s right to choose’? We will, unfortunately, never know. How many doctors, scientists, chemists or pioneers of new discoveries in medicine and other fields were killed by way of abortion?

When one considers the available ways for a woman to protect herself from becoming pregnant, we can only condemn the lackadaisical attitude women have when it comes to this. There are exceptions to our argument, things such as rape, incest and also the health of the mother could easily be excerpted and dealt with by passing appropriate laws but we do not need a Roe versus Wade pro- abortion law. We believe it is shameful that we do have such a law.

There were times in America when the people could trust information passed on to them by the Federal Government or even State and local governments. This is sadly no longer the case. At the same time, it is ironic because computerized information technology has improved so vastly that data collection by government should be so much more reliable and timely. We stand corrected, it is timely. It does only take a few days for updates on unemployment filings nationwide and other such information being made public. The problem is, it is unreliable.

We could list several examples of this but instead will concentrate on the employment picture in America. The Department of Labor of the Federal Government comes out every week and shares with us the number of people who have filed for unemployment benefits. On a monthly basis, we get the overall unemployment rate in the country. This statistic includes a number of things such as new unemployment filings, new jobs created and also the number of people who simply ‘left the job market’ or do no longer receive unemployment benefits. This changes the base constantly and results in some truly weird numbers. There can be no doubt that some element of manipulation is involved and this is at times so apparent that one has to question the accuracy of the reports.

We will try and state our analysis in simple terms: We are, for the purposes of this view, assume that the approximate number of full employment in America is 150,000,000 (one hundred fifty million), can we not deduct that 15,000,000 equals ten percent of the total? We believe we should, it’s simple math! When the total number of people reportedly not working in America is somewhere between twenty to twenty-five million, why is the unemployment rate not at least thirteen to sixteen percent? Is this a stupid question? We do not think so! But the Government apparently believes this and the media is accepting this and reports it as such.

When the Feds in Washington report that the economic growth in the country during a given quarter of a year is 1.2 percent, how can we accept and trust when it corrects this number down to 0.5 percent three months later. This is wrong and to our way of thinking a clear sign of report manipulations that should be challenged by everybody and not at all accepted as fact. We could present many more such examples of immense inaccuracies when it comes to what the Government tells us. We are convinced that this type of reporting could easily have a political element to it. President Obama would of course like to see the unemployment go down this year and he is willing to setlle for a downward trend instead. It’s referred to as “moving in the right direction” but it is based on number manipulations that are vastly inaccurate and it should not be accepted.

Is it any wonder that Americans are increasingly suspicious of what the government tells them? To us here at Common Sense University it is not! Only the ignorant are happy and do not care what they are being told and that is a shame. Trust in government should be a goal pursued by everybody who is serving in whatever capacity the population of this country.

Iowa is a state in the middle of America, also referred to as ‘fly-over’ country. The state has a population of about three million, very similar to the population of San Diego County. Yet we hear that Iowa has 99 counties and some Republican candidates tell us with pride that they have visited all 99 counties. We say to this: ‘Whoopee‘! Now then, we are also being told that the Iowa caucuses on January will probably see a participation of one hundred to one hundred twenty thousand folks. That’s four percent of the population. Again, we say ‘Whoopee’.

The caucuses will determine which candidate will get how many of the 28 convention delegates. While we do not know any exact numbers, we estimate for purposes of presenting the absurdity of it all that the candidates combined spent altogether since last summer approximately twenty-eight million dollars in Iowa in campaign related expenses. This equates to one million bucks for one delegate. Now then, if this is not ridiculous, we don‘t know what is and we therefore say for the third time ‘Whoopee‘. Even if only twenty-one million were expended, it would still be ridiculous. From poll results in recent weeks and months, we know that no candidate has a share greater than thirty percent of the votes, this translates that the winner will walk away with about nine delegates and that is our last ‘Whoopee’.

If this does not show the idiocy with this primary election system, we do not know what is. We refuse to understand the importance of the Iowa caucuses. This is absolutely ridiculous and totally absurd. To boot, we are being told that there is a good chance that candidate Ron Paul could be the winner in Iowa. He has reportedly a great number of loyal supporters who will work hard to turn out the participants in the caucuses. And who is Ron Paul? He comes across as the disgruntled and grumpy old uncle who knows everything better than everybody else and his ideas and proposals are so whacky, Hollywood would not even make a funny movie out of it. He tells those who come and listen to him that he will when elected President cut one trillion dollars out of the annual federal budget. No details, no specifics just one nice round number! Since he hates the country’s military, can we assume that he will just abolish it? That would get him about two-thirds to his trillion dollar goal. Yet some people in Iowa must believe this absolute nonsense or else they would have run him out of the state a long time ago. Ron Paul espouses positions of such an extreme nature without any basis of reality or rationale, we can only conclude that some people in Iowa are truly backward hicks and hayseeds.

