World Events

Floor Speech

Mr. GOHMERT. Mr. Speaker, so much is happening in the world today, so much that is really earthshaking in its potential effect.

In the Middle East, I've spoken before about the potential rise of a new Ottoman Empire that, unfortunately, our own country, this Obama administration, has helped jump-start.

In Egypt, we supposedly had a friend. There were comments to direct attention to. Back on June 2, the BBC reported an interview in 2009 where during the interview the President was asked:

Do you regard President Mubarak as an authoritarian ruler?

President Obama said, in part:

He has been a stalwart ally in many respects, to the United States. He has sustained peace with Israel, which is a very difficult thing to do in that region. But he has never resorted to, you know, unnecessary demagoguing of the issue, and has tried to maintain that relationship. So I think he has been a force for stability and good in the region.

He points out, obviously there have been criticisms, but he saw him as a force for good in the region.

That's rather amazing when you look at what happened--we recall it was an

Arab Spring, that we've later since realized was more of a nightmare winter. Certainly, the people of Egypt did not see it as a ``spring'' after President Morsi got around 13 million votes from the potential, as I understand, 50 million or more that could have voted. And he took over; and he began creating problems; and he became dictatorial; and he started violating his own constitution and taking actions that only a monarch or a tyrant should be taking.
But going back to the disposition and deposal of Mubarak in Egypt, it creates problems for a country when their leader on one occasion says, as the President did:

He has been a stalwart ally in many respects, to the United States. He has sustained peace with Israel, which is a very difficult thing to do in the region. But he has never resorted to, you know, unnecessary demagoguing of the issue, and has tried to maintain the relationship. So I think he has been a force for stability and good in the region.

What kind of message does it send to the world from what has been referred to as the remaining superpower in the world when its leader says to the world, this man has been a force for stability and for good, and then, not so long later, the same U.S. leader says he's got to go? He's got to go. He just needs to be done.

Well, if he was a force for stability and good, if you were accurate in those comments, then one would think to get rid of him would bring about instability and bad--to use the antonyms. But push, cajole, make efforts to force Mubarak to leave, we did. And as the President said, you know, he had been an ally.

That doesn't look very good when other nations start trying to determine how should we deal with the United States.

In one of my trips overseas meeting with foreign diplomats, I was told that diplomats from China regularly stop by and ask, Have you learned that you cannot trust the United States yet? Because one of these days you are going to figure that out; you can't trust the United States. They'll say they're your friend one day and then turn around and be your enemy soon after. One of these days you're going to figure out the United States can't be trusted, they're not your friend, and we're ready to be your friend whenever that happens. Just let us know. We're always ready to be your friend. You can trust us.

Well, I'm not so sure about that, but I am concerned about the U.S. lack of credibility. So Mubarak was ousted and the Muslim Brotherhood took over Egypt. The people of Egypt, on the whole, very good, decent people. The moderate Muslims that reside there didn't want Muslim Brotherhood, didn't want tyrants, but enough people didn't come out early on.

The Muslim Brotherhood had the best organization, and anybody with any intelligence in the region or anybody that watched news other than CNN could figure that out, that the Muslim Brotherhood was going to take over, but they were not what the rank-and-file people really wanted. That became clear when the rank-and-file people saw Morsi, a Muslim Brotherhood member who actually technically said he was withdrawing since he was leader of Egypt. But his comments, so disparaging and slanderous of Israelis and Jews, and certainly uncomplimentary of Americans, did not make him someone that the United States should endorse so wholeheartedly.

In Libya, though Secretary Gates, Secretary of Defense, said we have no national interest in Libya at all, we had a President that decided unilaterally--at least, unilaterally in this country. He did have the support of the 57 States that comprise the organization Islamic Council and he had support of some of the NATO countries that got a lot of oil from Libya. He went in unilaterally, when it certainly did not appear there was any will of a majority of Congress to use American assets, military assets, to take out Qadhafi.

Make no mistake about it, Qadhafi was a man who had blood on his hands, there's no question. Qadhafi was a man who had been engaged and supported terrorism. But interestingly, after 2003, when the United States, under President Bush, went into Iraq because both Democrats and Republicans, most of them, believed he was a threat, and according to the CIA notes, some guy named Joseph Wilson also believed that they were trying to get uranium, and even though there had been reports of yellowcake uranium having been taken out of Iraq, President Bush went into Iraq and in record time Saddam Hussein, his defense became the mother of all weak defenses and he was ousted.

