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Nov. 3, 2025 - Dinesh D'Souza
59:44
WHAT IS CANCEL CULTURE? Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep1203
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Is the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians the revival of an ancient conflict recorded in the Bible?
The nation of Israel is a resurrected nation.
What if there was going to be a resurrection of another people, an enemy people of Israel?
The dragon's prophecy.
Watch it now or buy the DVD at thedragonsprophecyfilm.com.
Coming up, what is cancel culture?
I want to highlight the distinction between cancel culture, canceling someone, and endorsing points of view that undermine and discredit conservatism and the MAGA movement.
Author Dan Burmawi, a Muslim convert to Christianity, joins me.
We're going to talk about his new book, Islam, Israel, and the West.
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The conservative movement, the MAGA movement, and the Republican Party, I think, are facing the greatest crisis of identity that they have faced in certainly in recent years.
And what started out as a dispute about Israel, about Hamas, about Gaza, and about Israeli influence in America has become something much, much bigger and more fundamental than that.
In my view, if not addressed, we are likely to see not just a divide or a fissure in the Republican Party, but a burning down of the brand of MAGA,
a burning down of the Trump legacy, a great deal of fog and difficulty for Trump himself and the Trump administration to be able to effectively move forward, and really a derailing of the agenda and a derailing of who we are and what we stand for.
Now, this threat is not obvious to people, and in some cases, we'll meet with resistance.
People, how can you say that?
We're just standing up for free speech.
We're just defending the right of people.
Are you, Dinesh, joining the armies of cancel culture?
This is going to be the tiresome and inevitable rebuttal.
And therefore, I'm going to try here to draw some very important distinctions, key distinctions that I thought our side understood, and so that we can make a way forward.
Now, strictly speaking, cancel culture has to do with shutting someone down and shutting someone up.
And so, cancel culture would mean, for example, someone is, let's say, censored, censored typically by the government, but maybe by private actors acting in concert with the government, as we saw with places like Twitter and Facebook and YouTube.
So, being deplatformed, being canceled, being shut down, that is cancel culture in the strictest sense of the word.
But I suppose that you can interpret cancel culture more broadly in the sense that you are trying to prevent someone from saying what they want to say.
And I want to emphasize that that is not, I repeat, not what is going on here at all.
No one is trying to cancel, leave alone Candace Owens or Tucker Carlson.
No one's trying to cancel Nick Fuentes either.
I always opposed and was very consistent in opposing the censorship of Nick, the deplatforming of Nick.
I agree with the idea that Nick Fuentes has, in a way, gotten bigger precisely because he has become so taboo, or he had become so taboo, and so he could claim to be saying the things that other people didn't want him to hear.
So, this is really not about shutting anyone down.
And in fact, no one on the mainstream right, no prominent conservative that I know of, has called, for example, for preventing Tucker from, let's say, having a show or having a big platform, which he clearly does, or even organizing like a boycott of his advertisers.
No one's even doing that.
So, no cancellation is happening, and yet we are being warned from every quarter against cancel culture.
What's really going on, rather, is a fundamental question of what it is that the MAGA movement and the conservative movement stand for.
Now, this is obviously important in many ways.
It's important for elections.
You need to be able to stand up and say we stand for this, we don't stand for that.
So, for example, we stand for free markets and we don't stand for socialism.
And we stand for an American foreign policy that does this and does that, but doesn't do this and doesn't do that.
So, clarifying who you are and what you stand for and what your platform is, this is essential for any political movement.
And therefore, to say what you're for is also to say what you're against.
If you're for free markets, you're against socialism.
If you are for a colorblind society, you are against people who are trying to racialize our society to assign benefits and reputations and awards and government contracts based upon race.
The positive and the negative side of this kind of go together.
Now, this was well understood a generation ago, in which we had, I would call them conservative guardians who by and large said, This is what conservatism is, and this is what it is not.
In a way, those guardians had a lot of power because they had the ability to say that if you were outside the orbit, you couldn't really speak at an AEI conference.
You would not be published in a magazine like National Review.
And there were people who fell afoul of the boundaries set by these Guardians.
Who were the Guardians, by the way?
I'll just name a handful of them.
They were people like William F. Buckley at the National Review, Irving Crystal, Norman Podhoritz at Commentary Magazine.
