"I Was Given To A Man When I Was A Child " Michael & The Sharia Survivor | Sabatina James
In this emotional and eye-opening episode of Michael &, Michael Knowles sits down with Sabatina James — a woman who was given away as a child bride and forced into marriage with a man twice her age. Sabatina courageously recounts her harrowing experience, her fight for freedom, and how she ultimately found redemption through faith in Jesus Christ.
This powerful conversation exposes the dark realities of child marriage, honor culture, and the persecution faced by women who dare to break free — while offering a message of hope and transformation that only God can provide.
🙏 Watch until the end to hear how Sabatina’s life was forever changed.
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In my case, I was promised to my cousin when I was born.
They're in that living room of my parents, my mother and my father, and a Muslim scholarly person, and my cousin from Pakistan.
They had invited him to come over, and you know how they did that?
They adopted him as their son.
To get around the immigration beast.
Yes.
So he was adopted.
The Muslim scholar, he folded his hands, said, you know what happens in Islam when you leave the religion.
And I knew what happens.
It's the death penalty.
Normally you get three days.
That's Sharia law.
You get three days.
To recant.
It's torturing the convert so that he can become Muslim again.
And if they don't, then you kill them.
Please don't let us do what we have to do otherwise.
A Muslim mayor in New York, Muslim mayor in London, whole Muslim towns in America, in the Midwest, in Michigan, in Minnesota.
As Islam spreads throughout the West, Europe, the United States, many people are scratching their heads.
They don't seem to know what we're dealing with, myself included, which is why I'm so pleased to sit down today with Sabatina James, who has experienced Islam firsthand in Pakistan, in Europe, and all of the attendant death threats, a forced marriage, living as a refugee or a fugitive.
Sabatina, thank you so much for being here.
Your story is unbelievable.
Unfortunately, it has to be believed.
You're born in Pakistan, Muslim.
You end up in Austria and Germany, put into a forced marriage, refusing a forced marriage with your cousin, converting to Christianity.
Take us back to the beginning.
I was born in a little village in Pakistan.
My grandfather was an imam.
And from the very early age, I grew up hearing his voice through the minarets calling people to prayer five times a day.
And he was always very proud of me because I was a very eager student of the Quran.
Nothing mattered to me more than going to paradise.
And I knew from the early beginning that the only direct way to paradise is to die for Allah in killing the infidels.
That was what everyone believed.
It was nothing special.
But I tried to please Allah.
I mean, I was a child.
I just tried to please Allah with reading the Quran in Arabic without understanding it.
That's how most Muslims read the Quran.
Because the Quran is not like the Bible, where we read the Bible, it's God's word, we try to understand it, but we read the Quran in order to memorize it.
Because I think most people think that the Quran is just, it's like the Bible, you know, I guess it's in Arabic and it's, you know, the Muslim version.
Basically, it's the same thing.
Yeah, no, no, it is not.
But I learned the Quran in Arabic, read the whole thing by the age of 10.
And yeah, and my father was already in Austria.
And he used to come to visit us, I think, about every year or two.
And I have two brothers and a sister.
And yeah, then I came to Austria as a little child and was completely shocked with the two worlds.
And I remember having one of these neighbors who had a child, a daughter, and she had children and she wasn't married.
And I just couldn't wrap my head around this.
How does that even happen?
Because in Pakistan, they would have soaked her in gasoline and set her alight or buried them alive.
As happened recently in Pakistan, five women were buried alive just because they refused the arranged marriage that their family had chosen for them.
They wanted to marry men of their own choices.
Three of them were actually teenagers.
So this stuff happens every single day.
We just don't hear about this in the West because you can't point out all these human rights violations without the accusation of malice and Islamophobia.
Islamophobia.
That's always the word.
Yeah, I mean, Mamdani talked about Islamophobia, right?
Throughout this whole campaign, right?
It's just unbelievable.
Here's a guy whose mom is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker.
Dad is professor at Columbia.
He's mayor of New York and he's whining about Islamophobia.
He's the victim.
Yeah.
And I love how he was actually talking about some of his aunts, I think.
Yes.
Zerofuy, I think that's what he called them.
That is the funniest thing that she's so terrified taking the train or something because, you know, the vicious New Yorkers would just come and probably attack her.
And I'm going, you know, I would understand if the New Yorkers, the Christians, would say that and say, I'm so scared going out because there are Muslims here and they, you know, and they just killed about 3,000 of our people.
Yeah.
But they don't do that.
You know what's very strange?
In New York, I'm in New York originally.
Yes.
New York on 9-11.
After 9-11, the public opinion of Islam in America increased.
It's not that it decreased.
It's not that there was Islamophobia.
It was totally the opposite.
There was more Islamophilia.
But it seemed like a lot of Americans, still seems like it today, don't really seem to know what Islam is, what political Islam's goals are, what any of it means.
Yeah.
So you're in Austria.
Yes.
You're confused as to why your neighbor wasn't burned alive for having a child out of wedlock.
How old are you at this point?
Because I was about nine or ten, yeah.
So, yeah.
And so this village where we landed was very Catholic.
We were the only Pakistani Muslim family there.
And they were very proud of their faith.
And the one thing, the first thing you notice coming, the first revelation of Christianity, to me anyways, was Jesus on the cross.
Present in every classroom.
You go hiking.
That's a big thing in Austria, right?
And all the trails.
You go to people's houses in the living rooms.
You would have the cross.
And so they were really very proud.
And it certainly the first seeds were sown there for my later conversion.
Because when I was in Dedar, where I grew up in this little village, you know, I used to hear the voices of women.
They would cry out aloud because they were beaten by their husbands and the reason they would scream so loud is they wanted help.
Police doesn't come, so they're expecting the villagers to help.
And the villagers would come, but they would surround the victim and accuse her.
And when I came to Austria, in this little village, Every morning in the classroom, the children would surround someone who was beaten and bruised and they would look up to the victim and pray to him, because that was Jesus on the cross.
And that to me was the most striking difference between the world shaped by Muhammad and the world shaped by love.
So that was, I always found that very fascinating because I think somehow even without understanding the theology of Christianity, Jesus on the cross fascinated me.
And to this day, I don't need theological books.
Just looking and gazing at him on the cross, that to me is Christianity.
So you're nine or ten years old.
You have this revelation.
Yeah.
It's a tangible one.
It's Christ on the cross.
Yeah.
Do you think, oh, well, maybe I'll leave Islam.
Maybe I'll become Christian.
No way.
It just was.
This little sees, I was fascinated by it, but no, I was still very proud to be a Muslim.
And I read the Quran.
And the thing is, in Islam, we do not believe in the core teachings of Christianity.
The crucifixion, the resurrection, and divinity of Jesus are, we don't believe in it.
And you know, this is fascinating because a lot of people who I think are struggling to understand Islam, they seem to think that there's a lot of affinity.
So sometimes you'll see this on the internet.
They'll say, oh, Islam is actually very nice and reverent about Christ or Our Lady.
But I remember, I read the Quran when I was young, not as young as you.
And I remember the denial of the crucifixion, which made me think about the letter to the Philippians.
I think it's the letter to the Philippians, where St. Paul writes, there are many walking now, and I tell you, even weeping, who are enemies of the cross of Christ.
I always found that to be interesting.
What is it about being an enemy of the cross of Christ?
And of course, the cross is where Christ conquers death.
Exactly.
And the thing is, the Islam considers the belief in the Trinity as the greatest sin because it's called shirk, associating partners with Allah.
And I mean, people don't have, it's actually frightening how little Christians know about what Islam teaches about them.
What does it teach?
Surah 98, verse 6, that Christians are among the worst of creatures.
And they have three options.
They can either convert to Islam, then they are safe, or they can, if they don't convert to Islam, they can pay the jizya, which is a tax for being non-Muslims.
And if they don't, they have to be fought.
And Jesus in Islam, he will return and he will break the crosses and he will kill all the pigs and the most influential Quran commentators say that this means the end of Christianity.
Jesus will come to fight against Christianity and he will fight for the sake of Islam.
It's not quite the Jesus we find in the Bible or history or known by the people who knew him and his sojourn on earth and their disciples.
So there's a great hostility obviously to Christianity in Islam.
Yes.
Which you're aware of as you're in Austria of encountering Christ on the cross for the first time.
Yes.
Yeah.
And then, you know, we moved away from this little village and then I ended up in Linz, which is close to that, also close to Salzburg.
Austria is, we were talking about you, you recently went to Salzburg.
I was just recently in Austria.
Yes, I mean Austria has no equal among the nations.
And I had to say that.
Not only because we are Habsburg and Mozart, it's just also stunningly beautiful.
And but so I came to Linz and in Linz everything looked different.
It felt like it was home to the entire world because all the immigrants went to the big cities and that classroom looked very different.
No one prayed to the man on the cross there.
We had Islamic education in the public school.
That is normal in Austria.
Every public school has Islamic education.
And I mean, people are not aware of that.
But for example, in Vienna, Muslims have outnumbered Catholics in primary schools.
I had no idea.
Because, you know, a little bit of the history is that Islam tries to conquer Europe almost immediately.
And it makes it to within 150 miles of Paris in 732, Battle of Poitiers.
Then they tried again.
Well, they keep trying it, but they tried again, notably in 1571 with the Battle of Lepanto.
But then the last of these three great battles was the Battle of Vienna.
It was the largest cavalry charge in history.
Jan Sobaeski happily boots the Muslims back again.
And then what you're saying is, well, actually, now they've just invited not only Muslim people in, but Islam to be taught in schools.
Yeah.
So I don't think Muslims need jihad to conquer the West.
They just need the West to keep apologizing for who they are while they push their agenda.
We used to actually make fun of that as Muslims.
You know, how weak the Christians are.
And we had a powerful weapon with the accusation of Islamophobia.
