Editor’s note: Below are the video and transcript of remarks given by a panel on “Trump’s World, China to Europe” at the David Horowitz Freedom Center’s 2018 Restoration Weekend. The event was held Nov. 15th-18th at the Breakers Hotel in Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump’s World – China to Europe from DHFC on Vimeo.
Transcript:
John Gilmore: We have three highly regarded and esteemed individuals to talk about Trump’s world, China to Europe, and I’ve asked each of our panelists to give a 5 to maybe 7‑minute opening macro-view on that topic and then I’ll try to have some questions to keep the conversation going and then we’ll have questions from the audience and the total time of this session is 45 minutes.
Bill Gertz is a reporter for the Washington Free Beacon and the Washington Times. He is the author of six books and writes a weekly column on the Pentagon and national security issues called “Inside the Ring.”
Daniel Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum and a columnist at National Review, the _Jerusalem Post_ and other publications. He is the author of several books on the Middle East and Islam.
Ann Marie Waters is a British politician who founded the For Britain Party. Please give them a warm welcome.
Bill Gertz: Great. I’ll go first. I’m gonna give you a kind of an overview of Trump’s foreign policy which is America First and then I’m gonna focus on China which is a specialty that I’ve had and what I think is the most long-term existential threat to the United States.
First off, the Trump foreign policy got off to a somewhat rocky start in the beginning, through a number of different personnel changes. The Secretary of State was fired on Twitter. It was changed that the CIA Director, Mike Pompeo, became the Secretary of State. Jim Mattis has been the Defense Secretary. He’s done an incredible job there. It’s an amazing thing to see. The America First policy is, was outlined in two main documents. One was on December of 2017 which was the national security strategy of the White House and the main shift in that document and I’ll mention, that was followed in January of this year by the national defense strategy which kind of put a little bit more of meat on the bones of the national security strategy. And the strategy shifted the focus from countering Islamic terrorism to nation states and, of course, the main nation states that we’re dealing with are China and Russia. And of those two, I would say China, again, is the most serious threat and it’s something that I’ll go into in some detail in my opening here.
But, let me first say that the way that the government is looking at the threats facing the country now, the military likes a lot of acronyms and their acronym for the threats now is CRIKT, which is C-R-I-K-T and it stands for China Russia Iran Korea and Terrorism. So, those are the main threats facing the U.S. and that’s really where the bulk of the Trump’s foreign policy and national security policy are working.
As it relates to Russia, Trump definitely had a soft spot for Vladimir Putin in the beginning. That’s clearly changed as he has taken pretty aggressive steps to sanction Russia, to continue the pressure on Russia for its forcible annexation of Crimea and continued subversion as well as its election meddling. The GRU was indicted. This is the strategy of the administration to highlight things rather than releasing reports about intelligence. They’ve used the legal systems, so they indicted a number of officers. They’ve sanctioned a number of companies. They’ve sanctioned the troll farm in St. Petersburg that was behind the election meddling.
But the problem of Russia and I think Trump has really not outlined why he wants to develop closer ties, but one strategic reason to develop closer ties with Russia is the problem of China. If there’s some way that Russia could help the United States and not China, that would be a very good thing strategically and it should be a natural development. I’m reading a book now called “Russia’s Dead End” and it’s by a former insider in the Mikhail Gorbachev era and he basically outlines how these were real democratic reformers that took down the Soviet Union in 1991. What happened then was that there was a backlash and Revanchist came into power and the security administrates came to dominate that system along with Oligarchs which were also run by the ex‑KGB and security service people. And so, you have the situation where Russia has really reacted against democracy and now it’s an authoritarian, anti-U.S. state under Vladimir Putin.
But like I said, the most important threat facing the country is China and we’ve seen a major shift in U.S. policy towards China under President Trump and it’s manifested itself primarily in the economic sphere. The President, one of the first things he did was he had the U.S. trade representative conduct an investigation into China’s theft of American technology which has been massive to the tune of tens, if not hundreds of billions of dollars of stolen American technology. Not only was this technology stolen, it was applied and it’s part of a major military buildup by the Chinese.
