The Honorable Robert Wilkie
November 10, 2025
TRANSCRIPT
Thank you all very much. It goes without saying that it is an honor to be here. I got my start in politics with one of the giants of the American conservative movement, Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina, and he had three B’s when it came to public speaking: be bold, be brief, and be gone. So I will try to fulfill his mandate.
I am not a Bale College don. I am not a theologian. I am a recovering politician. But I am a partisan of that civilizational continuum that began in Judea 3,000 years ago and moved to Athens, to Rome, to London, and finally across the oceans to the young American colossus.
In 1942, the chief of staff of the United States Army, General George C. Marshall, asked the great Hollywood film director Frank Capra to produce a series of films for the American people entitled Why We Fight, to remind the American people why it was in their heritage to fight monstrous tyrannies across the globe. In a country of 140 million people, two-thirds of Americans saw those films. One of the narrators was a young 30-year-old captain of cavalry named Ronald Reagan.
I think here we need to discuss the why. It begs the question that to defend an idea that began in the Judean desert, the idea of the West, does the West even understand what the West is? And how can one defend a civilization kinetically if it cannot defend it rhetorically?
Donald Trump said it pretty simply in a speech that he gave in Warsaw in 2017 when he said that the defense of the West ultimately rests not only on the means but also the will of its people to prevail. The fundamental question of our time is whether the West has the will to survive.
Sitting here, we are the heirs of Thucydides and Cicero and Homer, Constantine, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, Liszt, Burke, and Jefferson. The late American historian David McCullough noted that reverence for our past reinforces not only what we believe in, but what we stand for and what we ought to be willing to stand up for. Because indifference to the history of the West is not just ignorant, it is rude.
As I mentioned, ours is a 3,000-year expression of memory, what the great G.K. Chesterton called the democracy of the dead that refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking about.
We are now told with unrestricted and unrestrained fury to reject that tether to the past. We are surrendering our posterity to what Professor James Hankins of Harvard calls the devouring machine of ignorance and spite that in recent years has been cutting off the people of the West from their own history and making them ashamed of it.
We have seen spread through our schools and institutions a malicious form of humility indistinguishable from self-hatred. This is the humility that humiliates, that seeks to blind Westerners to their magnificent traditions and rub their noses like misbehaving dogs in their worst offenses.
Nowhere is this intersectional madness more apparent than in the case of Israel. When the left sees Israel, it sees critical race theory. The left wing of the American Democratic Party manifests an all-encompassing woke mindset that collapses individuals and events into a reductive binary of oppressor and oppressed. The media ignore the oldest hatred while editorialists preach a moral relativism between the Hamas death cult murdering Jews and Israel defending and protecting innocent lives.
As the Jewish people rose in response to the bloodiest day since 1945, the world’s oldest hatred reared its head in places once thought unimaginable.
I am a son of the city of New Orleans, the most bizarre and eclectic city in the United States. It is where our only native art form, jazz, was born. It is where our greatest writers were either born or came to: Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Tennessee Williams. It was also the first city in the United States where Jews were fully integrated into all levels of American society, to the point that when Benjamin Disraeli was beginning his climb up the greasy pole in Westminster, New Orleans had already sent a Jew to the United States Senate in the late 1800s and early 20th century.
When the Ivy League schools were issuing quotas prohibiting the admission of Jews to their schools, two universities in New Orleans, Tulane and my Jesuit university of Loyola, opened their doors to Jews from all over the country. Today, Tulane’s population is 40% Jewish.
I never thought in my lifetime I would see Jews attacked on the streets of my hometown and synagogues desecrated. These are attacks on all of us. Western identity and America’s foundation as the defender of liberty is uniquely tied to the people of Israel.
The same woke voices who decry the resilience of the Jewish people have the United States in their sight. The ancient hatred simmers here in Europe. Jews in Europe are fleeing violence to the safety of the Israeli lifeboat. The exodus was starting in the United Kingdom with the prospect of the Marxist anti-Semite Jeremy Corbyn being given the keys to 10 Downing Street. It is now a torrent as police tell Jews to take off their yarmulkes in public lest that offend the Islamists.
