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June 5, 2017 - The Ben Shapiro Show
24:39
Ep. 312 - The Left Is More Anti-Trump Than Anti-Islamist
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The threat of Islamist terrorism is absolutely real.
The attacks in London weren't unpredictable or undefined.
They were carried out by a cell of terrorists who believed that global Sharia law ought to be implemented, that the Dar al-Harb, territory of war, must be turned into the Dar al-Islam by forceful means.
In order to fight the threat of Islamism, three myths must immediately die, and we in the West must do all we can to put them to death.
Myth number one.
Only a negligible minority of Muslims are Islamists.
It's simply not true that the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of Muslims don't believe in the goals of Islamism, even if they're unwilling to participate themselves in the Jihad.
Bernard Lewis explains, quote, significant numbers of Muslims are ready to approve and a few of them to apply this interpretation of this religion.
As Muslim moderate Zuhdi Jasser puts it, it's a political movement of 30 to 40 percent of Muslims globally and 80 to 90 percent of establishment leadership due to petro-Islam of Saudis and Qataris.
Myth number two.
Not everyone who is non-violent is non-Islamist.
President Trump has spoken out about the nature of Islamism, but he made the mistake of doing so in Saudi Arabia, ignoring the Saudi support for Wahhabism all over the planet.
In doing so, he lumped Islamists in with moderates, a crucial mistake.
American groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America also reflect an Islamist worldview.
Dr. Jalal Zubairi, director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, says, quote, they support Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Yet these organizations are routinely utilized as points of contact for governments on the local, state, and federal level.
The seedbed for terrorism is a far larger community of people who agree with terrorist views and tut-tut their means.
Myth number three.
The West has no part in pushing Islamic reform.
The notion here seems to be that only the Islamic world can produce reform inside Islam.
That's true, but the federal government and Western governments around the world have an obligation to help identify reformers and moderates and provide them with support while excising everyone else.
This doesn't mean we can't engage in real politic, but it does mean we can't blather about the threat of Islamism while standing in the middle of Riyadh next to one of the greatest sponsors of Islamism on the planet.
We took an active role in promoting democracy in Western Europe rather than communism in the aftermath of World War II.
We should be playing a similar role in the Muslim world now.
This is why it was so egregious for President Obama to simply declare an, quote, Arab Spring and do nothing to support actual moderate forces.
Finally, we must fight the perception that we can't kill enough terrorists to make a difference.
We certainly can, and we must.
We must also take measures designed to protect ourselves at home, including President Trump's extreme vetting.
But the true battle The one that will last decades is about what happens inside Islam itself.
We must get active in that battle.
I'm Ben Shapiro.
This is The Ben Shapiro Show.
Alrighty, so, lots to talk about today.
I want to talk about President Trump's tweets, I want to talk about the nature of Islamism, I want to talk about global warming, so a lot to get to today.
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Okay, so, big terror attack happens in London on Saturday.
Killing seven people, wounding another 45.
A group of radical Muslims apparently just walked down the center of London Bridge, started stabbing people, knifing people, attacking people, people running away.
They had no capacity to defend themselves because guns are basically illegal in Britain, so people who were at bars that were under assault were actually throwing beer mugs at the terrorists.
The police had to run away and come back with guns.
There was an eight-minute delay between when this started and when the police were actually able to put these terrorists down.
It was not lone wolves.
It was a full-on terror cell.
There was also a stabbing attack nearby.
Apparently the police had to explode a few bombs that didn't go off, so it could have been much worse.
Thank God it wasn't.
But instead of the left looking seriously about the fact that we've now had two major terrorist attacks in Great Britain in the last Three weeks.
Instead of looking at that and saying, well, maybe we ought to take a look at the standards for vetting immigrants coming in from Muslim countries.
Maybe we ought to look at the impact of Wahhabi money coming in and impacting the mosques.
Maybe we ought to take a look at better surveillance inside the Muslim community, because not all Muslims are terrorists, but these radical terrorists are all Muslims.
