Ep. 126 - Fighting The Religion Of Peace ft. Brigitte Gabriel
From the Umayyad invasion of Tours in 732 through the ISIS bombing of Paris just a few years ago, the West has faced a lot of violence from the Religion of Peace. We’re joined today by Brigitte Gabriel, author of “They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It.” She discuss her firsthand account growing up in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War and the devastation that religious ideology has wrought on her own life and those of her family and friends. Then, the Mailbag!
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From the Umayyad invasion of Tours in 732, through the ISIS bombing of Paris just a few years ago, the West has faced a lot of violence from the religion of peace.
We are joined today by Brigitte Gabriel, author of They Must Be Stopped, Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It.
She will discuss her first-hand account growing up in the midst of the Lebanese Civil War and the devastation that that religious ideology has wrought on her own life and those of her family and friends.
Then, the mailbag.
I'm Michael Knowles and this is The Michael Knowles Show.
My guest today, Brigitte Gabriel, was born in Lebanon to a Maronite Christian family.
During the Lebanese Civil War, Islamic militants destroyed her home and injured a 10-year-old Brigitte.
She relates that she and her parents were forced to live underground in an 8 by 10 foot bomb shelter for seven years without electricity, water, plumbing, or very much food.
She had to crawl in roadside ditches to gather water while avoiding Muslim snipers.
Eventually, an explosion caused Brigitte and her family to become trapped in the shelter for two days before they were rescued by three Christian militia fighters, one of whom was later killed by a landmine.
Her family was ultimately saved when the Israeli army invaded Lebanon in 1978.
Brigitte runs Act for America, a group dedicated to fighting radical Islam.
For that effort, lefty groups like the Southern Poverty Law Center and the New York Times have condemned Brigitte as hateful and Islamophobic.
She is also the author of They Must Be Stopped, Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It.
Brigitte, thank you for being here.
Oh, I'm so excited to be with you, Michael.
What a great opportunity.
Islamophobia.
Brigitte, I suppose in your case, that would be not just the irrational fear of having your head chopped off, the irrational fear of reality, of being shot or bombed by the Islamic militants who ravaged your family and childhood and murdered most of your childhood friends.
How irrational.
Are you an Islamophobe?
I am not an Islamophobe.
I do have a rational fear of terrorists who are threatening to blow us all up, who are committing terrorist attacks across the world, whether in Europe or in the United States.
I know what's at stake.
And as a terrorism analyst, I listen to chatter.
I infiltrate Islamic and terrorist chat rooms.
I know what they're talking.
And when you understand that you are dealing with an enemy bent on attacking you, on killing as many of you as possible, your fear is justified.
But I do not let my fear stop me from doing whatever I have to do to protect our country and sound the alarm.
And as you alluded earlier, Michael, I mean, I was raised as a child, understanding what it's like to be raised And the majority Muslim Middle East as a minority Christian and the price I paid for that.
Your opinion of Islam was mainstream in the West from the Battle of Tours in 732 through at least the publication of Hilaire Belloc's Great Heresies, as you point out, really up until the 1970s or so.
How did the West get so Islamophobia phobic?
Well, you know, the West only after 9-11 started to realize what we are dealing with.
And even during 9-11, a lot of people thought, oh, these are just a handful of crazies.
That does not represent what's happening around the world.
And what we have realized is that right now we are seeing radical Islam spreading worldwide.
So whether you are in America or in Europe, as you see your follow the news in Europe, Europe is gone.
When you look at what's happening in Australia and Canada, So when you look across every continent across the globe right now, every continent is dealing with the same problem, and that is the rise of radical Islamic terrorism.
And it's radical Islamic terrorism.
It's not Buddhist terrorism.
It's not Jewish terrorism.
It's not Hindu terrorism.
It is Islamic terrorism.
Right now, it's justified when we watch television and we hear ISIS, or before ISIS it was Al-Qaeda, issuing press releases saying that they are going to come after the West, that they want to establish a caliphate, that Islam should rule the earth, and they are following on their threats, and it's about time we in the West start listening to them.
