What is Suicidal Empathy and Is It Destroying the West?
Charity, pluralism, and openness are values that made the West great. But they are not values shared by the aggressive Islamists and resentful Third Worlders the West has been admitting in huge numbers. In the wake of New York's mayoral primary, Dr. Gad Saad issues a warning about how foreign migrants view the West's practices as weaknesses to be exploited. Plus, Hillsdale's Prof. Paul Rahe describes the nature of the Iranian Islamic regime, the history of its conflict with Israel, and the prospects for it being overthrown by more moderate, friendly forces inside the country. Watch every episode ad-free on members.charliekirk.com! Get new merch at charliekirkstore.com! Support the show: http://www.charliekirk.com/supportSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Hey everybody, Charlie Kirk here live from thebitcoin.com studio.
Dr. Gad Saad joins us and he criticizes Islam.
And then we have Dr. Paul Ray all about what's actually happening in the Middle East.
Is the regime weak or strong in Persia?
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Joining us now is Dr. Gad Saad, a great friend of mine, visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood University, author of The Sad Truth About Happiness and the Parasitic Mind.
Dr. Saad, great to see you.
How are you, sir?
So, Dr. Saad, I'm doing well.
You were the first guest that we thought of, of someone who could really speak truth to power about what we're seeing in New York and a broader takeover of the West by Islam.
And I said something yesterday.
I said, look, it doesn't feel right or seem right that the West is quickly being taken over.
Both London and New York are going to have Muslim mayors and having third world immigration that has made that possible.
Dr. Saad, how should we think about all of this?
Look, Islam, like any ideology, has certain defining tenets, some of which might be perfectly consistent with our values, but many of which, regrettably, are perfectly inconsistent with our values.
So take, for example, Sharia law, which is Islamic law.
It purports that the severity of a punishment depends on the identity of the perpetrator and of the victim.
In that sense, it couldn't be any more antithetical to American jurisprudence, which basically says that lady justice has to be blind.
And so the people who say, hey, you know, all religions have good, good and bad.
I mean, in a very idiotic sense, that's true.
But, you know, Jains, people who practice Jainism are extremely pacifists, so much so that when they walk down the street, they use a broom so that they don't inadvertently step on any ants.
Regrettably, Islam is not as peaceful as Jainism, and therefore we must make sure to let in people who share our values.
But why is this so complicated?
And so why is it that secular Westerners, especially in New York, go out of their way to try to elect someone like Mamdani, who has, by no way whatsoever could you say this guy is a believer in Western values?
What drives that?
So, I mean, there are several reasons, one of which is, so Islamophilia, the love of Islam, stems from several parasitic ideas, one of which is that Islam, because it is in the minority status in the West so far, it is viewed as the underdog.
And of course, progressives with their suicidal empathy love to view the underdog as downtrodden and therefore we need to protect it.
Of course, what they don't know is that Islam is the majority position in 56 countries that constitute the Islamic organization, you know, the IOC, OIC, Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
And so therefore, they have this reflex, right?
The noble Gazans are the sweet boys.
The Israelis are the mean guys.
And so that just comes from the reflexive bent of progressives to always go for the minority.
And so what further about Islam do you wish or want Westerners to know about?
Do you think that Islam is compatible with Western civilization?
The short answer, no.
Of course, millions of Muslims decide to ignore the incongruent elements of their religion.
They're practicing cafeteria Islam, right?
They're choosing the parts that they agree with and they're ignoring the parts that they don't agree with.
But once Islam becomes, never mind a majority, if it becomes a strong minority, we have 1400 years of history that tells us what happens to all of the foundational values that we hold dearly in the West, right?
I mean, you don't have to, you know, believe me, you could just study history, right?
I mean, almost every single one of the 56 Countries that I mentioned a few minutes ago started off with having zero Islam.
And then you close and open your eyes, suddenly it's 99.9% Islam.
How did that happen?
In some cases, it takes five years for it to happen.
In some cases, it takes 500 years to happen.
But inshallah, it will always happen.
I'll mention one other thing.
Many of your viewers may not know this.
Since 9-11 alone, Charlie, so that's 24 years, there have been 47,000 plus terror attacks committed by Islamic terrorists in nearly 70 countries.
And now there are multiple databases that you can use to prove that this number is correct.
47,000 terror attacks.
So that should give you a sense of whether Islam is compatible with the West or not.
