Robert Spencer traces Islam’s embedded violence through Pakistan’s blasphemy laws and Salman Tasser’s 2011 assassination, citing Quranic verses like "kill them wherever you find them" and Muhammad’s militant legacy as mainstream justifications. Unlike Judaism or Christianity, he argues, Islam lacks interpretive evolution, with literalist readings dominating—exemplified by Hamas’ October 7, 2023, attacks and Western campuses’ silence on jihad’s textual roots. Spencer warns of Bernard Lewis’ predicted Europe-wide Islamization by 2100, driven by unchecked migration and Quranic dehumanization of non-believers, proposing immigration halts and legal crackdowns to counter it. His solution merges Byzantine-era resistance with U.S. political reform, but the host’s cautious optimism clashes with his stark warning: civilization’s survival hinges on confronting Islam’s unyielding theological violence. [Automatically generated summary]
Hey, it's Andrew Clavin with this week's interview with Robert Spencer, the director of Jihad Watch, jihadwatch.org.
You can find him there and get his new book, Empire of God, How the Byzantines Saved Civilization.
You know, the other day, just this week, I was talking to an Anglican bishop from Pakistan, and he was talking, telling the stories, I was listening to him speak, and he was telling stories about how there's a law in Pakistan now where if you insult Islam, you can receive the death penalty.
A governor, Salman Tasser, 56, in 2011 stood up and said that the law was a bad law, an intolerant law, and he was gunned down by his own bodyguard.
The bishop was speaking about how simply because someone comes on the loudspeaker in a mosque and says somebody insulted Islam or burned a Quran, untold violence can be unleashed in the lives of Christians, the few Christians still living in Pakistan.
This is a real problem in the world.
As I've spoken, I've said many times, we only see the activists, we only see the terrorists who do the things that they do.
This is true whether you're talking about gay people, when you're talking about black people, you see a lot of the criminals and the guys who, the activists who say dishonest things about race relations.
And it makes it easy to hate people en masse.
And that's something I never like to do.
I think it's a waste of spirit.
And so it's very difficult to find our way.
And Robert Spencer is a guy I have listened to a lot.
I've known him for a long time.
He's very honest, very direct, very controversial, but he speaks his mind and speaks honestly about this.
And I always think that telling the truth is the fastest way to get to reality and to be able to deal with people without prejudice, but with a realistic view of what they're doing.
So I want to talk to Robert about the state of Islam and how we are dealing with it in the West.
He is, as I said, the director of Jihad Watch, which you can find at jihadwatch.org.
He's a Shulman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and the author of Empire of God, How the Byzantines Saved Civilization, which is available now.
And I will ask him about that as well.
Robert, it's good to see you again.
How you doing?
Great, Gate.
Good to see you.
So, you know, I've listened to you talk many, many times, and you are a hard-boiled guy, and you must be a very brave guy, because I'm sure you get plenty of death threats.
And I do always worry, I meet a lot of Muslim people, and they're lovely people, Muslim-American people.
They are lovely, pious, decent human beings.
And yet I do know that there is a problem, like a real cancer of violence in this society.
I guess let's start with this.
How endemic is the violence to Islam?
Is there a way to separate, it doesn't seem to me it was always this violent.
Is there a way to separate Islam from this cancer of violence?
Well, it wasn't always this violent.
The problem is that the justifications for the violence are embedded in core texts.
You have the Quran saying, kill them wherever you find them, saying when you meet the unbelievers, strike the next, saying that you should fight the unbelievers until religion is all for Allah, until they pay this tax, the jizya, with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.
Now, all this doesn't mean that every Muslim is going to be violent, but it does mean that those who are violent are able to justify their actions by pointing to the text in a way that those who are not violent cannot do.
And not only that, but then there's the example of Muhammad who led battles, who called for the assassination of his enemies, who did all kinds of things that play into the hands of those who want to use the religion to justify violence today.
So what do you say to people?