And I believe in the West, a lot of people, and obviously the polls are showing that people are starting to listen to our enemy and realize that they actually mean what they say.
Speaking of loving the West, I want to ask you more about this, the West's reaction, what's happening right now, what has just changed.
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Let's get back into it.
You write, Brigitte, in They Must Be Stopped.
You write, quote, It's religion, Islam, and how Islam as a political and religious ideology drives and impacts every aspect of the culture and its people.
Westerners come from a Judeo-Christian background where the teaching of faith centers on love, tolerance, and forgiveness.
They do not understand that the sword of Islam, so glamorized on film, represents hatred, intolerance, murder, and the subjugation of anyone not Muslim.
That seems a little harsh.
No, I spent a weekend in Beirut a couple years ago.
I had a lovely time.
Very nice people.
You, of course, spent an entire childhood outside of that cosmopolitan city.
What did you observe growing up in Lebanon that we are missing in the West?
Well, I'm going to start with the Arab nation treatment of the Jewish population immediately after the state of Israel got its independence.
When we talk in the West about the radicalization of these new groups like Al Qaeda or ISIS, it's only a radical minority.
Most people are not learning history or paying attention to history.
Almost one million Jews were expelled out of Arab land immediately after Israel was declared the state.
Most people were put on buses and set on fire as they were playing Jews.
Now, these people were being expelled by their own government, by their own neighbors, by their own friends, by their own countrymen.
We as minorities in the Middle East understand what it's like to be a minority in the sea of a large Islamic Middle East.
Lebanon used to be the only majority Christian country in the Middle East.
We were open-minded.
We were tolerant.
We were fair.
We had open border policy.
We welcomed everyone into our country because we wanted to share with them the westernization which we had created in the heart of the Middle East.
Muslims used to send their children to study in our universities because we had built the best universities In the Middle East, their kids graduated and worked in our economy because we had built the best economy in the Middle East, even though we did not have any oil.
Beirut became Paris of the Middle East.
Unfortunately, all that began to change as the Muslims became the majority and we Christian became the minority.
And once the call of war was declared, the call of jihad, and that happened because of the influx of the Palestinians, when Jordan expelled them, and Lebanon, being a fair and open-minded and tolerant country, it was the only country that accepted the third wave of Palestinian refugees, which most of the Arabic countries did not want them.
They were majority Muslims, and we, the Christian, accepted them.
Once the Palestinians came in, they put their heads together with the Muslims in Lebanon and they have become the majority and we the minority.
And that's when they declared war basically on Lebanon.
What they tried to do is basically create a base from which to fight Israel, kill the Jews and throw them into the sea.
Something they tried to do in Jordan but failed because of the dictatorship of the king in a Muslim country.
But they were able to do that in Lebanon Taking care, taking advantage of our democracy and open-mindedness.
So I saw it up close and personal, what happens to minorities in the Middle East, whether you are a Christian, whether you are a Jew, whether you are a Yazidi.
I mean, look what ISIS did to the Yazidis.
Whether you are a Kurd, it doesn't matter.
So my story is just a small example of what's happening all across the Middle East to different denominations and different groups who happen not to be Islamic.
Israel is a good place to enter into this topic, too, because our own politicians in the West seem to blame us for Islamic terror attacks on us.
Barack Obama prattles on in total ignorance about the Crusades, the Gulf Wars, and then, of course, the activist left blames Israel.
Now, the Israeli army, from what I read, saved your mother's life.
How did the reality of Israel contradict the propaganda that you grew up with?
Oh my goodness.
When I was 10 years old, Islamists blew up my home, bringing it down, burying me under the rubble wounded.
I ended up in a hospital for two and a half months and later ended up living in a bomb shelter underground without electricity, water and very little food, as you mentioned in the introduction.
We thought the world is going to come save us.
We thought, you know, America, all the Christian countries are going to hear what's happening to the Christians in Lebanon, the slaughters, the massacre, and they're going to come save us.
And we waited and we waited and nobody came.
And meanwhile, Islamic radicals, the combined forces of Palestinians and Muslims, and they were all Muslims, started massacring the Christians and killing the Christians.