Just this week, there was a report that came out by Congress. It was saying that our military is in dire need of a buildup. Trump has done that. He’s infused the last defense bill plus upped the defense spending by some $70 billion. That’s a good start, but the hollowing out under the Obama administration was serious. It’s gonna take a long time to fix and at the same time that report came out in Congress, another report came out on China, the annual U.S./China economic security review commission and that report said that China is accelerating its military buildup. And what the Chinese are doing is building up high technology arms and weapons in specific areas: space warfare, cyber, undersea warfare and missiles. And these are the areas and most of these areas, China, unfortunately, has become either on par or ahead of the United States in a lot of these areas and that’s a real challenge for the United States.
A landmark speech was given October 5 by Vice President Mike Pence and this was, in all my years in Washington and I wrote a book in 2000 called “The China Threat” which warned about all of the developments and they basically came to pass and it’s been a major battle in Washington over the China threat. We’ve gone from a situation where back in the late 90’s when I did an interview in the Pentagon and I met with the head of the Defense Intelligence Agency who told me to my face that China was not a threat. And I was totally shocked and that led to my book “The China Threat” which is based on what China called the China threat theory which they try to play down.
The main threat from China is ideological and this is something that most people don’t fully understand. China is a nuclear armed communist dictatorship. The U.S. strategy, again, was to try to play down the threat from China. We had a former Pentagon official named Joe Nye put forth this in the 90’s. He said if you treat China as a threat, it will become a threat. So, U.S. policy for the last several decades has been to pretend that China is not a threat and China played along. As good communists, they were able to play along and pretend that they were not a threat, that they had no global ambitions and it was a total disaster. The U.S. policy towards China was facilitating the rise of the communist party. Now, the communist party of China under Xi Jinping is becoming more communistic, more repressive. They’re doing high-tech totalitarianism. They’re controlling the Internet. They’re creating a more repressive police state and the President is pushing back. He’s definitely pushing back and this Pence speech, I think, was a landmark; this October 5 speech by the Vice President; where he talked about, it wasn’t just Russia that was meddling in the elections. But China is meddling in our elections. They meddled in the mid‑term elections by trying to support putting out propagandas to support farmers who are hurt by the tariffs that the President imposed. But then he went further and he said that China actually has a plan to replace the U.S. President in the 2020 elections. They want somebody who’s more friendly to China that wants to go back to the conciliatory appeasement approach towards China.
So, that’s the current state of play. I’m in the process of writing a book now on the new China threat and it’ll come out later next year but the good news is, we’re on the path, the super tanker of American foreign policy and national security policy towards China is changing; but there is strong resistance within the bureaucracy, especially with those who have the vested business interests, who wanna do business with China and who are wedded to the fiction that if we just trade with China, that this will have a moderating impact on China and turn it into a normal nation state and not a nuclear armed communist dictatorship. And I’ll stop there. Thank you.
Ann Marie Waters: Good morning. It is a pleasure to be here. My name is Ann Marie Waters and I have spent the last decade of my life trying to tell the truth. And I have paid quite a high price for it. I started out my political career in the U.K. I started out on the left. I was a member of the Labor Party and activist with the Labor Party. And I left because they wouldn’t allow me to tell the truth. In fact, they punished me quite severely when I tried to tell the truth. It was a truth that was inconvenient to them and to the rest of the political establishment in my country. And that truth was that we had allowed immigration, specifically Muslim immigration, which was destroying our country. It is continuing to destroy our country. We don’t want mass immigration of any kind. I mean immigration is fine, but this what we’re talking about here is not immigration. It’s mass population shifts, from societies with which we have very little in common, into our formerly free democratic countries. It has resulted in rape gangs roaming our streets almost exclusively made up of Muslims, raping young, almost exclusively white girls who they view as trash. It has resulted in terror attacks. It has resulted in ghettos, Islamic ghettos, under Sharia law. And I did not see a bright future if we continue down this road.
