David Horowitz - senior fellow/director, Project for Civil Justice Reform and director, Project for International Religious Liberty, Hudson Institute; former senior fellow, Manhattan Institute; general counsel, Office of Management and Budget, former associate professor of law.

 There are many reasons why I, a Jew, am engaged in the most important and fulfilling work I anticipate doing over the course of my lifetime. That work is helping to blow the trumpet and energize my fellow Americans about the plight of persecuted Christians around the world.

I think I've been able to be particularly helpful, as a Jew, in this effort, now a prairie fire and soon to redefine our human rights and foreign policy here in the United States.

First, as a Jew, I was free of all the internecine squabbles between denominations and in-groups -- [Laughter]

That's real war, I've discovered, looking at those groups. [Laughter]

Secondly, my people are a lot closer to the ovens of Auschwitz than yours are to the Roman Forum. We know, when we see the signs about us, what the coming storm is about. We know what those people are enduring and are about to endure. And we know that there are no foxholes from those persecutions for anyone else.

And finally, being bound by the Old Testament, I feel myself under no obligation to love the murderers and thugs out there --

[Laughter] -- who are engaged in torture and rape and mass resettlement and starvation, enslavement, crucifixion.

We're not talking about small numbers, either, because we are witnessing in the world today the largest explosion in the history of Christianity. Twenty years ago, the paradigm Christian would be probably a white, Western male. There are now more Chinese praying on any given Sunday -- illegally -- than in all of Western Europe. Christianity has become the most widespread, and if records were accurately kept, the largest faith in the world. Its explosive growth threatens the thugs and tyrants who want to keep the Third World in the Dark Ages.

As Christians become the scapegoats of choice, I, as a Jew, understand that. That was the role that my people played over much of European history.

You are the battlegrounds on which the war for the 21st century is to be fought -- and how ironic, the common notion of, "Oh, those Christians" -- you see it in the media. "Those polyester bigots, those people who believe in the past." You, your faith, tested every day in the real battlegrounds, are the greatest single force for modernity in those parts of the world whose future is not yet defined.

So we must, all of us, speak for such people if we would call ourselves decent. One Holocaust in a lifetime is, I think, the maximum we are permitted to sit out. After that, you're on the hook. And all of us are on the hook. In fighting for those people, we do right. At the same time, lots of revolutions -- good revolutions -- come in the wake of our decent compassion for those lambs living in gulags of faith around the world.

The campaign in the United States is exploding. And you ain't seen nothing yet, by the way. It is fast becoming a signature issue of the American Christian community. It is becoming an issue of deep concern to the Jewish community. It is becoming an issue in which a reluctant State Department and a reluctant human rights establishment is coming, like it or not, to be more and more engaged.

It is also a means by which Christianity itself, and Christians, are becoming redefined in America. The caricature of Christians, which establishment elites have so powerfully used for so long to intimidate so many of you to make you feel defensive, that big lie, is being shattered as well. We are defining, and redefining, the very nature of the world in which our children will live in the 21st century.

As I say, we first save lives. The scholar Paul Marshall estimates that about 400 million Christians around the world today live in conditions which subject them to real discrimination, but that no fewer than 225 million Christians live under conditions which subject them to increasing measures of persecution, torture, rape, assassination, murder, starvation and enslavement.

In the Sudan, you can buy a Christian, a black Christian kid, often stolen from the parents, for the price of a cow in open air markets in that country.

That's the condition of 225 million people.

Hero friends of mine tried to keep the flame flickering with nobody listening for all those years. The good news is, it's beginning to sear our consciences here in America. We're going to do something about it. All of the elements are in place for us to make some real history.

Sometimes discussing how the world will be redefined, I talk to my Christian friends. They say, "But, gee, you know, we can't get involved in the campaign just for Christian victims. Won't it seem selfish for us to do it? Will it be put down as one of those Christian Right things, and nobody will listen?"

And I tell them that the persecution of Christians is growing. I think it's the largest human rights problem in the world today. That's reason enough. That oceans of ink get spilled to define all the other human rights problems.

Take Bosnia. There the world is "right in its place," because the Christian community is said to be doing the bad things, the ethnic cleansing. So we all know about that.

But the story doesn't seem right, and it hasn't been told to many media elites, when Christians are the victims. So I say to my Christian friends, "You've got to be out there to tell a story that no one else knows, to redress the balance."

