Ep 2 | Robert Spencer | The Glenn Beck Podcast

When I was growing up, we knew what poison was.

We knew when we saw the skull and crossbones, that's dangerous, don't go there.

It can hurt you, it can poison you, it can kill you.

More and more, it seems that words and ideas are poisonous, dangerous, have to be banned, put up high on the shelf so no one can find them.

We're going to introduce you to a man who's been deemed very dangerous, Robert Spencer.

It's ridiculous when people say, well, the Bible is just as violent violent as the Quran.

It just indicates that they don't really know what either one of them says.

His ideas are dangerous.

The media is submitting by not showing the cartoons and kow-towing to this violent threats and intimidation.

That's just the wrong thing to do because it's only going to encourage more violent threats and intimidation.

His new book, The History of Jihad from Muhammad to ISIS, is dangerous.

In 2011, Spencer was removed as an FBI and military trainer.

He was training everybody in the United States, CIA, FBI.

He was training our military leaders, and but in 2011, he was found to be dangerous.

Now, this coincided with the purging of all of the training materials that mentioned Islam and jihad.

Spencer wrote in his book that America was going to war against jihadists while forbidding itself to understand jihad.

Spencer would also be banned from the United Kingdom for pointing out that Islam had doctrines of violence against unbelievers.

There are calls tonight to stop two anti-Islamic campaigners from entering Britain.

In August of 2018, MasterCard blacklisted Spencer and pressured Patreon to remove his site and his podcast.

It seems he's pretty dangerous.

Robert, you are a dangerous man.

You have a travel ban before travel bans were cool.

Yes, that's true.

It is kind of a Muslim travel ban, except it's the opposite.

I criticized Islam and thus I was banned from entering Britain, yes.

What is that like to not be allowed in the country of England, a Great Britain?

It's a nuisance because American Airlines is tied to British Airways, and so every time I fly American Airlines, which I avoid at all costs, they give me the third degree to make sure I'm not going to somehow sneak into Britain.

That's crazy.

Yes, it is.

That is crazy.

And then

this summer, MasterCard has come after you.

Yes.

Tell me about that.

They haven't given me any explanation.

They dropped me from Patreon, which I didn't even know was tied to MasterCard.

I don't have a MasterCard.

Patreon dropped me because MasterCard complained, and MasterCard only explained that it did so because I had illegal content on my website.

Now, the only conceivable way I could have illegal content on my website is by the criteria of Islamic law, not American law.

Are you concerned about

what I called

the digital ghettoization of ideas?

I'm deeply concerned about that,

very much so.

I wrote a book a few years back, as a matter of fact, called The Complete Infidel's Guide to Free Speech and Its Enemies, and warned about what's happening, that the social media giants have more control over the means of communication than the Soviet Union had at its height.

Correct.

And if you get the banking industry, you're on an island.

Yes.

You can't make any money and you can't have your voice heard.

And we're on the way to that.

Why with you?

Why?

What is it that you say that is so dangerous?

Well, when the UK banned me, they kindly sent a letter that explained that I had said in a 2002 documentary that Islam has doctrines of warfare against unbelievers.

And because I was likely to repeat that in Britain, I was not to be allowed in.

Now, Islam does have doctrines of warfare against unbelievers, but truth was no defense.

I read a study that said, and I can't remember the exact percentage, but it's pretty high.

It's like around 70%.

70% of people, when they start to listen to somebody,

if that person says, look, you know what?

I have to tell you, I've made mistakes i i wish i wouldn't have said this

70 of the people are more willing to listen to that person is there anything that you've ever said that you go i wish i wouldn't have said that or i wish i would have said it differently yeah actually there is one thing in my very first book uh that i wish i could recall uh i mean take back yeah okay you remember it i remember it very well right i said that the uh is both the israelis and palestinians had committed inexcusable acts and that gave the impression that I was considering them to be equivalent.

When, in reality, if you look at Palestinian television, there are calls for genocide on a routine basis

and incredible anti-Semitism and

all sorts of horrible things people wouldn't expect would be broadcast anywhere.

And there's nothing like that in Israel.

What I was referring to was the fact that there have been Israeli soldiers who have committed excesses, but they were prosecuted, which is very different from how the Palestinian terrorists are actually celebrated as heroes.

So I very much regret that.

Are you Jewish?

No, I'm a Greek Orthodox Christian.

Okay.

Why have you...

I mean, you started in 1980.

Yes.

Well, you know, you have the Quran

most of it, yes.

Why?

I was fascinated by it.

You know, I remember in the 90s,

one time, a group of friends and I were going on vacation and they were packing novels and such to read on the beach, and I packed the Quran.

I was just interested in it.

But the interest ultimately comes from my family.

My grandparents were actually exiled from the Ottoman Empire in 1918.

They were given the choice of conversion to Islam or get out, which was in a certain sense generous because they could have said convert or die.

Although they did kill my great-grandfather as they were leaving,

the rest of the family was able to get out.

Now, the funny part about this story is that when I knew my grandparents and they were very old,

they would talk about how wonderful it was over there.

And my grandmother and Barack Obama are the two people I know of who say that the Muslim call to prayer from the minaret is the most beautiful sound that they've ever heard.

And so I would ask her, well, then why did you leave while we were exiled?

Why were you exiled?

And then there was silence.

I don't know if they couldn't tell me or wouldn't tell me or didn't even know themselves, maybe all the circumstances that they were told that they had to get out, but I wanted to know.

So I started to study it.

This led me right into Islam and the Quran, because the history of that period in that area is all about, as I explained before, the infidels at war with Islam and how they have to be killed or they have to be exiled because we have to purify the land of them.

And so this led me into reading the Quran and studying all this.

And then, of course, You can't understand the Quran on its own.

So I started to study the Hadith, the Hadith of Bukhari and Muslim primarily, but also Abu Dawud ibn Majah on Masai and the tafsir, the primary tafsir, the commentaries on the Quran of Qurtabi,

the two jalals, al-Jalalain, and Ibn Kathir.

And

then, of course, in the 90s, this became something that people wanted to know about, and I was in a position to tell them.

When you read the Quran, it's important to know how to read the Quran.

That's right.

And so, well, the Quran is not organized in any immediately accessible fashion.

It's not organized chronologically.

It's not organized thematically.

And the way that it is organized is essentially, but even this is not uniform, from the longest chapter to the shortest, starting with the second chapter.

And then the second chapter is very long, the longest of the book.

And then chapter 114, the last chapter, is very brief, just a few lines.

Now, the subjects change without any notice.

And also another very great difficulty in reading the Quran is that it's as if you're having a conversation with a close friend and you've had many shared experiences and you don't have to explain because your friend knows what happened.

And so there are many, many things that are referred to in the Quran that are like that, where you have no idea what is being said unless you consult the Hadith, the tafsir, the commentaries on the Quran.

The Haditha reports on the words and deeds of Muhammad, which contains a great deal of tafsir, the commentary.

And so, as a result, when you're reading the Quran,

you can't, you might,

things will fly by and you have no idea of their significance.

Can you give us a big significant example?

One good one is chapter 66, verses 1 to 5, where Allah is scolding two of Muhammad's wives.

And there is no evidence, no reason given for what they have done.

