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Nov. 30, 2016 - The Ben Shapiro Show
18:39
Ep. 218 - Islamist Terrorist Attacks, Left Goes Silent
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On Tuesday, nearly a full day after Islamic terrorist Abdul Razak Ali Artan, also not named Bob Smith, ran a car into a group of students and then hopped out with a butcher's knife and began hacking away, CNN still can't uncover a motive.
Here's CNN's headline, quote, Students back in class at Ohio State, investigators search for knife attack motive.
Ohio Governor John Kasich, oh God no, please God no, not John Kasich, has now announced, quote, we may never find out why Artan committed this act of terrorism.
I have a hot lead.
It is called Facebook.
Here was Artin's post just before entering into a personal jihad against Americans.
Quote, in the name of Allah, the most merciful and the most gracious, my brothers and sisters, I am sick and tired of seeing my fellow Muslim brothers and sisters being killed and tortured everywhere.
Seeing my fellow Muslims being tortured, raped and killed in Burma led to a boiling point.
I can't take it anymore.
Americans, stop interfering with other countries, especially the Muslim ummah.
We are not weak.
We are weak.
Remember that.
Wait, what?
If you want us Muslims to stop carrying lone wolf attacks, then make peace with Dawla in Al-Sham.
Make a pact or a treaty with them where you promise to leave them alone, you and your fellow apostate allies.
By Allah, we will not let you sleep unless you give peace to the Muslims.
You will not celebrate or enjoy any holiday.
Stop the killing of Muslims in Burma.
By the way, every single Muslim who disapproves of my action is a sleeper cell waiting for a signal.
I am warning you, oh America, and a message to the Muslims.
Don't listen to celebrity scholars who sold their dean I'm talking about the likes of Yasser Oafi, Omar Suleiman, Nouman Mufti, and the list goes on.
Beware of Al-Maghreb Institute.
Listen instead to our hero Imam Anwar al-Awlaki.
Let me ask you this question.
If the Muhammad, peace and blessings upon him, and his Sanabah were here today, wouldn't the Western media call them terrorists?
To conclude, by Allah, I am willing to use a billion infidels in retribution.
I can't get it, guys.
How?
What drove this?
Encyclopedia Brown must be on the case.
Let's get him out there on his bicycle.
Maybe he can uncover a motive in the great Ohio State stabbing attack.
I don't know.
The clues are just not there.
I can't make the connection.
The hot lead wasn't so hot.
The media have decided to make this about discrimination against Muslims, of course.
Here is CNN again.
Quote, Back in August, Ohio State's student-run newspaper profiled Artan as part of its Humans of Ohio State series.
Obviously, they took humans a little too seriously.
He had just transferred from Columbus State and talked about his struggles to find a place to pray in peace on the large campus.
Unquote.
They neglect to mention that at the end of that profile, Artin admits he engaged in prayer in the open with no consequences, which is normal.
As an Orthodox Jew, I pray three times a day.
In the mornings, I pray with the talus, which is the prayer shawl, and the tefillin, which is the phylacteries.
You wrap them around the arm and on the head.
I have never been bothered or even approached while praying in public, everywhere from campuses to airports.
This is America, the most tolerant country on planet Earth.
But the media have to pretend that Artin was a victim of the West, rather than a perpetrator against it.
That, by the way, springs from a deep-seated need to cast Western civilization in a negative light.
The media did the same thing after a spate of attacks in France.
An enormous series of stories broke about how France had not been tolerant enough toward new Muslim immigrants, you know, aside from giving them welfare and taking them in and the whole deal.
Because the left's chief priority in life is equality of outcome, and because the left believes actions should have no connection with consequences, the left has to connect All unhappiness and suffering, not with individual decision-making or bad ideology, but with the system.
And the system is Islamophobic, and that must be why Arton was so upset and went on a stabby spree.
Or, alternatively, we may never know why this Islamic terrorist self-declared committed an act of Islamic terrorism.
You wanna know why Donald Trump won?
Because of this sort of crap.
We all know why Artin committed an act of terrorism.
It wasn't because of the lack of gun control, or the evils of income inequality, or any other stupid reason those who purposefully attempt to obscure the truth suggest.
It was because of radical Islam.
At least Trump will say the words, unlike cowards from both the left and the right.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
All righty, so we have tons to get to here today.
Lots of Trump Twitter fun.
