on borrowing on fairness. unfair, out of touch for the few not the many. an unfair budget built on economic failure. an unfair budget from the same old toris. >> order. >> president obama has sempl campaign events in burlington, vermont, today. following remarks at a fundraiser lunch the president will speak at the university of vermont. watch live coverage at 2:35 eastern this afternoon on c-span. in washington the clinton global initiative is kick off their fifth annual student conference this evening with a discussion on the power of public service. founding chair and 42nd president bill clinton will host a panel that will include former secretary of state madeleine albright. the event's being hosted by george washington university. live coverage starts at 7:30 eastern on c-span.

coming up this weekend, c-span will re-air the supreme court oral arguments dealing with the constitutionality of the nation's health care law. tomorrow afternoon at 2:00 eastern, justices examine whether the penalty for failing to purchase insurance constitutes a tax and there be removing the case from the court's jurisdiction. at 5:00 eastern, the question of whether the law's expansion of medicaid is an intrusion on the states. sunday, arguments on the constitutionality of the individual mandate that's at 10:30 a.m. eastern. and later at 4:25 if the mandate is found unconstitutional, can the rest of the law stay in tact? listen to all the arguments from this week on c-span or any time at cspan.org. >> follow c-span's local content vehicles throughout the weekend as book tv and american history tv explore the history and literary culture of little rock, arkansas. saturday, starting at noon

eastern on book tv on c-span dlst 2. author griff stokley on the little known riots and killing of at least 20 african-american sharecroppers. >> you had calls going all up and down the mississippi delta. saying that blacks were now in revolt. and the next morning between 600 and 1,000 men, white men pore into phillips county to begin shooting down blacks. >> on american history tv on c-span dlst 3 sunday at 5:00 p.m., former student bruce lindsay on integration at north little rock high school. >> it's as if they know what's going to happen. but we don't know what's going to happen. we don't realize what's going to happen when we get up those steps. but they seem to, because the crowd is with us now. the momentum is behind us. and they are pushing us up the steps.

>> these stories and others from c-span's local content vehicles in little rock this weekend on c-span 2 and 3. >> in march 1979, c-spangan televising the u.s. house house of representatives to households nationwide. today our content of politics and public affairs, nonfiction books and american history is available on tv, radio and online. >> on or about friday, november 21st, i asked admiral point dexter directly does the president know? he told me, he did not. on november 25th, the day i was re-assigned back to the u.s. marine corp. for service, the president of the united states called me. in the course of that call, the president said to me, words to the effect that i just didn't

know. those are the facts as i know them, mr. neils, i was glad when you introduced this you said that you wanted to hear the truth. i came here to tell you the truth, the good, the bad and the ugly. i'm here to tell it all pleasant and unpleasant. i'm here to accept responsibility for that what i did. i will not accept responsibility for that which i did not do. >> v-span created by america's cable companies as a public service. >> georgetown university recently convened a panel of psychological lohrs to examine a group of scholars in the arab world. this discussion looked at egypt and how the views of american reejs freedom don't easily apply in arab countries. this is about an hour and ten minutes. >> let me turn now to the panel of experts.

first tell me tell you what we've asked them to reflect on and you'll find a remarkable similarity to other themes of this conference. this isn't everything we asked them to do. this is the things we asked them to give some thought to. whether a free and fair academic system for all religious actors is best for egypt and other arab spring countries in the long run. second, whether a regime of robust reejs freedom which we poz it, although they may not is an essential component of religious democracy. whether robust religious freedom is likely to moderate the liberal radicalism of some religious actors or is it to the contrary more likely to unleash liberal radicalism. finally and here we move back to the area that we just discussed a bit in our keynote conversation.

how can u.s. foreign policy including our policy of advancing religious freedom best foster both robust democracy and religious freedom in egypt or if you like religious tolerance as well as other countries affected by the arab spring. let me now introduce our panelists in the order in which they're going to speak. we'll each talk, ten, 12-. we'll have a conversation among ourselves. as always we want to get our audience involved. we have an assistant professor in the center for contemporary arab studies at georgetown university. he has served as ablgting director of master of arts in arab study program. and his writings have appeared in many papers and journals

including the international jurn of middle east studies and policy. the georgetown journal of international affairs. i'm glad that you have published here at georgetown. slate, salon weekly. a nice mixture. i'll say that i first saw him myself or met him once before, i saw news hour with jim lehr and was very impressed with what he had to say. next associate professor of political science at the university of massachusetts amherst. we heard from jillian earlier in an extraordinarily good question, which led to i thought some reflective and interesting answers. her academic interest include political culture, protest and policing in jordan, neoliberalism, identity publics. this is my favorite, contentious

