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Aug. 14, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:43
JIHAD IN AMERICA Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1147
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Coming up in this special edition of the podcast, I'm going to do an in-depth one-on-one conversation with Robert Spencer.
He is the director of Jihad Watch.
He's a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
The website is jihadwatch.org, and he's written a bunch of books.
Recently, anti-Semitism, History, and Myth.
And also coming up in November, his new book, Holy Hell, Islam's Abuse of Women and the Infidels Who Enable It.
You get an idea here of what we're going to be talking about, jihad in America.
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This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
America needs this voice.
The times are crazy in a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza podcast.
Guys, I'm delighted to welcome to the podcast Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch.
The website is, by the way, jihadwatch.org.
Robert is the director of Jihad Watch, but also a Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
His latest book, Anti-Semitism, History and Myth.
And also coming in November, and you can pre-order now, Holy Hell, Islam's Abuse of Women and the Infidels Who Enable It.
Robert, thanks for joining me.
I really appreciate it.
This is a topic that you have been studying closely for, gosh, a couple of decades now.
And I think you began this project, if I'm not mistaken, in the aftermath of 9-11.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems like your work started and you built it around 9-11.
And then now we are dealing with, of course, a different situation with Israel and Hamas in the Middle East.
And so your focus has shifted slightly more in that direction.
Would you say that that's right?
Yeah, absolutely, Dinesh.
I've been studying jihad actually in Islam since the 80s and was doing it privately consulting with some private organizations and individuals in the 90s.
Then one of them asked me to go public and write a book after 9-11.
And so I did.
And then one thing led to another, needed a good news source for jihad activity.
And it didn't exist, so I started it Myself, and that's been that's jihad watch been going now for 22 years and have written many books on various aspects of this problem.
But you're absolutely right.
The real, the big issue right now, if you're talking about the global jihad, is the jihad against Israel, which is very poorly understood.
And that is where the focus really should be.
We'll come back to that in just a moment, but let's focus on the word jihad, which most Americans probably became acquainted with for the first time after 9-11.
And this is a central concept within Islam.
We were told after 9-11 that it has multiple sort of dimensions: the jihad of the pen, the jihad of the sword, and that the violent jihad is not even necessarily the main way in which most Muslims practice jihad.
Can you enlighten us about the term jihad and what obligations, if any, it imposes on a typical Muslim?
Jihad means struggle, and it is a central aspect of Islam that is incumbent upon every Muslim to undertake one way or the other.
But as you noted, the jihad of the pen, jihad of the tongue, these other various kinds of jihad are founded in Islamic tradition.
And so it isn't as if when we say every Muslim is obligated to wage jihad in order to be a good Muslim, we're not saying every Muslim has to take up a sword or a machine gun and become a terrorist.
This is something, however, that allows terrorists.
This is a doctrine that allows terrorists not only to claim legitimacy within the Islamic community, but also to make recruits.
Because it's unmistakable that while there are various understandings of the word, which means struggle, in Islamic theology, that a key and important meaning is warfare against unbelievers in order to subjugate them under the hegemony of Islamic law.
And that jihad that is violent and supremacist and aggressive and expansionist has been going on for 1400 years without any interruption and is still going on today.
Now, has there been a kind of new vigor in the jihadi movement subsequent to the foundation of the Muslim Brotherhood, the 1920s, and then later, of course, the capture of a major state, Iran, falling to the Ayatollah in 1979.
You seem to have gotten something new in the Muslim world.
Am I wrong about this?
And the reason I say that is if I think of the 1950s, I think of a guy like Nasser, who was a Muslim, but it seems like his main focus was Arab nationalism.
He was described as an Arab nationalist.
But you would never describe, for example, Khomeini or even Khomeini as some kind of a nationalist.
Their primary loyalty is to Islam.
I think I even heard one of the mullahs say in the aftermath of the American strike against the nuclear targets that their primary concern was not Iran, it was Islam.
And right there, you see that for some of these guys, it is jihad in the Islamic sense that is the ultimate goal, whereas maybe for guys like Nasser, it wasn't.