I left the Labor Party after I had spoken at Oxford University and said that Islam was not a religion of peace. I left. I then joined the U.K. Independence Party which some of you may be familiar with. They tried also to silence me on Islam. I tried for a long time to ask, begging them to allow me to talk about this issue. They wouldn’t. So I was deselected from a Parliamentary seat. I ran for Parliament. The leader of the party deselected me for my views on Islam. And I decided that I would challenge him for the leadership on that basis. I did so. I came second. I had been subjected to a smear campaign in the national media by that party. So I left. And I thought I am not going through this again. I am not going to beg to be able to tell the truth about this massive threat to the country I love. So I started my own party, For Britain. I’m very proud of it and I’m proud of its success so far.
How does this relate to Donald Trump in the world, you may be wondering? His victory. I had no interest in Donald Trump. I knew I didn’t want Hillary Clinton to win because she was inside Arabia’s pocket for one thing. But I had no real views on Donald Trump. I thought, Donald Trump. Since he’s become President, my respect for him has just exploded for several reasons.
One of them is he actually wants to do what he said he was going to do when he was running for election. That is what I want from a politician. In fact, he’s not a politician which is, of course, one of the things that makes him, it maintains his integrity. What his victory has done is allow people like me and people who support and follow people like me, to know that you can tell the truth and still win. You can have the media, the corrupt, lying media, totally against you and still win. It gave us hope in Europe, those of us who love our country, those of us who want to maintain and keep our nation state, our culture, our democracy and you must oppose, stand up, to a corrupt media the way he did. He told us in Europe and in Britain that if you do this, you can still win. That is golden to me and I thank him for it.
Where starting my party is starting out, we don’t have much. We have a media against us. We have an entire political establishment against us. We don’t have the billions, unfortunately, that Donald Trump has; but we have done really well in our first year. We’re not even a year old yet. We have already at local elections beaten every other small party in Britain. Weeks only after starting, only weeks in. We beat every small party in Britain. Because I know, I know that the British people, like the American people, were waiting for someone of honor, someone who would say it like it is and someone who talked like they talk and someone who would stick to their promises. You have Donald Trump. I intend for Britain to be our equivalent. Thank you very much for having me this morning.
Daniel Pipes: Well, thank you, Ann Marie, for making my life difficult. I’m Daniel Pipes and normally I’m here as a Middle East Islam specialist. But in part to coordinate with Ann Marie and in part because it’s a particular passion of mine. I’m gonna talk about the European–what I call–civilizationalist parties. The European parties like For Britain, that are standing up to the establishment and talking about immigration and Islamization. Now in 2015, the EU commissioner for enlargement, Johannes Hanas, said that there might be some 20 million refugees at the borders of Europe wanting to come in. That’s a substantial number, isn’t it? But if you look at, not just refugees, but economic migrants, if you look at the water and food shortages in the Middle East, if you look at the crises in Sub Sahara Africa; I think it’s reasonable to say that the number of would-be immigrants to Europe easily matches the number of the population of Europe itself which when you include Russia, is 740 million, not 20 million, but more like a billion people. And if you look at Africa and how it’s expected to double from 1 billion to 2 billion by 2050, and quadruple to 4 billion by 2100. If you look at Iran, where an official of the government said that 70 percent of the population will have to leave unless there’s some major change to the use of water. If you look at Yemen where their villages where each inhabitant has one liter, more or less one quart of water per day. If you look at Egypt with the damning of the Nile in Ethiopia and the crisis of water there. You can easily see tens and hundreds of millions of people wanting to leave and where will they want to leave to? Well, Europe and also the United States and Canada.
Our population is almost exactly half of that of Europe. It’s 360 billion, Canada and the United States together. And while we’re further, modern transportation means that we will too get the sort of immigrants. So while my subject is Europe, it’s also the United States and Canada.