There were also Reagan was part of this, of course, and a number of prominent Reaganites, people like Ed Meese and Caspar Weinberger, who was the defense secretary at the time, George Schultz, and others.
And essentially, what it is, is that we want to have a set of debates, even on conservative issues.
And those debates, by the way, raged between the libertarians and the paleoconservatives.
And National Review, for example, was a forum for those kinds of debates.
So no one is saying that the conservative movement stands for X, Y, and Z and there's no discussion or argument around it.
Of course, that occurred and occurred in many ways in a much more feisty and interesting way than is even happening today.
But there was a limit.
And the limit is that the John Birch Society, for example, which went around calling Eisenhower a communist, which basically said that the Democrats had been essentially overrun by the Communist Party and that everything was, in a sense, a communist plot.
Also, there was a deep strain of anti-Semitism in the John Birch Society.
And Buckley was like, no, I'm not canceling them.
They are a large organization, but I don't want to have anything to do with them.
And this is, by the way, after being in some ways joined at the hip with the John Birch Society at the beginning.
Similarly, over the years, there were some prominent figures, and I can think of figures like Joe Sobrin, by the way, a friend of mine, and to some degree a mentor.
Joe Sobrin was brilliant in many ways, and he lived in Princeton, where I lived.
And so I was one of the guys who talked to him a lot and learned from him a lot.
And yet, Joe, for some reason, I think it was from the family, I don't really know, but he was an extremely, he did not like the Jews.
He did not like Israel.
He was very witty about it, but he was, I'm sorry to say, an anti-Semite.
Now, being an anti-Semite doesn't prevent you from being very smart and interesting on other subjects.
But on this subject, Joe was a little bit of kind of a Johnny OneNote.
And so what I did in my association with him is I kind of separated out that issue.
And ultimately, Bill Buckley, because the issue came to a head at National Review, Bill Buckley, although very close to Joe, defended Joe to a point and then ultimately said, I can't defend him beyond this point.
And Joe became very bitter and exited the National Review.
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Something of the same happened to Pat Buchanan, I think to a lesser degree.
Pat was another great conservative defender, very smart, brilliant writer, real patriot, and yet in some ways said some things about Nazism and about World War II that seemed just indefensible.
And so, the conservative movement basically said, we don't go along with this.
We condemn this.
We don't necessarily condemn Buchanan.
We don't condemn the good work Buchanan's done, but we don't agree with this.
This is not what we believe.
And so, there was a bit of a rift created, particularly toward the end, on this specific issue with Buchanan.
On other issues, by the way, Buchanan was a big defender of tariffs, and he broke with Buckley on that issue.
He broke with what was then the mainstream Reagan position.
But nobody thought that was a reason to ostracize or excommunicate Buchanan, not at all.
The free market economist just said, well, he's wrong on the issue of tariffs, and that's just a disagreement that we have with Pat Buchanan.
Now, fast forward to where we are now.
We're dealing here with a guy, as you know, someone I've debated, Nick Fuentes.
And I debated him on the issue of Trump's strike on Iran.
Obviously, the larger issue was Israel, Hamas, Iran, radical Islam.
That debate was actually fairly substantive.
And Nick comported himself like a gentleman.
And I complimented him on the fact that he was well-spoken, he was very self-assured.
But I was careful to compliment him on those things alone.
Why?
Because I also know that not in our debate, but elsewhere, Nick has said some absolutely outrageous things.
Now, some of it could be just being said as a middle finger to society or just a way of trying to be a rebel, but saying things like, I'm on Team Hitler, and I don't need to really go into Nick's kind of long procession of outrageous statements, jokes about the Holocaust, other things like that.
Nick is, Nick may even take pride in the fact that he's absolutely toxic.
But the difference between me and Tucker is not merely that Tucker platformed Nick, elevated Nick, played the kind of avuncular kind of elder statesman with Nick, sought to kind of amplify Nick's views, really express little or no disagreement with them.
At one point, Nick even said, Well, I'm a fan of Stalin.
Think about this.
I'm a fan of Stalin.
If there's one thing that unites all conservatives, it's not just opposition to socialism, it is opposition to the greatest socialist despot there has ever been, even more than Hitler, and that is Joseph Stalin.
So to say I'm a fan, and Tucker says, oh, that's interesting.
Well, let's circle back to that.
It never does.
