The argument was summed up lucidly by Jeane
Kirkpatrick in her essay and later book Dictatorships
and Double Standards. Characterizing President Jimmy Carter's foreign
policy as weak and timid, Kirkpatrick urged the U.S. to support "moderate
autocrats friendly to American interests" against "less friendly autocrats."
The essay would eventually become a cornerstone of Ronald Reagan's foreign
policy and earn Kirkpatrick the post of U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.

To be sure, there
was a lot of appeal in this sort of simplistic and Manichean thinking. To the
right, the world was divided by the forces of good and evil and those who were
insufficiently opposed to the forces of evil or too judgmental on the forces of
good were, as former Secretary of State George Shultz charged,
"self-appointed emissaries to the Communist regime."

After the Soviet
Union collapsed, this sort of partisan rhetoric largely disappeared as
conservatives and liberals both embraced democratic movements around the world.
(There was still plenty of support for autocrats perceived as less repressive
and more responsive to our geostrategic needs, however.)

But as the uprising in Egypt continues, and the administration's response
to it becomes clearer, the charged rhetoric of the 80s is making a comeback. Although the
conservative movement is largely split on whether the U.S. should continue to support
Egyptian dictator Hosni Mubarak, many on the right are yet again echoing
Kirkpatrick's old mantra about the two kinds of dictatorships: the ones we can
tolerate and the ones we can't. They charge President Obama with being a
hypocrite because his response to the uprising against the Egyptian regime is markedly
more strenuous and urgent than his response to the Iranian regime's repression
of pro-democracy demonstrators following the country's disputed presidential elections
in 2009.

At that time, Sen. John McCain blasted the president's response,
accusing Obama of having forgotten our "fundamental principles." Rep. Eric
Cantor, now the House Majority Leader, called the White House's silence
"troubling." "The president of the United States is supposed to lead the free
world," added
Sen. Lindsey Graham, "not follow it." A recent editorial in the Washington Times accuses the president
of "fanning flames of Islamic revolution" and notes that while Obama did little
to call out the Iranian regime, he "is quick to toss Mr. Mubarak under
the bus."

It's true that the Obama administration remained
largely silent in the aftermath of the Iranian elections, but the reasoning
behind the calculated silence is missed by many conservatives. Prominent members
of the Iranian opposition, including Shirin Ebadi, explicitly called on the
administration to lay low, lest the Iranian government charge the pro-democracy
movement of doing the bidding of the U.S. In Egypt, the opposition — and Mohamed
ElBaradei in particular — has called on Obama to denounce Mubarak and pull its
support.

There is, however, an even more important difference between
the two situations. The fact is that the U.S. has a greater ability — as well
as a more urgent responsibility — to stop repression by U.S.-backed regimes
than by those we oppose. As President Franklin Roosevelt famously remarked when
asked about U.S. support for a certain Latin American dictator, "He may have
been a bastard, but at least he's our bastard." The protesters in Tahrir Square
understand that Hosni Mubarak has long been "our bastard."

During the Cold War, nothing we could say or do — short of
war — would change the behavior of Soviet despots. They weren't doing our
bidding nor were they using our tax dollars to repress their people. They owed
us nothing since they weren't on our side: that's what made them the enemy. Simply
put, we had about as much leverage with Soviet bloc dictators on human rights
issues as the Soviets would have had if they called on us to end racial
discrimination.

But Washington did have to power to pull
support from the Contras, demand that the Argentinian junta stop throwing people
out of helicopters and implore Augusto Pinochet to close down the concentration
camp in Chacabuco. Reagan didn't want to do these things, of course, because he
viewed these juntas and counterrevolutionaries
as allies.  But, had he chosen to
speak out, his words would have carried tremendous weight. The repression these
groups inflicted on their people was — if not sanctioned by the U.S. — partially
subsidized by our tax dollars.

When the Iranian security forces used tear gas and live
ammunition against pro-democracy demonstrators, they weren't using weapons that
the U.S. had supplied them with. (On the contrary, we work to prevent weapons
from flowing into Iran.) In contrast, when Egyptian security forces fire at
people or run them down along Cairo's streets, they are doing so with arms provided
by the United States. And when Egyptian leaders order a crackdown, they believe
they are advancing our geostrategic interest. They are not and we have a duty
to let them know it.

Adopting a different approach to Egypt than to Iran is not
evidence of a double standard but recognition of reality.

