“There are laws that enslave men, and laws that set them free. Either what we hold to be right and good and true is right and good and true, for all mankind, under God, or we’re just another robber tribe.”
In the minds of many Americans the words “the threat of terrorism and the principle of personal liberty” may conjure images of airport scanners, perverts “looking for bombs,” or t-shirts that proclaim the Fourth Amendment in metallic ink. Many claim that the TSA violates each individual’s “right to privacy.” While complaints about privacy bear some merit, and even illustrate how an unrestrained federal government abuses its power, this speech will address a deeper problem, namely that of Islamic Fundamentalist terrorism and the threat that it poses to the American understanding of Personal Liberty.
As Bernard Lewis remarked, “most Muslims are not fundamentalists, and most fundamentalists are not terrorists, but most present-day terrorists are Muslims and proudly identify themselves as such.” Indeed, Al-Qa’ida, the Saudi establishment, and the ruling Iranian hierarchy “claim to represent a truer, purer, and more authentic Islam than that currently practiced by the vast majority of Muslims.” Regardless of the truth or falsity of these fundamentalist claims, many Muslims across the United States and in the world at large are not fundamentalists or terrorists, and so do not pose the threat discussed in this speech. Islamic Fundamentalist terror, however, forms the centerpiece of this discussion.
In 1928, Hassan al-Banna founded the Muslim Brotherhood, which aimed “for the establishment of a world Islamic state governed by Koranic law, ruled by a single caliph.” This association openly supports terrorism in the name of jihad. In this capacity, it has reached American shores. On September 11, 2001, hijacked planes struck the World Trade Center, killing thousands. Another plane crashed into the Pentagon, and the hijacking of United Flight 93 resulted in the deaths of all passengers. “Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the architect of [these] attacks, told U.S. interrogators he was drawn to violent jihad in Kuwait after joining the Brotherhood and attending its desert youth camps.” These attacks destroyed more than Personal Liberty; they took the lives of thousands of Americans.
But the Muslim Brotherhood, not content with the first attack on U.S. soil since Pearl Harbor, has also infiltrated the United States of America. The organization itself crossed the Atlantic in 1962. The annual report for 1990, however, lists “several committees and organizations” working for the Brotherhood, including the Occupied Land Fund, which became the Holy Land Foundation. In the case United States v. Holy Land Foundation, the United States government found the organization guilty of funding the terrorist organization Hamas.
A senior Brotherhood member described their work in America as “a kind of grand Jihad in eliminating the Western civilization from within.” This “civilization jihad” also emerges in the phenomenon of honor killings. In August, Fox News reported that Texas teenagers Amina and Sarah Said dated non-Muslim boys, which incited their father to murder them. Human Events reported that, while many Muslim spokesmen deny the connection between Islam and honor killings, the Yemen Times invoked Islam to insist that “violence against women is necessary for the stability of the family and the society.”
These honor killings incite anger among Americans, who consider them identical with murder. They violate the very principles of Personal Liberty. Among Americans, Personal Liberty invokes associations of individual natural rights, positive rights, common law and established custom. It indicates a sacred sphere of choice which no external force can justly violate, and which the American government was established to defend.
The Declaration of Independence states:
“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.— That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed.”
The First Amendment to the Constitution outlines this Personal Liberty which no man can justly attack and which government exists to protect. It lists five liberties against which Congress cannot legislate, namely those of religion, speech, press, peaceable assembly, and petition. These protected freedoms provide a working definition of Personal Liberty. Free association in particular, through the institution of marriage, illustrates the principle of Personal Liberty.
As G. K. Chesterton explains, “the small state founded on the sexes is at once the most voluntary and the most natural of all self-governing states.” While many Americans may find themselves dumbfounded at the idea, the Family stands as the freest and most natural human institution. Chesterton explains, jokingly, that “it is not true of Mr. Brown that he might have been a Russian; but it may be true of Mrs. Brown that she might have been a Robinson.”
In discussing the vow that establishes a family, Chesterton describes the mindset of the pre-Christian world of status. Men, having been born into their condition, be it slavery or kingship, found themselves subject to the iron law of society, without the liberty to choose their place. “When Christianity had been for some time at work in the world,” however, “this ancient servile status began in some mysterious manner to disappear.” The civil society of the Middle Ages, as opposed to that of the Ancient World, grew around the vow. The vassal pledged himself to his landlord, and “by swearing to be his man, he proved that he was not his chattel.” The freedom of the Middle Ages consisted in “the notion of the free choice of a fixed estate.” This sentiment survives, Chesterton concludes, “before and after the marriage vows at any ordinary wedding in any ordinary church.”
Marriage proves at once free and, at least in the promise itself, final. Indeed, few choices match its freedom or its deep personality. Even arranged marriages express personal liberty, as the parents negotiate for the good of their son or daughter. Indeed, they render the decision more personal, as it involves more persons. Marriage provides a good example of personal liberty, to illustrate the great value of this principle. While marriage does not form the whole of personal liberty, it provides a glimpse into its historical roots and its deep meaning for the West in general, and America in particular.
This sort of freedom, the Declaration of Independence asserts, derives from our Creator, and falls equally upon all men. In order to prove, against the Anarchist, that our government is not a band of robbers, we must show that this freedom is “right and good and true, for all mankind, under God.” The United States of America, “conceived in Liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” having weathered a great civil war, which tested whether “any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure,” and having achieved a prominent status in all the world, demonstrates the vitality of this principle. No worldly success can prove the justice of a cause, but the United States has demonstrated that these principles are not transient, and that men derive an astounding strength from their dedication to the principle of Personal Liberty.
Islamic Fundamentalist Terror, by murder and subversion, undermines the rights of the Declaration. Openly hostile to Western Civilization, the Muslim Brotherhood also opposes the American principles of government by the consent of the governed and religious liberty. “A world state governed by Koranic law” stands in stark contrast to the Declaration of Independence and the First Amendment to the Constitution. While “peace is the end of war, … it is appropriate that” Americans “have moderation, courage and endurance, for as the proverb has it, “there is no leisure for slaves,” and those who are incapable of facing danger in a courageous spirit are slaves of whoever comes along to attack them.” War, while it never constitutes the purpose of life, proves necessary when life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness come under serious threat.
Defending Personal Liberty from the threat of Islamic Fundamentalist terror may require scanners at airports, cases against Muslim Brotherhood front groups, and even preemptive wars to weaken the global force of terrorism. Despite the costs, Americans should defend their liberty with the spirit that Winston Churchill expressed on May 28, 1940. Indeed, let us live by these words: "If this long island story of ours is to end at last, let it end only when each of us lies choking in his own blood upon the ground."