This is a shtick that's going on, and it obviously is something that we need to pay attention to.
Now, with regard to Tucker, the simple question is: are his positions, yes or no, clearly, clearly anti-Semitic?
So here we cannot engage in generalities.
We have to sort of ask ourselves simple questions.
And so I'm going to give you a test right now, looking at some of these positions, and you can decide whether you think they're anti-Semitic, yes or no.
I'll tell you what I think.
Here's number one: Christian Zionism is a heresy that makes people into supporters of Israel, makes Christians into supporters of Israel.
And those who believe this heresy are more detestable to Tucker than any other group.
So, in other words, this is so detestable because it's making Christians into Zionists.
Is this anti-Semitic?
Yes or no?
I say yes.
Number two, Hamas is not a terrorist group.
Hamas rather is a political movement.
Political movement means we'll be similar to, for example, the Labor Party in Great Britain, be similar to the Democratic Party or the Republican Party or the Libertarian Party.
It's a political movement.
By contrast, the IDF are the real terrorists because they target civilians.
They deserve to be a terrorist group.
So is this anti-Semitic?
Yes or no.
Is this applying a standard to Israel and the Jews that doesn't apply to anyone else?
I say yes.
Number three, the U.S. should have allied with Hitler in World War II.
Despite what Hitler was doing before the war to the Jews, despite what he was doing to the Jews that we know about now, with all that we know now, we still think that instead of allying with Russia to stop the Nazis and then initiate the Cold War to take on the Soviet Union, we should have taken Hitler's side.
Now, Tucker's never openly defended this, but he had a guest on who argued this, and Tucker was, again, it's very interesting.
I've never thought of it that way.
These ideas have been suppressed for decades.
Is this an anti-Semitic point of view given what we know about Hitler and the Jews?
I say yes.
Number, what, four or five?
Sharia law is not really that bad because it creates an orderly society.
Jewish influence on the U.S. is far more dangerous than Islamic infiltration, including all the stuff that is done by Qatar, including efforts to bring Sharia to America.
Sharia is nothing more than creating an orderly society.
By the way, no mention of the fact that if you're a Muslim under Sharia and you leave Islam, you can be killed.
It's actually right that you be killed, and someone can put a fatwa urging random Muslims to approach you, stab you, and murder you.
No mention of any of this.
Is this view anti-Semitic?
Yes or no?
I say yes.
Number five or number six: the elected prime minister of Israel, Netanyahu, is, quote, completely evil.
And he should be removed from power, even though he's in a parliamentary democracy and he has wartime support from Jews of both parties.
Somehow, externally, he should be removed because he is, quote, completely evil.
Something that, by the way, Tucker won't even say about the radical Muslims.
Is this anti-Semitic, yes or no?
I say yes.
And regardless of whether you agree with me on all these positions, and by the way, I could go on like this, but I won't.
Do you agree that taking these positions together on a range of issues amounts to a clear case of anti-Semitism?
In other words, it's sometimes said, well, we should be able to criticize Israel.
This is not about criticizing Israel.
We should be able to criticize Netanyahu.
This is not about criticizing Netanyahu.
We should be able to be concerned about foreign influence in American politics.
This is not about that either.
So what is this about?
This is really about legitimizing a deep strain of not just anti-Jewish sentiment, but I'm going now to argue anti-black sentiment, anti-brown sentiment.
This is what is going to drive not just the Jews, but blacks who have come to the Republican Party for the first time, Latinos who are making the key difference for our society in places like the Rio Grande Valley in Texas, Asian Indians who have been largely on the Democratic side, more are moving in the Republican side.
Just recently, Vivek Ramaswamy, on the occasion of Halloween, posted an innocuous photo of him, Vivek, with his two young kids.
They're what, maybe like nine and seven.
And they're just dressed up for Halloween.
They're all excited to go.
And all that Vivek posts are happy Halloween.
All you have to do is read Dad Vivek's thread.
Go back to India.
Take your kids back to India.
You don't belong here.
And this is, by the way, me putting it in the most mild and polite way possible.
Now, I'm not saying that there weren't people who wished Vivek well, but I'm saying as you read down and down and down, there is a deep strain of, you could call it groiperism.
That's a self-described name of the sort of Fuentes divisions.
And these guys basically don't want Vivek in this country.
They don't want me in this country.
