Dinner conversation

From The New York Sun, October 19, 2007, by AMANDA GORDON [about the inaugural Scholar-Statesman Award Dinner of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy on Wednesday evening]:

...."It's misleading to say we are engaged in a war against terrorism," [emeritus professor at Princeton University, Bernard Lewis] said. "If Churchill had told us that we were engaged in a war against submarines and war craft, we'd be in a different world today. Terrorism is a tactic, it is not the enemy." The enemy, he said, is Islamism, which he placed as the third in a sequence of ideological deformations that have taken place in his lifetime, the first two being Nazism and Bolshevism.

"There is only one way to deal with Islamism: to mobilize the Muslims themselves on our side," Mr. Lewis said. "Nazism and Bolshevism were a curse to their own people before they became a threat to the world. We must strive for the same situation. … Perhaps it is our only solution. We must free them or they will destroy us." Mr. Lewis said his optimism in facing Islamism derives from his expectation of foolishness and error on the part of our adversaries, noting historical examples such as Hitler's exile of his best scientists.

...[former secretary of state, George Shultz] had plenty to say.... On the challenge of radical Islam: "I fear that to a certain extent we're going to sleep on it. In the Reagan years, we had a strategy, we had an idea, and a way of going about it, but we don't seem to have such an idea right now," he said. He proposed going back to the three key words that guided him during the Reagan administration: realism, strength, and diplomacy. "If you have ideas, you're going to get somewhere. The ideas are your compass," he said.

Mr. Shultz also addressed the role of lobbyists. "Lobbies are a good thing, but it's up to the government to take all this in and decide what's in the best interests of the U.S," Mr. Shultz said. Asked about the book "The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy" by John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, Mr. Shultz said: "I don't even want to talk about the book. It's a disgrace. And to call Israel an apartheid society is also a disgrace."....