Newt Gingrich Focuses on Radical Islam at Iowa Freedom Summit

Former Republican House Speaker Newt Gingrich focused on foreign policy, most specifically on radical Islam, in his remarks at the Iowa Freedom Summit in Des Moines on Saturday.

Gingrich used his opening remarks to chide Barack Obama for attacking sponsor Citizens United and David Bossie in three State of the Union addresses, adding that when Obama was teaching constitutional law in Chicago, most had perhaps wrongly assumed he had been teaching the American Constitution.

“The United States today is losing the war with radical islamists,” said Gingrich as he shifted to his main topic, calling the State Department under former President George W. Bush just as bad as it is now under Obama. Calling it “a global war,” he also pointed out that Islamist Boko Haram, much in the news today, had killed more people than Ebola, yet the State Department under Clinton refused to label it a terrorist group. Gingrich’s point was that a Hillary Clinton presidency would be just as dangerous for America as is Obama’s in this regard.

Obama, who recently refused to use the phrase “radical Islamist,” has a “pathological incapacity to deal with reality,” according to Gingrich. Republicans didn’t rate a pass from Newt, either. He said the elites in “both parties” are afraid to tell the truth when it comes to radical Islam. Time and again, Gingrich, a former history professor, returned to comparisons of radical Islam with Nazi Germany.

He also pointed out the recent fall of the government in Yemen, despite Obama having held Yemen up as an example of his success in fighting radical Islam as recently as October.

The former Speaker also called on Congress to get more involved, directing listeners to a recent item he penned in The Wall Street Journal:

Why We’re Losing to Radical Islam

Fourteen years after 9/11, we still lack a strategy. Congress should lead with hearings on the enemy and how to prevail.

The United States has been at war with radical Islamist terrorism for at least 35 years, starting with the November 1979 Iranian seizure of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and taking of 52 American hostages. President Jimmy Carter in his State of the Union address two months later, declared the American captives “innocent victims of terrorism.”

For the next two decades, radical Islamist terrorism grew more powerful and more sophisticated. On Sept. 11, 2001, a remarkably sophisticated effort by Islamist terrorists killed nearly 3,000 Americans in New York City, Washington, D.C., and western Pennsylvania.

Saying he believes “our government lies to us every day” about radical Islam, adding he believes the intelligence community  has also been intellectually co-opted, Gingrich’s point is that the politically correct view of the world significantly hinders our ability to fight an enemy every bit as dangerous as Hitler was in his day.

He also encouraged Iowans to demand that every potential presidential candidate who visits the state explains what they are prepared to do to defeat radical Islam.