Rudy Giuliani Has Spoken Out for America

"In a room where everyone maintains a conspiracy of silence, one word of truth sounds like a pistol shot." ___Czesław Miłosz, Polish anti-stalinist patriot, writer and Nobel Literature Laureate. ~~~~~ Former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani made some remarks at a New York fund-raising event for Governor Scott Walker of Wisconsin on Wednesday night. His comments were first reported by Politico and set off an uproar. Giuliani said : “I do not believe, and I know this is a horrible thing to say, but I do not believe that the President loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up, the way you were brought up, and I was brought up, through love of this country.” Giuliani has since defended his assertion that President Obama did not love America, adding that his criticism of President Obama’s upbringing should not be considered racist : “Some people thought it was racist - I thought that was a joke, since he was brought up by a white mother, a white grandfather, went to white schools. This isn’t racism. This is socialism or possibly anti-colonialism.” Giuliani also challenged a reporter to find examples of President Obama expressing love for his country : “I’m happy for him to give a speech where he talks about what’s good about America and doesn’t include all the criticism,” Mr. Giuliani said. ~~~~~ Mayor Giuliani's comments have caused a firestorm of criticism -- from the White House feeling "sorry" for him but nonetheless creating a hashtag so that others can vent negatively, to CNN saying he is no longer "America's Mayor." Critics suggest that Giuliani’s description of Obama’s upbringing reflects a prejudiced view that Obama is different from other Americans. But, in an interview with the New York Times, Giuliani dismissed the criticism and said he was describing the worldview that informed President Obama’s upbringing. Giuliani said his remarks on Wednesday were in answer to a question about the kind of President he would like to see elected in 2016. He answered, he said, by telling the audience that he wants a President who was Obama’s opposite : “I want an American President to raise our spirits again, like a Ronald Reagan." Giuliani added that he also objected to the President’s comments about the Crusades at the National Prayer Breakfast, in which Obama said that during the Inquisition, people had “committed terrible deeds in the name of Christ.” Giuliani's reaction to that was pure New Yorkese : “Now we know there’s something wrong with the guy. I thought that one sort of went off the cliff.’’ He added: “What I don’t find with Obama - this will get me in more trouble again - is a really deep knowledge of history. I think it’s a dilettante’s knowledge of history.” ~~~~~ It isn't easy to match Obama's pro-America and anti-America comments. But, we can easily compare his Islam and Christianity comments because there are many of them. ~~~ Obama Quotes about Islam : **The future must not belong to those who slander the Prophet of Islam. **We will convey our deep appreciation for the Islamic faith, which has done so much over the centuries to shape the world - including in my own country. **As a student of history, I also know civilization’s debt to Islam. **Islam has a proud tradition of tolerance. **Islam has always been part of America. **Islam is not part of the problem in combating violent extremism - it is an important part of promoting peace. **So I have known Islam on three continents before coming to the region where it was first revealed. **Throughout history, Islam has demonstrated through words and deeds the possibilities of religious tolerance and racial equality. **Ramadan is a celebration of a faith known for great diversity and racial equality. **I look forward to hosting an Iftar dinner celebrating Ramadan here at the White House later this week, and wish you a blessed month. **We’ve seen those results in generations of Muslim immigrants – farmers and factory workers, helping to lay the railroads and build our cities, the Muslim innovators who helped build some of our highest skyscrapers and who helped unlock the secrets of our universe. **That experience guides my conviction that partnership between America and Islam must be based on what Islam is, not what it isn’t. And I consider it part of my responsibility as President of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear. **I also know that Islam has always been a part of America’s story. ~~~ Obama Quotes about Christianity. **Whatever we once were, we are no longer a Christian nation. **We do not consider ourselves a Christian nation. **Which passages of scripture should guide our public policy?  Should we go with Leviticus, which suggests slavery is OK and that eating shellfish is an abomination? Or we could go with Deuteronomy, which suggests stoning your child if he strays from the faith? **Even those who claim the Bible’s inerrancy make distinctions between Scriptural edicts, sensing that some passages - the Ten Commandments, say, or a belief in Christ’s divinity - are central to Christian faith, while others are more culturally specific and may be modified to accommodate modern life. **This is something that I’m sure I’d have serious debates with my fellow Christians about. I think that the difficult thing about any religion, including Christianity, is that at some level there is a call to evangelize and prostelytize. There’s the belief, certainly in some quarters, that if people haven’t embraced Jesus Christ as their personal savior that they’re going to hell. **I’ve said this before, and I know this raises questions in the minds of some evangelicals. I do not believe that my mother, who never formally embraced Christianity as far as I know...I do not believe she went to hell. **Those opposed to abortion cannot simply invoke God’s will–they have to explain why abortion violates some principle that is accessible to people of all faiths. **In our household, the Bible, the Koran and the Bhagavad Gita sat on the shelf alongside books of Greek and Norse and African mythology. **On Easter or Christmas Day, my mother might drag me to church, just as she dragged me to the Buddhist temple, the Chinese New Year celebration, the Shinto shrine and ancient Hawaiian burial sites. ~~~~~ And then, dear readers, there is my own personal 'favorite' Obama quote -- one in which he belittles small town Christian America as bigoted. It summarizes Barack Obama's contempt for America and is, for me, the best example of Obama's lack of feeling, lack of love, for America. It shouts out support for Rudy Giuliani's position. Obama made the comment during his 2008 presidential campaign : "You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.” ~~~~~ Dear readers, I grew up in one of those small Pennsylvania towns. I went to school with the sons and daughters of factory workers -- children of the immigrant generation of patriotic, religious, Christian Americans who fought in WWII and Korea, who died of black-lung disease and exhaustion from working in steel mills to send their kids to college, who invited me to share their special holiday cuisine, and who were decimated when America's steel industry was killed by cheap Japanese imported steel. So, I know these honorable Americans - and I respect them immensely and yes, I love them - as Barack Obama might if he took the time to become a patriotic American who loves America himself. As Czeslaw Milosz said, truth hits like a bullet when everyone is conspiring to lie. Americans have been taught to lie about what they see and sense in President Obama because every even slightly negative remark is called "racist." Well, I have news for CNN and the White House. You may silence America for a few years -- but not forever. As Abraham Lincoln said : "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all the people all the time." The time for truth-telling is upon us. Thank you, Rudy Giuliani.