Rudolph Giuliani was the mayor of New York when the twin towers fell on Sept. 11, 2001. While he may have been a well-known figure and an extremely successful mayor before that day (particularly thanks to dramatically decreasing the crime rate and completely rebranding the city), after that unprecedented terrorist attack, it was a different ball game. Giuliani came to be known as the "mayor of America," and he was soon named man of the year by Time Magazine. On that horrific day, Giuliani managed to inspire as much confidence as possible, offering a sense of stability and responsibility even in the face of extreme adversity. His name even came up as a potential presidential candidate, and in 2008 he did in fact throw his hat in the ring, but ended up quitting the race early. Since then, he has launched a career providing counsel on security and fighting terrorism and has become somewhat of an expert on the topic. Giuliani combines his training as an attorney and his experience as a former prosecutor with his crisis management abilities. He currently heads the Cybersecurity, Privacy and Crisis Management Practice at the global law firm Greenberg and Traurig, which has a branch in Israel. According to Giuliani, his is the only American law firm to ever make aliyah. Giuliani has always been a friend to Israel, even insisting on visiting the country during the wave of terrorist attacks of the second Intifada. Today he is among the many supporters of Donald Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, who, like Giuliani, is from New York. Giuliani believes that Trump has the power to defeat Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton. This week, Giuliani was invited to speak at a legal conference in Israel, and took the time to sit down with Israel Hayom for an interview. Q: What are your thoughts on the recent attack at the gay nightclub in Orlando? "The shooting in Orlando was an act of Islamic extremist terrorism. In this particular case it was focused on a gay club. The tape that we have now heard makes his motive clear. His motive was to act on behalf of the Islamic State," says Giuliani. "So you add this to what is now a growing list of attacks in less than a year -- San Bernardino was in December, and then we had Brussels and then Paris and now Orlando. We are getting more terrorist attacks than we've ever had before, and I attribute that to something that I predicted: I said that the more America withdraws, the more weakness America shows, the more they will attack." Q: Can you list some examples of this weakness? "The withdrawal from Iraq, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the withdrawal of police officers from mosques, the failure of the president to use the term 'Islamic extremist terrorism,' these are all very bad signals to give to terrorists. The more they see weakness, the more they attack. "Before Sept. 11 they saw weakness: They attacked us in east Africa and we had a very very tepid response; they attacked the USS Cole and killed our sailors, and I think that emboldened [Osama] bin Laden to commit his attack on Sept. 11. I wish I could say something different, but I expect there are going to be more attacks." Q: If you were the director of the FBI, what would you do differently than what is being done? "The head of the FBI happens to be a friend of mine and a former assistant U.S. attorney. I think the FBI is in a difficult position to handle this because the FBI is rather small -- I think it's about 14,000 agents. My only advice to him would be more and more use of local police, because you don't have enough FBI agents to cover this problem. So train your local police in how to detect terrorists, and if you get cases of suspected terrorists, as we did in the Boston massacre, and as we did in Orlando, and you don't have the resources to follow it up, turn it over to the local police and give them an opportunity to follow it up. I'd like to see them do that more often." Profiling is not discrimination Giuliani does not view the events of Sept. 11, 2001 as a watershed moment in the U.S.'s attitude toward terrorism. "9/11 was a much bigger attack than San Bernardino or Orlando," he says. "It was almost 3,000 people. It was a complete surprise, complete shock. It is not the same reaction, but there is a reaction against it. Two years ago, many Americans would have told you that they are not afraid of terrorism; now a large percentage will tell you that they are afraid of terrorism. I think most Americans believe that this is not the end -- there is going to be more." Q: Do you agree with Trump that security requires racial profiling of Muslims- "The U.S. doesn't need racial profiling in the sense of discriminatory profiling. It does need profiling based on the characteristics of suspected murderers, suspected terrorists. You can't investigate everyone, and law enforcement is constantly profiling. You have to make a distinction between profiling based purely on race, religion, ethnic background or gender, and profiling based on facts. "If I'm looking for a serial killer who is 5 foot 4 with dark hair and I'm told that he is Italian-American, I don't go looking for Irish Americans or black people, I go looking for Italians who are 5 foot 4. When I went after the mafia, you could say that I ethnically profiled Italians. Well, why did I do that? Because to be a member of the mafia, you had to be Italian. "So to say that we are going to have more scrutiny of people belonging to the Islamic religion coming in from certain countries who are planning to kill us is only common sense. We just have to be aware of