But he's threatening, he's saying

he can divorce you and get better wives, and so you better toe the line.

And there are two divergent Islamic traditions that explain what this passage is all about.

One of them is that he was

eating honey, and it was on his breath, and he lied about it because his wife didn't like that he ate honey and had bad breath.

And the other story, which is more likely because it is a bit more damaging, and so it's unlikely that it would have been invented, is that he skipped the turn of one of the wives who was angry.

He stayed the night with one of his wives each day,

and they had a rotation.

But he spent the night with Mary the Copt, his concubine, instead of Hafsa, one of his wives.

And then Hafsa and Aisha,

another one of his wives, were angry, and they are being scolded in this passage.

The passage really makes very little sense unless you know the background.

And if you don't know it, then you might read this and think,

this is just incomprehensible.

And there are many, many passages of this kind.

Okay.

Your book takes the history of jihad from Muhammad to ISIS, and you're pretty much making the case that the history that we have, at least the history now, and especially the last 20 years, is wrong.

Yes.

Explain.

Yeah, the last chapter is called the West Loses the Will to Live.

And it is all about how our response to 9-11 and all the jihad activity that has happened subsequently has been on the wrong track.

Starting on September 17th, 2001, when George W.

Bush went into the mosque in Washington in the company of an al-Qaeda financier who is now in prison.

for financing al-Qaeda.

And he's standing behind the president, Abdurrahman Alamoudi, of the American Muslim Council.

And he says Islam is a religion of peace.

I mean, can you imagine FDR standing on the day after Pearl Harbor with a chief Nazi financier?

It's inconceivable.

And it, I think, is a symbol of how the whole thing went wrong from the beginning.

Aaron Ross Powell,

let's look at

the caliphate and how we have to take people seriously, because that's what's happening to us.

We think that they don't necessarily mean this.

They're just saying that.

They're just saying these things for their population and their popularity or their poll ratings or whatever.

We also don't listen to, as you said, Arabic television.

It is shocking when you actually see what they say.

I know I took Osama bin Laden seriously in 1999 and talk radio because it was during the Clinton administration, they wanted to hang me.

I'm not surprised.

And I said on ABC, there will be blood and bodies in the streets within the next 10 years and that guy will do it if you don't take him seriously.

Second one was the caliphate.

I was mocked like crazy for saying there would be a caliphate.

Yes.

Well, ISIS.

And all you have to do is look at what they're saying.

Absolutely, yes.

I couldn't agree more.

Tell me about the caliphate, because because if it's not this caliphate, it will be another caliphate.

Absolutely.

Iran is trying to build a caliphate.

Iran, well, it's Shiite, so it's a little bit of a different situation.

But yes, the desire for a caliphate is a universal longing

in Islam.

The caliph is the successor.

That's what the word means.

Khalifa is the successor of Muhammad as the military, political, and spiritual leader of the Muslims.

And if you go through the book from the beginning, you have the period of the four rightly guided caliphs, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali, the four immediate successors of Muhammad.

Then you have the great Islamic empires, which were all caliphates, the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Ottomans, the Caliphate of Cordoba in Spain, the Fatimid Shiite Caliphate in Egypt, and these were all the engines of the jihad because in Sunni Islamic theology, and remember the Sunnis are 85 to 90 percent of Muslims, the caliph is the only one who's authorized to declare offensive jihad.

So since 1924, when the secular Turkish government abolished the Ottoman Caliphate, all the jihad groups, as well as groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, have been trying to restore the caliphate so that offensive jihad can again be waged and that the Muslim world will ostensibly be reunited instead of being disunited in all these artificial nation-states that the jihad groups blame the West for establishing.

Trevor Burrus, So the caliph is like Moses or a prophet.

Not a prophet in the sense that he can bring new revelation.

No, but he's more like a pope with an army.

Okay, okay.

Well, I think the pope had an army for a while.

Yeah.

So,

but he speaks for, once that's established, then he speaks for all Muslims and can call, if they're attacked, if the caliphate is attacked, he can call on all Muslims to come and they feel that it's their duty to come.

Defensive jihad, you don't even need a caliph for.

Defensive jihad.

When a Muslim land is attacked, that's why they're fighting now.

9-11, as far as they're concerned, was defensive.

And this is why jihadis like Osama bin Laden, they always list all these grievances, all these terrible things that the West has supposedly done, because that situates their jihad as defensive and justifies it.

The defensive jihad is obligatory upon all Muslims everywhere in the world to aid in some way if a Muslim land is attacked.

But the offensive jihad, the Quran says in chapter 8, verse 39, fight until religion is all for Allah.

And so that's an offensive jihad.

It doesn't say fight if you're attacked, fight if you were just defending Muslim lands, but fight if until religion is all for Allah.

The offensive jihad is the province in Sunni Islamic theology of the caliph only.

And so it cannot be pursued unless there's a caliph.

Tell me about Muhammad, who he was, and what Islam was like when he was alive.

Muhammad, according to Islamic tradition, all of this is shrouded in legend and its historicity is doubtful.

But according to the traditional story, he was born in 570 and died in 632.

He was an Arabian merchant in the year 610.

Troubled by the polytheism of his native land,

his native town, Mecca, the city of the Qurays tribe, which he was a member.

He was praying on a mountain outside Mecca, and the angel Gabriel appeared to him and told him to recite.

And he said, I can't recite, I can't read.

And the angel insisted that he recite.

He began to recite.

What he recited was the Quran.

The beginning verses recite in the name of him who created man from clots of blood.

That is still in the Quran in chapter 96.

And that's the first revelation that Muhammad received.

Over the next 23 years, he received all of it.

He would go into a trance and then come out of it and say that these are the words of Allah.

The Quran is supposed to be the perfect word of Allah that existed forever with Allah in paradise, one of the three eternal things.

Allah, His throne, and His book.

And the book was transmitted perfectly to Muhammad over those 23 years.

The Quran becomes violent and bellicose when Muhammad emigrates from Mecca to Medina after the Quraysh rejected his claim to be a prophet and things grew very antagonistic, 12 years into his prophetic ministry, around the year 622, he moved to Medina, a little ways away, and began to get revelations calling for warfare against the unbelievers.

Went to war with the Quraysh, conquered them, went to war with the other Arab tribes, conquered them, unified Arabia.

By the time of his death in 632,

the Muslim armies that he had amassed and the Muslim force was able to to take advantage of the exhaustion of the Byzantine and Persian empires, the great powers of the day, which had exhausted each other in a series of wars just in the decades before this.

And so they were able to pour out of Arabia and conquer the Middle East and North Africa with astonishing speed.

I don't know how many people understand that

they believe in Jesus.

They believe in Moses and the Bible and Abraham.

And

it is Isaac and Ishmael.

Yes.

Correct?

Yes.

Tell that story for anybody who doesn't know.

Well, of course, in the Bible, you have the story of Abraham and Isaac and the sacrifice where God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and then stops him at the last minute.

And it's taken as a sign of how great Abraham's faith was that he was willing even to sacrifice his son.

In the Islamic tradition,

the sacrificial son is Ishmael, not Isaac.

And the Muslims are considered to be the children of Ishmael.

But all the prophets are Muslims.