So why is it that so many Muslims are moving to Western countries?
Is it just economics or is there something more ideological at play here?
It's both.
Of course, many, many Muslims have no interest in conquering anyone.
And they want, as you just said, exactly what you said, which is I want better economic opportunities for me and my children and so on.
But the Muslim Brotherhood and many other Islamic theorists and scholars and politicians have said that we will conquer the West through three means.
And I hope that your listeners and viewers take note.
Number one, we will conquer the West through the womb of our women, right?
So that's a demographic fertility battle.
We will produce five children, you will produce 1.2 children, and we will outbreed you.
Number two, we will conquer the West through hijra.
Hijrah is the Arabic word for immigration, and that's exactly what we do with our open border policies.
And number three, we will conquer the West by using your miserable freedoms and liberties against you.
They're screaming this out from the top of the mountain.
And yet most Westerners choose to ignore it, Charlie.
It is so galling.
It is so frustrating.
I escaped that world 45 plus years ago.
And here it is now hunting me down 50 years later.
And it's what can we do to fortify ourselves against this?
And mass immigration leads to bad policies.
You become what you import.
And I know that you're working on a book called Suicidal Empathy, but help me further understand the fortification strategy to help prevent this.
Well, demography is indeed destiny, right?
I mean, a culture is defined by the values that the majority of people share in that culture.
Cultures are not all equal, right?
Cultures that throw gays off rooftops are not as good as cultures that don't.
Cultures that don't engage in female genital mutilation of their little girls are not as good as cultures that don't, and so on and so forth.
So cultures have values.
Religions have values.
It is perfectly reasonable for a host society to say you're only welcome here as long as you completely reject some of the values that are antithetical to ours.
If yes, welcome in, my brother.
If no, stay from where you came from.
I mean, it's as simple as that.
But again, Charlie, the reflex in the West, hence parasitic mind and suicidal empathy, people in the West have been taught that it is gauche, it is callous to ever criticize someone's religion.
And that's what makes most Westerners so impotent to ever criticize Islam, because they say, well, you know, I've got my religion, they have theirs.
Who am I to judge them?
Well, you should judge if those values are inconsistent with those that you hold dear.
And people in the West assume that Western values are universal, and they're not.
What in particular makes Islamic values incongruent with Western values?
What are the specifics you would say?
Well, there are many, but one of which, so look, all Abrahamic faiths have a coalitional psychology, us versus them, right?
The Jews say they are the chosen people and they are the gois.
The Christians say they are the ones who accept Jesus and are going to heaven and the rest who are going to hell.
The Muslims say that they are the believers and the kufar, the non-believers, which is kind of a derogatory term.
But there is something unique in Islam in that the doctrines of Islam spend an extraordinary amount of time being very concerned about those that don't share their faith, right?
So for example, Judaism is not a proselytizing religion.
That's why there are only 15 million Jews in the world.
There are as many Jews today in the world as there were at the start of the Holocaust, roughly.
Totally.
Whereas Muslims, in a sense, it's the ultimate successful marketing strategy.
In 1400 years, Charlie, they have nearly 2 billion people.
So Islam is successful.
Judaism sucks at marketing itself.
And so there are many elements within the contents of the doctrines of Islam that make it uniquely dangerous.
And again, this doesn't take away from the fact that most Muslims are perfectly nice and sweet and peaceful.
But where Islam goes, personal liberties die.
But and think about even within that statement, Dr. Said, okay, they're peaceful and sweet because we're comparing them to Western values.
And so if you compare a Muslim to Muslim values, so they're sweet by our standard is what I'm saying.
And so insofar that they will comply to the Western standard, then fine, of course.
But what is a good Muslim?
In a Muslim standard, what is a good Muslim look like?
Well, certainly one, doctrinally speaking, is certainly one who is working to unify the entire globe under the unifying flag of Allah, right?
So that should give shivers down the spine of most people.
Look, Egypt used to be fully 100% Coptic Christian country.
Fast forward many centuries, it's now 10% Coptic.
Lebanon, during my lifetime, when I grew up in Lebanon, was a majority Christian country.
Fast forward 45 years, it is a largely Muslim majority country.
What happened to the Syrian Christians?
What happened to the Iraqi Christians?
What happened to the Pakistani Christians?
So again, it's not as though Islam always goes into a place and decapitates everyone who's not Muslim.