the fact that obviously not all members of the Islamic religion are terrorists -- it would be terrible to suggest that -- but it is true that most terrorists are in fact members of the Islamic religion. If you didn't pay special attention to that, you wouldn't be protecting the American people. So all this depends on how you define racial profiling." Q: Does political correctness stand in the way of such monitoring? "I think political correctness may have killed people. I'm fed up with political correctness. I'll give you an example: In San Bernardino [where 14 people were killed and 22 were seriously injured in a mass shooting and attempted bombing at the Inland Regional Center], some of the neighbors of the two people who committed the killings there, in the evenings leading up to the attack, noticed that they were in their garage late at night. They even suspected that they might have been making a bomb. But they didn't report it, I suspect, because they didn't want to look like they were being prejudiced against Arabs. "I think this whole tyranny of political correctness is stopping us from doing what we can do to prevent these attacks. If those people had reported that to the police, maybe those people in San Bernardino would never have been killed. "I'll give you another example: Maj. Nidal [Malik Hasan, who shot 13 people to death and injured more than 30 others in the Fort Hood mass shooting in 2009] had announced his jihadist views three years earlier, and he was promoted. I believe that political correctness prompted the military not to hold back his promotions despite his very extremist views. "I care more about human lives than I do about political correctness." Q: A lot of people have been asking me why U.S. President Barack Obama refuses to utter the words "radical Islam." Can you explain it? "You're going to have to ask him. I don't know." Q: I called him. He doesn't answer my calls. Giuliani laughs. "You'd have to ask him. I don't know what he thinks he is accomplishing. Everybody knows that it was Islamic extremist terrorism. He wouldn't be telling us anything we don't know. In this particular case, the killer himself told us. In Maj. Nidal's case, which they described as workplace violence, the killer yelled out 'Allahu akbar' as he was shooting people. I have a pretty good idea why he did the killing when he's yelling out 'Allahu akbar.' "I think it is stubbornness, not to say Islamic extremist terrorism. Not only that, but they take the words out. I think the French president used those words in a conference several weeks ago and the State Department took the words out of his mouth. That's absurd, that kind of censorship. "When the Justice Department released transcripts of the police call made by Orlando shooter Omar Mateen, they were going to omit all the references to Islamic terrorism and Mateen's pledge of loyalty to the Islamic State. That was the first decision made by the White House and the Justice Department, until many many people complained and they finally had to put it out. "I don't know what they think they're accomplishing. I actually think they're making it worse. They should just put out the facts. Instead, they hold the facts back and it only gets more attention. "They're not offending decent members of the Islamic religion by saying that this was done by extremist Islamic terrorists. The only people they're offending are Islamic extremist terrorists. If you're offended by that, there's something wrong with you. You have a sympathy you shouldn't have. You have a sympathy, or feel empathy toward people who are destroying innocent human beings, including, now, children. That has to be confronted. It has to stop. The decent members of the Islamic community need to stand up. They should be condemning it more than I do." Q: So you agree with Trump on this issue- "He's absolutely right that President Obama has been extremely weak in dealing with Islamic extremist terrorism. The Islamic State would not exist in the form that it is currently in had President Obama not withdrawn from Iraq, and had President Obama intervened in Syria. Yes, it existed before he came into office, but it was a very small group. "By the time the surge was successful [President George W. Bush's 2007 increase in the number of American troops in Iraq in order to provide security to Baghdad and Al Anbar Province], it had been shrunk down to a very small group and Gen. [David] Petraeus [then the commanding general of the national force in Iraq] and Gen. [Jack] Keane, who advised the strategy, brilliantly brought the Sunnis over to fight for us. But when we abandoned Iraq and left it to [Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-] Maliki, a Shiite and, I believe, a puppet of Iran, he started killing the Sunnis. They had nowhere to go. So the good Sunnis went and hid at home and the bad ones joined ISIS. Had we had troops there, that would not have happened. "Secondly, if we had troops there, we would have found out about it when it first started. Remember when Obama referred to Islamic State as JV? That was poor intelligence. And why did we have poor intelligence? Because Obama pulled the troops out. "Finally, he created this whole refugee crisis because he refused to set up a no-fly zone in Syria. He had been asked to do that by a number of senators, as well as the president of France, but he didn't do it. He threatened [Syrian President Bashar] Assad with attack 12 different times if he used chemical weapons and backed down all 12 times. And he brought [Russian President Vladimir] Putin back into the Middle East. So I think that when