Islam is the original religion of Adam, and it is the religion of all the prophets that are listed in the Bible, as well as others that are not in the Bible and that are recounted in the Quran, like Hud and others.

And Jesus is a prophet?

Jesus is one of the prophets.

He's the last prophet before Muhammad.

And the Quran says explicitly: say, take chapter 3, verse 67: Abraham is neither a Jew nor a Christian.

He is a Muslim.

Now, how could Abraham have been a Muslim when he lived before Muhammad?

The premise is that all the prophets were Muslims.

The original religion of mankind was Islam.

But the followers of the prophets, they twisted the messages that they received from their prophets to create the religions of Judaism and Christianity.

So Jesus, see, he was a prophet.

He taught Islam.

In chapter 61 or 62 of the Quran, 61.6, I think it is, he says that there's going to come a prophet after me whose name is Ahmed, Muhammad.

But

he's only a prophet.

He teaches Islam.

He's a Muslim.

Muhammad is the greater prophet, the last prophet, the seal of the prophets.

And

it is Muhammad who

is, of course, the one who is the foundation of the religion.

But all of the prophets were Muslims, and the followers of Jesus created Christianity by twisting his message.

Why was he not just a great leader to his people?

How was he able to grab prophet status?

I mean, Jesus, you know, had kind of a

small gathering before people just killed him.

How did he

and Jesus, you know, supposedly did miracles and everything else.

What was the MO of Muhammad?

Muhammad actually had a very small band of followers too when he was in Mecca.

And he didn't do miracles.

And he actually says, it's repeated in the Quran that the miracle is the book.

This is the miracle.

There is no other miracle.

Don't expect anything.

They ask you to do a miracle, but you're only a plain warner in the face of a terrific punishment that is hellfire.

You're warning the people.

But what he did do when he went to Medina, And this is the second part of his prophetic career, he tells his followers, first invite the unbelievers to accept Islam.

If they refuse, invite them to pay the jizya.

Now chapter 9, verse 29 of the Quran says, fight against those who do not believe in Allah or the last day, and do not forbid what he has forbidden, even if they are of the people of the book, which is the Jews and Christians primarily, until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.

That jizya is a tax, that's what the word means.

And the idea is that the Jews, the Christians, and the other people of the book are to live in a state of subjugation to the Muslims, paying a tax and being denied basic rights, so as to remind them every day of how they have rejected the true faith and make them suffer in this world as well as in the next.

But he's so getting back to what Muhammad taught, he said, first invite them to accept Islam.

If they refuse, invite them to pay the jizya, that is to submit.

And third, if they refuse both, seek Allah's help and fight them.

So

it is a missionary faith, as Christianity is, but there's also an or else after the invitation to accept.

If you don't accept, then you have to accept subjugation or war.

Most people don't know

there are more slaves in the world today than there were during the entire 400 years of the Western slave trade.

Indeed.

And a lot of that is

Islamic in nature, at least in the Middle East,

because you can take the unbelievers and enslave them.

Most people also don't know that the slave trade here in America, much of it was Muslims who said, well, these savages or these people, they're infidels.

We have the right, if they won't submit, to bring them in and sell them as slaves.

Absolutely.

And a lot of this is in the book.

But one thing that's interesting about that is that you hear nowadays, it's an increasing talking point on the left that the slaves in America in the...

Were Muslim.

Yeah,

it's extraordinarily unlikely that any but a handful were Muslims and the ones who were Muslims were taken by mistake

were not Muslim enough.

Yes, the Muslim slave traders were not enslaving fellow Muslims.

They might have been, as you say, they might have been enslaving Muslims of another sect who they did not think to be sufficiently Muslim.

But much more likely, they were taking pagan Africans and selling them because that, as far as Islam is concerned, is completely permissible.

Okay, so there's this split between the Sunni and the Shias.

Yes.

When does that happen?

That happens almost from the beginning.

Okay, and that is because they're arguing, no,

I'm the successor to Muhammad, right?

Yes, it solidified at 680 at the Battle of Karbala in Iraq,

where Yazid, the son of Muawiyah, the Sunni caliph, is confronted by Husayn, the son of Ali, who was the previous caliph.

before Muawiyah, but he has been passed over just as Ali was passed over for the caliphate.

And Yazid kills Husayn and the split was solidified forever.

This is actually when you see Ashura celebrations or commemorations when the Shiites cut their heads and the blood pours down and they whip themselves and they're all bloody.

You see the horrible pictures of this sometimes.

That is mourning for the death of Hussein at Karbalah and punishing themselves for not being able to save him.

And which one was he?

Did he turn out that was the Shiite?

The Shiite.

The word Shiat Ali is the party of Ali.

And so it's really the party,

the group that didn't accept the Sunni caliphs.

Right from the beginning, at the death of Muhammad, when Abu Bakr was chosen, there was a party,

a Shiat Ali, that said, Ali is actually the one who was chosen by Muhammad.

But Aisha, Muhammad's favorite wife, hated Ali.

because Aisha was at one point accused of adultery and she was going to be executed, stoned to death.

And Muhammad was very upset because he really liked this girl and his famous child bride.

And Ali got irritated and said to Muhammad, while Aisha was standing there, what difference does it make?

Let her be stoned to death.

You can always get other women.

So she hated him with burning intensity for every half.

Yes.

And she disputed his claim

and his group's claim, his party's claim that he was chosen the successor by Muhammad.

She denied it.

Abu Bakr was picked.

He was passed over three times.

Finally, he got it.

And then she led a rebellion against him.

And he was killed.

Not a lot changes in the world.

Yeah.

They're still at it.

They still hate each other.

They're still fighting.

So when did the 12th Imam come into play?

The 12th Imam was a little boy.

In Shiite Islam, the Imamate is what corresponds to the caliphate.

They don't call them caliphs, but they do consider them to be the leaders of all the Muslims, although of course the Sunnis, who were most of the Muslims, they discount that and they killed most of them.

But there were 12 successors of Muhammad after Ali, and they all have to be a member of Muhammad's household because Ali was Muhammad's son-in-law.

He had married Fatima, Muhammad's daughter.

When Ali died,

the

The Shiites considered that their imams had to be in his family.

So it was a hereditary office that was passed down from father to son.

In the case of the last Imam, the 12th, he was a little boy.

He was five years old.

This is the year 874.

And he disappeared.

Probably he was killed by some Sunnis because most of the Imams of the Shiites were killed by Sunnis.

But the Shiites evolved.

There was a group of adults who were actually running the show for the Shiites at this time.

And they claimed that he wasn't dead, that he had just gone into occultation, he was hidden, and he was going to reappear at the end of the world.

And this is the kicker about that.

He's going to reappear at the end of the world when the Muslims are more persecuted than they have ever been.

And so, Mahmoud Akhnine Nijad, when he was president of Iran, he took that very seriously.

And he actually had a highway built from the city where the 12th Imam is going to reappear to Tehran so he could get right to Tehran and get to work.

And what he's going to do is with Jesus and the Mahdi, they're going to kill the non-Muslims or convert them and the whole world will be Shiite Islamic.

But the problem is that this is predicated on the persecution of the Muslims.

And so.