But by one mean or another, once Islam takes a foothold somewhere, then the trajectory is very clear.
And so if we wish to have the United States become an Islamic countries, stay with the current open border policies, and in 500 years, we'll all be named Muhammad.
What a smart point that in the Islamic text, they spend so much time about people who do not share their values.
Christianity spends a fair amount of time of it, but nowhere near Islam, though.
It doesn't seem there.
There are like direct calls in Islam of what to do for those that don't believe.
And it's a very pernicious preoccupation.
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I want to play 526 and then let Dr. Sad just riff.
This is if Rush Limbaugh was king, and we should have listened to Rush.
This was 20 years ago.
20 years ago.
I should get a hat.
Rush was right about everything.
Play cut 526.
Everybody's making immigration proposals these days.
Let me add mine to the mix.
Call it the Limbaugh Laws first.
You immigrate to our country, you have to speak the native language.
You have to be a professional or an investor.
No unskilled workers allowed.
Also, there'll be no special bilingual programs in the schools with the Limbaugh Laws.
No special ballots for elections.
No government business will be conducted in your language.
Foreigners will not have the right to vote or hold political office.
If you're in our country, you cannot be a burden to taxpayers.
You are not entitled to welfare or food stamps or other government goodies.
You can come if you invest here, an amount equal to 40,000 times a daily minimum wage.
If not, stay home.
But if you want to buy land, it'll be restricted.
No waterfront, for instance.
And as a foreigner, you have to relinquish individual rights to the property.
And another thing, you don't have the right to protest.
You're allowed no demonstrations, no foreign flag waving, no political organizing, no badmouthing our president or his policies.
You're a foreigner.
Shut your mouth or get out.
And if you come here illegally, you're going to jail.
Now, you think the limbaw laws are harsh?
Well, every one of the laws I just mentioned are actual laws of Mexico today.
That's how the Mexican government handles immigrants to their country.
Yet Mexicans come here illegally and protest in our streets.
How do you say double standard in Spanish?
How about nomas?
Dr. Saad, react to the great Rush Lambaz as a conversation starter.
He is missed.
Look, I don't know about the 40,000 of the minimum wage.
I'd have to calculate whether that number makes sense or not.
But the general gist of what he's saying, I mean, I couldn't agree more, right?
I mean, what is it that allows, what's the logic of having illegal immigrants more money spent on them than American vets who've lost limbs fighting, defending our liberties?
It's insane.
I mean, hence, that's the exact point of my next book, Suicidal Empathy.
So yes, Rush Limbaugh is right about everything.
In closing here, Dr. Saad, what would you say the West is a woman to be mounted?
That is the Islamic creed?
Remind us of it.
So that quote comes from, so prior to people knowing who I am, I mean, now I couldn't get away with it.
But in the past, because Arabic is my mother tongue, I would hold conversations with all sorts of Muslim and Arabic-speaking people to sort of gauge their sentiments about things.
And I would repeatedly hear from Arabic-speaking, Muslim-speaking immigrants, in this case, it was in Canada, always say that the West is a woman to be mounted.
And what the reflex that that captures is that all of the virtues that we think as laudable in the West, compassion, magnanimity, generosity, empathy, are heard as weakness, weakness, weakness, and weakness by cultures that don't necessarily share our infinite largesse.
And so it's exactly what they're saying.
West is weak.
It's a woman.
Therefore, really quick.
We know the red-green alliance, right?
But Islam is all about power and leftism is all about power.
Maybe that's also what they have in common.
Exactly.
They both despise the West.
So because we both despise the West, we will join in unison in trying to get rid of the West.
But of course, the leftists don't recognize that once Islam becomes ascendant, they will be decapitated just like the rest of us.
Dr. Saad, please plug your work so our audience can follow and support you.
The Parasitic Mind was a big international bestseller.
You can certainly read my latest book on happiness, The Sad Truth About Happiness.
And I am feverishly working on my next book, which should be out probably early in 2026, called Suicidal Empathy.
Dr. Saad, thank you so much.
Excellent work.
And we'll have you on it soon again soon.
Thank you.
Thank you, sir.
Cheers.
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If you see any of that, we're alerting the top levels of Facebook.
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We have the video.
We should play it.
All right, here is the fake AI video.
This is going to creep you guys out.
This is totally fake.
Be careful what you see.
Play cut 541.