That guy's Twitter account is just going to be a barrel of laughs for the next four years, and he will definitely fill us up with good Trump, bad Trump for years to come, which is very exciting.
And again, thanks to Brandon Snipes for the theme on that.
We'll get to that in just a second.
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Alrighty.
Let's begin with yesterday's attack at Ohio State University.
So, as I say, the media have completely gotten it wrong because this is what they do for a living.
There was this interview that this attacker did with the Lantern, which is an Ohio State University publication, and here's what this interview said.
It said, humans of Ohio State, and this is a direct quote from this guy who just wounded 11 people with a knife after driving a car into them, quote, I just transferred for Columbus State.
We had prayer rooms, like actual rooms, where we could go to pray, because we Muslims have to pray five times a day.
There's Fajr, which is early in the morning at dawn, then Dhuhr during the daytime, then Asr in the evening, like right about now, and then Maghrib, which is like right at sunset, and then Isha at night.
I wanted to pray Asr.
I mean, I'm new here.
This is my first day.
This place is huge, and I don't even know where to pray.
I wanted to pray in the open, but I was kind of scared with everything going on in the media.
I'm a Muslim.
It's not what the media portrays me to be.
If people look at me, a Muslim praying, I don't know what they're going to think, what's going to happen.
But I don't blame them.
It's the media that put that picture in their head.
So they're just going to have to have it, and it's going to make them feel uncomfortable.
I was kind of scared right now, but I just did it.
I relied on God.
I went over to the corner and just prayed.
And nothing happened because no one cares.
Because in America, you can pray however you want, and no one is going to bother you because, again, this is America.
But it does illuminate a couple of points that are pretty amazing.
Number one, in order for people to perpetrate acts of violence and terror, they have to feel like they're victims.
People like to feel justified in what they're doing.
Very few... TV makes all of the bad guys on TV people who are insanely barbaric and sadists.
Like if you watch Game of Thrones, the great Villains in Game of Thrones.
People like Joffrey Baratheon or people like Ramsay Bolton.
These are all people who revel in other people's suffering.
It's something they enjoy, right?
They just like cutting parts off of people and they take a sick sort of pleasure in it.
The truth is, the vast majority of people who commit acts of violence on Earth are not sociopathic sadists.
They're not people who just sit around going, you know what I'd really like to do?
Cut a finger off somebody today.
The number of people who are like that is actually very, very small in the human population.
It's really small.
Hollywood likes to build those people up as the real villains.
The real villains are always people who just enjoy the sadism for the sake of the sadism.
But that's a really small group of people.
Most people who do evil things think they're doing something good.
Right?
Most people who were participating in the Holocaust thought that they were doing something good on behalf of the fatherland.
Most people who participated in the mass killings in the Soviet Union, literally people got so tired during the mass killings in the Soviet Union, the soldiers got so tired from holding their arm out to shoot people in the head, that they actually had people on staff, masseuses on staff, who would massage the right arm and trigger finger of the people who were pulling the gun because they were murdering so many thousands of people at a time in the Soviet Union.
Those people They thought that they were heroes.
They thought they were doing something good.
People always have to think they're doing something good.
There's not a person who's alive who doesn't have a way to justify their actions.
It's just the way the human brain works.
In fact, Jonathan Haidt, who's an ethicist and sociologist at New York University, he wrote a whole book called The Righteous Mind, in which he discusses the fact That the human brain is sort of like, we tend to think that the reasonable side of us is what controls the human brain.
In reality, he likens the human brain to a rider on an elephant.
The elephant is sort of your instinctive mind.
The elephant really tells you where to go, and then the rider can sort of make small deflections as to the path of the elephant, but in the end, the elephant rules.
That's how human beings really work.
We want to do certain things, and then we come up with justifications later for the things that we're doing.
Well, one of the ways that you justify killing a bunch of innocent people at Ohio State University is not because you're a sadist and you want to watch people suffer.
You do it because you think you're a victim.
You built up in your own mind that you are the victim of an evil, evil system, that Islamophobia is targeting you, and therefore you are acting in response, right?
You're always punching back.
No one has ever been an offender, no one's ever an aggressor.
You're always punching back.
Bin Laden, if you read his statements, it was always about, I'm taking revenge for X. It was always, I'm justified in doing what I'm doing because I'm reacting, right?
I didn't start it, you started it.
And that's always what evil people say.
It's what good people say, too, sometimes, but they're the ones who are telling the truth.