But also, because Ahmadinejad used to say at the beginning and end of every one of his speeches, oh Allah, give me the strength to hasten the return of the promised one.

And to hasten it.

Right.

To hasten it would be to, from what I understand, to wash the world in blood.

It has to be in absolute chaos.

Yes, because that's the persecution.

See, the Ayatollah Rafsan Jani, one of Ahmedi Nijad's predecessors as president, said in the 90s, look, we could nuke Israel.

And they'll be destroyed.

Right.

But we could sustain retaliatory nuclear fire, lose 15 million people, and still be here.

And that could be the persecution that triggers the return of the 12th Imam.

The world awash in blood, the Muslims persecuted like never before, and here comes the boy.

What percentage of

Islam, I know it would be a wild guess, believes that we need to hasten this,

that we can make this happen?

Well, probably the same percentage as those who are knowledgeable and devout, because there are numerous hadiths in which Muhammad says, the end times will not come until you do this.

The most notorious thing being kill Jews.

The end times will not come until Muslims kill Jews.

The Jews hide behind trees and the trees cry out, oh Muslim, there's a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.

So that's a clear implication that you can help to bring about the consummation of all things if you kill Jews.

So Khomeini, I think it's Khomeini, said recently that the 12th Imam is alive.

He has spoken to him.

Yes.

And he's coming soon.

Ahmedi Nijad spoke that way as well.

Yeah.

He would go talk to him.

Yeah.

At a well where he was

sighted at the well about a thousand years ago.

And so that's where he would go and have chats with him.

So

at some point, don't they have to produce somebody?

They might well do that.

Yeah, that could happen.

I think it would be very hard to put it over because this is going to be some sort of, it has to be some sort of a numinous eschatological being, not just some kid that they pick and dress up in a robe.

Right.

I mean, I don't know.

Maybe they they can pull it off.

Does that make them more dangerous?

Because, first of all, do they believe it?

Oh, yeah, I think they very much believe it.

How much of the Iranian population believes this?

Much less.

The mullahs believe it, but the Iranian people are so disenchanted now.

Many of them are not just against the regime, but they've left Islam as well.

And Zoroastrianism is experiencing a resurgence.

And Christianity is experiencing a great period of growth in Iran now.

Let's go back in time and

let's take a look at one of the happy caliphates.

Of course, the one in Spain.

It's totally happy.

Tell me about it.

Yeah, you know, Muslim Spain is quite a bit of the book is, well,

a portion of the book is about Al-Andalus

and the

occupation of Spain, the invasion of Spain, and its occupation by Muslims for 700 years.

Which they got along famously with Jews and Christians.

And this world is a historical myth.

What?

It didn't really happen.

And I've got documentation from the primary sources in the book that

remember that the Jews and Christians have to pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.

That became the impetus for a series of humiliating and discriminatory regulations that denied them basic rights in the superstructure of Islamic law.

That law was enforced in Muslim Spain, and the Jews and Christians lived a very precarious existence.

It was a center actually of the slave trade in the Middle Ages, especially during the time of the Caliphate of Cordoba, which ended in 1031.

And the idea that it was wonderful and peaceful is only predicated on the fact only when that's only true when the Jews and Christians knew their place, submitted to their second-class status, and didn't rock the boat.

But in one very telling incident in 1066, there was a Muslim ruler who placed a Jewish man in charge of the city of Granada.

Now, this was because they were friends, and this Muslim ruler was not so by the book.

The rules are often not observed and made to be broken.

It is against Islamic law for a non-Muslim to have authority over a Muslim, but this guy went ahead and did it.

Now, the Muslims in Granada knew very well that Islamic law forbids a non-Muslim to hold authority over a Muslim, so they were not happy with this appointment.

They rioted, they killed the man, they killed 4,000 Jews.

It was one of the most famous pogroms of the Middle Ages.

And it was all because a Muslim must not be in authority under a non-Muslim.

And when did that fall?

The, well, Spain, of course, the last holdings of Muslim Spain were conquered by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492.

Charlemagne.

Is that the Charlemagne when he comes over the mountains to Spain, right?

Yeah, Charlemagne, actually, not long after the

Muslims were in France, and they were defeated by Charles Martel at Tours in 732.

Now, Charlemagne is right around 800, 798.

He comes into Spain and battles with the Muslims.

This is the occasion for the Song of Roland, which became one of the epic poems of European literature.

And it recounts Charlemagne's expedition against the Muslims.

He didn't really make any headway.

It was not a successful expedition in his career.

But what stopped the spread of it into Europe?

Well,

if they wouldn't have been conquered, they would have obviously spread.

Charles Martel, 732, in Poitiers in France.

This is a very pivotal battle.

Edward Gibbon, the great English historian, says

if Charles Martel had not won, then the Quran would be taught like it is today in Oxford and we would see minarets all over England and all over Europe as we do today and so it postponed the Islamization of Europe by all those centuries.

Another person who had a different perspective on Charles Martel's victory was Adolf Hitler.

And he said what a shame it was that the Muslims were stopped in France because if they had won there and gone ahead,

they wouldn't have had any more significant obstacles.

They would would have conquered and Islamized Germany.

And Islam, he said, is just the religion for a people of martial spirit like the Germans, not this weak and flabby Christianity.

I'm going to come back to Hitler a little later.

I just want to keep on the timeline.

People would say, well,

when

Isabel and Ferdinand took over, well, then the evil Christians were there.

And the evil Christians started in 14, you know, 90, what, 90, 1491?

They started the, you you know the inquisition and things they were were deporting Jews the same year

that Christopher Columbus set off he had a hard time finding boats because a lot of them had been already hired by the Jewish community to escape yes from the persecution that's quite right and there's no excusing that it's not as if the jihad has some monopoly on evil yeah uh the Jewish community in Spain was persecuted by both the Muslims and the Christians.

And they did leave the domains of Ferdinand and Isabella to go to the Ottoman Empire.

Now, at the same time, we should also remember that at the beginning of the 20th century, there were 18 million Jews in the world, and 17 million were in Christian Europe, and 1 million were in the Islamic world.

And that, I think, is a testimony to the overall better treatment that they received in Europe vis-a-vis under

in the the Islamic domains where they were subjugated as dhimmis.

When did the next caliphate happen?

Well, the caliphates, you have the four rightly guided caliphs, and Ali dies in 661, and that's the end of the first Islamic Golden Age, the rightly guided caliphate.

Then you have the Umayyads from 661 to 750.

The Umayyad Caliphate is really just Muawiyah, who was the successor of Ali, making the Sunni Caliphate into hereditary succession, just like the Shiites had done.

And so his son Yazid became the next caliph and so on.

Then the Abbasids, who said, accused the Umayyads of being irreligious and un-Islamic, they supplanted them in 750.

And they were a great power for a period, but fell into abeyance.

It was actually the caliphate in Spain was a renegade Umayyad prince who escaped from the Abbasid domains after the fall of the Umayyad Caliphate, went to Spain and set up his own little Umayyad Caliphate there.

And so the Umayyads persisted in Spain until, as I said, 1031.

The Abbasids were more of a spent force.

By the middle of the 13th century, it was more of a

name than a power.