I mean, in our classroom, we had Turks and Bosnians and Albanians.
And then we had the blonde Michael and Michaela who used to come in.
And every time they came in, we used to say, immigrants, out to us.
And they were just like little lambs.
They wouldn't say anything because they knew that if they said something, we would accuse them of racism.
Right.
And they did not want to be labeled as that.
And the only people that stand up to the Muslims are the Russians.
The Muslims don't muslims to Russians.
My bodyguards were usually Russians.
They were on.
I don't trust anyone else.
Those Russians have made a pretty tough stuff.
Yeah, yeah, I know.
I mean, they are.
I remember at one lecture, and you know, unfortunately, my last years in Europe were always with police protection at my public events, and I had these two Russian guards standing here, and some Pakistani Christians wanted to come and have my books, have the book signed, yeah.
And then he would just not step forward.
I was going, brother, what's going on?
He said, he looks okay.
Those are the bodyguards you want to have.
No, but that was Linz.
And the reason why Europe got so hooked on immigration is that there was a labor gap.
And they invited after the Second World War.
So that's where they invited the first Muslim migrants from Turkey and other Muslim lands.
And they thought, oh, they're going to go away once their work is finished.
But life was better in Europe, right?
And so they stayed and they imported the problems of Islam into the West.
And on top of that, you know, after the Second World War, obviously a lot of Europeans had been killed.
So that's part of the labor gap.
And they bring in the Muslims.
On top of that, the Europeans stopped having children.
So they don't reproduce.
The labor problem continues and continues.
They have to support an aging population supported by entitlements and welfare.
And the Muslims do have a lot of children.
Yes.
And so all of a sudden you're seeing a major demographic shift.
Yeah, that has been happening.
I mean, how many years have I heard living in Austria and Germany, don't have children because of climate change?
Climate change.
Don't have children.
And then all of a sudden, the message changed overnight.
Angla Merkel was of the opinion we need more people because we don't have enough children.
And so instead of encouraging their own women to have more children, they just decided to replace the next generation with Muslim migrants.
And this is what has been happening.
No, you will be accused, by the way, of an Islamophobic, racist conspiracy theory.
If you say that populations in the West have been replaced, that is a fit.
Now, if the people who are actually in charge of the political order, the Angela Merkels of the world, if they say, we want more migration to fill up our countries, that's not a conspiracy theory.
But if someone who opposes it says the exact same thing, that is called beyond the pale, racist, Islamophobic, you're not allowed to say it.
Well, I mean, all these accusations are just used to shut down any conversation about Islam.
So Islamophobia is a stupid word.
I mean, it's so self-contradictory.
What are phobias?
Phobias are irrational fears.
But fearing a religion that demands my death penalty is completely rational.
You know, I mean, apostasy in Islam is considered as such a grave sin that Islam demands the death penalty for it.
The Prophet Muhammad said, whoever changes his religion, kill him.
Well, now you can decide about how to kill him, stone him to death, or hang the person.
But these are, I mean, even the laws in Muslim countries.
I have friends in Iran and elsewhere who have parents that were stabbed to death just for converting to Christianity.
And this sort of things happens all the time.
We just, as I said, don't hear about it because the media covers up all these things and like the persecution of Christians in the Muslim world.
A religion that's spread by the sword for 1400 years is not going to change its stripes anytime soon probably.
So you see this happening.
You're right.
It's very rarely reported on.
Yes.
So you're seeing this.
You're in Linst.
You're now in this Muslim community.
You had this reprieve of a Christian school, but now you're back in the Muslim school.
Are you still thinking about the man on the cross or you or no?
Well, I think I got it.
What I liked was the taste of freedom.
The taste of freedom of seeing girls that were allowed to make their own choices.
And I secretly envied them because in my case, I was promised to my cousin when I was born.
When you were born?
Yes.
An arranged marriage when you were born to your cousin.
My mother said to her sister that when I grow up, I will be married to her son.
It's her sister.
Forget about arranged marriage for a second.
How common is marriage between cousins in Pakistan or the broader Islamic world?
Extremely common.
In Pakistan, extremely common.
I know so many people, Pakistani girls, that had to marry their cousin.
Yeah.
Why?
Why do they do that?
I think it has, it's not that explicitly Islam demands that, but sometimes I think it's to control the women.
And if they stay within the family, it's easier.
And in honor-based societies like Pakistan is and many of the Muslim countries are, honor is just the most important value.
And honor depends solely on how closely women follow Islamic tradition.
And it's also very important, I think, in this interview to mention that when we're talking about Islam, we're not talking about Muslims.
Muslims are not Islam.
They're people.
Yeah, there are people that practice their religion to varying degrees.
So when I talk about Islam, I do not talk about Muslims.
I talk about the teachings of Muhammad.
And that's, I think, an important distinction to make.
Certainly, because a Muslim, being a person, could believe anything he pleases.
Yes, and my entire family is Muslim.
So, yeah, and they too, within my family, practice the religion to varying degrees.
So your promise, speaking of your family, you're promised, you're betrothed to your cousin when you're born.
Yes.
When is this supposed to come to fruition?
When my parents started to notice that I was integrating into Western culture, it first started with fights over swim classes because that was something that my parents considered as a very decadent Western thing.
To go swimming.
To go swimming because of the clothing that you should, you know, that you wear.
And then theater classes at school, which my parents thought were just for prostitutes.
They watched Bollywood movies, but still, you know, so every little freedom that everyone around me had, I had to fight for.
And unfortunately, it was not just arguing.
There was always a lot of violence in my family.
And for just something that people don't understand, but I come from a culture where girls are killed over wearing a lipstick.
It's something people can't wrap their head around.
Even hearing you say that, probably people are going to hear girls are punished for wearing lipstick.
Yeah, I'll give you an example.
There was a young woman in Pakistan.
Her name was Kandil Baloch.
She was an online personality and she dared to take a picture with a Muslim man and posted it online.
And her brother saw it that that is very, very dishonorable.
And he murdered her.
Then he went to prison and was let go by the Pakistani government because when an honor killing happens and the family of the victim forgives the perpetrator, then he's out.
And in this case, it was the son of the same parent.
So he said, we forgive him.
So he's out.
These are official laws in the country.
People sometimes think, oh, you know, this is just some few radicals that are doing this.
Yes.
No, no, these are, when you're raped, for example, I've interviewed women who were victims of gang rape in Pakistan.
And many don't have the courage to even report the case.
They drink poison and kill themselves.
But in this case, this woman was so brave.
She reported the case.
And first they put them into prison because international media was there.
When they were gone, let them all out.
They're free because she has to bring four male witnesses to prove the rape.
And if you can't, you go to prison for adultery.
Because even I, when I've read plenty of these cases and I've thought, oh, you know, it's just some radical or it's some tribal.
When you hear about honor killings, you think, this is extrajudicial.
Yeah.
You're saying, no, this is embedded in the law, in the government.
And sometimes they have things on paper just to look good, so to get funded by Western governments, but it's actually not applied.
So Pakistan prides itself, for example, with, you know, we have laws against honor killings.
Here it is.
But that's how it looks like reality, like in this case.
Sometimes governments, sorry, human rights activists will fight for certain people.
And then, you know, if you're lucky, you can get out of prison or so.
But for a lot of people, there is no justice.
And the victims suffer.
I mean, I'm right now helping a girl.
She's 14 years old.
And she was raped by a Muslim man, one of the neighbors, while she was taking care of her baby sister.
He just came in and did that to her.
And what do these people do?
They threaten the entire family and say, we are going to wipe you out if you report the case.
And often they're scared to even file a report because there have been cases like the case of poor Shazia Bashir.
She was a 12-year-old girl who worked for a Muslim lawyer.
And that man raped and tortured her to death.
The mom went to report the case at a police station and they said to her, can't be filed against the lawyer.
Because he is a lawyer.
Just he's a lawyer.
Yeah.
That's it.
I see this every single day in my work.
And the victims are getting younger and younger.
Recently, the victim we took care of was six years old.
Six years old.
She was playing outside.
And a Muslim from the neighborhood comes, grabs her, takes her to the fields, rapes her so brutally, and then leaves her there to die.
She's bleeding and screaming in pain.
And what happens?
She's discovered and brought to the hospital.
He has torn her uterus, and that poor child had to be in the hospital for three months just to...
But he has ruined her.
She is...
She's never going to have a normal life again.
And that is what's happening to little girls, not just in Pakistan.
I see it all the time in Afghanistan.
You know, I am a humanitarian, so sometimes people send me footage of child bribes.
And I recently saw this one, which was so horrifying.
There's this little girl, she's tiny, and she's with her parents.
And then comes in a stranger who is the age of her grandfather.
And father and mother hand her over to the strangers.
A few prayers are said.
And she is trying to grab her parents to hold on to them.
And they walk away.
And this poor girl with a teeny tiny suitcase is now walking home with a stranger.
And she's resisting.
You know, she's just, he holds her hand and she's just resisting because she doesn't want to go.
But she's let go.
And that little girl is just been sentenced to rape for a lifetime by her own parents.
And you know what they say when people like I come and say, don't do that.
Or liberal Muslims come and say, don't do that.
This is not Islam.
They confront you with the Prophet Muhammad.
The Prophet Muhammad, his youngest wife was six when he was about 50.
And that is the problem that the role model Muhammad that the Quran explicitly says is the greatest role model for all mankind, that that has not been reformed.
And whoever is.
I suppose in that telling.
Yes.
It can't be reformed.
Because in Christianity, where the man happens to be God and is a perfect man, then he really is the perfect role model.
And you'll never go wrong by emulating Christ.
But in the case of Muhammad, who is a false prophet, who committed all sorts of sins and foibles, if you endeavor to, if you say this is the man to emulate, then that's just going to be baked into the entire religion.
False prophet.
I feel like we are going to die, Michael.
