this was going to lead. it was going to lead to democracy and freedom. and then you had the backlash. and we're seeing that now, you know, very clearly in a number of different ways. the two most prominent are the phenomenon in egypt and the sectarian war we've got in syria. and it's very difficult to look at that picture and say this is going to end up in the end in a good place or in a -- in a much more beneficial place than it was before it all began. so now, having said that, with the big picture, let me just turn to the u.s. attitude toward all of this, or discussion of it or thought about it back in the 1950s. and, as i said, totalitarianism happens while you're making other plans. the united states wasn't concerned about these kinds of i-about -- about the rights of

the individual, checks and balances, freedom, liberty and so forth. as i said, trying to channel arab nationalism into the western camp into the cold war. i've -- in looking at how the united states thought about this and the strategy they developed, i've come to the conclusion that there was a kind of map that the americans had that was above all of their -- all of their policy discussions. a kind of paradigm. i actually started thinking this way. i worked, if i could give you a personal anecdote, i worked in the white house in the george w. bush administration. and i had a -- had come from academia, which i thought prepared me for policy work. and then i went to the white house and realized, actually, it prepared me for nothing. but one of the things that really surprised me was somebody who considered himself an expert.

in the middle east. at the highest levels have simple ideas in their head. and i don't mean that as insult. i'm not saying simplistic, they just have simple ideas. and they have to. they're getting so much information from so many different parts of the world. and the trends they're looking at are so contingent on different things, at some point, they have to develop a simple picture and say, you know, i want to turn left, i want to move in this direction, i want to move in that direction. and these ideas they develop over time are incredibly resistant to -- it's very hard to argue against them because they are up above their paradigms rather than strategic ideas. they're not the kind of things you can debate in a sea setting or something. it's a profound inclination

people have. where do they get these ideas? by the way, since i am on the university campus, i would like to quote max vaber. max vaber said -- he said that's max vaber the father of modern sociology, for those of you who don't know. he says, not ideas, vapor wrote, but material and ideal interests directly govern men's conduct. yet, very frequently, the world images that have been created by ideas have like switchmen determined the tracks along which action has been pushed by the dynamic of interest. so basically as this idea of these pictures that people have in their head -- and that directs the tracks along which they act. and i think this is very true in the middle east. and so i've started asking myself, where did the picture that the americans had at mid

century of the middle east come from? and this inquiry led me to a really surprising, a surprising place. when you think about it, it's not that surprising, but it was surprising when i first came across it. and that is, basically, i think it came from religion. the experts on the middle east, the first experts on middle east were all missionaries. and the first ambassadors, the first people who worked in the cia, who established our expertise, they were all either the descendents of missionaries or people trained by missionaries. and i think the missionary world view had an enormous influence on what we thought we were doing in the middle east. i'm not the first one to point this out, but i don't know of anybody else who has poened in on the kind of specific inclinations that the missionaries had. now, if i can take you back a little bit to the 30s and 40s,

john foster dulles, secretary of state in the eisenhower administration, he first became prominent on the international diplomatic stage by his work in the churches. he worked in the federal council of churches, in the late 30s, early 40s after the war broke out in europe, to convince americans to build a better league of nations. john foster dulles was the single most pernt in the establishment of the united nations. which had a strong religious dimension to it. could talk to organizations and speak in terms of christ's will for humanity and then could walk into diplomatic settings and pursue the exact same agenda without mentioning the ideas

that dulles had about world order were, themselves, i think, were by the missionaries. there was debate in the world. in the 20s and 30s about whether we should focus our missionizing work on -- on deeds or on -- or on belief. should we actually go out and try to convince people to become good christians and to believe in jesus christ? or should we make alliances with people of other religions by focusing on those values that we all share, and that we as christians believe are are the values and the teachings of jesus christ. but without actually attaching to jesus christ.

to take care of health care and take care of the poor, the sick and educate people and so on. this line of thinking was particularly pronounced in the middle east. because in the 19th century when the missionaries went to the middle east and tried to convert muslims to christianity. so they quickly -- they quickly moved. now, there was a professor, i think, whose thinking is absolutely crucial for understanding all this from harvard in the 1930s. william ernest hawking who was tapped by john d. rockefeller jr. to put together a report on missions and what our mission activity should be. rockefeller had very much in mind creating of the coming of

the american age. and he picked hawking to do this because hawking had this notion of what's going on in the world is we are moving toward a world culture. and the key then for us is to create the world culture that will, that will be consonant with the teachings of christ. but we will not sell this to the world. we will not sell this to the world as -- as a christian vision as a general moral vision supported by all major religious traditions. the united nations is the constitutional reflection of that effort to create a global culture that is infused with christian, with christian values. and that's why -- to this day, there's this kind of saintly afterglow that the u.n. has. you look at this organization corrupt and everything else and you think, how can people treat the secretary general like a pope? there's this little afterglow of

that moment we remember in the culture somehow. so this was the vision. this was the vision globally. dulles was very much a part of it. and then there was a specific middle eastern dimension. and the motion in the middle east was that what we need to do is we need to create an alliance with the muslims. that's what we -- that is what we are doing in the middle east. now, hawking, the professor who had this idea of the global culture that will be infused with religious values, hawking said that missionaries have to go out and they have to stop behaving like preachers and they have to start behaving like ambassadors, like they're ambassadors of the west. what happened in the middle east, the missionaries did become ambassadors of the united states. and what they -- they just transposed the hawking, rockefeller, dulles view from -- of what missionaries should do.

they just transposed it on to the united states. hawking believed that the great enemy of the -- of christians on the global scene, in the 1930s, was secularism was secularism. and godless communism. and it was just a matter of transposing that on to the united states and saying that the goal of the united states is to put together a global alliance against communism and to try to make alliances with states. now, in the 1950s, what this led to, then, if this is the picture they have in their heads, the vabarian picture. it led to two priorities above everything else. and one was disassociating the united states from british imperialism. because we're making an alliance now with the muslims as equals.

and so the unequal -- the unequal aspect of the british imperialism was a wedge that was driving the muslims away from us and into the arms of the soviet union. and the other problem was israel. there were two wedges. the jews were also getting in the way. so our diplomacy, the goal of our diplomacy was to basically witness in a sense, witnessing for christ. of course, nobody's thinking about it this way. and the men -- many of the men, eisenhower isn't doing this from any kind of religious motive. but these are sort of deep concepts that are in the culture. we have to go out and we have to prove that we have the same values as the people we're trying to ally with. and if we show our good intentions, they will come toward us. this kind of thinking reaches its logical conclusion in the suez crisis, when israel, and

france attack egypt. and without getting any concessions any concessions, turns as a result into a hero and gives the wherewithal to sort of then take over a big chunk of the middle east or at least pull a big chunk, doesn't necessarily take it all over, but takes a big chunk out of the western orbit and hands it over to the soviet union. so that ends -- that effort -- that effort at witnessing our shared values ends up actually empowering the elements that we're most interested in moving to the soviet union. it has the exact opposite of the one intended. now, none of this has anything to do with totalitarianism. but nobody is thinking about it at all. and then, just one minute on the -- i've been told by mitch here i have to cut off. let me give you one -- a little

quick comparison with the present. i think, first of all, i don't want to suggest it's going to keep replaying itself over and over again. it's certainly not true. but i do think that some of the -- as i rain with the u.n., this saintly afterglow. i think some of these big ideas are still floating around in our diplomatic culture. if you go and look at -- some of these senses of what is a strategic imperative, right? it's the picture that existed in the '50s is still working on to a certain extent. if you look at president obama's famous cairo speech. what is that if not an outreach to the whole muslim world? and he says, there's this impediment to my relationship with you, oh, muslims, the state of israel. and -- and the state of israel and, oh, there's this other impediment, which is the foreign

