Michele Bachmann: Values Voters Summit 2012 Transcript

Family Research Council
2012 Values Voter Summit
Speaker: Representative Michele Bachmann (R-MN)
Date: Friday, September 14, 2012
Time: 9:45 a.m. EDT

click here to see the video

REPRESENTATIVE MICHELE BACHMANN (R-MN): Hi, everyone. It’s good to see you! Thank you so much. God bless you. What a wonderful morning. (Applause.)

Thank you so much. Good morning!

AUDIENCE MEMBERS: Good morning!

REP. BACHMANN: Thank you for that warm introduction. It’s always an honor and a thrill to be back at the Values Voters Summit. I want to thank Tony Perkins, the great people at FRC.

And before I start, I just want to say a word about this concept that you’ve heard about called the war on women, the so-called war on women. And I just want to say I think it has about as much reliability and truthfulness as Bill Clinton’s arithmetic. (Applause.)

But this week, as we have seen to our horror, there is a very real war that is going on across the world, and that’s what I want to take my few moments together that we have this morning. I sit on the Intelligence Committee. We deal with the nation’s classified secrets. And this is a very real issue.

And as we survey the political landscape today, it feels like it’s déjà vu all over again because we’re seeing struggles all across the Middle East and we’re seeing a tax on our embassies in a way that we saw in the late 1970s. Staggering unemployment. High gas prices. A struggling economy. You’d almost think Jimmy Carter’s back in the White House again, wouldn’t you? Only what we see is we are again desperate for another Ronald Reagan.

REP. BACHMANN: This time, I’m sorry to say, it’s even worse because the fires of radical Islamic traditionalism are not just limited to one country. They’re currently raging all across Africa and all across Asia. Each week our Christian brothers and sisters from Nigeria to Kenya are being persecuted. When they go to church, they don’t even know if they’ll make it home afterwards.

And now the violence has come to us, the United States. And on the anniversary of 9/11, no less, our Libyan ambassador and his courageous embassy staff lost their lives in Benghazi and Libya in a cruel, cold-blooded, gruesome, intentional terror attack. And all the while, the response of this administration has communicated both weakness and lack of resolve to the world. (Applause.)

And a top official seemed, incredulously, apparently convinced that the only way to curtail this crisis is to put a full, frontal attack on the free speech rights of American citizens. I want to be perfectly clear: this isn’t just about a movie. This was an intentional act that was done by radical Islamists who seek to impose their set of beliefs on the rest of the world, and we will not stand for it! (Cheers, applause.)

No one here is suggesting that all Muslims are radical, but we should not be ignorant of the objective reality that there is a very radical wing of Islam that is dedicated to the destruction of America, of Israel and of Israel’s (allies ?). And what we’re watching develop before our eyes today are the direct consequences of this administration’s policy of apology and appeasement across the globe and the supposed success of the president’s foreign policy genius, hailed by (media ?) even last week, now exposed for what it really is. And so now you see this media doing absolutely everything they can to scramble to make sure that their guy doesn’t get the blame for what’s going down this week.

It’s important to highlight the context of what got us to this point. It didn’t just happen out of nowhere. (Inaudible) – go back to the very beginning of the Obama administration. The very first television interview, don’t forget, that President Obama gave after he was sworn in was with the foreign Arabic KDTV network Al Arabiya, where he promised that he would provide Middle East peace in our time. Then President Obama went on his first foreign policy trip to Cairo, and he spurned our long-time ally, Egyptian President Mubarak, by inviting the very violent Muslim Brotherhood, who, at that time was outlawed in Egypt, to attend his speech, and gave them front-row tickets to his speech in Cairo when Mubarak’s policy was to keep the destructive Muslim Brotherhood at arm’s length.

Now, when you hear the Muslim Brotherhood’s mission statement, I think you’ll understand why former President Mubarak or anyone would want to stop the violent Muslim Brotherhood. The brotherhood is a political entity, and this is their motto. It reads, as I quote: “Allah is our objective. The prophet is our leader. The Quran is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” Recently the newly elected Muslim Brotherhood president, Morsi, even said, quote, “Jerusalem shall be our capital, Allah willing.”