All of a sudden Qadhafi, in Libya, went from a man who had been supporting terrorism to a man who was afraid of the United States and all of a sudden wanted to be our dear friend. There was a document that was made public that says the United States rescinded Libya's designation as a state sponsor of terrorism in June of 2006. Libya renounced terrorism and weapons of mass destruction in 2003 and has continued to cooperate with the United States and the international community to combat terrorism and terrorist financing.

On July 20, Malian President Amadou Toumani Toure confirmed to the Malian press that Libya, Algeria, and Mali planned to coordinate military and intelligence efforts to fight security threats linked to al Qaeda in the lands of the Islamic Maghreb in the Sahel-Saharan region.

Interestingly, Qadhafi had a true conversion experience when he became afraid that the United States might invade him next because of his support for terrorism, and he actually and legitimately did became an ally in the war against terror. In fact, when we look at things that the U.S. did--this is from The Washington Post, certainly not one of my biggest fans. But July 9, 2009, they reported that:

Libyan leader Muammar Qadhafi, who former President Ronald Reagan once denounced as a ``mad dog,'' supped on pasta just two seats away from President Obama at the Group of Eight summit today and even secured a handshake with the U.S. President.

It talked about Qadhafi attending the summit, and it said, as Obama was shaking hands with Qadhafi, there were families of Pan Am 103 victims gathered at the British Embassy in Washington, it goes on, because they still were concerned about the blood he had on his hands.

So that was rather interesting that all of a sudden this was a man we could shake hands with, be friends with, and work deals with. Of course, Senator McCain was one of those who had gone over and felt like there was an opportunity to be friends. In fact, with regard to Mubarak, Senator McCain, supportive of the Obama administration and Secretary Clinton, had said this: the case of Mubarak is a great example that Mubarak was a great friend of the United States. Mubarak's predecessor concluded Camp David agreements and he stuck to it. Basically, there was a stable relationship between Egypt and Israel.

With regard to Qadhafi, this article from Reuters from August 14, 2009:

Senator McCain and the delegation with him expressed their deep happiness to meet the leader--

Talking about Qadhafi.

and praised him for his wisdom and strategic vision to tackle issues of concern to the world in his efforts to sustain peace and stability in Africa.

So there were bipartisan feelings when the Obama administration started that, gee, Mubarak was an ally, Qadhafi had become an ally as somebody who could be trusted, and all these things. They're easy to find on the Internet, just a Bing search away from finding these things.

So the world watches this and they look for consistency. Because one of the things, for those who are fans of baseball, some umpires call balls and strikes with a different strike zone. But having been an umpire and having played baseball, you can live with somebody that calls a ball just off the outside corner as a strike as long as he's always consistent. So, you know, you can trust this umpire. He skewed a little bit, but he's consistent, so you can always trust him.

Consistency is critically important in the area of foreign affairs, yet we don't seem to have been very consistent when we used our military resources to help oust Muammar Qadhafi after he had a conversion experience and was doing what he could to help us fight terrorism outside of Israel. Some referred to him as the best friend we had in getting inside information on terrorism to help us combat it.

There was the sense here in Congress we had no business getting involved in Libya, especially as the reports emerged that al Qaeda was backing rebels and we didn't know how extensive that al Qaeda involvement was. But we knew it was there. We knew there were radical Islamists that were trying to drive Qadhafi out, and this administration did not pause long enough to get an answer to the question: If we drive Qadhafi out, will we be more safe in America or less safe?

Because, despite this desire to please the organization of Islamist Council and others in NATO, the

number one obligation of this Congress and this President is to provide for the common defense of the people in this country. We took an oath to support this country under this Constitution against all enemies foreign and domestic.

The reasoned analysis of Libya during this so-called Arab Spring that was really a freezing winter was that we are going to be in more trouble if Qadhafi is thrown out than if he is kept there--at least, those of us who looked at it besides the OIC and some that were getting oil from Libya who felt otherwise. But most people could see you're helping create instability into the region. If you look at the map of the former Ottoman Empire, you can see it around north Africa coming around up through the Middle East and Turkey, and you can see this starting to take shape.

