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November 8, 2001
Clinton calls terror a U.S. debt to past
By Joseph Curl
THE WASHINGTON TIMES
     Bill Clinton, the former president, said yesterday that terror has existed in
America for hundreds of years and the nation is "paying a price today" for its
past of slavery and for looking "the other way when a significant number of
native Americans were dispossessed and killed."
     "Here in the United States, we were
founded as a nation that practiced slavery,
and slaves quite frequently were killed even
though they were innocent," s aid Mr.
Clinton in a speech to nearly 1,000 students
at Georgetown University's ornate Gaston
Hall.
     "This country once looked the other way
when a significant number of native
Americans were dispossessed and killed to
get their land or their mineral rights or
because they were thought of as less than
fully human.
     "And we are still paying a price today,"
said Mr. Clinton, who was invited to address the students by the university's
School of Foreign Service.
     Mr. Clinton, wearing a gray suit and orange tie, arrived 45 minutes late for
the event. Some students camped out overnight to obtain tickets. The former
president, a member of the Jesuit university's Class of 1968, opened his
50-minute speech by thanking a former teacher.
     "He never abandoned me over all these years, even though he did not
succeed in convincing me to become a Jesuit," said Mr. Clinton, drawing
laughter and then cheers from the almost entirely white crowd of students.
     Mr. Clinton spoke from notes about the world after September 11. He
sought to dispel fears of terrorism and "this anthrax business."
     "I submit to you that we are now in a struggle for the soul of the 21st
century and the world in which you students will live to raise your own
children and make your own way," he said.
     Mr. Clinton said the international terrorism that has only just reached the
United States dates back thousands of years.
     "In the first Crusade, when the Christian soldiers took Jerusalem, they first
burned a synagogue with 300 Jews in it and proceeded to kill every woman
and child who was a Muslim on the Temple Mount. I can tell you that story is
still being told today in the Middle East and we are still paying for it."
     Mr. Clinton said America needs to pay more attention to its enemies and to
the way the United States is viewed by the rest of the world.
     "There are a lot of people that see the world differently than we do. It is
quite important that we do more to build the pool of potential partners in the
world and t o shrink the pool of potential terrorists. And that has nothing to do
with fighting, but that has to do with what else we do.
     "This is partly a Muslim issue, because there is a war raging wit hin Islam.
We need to reach out and engage the Muslim world in a debate."
     Mr. Clinton referred to stories in the media about some American citizens
cheering the te rrorist attacks and suspected mastermind Osama bin Laden.
     "This debate is going on all over America. We've got to stop pretending this
isn't out there," he said.
     Addressing matters of globalization, Mr. Clinton pondered the importance
of such issues as technology, poverty, democracy, diversity, the environment,
disease and terrorism.
     "Here's how I think you ought to think about it," he said. "We cannot
ignore the fact that we have vulnerability at home because of our
interdependence."
     The answer, Mr. Clinton said, is to spread freedom and democracy, reduce
global poverty, forgive billions in debt, improve health care systems and
encourage — even fund — educatio n in developing countries.
     "We ought to pay for these children to go to school — a lot cheaper than
going to war," he said.
     Perhaps most important, he said, is democracy.
     "It's no accident that most of these terrorists come from non-democratic
countries. If you live in a country where you're never required to take
responsibility for yourself, where you never even have to ask whether there's
something you should be doing to solve your own problems, then people are
kept in kind of a permanent state of collect ive immaturity and it becomes quite
easy for them to believe that someone else's success is the cause of their
distress.
     "We've got to defeat people who think they can find their redemption in our
destruction. And then we have to be smart enough to get rid of our arrogant
self-righteousness so that we don't claim for ourselves things we deny for
others."
     The former president, who left office just 10 months ago after an eight-year
tenure, said the federal government is "woefully" lacking on several key
terrorism-prevention areas.
     "We need to strengthen our capacity to chase the money and get it, and we
need some legislation on that," said Mr. Clinton, coincidentally on the same
day President Bush, who has made freezing terrorist assets a "front" of his war
on terrorism, announced the United States has moved to block the assets of 62
persons a nd groups associated with two financial networks linked to bin
Laden.
     "And one area where we are woefully lacking is the simple use of modern
computer tech to track people that come into this country," he said.
     While he criticized "the governmental capacity" now, he said "we all must
support our current government in whatever decision they make."
     "This is not a perfect society but it is stumbling in the right direction," he
said.
     At the end of his speech, Mr. Clinton — who was impeached for lying
under oath about a sexual relationship with a 21-year-old White House intern
— said the entire issue revolves around "the nature of truth."
     "This battle fundament ally is about what you think about the nature of
truth," he said, noting that God has imposed on us the inability to ever know
"the whole truth."
     He also championed women's rights in Afghanistan, saying the reason "you
see all those sanctimonious guys beating those women with sticks" is because
the country's rulers demand strict adherence to the rules.
     Students crowded around to shake the former president's hand after his
speech. There were no detractors in the crowd, despite the fact that the
university newspaper in September 1998 called on Mr. Clinton, then mired in
scandal, to resign.
     "The American public," the Hoya said in a 1998 editorial, "has forgotten
that international and domestic terrorism requires a proactive defense plan.
Terrorists must be caught before they strike, and we must remember that those
strikes always come when our head is turned toward other mat ters."
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