Yeah, absolutely.
It's been a big change.
And really, the change can be dated from 1924, 101 years ago, because in 1924, the secular Turkish government abolished the caliphate.
The caliph is in Islamic theology and Sunni Islamic theology, which is 85% of Muslims worldwide, or up to 90.
And the caliphate in Islamic theology is the caliph is the successor of Muhammad as the military, political, and spiritual leader of the Muslims.
And the caliph has the responsibility, not just the option, but the responsibility to wage jihad at regular intervals against infidel states with the abolition of the caliphate in 1924 suddenly there is no state authority that is authorized to wage jihad now that doesn't mean jihad goes away and everything is peaceful then there becomes there begins with the founding of the muslim brotherhood that
you noted the the attempt to restore a legitimate state authority to Sunni Islam so that offensive jihad can resume.
And in the meantime, defensive jihad, which doesn't need a caliph, continues.
And so the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups like it are dedicated to restoring the caliphate.
Now, in Shiite Islam, it's a little bit different, but in Shiite Islam, that was the impetus also behind the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the restoration of Islam as a state political power.
Now, Nasser represented a different strain of thinking altogether.
After the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which was the last caliphate, which is the big catastrophe of 1924 as far as jihadis are concerned, there was also a strain of thinking in the Islamic world that all their troubles came from political Islam.
So what they needed to do was reject political Islam and adopt Western models of governance.
And Turkey led the way.
Ataturk in Turkey led the way in this, but others followed.
And the Arab nationalist movement is a byproduct of that, that sought to create a unity in the Islamic world, not based on Islam, but based on secular Western-style governance and Arab solidarity.
Nasser represented that, Saddam Hussein, Bashar al-Assad, many others.
But now that's pretty much a dead movement.
Assad was the last one.
And you've got a resurgence of the idea of political Islam and the need to restore Islamic law and restore the caliphate.
And so Nasser wants, there's a very famous video you can see on YouTube of Nasser saying, the Muslim Brotherhood wants all the women in Egypt to wear hijab.
And the audience starts laughing.
And this is in 1958.
And he says, I tell them, you make them put it on.
And everybody laughs.
It's a big joke.
Well, now you go to Cairo, everybody's wearing it.
All the women are wearing hijab.
And the Muslim Brotherhood and other groups like it are able to appeal to classic Islamic theology that says Islam ought to be a state and a political power.
And it has this particular character that requires, among other things, women to wear hijab.
And so that has completely won in Egypt, although it's being held, there's a lid being kept on it by the Assisi government.
And it's winning out in other parts.
We see it in Syria now, winning out and winning out in other parts of the Islamic world as well.
Interestingly, Robert, it seems that this model that you're describing of nationalism and specifically ethnic nationalism is precisely the model that Western liberal governments and left-wing governments are using to think about what's going on between Israel and the Palestinians right now.
And I say that because, as you know, the governments of Canada, of France, of Australia, are all pressuring Israel.
You need to have a ceasefire, because if you don't, we are threatening to recognize a Palestinian state.
And the underlying thinking seems to go something like this.
The Israelis are an ethnic group and they have a right to a state, but the Palestinians are also an ethnic group and they have a right to have a state.
So there needs to be some carving out of the territory to give each of these ethnic groups representation, because otherwise they will somehow be either deprived of their land or they will be occupied by an alien people who will be ruling over them.
So this is an entirely kind of Western way of trying to understand what's going on over There, I think you argue that that is a wrong way to understand what's going on and that what's going on, in fact, October 7 itself was an expression of Islamic jihad.
Can you clarify what you mean by that?
Yeah, there's no doubt about it, Dinesh.
This is a big misunderstanding that has prevailed and continues to prevail among Western policy analysts of all political persuasions, that they assume this is a conflict over land and a conflict of competing nationalisms that both claim the same land.
It is not.
This is an Islamic jihad.
The reason why I say this is that there will not be peace if a Palestinian state is established.