Instead of doing that, the left has decided it's very, very important instead to go after President Trump.
So President Trump Again, he just tweets what's on his mind, which is not a wonderful thing.
I want to talk about whether this is effective or not in a second, but the first thing to note is that the left is using President Trump's tweets as a way of avoiding having to talk about the real issues that are cropping up inside the Islamic world.
So, President Trump tweets.
Here's what he tweeted.
This is on Sunday.
He said, we need to be smart, vigilant, and tough.
We need the courts to give us back our rights.
We need the travel ban as an extra level of safety.
Number one, the left jumps all over that because they say, okay, what does this have to do with the travel ban?
Because the travel ban, none of these people were actually from any of the countries covered by the travel ban.
And then...
He tweets next, whatever the United States can do to help out in London and UK, we will be there.
We are with you.
God bless you.
OK, see, that's actually what the president should be tweeting.
And then he should save all the rest of the policy talk for a big policy speech that he'd give on Monday about the threat of radical Islam and how we're actually going to counter it and who our allies are in that fight and what policies ought to be promulgated up to and including the travel ban.
He then continues, we must stop being politically correct and get down to the business of security for our people.
If we don't get smart, it will only get worse.
OK, so again, that's true, but you ought to suggest some solutions.
Ann Coulter, who's a big Trump supporter, obviously, she wrote in Trump We Trust, Ann Coulter said, right, this is why we elected you, to do these things, not to blather about them.
And then he also tweeted, at least seven dead and 48 wounded in terror attack, and Mayor of London says there is no reason to be alarmed.
And here he's talking about the mayor of London is a guy named Sadiq Khan, who is a Muslim guy who has downplayed the threat of terrorism in the recent past.
The mayor of London said, there's no reason to be alarmed because of the extra police presence.
Obviously, that's silly.
I'd be alarmed if I were in London right now.
I'm not sure why Trump was going after Sadiq Khan, per se, on this.
I mean, there are many reasons to go after the mayor of London.
This seems like a bad reason to go after the mayor of London.
And so that's that.
Is there one more Trump tweet here?
Okay, and finally, do you notice that we are not having a gun debate right now?
That's because they use knives in a truck.
Okay, that's true, but the way that he phrases that makes it sound like it would have been better if they had guns so we could have a gun debate, which is weird, but in any case...
Is any of this really egregious stuff?
Is any of it truly terrible?
No, none of it is truly terrible.
It's also not effective.
I'll discuss the effective point in a second, but the point I really want to make is that the left is jumping on Trump's tweets in order to go after Trump.
So, you have idiot Reza Aslan on CNN, who is just an awful, awful commentator.
A guy who's eaten human brains, by the way.
And Reza Aslan comes out and he says that Trump is a quote-unquote piece of bleep.
It's a CNN commentator saying that about the president of the United States.
And then an MSNBC anchor comes out and says, maybe Trump is trying to provoke a terror attack in the United States to prove a point.
Here's what this MSNBC anchor had to say.
Is the president trying to provoke a domestic terrorist attack with this Twitter rant?
Because only to prove himself right.
That's Thomas Roberts, which is just idiotic.
No, he's not trying to provoke a domestic terror attack with his Twitter rant.
That's so stupid.
It's not like ISIS is sitting around going, Oh, Trump tweeted something nasty.
Let's go kill Americans.
They kill plenty of them during Obama's time.
This idea that his tweets are responsible for an uptick in terror is just silly.
And then you have idiots like Bette Midler who just... I mean, there are no words to describe the stupidity of this tweet.
to each.
Said more sorrow and grief at the hands of mad men in London.
Men and religion are worthless.
Um, okay.
How about like the guys who are the soldiers killing the terrorists?
Are they worthless as well?
How about the men who were killed by the terrorists?
Are they worthless?
Are the police worthless?
How about the guy who's your father?
I assume that you find him not worthless.
Is he worthless as well?
Also, I'm weirded out by the fact that she lumps in all religion together.
