RUTHFULLY YOURS

Is Saudi Arabia still providing “Alms for Jihad”?http://spectator.org/suing-the-saudis/

On May 17, the Senate passed legislation that would enable private citizens to sue the government of Saudi Arabia and other Saudis possibly connected to al-Qaeda for damages incurred in the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks that took nearly three thousand lives.

Predictably, the Saudis took an apocalyptic view of the bill. Before it passed the Senate, the Saudi foreign minister reportedly threatened to pull hundreds of billions of dollars of investments from the United States. One Saudi newspaper headlined it as a “satanic bill” that would “open the gates of hell.” In truth, the bill would open a window on the Saudis’ involvement in the 9/11 attacks that they, and our government, have made extraordinary efforts to conceal.

President Obama has threatened to veto the measure.

Famous by now are the twenty-eight pages of the 9/11 Commission’s report that reportedly describe the connections between the Saudi government (including the Saudi royals and other Saudi citizens) and bin Laden’s al-Qaeda network. The Obama administration says it’s considering releasing the pages, but it’s a good bet it won’t because of Obama’s obsequious relationship with the Saudis.

What else do we know that could justify lawsuits against the Saudi government, and Saudi individuals, banks, and charities?

A December 30, 2009 State Department cable labeled “Secret/No Forn” (meaning no disclosure to foreign governments) published by WikiLeaks, says that, “…Saudi Arabia remains a critical financial support base for al-Qa’ida, the Taliban, LeT, and other terrorist groups, including Hamas, which probably raise millions of dollars annually from Saudi sources…”

If a nation that pretends to be our ally is still funding al-Qaeda eight years after 9/11, we have to ask are they still?

Equally valuable information, and a ton of it, is contained in Alms for Jihad by J. Millard Burr and Robert Collins. It details the enormous and complex web of Islamic charities and banks, many funded by prominent Saudis, that are directly involved in funding terrorism.

Recently my wife and I drove past the house in New Hampshire where I grew up. It looked lonely, in need of repair and, to anthropomorphize the place, hesitant about the future – a metaphor for our nation, with its flagging leadership, crumbling infrastructures and doubt that the future can be as good as the past – a past, admittedly, more idyllic in memory than in reality.

When my newly-married parents came to the house in 1938 the country was mired in an eight-year-old depression, Europe was on the verge of falling to the Nazis, and Japan had occupied large swaths of China. With a future so uncertain, it would not have been surprising if my parents had decided that prospects were too bleak to bring another person into the world. Instead, the first of nine children was born eleven months later – about as positive a bet on the future that a couple can make! Educated people (and my father had a Harvard education) don’t bring children into a world for which they have no hope.

Yet, today, amidst living standards our ancestors could not have imagined, we seem to have lost confidence that the future can be better than the past. Why? And why have we, as a nation, reached a nadir in terms of national confidence, while our leaders are at an apex in terms of supercilious arrogance? Is there a connection between the descent of the former and the ascent of the latter?

As a nation, we should be more confident. We should be able to look back over the past hundred years, with pride and relief in equal measures. The great domestic issues of segregation, civil and women’s rights were addressed and largely resolved in the last seventy-five years. Geography, abundant natural resources, a literate electorate, a penchant for innovation and hard work, and a democratic political system have made our nation the most powerful (and most decent) the world has ever known. What, for example, would have happened had Communism spread to the United States, as looked possible in the two decades following the Russian Revolution? What if Hitler had prevailed in Europe in the 1940s? What if the Soviet Union had won the Cold War in the 1980s? What would have happened to liberty and individual human rights? Would standards of living be as high? Would declines in global poverty have been as rapid as they were? Would there be a United Nations, or a World Bank? What would have happened to the world’s great centers of learning – to the Oxford’s, Cambridge’s, Harvard’s and Yale’s? Would the environment be as clean? Would science have advanced for the benefit of mankind, or would it have been used to sustain dictatorial governments? Those rhetorical questions and their answers should give confidence to Americans that their country is exceptional. America is not perfect and hubris is a sin, but confidence, which stems from self-reliance, a belief in one’s capabilities and faith that the nation’s laws will protect personal and property rights, is critical for a bright and sustained future.