I come from a town in southern Lebanon, and we knew what our faith was going to be because we heard what's happening to the rest of the Christians in Lebanon.
Our back was to Israel.
I live five kilometers from the Israeli border.
So a few people from my town decided to go to Israel to the border and beg for help because they knew that if we go to the Jews and beg for help, the Jews are not going to slaughter us because we had more shared values with them than we had with the Muslims.
So a few people from my town went to Israel and begged for help.
And Israel started coming in the middle of the night, bringing in ammunition for the military, bringing in food for the military, food for the children, even bomb shelters for those who did not have bomb shelters.
And this is how we survived for another three years.
I remember at the age of 13 years old, three years into our ordeal, and the only way we're surviving is because the Israeli army is basically...
Protecting us and sending ammunition in the middle of the night and training the Christians how to fight so we can stay alive.
I remember, Michael, at the age of 13, dressing in my burial clothes because we heard that we were going to be attacked that night.
And a friend of ours stopped by and he said, Brigitte, if I don't see you tomorrow, I wish you a merciful death.
And he gave me a hug and left.
And I remember dressing in my Easter dress, my Sunday best.
Because I wanted to look pretty when I am dead, knowing that when they come to slaughter me, there would be no one to bury me.
And I remember crying, begging my mother, I don't want to die, I'm only 13 years old.
And there was nothing my mother could say to me.
And I remember sitting in the corner of our bomb shelter.
We had a ceasefire for two hours.
And my father started praying from Psalms.
We held hands and my father started praying, I shall walk into the valley of death and fear no evil, for thou art with me.
And my parents said to me, when they come to slaughter us tonight, we will create a distraction.
We want you to run towards Israel and never look back.
We are old.
You are a young child.
Just run towards Israel.
Thank God I did not have to make that difficult decision that night, because that's the night when Israel came in physically into Lebanon and established security zone around our homes to make sure we are protected, that the Palestinians and Muslims will not be able to come into our town and slaughter us.
And this is how we ended up surviving another five years.
And at the end of the five years, it was seven years in the bomb shelter so far.
Israel invaded Lebanon, working with the Christians in Lebanon, trying to help them take back their democracy.
Because by that time, we had 11 Islamic terrorist organizations operating out of Lebanon, including the PLO. So Israel invaded Lebanon, working with the Christians, hoping to establish peace with the Christians in Lebanon and kick out the radical Islamic element.
And that's when my mother became wounded by a Muslim shell exploding in front of our bomb shelter, and we had to take her to Israel for treatment.
That really was the turning point in my life.
For my mother, it was a life-saving experience.
For me, it was a life-changing experience.
Of course.
How could it not be?
And yet now, as you relate what happened to you, as you relate these horrors that you suffered as a child and into adulthood, you are scolded by white liberals in the West and saying, oh, how dare you?
You don't really know about what it's like in Lebanon.
You're a hate mongerer.
You're giving out hate speech.
How do you respond to To these white lefties who are accusing you, ignorantly accusing you of hate speech for just recounting your own experience as a child.
Exactly.
Recounting my own experience.
Michael, I still walk around with shrapnel in my bone.
I look at my scars when I take a shower in the morning.
Those are the scars that will be with me until the day I die as a mark of evil, of hatred.
I understand what happens when people turn a blind eye to evil thinking it's not going to happen to me.
It's all the way over there.
Let them all kill each other.
Who cares?
I come from over there.
When I was a 10-year-old child, people said, let them kill each other.
Nobody cares what's happening over there.
I was the over there.
I am now in America.
I am the Anne Frank who lived to tell about it.
If Anne Frank was alive and she lived, don't you think she would be fighting against Nazism and any sign of Nazism and warning the world if she saw signs that she recognized as a child?
I am the Anne Frank who lived to tell about it.
And right now, my Nazism, my Islamic radicalism that I suffered through when I was a child is now a plague inflecting the world, whether it is in Australia or America or Israel.
Or any other place in the world.
Right now, what affected me, the evil that attacked me as a child is now attacking the world.
And I believe it is my duty.