You know, I have a pal, Ed Hussein, who's an incredibly civilized, educated man who I've never heard say anything violent whatsoever.
I've heard you talk to debate Dr. Zudi Jasser, a very brave, moderate Muslim who stands up to these people.
What do you say to them when they say, well, that's not the Muslim, the Islam I know?
I say, more power to you.
I wish that every Muslim followed you.
But we have to, as you noted at the beginning, we have to face the facts.
And the unfortunate fact is that neither of them have significant followings in the Islamic world.
And they don't precisely because they are advocating for a form of Islam that is not traditional and that does not have a long history within Islamic thought.
It's not a mainstream understanding of the Quran or of Muhammad's life, an example.
And consequently, they don't have large followings among Muslims.
And those who are violent are able to point to them and say, look, see, these are Westernized Muslims who are telling Western non-Muslims what they want to hear.
And they don't represent us.
They are not the real thing.
Now, I'm not a Muslim.
I'm not competent to say this is real Islam and this is not.
But we have to here again acknowledge that this is what is being said about people like that.
Where do you make the distinction between the Bible, which does, the Old Testament does have scenes where, for instance, God tells the Jews as they go in to conquer the promised land that they should kill the women and the children and the animals and everybody.
And yet the Jews, in fact, have developed a vastly ethical system of belief and their religion is almost all ethics.
It's almost all the parsing of ethics.
What's the distinction between the Bible and the Quran there?
Well, that's just it right there, that the Jews have evolved an interpretative tradition that militates against the literal understanding of those passages.
And the Christians, of course, think of those passages.
I get lots of people say to me, lots of Islamic apologists say to me, as a Christian, you have to believe in all these things that Christians believe have been superseded because they are part of the law that has been fulfilled.
And so consequently, both Judaism and Christianity do not look at those passages as having any kind of force as a guide for behavior for today.
Unfortunately, in Islam, there is no such interpretative tradition.
The literalistic interpretation of the violent passages is mainstream, is taught by all the major schools of Islamic jurisprudence.
And consequently, it has a very broad foundation within Islamic theology that, you know, most by comparison, most Jews and Christians, I would venture to say, aren't even aware of those passages in the Bible and certainly don't think that they have any force for their, to, to, to lead them in their behavior today.
Is the non the absence of an interpretive position, is that the new development or an old development?
In other words, it seems to me that in my lifetime, Islam grew more violent.
Or at least there seemed to be more violence in the Islamic community.
So is that non-interpretive tradition, is that a through line from Muhammad on, or is that something that has been interrupted at times?
It's not that there's no interpretive tradition.
It's that the interpretative tradition actually says just the opposite of what we would want it to say.
that going back to the first biographer of Muhammad and going up to the modern day, you have mainstream Islamic authorities saying that the violent passages supersede the peaceful ones rather than the other way around.
The reason, however, you're quite right in saying there's more Islamic violence, there's more jihad now than there was when we were young.
And why is that?
Because it's been a resurgence of the application.
of the mainstream understandings.
The discarding of those understandings in the early 20th century came as a result of the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the founding of secular Turkey.
Missouri College Walkout00:06:00
And Ataturk, the founder of secular Turkey, he said, all of our problems come from Islam.
He was an enemy of Islam.
He said, Islam is the theology of an immoral Bedouin and it is a dead thing.
And so he said, the West defeated us because the West is secular and we're going to be secular now in the same way.
And so he did not have a new understanding of Islam.
He didn't have a new interpretation.
He was just rejecting Islam.
And so secularism in the Islamic world has always been based in that way.
Reza Shah imitated Ataturk in Iran, but it was the same thing.
It was a rejection of Islam, not a new idea about how Islam could be applied.
And so that made it always vulnerable to somebody like Erdogan or somebody like the Ayatollah Khomeini saying, look, we're having trouble and all our trouble is because we have retreated from Islam.
We have to re-embrace Islam and then all our troubles will be over.
And that's what's happening in Turkey now and what's been happening in Iran since 1979.