policy of george w. bush. okay, so it's not the british and the french, but it's the imperialistic impulse that's in the dna of the west and i'm showing you i'm going to pull back and therefore we can get along with each other. the middle east blew apart and went in directions that nobody that nobody expected. and as in the 1950s, nobody's really focused on it. if i said to president obama and his advisers in 2011, you really ought to focus more on the relations that on the israeli/palestinian question would have been laughed out of the room. of course, now that conflict in syria has killed 150,000 people which is 30,000 more people than have died in the arab/israeli conflict from the beginning to the end, a century of conflict. but those details about the middle east, they're not on our

radar because it's not part of that big picture that we have. and with that, i'll stop. >> well, i think in the interest of time, we'll move immediately to taking questions. now, those of you who have attended madison program events will be familiar with their tradition of offering the first two or three questions to students. and i'm very pleased that we have a few students from the preston university chapter of the hamilton society with us this morning. so i will offer them the opportunity to ask the first question or two. >> okay. i have a question. >> wait for the microphone, please. you can stand up, that'd be great. >> okay. >> so i guess professor pierce spoke on sort of the importance

of bearing witness for foreign policy. but, i guess professor duran seems a little more skeptical. so i don't know who this is addressed to. either one of you can, but specifically for the middle east. is that kind of sort of bearing witness going to have any effect? or is it about having the kind of military and economic advantages that professor freedberg spoke about? >> i believe that the bearing witness -- i believe that the bearing witness does have a clear effect, especially when you're talking about the united states where the president and secretary of state by default have the bully pulpit. every time they make a speech. and it's not just what we choose to say. it's what we choose to avoid saying. for example, i think it was really harmful when hillary clinton took that first tour of asia and made it clear in her

statements she was not going to focus on human rights. that was devastating to human rights advocates over there. and all the talk in the papers was how devastating that was. then you look at syria, which i see is one of the worst humanitarian crises the world has ever seen. and in my opinion, it is one of the worst cases of moral indifference the world has ever seen. we should have been drawing attention to the reality about that conflict in so many different ways to assad's atrocities right from the beginning, instead of implying our reason for not getting involved anyway were extremists in the opposition. for example, it would have helped simply to point out that the syrian opposition movement under the damascus declaration was a group of pro-democracy advocates who wanted nothing more than the rule of law, human

rights, an end to the hated emergency law. and it was a peaceful group on top of that. only grew violent in response to assad's brutality, sniper firing the people from the hills, dragging children off from torture. then moving on to bombing civilians' towns and farms. but imagine what a real leader could've done in pointing out simply the reality about that conflict in the beginning. and of course, it's evolved to the point now where it's a very different conflict. but i always believe that the truth makes a big difference. >> so in the -- in the policy world, the debate on that is between the neo conservatives, sort of meat eating foreign policy experts like erin freedberg and the realists who

don't believe in pushing values. and i find myself in the mushy middle between the two. i actually agree that it's very important for the united states to project its values. and i also see our values as kind of a realist tool we have. it's -- people in the middle east actually care about these values. and it's useful to us in many respects, in many kind of practical respects to lead with our values. what puts me in the mushy middle is that i think that the impediments to democracy in the middle east are more deep rooted than some of my neo conservative friends have suggested at times. it isn't just a matter of -- it's not as simple as removing this or that tyrant and then -- and then democracy and human

rights will bloom. as you can see, i think if you look at what's going on on the ground. because there's a fundamental problem in many of these countries of political community. you can't have a limited government unless everybody in the -- the most politically significant elements in the society have a sense that they have a shared fate and they are part of a single community. and that the greater good of the community will be served by limited government. when everyone -- the major groups in the society have a sense of its winner take all. every middle eastern has a movie in their head, and the movie is what they're going to do to me when they take power. right, and you can see what's going on in syria right now. they are doing -- the assad regime is doing to the opposition what it fears the opposition would do to it if it go in power. and these are powerful, powerful forces.

and i don't think we should have any illusions about that. so i do believe that we should project our values. but i think there are lots of impediments out there and another problem, as well, which is the american public. the american public. and it has concluded after ten years of this effort that the candle wasn't worth the game. so those of us who believe in projecting our values, i think we have to take that into consideration, and we have to come up with a way of doing it that doesn't make our own society fearful that we're going to take them down and complet y completely -- completely futile adventure. >> any other questions from students? we'll open it up. yes? >> thanks. thanks very much for the panel.

i was wondering from beginning with the first talk. which mentioned lessons learned from totalitarianism. a more general question, are we done with totalitarianism? simply, this arises in the present context, there's a kind of discussion going on whether the various forms of authoritarianism seems to be regathering strength amount to something in the aggregate that has something in common. the usual suspects are venezuela, iran, russia, china, north korea. or whether it's simply a club of thugs. from about dealing with which we might learn some lessons from the 20th century. but it's not quite the same. not really the same issue. and i was wondering what the panel thinks about that. i'll leave it at that.

>> well, i think it is an important question, what are the commonalities among these various regimes we now find problematic. i mentioned russia and china, but as you point out, there are others that could conceivably included in the list. i think the defining characteristics of these regimes at the moment are their single-minded determination on the maintenance of personal power of the members of the regime. probably they define themselves in an ideological sense, on the one hand more in opposition to what they see as the prevailing liberal democratic american dominated order. so that's what draws putin and xi jing ping together. but it's an opposition to american imperialism as the ideological imperialism as they see it. the other characteristic is resurgence or reemergence of a

certain kind of nationalism. which does bear some resemblance to at least elements of fascist ideology of the 1930s. in particular on -- an emphasis on violence, militarism that, i think, east common. in the chinese case and the russian and other examples, as well. but for the moment with the exception of the islamist regimes, we're not talking about people who are actively trying to promote and promulgate a set of ideas. the last point on china, some people a few years ago were talking about a beijing consensus and alternative to a washington consensus which purportedly -- and market economics. that was a western construct and the chinese ran as fast as they could away from it. they don't see themselves as promoting anything other than their national interests and the greatness of chinese

civilization. >> if i would say that north korea is totalitarian as you could be, total control over citizens, over information. the camps, which are beyond belief, especially in light of the idea of never again. it's really a country, as i said, where the country itself is a concentration camp. nazi germany had camps as did russia. but we have an entire country that is oppressive beyond anything the world has ever seen. and it's just interesting to see the lack of effort in addressing it even on a moral basis, which you see if you go to the american political science association. professors will stand up and with a straight face say north korea is a fear regime and

you'll think, oh, yes, it sure is. but they'll mean the kind of regime they are because they're afraid of us. and if you raise the question, they don't like that. and this is pervasive. i make a point of going to panels on north korea. and this idea that it's really our fault. and if you ask the follow-up question, what would happen if the borders opened up? do you not think that people would flee? there seems to be no answer, but nevertheless that view of north korea remains in a lot of academic circles. that's been really shocking to me. >> thank you. >> mitch, i wondered if i could just put a follow-up question to aaron. aaron, i wonder if you could give us your views following up on what you said to the thesis that walter russell meade has put out in a couple of

provocative pieces of conceiving of the international system right now as the united states and the west against china, russia, iran, north korea. sort of looking to them as an alliance with the kind of unified vision of revisionist. >> i think they are in effect an alliance. and there have been elements of that that have been present for a while, iran and north korea cooperating in the development of missiles and nuclear weapons. russia and china cooperating to china's benefit in trade and technology and energy and so on. so, yes, i think there's a loose alignment of states see it as being in their interest to check and stymy and oppose american power, first of all, and also, which take their bearing to some degree by the u.s. and western reactions to their behavior. so i think some of the problems we're having, for example, now in dealing with china in east asia and russia and eastern

europe have to do with the fact that the leaders of those regimes don't assess the resolve of the united states as being very strong. and there may be deeper ties to come. one of the unfortunate consequences, for example, as western efforts fully justified in a moral sense to impose sanctions on russia in response to its actions in the ukraine is that it may be forcing russia further and further into china's arms, new energy deals have been announced that the russians are probably willing to sell certain kind of surface to air missiles they weren't willing to sell before to the chinese. so we may be in effect by our responses to their aggression forcing them closer and closer together. i don't know whether the absence of a common ideology is a disadvantage or an advantage for them. of course, in the great era of the communists totalitarian regimes, ideology became the issue of division. so maybe the fact that these guys ultimately don't really believe in much of anything will be an advantage for them, at