It is the duty of every person who loves peace to stand up and say, we come together with peaceful Muslims, with peaceful people from all religions and all backgrounds who want to make the world a better place for our children and for ourselves and their descendants.
We want to leave the world better than the way we received it.
Those people we embrace, we welcome, we work with.
But if you do not stand up against evil, that says something about you.
And unfortunately today, Michael, we are being vilified for standing up against evil.
The world is turned upside down.
But we cannot allow people to silence us.
I was, I just came from Israel last night.
I was in Israel for the last 12 days and I met with members of the Knesset.
I met with members of the IDF. I was actually on top, on the rooftop of the IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv.
And I recorded videos in Arabic targeted towards the Arabic world, speaking to them and saying, Let's have peace together.
Enough of the hatred.
Enough of the killing.
Israel is a peaceful nation who wants nothing but peace with its Arab neighbors.
Join us.
Let's work together towards peace.
How can anybody label someone like me As a hate monger.
And by the way, here I was on the border with Lebanon and I as a Lebanese was looking at my home across the border and I couldn't even drive five minutes to be able to visit my home of birth and take my children to see where I come from because Hezbollah wants my head on a platter simply because I want peace with the state of Israel.
Well, this, it's why I'll bring up making fun of the white liberals here, because it seems so morally backward and so absurd.
They're confusing this question of race with a question of religion, with a question of ideas.
The left calls disagreement with Islam racist.
They call you a racist, even though you're the same race as all of these people.
That's right.
And my mother tongue is Arabic.
And I can read the Quran in the language in which it was written.
I don't even need a translated copy from CAIR in order for me to understand Islam.
You can read it in the original language.
You can post videos in that language.
The left seems to equate religion with race.
But race is inborn.
Religion is a set of ideas.
And clearly, we think those ideas are wrong.
If we thought those ideas were right, we would be Muslims.
If anybody thought those ideas were right, they would become Muslims, but they're not.
How do we explain to people that Islam is not a race, that religion is a matter of ideas, and we can disagree over ideas without having racial bigotry?
Islam is not a race.
Islam is a religion.
And people who follow the religion of Islam are from all over the globe, just like Christianity.
I mean, there are black Christians in Nairobi.
They are in Nigeria.
There are black Christians in Africa.
There are blonde Christians in Switzerland.
People come from all shapes and colors who follow a religion.
We have to differentiate between people and between religion.
In the Islamic world, you have people who speak Arabic who come from all over the world.
Look, we have Louis Farrakhan and the Nation of Islam in the United States.
How many black Americans can speak Arabic or read the Koran in Arabic?
I mean, let's face reality.
But they follow Islam as a religion.
And again, not all Muslims are radical.
There are a lot of peaceful Muslims who do not want to have anything to do with radicalism.
Look at my national conference, at Act for America's national conference last year.
We had Raheel Raza, who is actually a practicing Muslim.
She's a Sunni, her husband is Shiite, and they call their children sushi.
So, you know, you have people like her who want to have nothing to do with radical Islam.
They actually condemn it.
Yet she is also condemned and she is called a racist, even though she's a Pakistani with brown skin.
So this is why we cannot allow ourselves to stop and listen to anybody who wants to criticize us.
I tell our people, focus on the end goal.
If you have to stop and answer every dog that barks, you will never reach your destination.
So don't let barking dogs stop you from reaching your end destination.
Focus on the end.
This is exactly why, Michael, I started ACT for America.
ACT for America.
We are the largest national security grassroots organization in the country.
We have almost a million members.
We have 1,000 chapters nationwide.
We have been able to pass almost 100 bills nationwide, 13 bills in Congress.
And over 80 bills in 32 states across the country to protect the nation.
So I encourage those who are listening right now, join us so together we can make a one mega voice in defense of our country.
Go to our website, actforamerica.org and join us as an activist, start a chapter as a chapter president.
We have to come together and work together regardless what the left says.
We cannot let the left dictate The destiny of our nation because we are too busy answering them instead of marching forward to protect our country for our children.
I also really like that line of yours, do not let barking dogs stop you on your way to your destination, which I believe is the new motto of United Airlines.
This is a recent change for that airline.