If Canada, Australia, France, and the UK go ahead with their plan and recognize a state of Palestine, and one actually gets established and starts to behave like a state with regular borders, it will not end the attacks against whatever's left of Israel.
We saw this with Gaza when the Israelis withdrew in 2005 and people were saying this will now bring peace.
They'll go about normal lives and stop trying to kill Israelis.
And they didn't.
They made Gaza into a massive jihad camp to fight Israel.
The reason for this has been made clear by numerous Islamic leaders and political leaders in the Palestinian Authority and in Gaza.
And they point back to Islamic norms and particularly to the Quranic imperative, drive them out from where they drove you out.
And they say, since Islam once ruled this land, it belongs by right to Islam forever, and we have to drive out those who drove us out.
And do you think, Robert, that this jihad is being conducted in two different but complementary ways?
And what I mean by that is this.
In the Middle East, it is conducted through the effort to overthrow any vestige of secular regimes that might be holding out against Islamic control and Islamic dominance.
But then you have a parallel movement, which is one of Western infiltration.
And by that, I mean infiltration into Europe, infiltration into America, the establishment of Islamic kind of political outposts and not just Muslims moving to these countries, but moving to these countries with a conscious objective of organizing politically to take power in these societies.
In other words, we've had immigrants who've come, for example, to America from lots of places, right?
The Italians have come here, but nobody thinks that the Italians are trying to sort of take over America and make us all, you know, eat pasta.
In other words, the Italians just come here to make a good life for themselves, right?
And so we've had waves of different people coming for different motives, but by and large, without some kind of a takeover objective.
Do you think that Islam in America or Islam in Great Britain is different in that the Muslims are not functioning like other ethnic groups, other immigrants, but they come with a different agenda?
Well, there's no doubt about it.
Many of them make no secret of that.
And it's also founded in the Quran, which promises great rewards to those who emigrate for the sake of Allah, which does not mean emigrating in order to get a better life or to get a good job or to live in a place that's relatively peaceful.
It means emigrating in order to bring Islamic law to that new land.
Muslim leaders all across Europe have been extremely clear about this.
20-some years ago, Diyab Abu Jajah in Belgium said assimilation is cultural rape.
And he was very clear that Muslims would be betraying their faith if they accepted European values and melted into the larger society.
He envisioned the establishment of Sharia-based enclaves, and that's exactly what has happened.
Rechep Tayyip Erdogan, the president of Turkey, has Done the same thing.
He's gone many times to Germany and warned the Turkish population there, which is growing quite rapidly, that they are Turks first and Muslims first, and they are not to think of themselves as Germans or to become part of larger German society.
This is all part of the same Islamic imperative of jihad.
The 1924 abolition of the caliphate meant that you don't have the age that we saw all through history of Islamic armies taking the field against non-Muslims and trying to conquer a state.
That is over because there is no caliphate, there is no Islamic empire.
But that doesn't mean, as I said before, that jihad is over.
And the way it is being carried out now is through this emigration for the sake of Allah that transforms a society from within.
And this is also something that is once again based on the Quran.
The Muslim Brotherhood, in a captured internal document that was uncovered years ago, said that the brothers in America must understand that their work in this country is, and I quote, a kind of grand jihad in eliminating and destroying Western civilization from within and sabotaging its miserable house by their own hands and the hands of the believers.
And that is a reference to the Quran, chapter 59, which refers to Allah making the unbelievers destroy their own houses by their own hands.
And so that is taken as a model for this kind of infiltration, subversion, ultimately leading to the collapse of the larger state and then the establishment, presumably, of an Islamist.
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And now we come to a, I think, a rather strange and fascinating development Because it seems to me that if you have Muslims and Muslim groups that are pursuing these objectives, they come to these Western countries.
It's true that there may be certain places where they are dominant or where they have majorities.
As you know, strong Muslim outposts in certain parts of Minnesota, also of Michigan, certain parts of London, some of the outlying towns around London, for example.
But obviously, these Muslims are going to be a small, relatively small majority in the society at large.
And so it would seem that their objective, for example, of trying to take over a country would be utterly hopeless because they would just be outvoted and outnumbered.