They don't want Debbie in this country.
They actually are trying to chase all the brown people and the black people and the Jews.
They'd like to chase them out of the country, whether they're legal or not, whether they're born in America or not, makes no difference.
And they also want to chase them out of the Republican Party.
Now, they're going to be successful in the last, but not in the first.
In other words, they're not going to chase, none of us are leaving the country, but they can chase people out of the Republican Party.
And this is, in fact, going to happen, and it's going to happen in large numbers.
And it bodes very badly for the midterms.
It bodes very badly for 28.
And it is because they want to redefine the right on a racial basis.
The right is the party of white nationalism.
And anybody who's not white and Christian, these are people who actually use Christ as king as a cudgel against Jews and also against people like me who see Christianity as continuous with Judaism, who see the New Testament as continuous with the old.
They use Christ as king against somebody like me, as if to say that I don't agree that Christ is king, even though I've written a book called What's So Great About Christianity and a lot of other work on this subject as well.
So, this is a precarious situation, and it's precarious not just because of Tucker.
Although Tucker, I think, is quite clearly the sort of leader of this movement.
He is quite obviously the most dangerous anti-Semite in the country today.
Probably, again, a label in which he takes a certain quiet pride.
He doesn't openly confess it, but he is promoting the ideas of anti-Semitism.
I just gave you my own short inventory, so you can decide for yourself.
It's not one idea or two, it is an ensemble of ideas amounting to a rather coherent body of thought.
And Tucker's goals are pretty clear: I want to take over Turning Point USA.
I want to have the Heritage Foundation eating out of my back pocket.
They've been sponsoring my podcast, they've been funneling millions of dollars to me.
I want to keep that arrangement.
I would like to ultimately have J.D. Vance as sort of the political figure that becomes the expression of my worldview.
So, this is the Tucker plan is kind of taking shape.
By the way, this is no criticism of J.D. Vance.
I'm not saying that J.D. Vance is in Tucker's back pocket.
I'm simply saying I think that this is where this is going.
This is the kind of aspiration of this movement.
So, it's not a trivial movement.
It doesn't work to say, oh, Dinesh, you know what, leave it alone.
It's going to die of it.
It's going to fall of its own weight.
Nobody pays any attention to all this nonsense.
Yeah, TPUSA pays attention.
Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, pays attention.
And Tucker, to this day, has access to the highest corridors of power.
He's not the only one who has access.
Others like us have access as well.
But the point is, this is a debate.
This is an argument.
This is a fight that is occurring at the highest levels.
And in some ways, the voice not heard here so far is from Trump.
Trump is the creator of MAGA.
Trump defines really what MAGA is.
Trump has a lot of influence over both sides of this debate.
And so far, he's stayed out of it.
And maybe with some good reason.
But I think what's happening now is that this divide, this bitter attack and counter-attack, this is derailing the Trump agenda.
It's certainly distracting from the Trump agenda.
It's not just about foreign policy.
It's having this effect even on domestic policy.
And as I say, I fear that it will have this effect on the electoral prospects of MAGA and the GOP if something is not done and done fast.
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Guys, I've been an admirer of the work of our next guest.
His name is Danny Burmawi.
And he is an author, a political commentator.
He's founder of the Ideological Defense Institute.
He was born in Jordan in 1988.
He converted from Islam to Christianity, moved to Lebanon.
He has a master's degree in theological studies and Islam, Israel and the West.
That's the name of the new book.
The subtitle, A Former Muslims Analysis.
By the way, you can get it on Amazon.
His website is DanBurmawi, B-U-R-M-A-W-I dot-com.
Danny, welcome.
Thank you very much for joining me.
Great to have you.
I want to start.
Thank you, Dinesh.
I'm a thrilled to be with you.
I appreciate it.
I want to start by asking you: you are seeing this turmoil in the United States over Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson, and now the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts.
As you observe this, can you give me your take on what you think is going on here?
Because I admit, even as someone who's been in the conservative movement for a long time, the vehemence of all this and its peculiar twists and turns have taken me by surprise.
What is your take on what's happening here?
You know, I grew up in a region that in my childhood, I would always hear on the news that without America, we could destroy Israel.
America is the only reason why there is a state called Israel.
So it has been a dream for a very long time for many Islamic nations to take Israel down.
So they want to cut this line or to sever this line between Israel and the United States.