I want to talk about radical Islam, which you bring up the difference between radical Islam and run-of-the-mill Islam.
American political leaders on both sides of the aisle have seen fit to lecture Islamic terrorists on the true nature of Islam.
George Bush famously called Islam a religion of peace.
Barack Obama said the same thing.
He said Islam teaches peace.
Barack Obama refused even to connect the religion with the terrorist acts done in its name.
He preferred euphemisms like extremism.
Although, of course, Mother Teresa was an extremist too, and not all extremes are created equal.
Your book is titled How to Defeat Radical Islam.
What is the difference between radical Islam and regular old everyday Islam?
Well, I have a chapter in the book titled Purists Drink Their Islam Straight.
And I talk about the ideology of Islam, and I talk about what the religion itself says and what the ideology is all about, and I differentiate between the two.
For example, Islam is a political movement cloaked in religion.
Islam is not like Judaism and Christianity.
Islam is a political movement.
So the ideology itself is a very violent, bloodthirsty Ideology, supremacist ideology that wants to subjugate everybody who is non-Muslim.
I mean, let's face it, the Islamic empire ruled for 1400 years.
By the time the Islamic empire ended, 270 million people across the globe have been killed by Islam, radical Islam, but Islam the ideology, because unless you are a people of the book, basically Christians and Jews, where you become second-class citizens if you do not want to convert, Anything else, like Buddhists, Hindus, everybody else, where you either become a Muslim or you die.
So the ideology itself is very strict, very violent, very bloodthirsty.
Now, a lot of Muslims don't even understand their religion, have never read their religion, but they like the structure of something spiritual.
You know, I like to pray five times a day.
I like, you know, to go to mosque on Friday.
You know, do good with God, but they do not understand their religion.
They like the structure of it, like the majority of African Americans in the United States who call themselves Muslims, but they don't really understand what Islam, what the Sira and Hadith and the Quran basically teach.
ISIS understands exactly their religion.
Al Qaeda understands exactly their religion.
So, for example, when President Obama would talk about al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS, that he doesn't understand what he's talking about, al-Baghdadi has a PhD in Islamic theology.
He graduated from the University of Iraq with a PhD in Islamic theology.
Yeah, but what does that guy know?
Barack Obama lived in Indonesia for a couple years, so he's probably the expert, right?
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
So this is what we're dealing with, education.
In America, we have a very short span about history.
So a lot of people in the West also, Michael, do not want to understand history, do not want to read history.
It's boring.
But this is why they say, if you do not learn from history, you are doomed to repeat it.
That's right.
And we are seeing the rise of Islamic radicalism.
That Islamic caliphate has already been established.
And we better pay attention because when you look at Islamic history, we're seeing the same signs happen again.
You know, Ben did a video a few years ago about the radical Muslim minority, which we hear Barack Obama talk about all the time.
And just a few statistics from this.
In Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, 200 million Muslims living there, 50% support strict Sharia law, 70% blame the US and Israel for 9-11.
In Egypt, 80 million Muslims, 65% support strict Sharia law in every Muslim country, 70% have positive or mixed feelings about Osama bin Laden.
Bangladesh, 149 million Muslims, 25% think suicide bombings and the targeting of civilians is justified.
A full two-thirds say that honor killings of women can be justified.
In Turkey, the most moderate Muslim country, a full 32% of Muslims think honor killings of women can be justified.
78% of Iraqis say honor killings of women can be justified.
In France, 35% of Muslims say suicide bombings can be justified.
In Britain, 78% of Muslims want cartoonists who draw Muhammad to be prosecuted.
And finally, in the good old USA, 13% of Muslims think violence against civilians can be justified.
Almost 20% are favorably disposed or neutral toward Al-Qaeda.
That said, the majority of victims of Muslim terror around the world, of course, are other Muslims.
How can we, maybe this will be the point we can close on, how can the West fight Islamic terror without alienating all Muslims?
We have to fight Muslim terrorism and we have to stand up for ourselves.
Other Muslims, let me put it to you this way.