But now we come to the development I wanted to highlight, which is that to their unbelievable good luck, there is a group in the West and in America that is not like them at all.
Certainly not in cultural values or social values.
In fact, the opposite.
And yet this group, which I'm going to loosely call the cultural left, likes these Islamic radicals, likes their objectives, is willing to partner and ally with them and make common cause with them,
will rush to their defense when they are attacked by people like you or others and insist that these are not only people who belong in America, they are like the best Americans.
And so how do you account for this bizarre, strange bedfellows phenomenon of radical Muslims occupying the same bed as cultural liberals and leftists?
In the first place, they have the same enemy.
And so it's the same thing that Chairman Mao said many years ago in another context: the enemy of my enemy is my friend.
They both want to take down Western civilization as it has been traditionally constituted.
They want to destroy Judeo-Christian civilization.
They want to establish an international, authoritarian socialist state.
Now, both the left and the jihadis want to establish an international state.
That's the whole idea of the caliphate, that it is a mega-state that transcends nationality and has no borders because ultimately it encompasses the whole world.
And it is authoritarian, as all Islamic states always have been, after the model of Muhammad the Prophet leading his community.
And he himself preached that you should obey your ruler, even if he is an Ethiopian with a head like a raisin, which is often quoted to say, look, Muhammad was a racist, and that's a reasonable point.
But I think what's more important about that is the authoritarianism of it, the blind obedience that is inculcated.
That's music to the left's ears.
Because as the late, great David Harowitz said, inside every progressive is a totalitarian screaming to get out.
And they're getting out now.
We're seeing that the left is increasingly open about their total contempt for real democracy.
While they're always whining about the threats, alleged threats to our democracy, really, they have a tremendous problem with dissent.
They want to squash dissent and silence dissidents, as we saw with the Biden administration moving against people who spoke out about the COVID business and many, many other examples.
And so they see the authoritarianism inculcated in Islam, and leftists say these people are our blood brothers.
They're internationalists.
They are authoritarians.
We can work with them.
And they're doing it.
Granted that they have a common enemy.
And also granted that both groups have an authoritarian streak and they don't mind putting their foot on your neck.
If we follow out their ideologies and we kind of give them the world and say it's yours, it's quite clear that they would want two different kinds of world.
So the cultural leftists would want a world, for example, of culturally, sexually, anything goes.
The Muslims, by contrast, will want a world that is morally and sexually highly regulated.
The Abaya, the Veil, the Parda.
The left will want the abolition of the family.
Muslims want very strong patriarchal families, sometimes built on the model of four wives.
But in any case, they want that structure to be preserved, if not strengthened.
The liberals are very big on criminals, right?
They are very upset right now about Washington, D.C. You're going to bring our crime rates down.
This is outrageous.
We like our crime rates the way they are.
Muslims, on the other hand, are quite ready to chop your arms off or your toes off for stealing a horse.
And so I can spell it out further, but even on the socialist agenda, Islam has kind of its own economy.
What I'm getting at is, are we heading to a world where, God forbid, if that side wins, are they then going to come to blows themselves to fight it out about whether we get a secular globalist left or a caliphate?
I mean, to me, it's two nightmare scenarios.
But I don't see how you can have both nightmares come true at the same time.
Oh, I don't have any doubt about it.
I think the odds that they will come to blows if they manage to defeat us are about 100%.
They, as you said, they have very deep divisions, and those are already showing.
We have seen Muslims in Michigan and elsewhere protesting against the left's cultural agenda, protesting at school board meetings.
There was a school board meeting in Dearborn last year, turned quite violent because Muslims were enraged about the left's putting all these pornographic books into the school libraries and all that business.
And they were not willing to have a polite, calm discussion about it.
And the police had to be called, and it was a very ugly scene.
And that was not an isolated incident.
This is a very big crack in the leftist-Islamic alliance.
Since then, actually, that was not last year, it was a couple years ago because it was before October 7th.