This is something the left likes to do so they can avoid having to talk about the real threat of radical Islam and the fact that Islam has a unique relationship with terrorism that does not exist in Christianity or Judaism.
Men and religion are worthless.
Really, like, all religion is worthless.
Like, the Jainists are a problem.
The Jainists are the problem?
Like, I'm confused.
Buddhists are the problem now?
Again, anything to avoid discussing the real issues here.
The real issues of what percentage of Muslims are actually radicalized, what percentage of those radicalized Muslims are actually terrorists.
Susan Rice of the Obama administration.
She of Benghazi lies.
She came out from a national security advisor and she says that Trump's travel ban isolates Muslims.
So she's again attacking Trump as opposed to talking about what strategy should actually be used with regard to combating radical Islam.
Well, George, there's really no evidence to suggest that by banning Muslims, or banning Muslims from a particular set of six countries, that we would make ourselves here in the United States safer.
And that's, I believe, one of the major reasons why the courts thus far have been very skeptical of the travel ban.
Moreover, I think there's a very real risk that by Stigmatizing and isolating Muslims from particular countries and Muslims in general, that we alienate the very communities here in the United States whose cooperation we most need to detect and prevent these homegrown extremists from being able to carry out attacks.
She's been all of her time arguing about the travel ban against Trump, and it's all about Trump's tweets, because if Trump hadn't said anything, then right now we'd be talking about the nature of radical Islam and what we actually have to do to fight it.
But instead, because Trump tweeted all this stuff, the left is jumping on that.
Sally Cohn, she tweets, political correctness.
Remember, Trump tweeted a few minutes ago about political correctness being a problem.
Sally Cohn tweeted, political correctness is simple idea.
Everyone should be treated with equal dignity and respect.
It's not cause of terrorism, it's antidote.
First of all, political correctness is not the idea that everyone should be treated with equal dignity and respect.
That's called the biblical golden rule.
But the idea that political correctness is crippling us is because if you treat terrorists with dignity and respect, if you treat radical Islam with dignity and respect, you're actually forwarding their agenda.
She says political correctness isn't the cause of terrorism, it's the antidote?
Okay, number one, Islamist terrorists don't deserve respect and they're not killing Londoners because people were mean to them.
Duh.
But then she said, look, Oregon, between an Islamophobic attacker and men who stood up to him, who do you believe in being politically correct?
Whose side are you on?
And then she said, of those multicultural kids in Manchester versus Maniac Bomber, who do you think believes in treating everyone with equality and respect?
Well, the good guys, but that doesn't mean that they would treat attackers and Islamists with equality and respect.
And I said, please name the situation in which tolerance and equality rather than resistance has defeated hate.
The point I'm making here is that tolerance and equality toward terrorists does not defeat terrorists.
What political correctness does, the reason political correctness is wrong is because it insists that we apply respect and dignity to people who deserve none of them.
Resistance is all—and some people were saying to me, well, you know, tolerance and equality defeated intolerance during the Civil Rights Movement.
Right.
With passive resistance.
You have to resist the bad guys.
That's the point.
Political correctness cripples you from resisting the bad guys.
But again, all of this is just about—all of this Unfortunately, is just about anti-Trumpism as opposed to anti-Islamism.
They would rather have conversations about how Trump is terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, than have conversations about what we can do to actually stop the growth of radical Islam.
Now, with that said, as I say, the left continues to be the real obstacle to fighting Islam, but President Trump is not making things any easier when he does silly things.
So, President Trump This morning he gets back on Twitter and he's been watching apparently Morning Joe and Fox and Friends and he gets back on Twitter and he issues this series of tweets.
Here's what he tweeted.
He continues, the Justice Department should have stayed with the original travel ban, not the watered-down politically correct version they submitted to Supreme Court.
The Justice Department should ask for an expedited hearing of the watered-down travel ban before the Supreme Court and seek a much tougher version.
In any event, we are extreme vetting people coming into the U.S.
in order to help keep our country safe.
The courts are slow and political.