Whatever we have done in the last seven years in trying to win them with love and affection and show them how nice we are and we're not against Islam, anything happens, you see people in Afghanistan or in Pakistan by the hundreds of thousands taking to the street and miraculously all of a sudden they all have American flag and Israeli flags and they're burning them and they are chanting death to Israel, death to the United States.
So this is what you are looking at.
These are the peaceful majority.
They are alienated regardless what we say.
They are alienated by us simply because we are infidels.
This is the reality.
This is what I call the irrelevant Muslim majority.
And I'm not sure if you saw a clip by me.
I was asked one time by a peaceful moderate student, was actually a lobbyist in her mid-30s, She said, well, what about, you know, you're painting all religion with such a broad brush, you know, what about the moderate majority?
And I told her, they are irrelevant, because when you look at the lessons of history, when you look at Germany, for example, most Germans were peaceful, yet it was the Nazis that drove the agenda, and as a result, 60 million people worldwide died.
14 million in concentration camps, almost 6 million were Jews.
The peaceful majority were irrelevant.
When you look at Russia, for example, most Russians were peaceful, yet Russia was able to kill 20 million people.
The peaceful majority were irrelevant.
When you look at China, most Chinese were peaceful, yet China was able to kill 17 million people.
The peaceful majority were irrelevant.
When you look at Japan, same story.
Most Japanese were peaceful, yet Japan was able to kill 12 million people, mostly killed with bayonets and shovels.
The peaceful majority were irrelevant.
And today, when you look at Islamic terrorism victims, And I have to disagree with everybody saying, well, the majority of victims of Islamic terrorism are Muslims.
Not true.
When you look at the people, 100,000 people died in Lebanon as a result of the war in Lebanon.
That's true.
That's right.
I mean, when you look at murders across the world, look what's happening in Sudan.
Remember the Sudanese massacre, Sudan and Congo?
Four million people massacred.
Four million!
And that's in a span of four years.
We have not seen four million Muslims dead in the last 16 years since 9-11.
This is a lie perpetrated by the leftist media.
The reality is, we as a Judeo-Christian culture, as a culture that is not Islamic, are being now attacked because the Islamists have declared war on us.
What we have to do is recognize That they have declared war on us.
They could care less us saying, well, we don't want to fight you.
We're not at war with you.
That's irrelevant to them.
What we need to focus on is how we protect our culture, our values, our democracy, our freedoms, and attack anybody who wants to erode those freedoms until we win and they lose.
And there's no other option.
And meanwhile, as you say these things, some atheist university student in the middle of Boston is going to say, oh, what does she know?
What does that racist know?
It's really powerful testimony that you give.
And you're so right.
People always, they'll only focus on Afghanistan or Iraq, and they'll say that most of the victims of Islamic terror are Muslims themselves.
But they forget the genocide of Christians in the Middle East.
They forget the other countries that aren't as fashionable to report on, where atrocities are committed against Christians, beheadings, crucifixions, and nothing is being said about it because it's not fashionable in the media.
But we're not fashionable.
We're not politically correct.
And thank you very much, Brigitte, for coming here.
The president of Act for America.
And also go out and read the book, They Must Be Stopped, Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It.
Brigitte, thank you for being here.
Thank you.
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We've said a lot of politically incorrect things on the show today.
They're going to call Brigitte, who's Arabic, who's part Arab, they're going to call her a racist, and the left, they're going to cry and scream because she relays her personal testimony growing up in Lebanon.
And she said nice things about Israel.
That's, uh-oh, that's going to be tough.
Make sure you have this to protect you and your family, the Leftist Tears Tumblr.
Go to dailywire.com.
We'll be right back.
I am going to burn through this mailbag.
We're running a little late, so we're going to just burn through these.
From Brett.
Hey Michael, I'm a Protestant and you're always making fun of us.
Why is that?
I do.
It's out of a place of love, but I do that somewhat frequently.
From history, it seems that over time the Catholic Church has incorporated pagan theologies and practices.
For one example, Matthew 23.9 clearly states,"...to call no one father." For we have one Father, and he is in heaven, and priests in the Catholic Church are referred to as Father.
How can you logically call someone Father if you read this verse?
