N.H. Debate: The GOP Field

Romney: I'd read their writings. I'd read what they write to one another, and that's why when someone like Sayyid Qutb lays out the philosophy of radical jihadism and says we want to kill Anwar Sadat – when there's the assassination of Anwar Sadat, it has nothing to do with us.

Qutb was a prominent Islamic writer and intellectual whose ideas, including the concept of jihad, are cited as an early influence on modern Islamic extremism. But his main antagonist was the government of Gamal Abdul Nasser, Sadat's predecessor. Qutb was executed in 1966, four years before Sadat became president and 15 years before his assassination. Huckabee correctly noted this fact later in the exchange.

And That's Not All...
We have other quibbles, some of them old. For instance, when Giuliani said yet again that New York "was not a sanctuary city" when he was mayor, we reminisced about our article from less than a month ago, in which we said that in a Congressional Research Service report, New York's policies were found to be similar to those of other sanctuary cities, including those that used that very term.

Finally, we were curious about Romney's statement that he'd be "honest" with the American people and tell them that "we can't become energy independent in 10 years." He's right, of course. In fact, the Energy Information Administration projects that even in 2030 the net imported share of energy used in the U.S. will be about 29 percent, just 1 percentage point lower than the share in 2006. But we just wonder what's led Romney down the path of realism here, when just last week he was telling us in an ad that "in the next 10 years, we'll see more progress, more change than the world has seen in the last 10 centuries." Not in the energy area, evidently.

With Brooks Jackson, Justin Bank, Jess Henig, Emi Kolawole, Joe Miller and Lori Robertson

Reprinted with permission of Factcheck.org
 
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