And I think after October 7, they succeeded in doing that.
So there are different groups on the right.
Some of these people who criticize Israel are genuine.
They think that Israel is exploiting America.
Israel is the reason why we have a high national debt, etc., etc.
Another group, they look at Israel as a liability.
They love Israel, but they cannot benefit from Israel now.
So they just drop it.
Another group, and I hate to talk about this, but some of them are paid, paid by Qatar, by Turkey, by Iran.
I don't know.
It's like if you look at a country like Qatar, who paid or poured $6 billion into the U.S. education system, then it's not a surprise that if they have also paid some hundred millions in order to recruit some people in order to fracture the relationship between the evangelicals and Israel,
because the evangelicals in particular, they are the most important voting bloc in the United States on the right.
And they have been supportive of Israel for theological reasons, even though I don't really like that.
If you want to support Israel, don't start with theology because that would drown you in arguments that you don't really need to go there.
You just need to look at the facts, at history, and that is enough to side with Israel.
So there are different elements that contributed to where we are today.
Let me start with the last point you made about the evangelicals, because what you're saying is that there's certain people on the right who want to drive a wedge between the Christians and Israel, between the Christians and the Jews.
Now, to do that would automatically strengthen the common enemies of the Christians and the Jews, namely, not only the radical jihadis worldwide, but also the cultural left in the West, which hates Christians and Jews, which hates, in a way, the principles of America as well as the nation of Israel.
So what possible motive could anybody on the right have to want to achieve such a result?
It would appear to be nakedly supporting the other side.
Are you saying that these are, do you think that we're dealing with a kind of treasonous element on the right?
Do you think ultimately it is just the bank account of Qatar that's driving all this?
Why would somebody on the right want to achieve such a result?
I believe that there is some kind of the old anti-Semitism somewhere here.
And people after October 7, some of them, they thought, okay, why don't we just build on this and use anti-Zionism as a reason to push for what we have already believed?
But listen, it's not only money, as I said.
I don't like to always accuse people of being paid.
But I believe that the cultural conflicts in the United States in the past few decades, the left or the radical left has been winning for many years because of all the victimhood and the grievances.
So they were really winning against that white Christian male.
So there was some kind of competition.
The left hates Israel and they want to attack Israel all the time.
And the right was supportive of Israel.
Of course, it's still supportive of Israel, but the walk right.
So they started this competition with the left.
It's like who hates Israel more?
We don't care about Israel.
We only care about America first.
So there's something there, some kind of competition, as I said.
But the support, I'm sorry, the position against Israel in the right, they think that, okay, we can stand against Israel, against Zionism, and at the same time, against Islamic Jihad.
They think that is possible.
They think there is some kind of neutrality, being on defense, but that is impossible because this civilizational conflict has been reduced to whether you stand with Israel or you stand with Islamic Jihad in the West, which has infiltrated the left.
And the left and Islam, they both share this ambition to take down the Western power structure because both of them, for different reasons, but they found this shared common ground.
And as you said, there's no way to stand against Israel without supporting the left and Islamic jihad.
However, we are accused of using this as a pretext.
Like, what do you mean?
We have to support Israel, otherwise we are supporting the left and the dismantling of the Western civilization.
Well, as a matter of fact, it's not a pretext.
It's the truth.
Because this war that Israel has been fighting for the past 78 years is about what?
Is it about what Israel does or who Israel is?
If it's about who Israel is, which is the representative of the West, an extension of the West, then this is the West war.
It's not only Israel war.
But if Israel is being attacked for what Israel did or what Israel does, then yeah, sure.
But the fact is, no, Israel has been attacked for eight decades for who Israel is.
So this brings us, I think, Danny, to your book, which is Islam, Israel, and the West.
And you begin the book by saying it is very peculiar that a tiny country like Israel could create this level of political upheaval in places as distant as Australia, Canada, Europe, and the United States.
And now, for a long time, many of us have believed, and this is the challenge that your book poses for me, that there is a division in the West between the right and the left, but that there is also a kind of division inside of Islam between radical Islam and sort of normal Islam or traditional Islam.
The basis for somebody like me believing this is I grew up in India.
I see not only in India that you have Muslims who are ethnically Indian, but I look next door and in Indonesia, you see Muslims in a seemingly democratic country, and there are other Muslim-majority countries.
