Cleveland, Ohio– Former House Speaker Newt Gingrich gave a pretty intense speech at the Republican National Convention, slamming Clinton and the Obama administration for refusing to face the facts about the threat we face from radical Islamic terrorism. He went on to say that Hillary Clinton is simply “incapable” of telling the truth about that threat. Secretary of State John Kerry even said that ISIS is attacking because they’re on the run.
Well, Gingrich listed various attacks in the last few weeks that show that ISIS and radical Islamists are not running away. He was talking about the attacks in Germany where an Afghan teenager who had an ISIS flag in his home attacked people on a train this week. Then there was the attack in Nice, France, where 84 people were killed, 300 were killed in the Baghdad bombings, 20 hostages killed in Bangladesh, the ISIS attack on Ataturk Airport in Turkey, the stabbing of a French policeman in France, and Omar Mateen shooting 49 people in Orlando, Florida. Mateen pledged allegiance to ISIS during the attack. That’s just the last 37 days.
“One recent analysis estimated that about 30,000 people have died at the hands of terrorists since January 2015,” Gingrich said. “We are at war with radical Islamists, we are losing the war, and we must change course to win the war.”
However, he also emphasized that this is not a characteristic of all Muslims. The huge majority of them would be good Americans and often fall victim to these vicious terrorists. The problem is that even a tiny fraction of the billion robust members of Islam is fertile ground for fresh terrorist recruits.
“For example, Pew Research found that only 9 percent of Muslims in Pakistan support ISIS. Unfortunately, that 9 percent is 16 million people. And that’s just one country,” he said.
Newt then went on to discuss at length the dangers of terrorists getting their hands on weapons of mass destruction. But then he went on to lambaste Clinton for her foreign policy record, which Newt calculated could lead to the death of the country.
“We’re going through history like a dream, as if it were just about politics. It’s not. It’s about our security and survival as a country. And that’s why every American should be terrified by the prospect of a Hillary Clinton presidency,” he said.
Clinton has been shown to be a serial liar about her emails, why the system was created, and whether there was classified information in those emails while she was Secretary of State. After the FBI investigation concluded, it was discovered that Clinton had classified information in 110 emails in 52 separate email chains, she never sought State Department officials’ permission to create the server, even if she had — it would have been rejected, and it was not created out of convenience.
It is this part of the ethos inherent in the presumptive Democratic nominee that has lowered her standing with American voters. These lies, combined with a failure to see the enemy we face, are a recipe for disaster. Newt was candid: “The cost of Hillary’s dishonesty may be the loss of America as we know it.”
Sometimes we know when Clinton and the administration are not being direct. The Syrian refugee crisis is a prime example.
“We know that Hillary Clinton and President Obama are lying to the American people when they say they can safely search Syrian refugees. They can’t. And yet Hillary wants to increase the number of refugees by 500 percent,” he said. Many Democrats have ridiculed the GOP’s security concerns, although even some liberal bloggers have warned that the attacks make the left look out of touch with reality.
Gingrich concluded his speech by saying that Trump will respect the rule of law, work to rebuild American communities in crisis, and work to make America great, protected, and significant again — all of which are the themes of this convention.