I say to them, "You weren't embarrassed, and it didn't seem wrong, to engage with the passion you did in the campaign against Soviet anti-Semitism, where your Christian decency was essential to letting my people go, in a battle which nobody thought could be won. But it was spectacularly won, in the days when the Soviet Union seemed ten feet tall."

This is part of the lesson of the campaign against Soviet anti-Semitism, and this is what I, as a Jew, do understand. Don't be nervous, if you think it's somehow wrong just to speak on behalf of your own. Because there are others whose fates hang in the balance.

One of the great facts of our effort, not surprising when you think of it, is that the most poignant expressions of support we have received in this undertaking have come from moderate Muslims. They've said to us, "There's a battle going on for the soul of Islam between us and the off-with-your-heads, infantile thugs, the anti-Western, the anti-intellectual, the intolerant Ayatollah Khoumeinis, who are seeking to seize control of our faith, which, over much of its history was as hospitable to strangers as Judaism and Christianity. Don't let the loud, radical voices speak for Islam. Stop the thugs from burning churches. Then the thugs shrink from ten feet tall to two feet tall, and we have hope."

 What thugs do when they persecute lambs, is first pick on the people who threaten them most. And for them, that's Christian communities. There's a great line in the Handel oratorio, "Solomon," where our common Judeo-Christian faith is spoken of as one that seeks love, unbought by price or fear.

Think of it. Your thug relies on bribes and threats in order to stay in power. And here's a community answerable to higher powers, beyond the reach of your bribes and threats. You've got to stamp them out.

The Chinese understand that. There's a line from the official newspaper of China, where the newspaper looked at what happened in Eastern Europe. It noted how the walls came down and said that the churches were at the heart of it. "We can't allow that to happen here," said the newspaper. "We must strangle the baby while it is still in the manger."

They're busily trying to do precisely that.

So the thugs must seek out people of faith to threaten them, always. But regarding the moderate Muslims and everybody else they want to enslave and intimidate, they don't have to lift a finger if we are silent. They say, "Look at us. We're burning down churches. We're pulling fingernails out of pastors. We're engaged in the persecution of Christians, and the West is quiet. What do you think the West is going to say when we turn to you?"

That's the lesson of the campaign against Soviet anti-Semitism. When those big, powerful Communists couldn't even beat up a bunch of Jews, why, all sorts of cracks began to develop in the walls that they had tried to build around churches and political dissidents.

Similarly, in this great battle for the soul of Islam, if we stop the thugs from burning down the churches, we offer hope to the silent whom we have patronized, to the people who are under the thumb. All will take hope from your efforts on behalf of your own people. And that is how this campaign will alter the very nature of the world, that world which is struggling to define itself as we enter the 21st century.

Another lie gets shattered as well, the lie about who Christians are.

Some say the church is asleep. I don't entirely share that view because part of the big lie I heard as I came on the scene was, "Oh, those people in the pews in America, they don't care about anything past the point of their noses. We can't blow a trumpet, because if we do, there will be no armies marching behind us. Then we'll really be exposed, and the persecution will get worse."

I knew differently. I know differently. I know that the common decency of this country is rooted in its faith, in its Christian faith.

I know that decency is why I'm not a lampshade. And I know that if the story were told, the troops would be more than there. They'd be saying, "How come you didn't tell it to us more powerfully earlier."

That's what's happening around this country. Finally, people are having the courage to really broadcast the message, the facts some have known and tried to tell in the past.

But in the process, do we define what faith is? We shatter the lies, the caricatures, of who Christians are in this country.

How can you be some retrograde, polyester bigot when your people are the scapegoats of choice for shrewd people who know that your faith is the only thing, the principal thing, that stands between them and continued power?

How can Christians be called reactionaries, living in the past, when your people are the battlegrounds on which the fight for the future is being fought? When your people around the world are the greatest forces for modernity within it?

In this campaign, we are separating the blind from the bigots about who Christians are and what Christianity is. It is, of course, true that Christianity, or any faith, is not a magic pill which, when taken, makes evil men good.

Of course, I know that. As a kid, as a Jew, I was beaten up by kids who would say, "You killed our Christ." My grandfather told stories of being in cellars in Poland during Easter Sunday pogroms.

No faith makes men perfect. But our common faith is the faith that makes evil men pay homage to good, that shapes and changes them.

The real story of Christianity is not the people burnt at the stakes that the elites want to make it. It's that it is the single most powerful element that created the basis for the democracy and the political freedoms we now enjoy.