So I say to myself, it's not really sort of Islam itself.
It is a particular kind of reading of Islam, a radical wing inside of Islam.
And of course, as you know, with any book, even with the Bible, you find that in Christianity, you have different denominations, different understandings, different eschatologies and theologies that come out of the very same book.
So for this reason, I've tended to see radical Islam as a kind of malevolent offshoot of Islam, but not necessarily Islam itself.
And this is the issue that you take on head-on, so to speak, in the book.
So can you speak a little bit to that?
Is the problem radical Islam or is the problem Islam itself and why?
So I always say this: 98% of Muslims worldwide, they are nice, they are kind, they just want to live their lives.
They don't want to take down the West or to occupy any country.
But the 2%, even though statistically, they are talking about 18%, but let's say, let's say 2% only of Muslims are radical Muslims.
Now, the 2% are considered to be, as you just said, fringe.
You know, it's the wrong interpretation of Islam.
They don't represent Islam.
Now, how do you tackle this problem?
What are you going to do?
If 98% of Muslims, they represent the Quran and the traditions and the history of Islam, and you are not allowed to scrutinize the text, the sacred text, to come near it, because this text is represented by the 98% good Muslims.
When you go to the 2% of the radicals, now you will try to come up with all kinds of reasons.
Like they are resisting occupation, they are the result of imperialism, they are mentally ill.
You will get all kinds of wrong reasons, and you will always fail to come up with the right reasons why these groups exist.
Now, if you scrutinize the text itself, you will find that the 2% are the result not of a fringe interpretation, but that they are actually doing exactly what Muhammad has done, what Allah has ruled in the Quran.
There is no interpretation in Islam.
The ultimate interpretation, the paramount interpretation is Muhammad's life, his life himself.
Now, if you want to say, okay, the 2%, they are French, then you're saying Muhammad is a friend.
You're saying what Muhammad has done does not represent what Muslims are.
So we end up with a dilemma.
The 98% who claim that they represent Islam, they are severed.
The line between them and Muhammad is cut.
So what do you do?
You are not allowed to scrutinize the text.
And at the same time, you have these groups.
Something is keep on producing them.
What is that?
What is that fountain that keeps on giving them life?
And we have seen this in the past 14th century.
It's not a new thing.
It was not a result of imperialism, the Western imperialism.
It was not the result of the CIA because, you know, the CIA worked with al-Qaeda.
Yesterday, I was listening to an Imam, a Saudi Imam, and he said, we cannot keep accusing the intelligence apparatus of the West to be behind ISIS and al-Qaeda.
They used Al-Qaeda and ISIS, but we have to be truthful enough to admit they were born out of our text, out of our scripture.
So just to one last comment, the interpretation, as I said, and this is a very important point, Islam is different than Christianity and Judaism.
In Christianity, you have the space to disagree, to read the text.
You have your agency.
You have God respects your conscience.
But in Islam, there is only one reading, and that reading is the embodiment that Muhammad has provided for what Islam is.
His life, 23 years of his life explain, translates everything that is Islam.
Danny, I had a guy on my podcast a few weeks ago.
He goes by the handle Imam of Peace.
His name is Tahidi.
You probably come across him.
And Tahidi is somebody who, unlike you, unlike, say, Mossab, Hassan, Yusuf, who are former Muslims, who have actually left Islam.
In your case, of course, you've become a Christian.
So Tahidi is sort of trying to, I would call it, hang on to Islam while nevertheless vehemently condemning Islamic radicalism.
And Tahidi made the argument right here on this podcast.
And he said, look, Muhammad was from one of the aristocratic families of Mecca.
And he had legitimate claims on Mecca, but the kind of ruling powers of Mecca expelled him, chased him off to Medina.
Ultimately, although Muhammad did in fact have a military campaign against Mecca, according to Tahidi, he said that was not a conquest or imperialism or colonialism.
Muhammad was coming back to his native homeland and really just claiming what was ancestrally his own.
I think what Tahidi is trying to say that, yes, in subsequent centuries, Islamic armies then began almost a worldwide campaign of conquest, but that Muhammad himself was not implicated in all that.
I'd just like you to, because this is a debate I'm not really all that familiar with, I'd like you to sort of give us an analysis of why you say that the radical jihadis today are in a way the most honest followers of the Prophet and the 98% of the Muslims, if you will, are, they're wrong.