One of the things that I know drives me crazy, I think it drives a lot of people crazy and is fuel to the fire of actual bigotry where people just hate people for being Muslim without actually looking at them as a person and whether they ascribe to the violent philosophy or not, is the left wing's absolute denial of what is in front of everybody's face.
And this, were you surprised at all by the reaction on American college campuses to the October 7th atrocities in Israel?
Oh, not in the slightest degree.
The groundwork for that's been laid for so many years.
You know, last few times I've spoken, I try to avoid speaking at universities.
I was invited a couple times last month and I turned them down.
It's just such an unpleasant experience.
You go and in the first place, if you don't have a phalanx of guards, then you'll get physically attacked.
And then you get into the hall and they're shouting at you like it's Jack the Ripper come to campus and they've got to show their, it's like the two minutes hate in 1984 and you're Emmanuel Goldstein.
And so it's absolutely ridiculous, but they have been taught and they've been taught now for two decades that Islamic jihad is a reaction to Western colonialism.
Western colonialism and racism are the whole problem.
The paradigm is white oppressors versus brown victims.
The Israelis are white oppressors.
The Palestinians are brown victims.
Consequently, anything the Israelis do is evil and anything that the Palestinians do is good.
And this is what they've been taught in the context of an anti-American atmosphere.
The same kind of paradigm applied to American actions as well.
And so it would have been surprising if the reaction had been any different.
It does remind me of when Paul Potch came into Cambodia and started slaughtering people.
And everyone said, well, it's his reaction to Vietnam.
It actually wasn't.
It was just carrying out the communist mission.
So you don't talk to universities.
I was going to ask you what you say to people in university.
When you confront the left, what do you say?
I could be, if there were a good situation where there was a chance to be heard, then I would certainly go.
And I have gone in the past.
When I spoke at Stanford in 2018, it was a very big deal.
They staged a walkout and the college administrators wouldn't even let people who wanted to come into the talk come in.
So I was speaking to a hall full of about 10 people who managed to get in, who were not part of the walkout.
And I had everything all prepared to try to confront them with their own contradictions.
I had a manual of Islamic law with me certified by Al-Azhar, the foremost authority in Sunni Islam.
And I actually started out before the walkout just by reading out sections from that saying you have to make war against the unbelievers.
You subjugate the unbelievers in this way.
You deny them these rights.
You can take slaves from the infidel women.
All these things that we're seeing now with Hamas and that we saw a few years ago with ISIS and that we see in West Africa all the time.
And I was just taking it straight from those sources, the Islamic sources.
And so then, you know, they start booing and hissing.
And I say, wait a minute, you're supposed to be saying that I'm an enemy of Islam and you're defending Islam.
Well, this is what Islam is all about.
And trying to get them to think in that way.
I did this at a school out in the Midwest.
I think it was, gosh, I can't remember the name of it.
It was in Missouri, some college or university in Missouri.
And this guy had a sign that he was holding that said queers against Islamophobia.
So I had my manual of Islamic law and I started reading out about the death penalty for homosexuality, trying to get the guy to maybe reconsider some of these insane notions he's been fed.
And what was his reaction?
Well, actually, what happened was this other fellow, a Muslim with the beard and the kaftan and the kufi, the whole nine yards, came up and gave him a big hug and said, this is my best friend.
And I thought, yeah, I believe you.
Yeah, sure.
But it was all, you know, it was all for show.
He was his best friend while I was there.
But I doubt that that carried over to the next day.
You know, this is the thing that did kind of rock me a little bit in the reaction to October 7th was the queers for Palestine and then the women for Palestine.
End of Female Education00:06:23
And, you know, abuse of women is endemic in Palestine.
I mean, it's just absolutely everywhere.
And obviously, the reconquest of Afghanistan by the Taliban has meant the end of female education.
That's what I guess what I'm trying to get at.
Is there any way to break through to people that at least this version of Islam, which is now dominant in these places, is destructive to the very things these people pretend to believe?