I’d like to make four points about the civilizationalist parties. Some of them are well known like the national rally in France, the League in Italy, the Freedom Party in Austria, the PVV in The Netherlands, the Sweden Democrats and so forth. There are many and they’re coming. They’re in revolt against the elites. What I call the six Ps: the policy, the politicians, the press, the priest, the professors and the prosecutors. They’re already in government in a small way in three countries–namely Norway, Switzerland and Sweden. Sorry, Norway, Switzerland and Slovakia. They have major roles in five countries; in Poland, in Hungary, in Czechia, in Austria and in Italy. They are the driving force in these five countries. And I expect there will be more to come, such as France, The Netherlands and Sweden. Particular interest is in 2‑3 weeks when the CDU, the ruling party of Germany, will be holding its national convention on December 7 and 8. It’s very critical for the future of Europe, I think, because Angelique Merkel has her would-be successor in place, Annegret Kramp-Karrenbauer, or known as AKK. She is the putative successor. If she does succeed, then Germany will continue down the miracle path which to say mass immigration, and ignoring these problems.
But if either of the other contestants–either the former faction leader Frederick Maras or more interestingly yet the health minister, Hans Swan—succeed, then you’ll see a dramatic shift in Germany and Germany might well be the next country. Germany is the largest and arguably the most powerful and important country in Europe. So, my first point is, the civilizationalists are coming.
The second point is that, yes, there are many problems with them. Without exception, almost without exception I should say, they suffer from deep problems. In many cases, they’re staffed by neophytes. They contain disturbing numbers of cranks, anti-Jewish and anti-Muslim extremists, racists, power-hungry oddballs, conspiracy theorists, historical revisionists and Nazi nostalgists. Autocrats run their parties. They take money from Moscow. They’re anti-American. There are all sorts of problems with these parties. No question.
But two points in reply. First, they’re getting better as symbolized by the fact that Marine Le Pen, through her father Jean-Marie Le Pen, out of the party that he founded in 1972 because of his antisemitism. And secondly, while yes, these parties have their problems, if you look at the establishment parties, they’ve got problems too. And if you look in detail at what’s happening, I think there’s more freedom of speech in Hungary today then in Great Britain. And I’m thinking in particular the Tommy Robinson case about what you heard a bunch of lies yesterday. He should not have been put in jail. The Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales pulled him out of jail in a 24‑page decision that said this was a kangaroo court.
The third point is that the civilizationalist parties have a crucial role where they do not exist in Parliament as in Britain and in Spain. You see things go rapidly downhill. Where they do exist, you see a push back and that’s why it’s so important that a party like For Britain get into power, into Parliament.
And finally the fourth point is that there are several paths to power for the civilizationalist parties. One is to come to power by itself, needing no one else. The best case of this, the only case of this, is in Hungary where Fidesz with Viktor Orban has two thirds of the seats in Parliament and can do what it wants and it does too much. From an American point of view, it controls the judiciary, the economy, the media, the schools and everything else. But that’s one way. Just win outright.
The second is to join with the legacy conservative party and that’s what we see in Austria, where the freedom has joined forces with the traditional conservative party and they now have 50 percent of the seats and they run the country between them.
And the third and most exotic, is what we see in Italy where the civilizationalist party has joined with what is in effect a left wing party, the Five Star. It’s most anarchist then left wing, but if you had to define it, it’s left wing and the league is running the show in Italy.
Now what is going to happen when these parties get to power. The easy thing for them to do is want to stop illegal immigration. If you will to do it, you do it. And two, to expel criminal illegal migrants. But that’s rather small compared to the problems that lie ahead, the difficult ones. One of which is to expel noncriminal illegals and the other is to integrate legal immigrants and that is going to prove very, very difficult. But at least Europeans are waking up to this problem and want to sing positive changes and I urge you to watch the situation only because in Europe, there is three quarters of a billion people and is the place where we get our civilization from, but also because this affects us directly as well. Thank you.
Gilmore: Thank you all very much. I’d like to start off the discussion with an admittedly broad question but I think you could each tailor it to your areas of expertise and interests. Bill Gertz spoke about a denial in the military, political, intelligence world about the threat that China poses to the United States and has posed for some time. Ann Maria Waters is a living testament to continued insistent, strong denial about the manifest downsides of importing whole cultures with which the host country has nothing in common. And Daniel Pipes has just given an overview of four civilizational parties that have arisen in Europe, obviously in the face of a political environment that refuses to recognize certain realities. Why is there this denial, what accounts for it and can it be successively overcome?