least in the short run. >> professor has a question. if you could wait for the microphone. >> let me just, i'd like to make a comment, which is that, first, i believe very strongly that values, i don't like to call them american values because they're by no means limited to the united states. democratic and liberal values are found all over the world. and they're highly attractive. i remember japanese foreign minister, ministry officer saying to me the great problem for china is that everybody bandwagons with the united states. and i said, what are you talking about? i mean, i've traveled all over. and wherever i go, i'm part of the roast of the american festivities. and he said, well, that may be true. most people want to live in a country more like the united states than it is like china. which brings me to the point

that at what point -- when did we -- when did the sort of human rights element drop out of our foreign policy. why is it that we say now -- we don't have any credibility of the subject at all. i would argue it's in the '70s with the nixon diplomacy to china. most of the papers regarding that have all -- they've all been declassified or almost all have been declassified. and i would challenge you to find any reference in the entire thing to human rights. in fact, nixon goes so far as to offer to sacrifice the alliance with japan, which is the democratic country. in return, by implication by an alliance with china. and i think once. it's still an aspirationally totalitarian machine. and surveillance and so forth is more intense and more effective

than it's ever been before. and if we give them a free pass, then the question is, what possible standing do we have say to condemn belarus, which i gather is in the deep freeze. i'm told the reason, that belarus has 11 political prisoners and we've come down hard on them. i promised you if i had the right friend in china and we flew there and landed in any city and got in a car and the guy knew -- i could find you 11 political prisoners, you know, in a couple of minutes. so what we have done with this massive change is really just to sacrifice our credibility on the whole issue. and it's going to be hard to rebuild. that's just a comment. thanks very much. >> just very briefly on china in particular, arthur. as you know, there has been a

cycle in the public emphasis placed by the -- on the human rights and political reform issue by american political figures. and, of course, at the outset of the opening as you say, it was utterly absent. but, it begins to come into the picture at the end of the cold war, and i think, particularly after tiananmen, which is a powerful reminder of the true nature of the regime. and at least for a while you have high-ranking officials saying, really rather remarkable things. sometimes sharing the stage with chinese counterparts and saying, you know, we're eager to transform into a liberal democracy, seemingly unaware that this is deeply threatening to the people they're talking to. but what's happened over time, i think is that component in our policy has been suppressed more and more and more, which i take as a response to the perceived

increasing strength and influence of china. i think we've become more and more afraid of talking about that. >> it is true. probably the best example of that is bill clinton. and we remember -- some of us remember the democratic convention with the tiananmen leaders and all the -- clinton was brutally disciplined by the chinese for having -- and he became the first american president to go to china -- on tape, recite the so-called three nos. and i point out -- he did it. quite amazing. and after tiananmen, of course, bush sent him off immediately to tell ping he would always be his best friend no matter what, which might say in public. i think the chinese to some

extent have disciplined us. but on the other hand, can think of people in american political history who simply wouldn't have submitted to that discipline. >> do you have something? >> yeah, just a couple of quick responses. with respect to the middle east, i'm not sure that -- i'm not sure, what i was saying is that the human rights and democracy component was never at the forefront of our policy in the cold war. that was one of my -- that was one of my points. we were always thinking of it in terms of this religious -- a big block of muslims over there. we wanted to move them as a block. and we weren't thinking about the relations between the muslims which have become much more apparent to us as major issues now. but then you have this other problem. i agree with you. i do agree with you that we should have -- that are -- our values, universal values, if you will, should be a significant component of our foreign policy.

but you run into -- you run into horrendous tradeoffs in the middle east very quickly. our closest arab allies, saudi arabia. are we going to -- are we going to stop having them as our closest allies? no, we're not going to. we promote a democracy in iraq. and that opened the door to iran. having an enormous amount of influence. and right now, we could've done it better, i believe. but these are not -- these are not simple problems that can go away if we just put values forward. >> well, we're coming to the end of our session. so the last question will go to professor levine who has been waiting patiently. >> thank you. it was a very interesting panel. i have a question about the historical analogies you've all used. i was very struck that comparisons made between today in the 30s, michael duran between today in the 50s and aaron friedberg, and we're talking about world war i in the

teens. from which, i conclude that some of the issues we're talking about are sort of permanent possibilities at any given moment in time. but those permanent possibilities have to be qualified with great detail, knowledge of the specifics of every individual case. i think you would all probably agree with that statement. so, but my question is, each of you based on the main analogy that you used, what would be the greatest difference in your judgment and between the 1930s and today might go between the 50s and today and 70s of today? thank you. >> okay. well, my orientation with american foreign policy is that at its best, it combines moral and practical concerns, concerns of power and concerns of democratic ideals.

and i believe that since world war ii, we have had some presidents and secretaries who have emphasized either one or the other. either power or ideals. nixon and kissinger, it was pretty much power. ideals were very secondary. with carter, ideals, although not so much anticommunist ideals, but his own variety of ideals were dominant. in the 1930s, we weren't paying enough attention to either power or ideals as these totalitarian powers rose. i see that as exactly the problem with our president and secretary of state today. as i said, after world war ii, we had presidents and secretaries of state who paid a lot of attention to one or the other. but never until now have we had president and secretaries of state paying attention to neither one or the other. >> mike, the 1950s.

>> so the biggest change between then and now is that there's no soviet union. and we're not even sure that we have to be deeply involved in the middle east anymore. we are pulling away. how far we're pulling away, i don't know. to add another decade for comparison. the one i always ask myself is are we in the 1920s or the 1970s? it mean, if you accept aaron's idea, there'll be a jolt. china will make a move in the south china sea. iran will get a bomb and the american people will wake up and the leadership will say, hey, we've got to be in the game. i'm more and more -- i'm thinking that we're in the 1920s. and it's going to take, we don't have that, we don't have that sense of a soviet threat out there, so we're reading these problems against the larger game with this threat out there. so -- at what point we start saying, wow, we should be engaged. i'm very much in favor of a

forward leaning policy. i think we should be very much involved in what's going on in syria and so on. the thing that has amazed me is how easy it has been for the president to say, i don't want to do anything. and that's -- that i never could've predicted. >> two differences. one having to do with what i see as a potential principal opponent. as regards china as compared to the soviet union, we now realize in retrospect by the 1970s was a burned out case, the economy has slowed so it wasn't growing at all. and most important, its leadership was utterly demoralized. they didn't believe in what they were saying. they knew they were lying to themselves as well as to their own people. and the case of china, this is not so. we don't know what the trajectory is going to be, but these are people who have experienced tremendous success over the last several decades and who believe that they're on a path to continued growth and greater power. so it's a different kind of strategic competitor. the real question, i guess i have myself is about us and

about our reflexes. and i wonder, too, as mike does about whether this is the '20s or the '70s. in the '70s, one thing you can say, although the divisions were very deep as some people in this room will recall. and there were people saying as the slogan of george mcgovern in 1972 is "come home america," real resonances, i think, in fact, this is a bit of a detour, but i think the core of democratic party thinking on foreign policy actually closer to what it was then than it was when president clinton was in office because he was an anomaly. nevertheless. so i don't know about the reflex. the reflex was still there. in the 1970s. it didn't take that much to get people refocused on something that they had been intensely focused on for 25 years previously. some people said we were too much focused on it. but it was pretty easy after the soviets invaded afghanistan and so on to get geared back up for

that and for the american public to be geared back up for it. i'm not sure that's so today. and one of the reasons i'm concerned about it and i believe so much in the mission of the alexander hamilton society is i think there may be generational shift underway. in which younger people are increasingly detached from the idea that the united states needs to play an active role in the world. that's a worrisome trend because that's means our reflexes will be very slow. and we could be in the 20s rather than the 70s. >> well, please join me in thanking the panelists. on wednesday, american history tv in prime time marks the 50th anniversary of the 1964 civil rights act. at the civil rights act signing ceremony. at 8:30, the congressional gold medal ceremony honoring martin