The city council of England’s second largest city, Birmingham, last week ordered Aston Villa Football Club not to admit Jews to their football grounds for a Europa League match with Maccabi Tel Aviv because the Jews caused trouble. There are now as many Sharia courts in Birmingham as there are common law courts. There are more protests against Hamas in the streets of Gaza than there are in the city of London.
If Israel did not exist, the United Nations would go out of business. UNRWA is an active agent of Hamas. Forty percent of the General Assembly resolutions of the last decade have been about Israel. Israel is the only permanent agenda item on the docket of the UN Human Rights Council. It is only when Jews are involved in conflict that the UN takes notice.
That Turtle Bay is now aided in this obscenity by the leaders of Western European democracy is a further indictment of how far our civilization has descended.
In towns and campuses across America, Jews have been bullied and assaulted. But this week, 800 rabbis in America finally said what all of us know about the dangerous Democratic candidate for mayor of New York, Zohran Mamdani, and what he means to the safety of Jews everywhere. The impact of his victory will echo beyond the five boroughs of the city of New York.
Armed with the power of identity politics and emboldened by a progressive media enslaved by identity and intersectionality, Mamdani has normalized anti-Zionism, using it as a glue to bring together an otherwise unwieldy coalition. By propagating lies about Israel, he is creating ever more fertile ground for anti-Semitism to survive. He is not only anti-Semitic, he is anti-American.
In 1790, George Washington heralded a new day in the United States when he wrote a letter to the Touro Synagogue in Newport, Rhode Island. He said, “It is now no more that toleration is spoken of as if it were the indulgence of one class of people that another enjoy their basic natural rights. The United States gives to bigotry no sanction, to persecution no assistance. May the children of the stock of Abraham who dwell in this land continue to merit and enjoy the goodwill of each inhabitant while everyone shall sit in safety under his own vine and fig tree and there shall be none to make him afraid.”
Washington preached revolutionary acceptance.
The late Charles Krauthammer argued that to Washington, America was the new Jerusalem, where peoples of the world could converge in peace, worship, and freedom and enjoy the greatest of uncharted human rights, the right to be left alone.
Harry Truman took up Washington’s charge when he said that the United States itself was built on the foundations erected by the people of Israel, saying that the fundamental basis of America’s law was given to Moses on the mount. The fundamental basis of our Bill of Rights comes from the teachings that we get from Exodus, Isaiah, and St. Paul.
Sadly, the events across our campuses and now in the voting booths of New York show even America has come a long way since William Bradford stepped off the Mayflower quoting Jeremiah, “Come, let us declare in Zion the word of God.”
The late Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Lord Jonathan Sacks, had it right. The Jewish people in its very being constitutes a living protest against the world of hatred, violence, and war. Anti-Semitism is the godfather of racism and the pathway to tyranny. If you do not believe me, visit the courtyard of the great synagogue on Dohány Street and stand before that weeping tree and ponder the horrors of the Nazis, the Arrow Cross, and the Communists.
The late Christopher Hitchens reminded us that anti-Semitism is the common enemy of humanity and Western man. For those reasons, it must be fought against with every ounce of our being, particularly in its most virulent form, Islamic jihadism.
Golda Meir warned us that when someone tells you over and over again he wants to kill you, believe him. We had better believe the mullahs and the Gaza-obsessed Marxists. It is on Europe as much as the United States to rediscover our historic virtues and fulfill them or betray 3,000 years of human progress.
So who is in charge of the clattering train? The axles creak and the couplings strain, for the pace is hot and the points are near and sleep hath deadened the driver’s ear and signals flash through the night in vain because death is in charge of the clattering train. So recited Winston Churchill as the tide of appeasement overwhelmed the traditional good sense of the British people while Hitler rearmed and swallowed Central Europe piece by piece.
When the reckoning was finally tallied, over 40 million were dead, and the great man lamented, “There never was a war more easy to stop than that which has just wrecked what was left of the world from the previous struggle. The malice of the wicked was reinforced by the weakness of the virtuous.”
We have reached that point again. We still have time to stave off disaster by confronting the malice of the wicked before someone utters the most lamentable words in the English language: too late.
Thank you all very much, and God bless you.