So you have to build up the idea that you are a victim of Islamophobia.
So the Islamophobia narrative that was promoted by this guy is point number one, which is you have to feel justified in order to kill innocent people.
Point number two, and this is the part that's truly amazing, is that he says in there that the media portray this really terrible vision of Muslims and that's why people view me badly.
No, actually, if people view Muslims badly, It's because people who say that Muslims ought not to be viewed badly drive trucks into groups of people and then stab them with butcher knives.
That would probably be it, right?
This guy who's saying, I don't understand why people see Muslims so badly.
If they do, it's because of people like you.
And we shouldn't paint, of course, all Muslims with the brush of this terrorist.
That's silly.
But it is worthwhile noting that the same guy who's complaining about media coverage of Islam is the guy who drove a truck into the middle of a group of people and then started hacking away with a butcher's knife.
I mean, that is worth noting.
It is also worth noting that the Islamophobia narrative is a way to shut down debate.
It's a way for people to simply suggest that you can't have real questions about how radical Islam works, about the ideology of radical Islam, whether it's promoting violence.
You just shout Islamophobia and that ends the conversation.
There's this suffix that the left loves to add to things.
And that suffix is phobia.
And the reason they do that is because they want to suggest that your opposition to some activity is not rooted in reason or risk assessment.
Your opposition to certain activity is rooted instead in an insane fear of things, right?
So if you say that men are men and women are women, for example, and that men can't magically become women and women can't magically become men, the response of the left is not, that's scientifically false, let me explain to you how a woman is a man, because they can't do that.
Instead, their response is, you're a transphobe, right?
You're transphobic.
I'm not afraid of transgender people.
I don't know a lot of people who are afraid of transgender people.
I feel horrible for transgender people.
But the way that the left act, it's not, if you believe this, it's not because in any way you have science to back you.
It's because you are a phobe, right?
You fear.
So if you are concerned about radical Islam, the left's response is, well, yeah, that's because you fear Islam.
You have an irrational fear of Islam and radical Islam.
First of all, Fear of radical Islam is perfectly rational, given the record of radical Islam around the world, to women, to gays, to people of civilized nations, everywhere, to Jews, to Christians.
There's plenty to fear from radical Islam, obviously.
But the left slaps the phobia label on there to label you pathological.
For having attitudes about people based on their own decision-making process.
You don't want to be called pathological.
You don't want to be called a weakling who lives in fear all the time.
And so instead you say, okay, well if I see somebody who may be engaged in something bad, I'm not going to report it because I don't want people labeling me an Islamophobe.
That's the danger of labeling people phobic.
It's the danger of saying that somebody is pathological.
They have something wrong with their brain.
If they have a risk assessment about a group of people who engage with a certain ideology.
Again, no one ever said Nazi-phobic, right?
Because Nazism was an evil ideology.
Radical Islam is an evil ideology.
Not Islam itself.
Radical Islam.
The Islam that says that honor killings are okay and that clitorectomies are worthwhile and that Jews ought to be slaughtered behind the rocks and the trees where they hide.
That sort of Islam is absolutely evil and should be fought.
And it's not phobic to say that.
Right?
No one's Nazi-phobic.
You just don't like Nazism because it's a bad ideology.
Radical Islam is a bad ideology.
Not mainstream Islam.
Not mainstream Islam.
Radical Islam.
And there is a distinction.
Westernized Muslims are not the same as Muslims who are living in Afghanistan.
You can see it by the polling data.
And one of the things I don't like to do here on The Ben Shapiro Show is get into textual analysis of the Quran, because I'm significantly more interested in what people do than in what people feel, right?
I'm more interested in behavior, right?
There's lots of stuff in the Bible too that's pretty violent, but Judeo-Christian tradition has basically read a lot of that stuff as either obsolete or inapplicable to today's situation.
And so how people act matters more to me than what the Bible says, you know, in terms of assessing how people think and act.
The same thing is true of Islam.
If you meet a moderate Muslim, I judge them by behavior, not by ideology.
The only reason ideology matters is if the ideology actually produces more violent people.
Radical Islam does produce more violent people.
Nazism produces more violent people.
That makes a difference.
But I'm not going to sit here and analyze Quranic verses, because there are a lot of people who interpret the Quranic verses In a moderate way, which is good, and there are a lot of people who don't, which is bad.
So I'd rather analyze the philosophy of the people who are doing the bad things than try and lump everybody together.
