William McGurn

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William McGurn is a White House Assistant to the President for Speechwriting for which he is paid $261,000, the same as Karl Rove.

Formerly he was an executive in the Office of the Chairman at News Corporation, parent company for the New York Post, Fox News, and The Times, the Weekly Standard and BSkyB and McGurn was the speechwriter for News Corporation chairman Rupert Murdoch. Previously he was chief editorial writer for the Wall Street Journal and a member of the Journal’s editorial board. From 1992 to 1998, he served as senior editor for the Dow Jones-owned Far Eastern Economic Review in Hong Kong. Prior to joining FEER, McGurn worked in Washington as bureau chief for National Review and had spent five years with the Wall Street Journal’s editorial pages overseas: first in Brussels and then in Hong Kong.

During his first tour in Hong Kong, McGurn edited a volume on the territory’s post-colonial future entitled Basic Law, Basic Questions: The Debate Continues and wrote what his Whitehouse biography calls "a prescient monograph for the London-based Institute for European Defence and Strategic Studies entitled Terrorist or Freedom Fighter."

This 1987 IEDSS pamphlet asserted it was "inconstestable that groups such as the Provisional IRA and the PLO are terrorist", but the Mujahedin resistance in Afghanistan and other groups supported by President Reagan, are not, McGurn argued:

"They cannot easily be categorised as terrorists, because they have generally demonstrated discrimination in their choice of targets and their conduct of operations. [...] Even in the case of the Contras, hard evidence is thin and often indistinguishable from the profusion of Sandinista propaganda. By contrast, the duplicity of the Sandinista government; its own attacks on innocent civilians, and the use of its soil as a base for Salvadorean rebels are well documented."

McGurn recently wrote in Crisis Magazine:

My children always want to know, "Is this the good guy?" or "Is that man the bad guy?" As they get older and come to look back on the atrocity of September 11, the one thing I would like them always to retain is the understanding that what hit their schoolmates was evil itself, even in the most explicit sense of nothingness: the nothingness that Osama bin Laden and his henchmen put in place of the flesh-and-blood fathers of children they go to school with.

Crisis magazine's advisory board contains Richard V. Allen, William J. Bennett, Daniel L. Casey, Edwin J. Feulner Jr., Alexander M. Haig, Paul Johnson, Peggy Noonan, Vin Weber, Paul Weyrich (who set up the Heritage Foundation), James Q. Wilson. In exploring how conservatives came to be so badly mistaken critics have pointed to the Heritage Foundation's line:

"...they paid only the slightest attention to the ideology of the mujahedin. And, when they did consider political Islam, they didn't treat it as a serious doctrine but, rather, the expression of noble savages and epic warriors. In 1982, the Heritage Foundation's James Phillips wrote, "The Afghans' courage is fortified by traditional Islamic beliefs: if he kills an enemy in the jihad (holy war) and he is revered as a ghazi (Islamic warrior) and if he falls in battle he becomes a shaheed (martyr) who reaps great rewards in paradise." After the 1983 bombing of the U.S. Marine barracks in Lebanon, it became clear where this eschatology could lead. But conservatives didn't want to ask the kind of questions that might tarnish their heroes. In lieu of an honest evaluation, they remade the Afghans into foreign versions of themselves, religious victims of secular zealotry. William McGurn, now The Wall Street Journal's chief editorial writer, described the mujahedin as "simply ornery mountain folk who have not cottoned to a foreign power" that "attacked their faith.""

McGurn is also author of Perfidious Albion: The Abandonment of Hong Kong 1997, published five years before the handover. More recently he co-authored Is the Market Moral? A Dialogue on Religion, Economics & Justice published in March 2004 by the Brookings Institution Press. During 1992 presidential elections, McGurn wrote a column for New York Newsday. His articles have been published in a variety of periodicals including Newsweek, Esquire, The Spectator (of London), The Sunday Telegraph, the National Catholic Register, The Sunday Telegraph, The New Criterion, The Washington Post, the South China Morning Post and others. A graduate of both the University of Notre Dame and Boston University, he is a member of the University of Notre Dame’s Asian Studies Advisory Committee, the Council on Foreign Relations, and the President’s Commission on White House Fellowships. He is also a Hoover media fellow.