Gertz: Why is there not a recognition of these things?
Gilmore: Why is there and in your wheelhouse so to speak, why is there a denial about the very real threat China, we face from China?
Gertz: Yeah. Like I say there’s been a debate on China that’s been underway for decades and it took Donald Trump to basically say the Emperor had no clothes. And even the foreign policy establishment was recognizing this. In April of this year, the Main Journal of Foreign Affairs put out a major piece by two Obama administration officials and they basically said we got China wrong. We were wrong on China for a very long time. Everybody, from the conservative side that said that if we had a strong military, that would prevent China from becoming a greater threat to the business side which said if you just trade with them, this will have a moderating influence on China’s development. And then the middle, the academic grounds which said, oh, let’s just engage China and that will have a moderating influence.
It was an utter failure and now we’re facing the consequences of an expansionist China which is pushing its, what is known as the Felton Road Initiative. This is a wolf in sheep’s clothing for the Chinese. It’s an economic program to develop infrastructure in the developing world. They’re using what’s called debt diplomacy, coercive debt diplomacy, where they get these countries deeply in debt and then guess what? They have to rely on China. And China is promoting its brand of communism which is communism with Chinese characteristics and this is not a win‑win situation as their propaganda says. This is a zero sum approach and their main target is the United States. They want to defeat the United States. They want the United States to be brought down. They’re using all means possible to subvert our society whether it’s through the use of Fentanyl to increase the drug prices. Most of the Fentanyl comes from China. So we see a major threat and like I said, people are starting to recognize it because we were so wrong for so many years that Trump is really leading the way in changing people’s perceptions in government and outside.
Waters: Probably the question I’m asked most is why is this happening? Why? Just to explain, we are living in the George Orwell novel from 1994 in the U.K. We are living in it. We are seeing something with our own eyes and our politicians are telling us that’s not there. That’s not happening. If you do see it, you’re a racist, you’re a bigot. The truth is what we say the truth is, and not what you see with your own eyes. That’s what we’re living in. You are almost as likely if not more so to go to jail for insulting Islam than for raping a child in the U.K. today. We are a complete mess. Why is it happening? largely fear, I think the country is afraid. Britain is a frightened country at this time. I think a lot of our politicians are afraid. They’re afraid of a backlash. They’re afraid. For example, we have tens of thousands of cases of female genital mutilation in the U.K., carried out mostly by Somali Muslims. We have clinics in London set up to deal with the medical aftermath of those. It’s a crime that carries a 24‑year sentence and yet no one has ever been successfully prosecuted for it, despite the fact we have hospital units treating it. No one has ever been prosecuted for it or successfully at least. I can tell you why. Because there will be riots in the streets if we did. You saw in France recently, you know that the burka is banned in France. A woman was arrested for it and five nights of rioting followed. This is what they know is going to happen. We have Sharia law. We have Sharia courts in the U.K. which are acting completely unlawfully. And nothing is done. Absolutely nothing is done because once again, we know that there will be trouble. There will be violence. There will be a violent response. And the police and the states don’t want to deal with it.
And as the perfect example of how frightened Britain is and quite how dark it has become in my country, was when Asia Bibi, a Christian woman sentenced to death in Pakistan for insulting Islam, the United Kingdom said we would not offer her asylum because of fears of community tensions. And you know exactly what that means. That means that Britain is not safe for a Christian woman who is a genuine refugee. I mean we can welcome every ISIS fighter and every Jihadian on the planet into Britain but we can’t bring an actual refugee. And it also tells us that we have essentially capitulated. We have now our state, the British state, being told what to do by Imams. And that is the actual reality of it. That’s one reason.
Another reason is careerism. Our politicians are careerists. They’re not in it for principle, most of them. They’re not in it for the country. Most of them come up through the party system. It’s a career to them. A nice, well paid, high status career and none of them will rock the boat. None of them are going to be the first to stand up and say it. And if they did, our media would utterly destroy them. There are ideological reasons as well; people on the left who genuinely despise western democracy, who genuinely want to see the end of Great Britain that we know and see mass immigration, particularly Muslim immigration, as an ally in bringing down the traditional Britain that we know.