I want to be perfectly clear this morning. Even though the Democrat party had a little trouble with this last week in Charlotte, North Carolina, the undivided city of Jerusalem is not now, nor will it ever be, anything other than the eternal capital of Israel! (Cheers, applause.)

Another factor in understanding this administration’s policy of appeasement is its relationship with an organization you may not have heard of before, one of the largest, most powerful organizations in the world, and you should know its name. It’s called the Organization for Islamic Cooperation, Organization for Islamic Cooperation, OIC. And so far, it’s gone virtually unnoticed.

Who are they? The OIC is the second-largest intergovernmental organization in the world after the United Nations. The OIC declaims they have authority to represent all Muslims, even those who live in non-Muslim countries, like the United States. In 2005, this very influential Islamic organization published a 10-year plan of action, in 2005, to implement Shariah-based speech code requirements worldwide. Listen very carefully to what I’m telling you right now. It explains this week.

They had a 10-year plan of action to implement their Shariah-based, Islamic-based speech code requirements worldwide. But don’t take my word for it. They published this plan on their website in English so no one would miss their intent. They intend to internationally criminalize all communication or any communication or speech that’s deemed by them to be insulting to Islam, even in countries like the United States. That, my friends, explains the story of this week – Islamic-enforced speech codes. No one, not Muslims, not non-Muslims, not Americans, are allowed to speak anything Islamists see as insulting to their religion. They intend to force us to kiss our freedom of speech and religion goodbye, and that’s why we’re being forewarned today. (Applause.)

Unbelievably, last December they succeeded, with both President Obama and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s help, because they pushed through the United Nations the passage of U.N. Resolution 1618, which called upon all countries to enact laws preventing derogatory references to Islam – a clear violation of our First Amendment freedom of speech. And even before that, in October, last October, many prominent Islamic organizations wrote a letter to the White House, where they urged our White House to do a complete purge of any federal materials from references to the ideology of Islam, to ensure that all trainers in our U.S. military, our FBI and other U.S. security agencies be retrained so they would be brainwashed in political correctness toward Islam. That’s enforced Islamic speech codes here in the United States, and all done with the help of our president and secretary of state. It took only days for the Obama administration to reply to this demand letter from the Islamists, promising to set up a task force with these same organizations to immediately begin this unprecedented purge of our counterterrorism training in every federal agency across the board. It’s breathtaking – never been done before.

But when members of Congress, myself included, started to ask questions about the identities of who these people were who were leading this purge in our government and what it was they were purging from our training materials, the Obama administration told us the information was closed; it was classified; we couldn’t know who was behind this. I’m here to say, my friends, that we’re now today very late in the game. We’re quickly losing our sense of who we are as a nation, and we’re losing our ability to identify our radical Islamist enemy. The time has come to stand unashamedly this week for our freedom and our values and draw an unmistakable red line for our enemies across the world. (Cheers, applause.)

In light of the attacks this week on our embassy in Cairo, we need to tell the Muslim Brotherhood-controlled government in Egypt, if you continue to inflame sentiments against the United States, we will immediately put an end to the United States taxpayer gravy train that we’re sending your way – (cheers, applause) – starting with the $1.5 billion we send Egypt in aid and the $1 billion in loan forgiveness program and the $5 billion International Monetary Fund loan program that we’re backing. We also need to stop the upcoming state visit that President Obama agreed to to welcome Egyptian President Morsi into the White House, and we need to cancel the planned joint military exercises that we have just recently planned with the Egyptian military.

Secretaries Clinton and Napolitano also need to immediately end the policy of violating U.S. federal law by granting visas – now, get this – to members of designated – U.S.-designated foreign terrorist organizations. (Applause.) We’re granting them visas so they can be escorted through the front door of the White House to meet with our president’s national security staff, whereupon they’re demanding the release of the – of the leaders of the radical Islamist organizations, including the blind sheikh, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. You would think this was a novel that you’re reading, not reality.