Yeah, I hope not.
Maybe we'll have to outmark.
We're going to be the first martyrs under Mongani.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I already planned to avoid New York after he got elected.
So you've got this horrible problem where you're just seeing this episode after episode after episode.
But then everyone's going to ask, why on earth would the parents give the little girl over to some old man?
Because of their religiosity or something else?
Because they wanted to go to paradise.
And then you include the economic situation in these very, very poor countries.
And so it's a combination of a lot of factors.
then if you can marry your girl off to someone who brings you a lot of money and you are practicing Sunnah, which is doing as the Prophet Muhammad did.
So it's a win-win on both sides.
So I have met child brides.
One of the first victims I helped, I have an organization, a foundation that helps these sorts of girls.
And she was a child when she was married off in Afghanistan.
And they always say the same stories.
I mean, in her case, her parents were shot by the Taliban.
And then she was married off to her nephew.
Yes.
And he had, I think it was her arm or something that was broken, but she was in pain when I met her.
And she had converted to Christianity.
And Germany wanted to send her back.
That's the thing, you know, the Salafists, Hamas supporters, and all the other Islamists, they're allowed to stay.
And the girls that integrate, that take off their headscarves and even convert to Christianity, they have to go back.
Anyways, I fought for her and she was allowed to stay with her two little children that she had from that marriage.
But when you listen to these girls and their stories, how many of the girls don't survive?
Because they're so little.
And I have heard of cases where the little girl actually became pregnant and then struggled for days to deliver a child and then died herself.
Because they're not, the little bodies are not built for it.
Of course, of course.
And so this is what is happening.
And I'm astonished about the human rights movement in the West that always says that they care so much about these Muslim women.
No, they don't.
They don't talk about this.
No, they're protecting an ideology.
And even people that are trying to point out that this is happening in the Muslim world are considered racist bigots, Islamophobic monsters, like my friend, who is a journalist from Pakistan.
She's an atheist.
She was persecuted there.
She came to Germany.
And she said, it is astonishing how the liberal left abandons all the human rights activists that come from these Muslim countries and point this out because they won't take it.
Unbelievable.
They've categorized Islam as an unclear while and as the religion of peace, which having read, you've read the Quran much more deeply than I have.
That was not the impression I got when I read the Quran.
In fact, the reason I read the Quran was because all the liberals in the West kept saying it was a religion of peace.
I was 14.
I said, that doesn't sound right.
And I read it and I said, yeah, it doesn't seem quite right.
Yes.
So then you're betrothed to your cousin.
You're now, you're taken in by the West and by freedom.
And you want to do these radical crazy things like go swimming or maybe something.
And your parents don't like this very much.
No.
So then what happens?
Well, they discovered that I was holding hands with a boy at school that was the only friendship I had with this young boy who was an exchange student from North Carolina.
He was an Albanian Muslim who introduced me to Snoop Dogg and Dr. Dre.
I don't know what to make of this man.
It's how I learned English.
With Snoop Dogg?
Yeah.
There are so few issles in your addiction.
That's how odd.
No, no, no.
That's my first impression of the U.S. was they're all black.
They smoke pot all the time, every day.
Wow, that's an Albanian Muslim from North Carolina.
From North Carolina introducing you to Snoop Doggy Dog.
Yes, and he's, yeah.
And he had a friend from the Bronx who was there, Emmanuel.
Maybe he watches this interview.
He's going to know hate sir.
Hello, Emmanuel.
Hi.
And yeah, when they discovered that I was beaten so badly by my mother.
By your mother?
Yes.
Not by your father.
You would think the father would be the disciplinarian.
No.
Your mother.
It was.
It's mostly, unfortunately, the women.
Because women lose face if their children do not grow up to live Islam according to tradition.
And there's an entire society, parallel society within the Western communities that is watching the girls.
That's what people don't realize.
So there's a lot of pressure.
And so I was just not allowed to belong to the world that I was growing up in.
That was the problem.
And what, and they considered the West as just very decadent.
And I used to hear this from Muslims in my community.
Look at the Christians.
Their brothels are full.
Their churches are empty.
And when their parents are old, they dump them in old age homes.
I mean, they're not wrong.
I hate to say the Muslims have a point.
They do have a point.
Yes.
And they were just also afraid that I will become like that.
And so what happened then was they said we have a vacation planned in Pakistan.
And I was scared of this.
And when my mother beat me so brutally, I went into a shelter because the beatings happen so often that my teachers who noticed that said, this is not normal.
You need to go to a shelter.
And the social workers already knew me.
And so I ended up there and I told them I'm very scared to go back to Pakistan for vacation because my aunt had called and said that she was ready to have me as her daughter-in-law.
And I was 16 and I was just a teenager at school and now I was supposed to be a wife.
I wasn't ready for that.
But my parents, I mean, they're not the Taliban.
My father is this extremely handsome, charming man.
You know, they couldn't believe that they would do this to me.
Of course.
And I think a lot of people watching probably think, especially when you see what's happened to New York and London and Dearborn, Michigan and all the rest, you think, well, look, obviously there's some kind of crazy guys living in caves with big beards and Casio watches.
And those are the ones you have to really watch out for.
But, you know, all the rest, it's probably just like some slightly different form of Christianity or something.
No, no.
We're not, we're not, we weren't that.
My brothers are highly educated, like highly educated.
And my mom doesn't even wear a headscarf.
But still, these were the things that were going on in my family.
And we went back, they sent me back because I was a minor.
And my parents promised that they will not force me to marry my cousin.
And so we went back to Pakistan.
And when we arrived there, my passport was taken.
I was literally locked in that little house of my cousin.
And I was invited into a room where all my family members were sitting.
And they said that they were now ready.
My aunt said she was now ready to have me as her daughter-in-law.
And I refused.
And I was the first girl in the history of my family to refuse a marriage.
And which was a great shame for my father.
And I love my father.
I still love my father.
And I did not want to shame him, but I just could not live with a man that I did not love.
I wanted to make my own choices.
My mother beat me, and this time there was no one to call, no police, and no social services.
You know, when I'm talking about beating, it's not just I give you a slap.
That's normal in my culture.
But my mom used to grab my hair and drag me through the apartment.
And often when I went to school, I would lock myself in the toilet because I was so afraid of her.
And this is how my school day started often.
And in that case, I was now there.
My family decided to leave me behind and they went back to Austria.
I had no idea what was going to happen to me.
No passport, no phone, nothing.
And then they decided, decisions were made for me.
I was not allowed to make decisions.
And they said they're going to go and visit a few schools with me.
And the schools they visited weren't just normal schools where other children went.
They were madrasas.
Madrasa is a religious seminary, basically, or as some people call it, jihad factories.
Because these are the very places where the Taliban and other radical Muslim groups recruit the next generation of jihadis.
The men come and learn and memorize the Quran to fight for Allah.
And the women are there for submission, to learn submission.
And there are over 30,000 of these madrasas just in Pakistan alone.
And what do you learn there?
You learn nothing else but the Quran and the hadith and how to enforce them with violence.
When I arrived there, I noticed that there were no chairs, no beds, no desks, except a piece of carved wood on which the Quran was laid.
And for almost 12 hours a day, we were just indoctrinated with the Quran, reciting the Quran and praying the namas.
And when there were girls that disobeyed, they put them in the courtyard and they would punish them so badly that they would scream and we were forced to hear and watch it.
And what did they achieve was that if you treat one like this, none of the others are going to come and resist.
It was a time of hell.
I mean, I've described this hell in my book.
And the only way for me to get out of that was to marry the cousin.
And I thought, I will marry him.
Then I will go back to Austria.
And then I will divorce him.
Right.
Right.
And that's exactly what happened.
He came, or almost what happened, because it was actually then an engagement.
My father came and he couldn't afford to bring the entire family back and said that we will do the marriage later.
We'll do the engagement.
And so that's what happened.
I came back to Austria after the engagement with the cousin and started my school.
And that's where everything then changed when I met Joseph, the evangelical Christian.
This is not the Albanian Muslim from North Carolina.
This is a different.
No, no.
The Albanian Muslim, I mean, he, he was, that was just our relationship was listening to Snoop Dobb and Dr. Dre and holding hands.
That's what we did.
Because we were both Muslims, right?
So, but, you know, here, and then I met Joseph, and he was like no other Christian I'd met before because he actually brought his Bible to school.
And I just said to him, what happened to you?
And he said, I've gotten to know Jesus.
And I just thought, hmm, this guy used to stand in the smoker's corner with the guy who had dreadlocks.
And maybe he's on drugs.
I don't know.
You know, but he was very much on fire for Jesus.
And he was trying to bring me the good news.
And I was just thinking, no, no, this is bad news.
It's going to get me killed.
This is definitely going to mean bad news in my family.
That's for sure.
Yeah.
But once I told him about my problems with my family, and he said, you must pray.
And I said, five times a day I pray.
And he said, maybe you're praying to the wrong God because obviously he's not hearing you.
I love the evangelicals.
They do that sort of thing.
They're very blunt.
We don't do that.
No.
We just, you know, it's for us.
Yeah.
If you have a bunch of kids, you get them to the Latin Mass.
Yes.
That's the extent that we do.
The Catholics, we're like a little more subtle sometimes.
But the evangelicals, they're so forthright, they just drop it all as hard as it can be.
Drop the bomb.
Yes.
And I just thought when he said that, that's section 295A in the Pakistani Penal Code.
You would go to prison in my country for saying that.
That's actually true.
They have a blasphemy law that actually puts people into prison if they criticize Islam.
And that's what they want to enforce in the West.
That's why they're always whining about Islamophobia because they're not used to criticism.
Anyways, in my case, he then gave me a Bible.
It was a gift close to Christmas.
And Old Testament, New Testament, and a map of Israel.
Like, seriously, I'm a Muslim.
I don't like this.