For a century progressives have argued that History and a more scientific understanding of human behavior have required a new, “living” Constitution interpreted “according to the Darwinian principle,” as Woodrow Wilson put it. The technocrats, whom Wilson called “the hundreds who are wise,” were gradually empowered by an expanded federal government to guide the millions he dubbed “selfish, ignorant, timid, stubborn, or foolish.” This concentration of power in the federal Leviathan has subjected both individuals and the states to its ever-expanding, intrusive reach.

In other words, we now have a kind of government that the Constitution was designed to prevent. To quote George Orwell, “We have now sunk to a depth at which the restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.” Robert Curry’s Common Sense Nation, however, is much more that an intelligent restatement of the Constitution’s protections. A member of the board of directors of the Claremont Institute, and a contributor to the American Thinker and the Federalist websites, Curry corrects various misconceptions and recovers influences on the founders that are too often forgotten.

He pays special attention to the influence of the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment on men like John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison. Curry clearly and briskly sets out the key insights of philosophers Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith, and Thomas Reid, as well as of Protestant clergyman John Witherspoon, who immigrated to America, signed the Declaration of Independence, and served as president of what would become Princeton University, where his students included three future Supreme Court Justices and 28 senators.

The distinctively Scottish belief in innate human faculties of “moral sense” and “common sense,” Curry argues, left their mark on the American Enlightenment that produced the Declaration and the Constitution. The moral sense, as Hutcheson explained, is the instinctive faculty for recognizing right and wrong. It is as much a part of human nature as is hearing or seeing, providing access to elementary morals through feelings of pleasure and pain innate to a social animal; and a political community is impossible without it. Reid expanded this notion to include common sense, which Curry defines as “an endowment of human nature that makes possible both moral knowledge and human knowledge in general.” Common sense unifies the reports of the other senses, both physical and moral, into a full picture of the real world. With it we are able to make rational judgments on everything from technical knowledge to moral questions, in order to determine what is both useful and morally right. Rather than being John Locke’s tabula rasa, a “blank slate” upon which experience writes ideas and concepts, people are born with both common sense and the moral sense upon which popular sovereignty must be founded.

One week into office, President Barack Obama apologized to the Muslim world declaring, “we have not been perfect.” Traveling the globe as president, he continually blames America for the world’s ills.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, veterans groups opposed Obama’s May 27 visit to Hiroshima, Japan, where America dropped the world’s first atomic bomb, bringing an end to World War II.

Although Obama promised he would not second-guess President Harry Truman’s August 6, 1945 decision to use the weapon, he did. This should not be surprising—it was proffered by self-confessed liar (concerning the Iranian nuclear deal) Deputy National Security Advisor Ben Rhodes.

At Hiroshima, Obama said the “scientific revolution that led to the splitting of an atom requires a moral revolution as well.” Supposedly, the morality of dropping the bomb was lost upon Truman. Later, Truman challenged critics to stand upon the keels of Pearl Harbor’s sunken battleships where remains of thousands of young men, never given a chance to live full lives, are entombed and opt for a costly invasion.

Basking in the peaceful sunshine of the hard fought freedom won by our Greatest Generation 71 years ago, Obama easily moralized about Truman’s decision. But, by not dropping the bomb, a million-plus more American lives would have been lost by invading Japan. Planners knew Operation Olympic, set to begin in November 1945, would be the bloodiest seaborne attack of all time.

Unlike Obama who, today, pontificates as an idealist, the situation back then demanded a realist as U.S. president.

Obama chastised Truman’s decision with the statement, “How easily we learn to justify violence in the name of some higher cause.” He later added, “We shall not repeat the evil” of Hiroshima.