Well, the problem with the education of women is that the Quran and Islamic tradition in general is deeply misogynistic.
And, you know, not only can you beat your disobedient woman, the Quran says, but also it says if you have a court case, you should have one man or two women testify.
And then you have a tradition in which Muhammad says, this is because women are deficient in intellect.
And then he says most of the people in hell are women.
And on and on and on like this.
So much misogyny that it is easy for groups such as the Taliban to justify what they're doing on the basis of the idea that really the only role that women have in Islam is for them to be the servants of men.
And here again, they have this massive textual witness on their side from the Quran and from Muhammad's example.
There are plenty of Islamic cultures that grant more rights to women than the Taliban do, but the Taliban is able to point to chapter and verse to justify what it's doing.
And that's always a powerful argument in a culture where literalistic interpretations are dominant.
You know, one of the things that distinguishes you among people who talk about Islam, when I talk to, say, Andy McCarthy, the terrific legal writer, he's a federal prosecutor.
He prosecuted and jailed the blind sheikh who made the first attack on the World Trade Center.
And I asked him once, you know, how do we deal with this so that we don't become, you know, just bigots?
And he said, well, the Sharia is the difference.
There are people who believe that Islam should be installed as a political vehicle and people who simply don't.
And they just are worshiping God.
And this is the way they worship God.
The book, The Looming Tower, tells the history of the development of the Muslim Brotherhood and how it kind of radicalizes the thinking in Islam.
So in other words, both Andy and the Looming Tower sort of present this as a temporal problem, something that has arisen.
But do you really see this as permanent?
I mean, you have no, you don't see any doorway out of this conundrum.
Yeah, I'm sorry.
I wish I did.
I'd love to be able to go along with all that.
But the problem is, we'll take, for example, the Looming Tower, the Muslim Brotherhood.
That is absolutely true.
The Muslim Brotherhood was founded in 1928 as a reaction to the abolition of the caliphate in 1924.
And the Brotherhood is dedicated to restoring the rule of Islamic law, first in majority Muslim countries and then also in non-Muslim countries.
The problem is, here again, the Muslim Brotherhood didn't arise out of nothing.
I wrote a book myself in 2018, The History of Jihad, which shows that there are groups like the Muslim Brotherhood going all the way back to the beginning of Islam, that whenever there is a relaxation of the application of Islamic law, then there are groups that arise that say, this is the cause of our troubles.
This is why we are suffering.
And there's always something they can point to in the society that's wrong and say that it's because Allah is angry with us because we are not following Islamic law and we have to reapply it.
And so these kinds of reforms, you could call them, or relaxations of Islamic law, these periods are always followed by a period of the retrenchment of Islamic law.
So I see what's happening now as just what happens all the way through Islamic history.
It just keeps going again and again.
The pendulum swinging from side to side.
People have difficulty living under Islamic law because it is very strict and very difficult to deal with in many ways.
And so they want to get away from it.
They start to relax it.
And then the hardliners come in and blame all the problems on the relaxation.
And a period of hardline enforcement follows.
Do you ever have Islamic people approach you and say, you know, I agree with you about the state of Islam.
However, you know, here is another path.
Anybody, I mean, I guess Dr. Zudi has said that to you.
Joshler has said that to you.
Well, you know, yeah, I've had conversations with him.
remember when years ago, Harowitz and I were working on an initiative to get Islamic groups in America to repudiate the genocidal hadith, which is once again newly relevant because it's a call to murder Jews.
Muhammad says, the last day will not come.
That's the final judgment, the victory of this, which they see as the final victory of Islam.
The last day will not come until Muslims kill Jews and the Jews hide behind trees and the trees call out, oh Muslim, there's a Jew hiding behind me, come and kill him.
So I was talking to Zudi Jasser and I said, will you repudiate this as well?
And he said, no, because I don't think it's authentic.
And I said, well, will we repudiate it on the basis that Hamas thinks it's authentic?