The Muslim domains were expanding in India, and you have in the 12th century, the early 13th century, the Indian Muslim rulers were very anxious to get the approval of of the Abbasid Caliphate and to submit to him, the Abbasid Caliph.

But later on, when you have the Mughal emperors in the 15th century, the 16th century in India, very brutal and bloody jihad warfare there against the Hindus because they're not people of the book, they didn't pay attention to the caliphates at all.

They were just on their own.

And the idea that every Sunni Muslim must submit, or every Muslim must submit in Sunni theology to the authority of the caliph has always been more on on paper than in reality.

But I think probably never more so than when the Indian Muslims were going their own way and ignoring the first the Abbasids and then the Ottomans.

They actually fought with the Ottomans a bit.

We get to the

America's first war,

foreign power, war with a foreign power,

was the Barbary pirates.

Yes, indeed.

And

there's this idea that Thomas Jefferson

got the Koran because he's such a scholarly man.

And he just, you know, he loved to read about all religions.

And, you know,

he was a universalist, so he didn't really believe in anything.

And he got the Koran, and that really helped him write the Declaration of Independence.

Do you know the date?

of when Thomas Jefferson got the Koran and why he got the Koran?

I believe he got it in 1804,

but I'm not sure entirely about that.

But I know that he got it in order to understand the Barbary pirates.

Because actually, he and John Adams, before he was president, had gone to London, and in London there was arranged a meeting between Jefferson Adams and the Moroccan ambassador to England.

And they asked him, what are you doing?

You know, we have no bellicose intentions against Morocco.

Why are you fighting us?

Why are you attacking our shipping?

And they wrote a report to Congress in which they said, the ambassador answered us that it was founded on the laws of the prophet, that it was written in their Quran that all nations who should not have answered their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon them wherever they could be found, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Muslim who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise.

People don't know that our Marines are called leathernecks.

Yes.

Because they put leather around their necks so they wouldn't be beheaded by the Muslims.

When you meet the unbelievers, strike the necks.

Quran 47.4.

I have

the first Quran printed in the United States.

I think it's 1805, 1806.

And it was at the request of Jefferson.

And what he was saying was, everybody has to read this.

He didn't take quotes.

He didn't take it out of context.

He said, we have to publish this entire book because you have to see what they say.

And in fact,

I have, I have, this is just, these are the first three pages of it.

Wow.

And it starts to the reader.

And if you read it, it says, you got to look at this book.

You got to read this book.

And you have to read what's really in it.

And at the end here, it says, you're not going to believe the absurdities that are in this book and how it has infected the minds of so many people all around the world.

It's while this preface is here,

it's not like today when people are just picking and choosing words.

Back then,

he was telling the American people, you have to know all of it.

Yes, it's a warning.

Right.

And because he said, after the Barbary Pirates, the war with the Barbary Pirates,

it was very clear, at least to Adams and and Jefferson and all those involved, this is coming again.

And it has.

So

let's skip ahead and into the next century.

Let's just go to

the Ottoman Empire.

Ottoman Empire starts 13...

Yeah, middle of the 1300s.

Okay.

And it's still going strong.

World War II, World War I.

Or World War I.

I'm sorry.

World War I,

it's still there.

And

it

encompasses what at that point?

By the time of World War I, it is Turkey, what is now Turkey, and the Middle East going down, encompassing Lebanon, Syria, Israel,

and

ending at Egypt.

It claimed Egypt and North Africa, but they had for many years previous been essentially independent.

And going east, how far?

East into Iraq.

And that's about it.

It bordered Iran and stopped there.

Okay.

And they still deny it to this day

the Armenian genocide.

Yes, they do.

Where they are scooping up Christians and slaughtering Christians, anybody who isn't Muslim or Muslim enough.

Well,

it was primarily a Christian targeting

because the Christians were considered kufar harbi, infidels at war with Islam, because the Ottoman Empire, of course, enforced the Dhimmah, the contract of protection, in which the Christians were submitting, paying the jizya, and so on.

Then they abolished that under Western pressure, pressure from Britain and France, in 1856.

but they still oppressed the Christians.

And of course, the Greeks won their independence in 1821, and the Greeks in Asia Minor wanted to join independent Greece.

The Armenians wanted their own state.

And so because they were rebelling against the authority of the caliph, they were considered to be kufar harbi, infidels at war with Islam, and thus could be killed.

And so the genocide was exclusively Muslims killing Christians because the Christians were considered lawfully to be killed for having rebelled against the legitimate authority.

Were there any Muslims at the time standing up against any of these things?

Not in any significant way.

There's a very horrible story of an old woman and

she is at her house.

Her husband comes home.

He's been at the mosque.

And he says, the Imam told me I have to kill our Christian neighbors.

And she says, what are you talking about?

These people have been our neighbors for 30 years.

We're friends with them.

We've been at their house.

They've been here.

You're going to go and kill them?

I have to.

The Imam told me to, and he went over and did it.

Now, there was that kind of resistance that people thought that the commands they were being given was appalling, appalling, but the people who were saying that were not in any positions of power and never were able to stop it.

So it's kind of like the Germans in Germany where there was resistance, but it wasn't effective.

Yes, that's right.

Yeah, okay.

It was, yeah, there were people who were disgusted by the whole thing, but they were powerless.

Yeah.

But the reason why I bring up the

martyrdom of all of the Christians in Turkey is because Hitler sees that and uses that as the example of the world doesn't care.

I mean, I can do anything.

I could gas all of these people and the world won't care.

Not only that, but the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajamin al-Husseini, lived in Berlin during the war.

He was very close friends with Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler.

And I believe it was Eichmann's adjutant who said, who testified at Nuremberg that the idea for the gas chambers and the exhortations to gas and kill millions of Jews came from the Mufti of Jerusalem.

So

I don't want to get into the whole theory here, but

I've studied the Holocaust, not just that one, but all of them.

And I have

this theory that

evil knows when it's been bested and it jumps to the next place and plants the seed in the next place.

I find it fascinating because I could see that jump in every single stop.

And it always takes pieces of the last Holocaust with it.

And then it learns, it mutates, it gets a little stronger, a little better, a little slicker, and then it does it again.

The last time we saw it was with the Germans, and it jumped and planted those seeds in the Middle East, where we're now seeing such anti-Semitism.

Well, anti-Semitism has always been in Islam.

In the Quran, the worst enemies of the Muslims are the Jews.

It's chapter 5, verse 82.

And Allah transforms the Sabbath-breaking Jews into apes and pigs, which is rhetoric that the jihadis use today, calling Jews apes and pigs.

Chapter 2, 63 to 65, 559, and 60, and 7,166.

The Jews are depicted as scheming against the Muslims, as hating Allah, as killing the prophets, and deserving and being under Allah's curse.

I'm not saying that it was a hard sell.

I'm just saying, for instance, the name Persia.

Where did the name Persia go?

Yes.

Why is Iran called Iran?

Reza Shah changed the name of the country in 1935 to Iran to emphasize that it was an Aryan nation.

Almost as a gift to Adolf Hitler, we're on the same side.

We are.

Yes.

But they believe, we believe.

They had plans, actually.

My cousin is married to an Iranian Jew, and he told me that the

people, they had a department store in Tehran, and during the war, people would come to their house and say, when the Germans get here, can we have your furniture?