So, there’s no one answer to this. How do we overcome it? Perseverance and truth because it is changing, and I often think this is the case and I hope it continues. The more that our state, the more the media digs its heels in, the more it lies, the more it pretends, the more the British people are waking up. And that is the future. We will wake up. 47 percent of the British public wants a complete end to immigration from Muslim countries. Now, that’s a pretty strong position to hold and it’s almost half the country. And they also want, 42 percent, want to vote in a new political party. That looks good for us. Thank you.
Pipes: I’d like to pick up on the third of Ann Marie’s reasons which she called ideological and what I’ll call guilt. I think there’s a profound sense of guilt in Europe over the satanic trio of imperialism, racism and fascism. It is found throughout Europe, especially Western Europe. It’s ironic and sad to note that those countries that were part of NATO through the Cold War are in fair worse shape than those countries that were part of the Warsaw Pact. In other words, the American ages has far less prepared them far worse for 2018 then the dead hand of Soviet communism. Guilt. The sense that your civilization is bad, that you brought bad things to the rest of the world, that your white skin is a sign of evil, that your culture has wrought damage throughout the globe. These are the fundamental sentiments I think that lie behind this wanting to bring in a new population, wanting to eradicate the old civilization. It is deep. It is profound. And it is primarily elite, what I call the six Ps: again, police, politicians, priests, press, professors and prosecutors. It is not found among the general population who increasingly, as she points out, are opening their eyes to this. So, what one sees is a coming revolution. It’s already in six countries out of the 28 of the European union and it’s going to be felt in more of them and they’re gonna come to power. I predict in 20 years, what I’m calling civilizationalist parties, will be in power through most of Europe and you’ll see a huge change.
Gilmore: Thank you. Thank you all three. We’re gonna have about 10 minutes of questions and as soon as I can identify who from the Center is going to be walking around with a mic. It might be me. Apparently, we don’t have anyone with a mic and so I think what we’ll do, ladies and gentlemen, is if you can come forward, I’ll hold the mic. Don’t be Jim Acosta when I want it. Oh, there is a mic. Okay. We actually have a gentleman in the back who will be activating those mics. You can ask a question to the entire panel in which case I would ask the panel, okay. Actually, ask an individual panelist a question rather than all three of them and we’ll try to have brief answers from our distinguished panelists because we want to hit so many questions. Yes, ma’am.
Audience Question: Yes. This is a question for Bill. How much of the Chinese money buying both politicians and bureaucrats has been influencing the policy?
Gertz: This is the main question that was put out by the, first the President at the United Nations and then the Vice President. The simple answer is we don’t know and it’s because our intelligence community knows this information and they haven’t made it public. It’s part of the problem of not telling the truth about China which has been a perennial difficulty. I’ve covered it for decades. The government for whatever reason, again, it’s this policy, it’s been promoted by the liberals that says if we just treat China as a normal nation, that it will become one and so we need to get more information out. I can tell you that the amounts are in the hundreds of millions of dollars that they’re spending on their influence operations. We’re starting to see more action just within the last month or so. They arrested a Chinese intelligence officer who was extradited from Belgium and he’s now being charged with economic espionage and it’s gonna be a big case. But it was an unprecedented arrest because more than likely the Chinese will probably try and take some retaliatory action against our intelligence personnel in China which could limit our ability to really learn secrets about the regime in Beijing.
Audience Question: For Ms. Waters, while immigration is a tremendous problem, we know that there is a tremendous amount of homegrown, perhaps second immigration native-born Muslims who live in Britain who cause a huge number of problems. What do you do with the population that exists in these countries, not only Britain and others who have been there for a long time, who simply have not adopted western values and are trying to overthrow the system?
