The Ricochet Podcast - CPAC #6: Herbert London

Episode Date: February 27, 2015

Jay Nordlinger chats with Conservative activist Herb London. London is the president of London Center for Policy Research and a member of the Council on Foreign Relations. Source

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Thank you for those edgy type of phrases, Jamie. I really appreciate it, but none of it is true, of course. We could talk about almost anything. I want to talk a bit about universities. Okay. There are conservatives, people on our side, who say we need to give up on the universities, at least the so-called mainstream ones, build our own, maybe go online. Others say, no, do your best to integrate the universities.

We don't have separate universities, conservative you, but integrate the others. Other people say, no, that's a fool error. It'll never happen. They'll never let you in. We might have a couple of tokens. This is a very big topic about which books have been written, but do you want to give us a couple of minutes on that subject? Well, I've written about it myself and obviously have a position, and my position is that we should establish beachheads at American universities. These may be small programs, but programs that could make a difference. We already see some examples of it. Harvey Eba has done an enormously important job

at Harvard. You have this... Excuse me, who has? Harvey Mansfield has done an extraordinary job at Harvard and putting together a lot of students who've not only remained in the program but have become journeymen, delivering the Harvey Mansfield message around the country. In addition to that, there are programs at UCLA. There are programs at Brown University, oddly enough. There are programs at Columbia. Columbia still has a great books program. I organized a great books program at NYU, which to some degree is still in existence.

So I think it's a mistake to simply give up on the present universities. I think we need beaches. We have to move ahead slowly. It's going to be a long, difficult plotting process. But in the end, I think that we can be quite successful. Herb, is it possible to go to college without going somewhere, without going to a place with nice buildings and a quad and a football team and pretty cheerleaders and a cafeteria, you know, a bricks and mortar university or college. Is it possible properly to go to college online? I think that it is, but I think that it is a very, very difficult thing for most people. The idea that you're simply going to be talking to a computer all day and not dealing with a real person is, I think, somewhat complicated for most students.

I think that you do have to have this kind of human experience. The Open University in England tried very hard to do this without the human experience and ultimately came to the conclusion that you needed a weekend college where people would experience the idea of getting views from different people. So I do think that you need that. MOOCs are important and obviously can play some sort of role. I remember the interesting conversation with Larry Ellison. Larry Ellison was at an AAUP meeting, and he said, faculty members in the United States are underpaid.

Wild applause. Then he said, faculty members should be paid a minimum of a million dollars a year. And wilder applause. And then he looked at the audience and he said, and I want you to remember something, I only need 100 of you. And it's a rather poignant statement because you already see examples in the University of California and in other systems where they're very much opposed to MOOCs because there's a realization,

well, we don't need 20 people in the philosophy department. Tell us what a MOOC is. The MOOC is these online courses, the massive online courses in America. And these online courses, of course, are gaining some steam, but it's very obvious that they're a threat to faculty members who have tenure and have what is ostensibly the most significant welfare program in the United States. Now, Herb London, you are an out conservative, so to speak, a known conservative, and you have swum in some pretty high circles.

Are people on the left receptive to you, tolerant of you, welcoming of you as a rule, or do they treat you as a pariah? Well, it's very difficult. Obviously, in some circles, people say, well, he's a reasonably intelligent guy. So listen, I very often face the Park Avenue problem when I go to a cocktail party and someone invariably says, well, you know, you're rather cosmopolitan and somewhat sophisticated. How come you hold the views you do? So that usually means that I'm going to turn around and leave the party. But I would say that there is some variation on the way in which the left responds.

There are liberals who understand that there's a conservative opinion, and they're responsive and somewhat receptive to conservative ideas. And then there's the hardcore left that under no circumstances would listen to the positions associated with the free market or with my strong stance on foreign policy. Speaking of foreign policy, you've been keeping an eye on Egypt and its new leader, Sisi. Tell us what you think. Well, I went to Egypt eight months ago. This was prior to the election, and I spent three hours with Mr. El-Sisi. In fact, he said, I only have a half an hour for you.

We spent three hours together going over a variety of foreign policy issues. He actually provided a very penetrating analysis of the mistakes that the Obama administration has made in the Middle East. And during the course of our conversation, it became very clear to me that this man is the appropriate leader for the moment in a variety of ways. One, I think he can put together a defense condominium in the Middle East that would include Egypt and Saudi Arabia and the UAE and Kuwait and probably Jordan, all working together in some fashion to serve as a counterweight to whatever ambitions Iran has. Of course, the president of the United States has made up his mind that we're going to make as many compromises with the Iranians that we can, nuclear weapons being merely one, but using the Iranians as our troops on the ground, our boots on the ground, because we're not

going to deploy any additional forces in the Middle East. But here is el-Sisi on the other side saying, we can put together a rather formidable force. And yet the United States has resisted this, in part because we continue to assert, or this administration asserts, that el-Sisi is a leader of a military coup. With a military coup, you have legislative restrictions. There are only so many things that you can do. The consequence of that is that the F-16s, the tanks, the Apaches that were all promised to Egypt to deal with their war in the Sinai and with other issues in the Middle East have not been delivered. It's one of the reasons why el-Sisi has gone to Russia and has said,

we're going to sign a $2 billion agreement with the Russians for military equipment. He'd much prefer the very desirable American military hardware. He just can't get it. So it is quite interesting. Here's a guy who not only is fighting, are willing to fight the battle on the battlefield in behalf of our interests, but he's also willing to fight the ideological war with the speech that he gave at Al-Azur, which in some ways was a tumultuous statement about the Muslim world, a remarkable statement in many ways.

