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March 30, 2005

Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar, Dallas

 

 

 

-Martin Kite-Powell

 

 

I and a guest will be in attendance this May 23-24 at Westin Park Central in Dallas for the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar, which will be addressing the topic "America’s War Against Islamic Terrorism". The invitations actually came a couple of weeks ago, but with everything else going on the news of it has had to wait.

 

Among those who will be speaking on the first day will be Washington Post and ABC News commentator George F. Will on the question of “Containment or Preemption?”.

 

On day two we will be hearing from a variety of speakers including Larry P. Arnn, Ph.D Hillsdale College on “Statesmanship in Wartime”, Malise Ruthven, author, A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America on “The Origins of Islamism”, Frank J. Gaffney Jr., President of the Center for Security Policy on “Meeting the Domestic Terror Threat” and finally former CIA director R. James Woolsey, who will be speaking to us on “The Long War of the 21st Century: How We Must Fight It”.  

 

More about the speakers:

 

George F. Will, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, commentator and author, according to the Post Writers Group is, "…one of the most widely recognized, and widely read, writers in the world. With more than 450 newspapers, his biweekly Newsweek column, and his appearances as a political commentator on ABC, Will may be the most influential writer in America."

 

Will has also written articles for Newsweek and was the Washington Editor for National Review.  His education background includes studies at Trinity College in Hartford, and Oxford and Princeton universities. Will also taught political philosophy at Michigan State University and the University of Toronto. Other political work includes his time as a staff-member for U.S. Senator Gordon Allott. After his time on staff for the senator, Will decided to head into journalism where we now find him.

 

Larry P. Arnn is also involved with the Claremont Institute and has stated clear positions on many topics including domestic ones such as repealing the income tax. Larry is also a professor of history as well as the president of Hillsdale College.

 

Malise Ruthven is an expert in comparative religion. According to the biography at the Center for Ismaili Studies website, his background includes,

 

…the author of Islam in the World, The Divine Supermarket: Shopping for God in America, A Satanic Affair: Salman Rushdie and the Wrath of Islam and several other books. His Islam: A Very Short Introduction has been published in several languages, including Chinese, Korean, Romanian, Polish, Italian and German. His most recent book, A Fury for God: The Islamist Attack on America, explores the religious and ideological background behind the atrocities of September 11, 2001.

 

A former scriptwriter with the BBC Arabic and World Services, Dr Ruthven holds an MA in English Literature and a PhD in Social and Political Sciences from Cambridge University. He has taught Islamic studies, cultural history and comparative religion at the University of Aberdeen, the University of California, San Diego, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire and Colorado College. Now a full-time writer, he is currently working on Fundamentalism: A Very Short Introduction and Arabesque and Crucifix, a study in comparative religious iconography.

 

 

Frank J. Gaffney, in addition to being the founder and president of Center for Security Policy has also written for several well-known publications including National Review and spoke last year before the Congressional Committee on International Relations. Many of his online articles can be found at Townhall.com, Jewish World Review and FrontpageMag.com.

 

R. James Woolsey, who joined The Foundation for the Defense of Democracies in 2002 as a Distinguished Advisor, has also written several articles for the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today, FrontPageMaga.com, The Weekly Standard, The Financial Times, The New York Times Online and for the Council on Foreign Relations. He has also released a whitepaper discussing the dangers we now face as we begin to fight World War IV.

 

Woolsey is best known for his time as Director of Central Intelligence from 1993-1995, but has also served in many other significant government posts including Under Secretary of the Navy and participated in delegations to the START, NST and SALT I U.S.-Soviet arms talks. He has also been involved in various capacities with numerous civilian projects and organizations as well as the law firm in which he was a partner, Shea & Gardner in Washington, D.C.

 

On the so-called Wahhabi moderates, Woolsey states in 2002,

 

If you want to a feel for the intellectual infrastructure – if you can call it that – of [Wahhabi] thinking, there are websites where one can go to pull in what the sermons are on any given Friday throughout Saudi Arabia. I looked at one such set of sermons two or three weeks ago before some discussions we were having at the Defense Policy Board. And the three main themes that week were that all Jews are pigs and monkeys. The second major theme was that all Christians and Jews are the enemy it is our obligation to hate them and destroy them. And the third was that women in the United States routinely commit incest with their fathers and brothers and it is a common and accepted thing in the United States. This is not extraordinary. This is the routine Wahhabi view. One Wahhabi cleric was interviewed by a Washington Post reporter a few weeks ago in Saudi Arabia. The Post reporter asked him: ‘Tell me. I'm a Christian. Do you hate me' And the Wahhabi cleric said, ‘Well, of course if you're a Christian, I hate you. But I'm not going to kill you.' This is the moderate view. And we need to realize that just as angry German nationalism of the 1920s and the 1930s was the soil in which Nazism grew, not all German nationalists became Nazis, but that was the soil in which it grew. So the angry form of Islamism and Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia today is the soil in which anti-Western and anti-American terrorism grows.

 

 
 

Posted by Martin at March 30, 2005 12:58 PM

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