politics. where is there politics that is not -- and state repression. professor has received awards in fellowships from the social science research council, the fulbright foundation, overseas research centers and the american institute for yemeni studies. she's conducted wide ranging field research in egypt, jordan and yemen and has traveled extensively throughout the region. finally last but at at all least, sam a research fellow at the hudson institute. he was a senior partner at the egyptian union of liberal youth. an organization that aims to spread the idea of classical liberalism in egypt before joining the hudson institute, he worked on the subject of the muslim brotherhood at the american enterprise institute and the heritage foundation on the subject of religious freedom in europe. he's written for many journals, newspapers and blogs including

"the wall street journal," the american thinker especially about the subject of liberalization in egypt. i have to add that this is the first panel that i've ever moderated in which a former student of mine participated and that's sam. glad to have all of you here. professor, would you lead us off. >> thank you very much. i should preface my remarks by saying that unlike jillian and samuel in the morning and some of the other distinguished panelists, i don't really work on questions of moderation and extremism. in fact, i have my students read your work or religious freedoms or religious minorities. but i have done quite a bit of work over the last few years on egyptian politics and quite specifically the muslim brotherhood. it's in that frame that i kind of will approach the questions that i've been asked to address. as you mentioned there were three questions. i'll try to briefly address them

as much as i can in order. the first of course, and the easiest to answer was whether a fully inclusive free and fair democratic system that makes room for all voices including islamist voices is best for egypt and other arab spring countries in the long run. i think obviously the answer to this question is clear, at least for me and that is, yes. in fact, that any implication that limiting the participation of islamist groups that seek to participate in formal politics in the political process by peaceful means even those who hold views which we might consider a liberal and even in some cases as some of the groups views are i think detestable, any attempt to move in that direction is anti-democratic. for that reason alone, i think the question needs to be addressed in the affirmative. yes, fully inclusive free and fair democratic system makes the

most sense. in fact, anything other than that represents a step backwards. a failed logic. a logic where we supported mubarak because we thought the alternative was worse. as mr. sar cosey said in french it's better than the aljeerian taliban, better mubarak than the muslim brotherhood. i reject that not only on the basis of religious freedom issues, but also on the basis of democracy. the second question has to do with how i received it is slightly different than how you presented it a moment ago, your question was harder to answer. i'm going to tell you the question that i understood, was would a regime of liberal democracy including adherence to the principals of religious freedom moderate or unleash the liberal radicalism of some of these voices? the difference in emphasis is the emphasis on liberal democracy as opposed to a regime

that highlighted religious freedom. that's a slight variation. my answer is i think this is somewhat similar to some of the excellent discussion that was in panel one this morning was -- i don't know. but i would hope. this is where i would hope to and defer to jillian and mohammed, i would hope that inclusion in the political system, the political inclusion would force some groups if not to moderate to at least behave like political parties interested in gaining votes, interested in winning seats, interested in influencing policy. and maybe less like only idea logically committed organizations that aren't going these things. if they are interested in participating in the political process, then you would think that they would present their

message according to the median voter theory, present their message in a way that would attract the largest number of voters and therefore it would be transformative in that sense. in addition to -- in addition to attempting to build coalitions involving compromise and negotiation with other political forces. including ones which they disagree with. that also would have a positive effect. i think we've seen that, actually, with regard to the muslim brotherhood from the 1980s forging alliances on specific issues and in other cases as well. not only in egypt, but in other places. we've also surprisingly seen that in a very beginning sense with some of the parties in egypt.

moreover you would think in elections and participation in elections that the voting public would make future decisions based on performance. based on whether these groups have delivered jobs, whether they've established better education systems, health care that wasn't deteriorating, economic progress as opposed to the idea that islam is the solution. the other thing that's not directly implied is there does seem to be an assumption. i have a little bit of difficulty with this, that the type of government in a place like egypt or tunisia or

elsewhere should somehow look very much like the government that we have here in the united states. and i think that's a false assumption. i think that we should expect forms of politics and political discourse to look quite different. the key thing, however, is whether these political systems, constitutions, institutions are robust enough to guarantee rights including rights of religious freedom not whether the system in the end is our model of the ostensible. the ostensible separation of church and state and so on. the third question that was posed and i will also take some liberty to move after i initially address it in a different direction was how can the use best foster both robust democracy and inclusive religious freedom in egypt and other countries affected by the arab spring. i hope you're looking at the minutes. i'm certainly not in terms of how much time i'm taking. i think some of the key things

