President Bush has called the fight against radical Islam “the decisive ideological struggle of our time.” Those militants who hold to this worldview seek to bring about global submission to Allah through the power of state enforced Sharia law. These laws would dictate how everyone will worship, dress and conduct their daily lives and relegate women to all but non-citizen status, all at the threat of imprisonment, dismemberment or death for failure to comply. To accomplish this goal, the Jihadists realize that they must destroy the United States, Israel and any other nation with the military might and will to stand up and say we will not live this way. In short, their goal is to establish a worldwide tyranny.

The United States was born out of resistance to tyranny; and has stood against it many times since. At the founding, it was the King and the British Parliament who went beyond the rightful boundaries of governmental power by proclaiming that they had the authority to pass laws “in all cases whatsoever.” The Founders, in the Declaration of Independence, stated that only God held such power and by the “laws of nature and Nature’s God” which He established when He created the earth and man, there are certain boundaries beyond which governments or individuals cannot rightfully go in treating their fellow man. These laws can be discerned both through reason (“the laws of nature”) and found in part in the Christian scriptures (“the laws of Nature’s God,” which include the Ten Commandments). Based on these beliefs, they proclaimed “We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. To secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed…” When the King and Parliament usurped them by imprisoning citizens, and taking their property and even burning their towns in reprisal for failing to abide by unjust laws, the colonists had the right, indeed the responsibility to oppose it or alter or even replace it, which of course they did.

Abraham Lincoln in his time saw a tyrannical spirit at work within the borders of the United States in the form of government sanctioned slavery. In 1858, he ran against Illinois Senator Stephen Douglas for his office opposing the senator’s view that slavery should be permitted into the new territories and states. Douglas held that the white people of new states coming into the union should be able to decide whether their state would be slave or free. In a debate with Douglas, Lincoln said, “No matter in what shape it comes, whether from the mouth of a king who seeks to bestride the people of his own nation and live by the fruit of their labor, or from one race of man as an apology for enslaving another race, it is the same tyrannical principle.” Lincoln’s answer was for America to live up to its founding vision and not allow slavery into the territories and hence the newly admitted states. In another fiery campaign speech, Lincoln exhorted his audience that if the Declaration is true in stating that all are created equal, then there can be no exceptions. “If one says it does not mean negro, why not another say it does not mean some other man. If the Declaration is not truth, let us get the statute book, in which we find it and tear it out! Who is so bold to do it! If it is not true let us tear it out! People in his audience cried “No, no.” “Let us stick to it then.” People cheered. “Let us stand firmly by it then.” One could just as easily substitute “race” or “negro” in Lincoln’s words with “religion” to see how the Jihadists seek to use of religion to justify subjugating others.

Eighty years later the threat of tyranny came again from outside the United States. President Franklin Roosevelt watched with increasing concern the actions of Nazi Germany, and Fascists Italy and Japan because of the ideologies for which they stood and their stated goal of world domination. The fruits of these governments began to manifest themselves in the forms of concentration camps, and mass murders and rapes of the civilian populations of those lands they conquered. A week after the Japanese struck Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt addressed the largest radio audience in history to date as part of a broadcast entitled We Hold These Truths. He said now that we were in this war, we intended to stay in it until the world was once again safe for those who believed in the principles found in the Declaration and the Constitution to live free. He said that, “The issue of our time, the issue of the war in which we are engaged, is the issue forced upon the decent, self-respecting peoples of the earth by the aggressive dogmas of this attempted revival of barbarism; this proposed return to tyranny ...It is an attempt which could succeed only if those who have inherited the gift of liberty had lost the manhood to preserve it…”