Trump says that ISIS, in its present form, was created by President Obama and Hillary Clinton, I think he is right." The election will be close When talking about the presidential race in the U.S., Giuliani stresses that "all politicians are trained to say that we don't believe in polls, but we're not telling the truth. Of course, when you get a good poll you feel good, and when you get a bad poll you feel bad." Q: The polls aren't looking good for Trump right now. "The polls indicate problems that he has to work on. The main problem he needs to focus on is getting people to like him more. Knowing him personally, I can say that he's a very charming man." Q: What would be your advice to him? "I do advise him, not regularly but on a fairly consistent basis, and my advice to him is to be himself, to be a nice guy. You can deliver very harsh criticism and still be a nice guy. I hope he can get the rest of his personality out, I think it would help a lot. "But I think it's going to be a very close election, no matter what the polls say. I think that while the American people have issues with Trump, they have just as many issues with Hillary [Clinton]. She may not be as unpopular as he is, but she is very unpopular. More than half of the American people don't like her, his numbers are just higher. They are calling this a race to the bottom -- who are the public not going to like the least? "There are many unresolved issues surrounding her candidacy, like her email affair. The FBI are still investigating. The inspector general's report about her conduct was very harsh. She tried to say that she did what others secretaries of state did, and the report pointed out that no other secretary of state did anything close to what she did -- they certainly didn't destroy any material while she destroyed 34,000 emails, they didn't have private servers in someone else's house. A relative amateur could hack the kind of server she had -- it was just a private server at home. It didn't have all the national security protections that we install on government servers. I'd be very surprised if the Chinese, the Russians or WikiLeaks don't have a number of those emails." Q: Can Trump win in his home state of New York? "New York will be hard for Trump. New York would even be hard for me, as a Republican, even though I was mayor of New York. I think it's too early to say we're going to give up New York, but I wouldn't hold out a great deal of hope for New York. I would hold out more hope for Pennsylvania and Ohio, where he's currently ahead. Those are two states where two of his issues resound pretty strongly -- coal and loss of jobs to overseas. A good deal of Pennsylvania used to rely on the coal and steel industries. Obama has just about done away with coal and all those guys are out of work. Hillary made a very unfortunate comment that, basically, they should be out of work because coal is no good for the environment. So that's not going to help her in the coal states -- Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia. Those states are filled with unemployed or underemployed coal miners and steelworkers. That should be a perfect constituency for Trump." Q: Will the Republican Convention in July be a turning point in the campaign? Will there be a "Trump Show"- "The Republican Convention will be the Trump show and the Democratic Convention will be the Hillary show. There might be a few demonstrators against Trump and a few Bernie Sanders supporters demonstrating against Hillary, but if we didn't have demonstrators, it wouldn't be a convention. I think both conventions are going to a little boring, in that sense. I almost looked like we were going to have a real convention, no one had a majority, but now the nominees are decided and they get to run the convention the way they want. But Trump is a good showman. He sure knows how to use television." Q: You mentioned that winning New York would be tough for you. Are you implying that you may run for the presidency in four years? "No, no, I have no plans." Obama was bad for Israel Before we part ways, I bring up the issue of U.S. military aid for Israel, which is currently under debate. I note that based on previous comments, some people are saying that, if elected president, Trump will cut the aid currently provided to American allies. I ask Giuliani whether we, Israel, should be concerned. He laughs. "I'll talk him into it," he says. "You know, he's in a lot of trouble for saying he wants to ban all Muslims, which maybe goes a little too far. I agree with the need to ban all Muslim terrorists, but not all Muslims. I think that Trump will have a good appreciation of who our friends and who our enemies are. "I actually do think that Israel will be better off under either Trump or Hillary. I think Hillary would be better for Israel than Obama, but that's not saying a lot because Obama has been terrible for Israel. He is probably our worst president. "I can't imagine what it's like to be the prime minister of Israel and not know whether the American president has your back. There has never been an Israeli prime minister who did not enjoy the full support of the American president, Republican or Democrat. There were some presidents who were more critical and some who were more supportive, but if we start with Harry Truman, who first recognized Israel, all the way to the last Bush, every single one of America's presidents supported Israel when push came to shove. This guy [Obama] seems to be supporting the other side. "In fact, I told this once to your prime minister. He didn't respond because he is a diplomat and a gentleman."