to understand about this question is that the legacy unfortunately, you know, the legacy of u.s. involvements in egypt and other states in the region supporting of the mubarak jet stream for decades is not a very good one. it makes it difficult for the u.s. to be seen as credibly interested in promoting democracy, even religious freedoms in egypt and states in the future. when most egyptians i think look at the united states, they see decades of support for the mubarak regime, litcally, himtarily and economically. they see in fact, little sustained criticism in the past with consequences of systemic human rights abuse, consistent electoral vielss or repression. interestingly enough the u.s. did focus sometimes on some liberal activists when they were the victims of the regime's

wrath. because there were 20,000 or 15,000 egyptian political prisoners in jail at different times in the mubarak regime, they seemed to only focus on one. what that means is that other people who are in prison including members of the muslim brotherhood, who some people are quite prominent and people are talking about him being the potential prime minister the deputy guide who was unfairly tried in an egyptian military court and sentenced to five years in prison and served many of them and so on. no mention was made by u.s. officials of that injustice and so on. it doesn't only end on january 25th with the beginning of the revolution, you might remember that on january 25th, the first day of the revolution in quotation marks, secretary clinton said that the egyptian government was stable and that it was looking for ways, i'm quoting to respond to the legitimate needs and interests of the egyptian people unquote.

the following day she called on all parties meaning the protesters and the regimes to exercise restraint. setting up unquote, setting up some kind of moral equivalency between the protesters and the regime's oppressive apparatus. the following day vice president biden said that mr. mubarak was not a dictator and so on. in fact, if we want to go deeper with this, we can speculate that the message that the ambassador gave to mr. mubarak on his visit there on february 5th, was not the message that we were hearing the american administration was presenting. and that is immediate change now. in fact, the message that he told reporters afterwards which is in order for an orderly transition quote unquote to tak in power until september probably so an outcome like we saw in recent elections doesn't transpire. this point is there's a dilemma

for the united states right now. as witnessed by the recent ngo controversy. and so on. there also has to be a recognition that the u.s. has decreased influence not only in egypt, but adrosz the region. that in authortarian states, which don't allow citizens to have significant voice in politics and policy and which are alied with the united states and heavily dependent on u.s. foreign political and diplomatic support that the u.s. has much greater influence in those kinds of policies than in policies which have popular sovereignty and which governments are supposedly based onni the past discourse, as a kind of discourse that was insincere and that championed one group, egyptian christians primarily and so on at the expense of

everyone else and i will be the first person to say that egyptian christians have -- have and continue and maybe increasingly suffer discrimination and deteriorated status post egypt revolution. but nevertheless, because that was viewed as such, it created backlash among eegypt and it ma be counter productive thinking about it now to continue to pursuit a discourse that focuses explicitly on religious freedom as opposed to a more general discourse focused on democracy. equal citizenship rights, including within that, of course, religious freedom. i'll stop there. i was hoping or planning to say a lot more about islamists in egypt, particularly the muslim brotherhood. but maybe in the question and answer period i'll have an opportunity to do that. thank you.

>> a lot of what i wanted to say was echoed this morning so i'm going to try to move quickly past some of the things that were mentioned. but to reiterate where i agree and maybe some points where there's a little disagreement or at least some questions. i see the theme of the conference is these two related things that inclusion will lead to moderation and exclusion will lead to radicalism. connected with that is this question of religious freedom. will religious freedom in general produce moderation? i want to separate those two and take those in turn. it is important to separate the arguments, the hiypothesis that repression leads to extremism and inclusion leads to moderation. there's not a simple, you know, slide along the continuum where it's like reduced repression is going to automatically lead to moderation and then go back again. there is different mechanisms that could be working in each case. i'm going to talk about some of these briefly. but just to give a simple

example, you could easily have a system become much more inclusive, have a large number of parties move to a more moderate direction and have some of those that are still left extremists escalate what they're doing, escalate their extremism. and so overall you still maybe can see more violence. i think actually the literature which professor talked about this morning, the literature of oppression leads us to expect this. it's a linear relationship. you have the extreme repression loosen slightly, you'll have an pull but you'll see an explosion of overall violence. and so i think we need to sort of separate these two propositions. and so the one that gets, you know, that has to do with this sort of religious groups is less about the repression producing extremism which i think the logic of that is fairly clear. it doesn't always do that. but severe repression leads groups to go underground and when they don't have a whole lot else they can do, there are not a lot of options, kit lead groups that otherwise might be strange bed fellows to work together.