The October 7th massacre in Israel has allowed the left and the jihadis to ignore their differences for now, but they're not going to be able to ignore them forever.
And ultimately, there will be conflict.
There always has been in history.
This alliance is something we've seen before.
Most recently, in 1979, when the communists in Iran allied with the Ayatollah Khomeini, and they figured that they were going to get a place in the government, it was going to be a coalition.
And instead, Khomeini threw them in jail and ultimately had them killed.
All right.
Let's talk about anti-Semitism, which is the title of your most recent book.
As you know, Robert, there's kind of a little bit of a schism in the MAGA right over this issue.
And there appear to be some truculent young people who are on the right, right of center, and they are like, I'm tired of being called an anti-Semite.
And criticism of Israel doesn't make me an anti-Semite.
And even criticism of the Jews doesn't make me an anti-Semite.
And the term itself is an extension of political correctness and an effort to tell me what to think and what to believe.
I'd like you to illuminate what is the definition of anti-Semitism and what do you have to do or say or believe to qualify as an anti-Semite?
Anti-Semitism, Dinesh, involves straight demonization of the Jews as a people and the imputation to them of some particular evil that other people do not share.
You can take, for example, the great Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his Wonderful statement about how he realized at a certain point in his life that the dividing line between good and evil was not between one group and another, but it goes down every human heart, that every individual human being is capable of good and capable of evil.
And you can't generalize about one group and say, This group is evil.
And if we keep them over there, then the dividing line between good and evil runs between us and them.
But that is what anti-Semitism does.
And so I understand why a lot of these young people are frustrated because they feel as if they've been lied to by the leftist elites.
And they have been lied to by the leftist elites.
And one of the things that the leftist elites has told them is that they should be careful about anti-Semitism.
But the thing about the leftist elites is because they have lied to us about so many things does not necessarily mean that they have lied to us about absolutely everything or that everything that they have said is to be understood as a lie simply because they have said it.
As it happens, there are leftist elites who are also quite anti-Semitic.
And this whole pro-Hamas, the mainstreaming of the pro-Hamas perspective in America since October 7th, is a product of the left and comes from the college campuses, from far-left professors with Marxist theories that see the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as one between the oppressor and the oppressed and so on.
So a lot of these patriotic young people who are thinking that rejecting anti-Semitism is to reject leftism need to rethink and re-examine this issue and understand that if they have a Christian commitment, that they need to re-examine the idea of original sin and stop, because it can be a very dangerous idea no matter what people you are demonizing.
Stop demonizing one whole group of human beings because we have seen where that leads.
And it is absolutely in conflict with the Christian faith and pretty much with every other understanding of human nature in the world that you have this one group of people that is uniquely evil.
And I show in the book why a lot of the main claims that are made about the Jews are false, where anti-Semitism comes from and why it can be so dangerous.
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Do you argue that anti-Semitism is a species of racism or is it fundamentally different?
And I ask for this reason.
Racism typically has been a looking down at people who are presumed to be defective, inferior.
Racism has been, I'm up here, you're down there, and you are lesser than me.
Anti-Semitism, though, is much more complicated, isn't it?
Because part of, for example, what Hitler writes about in Mein Kampf is: he goes, the Jews are like, they're running Germany.
They control the banks.
They control the financial system.
So this is not saying that the Jews are low and they haven't accomplished anything and they're barbarians.
In fact, they appear to be people who are in Germany in powerful positions, are very successful.
So the motive for anti-Semitism appears less to be a looking down and to some degree at least appears to be almost an envious looking up to people who are doing better than you are.
And that's what you're upset about.
Is that absolutely?
Absolutely.
Okay.
Oh, yeah, Dinesh.
I couldn't agree more.
This is a very important point.
I don't think anti-Semitism is akin to racism for exactly the reasons that you're explaining.
The people who are anti-Semitic generally are not looking down at Jews, but they are often looking up at Jews and saying these people are not saying they're smarter than everybody else, but that's really the message because they're saying they have somehow,
even though they're very small numbers and have no power, they have managed to insinuate themselves into the position of running the whole world and running the media, running the international organizations, running various nations and so on.
