Two years ago, July 29, 2010, former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich delivered a singularly astute and courageous address.  Reactions to that speech across the political spectrum, whether immediate or delayed, illustrated the contemporary equivalent of what the greatest historian of Soviet Communist totalitarianism, Robert Conquest, appositely characterized as "mindslaughter" -- a brilliantly evocative term for delusive Western apologetics regarding the ideology of Communism and the tangible horrors its Communist votaries inflicted.

What did Newt Gingrich have the temerity to discuss?  In defiance of our era's most rigidly enforced cultural relativist taboo, Mr. Gingrich provided an irrefragably accurate if blunt characterization of the existential threat posed by Islam's living, self-professed mission: to impose sharia, its totalitarian religio-political "law," globally.

With vanishingly rare intellectual honesty and resolve, Gingrich described how normative sharia -- antithetical to bedrock Western legal principles -- by "divine," immutable diktat, rejects freedom of conscience, while sanctioning violent jihadism, absurd, misogynistic "rules of evidence" (four male witnesses for rape), barbarous punishments (stoning for adultery), and polygamy:

Sharia in its natural form has principles and punishments totally abhorrent to the Western world, and the underlying basic belief which is that law comes directly from God and is therefore imposed upon humans and no human can change the law without it being an act of apostasy is a fundamental violation of a tradition in the Western system which goes back to Rome, Athens, and Jerusalem and which has evolved in giving us freedom across the planet on a scale we can hardly imagine and which is now directly threatened by those who would impose it.

Moreover, Gingrich warned about efforts -- deliberate, or unwitting -- to represent sharia as a benign system:

So let me also be quite clear that the rules are radical and horrific. I think again it's fascinating that even when people go out and do polling and they say to, for example, Muslims in general, do you believe in Sharia, they don't then explain what Sharia is. Sharia becomes like would you like to be a Rotarian and it sounds okay.

Gingrich's unflinching portrayal of the existential threat sharia represents -- whether or not this totalitarian system is imposed by violent or nonviolent means -- was accompanied by a clarion call for concrete measures to oppose any sharia encroachment on the U.S. legal code:

Stealth jihadis use political, cultural, societal, religious, intellectual tools; violent jihadis use violence. But in fact they're both engaged in jihad and they're both seeking to impose the same end state which is to replace Western civilization with a [radical] imposition of Sharia.

The fight against Sharia and the madrassas in mosques which teach hatred and fanaticism is the heart of the enemy movement from which the terrorists spring forth. It's time we had a national debate on this. One of the things I'm going to suggest today is a federal law which says no court anywhere in the United States under any circumstance is allowed to consider Sharia as a replacement for American law.

Reminiscent of Conquest's earlier assessment of leftist apologists for Communism -- and anticipating reactions to his own speech, albeit from "see no sharia" cultural relativists not confined to the left -- Gingrich also wondered:

How we don't have some kind of movement in this country on the left that understands that Sharia is a direct mortal threat to virtually every value that the left has is really one of the most interesting historical questions and will someday lead to many dissertations being written.

How appropriate, then, that late last evening (7/29/12), Politico posted New Gingrich's passionate and articulate defense of Michele Bachmann and the four other intrepid House representatives -- Gohmert  Franks, Westmoreland, and Rooney -- demanding serious, formal congressional investigation of the overall extent of Muslim Brotherhood influence operations.

After enumerating salient examples that validate the concerns of Representatives Bachmann, et al. -- "the strange case" of Pentagon adviser and jihadist Louay Safi, the "civilizational jihad" motivations, and vast network of Muslim Brotherhood connections to mainstream U.S. Muslim organizations unearthed in the Holy Land Foundation trial, as well as the foundational charters of Muslim Brotherhood (MB) chapter member Hamas and of the MB itself -- Gingrich concludes, appositely:

The Muslim Brotherhood is a serious worldwide organization dedicated to a future most Americans would find appalling. Seeking to understand its reach and its impact on the U.S. government is a legitimate, indeed essential, part of our national security process.

The National Security Five were doing their duty in asking difficult questions designed to make America safer. Their critics represent the kind of willful blindness that increasingly puts America at risk. If we do not want a book to describe "Why Washington Slept," we will have to encourage elected officials to follow the advice of a later Kennedy book and exhibit "Profiles in Courage."

Bachmann, Franks, Gohmert, Rooney and Westmoreland are showing a lot more courage than the defenders of timidity, complicity and passivity.

Bravo, Newt!