You have such a nice place here.

Oh my gosh.

Yeah, it's a true story.

And the thing is that they really had plans to break through the Caucasus and then go south and kill the Jews in Palestine for the Mufti and the Jews in Iran for the Shah.

Now, this is the same general time period that the Muslim Brotherhood, which we learned from John Brennan, is a largely secular,

just like the Knights of Columbus.

They have nothing to do with Catholicism.

1928, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded.

Okay, and why were they?

In 1924, the Ottoman Caliphate was abolished by the secular Turkish government.

And so it was

founded directly in order to restore the caliphate.

That has always been their central aspiration.

And so the idea that it's a secular organization is just wildly ridiculous.

So why did we hear that?

Because we heard that from John Brennan, the director of national intelligence.

It was a clapper.

I thought it was Brennan.

But we also heard, and you would know,

we look back and we can find Clinton as the first kind of change of history saying that

the people who are doing jihad, that's a perversion

of Israel.

Yeah, he was the first one, really, as far as presidents of the United States go.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt, he knew full well what jihad was.

And a group of Zionists came to him and said, we want to establish a state of Israel.

And he said, are you trying to start a holy jihad?

And he knew full well what would happen.

And he was not in favor of it.

Right.

To his credit, his successor, of course, went ahead.

But

he never Franklin Roosevelt never said, oh, jihad is peace.

You have nothing to worry about.

Jihad is an interior spiritual struggle.

It was Clinton

during at the time when the Khobar Towers was attacked and the USS Cole was attacked.

There were several major jihad attacks in the 90s.

And that was the beginning of all the Islamist Peace business that, of course, George W.

Bush ratified right after 9-11.

Trevor Burrus, Jr.: So Hitler writes Mein Kampf, which translated means my jihad.

My jihad, my struggle.

Coincidence?

I don't think so.

He admired, as we know, I already quoted earlier, he admired the Muslims and Islam.

And he liked the idea of a warlike, martial, violent, expansionist religion.

Okay.

So

he knew it.

The jihadis declare it.

When did that get lost?

How did that get lost?

How is it that we get how is it we get to knowing exactly what this is, to President Clinton being the first one, and then George W.

Bush, all of them now,

are coming out and saying, no, no, no, jihad is an inner struggle.

There has been an extensive public public relations effort.

This is probably the most successful public relations propaganda effort in the history of the world.

Now, maybe you could say selling Hitler to the Germans or something.

I understand that that was also the use of very skillful propaganda.

But this is something on that scale.

that Islamic advocacy groups have been able to portray themselves as victims, to portray Muslims in the United States as a despised, persecuted, harassed, victimized class that deserves special accommodation and attention.

Now, of course, no hate crimes against anybody are ever justified, but the idea that Muslims are the victims of wholesale hate crimes in the United States is sheer fiction.

The FBI statistics show that they're way far down on the list of those who are commonly victims of hate crimes.

And yet there's much more attention given to them because this is in order to score political points and to manipulate people into thinking that to oppose the Muslim Brotherhood groups in the United States, to oppose Islamization, to oppose Sharia, even to oppose jihad terror, is somehow to endanger innocent Muslims.

And thus we must not and always must say how wonderful Islam is whenever we are saying anything in this subject matter at all.

So I wrote the book, It Is About Islam.

It's not Islam.

It is about Islam.

Yes, it is.

We may disagree on this.

I believe there is a difference between

the people who,

because I have friends, Zudi Jesser is a good friend of mine, who they're Muslim.

They read the book the way they want to read the book.

And they are,

they

leave out, just like many people leave out Christians, will leave out the Old Testament.

Well, that doesn't really matter.

Oh, it does.

It does.

And if you don't understand the relationship of the Old Testament and the New Testament,

you can't say that you're fully Christian because you don't understand Jesus was a Jew.

You know,

he was practicing this, and there is a new covenant that changes things.

Yes.

Or Jews that read the Old Testament and, you know, they're not taking an eye for an eye because

they read it in a different way.

The difference here is there are two groups, in my opinion.

Those who are Muslim and read it the way they want to read it, in a more of a reformed modern way, and those who are Islamists who say that's not what the book says, and it has to be this way, because it's always been this way.

And we will take you back to the seventh century because that's what it says.

Yeah.

And it's about state control.

Well, I'll tell you, there have always been Muslims who've not waged jihad.

But one notable thing that's absent from this book is any organized Muslim movement against the jihadis.

They have never stood in the way.

It's kind of like the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.

The Bolsheviks were never the majority party in Russia, but they were the organized, energized vanguard, and they were ruthless.

And so they were able to carry the day.

And you may be able to say that jihadis were never the majority of Muslims, but they are organized, energized, and ruthless, and they have carried the day.

And also, as you have noted, they do have the texts on their side.

And so they can always point to Muslims who don't pay attention to those inconvenient passages and say, you're not being loyal.

You are not being obedient.

I don't think

Zudi Jasser has any

doubt that

if

the peaceful Muslims don't stand together, he'll be the first to go.

I mean, they'll come, you know, and they'll, yeah, sure, they'll blow us all up.

But when they make a long list, first on Santa's naughty list are people who are saying, no, that's not what Islam is.

Well, look at Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, 1985 in Sudan.

He taught that the peaceful passages of the Quran should supersede the violent ones instead of the other way around, which is traditionally the way that they've been interpreted in Islamic theology.

And he was hanged as a heretic by the Sudanese government.

There's also a great man in Morocco right now, Ahmed Asid, who is a human rights activist who has said the same thing.

And because he said the same thing that the peaceful passages should supersede the violent ones instead of the other way around he now lives under death threat there have been fatwas calling for his head and he can't move around

explain why

explain why that

that law

how that law works that this is most violent chapter 2 verse 106 of the quran says whenever we abrogate or cause to be forgotten a passage then we will give you one that's just as good or better now this is obviously sounds to me like somebody's trying to paper over his mistakes.

That he's saying that I'm going to have to cancel some things that I told you before and I'll give you some things that are better instead, so don't worry about it.

And so in traditional Islamic theology, this has been understood as a simple chronological mandate that if Muhammad received a revelation later in his career that contradicts one from earlier, then the later one cancels or supersedes the earlier.

Makes sense.

And so the unfortunate aspect of this is that the violent passages of the Quran are all from later in Muhammad's career, and so they supersede the earlier ones.

This is something, this is an exegesis that goes back to the beginning of Islam.

Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad's first biographer in the middle of the 8th century, wrote that there are three stages of development in the Quran's teachings on unbelievers.

First, we tolerated them, but then came the commands to defend ourselves against them.

when they are attacking us, and then finally the command to fight until religion is all for Allah.

And that's offensive jihad.

That is the, he said,

the situation that prevails for all time, whereas the others are only for particular places, or particular situations.

If the Muslims are a weak, small, powerless group as they were when Muhammad first started, then they preach tolerance.

But then the other stages will kick in later.

Can we go off the chart for just a sec?

One last question.

Then I want to come to today.

My

understanding of Islam as, you know,

a man in his 50s and,

you know, not paying attention most of his life was 1979 and the Islamic takeover.

And then I think my next memory is

Salman Rushdie.