And then he flipped over to Fox & Friends and tweeted, Dems are taking—he tweeted at Fox & Friends, Dems are taking forever to approve my people, including ambassadors.
They are nothing but obstructionists.
Want approvals.
Period.
Okay.
Now, we can all, I think, resonate to the fact that President Trump sees radical Islam much more clearly than President Obama did.
President Obama saw radical Islam as this tiny minority of people.
It wasn't really a threat.
Why are we worried about radical Islam when we should be worried about things like global warming?
You know, President Trump doesn't do that routine, thank God.
But, I'm going to talk in a second About just what Trump is doing and whether it's effective or not.
Because listen, it's all well and good for a Breitbart commenter to say things that you agree with.
It's well and good for me to say things that you agree with or disagree with.
But the President of the United States has a job, and that is to implement policy, not to sound off on Twitter.
And if his sounding off on Twitter actually makes it harder for him to implement policy, then he's not doing his job.
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Okay, so, as I was saying, President Trump got on Twitter this morning, and this is an ongoing problem for President Trump.
I agree with many of the things that he says.
The travel ban, as I've said before, I don't think it's fantastic, I don't think it's terrible, I think it's insufficient in some ways and overbroad in others.
In other words, It covers some people who ought not to be covered, and it doesn't cover people coming from Britain, where these terrorists are from, or France, where many terrorists are from, or Germany, where many terrorists are from, or Saudi Arabia, where many terrorists are from, or Egypt, where many terrorists are from.
It covers a series of countries that are high terror, but high terror mostly inside the country, not necessarily exporting terrorism to other countries, per se, in mass numbers.
So, what Andrew McCarthy has said, and I think this is correct, is that if you actually want to stop importation of terrorists, what we actually need to focus on is less the travel ban, and more on the extreme vetting Trump talks about.
And this would be increasing standards with regard to vetting of people coming into the country, screening for ideology, screening for values, screening for, yes, which mosque did you go to, and was that mosque funded by Saudi Arabia, for example?
These are questions that ought to be asked.
Instead, Trump is focused on this travel ban.
And his tweets, as I mentioned before, are actually counterproductive.
They don't help implement the travel ban that even he wants.
So, in order to understand this, you need to understand that when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals knocked down the second executive order travel ban, Their justification for doing so is they said, one, it's a Muslim ban.
Two, it's the same as that first executive order that we knocked down, which was overbroad.
And it's just another way of doing that backdoor, basically.
That was their argument.
So, what does Trump do?
He comes out and he basically says, it's a travel ban.
And then he says, he links it to the London attacks.
By linking it to the London attacks, which have nothing to do with any of the people from these particular countries, it makes it sound like he actually would like to implement a Muslim ban.
Which is what the courts were saying, so he should shut up, because stupid.
Like, don't do this.
And then, for him to attack his own Justice Department, understand, the first travel ban executive order goes down in flames, and Trump comes back with a second one, right, and he signs it.
His tweet, he's now saying that it's the DOJ's fault that he signed it.
He signed it.
This is his tweet.
The Justice Department should have stayed with the original travel ban, not the watered-down, politically correct version they submitted to the Supreme Court.
He signed it!
What is he even talking about?
He signed it.
Like, you don't get to complain about a travel ban that you signed, dude.
And, by the way, the Justice Department works for you.
They're the ones who are appealing this thing at your behest.
Attorney General Sessions was hired by you.
He can be fired by you.
The Justice Department is under the purview of the executive branch.
You know, if you would like the Justice Department to seek an expedited hearing, you obviously have a phone you are tweeting from it.
Why don't you pick it up and call Attorney General Sessions?
All of this is just counterproductive.
It's a waste.
It actually makes it less likely that he's going to get the votes he needs on the Supreme Court to uphold the travel ban.
And this goes to, is what Trump Is he right in his general take on radical Islam?
I think he is right in his general take on radical Islam, but he's going to need to do more than that.
He's going to need to implement policies that make us safe.
And if he thinks the travel ban is one of those policies, then why would you go on Twitter and undermine your own legal case at the same time that you're trying to argue it?