And, you know, you have the anti-Semites today saying that this tiny state of 10 million people is running American foreign policy and controlling Trump and so on.
And you've got to wonder, man, they must be really sharp if they're able to pull that off.
But it's ultimately, I think, in the book, I explain that it's a different kind of thing.
It comes from people who are part of a collective that claims to encompass the entirety of the human race, saying that this one group refuses to join our glorious collective, and thus they are outside.
They are not us, and they are the cause of all our troubles, and we have to react to them accordingly.
And this has occurred in the context of Christianity, although Christianity is unique among sources of anti-Semitism in actually rejecting it.
And the main leaders of the principal Christian sects are all on record rejecting the understandings of Christianity that led to anti-Semitism historically.
But also Islam, national socialism, and international socialism.
A lot of people don't realize how deeply anti-Semitic communism is at its core.
But all of those four share the idea that we are the people who have it all figured out and we are in the new millennial wonderful community of the enlightened.
And those are the unenlightened who refuse to join.
And we have to deal with them accordingly.
I had a recent debate with this fellow, Nick Fuentes.
And of course, one of his themes is that Israel controls the United States and the Jews have all this power in the world.
And the point that I made was I said, well, Nick, first of all, if a country of 11 or 12 million people has figured out a way to control a country of 300 million plus people, I mean,
if Nedan Yahoo, who runs this small country, has figured out a way to sort of lord it over an alpha male like Trump, if the Jews have figured this out, it is so unbelievable that you would have to admit that they must be the master race after all, right?
Now, in reality, it's quite obvious that it's the other way around.
I mean, to take an example that you've written about, Netanyahu, I think, would love it if Israel could pulverize the mullahs in Iran, could have regime change in Iran, which I believe you've argued and I agree completely is a good thing.
And it looks like Netanyahu has been stopped from taking that step by none other than Trump.
So, you know, which is the tale that's wagging, you know, in other words, it seems to be Trump who is directing Netanyahu and not the other way around.
So this concept of the Jews kind of running the country and running the world appears to me to be way too fanciful to take seriously.
Oh, it's ridiculous for the reasons you mentioned, and there are many more.
I remember actually the reason why I wrote this book was because after October 7th, I encountered a couple of people that I had admired and respected for many years, and they were telling me all these anti-Semitic myths that I thought nobody believed anymore.
And I was kind of shocked as they're telling me the Jews, you know, they control the media and they control the UN.
And I thought, okay, if they control the media in the UN, they're really inept.
They're very bad at it because the media for years, I have been tracking this at Jihad Watch, the New York Times, CNN, Reuters, AP, all of them have been so anti-Israel as to question their integrity as news organizations, which, of course, it's obvious that they have none.
And that's one of the reasons why we can be clear about that.
And the UN has a standing item, agenda item.
Item number seven of the UN Security Council meetings is always the evils of Israel.
Every last meeting, they talk about what terrible things Israel has done and what the UN can do to stop them.
There's no other country comes in for that treatment.
And so if the Israelis control these things, if the Jews control these things, they've done an extraordinarily bad job of it.
And it's just a matter of common sense for these conspiracy theorists to look at the way the world really works and they would see that their theories don't fit.
Robert, let's get a little bit of a preview of what's coming in November.
You're writing about Islam's abuse of women.
Debbie and I followed Debbie more than I, this recent case in Washington State.
It was Washington State versus, I think, Ali and Ali.
And you might know the case.
It involves an irate Iraqi dad whose daughter ran away from home.
Apparently, they were trying to marry her off to some old guy in Iraq, and she didn't want it.
She had a boyfriend in school, and so she fled.
And so you had the scene where the dad descended on her and the school at the school facility was apparently trying to choke the life out of her, or at least was choking her really strongly.
The other kids tried to separate them without success.
Ultimately, a bus driver intervened.
And so they charged the father and the mother with attempted murder.
But very interestingly, they were acquitted of that charge.
Now, they were convicted on a couple of lesser charges.