I remember I was young and I went out and I bought a copy of that book just because

somebody's going to get killed for this.

Yes.

You know?

Can you explain what the satanic verses really are?

Yeah, absolutely.

The novel, of course, is based on a genuine incident from Islamic tradition in which Muhammad was very troubled by the fact that he had not been able to convince the Quraysh, his native tribe, to believe in his prophetic claim.

So he got a revelation.

And this was one that he knew was coming.

He told the Quraysh to come because he had important news.

And he got this revelation that then it went like this have you seen alat al-ut

al-at al-uzza and manat they are the exalted cranes worthy of veneration now Alat al-Uzza and Manat were the three goddesses of the Quraysh and he's saying that they are exalted and worthy of veneration they are the daughters of Allah essentially you can pray to them And so the Quraysh were delighted.

They prostrated themselves in prayer with the Muslims.

Word went out, the Quraish have become Muslim.

Everybody was happy, except Muhammad.

He was mortified when he realized, wait a minute, all this time I've been preaching an uncompromising monotheism, that there is only Allah and that all the other gods are not gods at all.

They're fictions or they're demons.

And now I'm saying that there are four gods, Allah and his three daughters.

So he had to think of something.

And what he thought of was that Satan had inspired him when he got this revelation.

So now if you read chapter 53 of the Quran, it says, have you considered Allah, al-Uzza, and Manat?

What?

He has daughters and you have sons?

That is an unfair arrangement.

And what it means is that it's saying, have you thought about these three goddesses?

Isn't it silly that you would say that Allah has daughters when you have sons?

Because of course sons are better than daughters in this view.

And so it's making fun of the Quraysh.

for thinking that Allah has daughters.

But the original passage was celebrating them, and he said he was inspired by Satan when he got that.

And that, of course, is extraordinarily problematic for Islamic apologists.

Most of the time, they say this never happened at all and was an invention.

The problem is, it's in Islamic texts.

It's in Islamic sources.

It's not something that you find in non-Muslim sources.

It didn't come from non-Muslims.

It was a story that circulated among Muslims.

Same time period, though?

Well, all of the Hadith come from the 9th century.

And that is another big big problem for Islam because Muhammad lived in the 7th century.

Right, so you've got 200 years,

so you don't really know if that happened.

I actually wrote a book a few years ago called Did Muhammad Exist?, where I examine this at length.

And I think that there was probably a person named Muhammad, but that virtually everything we know about him is legend that we cannot verify.

Because

for the first 60 years of the Islamic conquests, there's no mention of a new religion, a new prophet, or a new holy book.

There's plenty.

I have it in the book.

For example, when they enter Jerusalem, Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, wrote numerous sermons and essays about the conquerors and how they had laid waste and burned churches and how terrible what had happened was.

And he never mentions Islam, the Quran, or Muhammad.

He never gives a hint that they have a new religion.

And that is universally true of all the early historians who write about this at the time.

It's only much later we start hearing about Muhammad and Islam.

And even later later than that, do we get all these stories?

And people say, well, it's just oral tradition.

But if it were oral tradition, then somebody would have at least mentioned its existence.

But wouldn't have, I mean, couldn't you say the same thing?

I mean,

the only

outside evidence of Christ from the time is Josephus.

Sure.

And he didn't say he was a Christ starting newly.

He said he claimed this new guy living, you know, all these crazy people up in the hills.

Here's another one that's claimed he's the Messiah.

But there isn't any inside evidence either.

See,

in Christianity, in the New Testament, you've got, in the first place, let me say one thing.

They're completely separate issues.

And when I was talking about did Muhammad exist on a lot of shows back then, people would always bring up Christianity.

And it's a separate issue.

Christianity may be complete fiction, but that's irrelevant to the question at hand.

Well, in any case, now that we're in it,

the fact is that the New Testament writings were all extant and were being quoted by Clement of Rome, Ignatius of Antioch, the people at the end of the first century and the beginning of the second.

And they got some of the New Testament and they're quoting it.

But there isn't any internal evidence for Islam.

There is no writing from the first 60 years.

People say, well, the Quran was written then.

Okay, here's one for you.

The Quran is supposed to have been collected together by Uthman in 653, the caliph, and distributed to the provinces.

And yet nobody quotes it or mentions its existence for another 50 years.

And there's another thing about the Quran.

Abdul-Malik, who was caliph from 685 to 705, he says,

I'm afraid I'm going to die during Ramadan because I was born during Ramadan, I became caliph during Ramadan, and I collected the Quran during Ramadan.

Now,

why would anybody invent that if Uthman was known to have collected the Quran 40 years previous?

But it's much more likely that since in light of the fact that there's no mention of the Quran, that Abdul Malik actually collected the Quran, as he said, and distributed it, and in order to give it an air of authenticity, attributed the work to Uthman.

But why would he be celebrating Ramadan if he didn't know of Islam?

Ramadan existed before Islam.

It's not an Islamic holiday.

It's a month of the calendar that was there already.

But you don't need, but it's all, but it's celebrated

for the month.

There's rituals,

whether there are rituals before

the Kaaba?

Yeah, a lot of the things that are Islamic were there already.

You know, the Kaaba was there, obviously, because that's a central point of Islamic history, that Muhammad cleansed the Kaaba of all the idols.

And a lot of the things that are Islamic for us were taken over by Islam and Islamized.

Didn't know that about the Ramadan.

Didn't know that.

Well, see, I think it makes a whole lot more sense.

I know we're getting a little bit into the weeds, and I won't keep pressing it, but the historicity of Muhammad is very shaky.

And maybe we can talk about did Muhammad exist sometime?

Yeah.

You know, if we want to live, we probably shouldn't.

Well, I'm way past that myself.

I know.

Let me take you to

today and our intentional blindness.

We are,

well, we just had somebody who was apparently training children to kill children in a school.

Yes.

They found bones of a child in the back, and the judge didn't even issue bail, just said,

on your good name.

What good name?

The defendants' lawyers claimed that the whole thing was about Islamophobia, and the judge fell for it.

This shows this power, what I was talking about, about this victimhood posturing.

It's very powerful, and it can get you things like getting these people free when they should not have been freed.

But no thinking person can see the guy who testified as a character reference for the blind sheikh and was like, no, no, he's just doing what Allah told him to do.

And his grandchildren have to be moved to the middle of the desert because they're too radical for Western society.

That his son is raising the grandchildren in this training camp and there's a body buried.

What part of this doesn't reason click in and go, you know what?

Probably had,

there's probably a lot of truth here.

It's been ingrained in people now, especially on the left.

We have to protect Islam here.

We can't get anybody thinking negatively about Islam.

And you hit it right there.

Siraj Wahaj,

the unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade Center bombing.

He's one of the most prominent and respected Imams in the country.

He gave the first Muslim prayer in the House of Representatives.

And he's spoken at all the major Muslim organizations, CARE, ISNA, all of them.

And Linda Sarsour calls him her mentor.

So you have somebody that tied in.

You want to downplay and bury this story because it's going to reflect poorly on the entire Muslim community in the U.S.

Go to Linda Sarsour here, Sec.

We have her on tape at the ISNA conference saying, this is my mentor.

He calls me all the time.

He keeps me on.