And that's the university, that's the seat of Sunni Islam in Cairo. Seat of Sunni Islam, exactly, exactly. And the imams who listened to the speech sat on their hands. They didn't applaud. Good. They weren't applaud. Good. They weren't so happy about it. It's good. But he had the courage to do it. Obviously, the bullseye on his back kept growing during the course of that speech.

Absolutely. And there have been several assaults, I've been told, by members of his staff on his life over the last few months. So there is no question that this man has displayed a certain kind of courage, but has given scant attention in the United States. His speech received very little attention, even including some conservative publications that didn't write about it. Tell us about a visit to a church, a Coptic church, a Coptic cathedral maybe. The first Egyptian leader ever to go there.

He went to the Coptic church. He was also very responsive to the Coptic church after 21 Coptic Christians were killed and murdered in the most savage fashion by ISIS. And so there's no question that he is prepared to fight this battle. His F-16 took off immediately afterward. When the Egyptian pilot was immolated, there was no question that he was responsive immediately. And he assassinated the people, as you know, who were in captivity.

So this is a guy who's prepared to act and act on behalf of our interests and has not given any attention in the United States. In fact, is regarded as an outlier. And when the president has been asked to comment about al-Sisi, he invariably says there are human rights violations in that country, which in some sense is laughable. Human rights violations. Here you have savagery in the part of ISIS. He says not a word about it. You have savagery on the part of ISIS. He says not a word about it. You have savagery on the part of these militant Islamists, and he says not a word about it. But he's talking about human rights violations in Egypt. I want to ask you a funny question. If you'd been told in, let's say, 1970 or 1975, or even as late as 1980, really one of

the two parties in America will become robustly pro-Israel and the other not so much. Would you have guessed it would be the Republican Party and the conservatives and the right? I would not have guessed that. I mean, I was a member of the Democratic Party before I was mugged by reality. And there was no doubt in my mind it was a party that defended Israel, stood behind Israel, and was unequivocally on Israel's side. After all, it was Harry Truman who was president of the United States

when Israel became a state. Yes. So, I mean, there was no doubt about the role of the Democratic Party. For years, I worked as a speechwriter for Ed Muskie. And whenever I've talked to Ed Muskie about this issue, he was solidly behind Israel. There was never any equivocation. To think that the Democratic Party would have moved in this direction

is really quite, I mean, I find it unbelievable, really unbelievable. And it's moved so rapidly as well. And what you have is a party that has turned against Israel and turned against Israel with a certain kind of vicious quality that I have not experienced before in the Democratic Party. And interestingly, if you were to ask many Jews in the United States, where do you stand on Israel? It does not have the same support it once did. My father, listening to a radio in 1948, heard that Israel was created as an independent state and cried for hours. I'll never forget that moment.

I'm an old-timer. I could remember. I was a child. With relief and joy? Excuse me? With relief and joy and satisfaction and remarkable feeling and emotion that this was one of the most remarkable moments in his life, that Israel was an independence.

One of the most remarkable moments in world history? Yes, indeed. Indeed. In fact, I was in Israel very recently at the 65th anniversary of the State of Israel, and I went to a ceremony, and this was a ceremony for a lot of young men who were killed in the 1948 war for independence. And there was a gravestone there. It was called Berala. There was no last name.

It was the only gravestone that I saw that did not have a last name. I became very much interested in this. And I went to the archives in Israel because I became interested in the life of this fellow. And Berala, it turned out, was a fellow who was in the camps. He was 13 when he went into the camps. He was a husky, strong young man. He was broken emotionally and physically after being in the camps for four years.

When he was released from the camps, someone asked him, what is your name? He didn't know. His parents were killed. His grandparents were killed. All family members were killed as well. And he said, my name is Barry. And like many in Jewish law, they changed the

last name by adding an ELA. So Jaila, Herbala, Mamala, you've heard all of this. And he was called Berala. So Berala is now traveling through this area, a very dangerous area in the world, where it can't go east because of the Russians. and he can't go west because there are many in Poland who would kill a Jew, and a Jew who would want to reclaim his property by trying to find his identity. So he didn't know where to go. One day, a fellow says to him, come with me, we're going to Palestine. Palestine, where is that? He doesn't know.

He's taken to Palestine. He arrives there, and in about an hour, someone hands him a rifle and says, you're fighting for the war for independence. This barrel doesn't have the foggiest idea of what this is all about. He's given some training, if you can call it that, and he's put into the Jerusalem corridor where the heaviest fighting is occurring. And there, in the Jerusalem corridor, he is killed. Now, when you talk about the story of Beral, there is no question that this man gave his life, sacrificed his life for the state of Israel. But there is also no question that Israel gave him something in return, an identity he didn't have up until that moment of his death. He was a warrior

on behalf of the state of Israel. So there is very great emotion attached to the whole idea of the creation of this independent Jewish state. And unfortunately, many Jews over this long period of time have lost sight of what it meant to see this creation of Israel, and also have lost sight of the fact that it is a sanctuary for Jews that are facing oppression in other places, including France. Well, really, there's nothing that should follow that. No subject. We should really say goodbye right now. But let's do one more. Do you have a presidential candidate for this next cycle? I think that the Democratic Party has to be defeated. I think Hillary Clinton probably

has a war chest that will be unprecedented, maybe close to a billion dollars. The foundation has $980 million. I'm sure some of that money will be funneled into the presidential campaign. So you need a candidate who can raise money quickly and who can put an organization together very quickly. There's only one candidate who can do that, Jeb Bush. Now, is he the candidate I prefer? No, he is not. But I think he will end up being the Republican candidate, and I will support him. Whom would you prefer in your heart?

In my heart, probably Ted Cruz or Scott Walker. Herb London is a Renaissance man and warrior, and it was great to talk to you. Jay, always a pleasure to be with you. Bye-bye. Thank you very much. Thank you. Ricochet.

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