Yeah.
You know, I'm Presbyterian.
I'm a Calvinist.
I love John Calvin, right?
But if you talk to any Presbyterian today and ask him about John Calvin and how he approved the burning or the killing of Servetus, Servetus was a heretic who did not believe in the Trinity.
And John Calvin said, okay, yeah, let's kill the dude.
So if you ask us today, what do you think of that?
We will condemn Calvin.
We will say, you know what?
It was the norm at the time.
The Catholic Church used to do it to heretics.
So Calvin did it, but it was not the right thing.
Now, if you go to Islam and the moderate Muslims, instead of condemning what Muhammad did, they import it to our lifetime today, to the 21st century, and they just try to find justifications.
It's like, no, he did it for this, for that.
It's like all the time there's this attempt to whitewash what Muhammad has done.
And this is like the extremely moderate Muslims.
But the regular Muslims, no, they want to see that happens again.
So, and as someone who grew up among Muslims, as someone who grew up as a Muslim, we look at Muhammad as the ceiling of morality.
Muhammad is like, he's the perfect man.
So everything he has done must be true, must be right.
So repeating what Muhammad has done is something to be pursued because that is how you be justified before God or how you please Allah.
Al-Imamit al-Haydi and many people, many Muslims in the West, they have manufactured this whitewashed, sanitized version of Islam.
And it was designed for Western audience.
I'm not attacking Imam Tawhidi.
I love him.
I have been following him for a very long time.
But here's the problem.
If you protect the scripture and the man behind the scripture who keeps giving birth to all the terrorist organizations, then you are actually contributing to the problem.
You think that you are trying to reform Islam, but you're not reforming it.
You're just protecting the text because reformation is about self-reflection, self-correction.
It's about, okay, this is wrong.
We need to fix it.
But this is not how reformation works in Islam.
The Protestant Reformation was going back to the scripture, right?
It's about abolishing the authority of the church.
The Haskalah in Judaism in the 19th century, that reformation was about modernizing the text.
In Islam, what is reformation?
If it's going back to the text, that's a catastrophe.
If it's about modernizing the text, how would you do something like Muhammad saying, I came to make the world believe that there's no God but Allah to fight people until they testify that there is no God but Allah and I am his messenger.
And if they do, they will spare their properties and their lives.
So how do you modernize that?
So anyway, I believe that reformation in Islam must begin with desanctifying the text.
So instead of dealing with the text in a way that is so sacred, you cannot touch it, you cannot criticize it, you desanctify it through the education system, through overhauling the mosques.
Of course, this has to be done through the political leadership of the Islamic countries.
So yeah, anyway, and one more thing.
I have heard that if you tell someone you're a criminal, you're a criminal, you're a criminal, you are pushing them to be criminals.
And if we keep saying that Islam is the religion of terrorism and you keep repeating that, then you are actually pushing them to become tourists or some of them to become tourists.
Is this true?
It is not true.
Because here is why.
Because you don't really need to say that Islam is the religion of terrorism in order to create terrorists.
Because for the past 14th century, Islam is responsible for almost 360 million casualties, 80 million of them in India alone.
So this is reliable, it's like you can use reliable sources to prove this number.
360 million people died as a direct result of jihad.
So they didn't need someone to tell them, oh, you follow a religion of terrorism in order to create terrorism.
Besides that, after 9-11, the UK government and the United States government, they completely changed their language.
They don't refer to the terrorists as Muslim terrorists or Islamic terrorists.
They say Islamists.
They made up this term.
And in the imagination of the people in the West, Islamists are not Muslims, right?
But they look at them as just a fringe, as we say.
So who is accusing Islam of being the religion of terrorism?
No one is doing that except a few radical people here and there.
Yet we see what's happening around the world, whether it's Boko Haram, whether it's Taliban, whether it's Jabhat al-Nusra in Syria, which you know what happened since December.
But anyway, so I don't think that we are contributing to the problem by telling the truth.
We are exposing the body of doctrines that has been feeding the terrorist jihad for the past, especially for the past century.
What would you say about the project that I think the Trump administration is driving, starting with the Abrahamic Accords and continuing now with these efforts to pursue a Gaza peace plan?