luther king jr. and coretta scott king. later, at 9:25. senate historian donald ritchie on the congressional debate and passage of the bill with former cvs correspondent roger mudd. and at 9:25 p.m. eastern, a talk with the author of two presidents, two parties and the battle for the civil rights act of 1964. >> author alan huffman shares a tale of two mississippis as we visit prospect hill in jackson. >> well, prospect hill was founded by isaac ross who was a revolutionary war veteran from south carolina. and when he realized that he was going to die and the slaves would end up being sold or would just become common slaves, he wrote in his will that at the time his daughter's death that plantation would be sold and the money used to pay the way for the slaves to emigrate to liberia where the freed slave

colony had been established by the american colonization. they call it repatriation. they talk about them going back to africa. but you have top understand these people, most of them, they were americans. they have been here for three, four, five generations. so it wasn't like they were just going home. they were going back to the continent that their ancestors originally inhabited. it was quite the risk. and so they took their culture, what they knew here there. some of them took the bad aspects, too. the slavery, but that was all they had ever known. and they built houses like this one because after all, they're the ones who built this house. there were a lot of, basically, greek revival houses that the freed slaves built in mississippi and africa and across the river was louisiana

and liberia which was settled by freed slaves from louisiana. there was a georgia, there was a virginia, a kentucky, and maryland county. and all of those people came from those states in the u.s. >> explore the history and literary life of jackson this weekend saturday at noon eastern on c-span 2's booktv and sunday at 2:00 p.m. on american history tv on c-span 3. >> the privacy and civil liberties oversight board releases a report wednesday on the collection of electronic communications under the fisa law. we'll bring you at 10:00 a.m. sunday on c-span. >> book tv sat down with former secretary of state hillary clinton in little rock to discuss her new book, hard choices. >> getting to the point where you can make peace is never easy because you don't make peace with your friends, you make it with people who are your

adversaries who have killed those you care about, your own people or those you're trying to protect. you have to get into the heads of those on the other side. you have to change their calculation enough to get them to the table. i talk about iran, we have to get them to the table and we'll see what happens, but that has to be the first step. and i write about what we did in afghanistan and pakistan, trying to get the taliban to the table for a comprehensive discussion with the government of afghanistan. well, in iraq today, what we have to understand is that it is primarily a political problem that has to be addressed. the asengs of the sunni extremists is taking advantage

of the breakdown in political dialogue and the total lack of trust between the maliki government, the sunni leaders, and the kurdish leaders. >> more with hillary clinton saturday at 7:00 p.m. eastern and sunday morning at 9:15 on c-span 2's book tv. >> now, american history tv in prime time features a lecture on egypt on the origins of al qaeda. this is part of a class taught by juan cole, professor of

history at the university of michigan in ann arbor. this is an hour 20 minutes. >> all right. well, welcome, everybody. we're going to talk about the roots of al qaeda terrorism today. of course, this is a complex subject. and i'm going to focus specifically on its roots in modern egypt. that's a topical subject. in the past -- in the past few months, the military government of egypt has abruptly declared the muslim brotherhood to be a terrorist organization. this is a stark reversal of its fortunes. because in the summer of 2012

after the revolution of hosni mubarak, morsi won. so in from summer of 2012 until summer of 2013, not only was the muslim brotherhood not a terrorist organization, it was the government of the country. and now, all of a sudden, it's a terrorist organization. so this is, you know, makes your head spin, the redefinition of politics in this post, revolution period. but the roots of these attitudes toward the muslim brotherhood. and of the brotherhood's own, i think, political mistakes go back in 20th century egyptian history.

egypt was invaded by britain in 1882. it was just a colony. and there was a british -- one of the longer lasting one was lord chromer. and they ran egypt kind of as a cotton farm to produce cotton for british factories and for the benefit of the british as you might expect. they didn't do anything about spreading mass competition or literacy in egypt. he thought it was a stupid idea. he said we did that in india and they formed a communist party and started to try to kick us out. we won't make that mistake in egypt. and the british in egypt faced some severe difficulties having to do with their management of

the country's resources. and world war i was a difficult period economically because of the fighting in the mediterranean theater. there were disruptions of food supplies. there was a drought, there was substantial hunger in the middle east in this period. and some of that got blamed on the british. now, during world war i, the empire which ruled -- had ruled most of the middle east, some parts of the middle east had been taken over by the british or the french, but much of the middle east was ruled by the ottoman empire. and threw in with the austrians and germans during the world war. that made them the enemy of the british and the french, and ultimately the americans.

we historians widely consider this ottoman joining of the war to have been a mistake. and they were defeated. and when they were defeated, the victors add versailles carved up the turkey. and so, the british got iraq, syria went to the french. and so you had -- you had a new wave of colonialism in the near east. that was provoked by the victories of world war i. and unlike in europe where the

empire broke up into hungary and austria and where president woodrow wilson argued for 14 points and self-determination for the -- for the populations that came out of the war. the 14 points and self-determination were not applied to the middle east. and at the time, there was a kind of colonial, european sense of superiority. the rhetoric was one of -- of the juvenilization of the people of the middle east. so the -- the settlements that were made after world war i at versailles assumed people in the middle east were kind of like, you know, they were adolescents. they were 15. you know, not ready for a

driver's license. so the british and the french would adopt them as wards and would grow them up to the point where eventually maybe they could have their own countries. and suave, sophisticated iraqis and palestinians and syrians, some of whom had studied in paris and berlin were outraged to be treated in this way. and the iraqis actually staged a revolt over it, which the british put down. so the other thing that happened when they -- the powers aboli abolished the ottoman empire, the sultans in the late 19th century and early 20th century had begun trying to deploy some soft power against the encroachments of the europeans into their territory. and one of the forms of soft power that they had was that the sultan of the ottoman empire was

the leader of the muslim community. and at the time, you know, presided over the holy cities of islam. and so the sultan started claiming to be not only sultans, not only emperors, but also kalifs, and this idea of a renewed -- because they're kind of like muslim popes or sunni/muslim popes. this idea of a renewed caliphate, i don't think people bought it, but some did. but with the defeat of the ottomans and the rise of the secular republic of turkey after the war, the turkish parliament abolished the sultan and

caliphate. so became the french model and place in it for a muslim pope. but for a certain segment of the muslim community, the end of the caliphate was a huge disaster because it meant that there was no point of unity or authority for -- for the generality of muslims anymore. and they were divided up into these small, small colonies and mandates and ultimately nation states by the europeans. so there was a theory that, you know, the end of the caliphate was the end of muslim power. and this theory that the -- and there were conspiracy theorys. the british were the ones who put the turks up to abolishing the caliphate. this kind of thinking has survived as a minority opinion. because the vast majority, i think, of sunni muslims are

happy with their nation states and to have the religion organized along nation state lines sort of just as protestantism and christianity is now largely organized on the lines of the nation state. you have the swedish lutheran church. it was the same thing with sunni-islam. you have the religious authority in egypt. and in jordan and so forth. but there is a minority of muslims, and there has been for nearly 100 years now who really, really thinks you need the caliphate back. and al qaeda, the extremist organization is among those that wants the caliphate back. and osama bin laden gave a speech after the attacks of september 11th in which he actually said that, you know, we destroyed amongst the greatest of their buildings and we have

visited upon them some of the calamities for the last 80 years. and at the time, a lot of people kind of asked themselves, well, what have we been doing to the muslims for the last 80 years? but, he was referring to the 1924 abolition of the caliphate. so -- those muslims who took the ottoman claim to religious authority and not just political authority seriously, you know, wondered, can you be a proper sunni/muslim without a proper pope-like figure? and the more secular minded intellectuals in egypt actually wrote books in which they upheld that, yeah, sure, you know. islam, complicated religion, you pray, you fast. why would you need a caliphate ? they argued that it was protectly all right to be a