At least that page you have to take out if you're bringing it home.
Anyways, he did that.
And then I was sitting on my bed.
My parents were now forcing me to sign the marriage certificate so that I'm officially married and my cousin could come to Austria.
And so there were battles about this and I was praying to Allah to help me.
And nothing happened.
And that one night, I took the Bible home and it was an incalculable risk for me to take it home.
But I'm a risk taker for the truth, so I did.
And that night I said, who are you?
Buddha, Allah, Krishna, Jesus.
And so my gaze fell on the Bible that Joseph gave me.
And I had no idea where to start, because most Muslims don't.
We have weird ideas about Christianity.
I have a friend.
She is, her mom is an Indian Muslim.
And she was saying, you know, the Christians, they had the Old Testament.
It was too difficult.
So they found a new one so that their women can wear bikini and not be guilty about it.
It's funny, but that sort of talk is very common at Muslim dinner tables.
Wow.
Well, it's amazing, though, because the New Testament was written in the first century AD.
And when was the bikini invented?
1945 or something like that?
I don't know.
Okay.
There was a gap in there.
I know, but this is the sort of thing.
So I was, you know, holding this book in my hand.
God, who are you?
And I just randomly opened the Bible.
And the first sentence I read was, whoever searches me with a pure heart will find me.
Woo.
There was an answer.
And that happens, people.
It happens.
Yes.
I don't mean to make it sound like a magic trick or something because it's not, but that happens.
People just open the Bible or they look over and it just happens to be on a page with exactly exactly what you need to see.
And then I started to do what Joseph told me.
Read the New Testament.
So I started to read.
And I did what a lot of Muslims do.
I started to compare Muhammad and Jesus.
And I was especially struck by the story of Mary Magdalene.
Because when the mob was eager to execute her, I just saw myself in her with my entire family pressuring me.
And I saw the women of my country in Mary Magdalene.
And I have to interrupt you.
This is one of.
This is just kind of what we were talking about.
I woke up today.
I looked at my calendar and someone had added a meeting with a news organization because they wanted me to talk about Mary Magdalene.
And I haven't thought about Mary Magdalene in, I can't tell you how long.
And I actually wrote to my publicist, I said, do I need to know more about, I'm not an expert on Mary Magdalene.
She said, no, they just wanted to do the meeting.
I have this whole meeting about this whole project about Mary Magdalene.
I have no idea where this came from.
This just appeared on my calendar.
I didn't think about it afterward.
And then you say that.
That's what happens, though.
That does happen.
That kind of thing happens.
I think Mary Magdalene maybe sent me.
Should I speak to him, please?
Yeah, yeah, maybe, maybe, maybe.
No, I started to make mental comparisons between Muhammad and Jesus.
An adulterous woman is brought to Muhammad, stoning for the woman.
The same is brought to Jesus, mercy.
Muhammad said, kill the infidels wherever you find them.
And Jesus says, love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you.
Muhammad said, I have been commanded to fight against all people until they testify that Muhammad is the messenger.
And Jesus says, blessed are the peacemakers.
Muhammad participated in over 27 battles personally as a warlord.
And Jesus said, my kingdom is not of this world.
I mean, I could, you know, continue with this list because there is so much to say.
And actually, if people are asking, where is this actually written?
I've pointed that all out.
The only sources I'm using in this interview are the sources that are recognized as valid in classical Islamic theology.
So I was most fascinated by Jesus and I wanted to know more about him.
And there was this movie that was aired at Easter about Jesus.
And when the crucifixion came, my parents turned it off.
I wanted to see why someone would sacrifice his life for his broken creatures.
Because Allah is not interested in the brokenness of his creatures.
You cannot have a relationship with him.
You follow his rules.
So I wanted to know about him.
And so I ventured out to the city and to buy a copy.
And everywhere I went, I was just met with snorts and chuckles.
I think they were just like, who is this brown woman with an Austrian accent wanting a Jesus movie?
What is this?
Almost as crazy as an Albanian Bosnian from North Carolina, yes.
So I was going everywhere and I wasn't succeeding.
And then I remembered something.
Joseph used to say, Jesus lives and he loves you.
And I said, hey, Jesus, if you're alive, please help me find this movie.
And when my last attempt was unsuccessful, I just gave up, sat into the tram, and I just thought, even Jesus can't help me.
And all of a sudden, I hear this voice.
You're very pretty, aren't you a singer?
And it was the man sitting across of me.
And I just went, no, I don't need that now.
I've heard this line before.
And he said, I don't know, Freulein, which is a lady.
Freulein, but I just have this feeling that I must give you something.
And I said sarcastically, well, it's Christmas time.
Give me a gift.
And he just handed me this leaflet and then went off the tram.
And I look at it and it says, call this hotline and receive one Jesus movie for free.
And I just went, this is very interesting.
I felt I was followed in my thoughts by someone, something that I wasn't used to.
And while I was excited to have these little experiences, my head was speaking to me this reason.
Your parents are not even happy that you don't want to marry your cousin.
What are they going to say if you say, I actually want to exchange Jesus at Muhammad for Jesus, right?
Yeah.
And so when I was going home, I just thought, I will just practice the faith secretly.
Because I couldn't give up my family.
That was the most important thing to me.
And that night, of course, I stumbled upon the verses where Christ says, whoever loves father and mother more than me is not worthy of me.
So Jesus was a God of challenge, either all or nothing.
And it is for a lot of Muslims, you know, it's not just a change of religion.
You absolutely lose everything.
You lose your family, you lose your friends, your community, and your identity.
It's like suicide, basically.
And so Jesus was asking me to die so that I can become like him.
And that's the only thing that drove me to accept him because I wanted to be like him.
And there is so much to say, but I'm going to make it short.
I always had this inner voice within me, strangely, even though Joseph was an evangelical, to go to the Catholic Church.
The man on the cross was there.
And I always followed him.
So I went to this big cathedral in Linz and saw this holy water.
And I said, oh, it's some sort of ritual.
So I was just making these weird sounds.
Make these weird sounds.
And this young man comes and say, can I help you?
And I said, yeah, I have a meeting with the Pope today.
He just looked at me going, the Pope's not here, but he brought me to the priest.
And I tell the Catholic priest about my newfound love in Jesus Christ and the things that I was experiencing.
And he said to me, it could be that Muhammad was a prophet too.
We don't know.
The priest said this.
This is in Austria.
This is in Austria.
This is the time where Saint John Paul had kissed the Quran.
Yeah.
People wanted to follow.
So all religions were away to God.
And I experienced that firsthand.
So he let me go.
He didn't tell me that I needed catechism.
He didn't say, oh, you should come and if there is any problem, come to my church and I will give you a room if you have to flee.
Nothing like that.
He sent me home.
And then I saw a nun.
She had, you know, she was properly suited and booted.
She was on her bike and I made her stop.
Stop.
I was on fire for Jesus.
I needed someone to speak with me.
So she stopped and very sweet.
You know, Catholic sisters are always so extremely sweet.
And she said, yeah.
I said, I believe in the same as you.
And she didn't know what to do.
And I just said, I was a Muslim.
I wanted her to be happy.
Yeah.
And She said, all religions are a way to God.
Oh my goodness.
We must just believe deeply in what we believe.
And I just thought, if I believe deeply as a Muslim that killing an infidel is going to get me to heaven, is that a way to God?
How is that the way to go?
You know, this is, as you describe, I'm not even terrible.
I'm shocked, but I'm not surprised by these experiences, especially in Austria and Germany.
But truly, this is one of the great arguments Hilaire Belloc made the point.
The proof that the Catholic Church is divinely instituted is that if it weren't, bad clergy would have destroyed it 2,000 years ago.
Unbelievable.
I love Hilaire Belloc.
They have thrown him out somehow.
But I just, I loved Hilaire Belloc.
Yeah, anyways, but so I ended up back in the evangelical church, even though I always had this inner longing to go to the Catholic Church, but no one wanted me there.
So the evangelicals took great care of me.
I mean, they even study Islam just for Muslim converts, just to go through what are the challenges they have.
So they are most eager to accept converts.
But to make a long story short, don't make it too short.
Yeah, there's so much to say.
I've written three books.
Two bestsellers, by the way.
About Sharia.
I'm not surprised.
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When my mom pressured me to sign the marriage certificate again, I had accepted Jesus in my heart.
And she asked me to sign it.
I said no, because I knew the breakup was coming.
I said, God does not want that.
She was completely perplexed.
What God, you know?
So she took my closing, packed it in a bag, threw it out, and spat on me and said, if I would have known that you would become like this, I would have killed you when you were an infant.
And so I was standing in front of the sorry, I was standing, I didn't even have the strength to call the elevator because I was just shaking.
I was so weak and I didn't know where to go.
And I was just on the street.
And I ended up in the homeless shelter for young adults.
And I was probably the first Austrian to be homeless for Jesus.
At least a few centuries.
I want to imitate Christ in all the different forms in his passion.
So that was one.
And so I ended up in this homeless shelter.
And I've actually recently written to that shelter.
I love those people that helped me there.
And they then recognized, because they knew me from before, that it was all a lie and deception, what they had received from my parents before.
The thing is, you know, Michael, this is very normal.
It's going to sound very horrible.
And not all Muslims do that.
But it was very, very normal for us Muslims to lie to non-believers because it wasn't considered a sin.
And I would have friends that invite the Christians over who were best friends with them.
And the Christians would go home singing, oh, that was so nice and the hospitality of Muslims.
And then what did we do?
We separated their dishes, prayed the Muslim prayer over it because they are impure.
And the Quran itself in Surah 5 says that a Muslim and a Christian cannot be friends.
So if you have friendships, they have to be shallow friendships.
Never loyalty, especially in hard times, then Islam's honor is at stake.
I mean, that was normal.
That's what we believed.
Everyone believed that.