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Joining us now is Dr. Paul Ray, professor of history at Hillsdale College and war historian.
Dr. Ray, thank you for your patience and time with us.
One day when I meet you, I'll tell you all the fun backstory of our first attempted interview, but now we're live on air.
So thank you for your attention.
Thank you for your understanding, sir.
So Dr. Ray, you are like an encyclopedia on wars, and you've studied and watched the Middle East for decades.
Kind of give us your historical and just commentary on what we've witnessed the last couple of weeks and how it fits in Middle East history.
Okay, let me start by saying that when people talk about a 12-day war, they're wrong.
It's been a 46-year war.
That war began in 1979 with the overthrow of the Shah and the arrival in Iran of Khomeini and of a clerical regime that really is foreign to the Shiite tradition, which had been dominant in Iran and in various other places before that time.
Ever since that time, starting with the seizure of the people from the American embassy as hostages, there has been a low-level war going on between Iran, the Sunni neighbors of Iran, the United States, and Israel.
And every so often, this thing explodes into something larger.
And that's what the so-called 12-day war was about.
One of the key elements to this was that the Iranians were seeking nuclear weapons and had the means to produce them in short order.
And just having that capacity gave them leverage.
And they sponsored proxies, the Houthis in Yemen, Hezbollah in Lebanon, and Hamas in Gaza.
And this is all for the purpose of overcoming the Sunni world.
The Israelis in the United States are seen as obstacles to that.
We stand in the way, and we do indeed stand in the way.
And you can see the manner in which in recent years, the Sunni world has lined up with the Israelis, settling all sorts of questions, providing ambassadorial, diplomatic recognition, and so forth.
And that's because they're afraid of the Iranians.
So there is a split within Islam between Sunni and Shiite that is every bit as important as the division between Catholic and Protestant in, say, the 16th and 17th centuries.
It's a source of bloodshed.
It's a source of struggle.
Honor is involved.
And the Iranians have been very effective in this.
We've helped fund it.
Under Obama, we made a deal with them that they would put their nuclear program on hold, and we would provide them with a great deal of money, which then has been spent in attacking us and in attacking the Israelis.
So there's a large struggle that's been going on for a long time.
It may be over now, but I'm not too terribly confident of that.
As long as that regime stays in power, they're likely to pursue this.
If you see Khamenei, who is the leader There, being pushed aside.
He's an old man, he's 86, and other people coming to the fore, there may be a deal worked out that has some legs to it.
Otherwise, not.
I don't know if you noticed, but today Khamenei appeared and declared victory in this war, despite all the damage that has been done to their nuclear program, to their military, and so forth.
So who knows in that regard?
There is a larger context for this, and hidden in the background is the fact that there is a kind of rivalry between Turkey, which in the Ottoman period was the great rival of Iran, and the Iranians.
So you have a Sunni power in Turkey that is formidable and allied with us, at least nominally.
And then you have the Iranians.
That has not burst out into violence, but you could see that it was going on in Syria, in which the current regime in Syria was being sponsored.
Those people were being sponsored by the Turks.
The Iranians were sponsoring the Alawite regime of the Assad family.
So there's maneuvering that goes on sort of constantly in that region.
And we're drawn into it because it's a source of oil for our allies in Europe and, of course, Japan.
An awful lot of oil moves through the Straits of Hormuz, down through the Persian Gulf.
It comes from Iran, it comes from Iraq, it comes from Saudi Arabia, and it comes from other countries in that particular region, but it's of strategic importance because our allies are dependent on that.
For a time, we were dependent on it too, until we began to frack.
And we're now an exporter of oil, although not on a huge level.
The other thing is this is tied into the larger world.
You know, the things that we do or don't do have an impact on the calculation of people elsewhere.
To go back a little ways, when Obama was president, he declared a red line in Syria, and then they broke the red line, and he did absolutely nothing.
He then tried to suck up to the Iranian regime, showing weakness again.
And it's not a very big surprise that in 2014, the Russians will move into Crimea and will move into eastern Ukraine.
They figured they could get away with it, and they did.
The follow-up to that is that the Chinese take the reefs in the South China Sea and begin to militarize them, trying to turn the South China Sea into a Chinese lake.
So if you show weakness, everybody's going to move against you in ways they think they can get away with.
If you show strength, it's just the opposite.
I don't believe that Putin would have gone into Ukraine in 2014, or excuse me, in 2022, if Donald Trump had been president.