We helped get rid of Mubarak and all of a sudden we get a radical Islamist in charge of Egypt. We helped not just merely with words and coercion but with bombs to get rid of Qadhafi. Many believe it is doubtful Qadhafi would have fallen, and certainly wouldn't have fallen when he did, if it weren't for all our bombing and air support to help the al Qaeda-backed rebels to throw him out and ultimately have him tortured and killed.

So where was the reasoning about how much this would help America, to allow radical Islamists to take Egypt and Libya? And then coming on around, as things fomented in Syria, it looked like initially these were not al Qaeda-backed rebels in Syria, and perhaps, as some believe, if we had acted quickly enough, if we had someone that wouldn't vote ``present,'' if we had acted quickly enough, maybe we could have supported rebels who were not al Qaeda rebels, not radical Islamist rebels. But as it has degenerated in Syria now, and even as recent as this week, people are admitting that it looks like Assad really is more in control now.

It is degenerated to the point where our national security interest is not to get into the middle of that fight. You have a tyrant of a leader on one hand, and you have radical Islamists, most of whom would like to destroy the United States as well, who are challenging him. Where in the world is the interest in spilling American blood or treasure in getting into Syria?

With regard to Syria, we can look at comments that this administration had about Assad. CNSNews.com reported, March 28, 2011:

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, on Sunday, drew a contrast between Syrian President Bashar Assad and his late father and predecessor, and said U.S. lawmakers who recently have visited Damascus regarded him as a ``reformer.''

She made the startling comment while explaining why the United States will not intervene on behalf of Syrian civilians revolting against the regime as it has done in the case of Libya.

President Assad has been very generous with me in terms of the discussions we have had.

This is Secretary of State Kerry, continued.

``And when I last went to--the last several trips to Syria--I asked President Assad to do certain things to build a relationship with the United States and sort of show the good faith that would help us to move the process forward.''

He mentioned some of the requests, including the purchase of land for the U.S. Embassy in Damascus, the opening of an American cultural center, noninterference in Lebanon's election, and the improvement of ties with Iraq and Bahrain, and said Assad had met each one.

``So my judgment is that Syria will move; Syria will change as it embraces a legitimate relationship with the United States and the West and economic opportunity that comes with it and the participation that comes with it.''

Also in March of 2009 from the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, it says:

In early February, in a reversal of a longstanding U.S. policy, the U.S. Department of Commerce approved a license to sell Boeing 747 parts to Syria ..... A few weeks later, the U.S. Treasury Department authorized the transfer of $500,000 to the Children with Cancer Support Association, a Syrian charity associated with President Bashar Assad's wife, Asma. Both decisions were seen as a softening of U.S. sanctions and an important U.S. diplomatic overture.

So it goes on, our cozying up with Assad. Perhaps that's why, when others around the world were saying that you have some moderates who were rebelling against Assad and that perhaps we can help them, this administration had already started having good feelings with the Assad administration, and perhaps that contributed to the slowness to want to move and act.

One thing is very clear at this point--it should be to anybody who looks objectively--Syria is not a place the United States should be involved in right now because, when the winner between two forces fighting is not going to be helpful--no matter who it is--to our country and when our oath and obligation is to this country, we should not get involved in that.

There are stories about gunrunning, running guns from Libya to Syria. Hopefully, at some point, we'll know exactly what the story was on that and is on that. Was it ongoing? Was it going on when Chris Stevens was involved? Hopefully, our leadership will allow us to pursue that properly and get the information so that we know exactly what happened, because we still have not gotten to the bottom of what happened in Benghazi, and there are families of dead patriots who died in Benghazi who deserve to know the answers.

So we supported and were thrilled--I say ``we,'' meaning this administration, not the Congress, necessarily--and seemed to be pretty impressed with Morsi's taking over. Though reports came out of the slanderous things he said about Jews and Israelis and Americans, this administration seemed to be thrilled with his taking the position that he did, and seemed to be comforted by his saying--this is a Texas paraphrase--You know, I may have been part of the Muslim Brotherhood, but I'll kind of back off of that for a while.