And I think my parents saw in those social workers just a bunch of pig-eating infidels.
That's how I perceived it.
And you can lie to infidels.
And that's what they did.
And when I told them the whole story and that I had converted to Christianity and they helped me to find an apartment.
And the apartment happened to be right in front of a police station because God knew what was coming.
Providence.
Because when my parents found out, they called me home.
And there in that living room of my parents, my mother and my father, and a Muslim scholarly person was there.
And my cousin from Pakistan, they had invited him to come over.
And you know how they did that?
They adopted him as their son.
To get around the immigration visa.
So he was adopted.
And by a liberal lawyer who fights for the rights of refugees, he helped them to get him into the country.
So he was there.
And the Muslim scholar, he folded his hands, said, you know what happens in Islam when you leave the religion.
And I knew what happens.
It's the death penalty.
But I was just thinking, I'm living in Linz.
How are they going to do that in Linz?
And he just said to me, you know, normally you get three days.
That's Sharia law.
You get three days.
To recant.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So you can, and it's not just persuading the convert into accepting Islam again.
No, it's torturing the convert so that he can become Muslim again.
And if they don't, then you kill them.
And that's not just a radical interpretation.
That's, as I said, teaching of the Prophet Muhammad.
And in my case, he said, we give you two weeks to come back.
And otherwise, please don't let us do what we have to do otherwise.
And I was just frozen because my family had just sentenced me to death in Linz.
And so what I did was I called a friend who was a non-practicing Tunisian man.
So they just did this to me.
And he said, you need to go to the police.
But before I did that, I called Joseph.
But Joseph, when I told him about the threats, his family was scared.
He didn't come.
Because I'm going to come and help.
And then all of a sudden, he wasn't there, too scared.
So I ended up at the police station, told him the entire story.
The policeman first said, Why don't you convert back to Islam?
I mean, what does it matter what religion you have, right?
It's all fake anyway.
Yeah, so why don't you convert back to Islam?
Then I told him everything that has happened.
And then he went from one extreme to the other extreme, which was he needs to arrest my father because of all the violations.
But I didn't want him to arrest me.
I started to cry.
Then they called the psychologist because they were scared that I may be suicidal.
That's the condition that I was in.
Yeah, of course.
And the psychologist evaluated me and said she's psychologically completely fine.
But what they couldn't understand was that it wasn't just either being afraid of my parents or loving my parents.
It was both.
Yeah.
And I didn't want to harm my parents.
I just wanted them to protect me.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And so one day I receive, police start investigating.
Then I receive a letter.
It's about your husband.
And I just went, wait, I haven't married.
And turns out my father signed the marriage certificate himself.
And all of a sudden, I was married.
But according to the world that he comes from, he wasn't doing anything wrong.
Because in many cases, the bride doesn't even have to be present.
It's just the men in the family who can sign for her.
And then she's married.
That's what he did in Austria.
And you, by the way, I know of girls who've had that happen to them in Brooklyn and other places in the US.
This is not just a European thing.
Okay, this is happening here.
I have met victims in the US who are going through similar things.
And Anyways, I went against that and then my cousin called me and said, you're not going to experience this day anymore.
And he hung up.
And I knew he was coming for me.
That day I left Linz.
I came to Vienna and in Vienna, whenever I started new jobs, I was scared that my family would find me and then terrorize me, because that what had happened before, whenever I started to work somewhere, my parents would come there, create a scene and then I was let go right.
And so I wasn't sure what to do.
And I had a friend who was a model.
He said, oh, I know this photographer and that photographer, I'm sure he's gonna gonna do some amazing pictures and you can earn some money.
And so I did and then just said, no, I don't want to be seen like this by my father, and you know it's gonna degrade his honor.
So I did a few shots that I should have never done.
But during that time I met a priest that came to a press conference because I decided to write down my story by the persuasion of a policeman former policeman, so you should write this down.
Because he first didn't believe me when I told him the story and then all of a sudden he called me.
He said, no, I have all the statements.
This is not so he.
He said, and he had a publishing agency it's it's, it's a crazy story that he himself has.
He's a policeman that turned a millionaire.
And then whatever he did.
And then, even if your story is hard to believe.
Yeah that's, a policeman becoming a millionaire publishing mogul is a that's, but these things happen, these things.
He exists though, and so the story came out, and at one of my my uh, at my press conference, there was a priest.
I love him, Rudy.
Rudy was amazing and he was a Catholic priest and he just sat there and looked at me.
He said, you know, when you were speaking about Christ to the press, it felt like you were describing the sun to a bunch of blind men and I was so grateful that finally there's a Catholic.
And I said, I want to be Catholic, I want to be Catholic, but the priests and nuns I meet in Central Europe, they don't seem to want to do anything.
Yeah, so he baptized me, but he never told me that I need to be confirmed.
And that's something that happens, that sometimes, when people see the story that you risked your life for Jesus Christ and now you don't need catechism, but the problem is that the catechism is not supernaturally infused in you, you still need that.
So I was just begging these people, please teach me more please.
And he just, oh yeah no, you don't know.
No, it's a religion.
You actually have to learn things.
Actually, you know, problem was that my parents sued me for defamation and then I had to prove the entire story before court.
Then the court and my witnesses were all scared.
Of course.
Even the social workers would not testify because they were scared that my parents would come and create a scene.
So they left everything written to the judge, which was most helpful.
At least they did that.
Yes, no, no, I mean, my social workers, God bless them, they were amazing.
And they the court ruled in my favor, but it went on for years.
And my parents used to find me wherever I moved to.
So I then became ambassador for a women's rights organization in Germany.
My book was then published in Germany and it was quite successful.
So I came there and there was this friend of mine.
He said, you know, here is a young woman.
She's in desperate need of help.
And you're a public person.
Maybe you can help her.
And that was the child bride that I was speaking about from Afghanistan.
And I fought for her case.
And she was allowed to stay in Germany.
And it encouraged me so much.
And I established my foundation in Hamburg in 2006.
So Sabbathino slash Friends of the Passion was established there.
And we have helped thousands of victims of not just forced marriages, but especially people who are suffering persecution for believing in Jesus Christ.
That is our main duty as a foundation to help those people.
And this is also what I spoke about publicly.
And once I was invited by a Catholic priest, you know, I was baptized, but went back to the Catholic Evangelicals because they were the only ones taking care of me.
Who would teach you things and bring you in?
Yeah, yeah.
So during that time, the pastor used to speak, oh, you know, we are like the early church.
But I always felt that there was something missing.
And I think what it was, and I had visited mega churches in the US, I went to Hillsong and I went to Ayro, all the, and they are lovely.
I mean, amazing people.
The people are great.
Yeah, the people are great, but there was something lacking.
And I think it was the cross.
The cross that had followed me from the very beginning.
I stepped into Austria.
And the cross was there at the evangelicals, but Jesus wasn't suffering on it.
And I asked the pastor one day, I said, where is he?
He said, well, he's not there.
He is risen.
And I said to him, but he was just crucified in Syria, so he's still there.
And he didn't know what I meant.
ISIS had just crucified people for not fasting during Ramadan.
That's what I meant.
And I was interviewing Christians who had fled the Islamic State.
Was 2014 and one of the young men that I helped had testified to the murder of Coptic Christians.
And this that's what I was speaking about when I said.
Christ is still there, and God knew that The German church is a wilderness for Muslim converts, and whoever seeks him with a pure heart finds him, and he started to send me the saints, and the first one to reach me from across the centuries was Saint Augustine.
Saint Augustine.
A journalist from the Spiegel magazine had come to interview me and did a big portrait about me and I thought he's going to be super nice.
But he came out with this article God's supermodel, God's supermodel flattering I guess.
Yeah, the thing is, no one takes you seriously if you do that, but it's okay.
So he did that, but he was a great devotee to St. Augustine, even at Spiegel you have these people right.
That's shocking.
He's not there anymore but probably the most leftist magazine in Germany.
But good for them.
They did it and I must say the German media has treated me very well to you know, can't complain about that.
So he quoted him and I was fascinated by it and I started to read Saint Augustine and he was constantly talking about the Catholic Church and I just went wait a minute, I need to find out.
When did this begin?
And I went to the Church, Church Library, Library OF THE Church Fathers, and there I discovered the man of my life, Ignatius Of Antioch.
He's a good one, my goodness.
When he says these words, I am in love with suffering.
And I was like this guy has the same God.
And he spoke about the Catholic Church in the first century and I started to go to the Catholic Mass.
I didn't know what to do, but I remember someone saying, well, you have to go to confession.
So I went into the box yeah, said hello, don't know what to do.
That was the most interesting experience for that priest.
And then I went to Mass, and there is something that I experienced at that Mass that was beyond any explanation in words, and I believe that all those sorts of experiences should remain between God and the Lord.
the soul, and often for those experiences, even if you try to put it into words, it kind of fails.
They tend to have an illegal quality to them.
My spiritual director actually wanted me to write this down and I started and I wrote it down.
It's like nope, just throw it out and and then You know, I'm a devotee to St. John of the Cross.
And Saint John of the Cross says it very clearly that it's not even necessary to explain it because the spiritual effect that God wants to create is created without you having the explanation or you know knowing how to describe.
So since then I am Catholic and during that time I was invited.
See, this is how Providence works by a priest.
He has this teeny tiny little parish of the traditional Latin mass order.
He invited me to come and speak about persecuted Christians.
And he was shocked that I came.
He said, you know, I have a really small church and you're very famous in Germany.
So why did you come?
And I, yeah, well, not to speak, but to seek.
And he introduced me to the bishop, and I was then confirmed finally, 10 years after being baptized into the Catholic Church.
And yeah, during that time, 2015 and 14 and 15, that was the time of the huge wave of immigration into Germany.
Right.
And people like me were not safe anymore because millions and millions of new Muslim immigrants came.