I'm interested in hearing about your faith.
I'm assuming you've read into everything, being as logical as you are.
I hope that your Catholic faith is not cultural or familial.
So how do you understand these passages that clearly oppose Catholic theology?
Good question.
I must remind you, Brett, all shallows are clear, as Dr.
Johnson told us.
All shallows are clear.
If Christ were really forbidding us from calling anybody father, well, then we wouldn't call our earthly father father, would we?
Do you call your father dad, or father, or daddy, or papa, and do you do that?
Then clearly, clearly you're rebutting and violating Christ's word.
But of course, if we really were forbidden from calling anybody Father, then the word Father would lose all of its meaning.
The reason that we call God the Father, Father, is because it tells us something about the nature of God to picture Him as a Father.
The comparison works because we can picture an earthly Father.
If our Lord meant that from now on, Father should only ever refer to God, then we would just simply have another word for God, right?
We would lose the word for Father.
We wouldn't have a word for that.
We'd just say, you, hey you, bring me my bottle.
Hey, come on, you.
But if we'd have another word for God, we'd lose the word for Father.
The concept of God as Father would be meaningless if we abolished the concept of our fathers on earth.
Joseph uses the term to refer to himself in Genesis.
He says, Job says, In Isaiah of Eliakim, he shall be a father to the inhabitants of Jerusalem.
We hear, My father, my father cried to Elijah.
In Acts, Stephen refers to our father Abraham.
That's in the New Testament.
In Romans, Paul writes of our father Isaac.
Paul refers to Timothy as his child and his son throughout the epistles.
He calls Titus his child.
Paul writes in 1 Corinthians, I do not write this to make you ashamed, but to admonish you as my beloved children.
For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers.
For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel.
So is Paul a heretic?
John writes to his little children.
Peter writes to his son Mark.
Christ, in the same breath as he says, call no man father, also says, call no man master or teacher.
Do you call somebody mister?
Do you say, hey, Mr.
Smith?
Mister means master.
That's all the word means.
Do you call anybody doctor?
You go and you say, I've got the flu.
You say, I've got the flu, doctor.
Give me some medicine.
Christ himself instructs the apostles to teach all nations.
If he's saying, call no man teacher, it's a little strange that he would say, you should go teach all nations.
Paul writes to the Corinthians and to the Ephesians of the church's office of teacher.
Christ here is using hyperbole to underscore the point he's making in the very same chapter, that men should not covet places of honor at feasts or the best seats or the honors and titles of men.
Christ also instructs that if your right eye causes you to sin, you should pluck it out and throw it away.
Yet, we are all given to the, quote, the lust of the flesh and the lust of the eyes and the pride of life.
So, should we all amputate and mutilate ourselves?
Should all Christians just be amputees wandering around?
Of course we have literal fathers and of course we have spiritual fathers.
It's throughout the Bible.
What we must not do is to confuse the earthly fathers with the true father who is in heaven.
When things seem so clear, when they so clearly rebut the scripture or Catholic theology or whatever, look into it because all shallows are clear.
Next question from Corey.
What's a good mild cigar for a rookie cigar smoker?
Avo No.
9.
That's the one.
It's a little pricey, but it's a nice cigar.
Cusano 18 or Oliva Connecticut Shade are a little less expensive, also very good.
An equally important question to the soul, because the body is a temple and the temple needs incense.
From Christina.
Hey Michael, my stepdaughter participated in the school walkout last week.
She's in sixth grade.
She was not even aware of the walkout until one of her teachers told her about it that day.
She was told by her teacher that the walkout was for 17 minutes of silence for the Parkland students.
She was then told by her teacher when it was time to walk out.
I hadn't talked to my daughter about the walkout because I knew she was not aware of it and I didn't think junior high kids in our district were participating.
I thought it was just the high school.
I'm really angry about this and feel that my daughter was forced to make a political statement that I don't agree with when her teacher told her it's time to walk out.
I want to email the superintendent.
My husband thinks I'm overreacting.
What are your thoughts, Christina?
You're not overreacting.
That's outrageous.
That is such an outrage.