And the reason is when Soleimani, who was head of the Revolutionary Guard in Iran, instructed the militias that they sponsor in Iraq to attack the American base with missiles, we assassinated him.
Trump ordered it.
Boom.
I'm not the only one who thinks this.
I sat at a dinner three years ago with a columnist of the New York Times who shall remain nameless, but she has red hair.
A New York Times speaker was speaking about Ukraine.
She got up and she asked him if he thought that had Trump been president, Putin would have gone into Ukraine.
And the fellow then went into the Russian collusion nonsense.
And I leaned over to her and I said, you think otherwise, don't you?
And she shook her head, yes.
And I said, it's Nixon, isn't it?
And she says, that's it.
That's exactly it.
Now, the key thing about Nixon is he was unpredictable.
I'm afraid of him.
That's an incredible story about Maureen Dowd.
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So Dr. Ray, what you're articulating is Shia supremacism, where the Iranian regime has an ideological fervor to want to take over the entire region.
What would you say is the status or the health of that regime?
Can we tell?
Please tell us, Dr. Ray.
Well, we really can't tell.
At least I really can't tell.
We may have intelligence agents there who know quite a bit.
The CIA may know quite a bit.
I wouldn't be shocked at all if the Israelis know quite a bit.
But I don't think this is a good day for that political regime.
A lot of damage has been done.
They've shown weakness.
I mean, Khomeini may claim victory, but the whole world, including all the people in Iran, know that this was a grave defeat for Iran.
And weakness in that part of the world, in Iran, in the Arab countries, isn't tolerated for long.
So I think it's possible that there will be a change within the regime or even a change of regime.
One of the things to know about the Iranian regime is it's not a monarchy.
It's not an ordinary tyranny.
It's an oligarchy.
There's a sort of group of insiders, including the leaders of the Revolutionary Guard and so forth, but also the people in parliament and the mullahs.
And you can bet that there are conversations going on now about what changes need to be made.
And at a certain point, those changes could be serious.
In the year 2002, after 9-11, I used to live in Turkey, so I know that part of the world a bit.
And I went back to Turkey seeing old friends, but I was also invited to a party with Turkish journalists.
There was an Iranian journalist there.
There had been demonstrations in Iran, spontaneous demonstrations at soccer games, pro-American demonstrations in the wake of 9-11.
So I asked this Iranian journalist, is the regime going to go under?
And he said, no.
He said, the people who run this country were graduate students in Eastern Europe during the Soviet period.
They know how to control a population.
There's one thing they don't know how to control, their own children.
I don't know if his story about Eastern Europe is correct, but I can tell you they have controlled that population.
It's now 46 years old.
At that time, it was younger.
But one of the things you can see in these sorts of regimes is they run out of revolutionary fervor when the generation that made the revolution passes from the scene.
Now, it's a bit early.
Those people are in their 60s now and in their 70s.
They haven't passed from the scene.
But it could be enough of them have passed from the scene and that there are people in positions of responsibility who are younger, the sort of Gorbachevs of the Iranian revolution.
That is to say, people who were not there during the revolution.
And they may think a little bit differently, especially since the defeats they've suffered in Gaza, in Lebanon, in Yemen, and now in the home country.
So they might want to move away from a set of policies that brings this sort of thing on them.
Now, if Khamenei remains in power, 86 years old, and if he dominates, I doubt that there will be change.
But if he gets pushed aside, everything's open.
And there's a very large population in Iran that has never liked this regime.
And so there might be an opening in that direction.
If there was ever an opportunity for the people of Persia to rise up, I would imagine this would be it.
At least from the outside, they seem remarkably vulnerable.
And they're a proud people.
They are an ancient power.
And despite the spin that the Ayatollah is giving, they were humiliated on the world stage.
They had no air defense systems.
I mean, two foreign countries had complete control of the skies over Iran.
It was a joke.
Dr. Ray, we're out of time.
Thank you for your time.
Final thoughts, 20 seconds, sir.
Okay.
The Russians and the Chinese are watching, and they're beginning to think maybe we should be a little bit careful.
Well said.
Be a little bit careful.
Donald Trump did not just drop a bomb on Ford.
It was a memo of understanding to our enemies that was delivered straight to the desk of Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin.
And they took careful notes at the military precision and the willingness of the commander-in-chief.
