Initial Reaction to West Coast Retreat

Today was just like Saturday: loaded. The speakers and panels where intellectually intense and at times emotionally draining. The threats facing our country today are challenging — play time is over.

Breakfast begin with a debate between Robert Spencer and Dr. Zuhdi Jasser on the prospects for reform within Islam. Andrew McCarthy moderated and begin the talk by explaining that he still debates amongst himself over whether we’re at war with Islam or Islamism. This is a healthy debate to have and the position I find myself in at the moment. I’ll dissect Spencer and Jasser’s engaging back and forth once we have the video posted but in the mean time my position is basically that I embrace Spencer’s intellectual skepticism about the challenges reform faces but Jasser’s optimism and spirituality about the necessity of the project still wins me over. Yes, a reform of Islam into a pluralistic, spiritual faith is a daunting task for a whole host of reasons that Spencer all too competently lays out. But we don’t know what the future holds and even if our chances are 99 to 1 it’s still the right thing to do to embrace and motivate patriotic Muslim reformers like Jasser and his colleagues. The fruits of this labor might not be immediately apparent but it’s crucial that we hold up the Jassers of the world so that open-minded leftists and the apolitical can have clear examples of the difference between liberty-loving American Muslims and the stealth jihadis of CAIR and the MSA.

The first panel of the day was on Saving the Economy and featured Ben Horowitz, David Newton, and Congressman Ed Royce. The challenges facing our debt-addicted political culture were laid out but Ben still presented an encouraging vision showing the continued rise of our GDP in spite of bad presidents and stupid policies. Congressman Royce in particular was inspiring. If we had a whole congress full of dedicated public servants like him then perhaps the legislative body wouldn’t have such an embarrassing level of public disapproval.

The second panel was Enemies Within: Jihad on the Homefront. DHFC chairman of the board Michael Wienir did a great job moderating contributions from Karen Lugo, McCarthy, and John Yoo. All four challenged and inspired with their discussion of the threats we face from the stealth Jihad.

And the weekend ended on a high note with an entertaining, invigorating lecture by one of our true National Treasures: the great teacher Dennis Prager. Dennis’s speech was a perfect book end to Charles Payne’s opening from Friday night. And I was glad to meet him and tell him how influential his MUST-READ book on anti-Semitism has been for me.

Videos of all this will be up soon and I’ll be assigning NewsReal Blog bloggers to critique, analyze, and debate all of the talks.