Waters: We apply the law. First of all, we have to take a lesson from the facts. You are absolutely right. You have second and third generations who still despise us. So learn lessons from that. Secondly, apply the law. We live in a free country. We live in a country apparently of the rule of law, but we’re not, of course, utilizing the rule of law. If people incite violence, for example, using their religious scripture, we jail them for it. You send a message that it’s a criminal offense to incite violence. To use the law, if people commit female genital mutilation, you jail them for it. If you close down the Sharia courts, you ban the face coverings of which nobody is allowed to wear, you stop this supremacy. Islamic supremacy is happening in the U.K. We have halal food everywhere, in schools, hospitals, everyone has to eat halal whether they like it or not. Stop this appeasement. Send a message and when people break the law, jail them for it. It is as simple as that. We must treat everyone the same way we treat everyone.
Audience Question: This is a question directed towards the topic of China. I work for a Chinese company. They are very different in their approach to life, to business. The sad fact is we have to do business with them. So much money, so much time has been spent. We have to get along somehow. What is your idea about how we will get along with them? Because at this point, we have a choice. Armed warfare, cyber warfare or we have to figure out a way to keep détente in place and do business and I think it’s to our advantage to do business and keep them under control. What’s your thought?
Gertz: Well, I agree with the Trump policy which is to make China change its behavior towards business. They want free, they want fair. They want reciprocal trade agreements, they want businesses to be basically not have to be required to give up their technology as doing business there. I think we have leverage over China because they want to use our financial system. I think we need to put more pressure on them through financial measures and sanctions. We’ve started to do some of that. We just recently sanctioned one of the PLS’s generals for buying arm sales from Russia under a law related to sanctions law related to Russia. It’s a challenge because right now the Chinese are going to try to subvert Trump. They’re waiting him out. He’s imposed 250 billion in tariffs on Chinese goods. He’s got another 200 lined up to go if the Chinese don’t agree. They’ve just had some trade talks today. The problem is you can’t trust the Chinese. There used to be a guy named Fred Schwartz. He ran the Christian anti-communist crusade and he wrote a book called “You Can Trust the Communists to be Communists” and that’s the problem. They lie and they cheat and they use deception and they will tell us anything and then they will violate the agreements. So that’s really the problem. How do you deal with the system that’s inherently based on lies and deception?
Audience Question: For Daniel Pipes. If there’d be a natural alliance between these nativist parties and the European Jews; but the parties are still having Nazi tinge and the Jews are still afraid of them. You mentioned Le Pen, but do you think there’s any hope for getting these people involved or do you think ultimately the Jews are just going to leave Europe?
It just seems like there’s a natural linkage between because they both want to de‑Muslimize the continent between Jews–or the victims of antisemitism–and the anti‑Muslim parties, but there seems to be a fear between the two groups, between the Jews and the parties.
Pipes: No question that parties that are civilizationalists have elements that are fascistic or neo-fascistic. No question there are anti-Semitic elements in them. No question. I grant all those criticisms. On the other hand, while say, Viktor Orban is criticized so heavily for his anti-George Soros campaign, I note that here where there has been at the Horowitz Center a major anti-Soros campaign. How can we compare this anti-Soros campaign in Hungary with Jeremy Corbyn? I mean, there you have real overt antisemitism hanging out with Hamas and the killers of Jews. How can we compare Jeremy Corbyn who would probably end British recognition of Israel with Viktor Orban who is Israel’s best friend in Europe? So, yes. There are problems. But one, it’s better than the other side and two, they’re improving. I gave you the example of Marie Le Pen. Let me give you another. In 2010, I believe it was, the head of the freedom party of Austria, dutifully went to Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, the Holocaust memorial, and he wore the beer cap of his brotherhood which is tainted with antisemitism. And this created quite a bit of disgust. He went back in 2016 and he wore a homburg that had no associations whatsoever. So he learned. He has problems. The FPO, the Freedom Party of Austria has problems but they’re in general improving and secondly, they’re sure better than the socialist party, Social Democratic Party of Sweden or the Social Democratic Party of Spain and so forth. As I like to put it, Israel has better relations with Saudi Arabia than with Sweden. Better relations with Egypt than with Spain.
Gilmore: Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for your questions. I would like to thank the panelists.
Leave a Reply