And that story is learned as we think of and work for those vulnerable lambs heretofore silent and now under mounting persecution around the world.

As you move on this issue, as we move on this issue, the fate of persecuted Christians becomes a signature issue, a basis for action by the American Christian community. An essential element of what we demand of our elected officials.

You will find that you are not put down, but that you are followed. You will find the people who are blind to who you are separating themselves from the bigots, who know who you are but always want to keep you down.

And you will find those blind with eyes opened, thanking you, thanking your people and thanking your faith for what it means to us all -- even those who may not share it.

That's the real history of the West. The suffering of those people will help redefine our history, or at least bring it to light in the eyes of many of us who have not seen it or been taught it.

There is a prairie fire going on, and miracles are happening. About a year or so ago, the National Association of Evangelicals issued that statement of conscience which was the first step, if you really want to believe in miracles. And that's what this campaign is. That statement was endorsed, not only by the Southern Baptist Convention, but by the Presbyterian and Episcopal churches. How's that for a miracle?

 There are books coming out. I recommend one in particular to each of you. Their Blood Cries Out by the great scholar Paul Marshall. An absolutely towering book.

If 500,000 copies of this book are sold, Ernie Istook is not going to have much problem persuading his colleagues in Congress to take an interest in this issue. They'll know that your people know what's going on and that they're not going to let Ernie Istook's colleagues remain silent and indifferent on this.

Get this book. Spread it, and others like it.

Lincoln called "Uncle Tom's Cabin" the book that began the process of freeing the slaves. Well, this book, and others like it, are the means of telling that story and signs of things happening. Congress is energized to act. This will have an impact on the debate about trade with China.

And let me say, for me, it's a tough issue. Much as I think the Chinese are among the great thugs of the world, creating tariff barriers poses debatable questions.

So it was sure that, after a little bit of noise, Congress would act, and we would have, as we do now, the Prime Minister of China coming for a summit meeting in October, and all would be right with the world. And we'd sell Coca-Cola and computers, and the persecutions would go on.

Except for one thing. Instead of focusing on the human rights issue in terms only of the brave kid in front of the tank at Tianaman Square, our country began to understand that there are millions of people who brave precisely the same kind of persecution as an act of witness -- as an element in the witness of Christian faith.

Once that word began to spread, the MFN debate became a very, very different one. The political arithmetic of human rights radically shifted. The people counseling the Chinese said, "Don't worry about what you do to political dissidents," because the Chamber of Commerce lobby beats the lobby for the human rights. Now those same advisors tell the Chinese, "You'll never have normal relations with the United States until you stop the persecution of Christians."

That's a dilemma for them. Because once they do, they know that brush fire of freedom, that baby in the manger, they know it will do to them what was done to Eastern Europe.

Well, there will be other legislation. The Freedom from Religious Persecution Act of 1997 -- you haven't heard much about it, by design. Because the MFN debate deserves, and will get, center stage over the next couple of months. But come the fall, there will be hearings on a bill to establish an office of religious persecution monitoring in the White House, headed by a director, confirmed by the Senate.

I think we ought to support that, just for the heartache it's giving the State Department to think that the game is being taken away from it.

That bill now has broad, bipartisan support. Liberals, conservatives, Democrats, Republicans. Partly out of conviction; partly because they hear you coming.

Living in Washington for all those years, I tell you there's something quite remarkable about the democratic process and politicians. You may not know it, but all of them -- at least the good ones -- have antennae that come out of their heads. When the ground starts to shift a little bit, the antennae start to rumble. The good ones know that when that rumbling happens, they darned well better get ahead of that parade.

Even though you haven't read much about it, nothing like what you're going to read in the paper, lots of antennae are starting to quiver.

The Freedom From Religious Persecution Act will be as difficult to vote against, come the fall, when I hope we will have a vote on it, as the Jackson-Vanick amendment was in the campaign against Soviet anti-Semitism.

It will do many things. It will cut off all aid to countries involved in widespread and ongoing persecution, and it won't only be China. It will be all of the countries that think that they've got a free hunting license on vulnerable communities of people who share your faith.

It will radically revise State Department practices. It will revise immigration service practices.

This is a country founded as a haven for victims of religious persecution. I began in this effort through knowing an Ethiopian evangelical who'd been hung upside down and beaten with steel rods. They poured hot oil over him for being a leading evangelical minister in Ethiopia.

