Clinton calls terror a U.S. debt to past

Joseph Curl
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
Published 11/8/2001

Bill Clinton, the former president, said yesterday that terror has existed in America for hundreds of years and the nation is "paying a price today" for its past of slavery and for looking "the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed."

"Here in the United States, we were founded as a nation that practiced slavery, and slaves quite frequently were killed even though they were innocent," said Mr. Clinton in a speech to nearly 1,000 students at Georgetown University's ornate Gaston Hall.

"This country once looked the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed to get their land or their mineral rights or because they were thought of as less than fully human.

"And we are still paying a price today," said Mr. Clinton, who was invited to address the students by the university's School of Foreign Service.

Mr. Clinton, wearing a gray suit and orange tie, arrived 45 minutes late for the event. Some students camped out overnight to obtain tickets. The former president, a member of the Jesuit university's Class of 1968, opened his 50-minute speech by thanking a former teacher.

"He never abandoned me over all these years, even though he did not succeed in convincing me to become a Jesuit," said Mr. Clinton, drawing laughter and then cheers from the almost entirely white crowd of students.

Mr. Clinton spoke from notes about the world after September 11. He sought to dispel fears of terrorism and "this anthrax business."

"I submit to you that we are now in a struggle for the soul of the 21st century and the world in which you students will live to raise your own children and make your own way," he said.

Mr. Clinton said the international terrorism that has only just reached the United States dates back thousands of years.

"In the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it and proceeded to kill every woman and child who was a Muslim on the Temple Mount. I can tell you that story is still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it."

Mr. Clinton said America needs to pay more attention to its enemies and to the way the United States is viewed by the rest of the world.

"There are a lot of people that see the world differently than we do. It is quite important that we do more to build the pool of potential partners in the world and to shrink the pool of potential terrorists. And that has nothing to do with fighting, but that has to do with what else we do.

"This is partly a Muslim issue, because there is a war raging within Islam. We need to reach out and engage the Muslim world in a debate."

Mr. Clinton referred to stories in the media about some American citizens cheering the terrorist attacks and suspected mastermind Osama bin Laden.

"This debate is going on all over America. We've got to stop pretending this isn't out there," he said.

Addressing matters of globalization, Mr. Clinton pondered the importance of such issues as technology, poverty, democracy, diversity, the environment, disease and terrorism.

"Here's how I think you ought to think about it," he said. "We cannot ignore the fact that we have vulnerability at home because of our interdependence."

The answer, Mr. Clinton said, is to spread freedom and democracy, reduce global poverty, forgive billions in debt, improve health care systems and encourage — even fund — education in developing countries.

"We ought to pay for these children to go to school — a lot cheaper than going to war," he said.

Perhaps most important, he said, is democracy.

"It's no accident that most of these terrorists come from non-democratic countries. If you live in a country where you're never required to take responsibility for yourself, where you never even have to ask whether there's something you should be doing to solve your own problems, then people are kept in kind of a permanent state of collective immaturity and it becomes quite easy for them to believe that someone else's success is the cause of their distress.

"We've got to defeat people who think they can find their redemption in our destruction. And then we have to be smart enough to get rid of our arrogant self-righteousness so that we don't claim for ourselves things we deny for others."

The former president, who left office just 10 months ago after an eight-year tenure, said the federal government is "woefully" lacking on several key terrorism-prevention areas.

"We need to strengthen our capacity to chase the money and get it, and we need some legislation on that," said Mr. Clinton, coincidentally on the same day President Bush, who has made freezing terrorist assets a "front" of his war on terrorism, announced the United States has moved to block the assets of 62 persons and groups associated with two financial networks linked to bin Laden.

"And one area where we are woefully lacking is the simple use of modern computer tech to track people that come into this country," he said.

While he criticized "the governmental capacity" now, he said "we all must support our current government in whatever decision they make."

"This is not a perfect society but it is stumbling in the right direction," he said.

At the end of his speech, Mr. Clinton — who was impeached for lying under oath about a sexual relationship with a 21-year-old White House intern — said the entire issue revolves around "the nature of truth."

"This battle fundamentally is about what you think about the nature of truth," he said, noting that God has imposed on us the inability to ever know "the whole truth."

He also championed women's rights in Afghanistan, saying the reason "you see all those sanctimonious guys beating those women with sticks" is because the country's rulers demand strict adherence to the rules.

Students crowded around to shake the former president's hand after his speech. There were no detractors in the crowd, despite the fact that the university newspaper in September 1998 called on Mr. Clinton, then mired in scandal, to resign.

"The American public," the Hoya said in a 1998 editorial, "has forgotten that international and domestic terrorism requires a proactive defense plan. Terrorists must be caught before they strike, and we must remember that those strikes always come when our head is turned toward other matters."

Copyright © 2001 News World Communications, Inc.
All rights reserved.