If you look at what he did, here are developments as reported by FOX News in Cairo in 2012:

In June: Morsi was elected President with 51.7 percent of the vote. He was sworn in. He became Egypt's first civilian Islamist ruler;

In August: A gunman kills 16 guards near the border with Israel; Morsi scraps a constitutional document which handed sweeping powers to the military, and he ousted Field Marshal Mohamed Hussein Tantawi, who was Head of State after Hosni Mubarak's fall in February of 2011;

In November: Morsi decreed that he would have sweeping new powers for himself. Later that month, the Islamic-dominated constituent assembly adopted a draft constitution after a process boycotted by liberals and Christians;

In December: Morsi annulled the decree of giving himself increased powers after all of the rancor and the people began to rise up in Egypt. Later in the month of December, 64 percent of the voters in a two-round referendum backed the new constitution in a vote that was marred by low turnout. The people of Egypt could see what was going on. Egypt plunged into political crisis with demonstrations by Morsi supporters and opponents, and they sometimes turned deadly;

Coming through April 2013: Sectarian violence north of Cairo kills four Christians and a Muslim;

In May: Morsi carried out a cabinet reshuffle, which fell short of opposition demands. Later in May, gunmen kidnapped three policemen and four soldiers in the Sinai peninsula. They were freed on May 22;

In June: Egypt's highest court invalidated the Islamist-dominated Senate, which assumed a legislative role when Parliament was dissolved and a panel that drafted the constitution. The Presidency says the Senate will maintain its powers until a new lower house is elected;

Later in June: Egyptian and foreign nongovernment official employees were given jail sentences, ranging from 1 to 5 years, from working illegally, causing international outrage. We know there were some good people who were jailed for nothing except trying to help people;

On June 15: Morsi announced the ``definitive'' severing of relations with war-torn Syria;

On June 21: Tens of thousands of Islamists gather ahead of a planned opposition protest;

On June 23: Defense Minister Abdel Fattah al-Sisi warns the army will intervene if violence erupts;

On June 28: The U.S. says nonessential Embassy staff can leave after an American is killed during protests;

On June 29: U.S. President Barack Obama urges Morsi to be more ``constructive'' as the death toll rises. The Tamarod ``rebellion'' campaign, which called rallies for June 30, says more than 22 million have signed a petition demanding Morsi's resignation and a snap election. The reports are that the largest demonstration may reach 33 million.

There had never been a demonstration in the entire world of as many as 20 million people, but the people of Egypt rose up. They recognized that radical Islamists in charge of their country were not a good thing even though the leaders of our country and the executive branch could not see the obvious.

In having talked to Egyptians who were furious with CNN--because most of them don't get FOX News, and so they're relegated to CNN. They were furious at how CNN seemed to take the side of the Muslim Brotherhood over and over, and they related that CNN was basically a part of the Muslim Brotherhood, at least as conveyed to me. There were people very upset.

Why are they not more objective?

And I tried to explain to them, Look, you have to understand that CNN has gotten such low ratings at times in the last couple of years that sometimes we've got more people watching C-SPAN--they're that bored--than watching CNN. Even though we're not part of the Nielsen ratings with the coverage here in the House, there are estimates. How sad is that for the once great Cable News Network?

What's even sadder is that this administration, with all of its assets and intelligence ability at its fingertips and disposal and with supposedly all of the people it could ever want--the people they thought were the best in the world at analyzing foreign situations--they thought Morsi was a good thing. Then, as you look at the map and as you see this jump-start of an Ottoman Empire having developed, wow, a problem occurred.

As I've said on this floor, Egyptians have caught me and have said, Hey, you're in Congress. Quit helping the Muslim Brotherhood. They're not good for Egypt. We don't like their tyrannical nature. We want to have a government where we have some say. We don't want tyrannical people who are Muslim. We don't want that.

Just as in Afghanistan, moderate Muslims say, We don't want radical Islamists, like the Taliban, controlling our country.

I can't blame the administration for the constitution that was forced on Afghanistan--that forced shari'a law, that forced a centralized nation. Many of them I've met with over in Afghanistan. Together with the Northern Alliance leaders we've met with, they've said, Look, if you could just give us a more federalist government like you're supposed to have in America where States have more power; if you could let our regions elect our governors instead of the President appointing them and elect our mayors instead of the President appointing them; if you could let us have more control, we can keep the Taliban from taking over. We're Muslim, but we don't want the radical Islamists. Don't leave us in a situation where that's what we have.

That's what we left them with and appeared to encourage in Egypt. It's certainly what we left Libya with, and four Americans were dead in Benghazi as a result. Bad decisions, unfortunately, at the level of the highest positions in the United States of America have terrible consequences all around the world.

As I've mentioned, an elderly African from west Africa told me before I left a couple of years ago, We were so excited when you elected a Black President in America, but we've seen America. It appears to be growing weaker and weaker, and you're not taking the strong stance you used to. We're concerned because, if America does not stay strong, we will suffer around the world, those of us who count on you to stand for freedom and what's right. Please don't get any weaker.