this, after all, is the basic logic of why we end up with revolutions. the groups all cohere on the people wanting the end of the regime. that happens because all the other differences get put aside. so the logic of an inclusive system is to take away that unifying point of overthrowing a regime or overthrowing a system entirely. as you lead to a more inclusive system, people can move to what their more individual agendas might be. and you'll see, for example, islamist groups that might have a little affinity in the repressive system, the differences will start to pull apart is the hypothesis you would expect to see. i think kbeer empirically there's reason to expect that. this is something you've seen in a number of cases historically. i'm return to that in a second.

i do want to mention one of my big points i want to emphasize here is in a more inclusive system, you may not actually see extremists becoming moderate. what you might actually be seeing and what i think is more often what you see is moderates don't have a logic to alie with extremists anymore. and so the moderates will pull away, their voices become more prominent and agendas become more prominent. that doesn't mean you're seeing them pull away -- that they were the ones that were extreme being pulled to the center. i think that's an important point. that doesn't mean extremists might not necessarily also moderate. but very often that is what you're seeing. so my book faith and moderation examines islamists in jordan yemen as they enter the political system and point that i repeatedly in the book is neither one of these islamist groups sought to overthrow the regime. had i've perpetrated violence on the regime. in both cases they were allied with the regime. also as opposition but friendly opposition at times. so to hold those as cases of

successful moderation, misses the point that they were never the extremists in first place. but what happens in a more inclusive system is you separate -- you eliminate the logic for moderates to have to go ally with extremists. that is the first point. the logic of alliances among these elites or different actors. and elites not in the sense of social and economical elites but the politically organized leaders of groups. a more inclusive system changes the logic, whether tactical or strategic, but changes the logic of those interactions. the second side, which i think is equally important, has to do with the constituencies for those groups. in the more repressive system, when groups that are organizing don't have a whole lot of options and they might work together or they might be underground separately, very

often the broader population will look for the group that is making the most extreme statements against the regime like let's get the regime out. let's overthrow the system. they might have a larger support base. again, this is a proposition that i will then come back to in a second. so the logic would be that not only does an inclusive system take away the logic for moderates to have to ally with extremists against repressive system, it also takes away -- introduces more possibilities for the general public at large. so a public that wants to see something other than the incumbent regime now has a whole range of things to choose from. if you want to see a more religiously inspired, morally religiously inspired regime, you don't only have one poll to go to. you have a whole range of different groups to choose from. and here we see historically very significant differences between the muslim brotherhood

and i hope you have more about this in the question and answer. it's really very instructive. so i think there are the twin logics. the lodge igs of the alliance among the elites. even the best functioning democracies we have, we don't entirely eliminate extremists but you isolate them. they're fringe factors, seen as nut cases, if you will. but they're there. and so if the hope is to eliminate extremism through an inclusive system entirely, that's simply not going to happen. the second side of what i want to talk about has to do with this question of religion. and religious freedoms. i completely agree, you know, i think religious freedoms need to be front and center and i would even broaden that to say not just religious freedoms but freedom of beliefs. because you want to include in that the freedom not to believe in religion, of course. so the freedom of beliefs needs

to be front and center. for me, in any kind of inclusive system whether it's democracy or liberal democracy or represented democracy or some other kind of system, it's absolutely essential to me that be front and center. i would wish for more for a french system, just to say what americans think as an american. i just like to throw that out. >> so you're one of the americans that is becoming french. >> i understood his point that administrators were more pulling towards the french system. but americans are pulling maybe towards a more religious system. so maybe i'm -- >> so it's our elites are becoming french. >> or am i aligning with the administration? these are things i need to deeply reflect upon. so i think, for me, and this again echos points that came up this morning, for me, what's important about religion is not that it's confessional, per se. and so you want to have freedom of confessionalism, you believe what you like and structure your moral world around whatever

framework works for you. but it's not religion, per se. i think of it as confessional systems as a world view. and so world view is sort of the ethical, moral understanding of, you know, what the world is, how it functions and how it should function. what would be a better system? and religions, of course, are fronting and center in the spectrum of world views. but there are other world views that present other moral systems. the virtue of a inclusive system is it allows you to sort of find symmetry in certain components of that moral vision without

and received in egypt over in