And as President Obama needs to get his priorities straight, what he needs to do is cancels (sic) his interview with David Letterman – (cheers, applause) – cancel his meeting with Beyonce – (cheers, applause) – cancel his meeting with Jay-Z and instead agree to meet with the prime minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu – (cheers, applause) – because, you see, America and Israel have a commonality of interests.

Too much blood has been shed, too many lives been given to sacrifice our freedom of speech and freedom of religion and what we stand for here in the United States. Our forefathers sacrificed so much for us. We owe it to them, we owe it to our posterity to continue to stand for freedom, for liberty, for justice, for righteousness, for truth. And as we consider our way forward, we should remember the voices of history. Don’t forget Sun Tzu, who famously said if you know your enemy and you know yourself, you will not fear a hundred battles. But the fact is that this administration has virtually outlawed understanding who the enemy is. And at every turn, the enemy – the president seems insistent on apologizing for who we are as Americans.

Now, I’m no master war strategist, but I do know enough that when we refuse to acknowledge who the enemy is and what he believes and when we shame Americans for standing up for who we are, then President Obama is following a strategy of complete defeat. This is not a new battle for America. We learned in the very first international war we ever faced as a new country that appeasement doesn’t work.

It was in the early days of the American republic, when our government was busy paying extortion bribes also to people in North Africa in the Barbary states, trying to stop them from attacking our ships and taking our people to become their slaves. And even as we were paying extortion bribes to the Barbary states, fully one-sixth of our U.S. budget at that time was going to pay these extortion bribes. Then along came Thomas Jefferson, the first Democrat president, in 1801. And he decided, we’re going to end this policy of appeasement. And he wrote, and I quote, I know that nothing will stop the internal (sic) increase of demands from these pirates but the presence of an armed force, and it will be more economical and more honorable to use the same means at once for suppressing their insolencies (sic). So he built a Navy, and he deployed that American Navy to the enemy. Our troops were victorious, and the message to the world was clear: We will not tolerate attacks on our citizens or our sovereignty, and you do so at your own peril. (Cheers, applause.)

It was Thomas Jefferson’s policy of strength and determination, in complete contrast to the policy of the Obama administration of apology and appeasement, that’s been our American tradition of foreign policy and all political parties, Democrats and Republicans, ever since. Where has that American spirit gone? Where are the William Barret Travises at the Alamo, who told the enemy, here and no further? Where are our generals, like Washington, Jackson, Grant, Sherman, Pershing, Eisenhower, Patton, who understood that victory is the only goal of war because they understood the terrible consequences of defeat? (Scattered cheers.)

I’m reminded of General MacArthur, who led troops across the Pacific in the face of severe military aggression. And in his speech to the cadets at West Point, he told those young warriors, the long gray line has never failed us; were you to do so, a million ghosts in olive drab, brown khaki, in blue and gray would rise from their white crosses, thundering those magic words: duty, honor, country. Friends, we live in desperate times where we need to come together as Americans, remembering this gift of freedom and liberty given to us from those who’ve gone before. And we need to live those three words that they are echoing through the pages of history down to us today, through history, through duty, through honor and through country.

So let’s make sure that with everything within us, we lay it on the line in the next 50 days, because it is my belief and my opinion that Barack Obama has been the most dangerous president we have ever had on American foreign policy. (Cheers, applause.) And we cannot sustain another four years of Jimmy Carter-like policies, because you see, the future belongs where? All you need to do is look in front of you, look at your hands. I look at my own.

This is it. It is our hands that will determine the future. It is our hands that will determine if it is honor, duty, country. Now is ours. I believe we are worthy of the task, and nothing but the memory of the fallen should guide us.

God bless us now. God bless us in the future. God bless us in this important moment when we make our decision about the future of our nation. God bless us all, and in his mighty name we pray. We bless the United States of America. (Cheers, applause.)

(END)

You must be logged in to post a comment Login