I went to an immigration lawyer and said, "He's escaped. He's in the United States. Let's get him his asylum status. Clearly, that's what the law calls for."

She replied, "Well, if he were a political dissident, I could get him in. If he were a radical Muslim, I could get him in. But a Christian? Can he fit through the eye of a needle?"

Well, we're going to change that. And we're going to take Sudan, the most evil of all of the countries, and we're going to apply the same sanctions that this country applied against South Africa -- word for word, the same bill from when we fought apartheid, to fight religious persecution.

The South Africa bill said, "If the first level of sanctions doesn't work to end apartheid, the President must recommend tougher ones to Congress on January 1 of each year." Well, a change we made is that we changed January 1 to December 25th. One of the things we're going to get -- I think this year -- is an end to the regime that enslaves and sells young people for the price of a cow -- a little more if it's a girl, because Christian concubines go a little higher on the market. We're going to bring an end to that regime come this Christmas. And Congress is going to be there to make it happen.

That Office of Religious Persecution Monitoring will set a standard. You know, we have an AIDS Czar and a Drug Czar in the White House. It seems to me only right that we should have somebody with real power who, on the making of findings of religious persecution, will cut off aid.

Heaven knows, how do we support them with taxpayer money? Export-Import Bank financing? World Bank loans to people involved in that persecution? So we're going to turn around and stop it.

Let me close. There's much in it for me as a Jew. I'm engaged in this out of my rootedness as a Jew. Some from my community who have had historic differences with the Christian community, some of them rooted in history, some of them fanciful and manufactured by people who want to keep us apart, called me and said, "Why are you consorting with them, the other side?"

Other days, I'd get calls for Jews for Jesus saying, "When are you joining up? We're going to make it the event of the year."

It's the lessons I've learned as a Jew, and my rootedness as such, that makes me thrilled to think that, in saving the lambs, we are building bridges to each other. We are redefining who you are, and shattering the lies that the bigots have told of you, and freeing you to be the kinds of forces you ought to be on issues beyond this.

We all get rewarded when we do the right thing, and here's a good example of that. But the largest thing I think we do is reshape the world for our kids.

In 1886, the most accurate and chilling prediction was made about the future. It was made by an atheist, a German philosopher, Nietzsche. He was looking at the coming 20th century.

And he said this: "The greatest event of recent times, that God is dead, that the belief in the Christian God is no longer tenable, is beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe."

Nietzsche said -- and he understood, "When that God dies, it's not that there won't be gods. It is that the God of faith will be replaced by the god of politics." He knew that the evil man who became the terrible cleric, able to do harm but with the harm profoundly limited because of the virtue of our common faith and its power, would become the evil man who headed the state. And that rivers of blood would flow.

 He knew that would be the story of the 20th century. The mass murderers of our time are, at least to me, explained precisely by the insight of this atheist, who said that when your God dies, we're all at risk.

What those vulnerable Christians, with unspeakable bravery, fight for, stand for, is the possibility that we can have in the 21st century, for our children, an age where the God of faith commands the moral enthusiasm of young people. For my kids, for your kids. Therein lies the great hope that the 21st century will not be as the 20th has been.

So we stand here poised to make that difference. What a wonderful, wonderful discovery cynical Washington types have made.

We began these campaigns to energize the State Department and get the President to care. The President, at one point, said that he would make a speech to the National Association of Evangelicals on anti-Christian persecution, and then the State Department lobbyists came, and the Saudi lobbyists came.

Saudi lobbyists once told me, "Well, you know, we don't bother American Christians. When things -- when they get bad, when they get too involved in Christian activities, we deport them." He said, "Now, we do have problems with Philippine guest workers, but why would Americans ever care about them?"

That is the kind of cynical view to which Americans are giving the lie today.

But when we began thinking about how to energize the President, the State Department and others, we got advice. Set up political bucket shops. Let's have phone banks. Let's get this group and that group. This interest group, that interest group.

It ain't going to happen that way. The political system is being shaken up and democracy is working because of what's going on in the pews and the pulpits.

On November 16th of this year -- mark it down -- there will be an inter-denominational coordinated Day of Prayer for the persecuted church. An extraordinary young man in Wheaton, Illinois, is now working with denominations, trying to raise some funds to do it, getting a ragtag staff together, building support for that Day of Prayer.

I tell you this -- the world's going to be watching that Day of Prayer. If there's a lackadaisical level of interest, no matter how smart we are in Washington, no matter how hard Ernie Istook and people like him work, things will go back to usual and normal again.