At one of my lectures, bearded Salafists showed up, and when they became aggressive, security literally rushed me out of the lecture.
And the next day had to be cancelled because the organizers no longer felt safe.
I felt, I saw Muslim men following me to church, watching me at the train stations.
And I was taken into police protection, had been for a while because my parents had again discovered where I lived in Germany.
And so I was under police protection for many, many years.
And I was a nightmare case for my police protection officer.
Greetings to him because I had this great desire to help the persecuted Christians, but I had left Pakistan as a Muslim.
I wanted to hear the sorrows of that community.
And the only way you can do that is by being with them, listening to them.
And how do I do that?
I would have to go back to Pakistan.
And what would happen to me in Pakistan if anyone finds me?
I would be either imprisoned under section 295 for blasphemy or the mob would kill me.
But I knew it was the will of God because it was my duty to help the persecuted.
This is how I discovered the will of God.
What is my duty?
And then, but I was scared.
And so when I read the story of Joshua in the Bible, who was scared of the giants, even though he had an order to go.
Like, who is my giant?
The jihadis?
Am I going to go?
I thought, if it's the will of God, for whom I have given up the most precious thing in my life, which was my family, then I will go.
And so I actually went to Pakistan.
Not the loveliest vacation, I imagine.
That's astounding.
It really, you know, you can make a sort of joke as far as, but that is Chris.
It's crazy.
Yeah.
I went not just to Pakistan.
I went to the most dangerous area within Pakistan.
And my driver was someone from Peshawar.
I was there with a human rights organization and with they were Pakistanis themselves.
And one of them was a convert from Islam who had spent years in prison himself and is sort of an evangelical pastor and probably the most courageous man I've met.
And he had organized this driver and I just said, oh my gosh, how can you have a Muslim from Peshawar driving us throughout this whole journey?
I mean, that's the stronghold of the Taliban in Pakistan.
How do you know he's not one of them?
And he said, well, you know, where we are going, you need someone like that to even get through.
And I just said, where are you taking me?
Well, where the victims are.
And then when we arrived there, I always had armed men with me.
And when we arrived there, even at those so-called hotels, you would have these men with kalashnikovs and turbans standing there.
It was terrifying.
And there was an area where the victims would all meet to speak with me.
And then the bodyguard came and said, they have killed one of the victims.
And I don't know the whole story of her.
I just know.
I was terrified.
Of course.
I said, I'm not going.
I want to go back to Austria, Germany.
Yeah.
And then he said to me, think of Queen Esther.
God called her to save her people.
And she was scared.
And what did she do?
And I said, well, she went because of Mordachai, who encouraged her.
And he said, I'm your Mordachai, and I want to encourage you to go.
Thank you.
Thanks, Morty.
I'll be there.
So I read the story of Queen Esther, who said, if I die, I die.
But I will fulfill the will of God, basically.
And so I did.
And to this day, I'm so glad that I did.
Because out of that trip, something amazing has been established.
We have Operation Moses, which is the freeing of slaves.
Pakistan still has slavery.
And many of the slaves are Christians.
So we basically free slaves.
And we help victims that are accused of blasphemy laws.
We help bringing back Christian girls that have been abducted and forcefully converted to Islam.
Pakistan, every year there are about 1,000 Christian and Hindu girls that are abducted and forcefully converted to Islam.
And this is what we do.
But in my case, I mean, the journey wasn't over because on that trip, we were followed by an Islamist organization.
And at one time, a dead body was thrown on my car to make a stop.
And I just thought, this is the end.
Yeah.
Yeah.
And this is actually how I start my book.
And it was a long night, and I described all the details in my book.
And I wanted to visit people in prison as well.
But then, after this, the people that had organized the trip, they said, the person that needs the most help right now is you.
You must leave the country.
When they start throwing dead bodies on your car, that is a strong sign that time's up.
Yes.
And I miraculously survived.
And my police officer, you know, whenever I even started to say, God, he said, I know, I know, I know.
You're God.
He thought it was horribly imprudent for me to go there.
Imprudent.
That's a very diplomatic way to put it, I think.
I think the most prudent thing is the will of God.
And if that will leads you to risk your life, then it's still the most prudent thing to do.
And it's why I did it.
And we have saved countless lives since then, and we still do.
So we don't advertise our work.
So by the way, if you don't find like worst bad link, we don't.
You have to be a little undercover, I imagine, in that line of work.
Yes.
It's a very important point that you made.
That doing the will of God is always the prudent thing.
People are going to think that's really weird.
But I think a lot of people have this experience sometimes.
I certainly have it myself, where you're praying and you pray that something that you want will happen.
But you think, well, you know, if it's your will, guy, or I really hope such and such doesn't happen.
Please don't let this happen.
Please don't allow the consequence of this action to come, whatever it is.
And you think, I really, I feel like God might be calling me to do one thing, but I really don't want to do it.
But then really, one must conclude, even just as a matter of reason, whatever God wants is best.
He knows better than you do.
And he wills better than you do, and he loves better than you do.
So you, so long as we're talking about the real God, you know, who is the divine logos of the universe, the love that moves the sun and the other stars, go with him.
That's actually the practical, prudent thing to do, because he's right.
Yes.
Yes.
And, but, you know, it's not just that the danger was now in Pakistan.
We had invited and imported the danger of radical Islam into the West through all that immigration and not, and didn't just have all these bearded Salafists show up at my lecture.
Now I had literally when I went to church and I had a public event, there were armed guards standing in front of the church while I was at Mass because I had to have them there.
They were following me.
And so I took the whole thing online, you know, because the public appearances became very dangerous.
I took the whole thing online.
And during that time, we received so much attention from the radical Muslim scene because I exposed the Quran.
I'm a madrasa child.
They can speak about all these nonsense to Christians who have absolutely no clue.
You know, they can tell them anything.
They have never read their own scriptures.
And, you know, why should they know anything about Islam?
So the problem was then they started to send us death threats.
And the last one that we received in Arabic was, watch your head.
Have your house guarded and watch your head and have your house guarded by police.
And this is when the authorities started to investigate because they were saying that they are going to put the pictures of the channel on all European jihadi sites.
And what is the picture of the channel?
That's me and another ex-Muslim and some people from the Middle East.
We did that.
They know what it looks like when Sharia takes place, right?
And so with them, I had this channel, but even that was not safe anymore.
And so I fled Germany and I came to the land of liberty, America.
And I was always told, hey, you may have had this desert in Germany with the church.
But the American church is doing amazing.
Churches are full.
It's great.
And after having lived here for a while, I must say that's either great news or pretty disturbing.
Because I think that faith in America is not much better than in Europe in a different way.
I find it very, very focused on the self.
It is not the faith of the man on the cross.
It's not the faith of Ignatius of Antioch.
It is, if I had to describe it, sometimes people ask me, what is the difference between the persecuted church and the church in the West?
And I think the difference is that the persecuted live for Jesus.
And the church in the West lives for themselves with Jesus.
So, and I just, and you see it really, it's almost like a spiritual schism.
And you hear it in the way people speak.
I heard this testimony of a young man who distributed Bibles and they took off his arm.
And my colleague asks him, what are you going to do now?
And his answer was, I still have the other arm.
And then, you know, I, my Catholics, they've just gone to retreat, heard their pastor preach for a full weekend and they come back and have their testimony.
Yeah, sermon was good.
Breakfast was good.
Furniture was a bit outdated.
It's a nice weekend.
This is so therapeutic.
And I try to win the people for the persecuted church because literally people in Pakistan think that the Christians are praying for them.
And I'm trying to win people to pray for these people.
But what do the persecuted see when they look over to the West?
They see the conservatives obsessed with the Jews.
They see the trad Catholics obsessed with the devil.
And we've got the better mass, you know.
I mean, we do, but.
We do.
But that's beside the point.
That's beside the point.
Yeah.
And then you've got the liberals who don't think that rights for Christians matter in the first place.
So we are really stuck.
It's an amazing.
And the word you just use, therapeutic.
That's what we call it.
We call religion in the West is moralistic therapeutic deism.
Yes.
It's therapy.
And we have lost the art of sacrifice.
And there's a line that I think was an invective from Catholics against Protestants, but it applies, I think, broadly to faith in the West, which is, you know, we used to have the fast and then the feast.
And now we have the feast and then the hangover.
Another line, I think it was by Richard Niebuhr, said the religion now in the West is a God without wrath leads a people without sin into a kingdom without judgment through the ministrations of a Christ without a cross.
Yes.
Yes.
And so this is what I am seeing in everyday life, you know, and I recently, after Mass, said to this young woman, I said, you know, it's very important that we pray for the persecuted.
And she is this traditional Catholic, a lot of kids, and, you know, I think, oh, she's going to get it.
And she said, you know, the Nigerians may suffer their cross, but I've got all these children, so we have different crosses.
No, they have literal crosses.
They have literal crosses.
But here's the thing, you know.
You have a seminarian burned alive.
That's the same as having six kids.
So having six kids is the same as having your six kids murdered by Boko Haram.
Is that, where is the logic in that?
And it is, it is just, it astonishes me.
And people always tell me, oh, you know, we are Americans.
We're going to conquer Islam if it comes to us.
And so you're going to conquer nothing.
Most people in America are struggling to cope with facts of life.
Raising kids, challenging, I'm sure.
I mean, I've got one friend.
She's got eight kids.
So I know exactly what she's talking about.
Grocery store trips are difficult.
But I just think they, if you really want to conquer Islam, stand up to Islam.
You need the ability to suffer.
We mentioned Hilaire Belloc earlier.
Belloc writes in his book on the Crusades, he says, you know, look, the Christians lost at the point of Damascus.
And had they taken Damascus, Islam would have been broken.
But they didn't.
And actually, Islam remains structurally sound.
It's our faith that is weakened.
It's our faith that is cracked.