It is unbelievable.
Absolutely you should email.
This is the purpose of mothers.
The purpose of mothers in the public school system is to send angry emails to superintendents when teachers go too far and lose their minds and manipulate children.
It is an absolute outrage and the teacher who did it should be fired.
No question.
From Rodolfo.
Dear Michael, master troll extraordinaire.
I'm a huge fan.
My question is regarding a billboard in my conservative city of Chicago.
I think you're being sarcastic.
It read, even Blessed Mary wore the hijab.
Will you respect it?
First off, I support Muslims expressing their faith and I have no issue with the hijab.
My question is, what are they trying to imply?
How do you respond when someone says this to you?
Does it matter?
Should I even care?
Thanks, love the show.
This is a great one.
This is the central problem of the left, is they always want the appearance of the thing, but not the essence of the thing.
They accuse the appearance with the inner life, with the...
Content of it.
They like the form.
They miss the content.
I don't think that people who have trouble with the hijab or who maybe flinch a little bit if they see a whole nation of people wearing full burqa or something, I don't think the issue is they don't like head coverings.
People wear baseball caps all the time.
People have worn head coverings for all of human history.
It isn't the head covering that is the question.
The question is, what does the head covering represent?
What is it a symbol of?
What the hijab is a symbol of is Islam.
And in this particular case, Islam's treatment of women and Islam's subjugation of women, which does not exactly comport with our Western liberalism and our Western sense of sexual equality and the sense of sexual equality that comes from Christianity in particular.
So, I suppose Mary might have worn a head covering.
I think probably everybody wore a head covering.
Sure, it's a hot place in the Middle East.
But the question is, what are you really trying to say?
What they're really trying to say is that all Christianity and...
Islam, they're just the same thing, aren't they?
They're not the same thing.
Islam developed after Muhammad was on a merchant trip with his uncle in Syria and encountered a heretical monk named Bahira, which is why it has some similarities to Christianity but goes quite down another path.
Those are different things.
And to suggest that the Virgin Mary is really some secret Muslim or something, which I think is the logical conclusion of that insinuation, is ridiculous.
Do we have time for one or two more?
One more.
Just one more.
That's it.
Okay, this is a non-religious question.
From Marcus.
Dear Saint Michael.
It's a religious beginning, but not a question.
I live in a small town where it's still considered impolite to bring up politics.
I'm a small business owner, and when asked about my politics, I usually respond, commies buy things too.
Which is a nice way of saying, I hate communists, but I don't let politics get in the way of business.
What are ways you would recommend supporting conservative causes without directly outing myself as a conservative?
There are a lot of ways to do it, and these days it's very important to do that.
You should watch out for social media.
It'll come back and bite you.
Everything is public now.
One way you can do it is donate some money to Republican candidates, but not too much.
When it's too much, your donations become a matter of public record.
But that said, I don't know how much people are going to be looking into you.
That said, do business.
Calvin Coolidge said it very well.
The primary business of the American people is business, that you're keeping the engine It's an important thing to think about politics.
But C.S. Lewis pointed out when there are times of great political strife, you shouldn't ignore politics.
To do so would be like a sick patient ignoring his disease.
It could kill you.
But you shouldn't think that politics is the end of it.
The reason we have politics, the reason we talk about politics, is so that we can do other things, like business, like art, like culture.
Do all of that.
That's just fine.
There are some of us in the muck who are in politics all the time and...
If you're able to conduct business and do all of that, that's a wonderful thing.
That is the reason that we do politics, is to have that full civil society and that prosperous economy and the good life, man, the American dream.
Okay, that's what we have more questions, but I'm sorry we ran out of time.
That is our show.
I'm going to be in New York next week.
I'm going to be doing a couple speeches, one at Yeshiva University and one at Ithaca.
So I'll be traveling.
We'll be on the road.
It should be a lot of fun.
Maybe I'll spot you around town somewhere.
A good place to find me will be any of the cigar bars in New York.
In the meantime, I'm Michael Knowles.
This is The Michael Knowles Show.
I will see you next week.
The Michael Knowles Show is a Daily Wire forward publishing production.