That's why I don't bother doing the Quranic analysis, which everyone's capable of doing and everybody has a different read.
In other news from this Ohio State thing, the media is trying to ignore that Islam had anything to do with it, radical Islam had anything to do with it, or political Islam, more realistically, had anything to do with it.
Instead, the media wanted to jump on the bandwagon about gun control.
So, here is what, as this thing was unfolding yesterday, there were reports that there was an active shooter at Ohio State.
And normally when these things break, the information is really, really spotty, right?
You don't know very much about what's going on because usually there are several different accounts.
Very often they'll say multiple shooters, when it's really just multiple accounts of the same shooter.
In this particular case, there was no shooter.
The shots that were being heard were from the cop who killed this terrorist bastard.
So the left couldn't wait.
They immediately jumped to their narrative and they started tweeting.
Here's Tim Kaine.
Well, here's Shannon Watts.
We can start with Tim Kaine.
Fine.
Stick there.
So here's Tim Kaine.
The senator from Virginia and former vice presidential candidate, deeply saddened by the senseless act of gun violence at Ohio State this morning, praying for the injured and the entire Buckeye community.
So he's jumping immediately to the gun control argument, right?
Whenever the left says senseless act of gun violence, what they really mean is, let's ban guns.
Number one, it wasn't an act of gun violence.
Number two, it wouldn't have been senseless.
It was obviously driven by an ideology, an evil murderous ideology.
He wasn't the only one.
Shannon Watts, who is a gun control leader.
She tweeted, for school shooting victims, it's not too soon to discuss our nation's lax gun laws.
It's too late.
Ohio State University.
Except there was no school shooting at Ohio State University.
It was a Muslim terrorist using a car and a knife.
And Adam Feldman, who's a theater critic, and I know that when I'm looking for solid political analysis, I always go straight to the theater critics.
Here is Adam Feldman.
What happened at Ohio State is terrible, but mass stabber leaves eight people with non-life-threatening injuries is why gun control matters.
First of all, we have no evidence that this guy ever tried to even apply for a gun.
He probably could have gotten one legally.
There was nothing to stop him in the state of Ohio, I assume.
Beyond that, you know, this is a real strained argument.
So when your outcome is always the same to your argument, there's something wrong with your argument.
So if somebody shoots people, that's evidence that gun control is necessary.
And if somebody stabs people, that's evidence that gun control is working.
Amazing, amazing how that operates, according to the left.
The left had to jump to their narrative.
It's very funny.
The left is talking a lot these days about fake news, this big fake news controversy, this idea that That people were driven to their various political perspectives by news that confirms their bias.
There's truth to this, but this is an example of how the left did it, right?
So, the reality is we're always looking for confirmation bias.
It's one of the reasons why, on this program, I really strive to sort of give you what I think are the unbiased sets of facts.
I make my perspective clear, but I'm going to tell you the truth, whether it benefits me personally or not, right?
I mean, during the entire election cycle, I was very critical of Donald Trump.
That certainly didn't benefit me in any way.
You know, when it comes to his presidency, I'm gonna call it like I see it.
I think that most people have a tendency to find a piece of news and then try and fit it into the puzzle of their thinking.
So everybody's worldview has a set of holes that are to be filled by pegs.
Every piece of news is a peg.
If the peg doesn't fit, people try to ram it in anyway.
That's exactly what happened with the left on this story.
They wanted a gun control peg to stick in their gun control worldview.
It was a square peg.
They tried to shove it in the round hole anyway, and it ends up making them look stupid as well it should.
Here's my rule.
We should wait till all the facts are out.
This is true on police shootings.
It's true on Black Lives Matter riots.
It's true on all this stuff.
Okay?
You should always wait, and I don't always abide by this rule.
I should.
I'm trying to hold myself to a higher standard on this.
We should always try to wait till the facts are out, or at least base our opinions on the best available facts, before we jump to a conclusion that confirms our worldview.
That's what we should do.
Because otherwise we're not actually analyzing the news, we're just hacks trying to bolster what we already think about the universe, and that's not really particularly useful to anybody.
You should let the evidence lead you to a conclusion, rather than letting your conclusion lead you to the evidence.
Okay, we're going to have to break there, but we have much more coming up.
We're going to deconstruct the culture.
In a little while we're also going to talk about Donald Trump and flag burning, which is, I have sort of an interesting take on it, maybe different than some of the ones you've heard today.
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