And he's predicting in 1930, whenever he wrote it, that Islam, though it seemed somewhat dormant, would rise again.
Yes, the church has been too focused on Marxism.
And they let radical Islam rise.
I mean, even right now, I'm just looking at it.
What is going on with the conservative movements?
I mean, I think the Islamic Brotherhood should send them thank you cards for distraction.
Just like, good, let them do this.
Just this is of all the things you point out, all the obsessions you mentioned.
You know, they're either obsessed with the Jews or the liturgy.
And I love, I love it.
The liturgy, I think it's, it's more, it's the devil.
Everyone wants to hear more about what happens and all these stories.
And it's, and, and I ask myself, hmm, why is that?
And I said, therapeutic faith, they want entertainment.
Yes.
It's entertainment.
And the thing with the Jews, and I don't want to get into this whole Israel-Palestine thing.
I've had enough of jihad in my life.
I don't want to, I don't want to.
But, you know, I've asked myself, why this obsession with the Jews?
And I think I have the answer.
I think people are trying to explain evil in the world with something else than original sin.
And it is always easy to point at other people because we are complete narcissists because we can't look at ourselves and our own sinfulness.
And hey, I'm amazing.
Look at me.
Can't be me.
Look.
Can't be me.
Yeah.
It's just, and you see that narcissism absolutely everywhere.
I mean, we have the West coming to an end and people are rejoicing about how amazing everything is.
Like the church is doing so well.
And I actually asked that someone, why do you think American church is such a blessing to the world?
Because he actually said that.
And here's what he said.
Well, Mike Schmitz has so-and-so many million downloads.
Bishop Barron has so and so many million views.
So in the persecuted church, you know, we're always competing who has suffered more contempt for Jesus Christ.
You've got the American Christian.
He's got more followers.
He's a saint.
I was going, no.
How do you measure love?
Jesus said, by this, people will know that you are my followers, that you love one another.
Okay?
So it's measured by sacrificial love, not by clicks.
And but then what does one do in the in the rich?
I thought the other thing I thought you were going to say, the reason the American church is such a blessing is because we're rich, so we still give money, you know.
But you say money, what's that?
I have never asked anyone for money.
We don't even fundraise.
We are crazy.
We're like Mother Teresa.
God is going to send it.
My foundation was saying, do you think we should put an account number somewhere?
I was like, well, they will find us.
They can reach out to Michael McCarthy.
That's very trusting.
I'm sure I will get many requests to donate.
Because it raises a real question, which is, you know, the money and the clicks and the views and that can all be great, you know.
But then what do we do in a culture where, well, we'll see how Mamdanistan turns out in New York or all the rest of it.
But for right now, at least, we don't suffer much persecution.
Sometimes the federal government spies on our churches or something under Joe Biden.
But then what do we do when we are happily not being pursued by Boko Haram?
What are American Christians supposed to do?
American Christians have the responsibility to pray for the persecuted and I think every family should make it a habit to say at least one Our Father for the persecuted church every single day.
We have 13 martyrs in Nigeria alone every single day and we should not only pray in our family but also in our parishes.
But what I'm seeing is that the churches do not want to engage in this.
I have spoken to countless priests and they will engage with everything but Islam.
Why is that do you think?
I think the persecuted the bishops and the priests have learned that the easiest way to disturb a peaceful life is by criticizing Islam.
They probably learned that from Pope Benedict and so they have traded the truth for diplomacy and the persecuted are sacrificed on the altar of inter-religious dialogue.
That's what's happening.
Let me give you an example how that looks practically.
I have a friend.
He's probably going to watch this.
His name is Nassar.
He's a Pakistani Christian.
He was a Muslim who converted in England and his Muslim neighbors wanted to carry out Muhammad's demand of killing him and they tried several times.
One time when he stepped out of his house, they were standing there with a pickaxe and tried to kill him.
They smashed his kneecap and his hands, but he survived.
Then they tried to burn down his house, threatened to rape his girls.
He's got a big family of six children.
And then armed police stood at his door and had to relocate him.
Burdened with this weight, he went to the church, in his case, the Anglican church.
And they were all about interfaith harmony.
It disturbs what he says, disturbs the interfaith harmony.
It certainly does.
And that was the priority, not the suffering of a man who had chosen Christ.
And this is what I see happening in America as well when I speak to priests.
And we can all try to open their eyes.
I'm sending some of my books to the bishops.
Let's see how they respond because I did write letters in Germany to all the bishops that I've ever heard of.
And I had one request.
Will you be willing to meet with the persecuted Christians?
Not in Afghanistan, not in Tehran, not in Pakistan, but in your own dioceses in Germany.
Not one of them was willing to meet the persecuted.
So all these young men who had fled Islamic State came to Germany and then in the refugee homes were attacked by radical Islamists and wanting one of them was had blood on his face.
I mean, it was terrifying.
That was the diocese of Cardinal Marx, by the way.
And he had blood on his face and he tried to reach out to his church.
No one helped.
No one.
Because if you do that, you are challenging Islam.
And we don't want to do that.
Because that can cost you your reputation through being labeled an Islamophobic or your head like that of Theophan Gogh in Holland.
That's a beautiful observation.
And it ties in exactly with that first kind of revelation that brought you to the church.
She says, well, it's actually Christ on the cross.
Yes.
And what distinctly does Islam deny, reject as Christ on the cross?
Well, Islam denies that he was crucified.
He said, they say that someone who looked like him was crucified.
Yeah, yeah.
That he walked away.
They crucified him not, right?
Yeah.
Do you think many Americans watching this will say, yeah, well, I'm very sorry for everything she went through.
That's really tough.
Very traumatic in Pakistan and Europe and everything.
And yeah, you know, we have Dearborn and the Mamdani guy in New York and whatever.
But, you know, it's just Islam is not a real threat in America.
The Muslims who come here are going to assimilate.
They're going to be lured in, if not by Christianity, then at least by the decadence of the liberal secular West.
And it's just not going to happen.
She just doesn't understand how resilient American culture is to this kind of thing.
Yeah, I hear that all the time.
The American naivete.
First of all, dear Americans, I love you.
I feel a butt coming on me.
Where's the butt?
But you are probably the most inclusive and the most naive people on planet Earth.
I mean, you ask an American, will you pray for an Armenian?
And what comes back is, what's an Armenian?
What's an Armenian?
What's an Armenian?
Probably the oldest Christians on planet Earth.
But you know what?
Yeah, Christian before the Edict of Milan.
But they don't have Joe Austin, so they don't matter.
I was speaking to a friend of mine who does a lot of work for persecuted Christians in the Middle East, Father Ben Keely.
And he mentioned that he'll have these people very well-meaning.
They say, we need to send missionaries to go convert people in places like Armenia or the Middle East.
You know, they were Christian a lot longer before you were, actually.
But I think the greatest problem is that people believe that Islam is a religion like any other.
So that when the Muslims come, they're just going to assimilate like the Italians do or the Irish did, you know.
The problem with Islam is that it teaches that anyone who follows Christian customs is among the three most hated people by Allah.
So how would you like to be a faithful Muslim and then integrate into Christian society?
Who are the other two?
Sorry?
Among the three most hated people.
What are the other two?
I don't know.
I just, I don't want to say anything.
I just had this quote from the Hadith.
I do not know that.
And yeah, so I think what's happening is they think when Muslims come here, their religion is a religion of peace because that's how it has been advertised.
But I think the first question they need to ask themselves is, if Islam is a religion of peace, why does it threaten to kill those who leave it?
That's number one.
And secondly, I honestly don't understand why people are even confused about these questions.
We don't need to speculate over the fact whether Islam is a religion of peace or not.
We have 1,400 years of history to prove that it is not.
And then I think the other thing that is important to understand is the definition of peace.
How do you define peace?
Well, peace would ultimately, there's only one peace that one finds in the Prince of Peace.
But most people would say peace is just the absence of conflict.
Okay.
At a basic level.
So this is what we learned in the madrasa.
Peace is when the entire world is submitted to Islam and Sharia law.
And this is the peace of the Islamic Brotherhood that is working very hard to Islamize America.
And you think you still have religious liberty?
I heard of these evangelists who went to Dearborn, Michigan to distribute Bibles on a public sidewalk.
Within minutes, police stopped them.
American police officers.
And they had to stop distributing Bibles on a public sidewalk.
Hey, Muslim area now can't do that.
And that's the best way to avoid conflict.
Hey, let them live their parallel lives.
But you know what happens when you have parallel societies?
That's what my last book was in Germany.
Sharia in Germany, the parallel judiciary system, which is a real thing, that then once these parallel societies form, they do not follow the law of the country.
They follow Sharia law.
And then you have a parallel judiciary system, and that is the end of justice.
And you know who suffers the most are actually women and girls and all the minorities that these people always talk about.
You know, the gays, you know, the gays in Pakistan and in Iran, Iran is executing gays, you know, all the time.
Do you hear anyone talk about this?
No one.
It's just that Christians are being accused of the things that Muslims are doing in reality.
Right.
This happened after 9-11.
There was the new atheist movement where these four writers all attacked Christianity.
And I felt it was such a bait and switch because they were capitalizing on people's horror at an action by Islam.
Yes.
But they didn't want to be Islamophobic or xenophobic.
So then they just substituted animosity for Christianity.
Exactly.
And I think, look, they murdered Charlie Kirk and they accused Charlie Kirk of things he never said, okay?
And this is anti-gay.
And then on the other hand, you have people who are actually not just saying it, but also executing them.
Right.
And nothing happens.
You can't even name it.
You can't even name it.
And so this is why I think that this whole movement is not about human rights.
It's not about caring for the gays.
They don't care for the gays.
For goodness sakes, they don't care.
They come to me when they need help.
You know, please help me.
Just had one from Saudi Arabia.
And because the whole movement will say that they care for women, they care for homosexuals.