It doesn't make any sense.
I'm not angry at Trump for his perspective.
I think his perspective is probably correct.
But I think that his competence is in question here.
The President of the United States is there to do things.
He is not just there to say things.
And I know everyone on our side of the aisle, everybody on the right, is just overjoyed that he's saying a lot of the things that we'd like people to say.
Now it is his job to implement.
He has a Republican Congress.
I can, listen, I can say all the things you want to hear said.
Rush Limbaugh can say them.
Sean Hannity can say them.
Mark Levin can say them.
There are plenty of us on the right who say the things you want to hear.
You can say them in the comments section over at Daily Wire.
The question isn't Whether people are saying the things you want to say, the question is, are they implementing the things that will keep you safe?
Right now, President Trump's tweets are actually getting in the way of that.
They're giving leftists something to swivel to, instead of having to argue on the ground that Trump had chosen.
Imagine for a second, the London attacks happened on Saturday.
And Trump, instead of tweeting out, just tweets, thoughts and prayers with the UK.
We're going to do everything we can to help.
And then he waits till Monday and he gives a national address.
And he says, here's what the threat of radical Islam is all about.
It's about the idea of imposing Sharia law globally.
It is believed by a significant percentage of Muslims all around the world.
And we have to distinguish between these so-called moderate groups like Karen Isner from actual moderates like Zutty Jasser, or like some of the other people who are discussed in a book I recommended last week about moderate Islam.
There are plenty of moderate Muslims, reform Muslims, but they're not the ones the government goes to.
Here's what we're going to do.
We're going to reach out to this person, this person, this person, this person.
We're going to start working.
We're going to demand of the Saudi government that they stop funding Wahhabism in mosques.
If they don't, we're going to freeze their bank accounts.
Right?
These are all things that Trump could be doing.
And he could have done it with a well-stated policy speech.
What would be so wrong with waiting?
Like, I know that everyone has this gut level.
Ooh, I'm glad he tweeted.
Ooh, I'm glad that he said things that need to be said.
They do need to be said, but they need to be said in a smart fashion.
This is not 4-H-S what he's doing right now.
It is just him watching Morning Joe and tweeting, and that is not good for his agenda.
If you want the agenda passed— Look, I'm going to distinguish now, okay?
Are you a conservative who wants the agenda, or are you just someone who feels good because Donald Trump is punching things?
If you're just a person who feels good because Donald Trump, in random fashion, like the Hulk, is just breaking things, then let me suggest to you, you're not doing your job as a conservative.
Your job as a conservative is to forward policy that makes your children safer.
It is his job to implement that policy.
If he's undercutting the implementation because he can't control himself, that is no better than saying the wrong thing.
It's slightly better, but he's saying the right thing.
It's better to say the right thing than to say the wrong thing and do the wrong thing, but it's not that much better than saying the right thing and doing the wrong thing.
I'd prefer that he say the right thing and do the right thing.
But that would require him to actually use his prefrontal cortex as opposed to his lizard brain that just wants to lash out at things on Twitter.
I'm angry not because I think he has the wrong perspective.
You understand?
I agree with him on a lot of this stuff.
I'm angry because he has a job.
I agree with a lot of the people who work at my company.
But, they also have jobs.
If they came in, if Mathis and Austin came in here every day and they said, Ben, your show is just great, and then they didn't play the audio at the correct times, cut off the show at the wrong point, and didn't allow me to read my ads, I would say you're doing a crappy job, you're fired.
Because they still have a job.
It is really stupid to act as though Trump doesn't have a job, or that his only job is to say things, and it's really stupid if you say his only job is to say things, but then when he says things, you say, well don't take him seriously, don't take him literally, take him seriously.
So is it his job to say things, or is it to do things?
You can't just switch randomly.
His job is to say things and do things, and he should do both of those things correctly.
Okay, so.
With that said, we're going to talk about the left falling apart on global warming and a few notes on Vladimir Putin and such.
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