Former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich has an op-ed in today’s Wall Street Journal where he calls for congressional hearings into radical Islam. His opinion piece lays out the history and neglect of the Islamic threat starting with the Carter administration. Even Carter admitted at the time, the Iranian hostages were “innocent victims of terror.”
Fast forward to the Bush era when the former President promised “Our war on terror begins with al-Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.”
And after all that time, Gingrich says, “we’ve clearly failed to meet that goal.”
After more than 13 years of war, with thousands of Americans dead, tens of thousands of Americans wounded, and several trillion dollars spent, the U.S. and its allies are losing the war with radical Islamism. The terrorists of Islamic State are ravaging Iraq and Syria, Boko Haram is widening its bloody swath through Nigeria, al Qaeda and its affiliates are killing with impunity in Somalia, Yemen and beyond, and the Taliban are resurgent in Afghanistan. The killings in Paris at Charlie Hebdo and at a kosher supermarket are only the most recent evidence of the widening menace of radical Islamism.
Neither the United States or France has a strategy to fight radical Islam. The to begin to form strategy, argues Newt, is hold hearing that “outline the scale and nature of the threat. Additional hearings should seek advice from a wide range of experts on strategies to defeat radical Islamists.”
Gingrich is critical of the political correctness of “Western Elites” that has “discouraged the study of what inspires those who dream of slaughtering us. Congress should hold hearings on the historic patterns, doctrines and principles that drive the radical Islamists. No doubt these facts will make some of our elites uncomfortable. They should. We must understand the deep roots of Islamist beliefs, like the practice of beheading, if we are going to combat them.”
The former speaker closed with an exhortation: Who wants to get America on offense, with a coherent and intelligible strategy, against those who would destroy us?
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