There are people around the world pleading that, and they don't even ask us to be the world's policeman. They just ask us to stand strong so that, if we were needed to stop an outright injustice that could threaten the world, including us, we could step in. But unfortunately, in the Middle East, nobody fears the United States and nobody is threatened by the United States. They see us as a paper tiger.

It has been amazing, though. If you just watch certain cable news networks--and even FOX I don't think has done quite an adequate job of really capturing what has been going on in Egypt. This is for the whole history of mankind. We are talking about a major, incredible, earthshaking revolution that has gone on in Egypt. These are people--moderate Muslims, combined with Coptic Christians, coupling themselves with liberal secularists--who don't want radical Islam running Egypt. So this grand scheme of building a great caliphate, a new Ottoman Empire--whatever you want to call it--ran into a huge problem when these incredible, freedom desiring Egyptians rose up in greater numbers than has ever arisen anywhere in the world in the whole history of mankind.

This is incredible--incredible--and people need to recognize and need to be encouraged, not by the Arab winter that was originally called an Arab Spring, but by the true spring that is now happening in Egypt as moderate Muslims and Coptic Christians and caring secularists have arisen together and said ``no'' to radical Islam. We want freedom. We want a say in our government.

In having visited with a friend who has been over there and has taken pictures and talked to people, she said it was amazing to see the Egyptian pope have people--Muslims--come up and say, We are so sorry for the way Christians are being treated in Egypt by the Morsi administration. We are so sorry. We hope we can change this to where we can live together in peace.

That's what they want. Twenty, thirty million people coming out in protest? That would scare the little, puny Occupy Wall Street people to death. It's incredible.

The people of the United States, Mr. Speaker, need to understand we are living in a time that we are witnessing extraordinary international events, even when people at the highest levels of this country do not recognize how extraordinary it is. Perhaps they do, but perhaps they're embarrassed because radical Islam, through the Muslim Brotherhood, is now taking over Egypt and Libya and trying to take over Syria and putting our allied King Abdullah in Jordan in the hot seat, trying to force agreements out of him over the threat of deposing him.

People over in the Middle East get it. The people in Russia and China, leaders there, they get it. This is a big deal. But perhaps our administration has been embarrassed by not recognizing the real truth of what was going on.

I thought it would be helpful to just look at some of the photographs just recently taken during these demonstrations to get more of a feeling of where the Egyptian people are as this most extraordinary of revolutions is taking place. And it's important to note that you can talk to people in Egypt that say, Look, we want to be friends with the United States. We like the United States, but we cannot stand the fact that your government, we believe, really helped force us into having a Muslim Brotherhood, a radical Islamist in charge of our country. We didn't want it. You forced the elections on us before we were ready. Some would say, Well, they chose their own elections. We were helping. We could've delayed them until more people had time to participate. But all the information that I was hearing here on the Hill, that was nonclassified, indicated that if elections occurred when they did, the Muslim Brotherhood would win. They were the most organized. And if they could be delayed to a time where the people themselves had a chance to organize and be heard, that there really would be a good turn in Egypt.

But this administration did not help, did not delay the elections long enough to allow the true Egyptian people to be heard, and as a result, no matter how unfair it may be or how fair it may be, the Egyptian people, millions and millions of them, have a terrible perception of the leadership of the United States. They make clear they like America, they like the United States, but the leadership currently did them great harm.

We know that when the President was elected, as he went around and spoke in the Middle East, some said that this was going to really increase the love and affection between the United States and majority-Muslim countries. The polling data seems to say just the opposite: that our country, because of the leadership of this administration, is respected and admired far less than it ever was even under the Bush administration, because at least under the Bush administration they knew that Bush would be consistent, whether they liked him or not.
So I think it would be helpful to look at some of these pictures, one of the big posters that was being used during the revolution. Make no mistake. When the Egyptians put messages in their big banners and signs in English, they want the message coming to America. The message these Egyptians had:

Egyptians spoke. Al-Sisi listened. We the people have spoken.