sunni muslim without a central source of religious authority of that sort. as i said, there were conservatives who wanted it, a caliphate back. and i think this discussion about religious authority and its place in the modern world after world war i fed into the creation in 1928 of the muslim brotherhood in the egyptian port town, it was founded by a young man at the time named hasa hasan al-banna who was a watch maker. but was, you know, fairly well educated in a contemporary arabic sense didn't know much about the outside world or foreign languages or so forth. but he, from his point of view and from the point of view of many conservatives in egypt,

egypt had been robbed. it had been robbed of its heritage, of its culture, of its laws by that period of british rule. and he said well why would our form of government, our personal status laws, why would those have been made in london? what's london got to do with us? we're here on the nile. and we've been muslims for, well at the time it would have been 1300 years or so. so why, why would these british christians come here and tell us how to organize ourselves? and so al-banna wanted to push back against the british shaping of modern egypt. and he engaged in what i would say as a his or it -- historian in a certain amount of row the man sizization of the past because he had this idea that in

the past, muslim societies had existed that were ruled by muslim law. and just as roman catholicism has cannon law, islam has an elaborate legal apparatuses coming out of the sacred text the kuran and replace british law with it. that's going back to how they behaved in the past. but while one would argue that islamic law wasn't important in the past, in my view, this particular kind of lattice work of islamic law that al-banna had in mind was a minority affair in muslim world in premodern times.

it was something that the muslim clerks, they were invested in, but much law was customary, laws were made by governors, but secular rulers, and the ottoman empire, in the empire, the sultan, the emperor was recognized as a legislator. and this was a prerogative that went back to central asia and the mongul tradition that the chief of the tribe would issue laws. so they issued, the ottoman's issued laws and those laws that they issued often touched upon areas of life that were also touched upon by islamic law, and they didn't always coincide. the ottoman would sometimes issue a law that didn't bare any relationship to islamic law. it wasn't the case that there

was this ideal society in the past ruled by this kind of, i would say fundamentalist understanding of what islamic understanding it. understandings of law change over time. and what things you emphasize and so forth are different over time. and again, al-banna tended not to recognize this. now when the muslim brotherhood began and started to get off the ground and it was moved to cairo in 1930. it came out of egyptians traditions of spear chul wallty including what is called suffism. mysticism is about the warm heart about a sense of getting a feeling of unity with the devine beloved, and mystics in cairo would meet on thursday evenings at a mosque and they would chant

together, and these things, you know, were frowned upon by some more conservative muslims. but the brotherhood originally wasn't coming out of saudi arabia kind of tradition which, which condemned the idea of saints and intersession and noncanon call kind of rituals. the brotherhood was rich in islam tradition and it wasn't a sufi order, but some of its emphases came out of that tradition. over time i think it became more literalist and less mystical. now al-banna was the leader of this organization. and it grew. it grew quite rapidly through the 30s and 40s -- 30's and 40's. it was mainly at that time,

ironically enough because things changed later, but at that time, it was mainly a, an urban organization. it was especially popular with the urban lower middle classes. they were either artisans or workmen of various sorts. it was said back in the 40's if you have really a lot of trouble finding a plumber in cairo, like joining the muslim brotherhood and you'll never want for a plumber. and then there were people who joined who had an education of a modern sort, but in arabic. they didn't know french or english, but they weren't, they weren't lacking for an education. and many of those joined. and as the movement grew, it was

an authoritarian movement. you weren't allowed to be in the muslim brotherhood and say publicly well this idea about x, it's a limit loony toons. you'd be thrown out. not only thrown out if you defied the authority structures of of this organization, but the memoirs that i've read. social control mechanism of some religious groups, there's some peace churches in the united states that engage in shunning and so shunning is like people just stop talking, we were best friends and over at their house, and they'll just cut you off without a further by your lease. and not only cut you off, but

they might cut off anybody insisting on remaybing in touch with -- remaining in touch with you. and the shunning is again, it's a sign of a controlling kind of organization, and i would say in my definition, it's a cult-like behavior. and the word cult is controversial in social science because some sociologists of religion consider it pa jortive and want top avoid it so they talk about new religious movements. i in social science, you can always use a word as long as you define it properly. and i define a cult as an organization that's characterized by high demands for obedience. and commitment of time and resources. on the one hand. and by relatively distinctive

believes and -- believes and practices, the mainstream society on the other. if you knew somebody who believed weird things and acted strangely, then you might not spend a lot of time with them. and so they'll be off on their own. and then if they also, you know, get a message from their supreme leader that they have to do the x because my leader told me to, again, that's isolating. and the more isolated they are, the more easy they are to manipulate and likely to obey the leader and some point. and they're afraid they'll lose all their friends and so forth. so, i see the cult as a sociological formation, a set of social control mechanisms,

characteristic of some religious organizations and also i think some political organizations are cult-like in the way that they arrange things. the brotherhood had an emphasis from its beginning on social reform. it founded schools, it had you know classes for women, and it had womens august zil ri, and its message was a kind of religious egyptian nationalism. so the british influence on egypt had been pernicious. egypt was poor and frankly they would have said, you know, not a danced or backward because it had been kept back by people like lord kromer. literacy rates were low, most people were poor, and, but they would blame all that on the

british form of government in egypt. and i have to say as a historian, they would have been completely wrong about that. there wasn't any substantial industrialization in egypt under the british, literacy rates were kept low deliberately and so on and so forth. and so that message of egyptian nationalism, but with inflected by a religious sense. resinated with a lot of people. and there are all kinds of estimates, you know, we don't have good social science statistics for mid-20th century egypt, but my best guess is by the late 40s, they were probably half a million or so muslim brothers in egypt, or muslim

brethren, because they were men and women, that this was in a population of 16, 17 million at the time. so that's a very significant group. and if you remember that they are mainly urban, then it's even more significant because they're a high proportion of urban population. at the time, most were rural. now, in the 1940s was the first time that we have proof of the brotherhood developing a terrorist wing. up until that point, it seemed to be, you know, a typical movement of religious reform. in 1942, because of world war ii and the british fears of the italians and the ultimately the germans in libya and the possibility that the access might try to take the suez canal and it might even try go further east and get iraqi and iranian

petroleum, because of the war wft allies in world war ii, the british thought it was important, i mean, it's not what they called it, but more or less they reoccupied egypt. they recolonized it. so they just installed a government favorable to them in 1942 and they, they then sent a lot of troops. a lot of austrailians and new zealanders among others. and the egyptians again, you know were in this period of discovering themselves and somewhat nationalistic and the idea of having all these foreign troops suddenly in their country and having government switched out by british imperial decree was very distasteful to the

nationalists and the religious nationalists among them and including the muslim brotherhood. so the brotherhood hated this period of reimposition of british presence in egypt. reminded them of all the things they hadn't liked from 1882 to 1922. in addition to which, during world war i, the british had issued the ball four declaration which argued for a jewish homeland in palestine and when the british conquered palestine and was awarded to the british as a mandate by the league of nations, the british opened it to jewish immigration, mainly at that time from europe and russia.

the british balfur declaration said it would not inconvenience the palestinians. so, you know, this policy was a mishmash and destined to cause all kinds of trouble which of course it did. the muslim brotherhood among all egyptian political forces was most invested in stopping this pros. and during the '30s, an kpmpl of how history looking different upon where you are in the world. during the '30s with the rise of the fascists in europe and a very anti-semitism which, you know, began with people being fired from their jobs then you had crystal meth, then the attack on jewish shops in germany, and ultimately then in

the '40s the holocaust. so from the point of view of world jew ri and the 1930s and of anybody who cared about human rights was really important that some place be found that they could escape to from these predators. and the british having made these pledges in the balfur declaration opened palestine to jewish declaration, although not steadily because there was pushback from the palestinians and it changed over time. but from the point of view of the palestinian population and their supporters like the muslim brotherhood. there were foreigners coming in, it was like from their point of view, illegal aliens and taking jobs and taking land and displacing people. and so the brotherhood not only

was upset about egypt being more or less reopened by the british, but also upset that the same british were displacing or menacing their palestinian brethren. and there were actually muslim brothers who went and fought as volunteers in 1948 when war broke out between the israelis and the palestinians. so during the '40s, the brotherhood leadership appears to have decided that this was, the situation was intolerable, they would get the british right back out of egypt and they would do so by terrorism. and by terrorism i mean a political tactic of putting pressure on people politically. by engaging in violence, including, especially violence

against non-combatants, against civilians. and in the '90s, at least this was in the u.s. federal code, this definition of terrorism. it's a non-state group. it's a group that just like appointed themselves, right. nobody elected them, they don't have any particular standing web and they decide to deploy violence to get their political project through, and the violence that they deploy is, is deployed against non-dpat tants, against civilians. so they developed training camps in the desert, the egyptian desert leading to libya was isolated and had smuggling routes and so forth. that was a great place to put a training camp. they taught young men how to deal with dynamite, thousand make a timer, detonator, all those sorts of things. how to use a rifle.

