Newt Q&A on 9/11 and more

Newt Gingrich Answers Your Questions

Comment: A really excellent read. I only excerpt a brief portion.

Excerpt:

In the American conception, as stated powerfully by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, all are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights. This proposition was among the most radical in history and it turned on its head the way in which people were governed. We no longer conceived of individual rights as coming from a king or monarch or dictator. In 1776, we asserted the self-evident truth that rights came from God to the individual, and that collectively, the people loaned power to their elected leaders. It is this self-evident truth that is the key to any sustainable democracy — the individual is sovereign and primary, while the state is servant and secondary.

What we face worldwide in the aftermath of 9/11 isn’t a conflict between different models of government; it’s a conflict between the civilized world — which respects the rights of men and women and includes people of all countries and all faiths, including Islam — and the irreconcilable wing of Islam, which is so totally at odds with the civilized world’s views of the rights of the individual that there is no way to reconcile the two world views. Conflict is unavoidable. Certainly, the promotion of democracy is a strategy that should be employed, but it has to include property rights, equality for women and people of other faiths, and the other bulwarks of successful democracies that protect the individual from the power of the state.