So they're appreciating the military leader that--after 20 million, 30-plus million Egyptians arose that dwarfed the small number of votes that Morsi got in the early election, the people of Egypt spoke. This was a revolution, an uprising by the people. And the military heard and witnessed the people rising up, and it answered and said, Okay, Morsi goes, because they recognized, as did the vast people across Egypt, that he had violated the Constitution. He had become a tyrant. He had become a dictator, and he had to go. Our administration here was slow to recognize. It's very sad because we do have a very intelligent President in the United States. Yet, the image they have in Egypt is that he sided with the wrong people, that the masses in Egypt did not want.

So on this same poster where they're praising the leader of the military in Egypt for listening to the majority of adults in Egypt and doing the right thing for democracy, they have a red ``X'' through our great President's face. It's terribly unfortunate. It does not actually do what this President and most of us in this country hoped--well, at least majority-Muslim nations will look on us more favorably, and this is what we're seeing.

I have another poster here during the massive protests. From what I was told by people that were there, they got really upset as CNN kept saying this is a coup, this is a coup, trying to diminish the importance of what was happening with 20 million, 30 million Egyptians rising up. So obviously they mean this for United States consumption. But these are things that massive numbers of people in Egypt were supportive of. It's a revolution, not a military coup, 33 million Egyptians protesting peacefully against Morsi, the tyrant and terrorist, who was supported by the USA. They want to make sure that we understand this is the real people of Egypt rising up. We need to be supportive of that.

Another sign:

New supreme guide of the Muslim Brotherhood. Anne Patterson, hands off Egypt.

There were multiple of those signs around as people were gathering.

They've seen what this administration did, and they didn't like it. These were the masses. The symbol of the Muslim Brotherhood was in the same circle with CNN because they began to feel in Egypt that CNN was not reporting accurately, that the people did want to live in peace with Christians and did want to live in peace with secularists, and not at the hands of a Muslim Brotherhood tyrant.

This sign, in both English and their language, says, ``Obama supports terrorism.'' Well, of course President Obama doesn't support terrorism. Of course he does not. But the way it looked to Egyptians when we were supporting a terrorist, they presume we must and our President must support terrorism. We know he doesn't, but they don't know that because this Nation, this

administration has supported terrorists in Libya and Egypt, and is now trying to get support for terrorists in Syria.

Another sign during the demonstrations obviously for U.S. consumption:

My dear American friend, when you get killed by terrorists, do not blame anyone but your President Obama and his administration.

Well, that's ridiculous. When we're killed by terrorists in America, we should not blame the President. There may be negligence in America by many people when it occurs, as I believe happened with the Boston bombing. We were given information that was not properly utilized because of the handcuffing that has gone on within our FBI, within our intelligence community, within our State Department, and the purging of training material to keep us, as one intelligence officer said, from being able to see who our enemy is. We have hurt ourselves in a terrible fashion in our ability to understand who wants to kill us.

I don't support any of these signs. I don't think they're proper. But I think it's important to understand what the people in Egypt are seeing and thinking so that we can give them the proper perspective on American people.

You can't really read the whole thing on this one, but it is basically making it clear this is not a coup, it's the people:

Thanks to our great Army that supports our great revolution.

In the October Revolution in the Soviet Union, Lenin appeared there in St. Petersburg and persuaded some people to support his revolution, but that revolution, that little gathering would not have done any good, as historians know. It was not until Trotsky went across to the military, across the river--I've been there--and he got up on something and he starts speaking eloquently to the military. Once he convinced the military to side with Lenin, then there was a true revolution that occurred. Nobody called that a coup. It was a small handful of people around Lenin rising up, but they convinced the military to support the October Revolution. As a result, there was a revolution and not just a tiny little uprising, which it would have otherwise been without Trotsky's eloquence.

That's why it's important to understand that when 33 million in Egypt rise up, this is not an in-house coup. This is the masses of a great country rising up to say, We yearn to be free, and we don't want a radical Islamist controlling our country. And it's important for people of the United States to understand this is where we are. And 33 million people, the vast majority of the adult voters in that country, want to make clear they want to live in peace with Christians, secularists. Those are the people we can hold accountable and trust more that they will do the right thing because the support for the persecution of Christians around the world, the persecution and the killing of Christians, the torturing of Christians around the world, is growing like never before, and this great nation that arose based on Judeo-Christian ethics stands idly by as the last public Christian church in Afghanistan closed, as the last Jew, publicly admitting Jew, leaves.

