December 05, 2006

Newt Gingrich on Fighting the Cyber Jihad

More evidence that Newt Gingrich gets the cyber jihad. Human Events:

* We should be allowed to close down websites that recruit suicide bombers and provide instructions to indiscriminately kill civilians by suicide or other means, or advocate killing people from the West or the destruction of Western civilization;

* We should propose a Geneva-like convention for fighting terrorism that makes very clear that those who would fight outside the rules of law, those who would use weapons of mass destruction and those who would target civilians are in fact subject to a totally different set of rules that allow us to protect civilization by defeating barbarism before it gains so much strength that it is truly horrendous. A subset of this convention should define the international rules of engagement on what activities will not be protected by free speech claims; and

* We need an expeditious review of current domestic law to see what changes can be made within the protections of the 1st Amendment to ensure that free speech protection claims are not used to protect the advocacy of terrorism, violent conduct or the killing of innocents.

Read the rest, especially the first half of the article. My original analysis of last week's remarks are here.

Ace has a great legalistic analysis of the Gingrich plan against the cyber jihadis, and adds this:

Gingrich notes the "First Amendment is not a suicide pact" (a slight change of the adage that "the constitution is not a suicide pact," i.e., the constitution does not demand that those who would seek to destroy it and the country it binds be permitted to do so). But apperrently there are many people who believe it's just that, and that it is, somehow, crucial to the "marketplace of ideas" and "genius of American governance" that we permit terrorists to recruit, incite, plan, and the like without police intervention.
Amen. Just a note that it was me, not Gingrich, in my original essay that made the First Amendment is not a suicide pact play on words. And yes, I know, Lincoln never said "The Constitution is not a suicide pact." It was Justice Robert Jackson. But it certainly encapsulates, succinctly, Lincoln's theory of Presidential prerogative in a time of war. (See his letter to A. G. Hodges, April 4, 1864)

Let me also direct your attention to this week's Shire News Netork interview with Walid Phares. Next week's podcast promises to be even better, as the second half of the interview with Phares will focus on the use of the internet in the worldwide jihad.

By Rusty Shackleford, Ph.D. at 11:15 AM | |