I think that Trump, who's not approaching this issue theologically or philosophically in the manner that we've been discussing, I think he's been approaching it almost like a combination of a real estate man and a bit of a mafia boss.
But we won't go into the Trump style.
Here's what I'm getting at.
Trump seems to be saying, if I can round up some good Saudis and some good Egyptians and some good Bahrainis and some good Emiratis and a few Pakistanis, I'm not going to have to fight a war against Islam.
I'm going to be pitting the good Muslims against the bad Muslims.
Now, I'm not going to make this a fight about the Quran.
I'm going to see if there are Muslim countries that want to have prosperity, want to be on the forefront of artificial intelligence, want to make investments in the United States.
It's almost like I'm going to change the topic and see if there are other aspirations that we can appeal to with some of these people and mobilize them against these jihadis.
Can you give your assessment of this project?
Is it likely to succeed or is it based upon certain types of illusions?
I believe it is the same mistake the Reagan administration made with al-Qaeda, thinking that you can use terrorism and contain terrorism in order to serve your interest.
It doesn't work that way at all.
By denying terrorism, you are not erasing terrorism.
It's still there.
It's still in the theology of the public.
When you look at the Arab world and the Islamic countries, and you see moderate leaderships, they just want to invest in the future.
You confuse that with moderation and reformation of Islam, then you are making a mistake.
Because it only, actually, it all goes down to the leadership.
What if something happens to MBS, God forbids?
What's going to happen?
How long is it going to take for the Saudi society to snap back if the new leader is not as moderate, as open-minded as Muhammad bin Salman?
So we are not talking about foundations here.
We're talking about superficial or external imposition.
It's like some force is directing that country toward peace and modernity, but the foundations are still the same.
In the book, I discussed this.
Why did the United States succeed in Japan and in Germany and failed in Afghanistan and Iraq?
It was a disgrace, a catastrophe, right?
So what happened there?
I don't blame the United States.
What happened in Japan was amazing.
The rebuilding of the nation, what happened in Germany was amazing, right?
But in Afghanistan and in Iraq, there was a God who was not toppled.
In Japan, the God was toppled.
The emperor declared, I'm not a god.
In Germany, the god that Hitler or he was created as a result of the Aryan ideology, he also was killed or was he took his own life.
So in Afghanistan and in Iraq, the God was there.
He was still on the throne.
And the United States thought, okay, we can repeat rebuilding the nation the same way we did it before, but they completely misunderstood the soil.
So once after $2.4 trillion, Afghanistan was delivered back to the arms of Taliban.
And in Iraq, we have all seen what happened there because they were fighting over Ali and Domer.
America didn't understand that.
Who the hell is Omar and Dali?
It's like, you need to understand who is Ramar and Dali in order to be able to rebuild that nation.
You cannot just take that Western system, which is the product of the Judeo-Christian heritage, and just take it to a foreign land and try to impose it.
If that land is following an ideology that is antithetical to the Western system, it's going to reject it.
Japan is not the product of the Judeo-Christian heritage, but Japan was not antithetical to it.
So it was easy to just implant it there.
Germany was Christian, so it just returned to its Christian roots.
But in Afghanistan, Iraq, it didn't work that way.
The same thing is happening now.
Trump and not only Trump, it's like the Western leaders and even Israel.
They think, you know what?
We can work with this former al-Qaeda ISIS leader in Syria.
You know, behind the closed doors, he tells us what we want to hear and he's going to work with us.
So they think, okay, that's enough for us, right?
But they don't know what's happening on the ground.
All the Islamic or the Quranic Momarization centers, all the jihad centers, all the hundreds of thousands of jihadists who were fighting with Al-Julani, they actually control the ground now.
So I believe Trump's plan is short-sighted, and Israel has to go with him with whatever plan he's doing.
But Israel will have to deal with that tourism hub in just 10-15 years.
What they're doing now is only kicking the can down the road, and that's it.
Wow, very interesting and sobering stuff.
And, guys, I think you can see how knowledgeable and eloquent Danny Burmawi is.
I've been reading the book, Danny.
I want to show it: Islam, Israel, and the West available now on Amazon.
So, check it out.
It's very informative stuff.
You can follow Danny on X at Dan Burmawi, B-U-R-M-A-W-Y, the website danburmawi.com.
Danny, thank you very much for joining me.
Thank you so much for having me.
Really appreciate that.
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