It is our hope that a victory by Ron Paul in Iowa will result in some serious re-thinking and review of the current primary election system. Tradition is nice but stupid is stupid and a continuation of stupid reflects just that, stupidity! We can do better than that in America.

The following is the third part of Michael Mukasey’s speech:

People who wish to quibble about what it is we are at war with take the discussion off into absurdity. One such person is the President’s Assistant for National Security, John Brennan, who, before an audience at the Center for Strategic Studies, ridiculed the idea of a war on terrorism or on terror, saying it is impossible to have a war on a means or a state of mind.

This lack of clarity also distorts the view of policy makers about what is happening in the Middle East, and so they daydream about democratic movements when the reality on the ground is more populist than democratic. The principal beneficiary of populism is more likely to be the Muslim Brotherhood than the local spokesman for Facebook. The credo of the Muslim Brotherhood is succinct and chilling: Allah is our goal, the Prophet Muhammad is our leader, the Qu’ran is our constitution, jihad is our way, and death in the way of Allah is our promised end.

If the death of Osama bin Laden is more than simply a spasm, or an opportunity to engage in self-congratulation—if it helps provide some insight into the nature of what it is we are fighting—then it will have been significant indeed. If not, its significance will be substantially diminished.

The signs do not seem promising. Even on September 11 itself, as was pointed out by Fouad Ajami, there was no discussion whatever of the 19 people who perpetrated the atrocity. Ajami pointed in particular to Ziad Jarrah, the most Westernized of the hijackers. Raised in Beirut, Lebanon, to be cosmopolitan in the spirit of that city, he then went to Hamburg, Germany, where he was radicalized, and he then wound up at the controls of Flight 93, the flight that was supposed to hit the U.S. Capitol. It didn’t because the passengers learned what had already happened at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, figured out what was in store for them and their country, and chose to act.

There is much to be learned from those facts. Start with the last. We learn the importance of intelligence. The passengers on Flight 93 were able to act because of what they had learned about what was going on elsewhere. Intelligence gathering must be our number one priority. The people waging war on us are part of a movement that does not occupy any particular place or country that we can demolish and then pronounce ourselves the winners. They live in some cases among us, and the only way of opposing them successfully is to find out in advance what they intend to do and to thwart it.

Second, note that Jarrah was radicalized not in the Middle East, but in the West. We must be aware of those in our society who wish to create closed ethnic zones, where Muslims essentially run their own affairs and outsiders enter only at their peril. This has already happened in the suburbs of French cities, in parts of England, and in other places you would not expect it such as Malmo, Sweden, and it allows radicalization to go on undetected. Guidelines have been put in place to allow the FBI to function for the first time in its history as an intelligence gathering organization and not simply as a law enforcement agency. If the Bureau partners with state and local law enforcement, then the kind of insular activity that allowed Jarrah to be radicalized can be broken up. Those guidelines must remain in place, and must be defended.

Doing that will require an intelligent understanding of the part of the Constitution I didn’t discuss at the outset, the part that animated so much criticism of the Bush administration by those now in charge—the Bill of Rights. This part of the Constitution provides robust protection to both public and private activity that we value, which is essential for the continuation of our civic life. But it does not require that we close our eyes when there are people plainly setting the stage for activity that is in no way protected.

The First Amendment protects free speech and freedom of worship. It permits preaching even violence in the name of religion. But it does not guarantee that such speech will go undetected. Nor does it guarantee that evidence of it cannot be presented in a court when and if it is appropriate to charge that the speaker and those to whom he spoke understood this protected speech and took it as a call to unprotected action. This includes action that itself consists only of speech—such as an agreement to commit a crime, which is itself the crime of conspiracy.

The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures, and contains a separate warrant clause providing that warrants may issue only on a finding of probable cause. That does not mean that a search conducted for intelligence purposes requires a warrant, only that it be reasonable.

The Fifth and Sixth Amendments guarantee due process, counsel to those accused of crimes, and the right to confront witnesses, but their application is limited to trials occurring in Article III courts. How much process is due and what kind of evidence may be received and under what circumstances in other tribunals, such as military commissions, is an entirely different story.

The message lurking in the structure of the Constitution is that those acting lawfully under it deserve at least the benefit of the doubt when they act to protect the common good. That is not meant to be a statement or a suggestion of a jurisprudential standard, a standard of law; but it is meant as a prudential standard, a standard of civics and public discourse. This standard will help keep intact the system that we depend on to preserve the nation that Abraham Lincoln called the last, best hope of earth—words that are truer today than they were when he spoke them during another time of trouble.