But I think what Debbie and I found interesting was that, was the way that the case was argued.
It was not argued as an honor killing case at all.
It was Islam didn't really hardly even come up.
The issue was argued as essentially an irate parent, a case of domestic abuse, a case of corporal punishment taken too far, a case of, yeah, any dad would be upset if your daughter found ran away from home.
And so kind of corralling the girl and trying to bring her back home is something that any good parent.
So what I want to get at is: is it the case that here in America, it is a little difficult given our cultural presuppositions to understand what goes on when you're dealing with concepts like jihad, honor killing, concepts that seem to come out of an alien world and an alien set of books and ideas.
Oh, very much so, Dinesh.
You know, Eisenhower said it in the 50s that all Americans should have a religion.
I don't care which one, but they should all have a religion.
And it's a deeply rooted assumption in American society that everything that goes by the name of a religion is benign and teaches magnanimity and kindness and brotherhood and so on.
And the idea of a religion that could contain these concepts is something that boggles the minds of all too many Americans to this day.
In this case, it was especially egregious.
The judge actually forbade any discussion of The concept of honor killing because he said it would prejudice the jury.
Now, we have this guy on video, Ishan Ali, choking his daughter to death.
And his daughter said on the stand that she was afraid she was going to be killed by her father.
And it was very clear.
She made it abundantly clear that he was going to kill her because she had a non-Muslim boyfriend.
Now, that means that she has dishonored the family.
And the only way that honor can be cleansed by the family is to kill the daughter.
This is a very deeply rooted concept in Islam.
It goes back to a Quranic passage in which a young boy is killed and the killer explains that he was killed because he was irreligious and his religious parents deserved a better child that they will have later.
And this idea is so strong in the Islamic world that there are many Islamic countries that have relaxed penalties for people who commit honor killings as opposed to ordinary murders.
But all of this could not be discussed in connection with this case, as relevant as it obviously was, because the judge was afraid that it would create a negative view of Islam, which seems to be a preoccupation that all too many American authorities have, that they have to, for some reason, protect the image of Islam above all.
And I think what this discussion tells me as well is that there are larger implications here for U.S. immigration policy, because our immigration policy, at least ever since the 1965 Act, seems to be like relatively indifferent to who comes here, as long as you come here under certain criteria, right?
You have family members here, and so you come under family unification, or you get a job and have a sponsor, and so you come in that way.
But it seems like our laws make no distinction whether you come from Poland or whether you come from Pakistan or whether you come from the Congo.
It seems to be a matter of complete indifference.
And I think based upon what you're saying, I mean, I suppose one way is to deal with those problems over here by saying, what do we do about honor killings?
But another way to do it is to say, let's keep those people away so we don't have to address those kinds of problems.
We don't want those kinds of issues to deal with over here at all.
I don't see any reason why you couldn't have immigration requirements that included renunciation, explicit renunciation of concepts such as honor killing and others.
And then that would allow for people who engage in this behavior to be immediately deported, whatever the outcome of the case, or not admitted in the first place, depending on how they respond to queries about what they think about these issues.
But it's very difficult because there is also the possibility, of course, that they're not going to be honest in the examinations and so on.
But people always say nowadays, particularly since the 1965 Act, that America is not a unified race or culture, but a people who share certain ideas.
And that's great.
Okay, I'm all for it.
So we all share certain ideas.
So what are we doing to make sure that immigrants we admit share those same principles in regard to the freedom of the individual, the equality of rights of women with men, the equality of people of all religions without one of them trying to establish hegemony over the society and so on?
Can we talk about these things?
And I think that if we're going to embrace wholeheartedly the idea that this is a nation built on a shared adherence to common ideas, then we should start doing something about trying to bring about that shared adherence.
Yeah, I agree completely.
Guys, I've been talking to Robert Spencer.
He's the director of Jihad Watch, also a Shulman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
His book, Anti-Semitism, History and Myth.
And coming in November, Holy Hell, Islam's Abuse of Women and the Infidels Who enable it?
Robert, very illuminating discussion, and thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you.
Pleasure.
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