And he agreed on that basis.
But that is the vulnerability of that position that Hamas will say, well, look, it's in the canonical hadith collections, the ones that are considered reliable by Islamic scholars.
Also, Zudi, when I wrote my biography of Muhammad, The Truth About Muhammad, said, I don't think Muhammad was anything like that.
And I said, well, I used these various sources.
What sources should I have used?
And he said, well, no, those are the sources, but I just don't think Muhammad was like that.
And I think, well, I'm very glad you don't.
But unfortunately, that's not a view that's going to gain any traction in the Islamic world when you just sort of have your own private Muhammad that doesn't have any connection to what he was really like.
European Bans on Muslim Garb00:04:44
What do you think when you look at Europe today, where this is, you know, they've allowed a lot of people to come in and they don't look like they're leaving anytime soon?
If you had to guess, I mean, I don't know if you read Submission by Michelle Willebeck.
I'm familiar with it, but I haven't read it.
It's a great novel.
I mean, it's a wonderful, wonderful novel, but it's a very despairing view of the future of the West.
What do you see as happening in Europe?
Well, I think that there is every reason to have a very despairing view of the future of the West.
That doesn't mean that I'm despairing.
As the great philosopher Yogi Berra said, it ain't over till it's over.
And any number of things can change.
There can be all kinds of surprises.
Certainly history is full of them.
But Bernard Lewis, the great historian, said 20 years ago, Europe will be Islamic by the end of this century.
This has been coming for a long time.
It goes back to the 1970s when the European Commission made a series of agreements with the Arab League to encourage mass migration without assimilation in exchange for low oil prices.
And this is all documented in Bhat Ya Or's book, Eurabia.
She's got the documents.
This is not some conspiracy theory.
And so they're just following through on that.
But the problem is that when you've got a group of people and the core text, the Quran says that the unbelievers are the most vile of created beings, it's chapter 98, verse 6, and the believers are the best of people in joining what is right and forbidding what is wrong.
That's chapter 3, verse 110, then you come to the society of the most vile of created beings as the best of people.
And you're the best of people because you know what's right and what's wrong and they don't.
You're going to want to impose your societal vision rather than assimilate and accept theirs.
And that's exactly what's happening.
If you were a member of the EU, if you were at a position of power, what would your proposal be?
Well, I would stop immigration right away.
I don't think anybody has a natural right or some sort of a license under all circumstances to move to another place.
And Europe is full.
They should put out the closed sign and then start to deal with the migrants that they have there.
And any of them who are unwilling to publicly avow that they will obey the laws of the society and not try to impose Sharia should be deported.
And then you have to deal with the people who are there who are breaking the laws and flouting them because they don't have any respect for the law of the most vile of created beings.
Now, this is something that is not happening at all.
For example, only less than 1%. of the Algerians who were ordered deported from France ever actually leave.
Now, that's an untenable situation.
It's ridiculous.
It's just a license.
It's just a call for anarchy.
Aren't there European countries?
I mean, there are European countries that are banning headscarfs and Muslim garb and the towers on the minarets on mosques and things like that.
Do you think that that has any effect?
No, that's just cosmetic.
That's just, you know, it's giving the appearance of doing something while not actually doing something.
If they just enforce their own laws, for one thing, then a lot of this would go away.
For example, most of the jihadis, I mean, actually all of the jihadis are hardline Muslims.
And that means many of them are polygamists because Islam allows for polygamy.
And most of the European countries, if not all, have laws against polygamy.
However, many of them, notably Britain and Germany, do not enforce those laws, but allow the Muslims to live in polygamous arrangements.
If they started to enforce the laws against polygamy, they would catch a lot of jihadis.
But they don't.
Are you any more hopeful about the United States?
A little bit, but not a whole lot.
I mean, I'm not, it's not, here again, it's not that I'm hopeless, but I am realistic about the situation.