But if there are 50,000 churches -- indeed, 100,000 churches is what I expect -- involved in a day of education, of action, of commitment, of prayer on November 16th, I guarantee you we're going to make history.

And so we've subordinated this Washington group back to where it belongs, in the churches. Democracy will work, prayer will work its powers, and history will be made.

And knowing, as I do, the commitment of the people working on it; knowing, as I do, your character; knowing, as I do, the common bonds of all of us as Americans, and of our abhorrence of the murder and the torture and the persecution going on; and knowing the stakes for stopping it, I am convinced that come this fall, culminating on November 16th, we are going to make some kind of history, and will it ever impact on the century to come.

Thank you very much.

QUESTION: I just want to thank Mike for whatever influence he's had on Abe Rosenthal on this issue. At my newspaper, the Daily Oklahoman, I am proud to say, I inherited a position already writing and commenting on these issues.

I don't know when they started, I presume back in the '80s, but we are aware of it. We've been writing on it regularly. But there never seemed much printed in the news pages.

And the reason is, a lot of wire reporters just don't cover it, even if they know about it. Then if they do cover it, wire editors tend to block it out and not print it, because it's just "those people," those Christians.

I will tell everyone in this room, as somebody in the belly of the beast, as it were, in the journalism fraternity, that A.M. Rosenthal had more to do with breaking this issue out than any other single development. Because when he started writing on this issue, as the former editor of the New York Times, these articles started appearing all over this country, including in the Daily Oklahoman. It blew the lid off. All of a sudden, the Reuters stories and the AP stories that were occasionally written found their way into print as news, not just commentary.

MR. HOROWITZ: Well, let me just brag in this degree. I talked to Abe today, right before the meeting. We were on the phone for about an hour talking. I think he's going to have a story about the recent visit Paul Marshall made to China. And it's going to be one powerful story.

He said in his first column on this subject, and you may not be surprised to hear it from the passion I feel, that I screamed him awake on the subject. That's the best flattery I have received.

But I want to tell you something else. Do not, being in journalism, judge our success by how much coverage we get in the media. In fact, I think there's been very little in the way of news stories on this. There have been some impassioned columnists. We haven't yet broken through.

But it's coming. You and I know what it's like to start a story from no place and find it on the cover of Time Magazine and the center of attention. I expect that will be the case this fall, maybe a little earlier. I think everybody needs to be patient on that score, not to press for stories, but to organize the Day of Prayer.

This is a fabulous story. Journalists appreciate it. You know, it's a "Dog Bites Man" story. What? Christians the victims, not the bad guys?

Well, it can't be true. Wait. Maybe it is. What a story it is!

And I think you're beginning to see that development. So the little you've seen in Abe, of course, has been central to the beginning of the flood tide.

There's going to be a flood of it. It's going to be favorable, and it's going to be about you and your people. Just keep on working. The press is inevitable -- and good press -- on this story.

QUESTION: Mike, I applaud everything you've done and said. What reason do we have to believe that a White House office for religious freedom would not be co-opted and become a tool of the administration, and work against the very kind of things that we're trying to accomplish?

MR. HOROWITZ: First, this is the most political administration in my lifetime. So in one sense, having Bill Clinton as president on this issue may be bad news. But it's also quite a good news story. It's in your hands. If 100,000 churches are praying, I guarantee you Bill Clinton is going to lead that parade.

We tried to set up this office in a way that respects the Constitution. The President, under the Constitution, conducts our foreign policy. He, and essentially he alone.

It's a battle that Ed Meese fought in defending the Constitution. And I spent a lot of time with Sen. Bill Armstrong and others trying to figure out how to get maximal independence.

The person in this office has to be confirmed by the Senate. That means you will have the chance to pressure, to make sure it's a good appointment. That means that that person can be worked over by Jesse Helms and others here, and they can lay their markers on it. There's a legislative record that can be made.

What this person needs to do is make a finding -- yes/no -- about countries, whether they're engaged in systematic persecution. That's all. And if so, the sanctions follow.

There's no guarantee. We can't, under the constitution, make it an independent agency. We think the facts are compelling. We think we can lay the markers in them. But I tell you again, get to church on November 16th, give your pastors no peace if they don't participate in this Day of Prayer. Use every influence you have as leaders with your own denominations. Make sure they participate to the fullest. Don't worry about Bill Clinton. It will happen.