That's when Afghanistan still had vast American presence. Even today, we could still turn the tide if we choose to, but we are not. And there may be an accountability issue some day with the judge of all judges. Because as John Quincy Adams argued, right down here below us in the old Supreme Court chamber downstairs, in the Amistad case, as he stood there representing Africans who were free Africans, but then they were wearing chains, and they were said to be slaves because they had been captured by other Africans and sold and brought to the Caribbean and then put on the Spanish ship the Amistad, and then they landed in America by mistake, and the Africans wanted to be free and the Spanish said, No, they're our property. Ultimately, the Supreme Court downstairs--you can find online, Mr. Speaker, the last part of John Quincy Adam's oral argument as he was literally frightened because he knew if he had not done an adequate job to argue his case, that those Africans would wear chains for the rest of their lives, and their children would and possibly their children, if he did not do an adequate job in representing them.

He didn't feel good about the first 2 days of his argument. So he finishes by asking, Where is Chief Justice Marshall? And he ran through the names of every justice that had been on the court and was dead.

One of the Justices of that nine-Justice Court had died during oral arguments one night. It was not during the arguments themselves, but during the course of the arguments. So they were down. He asked where he was. He asked where the solicitor general was that had last argued a case against him in the early 1820s. And he ends up pointing out, in essence, they've all gone to meet their Judge, and the biggest question about their lives is did they hear, Well done, good and faithful servant?

John Quincy Adams won the case, and those Africans left as free as they should have been.

But some of us have a fear that if we do not do more to support truth and justice and the American ideals that this country was founded on, there will come a day of judgment; and but for grace, it would be a horrible thing. But we still have an obligation to do the best we can, to meet our sworn obligations, and to let people like this in Egypt know that we want to stand with free nations and be friends of free nations.

Here's another big banner that was there during the Egyptian protest:

Egypt will remain a civil state. Live, freedom, social justice.

And then with an American in the picture, the caption says:

We know what you did last summer.

They've gotten the wrong impression of the people of America, and it's up to the Americans to demand our leadership give the people of Egypt the proper impression that we do care about freedom-loving people.

Here's another one. It's hard to read, but:

Obama and Patterson support terrorism in Egypt.

Well, we know that's not true, but there are masses over there that believe that. We've got to correct that, and the way you do that is by supporting people who really do want to be free.

And another picture that just came from Egypt, I was told the Egyptians love America, but they don't trust our leadership.

We have an obligation. Our obligation is to the United States of America. And in this Congress, our obligation is to our oath, to fulfill our oath. And those of us who are Christians, to whom oaths mean so much more, we owe everything we have, owe everything we can do to support our Constitution and to protect people in this country from all enemies, foreign and domestic, and to protect our Constitution from all enemies, foreign and domestic.

And there are some who would say, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood, they got pretty violent over to Egypt and Libya and other places, and there are Muslim Brotherhood members in the United States. As one Egyptian article pointed out with pride, gee, they can be proud, they have six Muslim Brotherhood members who are high level confidants in this administration, in important positions of really advice in this administration.

The Muslim Brotherhood members here in America, as I understand it, did not support the Boston bombing because their position is we are doing such a great job of infiltrating and getting key positions of advice where we can monitor and watch and talk people into doing what we believe should be done, we don't want to stir up violence in the United States now; but maybe at some point it'll be necessary, but right now we're doing so well helping infiltrate the government and take over that we don't want violence right now. It may wake up the American people.

But the truth is anyone in this country or around the world that wants to subvert our Constitution to sharia law is an enemy of the United States. Whether they live here domestically or they live abroad, if their allegiance is to subvert the U.S. Constitution to sharia law, they are our enemy. And they are people from whom we took an oath to protect our Constitution and this country. The people of Egypt, God bless them, they have arisen and made clear, we don't want radical Islamists running our country. We don't want to see Christians persecuted and killed and tortured, as has been going on. Those are the kind of people this Nation should befriend and not try to rush in and shore up those who would persecute, torture, and kill Christians and Jews and secularists that just want to be free.

Mr. Speaker, we have an awesome obligation. We have an obligation to the people of the United States of America to get things right around the world so we do not put Americans at risk. And for those who would try to put a racial label on anything, there's nothing racial about wanting right and truth and justice. And I wonder where they were when I was supporting Alan Keyes. It's not about race; it's about truth, justice. It's about the life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness with which we were endowed by our Creator. But just like any inheritance, any endowment, if we're not willing to protect it, if we're not willing to fight for it, we will lose it.

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