Right now in the United States, if you talk the way I'm talking to you right now, out in the public forum, I mean, I know this is the public forum, but you are understood to be on the right.
If I were to go out to a, if I were to be on CNN, and this has changed quite a bit.
I mean, 10 years ago, I was on CNN, but now it would be inconceivable.
And if I were to say these things, there would be massive protests.
Looking at Jihad from Rome's Perspective00:02:37
If a public official says these things, he is forced to apologize and resign in disgrace.
And yet the things that I'm saying are readily demonstrable, readily documentable, and just essentially the truth.
So as long as the United States remains unable or unwilling to face these unpleasant truths, then the jihadis are going to be able to act in the United States without any significant pushback.
Tell me about Empire of God, your new book, Empire of God, How the Byzantines Saved Civilization.
I never heard that before, actually, that the Byzantines saved civilization.
Yeah, you should read the book.
It's a history of the Byzantine Empire and a little bit different for me, but I wanted to do something instead of saying, speaking about how there's the resistance to jihad or the jihad advancing all the time, I wanted to look at it from the other side.
The Byzantines staved off the jihadis for 800 years, and consequently they are responsible.
And this is just one way they saved civilization, not the only way, but they are responsible for the survival of Western Europe and the ability for Western Europe to develop the civilization that we both enjoy and that gave the world its notions of human rights, the dignity of the human person, and so on.
And if they had not been there, Europe would certainly have been conquered and Islamized, and we would not be having this conversation today.
You know, you know, it is funny that they used to talk about the fall of Rome and put it in the 400s, but the Byzantine Empire was Rome, essentially.
It became Rome.
Oh, yeah.
That's a big point of the book.
And it's an important point because, for one thing, the reason why the Byzantine Empire, which was the Roman Empire indeed, ultimately fell was because of lack of help from the West.
And the West didn't want to help because of the dispute between the Eastern Church and Eastern Church and the Western Church, the dispute over papal authority and so on.
It's all in the book.
And the big problem, I think, was a mutual suspicion that led the people in the West to think these are not our brothers.
These are not people that we need to save.
These are not our friends.
They are alien.
And so we can leave them to their fate.
And unfortunately, the West all too often thinks the same way today.
And instead of looking at the larger picture of how deeply our societies are threatened at this point and working together, there's still so much unnecessary infighting.
Unnecessary Infighting00:02:02
If you could, just as a final question, if you had a wonderful dream in which all this turned around and this kind of bad track you feel we're on turned around, what would it take?
Well, it would take a massive change in the political class in Washington, not just a new president, but a thorough house cleaning in which the federal bureaucracy were completely cleared out of these unelected hacks who were making policy on their own.
But even if we did that, I mean, we have freedom of religion here.
We certainly can't turn around and start to oppress people just because they're Muslims, really.
Yeah, I'm not in favor of any oppression, and I'm not in favor of anything that would contravene the First Amendment.
I think that we simply need to understand that the freedom of religion is not a license to break other laws.
And so you can't just say, oh, well, female genital mutilation, it's part of my religion.
And so I'm going to do it.
That actually happened.
And a case was thrown out against a couple of doctors in Detroit a few years ago on freedom of religion grounds.
I think, well, that's insane.
There has to be an understanding that these laws that protect women, laws that militate against religion-based violence and so on, you don't get a free pass to break them by saying, this is my religion.
Okay.
Well, it's always fascinating to talk to you, Robert.
It really is.
You're certainly a brave man, and you certainly say what you have to say.
Robert Spencer is the director of Jihad Watch, which you can find at jihadwatch.org, Shulman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and author of this book.
Sounds really fascinating, Empire of God, How the Byzantines Saved Civilization.
It's always good talking to you, Robert.
It's good to see you.
Likewise.
Thanks very much.
I always like talking to Robert Spencer.
He gives you a very dark and difficult vision to deal with.
I hope it's going to be a little bit brighter than he thinks, but we will find out.
And there's still the Andrew Clavin Show, which is on Friday.