and they began then staging attacks inside egypt, inside cairo, and alexandria, and elsewhere on a british soldiers, on egyptian officials and on jewish shops because at the time, egypt had a small, but substantial jewish population and they were targeted by the brotherhood. now, at the time that this was happening, it was not known who was behind these incidents. and it was a judge in alexandria and a case came to him of a altercation between a british sailor and an egyptian and he ruled for the sailor for the foreigner, and the brotherhood like shot him dead. it wasn't known who was doing this, and it just looked like well there's a lot of crime these days. there's incidents. but the british, you know, had a

pretty good intelligence system and the british archive there began to be suspicions that there was an organized group behind this. and so then in the fall of 1948, a car or a jeep was driving erratically with two young men in it, and the police stopped them and they searched the car and the glove compartment, they found documents from the brotherhood instructing them to carry out operations. and then there was like explosives in the trunk. so this was a smoking gun, they finally realized there's something in the brotherhood that's directed this stuff. and it was called the organization within the brotherhood that was involved in the terrorist operation was called the secret apparatuses, or the secret service. and hadn't been known what was being secret at all.

but now it came to light of day. and immediately as he understood this, prime minister muhammad in egypt outlawed the muslim brotherhood. now the thing i want to emphasize here is that most muslim brethren didn't know about the secret apparatus and weren't involved in terrorism. so the brotherhood was kind of like the layers of an onion. there were people on the outside of it who were sympathizers, then people closer called helpers, and, you know, strict inherents, and people around al-banna, the inside circle and on the way inside beyond anybody's preview was then the secret apparatus. so the people on the outside, again you know they thought this is a nice organization, it makes schools and it has meetings and

it's for egyptian independence and so forth. they didn't necessarily know. and i've had students come up in my class after this lecture and say my grandparents were members of the brotherhood, they weren't terrorists. that's almost certainly true. the terrorist ring of the brotherhood was a very small and specific group of people. but it seems to be impossible that hasan al-banna didn't know about it. the organization had a dual aspect. it had a terrorist wing, but also had a civilian wing. and there are many organizations like that, you know, not an analogy here, but in the '80s, the irish republican army conducted violent operations in

england, and yet there was a shinfane was the political wing. and when negotiations began, it was be, it was with the political wing. so having a political wing and a violent wing of a movement of that sort is not unusual. and i mean to say nothing about, you know, the rights or the wrongs of the situation in northern ireland. i'm simply giving the structure of the thing, and that was true of the brotherhood as well. when he forbade the brotherhood late in the that year, a brotherhood member assassinated him, killed him. and this is a really big event. the sitting prime minister of a major middle eastern country was assassinated by this group, or at least by a member this group. and early in 1949, al-banna was

standing outside the ymca in cairo and was killed. so these events are a little shadowy, but i presume that the egyptian secret police took revenge on al-banna for the assassination by rubbing him out. then the brotherhood is driven underground, it's an underground organization. and people have to stop meeting and deny they ever had anything to doed with it and so forth. 1952, young officers in egypt made a coup against the regime. the parliamentary regime in egypt was kind of game of big landlords, they had huge haciendas, cotton farms on which the pesants work, extremely

inequal society, a few thousand families on the good land. parliament was the big game, who was in parliament was the big landlords. of a few small industrialists and so forth. it was the elite. and much of the country were pesant sharecroppers or people without any power at all. and then this top elite was financially accused of corruption, and so the young officers made a coup. they felt they were betrayed in 1949 by the egyptian government because it had sent them to fight in the israel palestine war and had given them substandard equipment because of corruption, they sold off the good stuff. some of them, and hadn't backed them properly. there was a lot of resentments in the officer core about the government. and then there was popular

resentment, about his continued ties. because this government that existed in 1952 was still the same government that had been kind of put in by the british in '42, the waft party. there were riots in cairo in winter of '52, and in fact some of the city was burned over continued british, the continued british presence in the suez canal zone because the british owned the suez canal and had been an egyptian project in the 19th century, but in 1976, the british brought it for a song because the egyptian government had become very, very deeply in depth to european bondholders and needed to sell off assets. so egyptian nationalists really minded that the suez canal was not british, it was not egyptian, that it was british, and they wanted to push the

british back out of it. and there were riots about that. so the officers made a coup in 1952. and initially these young officers you know they had no grassroots. of a particular sort. and they, they banned political parties, but they were looking around for some group and society that might, you know, be reliable and be able to mobilize people and would support them. so initially they exempted the muslim brotherhood from their ban. they didn't athrow to operate as a political party, but they kind of lifted the prohibition on it and let it operate. well, it appears to be the case that the brotherhood, some of the brotherhood took this situation not with a sense of relief that okay now we can organize again and the ban against us is dropped, but they

were ambitious, and they said well gee, the officers made a coup and came to power, maybe that's what we should do. so they in 1954, muslim brother attempted to assassinate the leader of the military revolutionary command council. this was an unfortunate event for many reasons, for the brotherhood in particular, there may have been members of the brotherhood that didn't know about this. wouldn't have been in favor of it, but the particular people who carried it out brought a great deal of -- badness on the wheel movement. moreover the attempt failed. so then the full rath of nasser

was visited object muslim brotherhood. mass arrests, trials, people were jailed and some were tortured. it was a military government, so trying to kill the leader of it and then failing resulted in extremely unfortunate consequences. in the mid-'60s, nasser releesd most of these -- released most of the prisoners from brotherhood from prison. one memoir said that immediately they started talking about how could they kill nasser. so there were members of the group who seemed not to have learned from their experiences. and one of the members who wasn't released and who was kind

of idiolog of the more extreme wing of the muslim brotherhood was qutb. he developed a theory while he was in prison of the non-muslim state. sop he said you know abde abdel nasser, that seems like a muslim name. and there were a lot of people in government that seemed to have muslim names, but then they're jailing and torturing the real muslims who are the muslim brotherhood. how could that be? how could one muslim do that to another muslim? and the easy answer is, they're not really muslims. if they're behaving that way. and he didn't bring up anything about, you know, like the brotherhood trying to kill nasser. he saw this as an unjustified

persecution of the true believers. so he developed this theory which is in arabic is called tacfir of getting people who claim to be muslims, ex-communicating them if you will. this is not, this practice is not approved of in the tradition of sunni-islam and sunni law. sunni islam developed as a big tent tradition. so there were groups in early islam that, you know, in technical islam drinking alcohol is forbidden, and there were groups who said that somebody who drank habitually was not a muslim. would get thrown out of community. but this sunni-muslim point of view on the whole by and large was that does someone claim to be a sunni muslim, from a

sunni-muslim family and do they drink? do they tipple? well then they're a bad muslim. not that they're not muslim, just bad muslims. you find among the great sunni jurorists, one after another says that takfir or declaring someone not a muslim, we don't approve of. it would have to be an extreme case and so forth. but qutb went against that sunni tradition with an extremist view where he declared almost everybody who thought they were sunni-muslims to be not really muslim. and only, you know, the people who thought like him were actually. and moreover, he had taken on a lot of id logical baggage, he uses the word vanguard, he