Paying a price for liberalism

Jeffrey T. Kuhner

He's back. Just when we thought that former President Bill Clinton was out of the public spotlight, he delivered a speech at Georgetown University last week on the state of "our world since September 11." His remarks caused public outrage, and rightly so.

Mr. Clinton stated that the United States is now "paying a price" for its previous practice of slavery and for looking "the other way when a significant number of native Americans were dispossessed and killed."

Essentially, he drew a parallel between the terrorists who slammed jet airliners into the World Trade Center, the Pentagon and the Pennsylvania countryside, and the "terror" that has existed in America for hundreds of years.

The remarks were not only offensive, but false. The United States is not "paying a price today" for the evils of slavery; rather, it paid a heavy price in blood and treasure nearly 150 years ago when the Civil War that ended the abomination of slavery resulted in 500,000 dead and deep social antagonisms.

Also, most of the Indian tribes that were wiped out following the arrival of Europeans in the New World were not murdered over "land or mineral rights," as Mr. Clinton suggested. Instead, more than 90 percent of native American deaths were caused by contact with deadly foreign diseases such as smallpox. This was an inadvertent consequence of European settlement.

However, even more outrageous is that Mr. Clinton is suggesting a moral equivalence between America's founding fathers and Osama bin Laden's army of hate. Mr. Clinton believes that America is a flawed nation that is despised by many people around the world, especially in the Middle East. Rather than being arrogant and self-righteous in its current campaign against terrorism, he wants the United States to be "more understanding" of the reasons for the anti-Americanism in the region and to "engage the Muslim world in a dialogue."

Mr. Clinton's speech reveals the instinctive America-bashing and intense hostility to moral absolutes at the heart of modern liberalism. Mr. Clinton and many other liberals are uncomfortable with the notion of the existence of evil in the world. They cringe at the fact that the United States has no choice but to lead an international coalition in defense of civilized values against mass murderers such as the Taliban and al Qaeda.

In his desire to blame America, he is blinded to the reasons for the terrorist attacks. Slavery and the mistreatment of Indians has nothing to do with the events of September 11. Bin Laden admitted that the atrocities were committed in response to recent U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East: American troops based in Saudi Arabia, continued sanctions on Iraq and Washington's support of Israel in the conflict with the Palestinians.

Furthermore, bin Laden's terrorist network is not interested in achieving rational foreign policy goals. Contrary to the claims of Mr. Clinton and many on the left, Islamic extremists cannot be appeased by dialogue or compromise: They are motivated by hate. Ultimately, bin Laden and his supporters seek the destruction of Western civilization by targeting two of its pillars — the United States, the symbol of the West's power and cultural influence in the world; and Israel, the West's sole outpost in the Middle East.

Mr. Clinton's comments are offensive because they suggest that there is some kind of moral equivalence between the United States and its "racist," slavery-ridden past, and today's Muslim extremists who kill innocent civilians. There isn't. Thomas Jefferson — for all of his flaws — was no Osama bin Laden.

Moreover, to suggest that America is partially responsible for the terrorist attacks is not only an insult to the families of the victims, but undermines America's moral authority to conduct its current military campaign. How can the world's leaders be expected to fully cooperate with America's war on terrorism when one of its former presidents portrays the United States as a nation whose history was dominated by "terror" against blacks and Indians?

Instead of bashing America, Mr. Clinton should focus on his administration's failure to stem the tide of global terrorism. Under his presidency, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was treated as a criminal matter, rather than for what it was: an act of war. There also was no military retaliation for the 1996 terrorist attacks in Saudi Arabia, or the bombing of the USS Cole.

Moreover, following the 1998 bombings of two U.S. embassies in East Africa, Mr. Clinton launched a series of feeble surgical missile strikes against terrorist training camps in Afghanistan that did nothing to dismember bin Laden's network. In fact, Mr. Clinton's weak and ineffective response only emboldened bin Laden into believing that he could murder innocent American civilians and get away with it. The result was the heinous atrocities of September 11.

Yet, Mr. Clinton refuses to accept his share of responsibility for the terrorist attacks. Rather than blame America, he should start by blaming himself.

Jeffrey T. Kuhner is an assistant national editor at The Washington Times.

Europeans came with the intention of taking the land and enslaving the inhabitants—or at least removing them as obstacles. That disease did most of the work for them is almost a detail. They killed enough Natives directly to call their actions genocidal, and they took full advantage of the effects of disease.

What is there not to blame in this imperialistic attitude? That the Europeans let disease do their dirty work for them? When apportioning blame, the point is that they intended to do dirty work. How they accomplished it is irrelevant. (http://www.bluecorncomics.com/genocid3.htm)

If you break into someone's house with a known killer as a partner, intending "only" to rob the house, and your partner kills 90% of the house's inhabitants while you stand by and watch, how guilty are you of those deaths? (http://www.bluecorncomics.com/genocid4.htm)