Gingrich's affinity for religious freedom and his belief in God-given rights
it would seem, doesn't extend to Americans who are
Muslim.  Such outright bigotry and blatant hypocrisy from Gingrich, an
avid historian and former college professor, is even more repulsive when you
consider his reasoning.

"There should be no mosque near Ground Zero in New
York," he writes, "so long as there are no churches or
synagogues in Saudi Arabia." 
Gingrich, who has been railing against the so-called secular socialist machine
for trying to take religion out of the public square, and who, like most
conservatives, decries the
influence of foreign law, wants the U.S. to apply the same standards on
Muslims that Saudi Arabia applies to those who are not Muslim.

That's rich.

As the Washington
Monthly's Steve Benen, after noting that conservatives continually
justify despicable acts of torture on the premise that other nations and
non-state actors employ such tactics, points out, "We're not supposed to
lower ourselves to the levels of those we find offensive."

Gingrich's clarion call continues: "Those Islamists and their
apologists who argue for 'religious toleration' are arrogantly
dishonest."  What makes them Islamists, apologists or even dishonest?
Gingrich doesn't say but if you ask him, he'll likely tell you about the Katusha
rockets that Hamas has fired into Sderot or how Iran is hell-bent on acquiring
nuclear weapons.  Anything and everything to take the subject away from the
"religious freedom and God-given rights" to which American Muslims
are entitled.   

To understand Gingrich's paranoia that "America is experiencing an
Islamist cultural-political offensive designed to undermine and destroy our
civilization," one must delve deeply into the polarizing, overzealous and
paranoid minds of professional Muslim-baiters and the politicians who depend on
their support and cater to their illiberal demands.

Many of them are monomaniacs who have made it their life's mission to defeat
Islam and "expose" all Muslims as radical Islamofascists.  If
one asks them for evidence to support their claim that no Muslim can be
trusted, they will likely mention a purported plot by Muslim
Brotherhood operatives to destroy America from within.  The
Council on American Islamic Relations and their
intern/spies are routinely placed at the epicenter of the evil conspiracy.

Among these folks, any and all Muslims who "refudiate" such insane theories -- who denounce
violence and terror, profess their loyalty to the American system, take part in
the democratic process and who have assimilated into the American landscape --
are cleverly employing taqiyya, which, as any Muslim-baiter would tell
you, is religiously sanctioned deception.  The same
was said about Jews decades ago and anti-Semites once evoked the specter of
"Judeo-Bolshevism" the way that Muslim-baiters and politicians like
Gingrich today warn of "Islamofascism." But none of those awful
facts really matter, even to a historian such as Gingrich, because facts have
long been accused of being part of the secular-socialist machine.

Gingrich's stand against the mosque project and his attempt to smear its
backers as "Islamists" and apologists earns him his anti-Jihad bona
fides, and with that, the support of an increasingly mistrustful and hateful
electorate which lives off of tying American Muslims to every heinous act that
occurs anywhere that remotely sounds Islamic.  In this world, if the media
fails to make the connection, they are clearly part of the soft-jihad. 

Here is the key: The connection rarely has to be solid.  In fact, the
more specious the connection, the more the Muslim-baiter will be seen by others
as a patriot and an enterprising investigative reporter.  For instance,
the New York Times' Robert
Wright highlights one smear that has been contrived to defame the man
leading the effort to bring the project to fruition.  The imam behind the
project is not to be trusted because conservatives say that "[his] wife
has an uncle who used to be 'a leader' of a mosque that now
has a Web site that links to the Web site of an allegedly radical
organization."  If you can't keep up with all of that nonsense, then
you're complacent about the Jihad.

Any and all statements against violence made by Muslims must always be
placed in the right conservative context: scare quotes.  Gingrich does
this masterfully.  That simple act in effect says that Muslims who preach
peace are actually jihadists.

As Gingrich and his buddies believe, either you are with them or you are,
through your dhimmitude, a proto-Jihadist.  No, you're worse since you probably
support a second genocide against Jews. 
(Prominent Muslim-baiters have argued that Muslims instigated the Nazi
holocaust!)  Now that you've learned all
of these made up facts, you simply do not have an excuse to not fight! Wake up
and oppose the "Ground Zero Mosque" the "Islamization of America" and
prove to those who hate the freedom in America that those freedoms, as Newt
argues, don't actually apply to all Americans.