thinks the muslims need a vanguard just as the learnenists did. there is no longer any muslim state, there's a capitolist state, soviet, communist state in the soviet union, but no muslim state anymore, there hasn't been for hundreds of years. so that's his goal is to emulate communism to make islam like communism, a political ideology to have vanguards, and he uses explicitly marks his terminology in this regard and take the thing over and makes an islamic state and to implement a kind of fundamentalist version of muslim law, and to declare people who don't go along with this to be not muslims and then, you know, if you claim to be a muslim and you're not a muslim, among some medieval jurorist this is apostsi and to be a capital

crime. some of what he's implying is not only not muslims, but they should be killed. well, you know, the sue my muslim authority in egypt recoiled from this theory and denounced it, and even the brotherhood, the mainstream of the brotherhood leadership denounced it. nasser alleged that said dwrks utb was part of a -- qubt was part of a conspiracy and had him executed. whether he was part of a conspiracy or not, i don't know. the official egyptian newspaper descriptions of the conspiracy are not plausible, had something to do with connecting with the soviets and i don't know if extreme muslims at that time probably were very close to moscow, and i think he visited him in cairo in 1964, that didn't make any sense to me. but he was executed and he

became a marker to other extremists in egypt. sort of you could make an analogy maybe to, you know, what happened at waco in the 1990s when this cult was accused of stockpiling arms and ultimately was taken down by u.s. officials for the far, far right in the united states. they became martyrs and refer their, refer their -- there were further terrorists attacks in their name. in 1970, another change of government. nasser died in 1970 and he was succeeded by sadat. he was a man of the right. he liked free enterprise on capitalism, he thought the united states was the real superpower and wanted to dump

the soviets and go over to washington. and when he first got into power he was surrounded by leftists who would have been appalled, there was a joke that sadat, whenever he was in a taxi he would instruct the taxi driver to signal left and then turn right. and he, as nasser had in 1952 was looking around for some group and society that might support his shift of egypt away from the socialists model because, you know, something like half the economy was in government hands, and the egyptian military was supplied by the soviets. and it was, it was really, you know, a junior member of the east block in a way egypt at that point. he wanted to shift it to the right, and he needed, he needed some support in broader society. and who would be anti-communists, anti-left, might support sadat in this

enterprise would be the muslim brotherhood. so he makes up with them. he lets them mostly out of jail. he lets them have a news letter, lets them organize on college campuses, in fact he encourages them to organize on college campuses. and tries to rehabilitate the brotherhood as, you know, a right-wing political group that would support his change in policies. and to be fair, a lot of muslim brothers were tired of being in jail and tortured and being on the outs, and they welcomed this opportunity. so they weren't recognized as a political party, but they, when sadat brought back parliament in the late '70s and through the '80s they understand sadat's successor, they would contest elections for parliament under party rubrics. it would be known that somebody was a muslim brother, but they would run for parliament. and so they learned to campaign,

and they, their leadership kind of made a pact with the egyptian government. we won't commit terrorism, we won't try to kill anymore leaders, we won't blow things it up. on the one hand, and you won't persecute us and you'll let us have a few members of parliament and have a position in society. that was a bargain that sadat initiated with the muslim brother. i think on the whole by and large, it helped. oe kalgs -- occasionally the government would persecute them and put them in jail and so forth. and, but on the other hand, they had a long game. they were thinking over the next decades and they didn't want to the go back to being considered a terrorist group, so by and large, i think they, they reformed themselves and became a political and social force because they did a lot of cherokee work, a lot of help in soup kitchens and helping with

the poor and so forth and took up some of the slack that the government wasn't involved in at that point. and so i think it was a very unstable bargain in some ways, but it was, it was a bargain, and the brotherhood in my view, you know, for the next decades adhere to it. now it may be that some kind of secret apparatus continued to exist. and it may be that the inner core of the muslim brotherhood, you know, hadn't become european liberals. i don't know. these things are kind of of difficult, difficult to tell because they don't, people involved in secret activities don't usually spill them. but at the fringes of the brotherhood, as it became more active and it spread around these ideas that the real, the

good society should be what they considered to be an islamic society, women should be vailed and -- veiled and that islamic law should determine a personal status law and other laws, there were young people on campuses, in small towns who em bide these messages from the brotherhood, weren't necessarily brotherhood members, they were kind of fellow travelers, but who didn't have that long experience that the brotherhood leadership had had of coming into violent conflict with the government and trying to overthrow it and then being thrown in jail and tortured and so forth, and who were impatient. who said, why are these old guys you know sucking up top sadat when he's pursuing policies similar to muslim interest?

and so there were radicals at the fringes. and when, and there was a basic contraction in sadat's policies, because on the one hand, he unleashed the muslim right in egypt. and he did that i think mainly for economic reasons, muslim right was all about free enterprise. those guys weren't allowed to be part of the socialists sector, they wouldn't be allowed to be appointed a manager of a state factory. they had to be sberper ins and shop -- entrepreneurs and shopkeepers and so forth. and they would support sadat's attempt in the '70s to shift egypt towards a more capitalist economy, but on the level of geopolitics. he wanted to make up with the united states, and the brotherhood didn't like the united states. and sadat realized he had to have a peace treaty with israel. and there was no group in egyptian society that hated

israel more than most of the muslim brothers. in fact, morrissy who later became president in 2012 got his start in political organizing in the delta in rural egypt as a member, a group that had anti-zionist in its name. the grass roots organization of the brotherhoods very pro-palestinian and anti-israel. so sadat when he made peace with israel, he angered this fringe. not of the brotherhood itself maybe, but of groups in its or by the. -- orbit. one of the groups that merged in the '70s and became tabloid

fauder in egypt and they withdraw from society. this name was not their own, it was given by the egyptian press, but, you know, they would attract young people and marry them off to other members without their parents knowing about it or their permission. they would discourage them from contacting their families and they would, some of them would go abroad and work and send back remittances, and the others would like live in furnished apartments, it was kind of a come unikind of thing -- commune kind of thing. they became much more sinister was the egyptian islamic jihad which was two separate groups but over time they cooperated with each other, which also founded in the 1970s and 1977, and i was in cairo at the time,

and i remember this 80 members were arrested with explosives. this is a flashback to 1948, right? then one of their members, wrote a pamphlet about the lapse duty because there were five pillars of islam, praying, and fasting, and so forth, he said there's a sixth pillar that's been neglected which is jihad. which is fighting what he considered holy war. and i mean this is not again, it's not the sunni tradition. first of all, jihad in that sense is not even found in the koran. it means fighting for it. it's a later development, this idea of jihad, just as crew saids was a later development in christianity. not in the new testament. and, so that's one. second of all, not only is it

not a pillar, but in classicalist islamic law there are two kind of religious duties on an individual. there are individual duties, so like prayer, everybody has to pray, that's an individual duty. you can't escape it. you can't say well my friend prayed so i don't have to, it's an individual duty. then there are collective duties. there are things that the muslim community has to get done that somebody has to do. but not every single individual would necessarily be involved in that. and defending the community because most, most theorizing about jihad and holy war and so forth, ultimately views it as defensive in character, although there were medieval thinkers who promoted a kind of aggressive view of it. but in any case, defending the muslim community was a collective duty, and who would

carry it out would be determined by the leaders of the community. so this vigilanteism or this idea that some hydroponics engineer in some small town in egypt could wake up the in the morning and declare jihad on europe is not the sunni legal tradition. that's weird. that's cult-like. and would be rejected by, you know, the seminary, the great center of muslim law and learning. so this idea that farik had was, and the, one of the chief egyptian religious authorities wrote a reputation of him in this regard. well the egyptian islamic jihad formed a 12-man council, tobacco infiltrated the military, it took a leaf from the book because the revolutionary command council in 1952 were

young officers, former cadets. so obviously if you wanted power in egypt, one of the ways to get it would be infiltrate the officer core and make a coup. they tried to do that and had some success in getting some military men on their side. one of the eij leaders was zumur who wasn't dressed like that then, he was a physician in the upscale neighborhood in cairo. and he was from a very prominent, elite family. he was the first elite egyptian really to throw in with muslim extremism in the late 20th century. mid-20th century. he, another group and sadat encouraged these muslim groupings on college campuses. and they gradually developed