His son is the guy who's in the desert.

It's his son.

That's why they got to bury the story.

Right.

I'm not seeing that anywhere, but that's just one.

You then have Linda Sarsour and all the women leadership going to Louis Farrakhan and listening to Louis Farrakhan.

Now there's two strikes.

We have a history of Linda Sarsour that her,

what is it, her cousins are in jail for

terrorism.

Hamas.

Right.

And

the left can, the women's organization,

the

LGBT organizations embrace these people

when there is clear-cut evidence.

Oh, they'll kill you before they kill me.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

I'll tell you something.

I was speaking last year at the University at Buffalo, but I really didn't speak.

I just got yelled at for an hour and a half.

And I was standing there, and every now and then I would say something, but most of the time they were just yelling too loud.

I couldn't say anything.

But there was a young man in the audience.

He had a sign that said, queers against Islamophobia.

And so I had a manual of Islamic law with me, certified by Al-Azhar, the foremost institution in Sunni Islam, where Barack Obama went to give his outreach speech to the Muslim world in 2009.

And I opened it up and I started to read about how the homosexual should be killed, should be put to death, both him who gives and him who receives, the the whole thing, very set out.

The whole place started to boo and boo and boo, and I held up the book.

I said, you think I wrote this?

You think this comes from me?

And a young man came over in a Kufi and a kaftan with the beard, and he hugged the queers against Islamophobia guy and said, this is my best friend.

And I said, look, I didn't originate these laws.

Gays are being killed, put to death in Iran, in Saudi Arabia, in the ISIS domains, elsewhere, anywhere where Sharia is implemented.

And you're completely inured to reality here.

You're living in a fantasy world.

But the thing is, I think that the left in America really does hate America so much that they see this force that has been arrayed against Judeo-Christian Western civilization for 1,400 years, and they see an ally.

That's a pretty big charge.

How about this one?

They see an ally, and they think that the people that are here that are,

you know, Linda Sarsour

behind a mask,

they're different.

Yeah, I think they do think they're different, yeah.

But I also do think they hate the America and the West.

Oh,

I agree with you on that.

But, I mean,

I sat with Glad.

I went to New York, and I asked for a meeting of the leadership of GLAD.

And this is when they were just, they were pushing homosexuals off roofs

in Tehran.

And, you know, I sat down, showed them pictures, and I said, come on, we're going to argue about cakes all day.

But what do you say we saved some homosexuals?

Yeah.

They had wanted nothing to do with it.

Yeah, it's incredible.

It really is.

It's astonishing.

And

I do think it's revealing of their real priorities.

It's the same thing with the feminists and exalting Linda Sarsour, making her the leader of the women's march on Washington after Trump was inaugurated.

And this is somebody who wears hijab.

Now,

there have been women who've been killed for not wearing hijab.

I know.

There's a widespread myth that women who wear hijab are constantly harassed in the united states most of the stories have turned out to be fabricated yeah and i i've i've just posted a video just recently uh of a woman in saudi arabia i believe it was um the four women in a car in a car not wearing the hijab that was iran it was iran yeah and uh and this woman stops gets out and she just starts berating them and you know i think she's saying you should die for what they're doing they're getting 10-year prison sentences in Iran for going without the hijab in public, which many women are doing despite the risks because they hate the regime so much.

And yet, this, and so that, they're the real women's rights heroes.

But the idea that to wear the hijab is somehow compatible with feminism is a misunderstanding of what, you know, the hijab is, what the hijab is for.

No.

It's a woman's responsibility to make sure a man's not tempted.

Oh, yeah, she has to remove the temptation.

And if she doesn't, it's her fault.

So she's liable to get killed if the man goes ahead and rapes her anyway or attacks her.

And so it's an extraordinarily misogynist statement, not a feminist one at all.

I've heard some things that

I think would make some people angry.

Some things that people would maybe disagree with.

Some things that people should do their own homework and go, wait a minute, he said this.

Let me look that up.

And go to original sources.

Yes.

But But I haven't heard anything here that makes me say, well, I don't know anything that would make me say this, that you should be silenced.

Well, obviously, I don't think I should, but I think that anyone who speaks honestly about the nature of this threat and the fact that there are elements of Islam that give rise to violence.

This doesn't mean every Muslim is violent, but that the ones who are are able to justify their actions by recourse to the holy texts.

Anybody who speaks honestly about that is nowadays systematically targeted and vilified with an attempt to destroy and completely discredit him.

Are we in McCarthy times?

Oh, yeah, this is worse than McCarthyism.

Those guys could work.

You know, they may have worked under pseudonyms, but they could work.

I mean, I'm still doing this, but there's no chance I could get any other kind of work, even under a pseudonym, because it would be ultimately discovered, and then that would be that.

And the idea that speaking honestly about the derivations of the jihad threat and its nature and magnitude today renders one a social pariah, I think is ridiculous and evidence of how topsy-turvy the world is.

But that's how it is.

You say it's worse than

communism.

I fear we are headed towards the burning of Alexandria.

Yeah, absolutely, yeah.

That

what we have now is it's a kind of a mob, a Salem witch trials kind of atmosphere, hysteria, and you are either in the group or you're not, and if you're not, you must be destroyed.

And it's an anti-intellectual.

But also the information.

Tell the story of the burning of the Library of Alexandria.

The Caliph Umar, the second successor, the second caliph, he burned the Library of Alexandria when he invaded Egypt.

And

people asked him, you know, what are you doing, burning the library?

And he said, look, if the books in it agree with the Quran, they are superfluous.

And if they disagree with the Quran, they're heretical.

Either way, we don't need them.

That strain of anti-intellectualism, it runs all the way through Islam, I think, attributable to the centrality of the Quran and the idea that it's the perfect book that has everything in it that you need.

And so you don't need any other book.

And it

also makes for the persecution of people who try to bring rationalism and free inquiry into that atmosphere.

The reason why I brought out the Jefferson Quran is

because

I like Jefferson's approach.

Do your own homework.

Yes.

Don't listen to me.

I'm Thomas Jefferson.

I wrote the Declaration of Independence.

I'm surrounded by a bunch of smart guys.

I'm just telling you, guys, you should publish this whole book

because people have to read it.

Well, I couldn't agree more.

And everything in my books is always very carefully footnoted.

And I encourage people, invite people.

Check my work.

See if what I'm saying is accurate.

And if you find any inaccuracy, I will publicly acknowledge it.

As a matter of fact, there were several people when the history of jihad came out.

There's C.J.

Wurlman, who is the atheist Islamic apologist.

He

wrote a book about the Quran and how wonderful it is and so on.

And anyway, he wrote saying, oh, here's more Islamophobic lies.

And I said, if you find a single inaccuracy in the book, I will pay you $5,000.

And I made that, I'm not talking about typos, but factual inaccuracies.

And I made that offer to several other Muslim spokesmen who were dismissing the book before reading it.

If anybody reads it and finds a factual inaccuracy, I'm not going to pay $5,000 to anyone who says this because...

I might end up paying a lot of money.

But I think, more in reality, they're not going to find anything because I'm very careful in what I do.

And everything is exhaustively documented.

Check it up, check up on it, and you'll see it's there.

Thank you so much.

Thank you.

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