with an independent point of view, and some of them turned towards extremists ideas and they idolize d the upper egypt man who had radical tendencies and who was a recognized cleric. and he encouraged them in a radical direction. . '79 you had revolution in iran which character ieds itself as islamic revolution and the muslim brotherhood tradition in egypt really, really does not like shiite islam. it wouldn't approve of most of what happened in iran, but the idea that a muslim movement could take over the country and declare an islamic republic gave a lot of hope and, and heart to the sunni radicals in egypt. so in 1981, some of these radical fringe movements get

together and decide to take out sadat. to punish him for cozying up to the united states and making peace with israel and in hopes that then there'll be a revolution, the people will come to the streets and egypt will turn into an islamic republic like iran. and actually the evidence is that anwar, that he was cool to this project. he didn't think that egypt was necessarily in a revolutionary moment, but the more hot headed members of the group prevailed and sadat was reviewing, was in a military review, he was in the stands, and the tanks and artillery and trucks were going by, as one of the trucks went by, one of these egyptian islamic jihad members who was in the military jumped out of the back and sprayed the review stand with machine gunfire, killed sadat, wounded a lot of

other people, and hit sadat's vice president in the hand. so again, the experiment of letting political islam operate in hopes that it'll function something pliek christian democracy in germany you know that this project of trying to get it to become a responsible member of liberal society crashed and burned. and to be fair is wasn't because of the leadership of the muslim brotherhood which i maintain kept their bargain in this period, but on the fringes of the brotherhood, these other radical groups caused the policy to crash and burn. and the way that mubarak's government, because he is the successor in 1981 dealt with

this incident, i think caused a lot of trouble in the aftermath because, you know, holding terrorists, if you're the government is always chancy. because the other terrorists minded that you're holding their friends and that encourages them to do more terrorism. so the best thing is if somehow you could get them away, out of the country maybe. and so the egyptian government let most of these guys go after a while. with the understanding, i think, that they had to go fight the soviets in afghanistan. so you know the egyptian authority said look, you guys seem to like jihad a lot. you called anwar sadat, you want to fight, we got a fight for you over here, godless communists are running over a muslim country, go make yourselves useful.

and that's really the origins i think of al qaeda in some ways that the egyptian intelligence and, for its own reasons wanted to get rid of people and sent them there. you begin to get a core of arab fighters in afghanistan who collate later under osama bin laden into al qaeda. the blindshake got a visa to the united states, i hope whoever gave him that visa is not in the government anymore. i don't have any evidence that they were ever fired. charged with tried to kill anwar sadat wants to visit the sights in new jersey. sure. come. that's weird. and there's some back story here that i don't know. but in any case, he comes to new york and surprise, becomes the

head of a radical mosque in new jersey and attracts hodheaded radicals around him and maybe reaches out to the newly formed al qaeda and the early '90s and all of the sudden the world trade center has this explosion in its basement. these guys were amateurs thankfully so that they didn't realize blowing up a small truck bomb in the basement of the world trade center would produce a lot of smoke, but it didn't actually do really bad structural damage to the world trade center which was very well >> test. >> test. >> test. on how we could get bombs on planes. we wanted to fly a plane into brooklyn. these guys are very anti-semimettic. and they thought of new york as

a jewish place, they wanted to attack, we wanted to fly a plane into the cia building in langley, he said that we could never figure out how to get the bombs on the planes. so not a rocket scientist. later on in the '90s, al qaeda managed to recruit some engineers who knew what the shaik did not know is that planes don't need to have bombs put on them, they are bombs. so out muslim, the islamic grouping as they called themselves involved a covenant of islamic action, violent reestablishment of the caliphate, complete rejection of anything that looks like secular law. and they continued to carry out violent attacks in egypt all through the 1980s and '90s.

as i said, often these guys when they were arrested in imprisoned in egypt would be let out on grounds that they leave the country and go to fight in afghanistan. and he was among those who had been imprisoned and who went to fight. he actually set up medical clin toik treat the wounded, the freedom fighters who were fighting the soviet occupation. and he later became involved with the saudi billionaire osama bin laden. in the '90s, you had this steady stacato set of attacks in egypt. i remember one shootout in a restaurant. the radicals, the muslim radicals in egypt understood a

lot of money came into the egyptian government from tourism, so they wanted to destroy tourism. so they would shoot tourists. typically would succeed in keeping a lot of people away. in 1995, mubarak went to want ethiopia and they tried to assassinate him there and failed. in 1997, these guys jumped the shark in egypt because they, they killed tourists, just shot them down at luxor who had come on a tourist bus, and luxor is one of the major tourists destinations in egypt. and the egyptian public really minded this. you know, a lot of times in the united states there's this image of muslims as inherently radical or violent or whatever which has grown up, especially it has its roots in the crew saids, but it

has become more vur lant in the periods since september 11th and there are billionaires who have foundations that kind of promote this, what is called islamphobia. most muslims are not violent and, in europe most terrorism nowadays in the past few years has come out of the european left or far right than it has out of muslim groups in europe, even though there are a lot in europe. so it's just not true that most muslims have this or yenation. and the -- orientation. and the egyptian public in general really sweets, kind-hearted people that really value guests and they'll give you the shirt off their backs. you have to be careful when you're in egypt, not so say you really like something because they'll want to give it to you. and so the idea that these guys were killing their guests really wounded a lot of egyptians. and people in luxor ran to the

hospitals to give blood. and after that, i think recruitment for these groups was over with. and they went into very radical decline. and then the government, you know, arrested something like 30,000 people for thought crimes. . somebody wore a beard and looked like they might some day think well of the islamic grouping or the egyptian islamic jihad. the government would put them in jail. and put all the leadership of the islamic grouping in jail, and as a result, the leadership after a few years in jail understood they were going to be there the rest of their lives and their movement was over. they had no further success in rerecruitment. and so then they did repentence. they said we were wrong. the korun forbids this kind of

violence. it's basically an document that only allows violence under certain rare conditions, self-defense and so forth. and we just, our interpretation was just in the '90s and '80s, we were like wild men. we were on something and we were wrong. and so they issued this series of pamphlets which had a big impact on the street in egypt. so while i think radicalism declined in the nile valley and mainstream egypt, out in the mail strom of afghanistan, it thrived. and it was no accident that when the u.s. was hit, it was hit from afghanistan and not from egypt where things were going in an altogether different direction, and in fact, opinion polling seems to show there's a gradual -- not by any means

majority but significant move in the younger generations of egyptians less religious secularism. that's my story of muslim extremism i would characterize it as in modern egypt and the way it fed into al qaeda. we'll talk about how it fed into al qaeda itself. let me open into other questions. y yes, michelle. give me a few seconds to get you the mic. >> do you think the current aleg a legations that the muslim brotherhood in egypt has been overrun by al qaeda is true? >> well, i don't think it's true that the muslim brothers in egypt, between adherence and

supporters -- you're talking about probably 20% of the population at thinks well or had thought well of the organization. i don't think those people are terrorists. that's crazy. whether there was a small clique at the top of the organization which still operated like the secret apparatus and behind the scenes was looking up with muslim radicals, this is what the military was alleging. it doesn't seem plausible to me but i don't know. we don't have the documents. apparently, the egyptian military bugged mohammed morsi's offices. it may well be as the trial proceeds that transcripts will come out which are somehow damming of him in this regard.

i don't know. this is the allegations. on the surface it doesn't seem plausible to me. certainly i think the steps that the military has taken are not warranted against rank and file of the muslim morsi was run in a very closed way and it did have secret policies and we'll just have to see if any proof comes out of these accusations. >> why do you think more radical schools of thought in islamic i guess jurisprudence of, you know, how -- why did that gain so much popularity as opposed to more liberal or less hard-line elements of islamic thought. >> so the question is why the more radical understanding of islam and ex-communication practices, vig