But in the end, the human rights movements here are about anti-Christianity.
It's not about those people.
Yes.
But then otherwise they would care for those people.
Because the question on my mind, which I think people are thinking about, is look at Mamdani.
Mamdani is, I guess he's Muslim.
He's certainly a radical leftist.
Seems kind of like a communist.
He's tweeting about queer liberation.
Not the most Muslim thing I've ever heard.
But then he's palling around with jihadi types.
I mean, like co-conspirators in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing.
And so you think, well, hold on.
Why is it that now you get Greta Thunberg of the Blessed Sailboat, you know, sailing for the sun monster, and she's wearing a kefia.
Why would the left ally with Islamists?
Yes.
Because I think they have a common enemy, which is Christianity.
And that's what multiculturalism is at its core.
It's about anti-Christianity.
And I mean, I am actually horrified to see what is going on in America, but I'm not surprised.
I predicted this 10 years ago when I arrived here and that this is what's going to happen.
But I've been an early siren in Europe.
I warned Europe when no one else was warning Europe and no one wanted to listen.
And now people are not safe in Europe anymore.
2023, in Germany, there were about 9,000 knife attacks.
And so bomb plots and knife attacks and rapes of white women.
That's the everyday life of Europeans.
And I was just in Germany.
I wanted to go.
It was in October.
I said, oh, good.
I want to go to an Oktoberfest kind of thing.
Yes.
So they actually had to cancel it or really restrict it.
Because of terror attacks.
Because of the terror threat.
Yes.
You don't have that anymore.
I actually put because one of the questions that I find even more startling than the persecution itself is when Americans ask me, is it really that dangerous?
It's just this willful naivete.
So I've literally put out a list of things that have happened just in Europe alone during the time when I was writing this book.
Like day by day, what is happening every single day.
And this is your future.
America today is like what Europe was 15 years ago.
And I think America is going to go down quicker because there's a greater naivete.
This is one of the nicer characteristics of the Americans, but it's a big weak point.
Is this kind of innocent optimism that things are just...
You have another weak point, though.
I have to say that because I come from the country of Habsburgs.
People actually go out in pajamas.
It's awful.
I was at the airport and I saw people in pajamas.
Yes, they were.
That is normal, right?
Oh, all the time.
People look at me that I'm weird.
I rarely will go onto an airplane without a jacket.
I don't need a top hat, but usually I'll have a jacket on or, I don't know, at least a sweater or slacks or something.
And they look at me, they say, Michael, are you going to the opera or something?
Why are you dressing?
I'm usually not even wearing a tie.
They say, why are you wearing people wear like tight pants or whatever?
What am I?
Spandex.
Spandex.
Yeah, the weirdest.
Yeah, that's what we wear under skiing clothes in Austria.
You should have a sign of spandex is spandex is a privilege, not a right.
There was a time when spandex is what we wore under our clothes.
That was anyway.
Yeah, I agree.
I agree.
It's the innocence that could allow all sorts of hostile forces to take over.
And also, people need to dress a little better.
I agree.
I totally agree.
Yeah.
But hey, I do love the Americans.
But then what's your prediction?
When, you know, just to kind of bring it, I guess, full circle, you have a figure now, like a Mamdani in New York.
You have what you're seeing in Dearborn and what you're seeing in Minnesota and elsewhere, Texas, even.
You know, this is really kind of spreading.
What's the end of that?
I believe Mamdani is going to work for the furtherment of Islam and not for the people that voted for him.
And you can see that very clearly in his message.
Whenever he appears before Muslims, it's all about Islam and why Islam, why they should vote for him because he's a Muslim.
Okay.
And then he comes to the infidels and he preaches a different message to them.
He couldn't, you know, growing up, if Christians are addicted with drugs or if they are homosexual, let them rot.
Fine.
We care about our people.
I would believe Mamdani, if he would go to the same areas of New York where I have gone as a migrant, but I have bought books about jihad in New York City.
In New York.
In New York.
And that, and if he would preach that message there in the mosque, I am for queer liberation.
You know, no, he's not stupid.
He goes to these people.
He knows this is how you change their minds.
And it's all about free child care and free houses and free Palestine.
Yeah.
Free Palestine.
We'll give you free groceries and we'll throw in a Palestine with them.
But the question that people have is: okay, well, look, he's obviously duplicitous.
He's a politician.
He's lying to somebody.
But the question is, is he lying?
Is he basically playing the Muslims to get their votes to advance leftism?
Or is he playing the secular leftists to get their votes to advance Islam?
Well, we need to look for who was behind his campaign.
As it looks like it was the Muslim Brotherhood with care, you know?
And that is a red flag.
And I think a mayor who takes pictures with a, I would say, yeah, he is going to let Islamic radicalism go unchecked.
Because, hey, we've done you favors, you know?
And that will be very bad for the safety of New York.
And as we were speaking about so many years after 9-11, that this is happening shows you how hard the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic organizations have worked to get it there.
So my opinion, I think these Islamic organizations have looked at London and they have said, how can we transform New York into London?
We need a mayor like Zadiq Khan.
You go into London.
And they have him.
You go into London now and you draw into him.
I can't go into London.
You probably can't go into London.
When I go to London, you go east a little bit.
You feel like you are in another country.
I mean, it is Arabic, it's crazy.
And you're saying that's come to New York.
This is coming to New York, and this is coming generally to the U.S.
I mean, in Dearborn, Michigan, people are already waking up at 5.30 prayer calls to Diyazan.
And in Minnesota, they're doing it five times a day now.
And if you can't even distribute Bibles to these people in your own countries, religious liberty is already at stake.
And this is what's going to happen wherever you will have these parallel societies.
And, you know, people sometimes say to me, yeah, but they're, you know, most Muslims are peaceful.
So what are you talking about?
This is not going to happen here.
And I have hardly met one Muslim in America who distances himself from Sharia law and from the Prophet Muhammad's practice of a child marriage and the apostasy law.
And I actually asked one, I'm not afraid.
So I asked, she's Muslim.
So I said, how do you justify Prophet Muhammad marrying a six-year-old girl?
You are a woman.
She said, first she denied it.
And that's what usually happens.
It's not written there.
And it's like, I'm a madrasa child.
It is written there.
Go to Sahih al-Bukhari.
This is the Hadith.
And then she recognized, oh, okay, it's written there.
And then she said, she liked it.
The child liked it.
This is how it often happens.
Either they completely deny that it exists because they know that most people haven't read the sources, so they won't know.
They can fool them.
And then when you point it out, she said, well, she liked it.
This is broadly, this is like a meme in politics now where the left will deny that some terrible thing has happened that they're perpetrating.
They'll say it's not happening.
And then when you point out it is, they say, well, it's good that it is.
It's not happening, but it's good that it is.
Yes.
It's no, it didn't happen, but she liked it.
Yes.
And I mean, in my case, what do we do every single day?
We are, I am not against Muslim.
I'm helping Muslims.
My foundation is not just here in the US.
It's also in Switzerland and in Germany.
And in Switzerland, that is all that my social workers do.
They take care of Muslim girls that are fleeing their family because they were forcefully married or they're underaged and they're forcing them to marry, even in the West.
Coming here, coming to a city near you already, maybe in a city near you.
I guess that also brings us full circle where we say, you know, look, the Americans, a lot of people don't take the faith seriously at all.
And the ones who take the faith most seriously, what they've had to offer so far is apologetics, evangelism, you know, spreading the message and clicks and views, and which is all great, but they've lacked the opportunity to suffer.
What you're saying is, well, the opportunity for persecution might be closer than you think.
Oh, yes.
But I think the reason they haven't suffered yet is because they haven't evangelized to Muslims yet.
This is, and people tell me that all the time.
Oh, but this priest said it to me, yeah, but we are not persecutors.
I said, Father, have you ever preached to a Muslim?
No, no, no.
You're focused on Yale, for goodness sakes.
What are you going to do?
They're kind of anyway.
They're not going to do anything, right?
So it's easy peasy, looks good.
Instagram pictures look preaching to atheists.
Yeah.
Well, some of them are vicious, but seriously, most atheists that I know are actually concerned about Islam.
And in Germany, there have been only a few voices to challenge Islam.
And beside me, it is my, it's Hamid Abd al-Samad.
He's an Egyptian atheist who has been challenging radical Islam.
He's under 24 hours police protection.
He can't even go to the toilet without a guard standing outside there.
This is his daily life.
He cannot go to a restaurant.
First, the police has to go in there, check for Muslim migrants.
And then, as he recently said, well, they checked it out and then said, no, no, that's too dangerous.
So he had to leave there.
And it's especially hard for the Jews now.
I mean, it's hard for the Jews everywhere.
And just generally, it sort of is.
You grow up in Pakistan, anything bad happened, it was the Jews.
Grew up in Pakistan.
I didn't even have Jews in Pakistan.
I was thought it was a Muslim thing.
It's more sort of universal.
Yeah, yeah, I know, I know.
But now they are being persecuted even in Germany.
It's unbelievable how after the Holocaust that can happen there.
But it is happening.
And yeah, and I think this is what we are going to be importing into America.
And anyone who stands up and challenges it has a hard life.
I speak out of experience because you are a minority within the minority already.
Right.
Right?
So from the Muslim minority, you are the one who has left.
And they persecute you with ruining your reputation in any way possible, whether it's online or anywhere possible.
And if they do get their hands on you, like it happened to a friend in Germany who thought, oh, I'm going to take up what you abandoned here in Germany.
I'm going to preach the truth about Islam to people publicly.
Yeah, he was just recently stabbed.
And the policeman that tried to rescue him was stabbed to death by the same guy.
That's with police protection.
And people say, oh, but you don't have to be scared because this is America.
Look what happened to Salman Rashti.
Right.
Salman Rashti was sentenced to death through Iran, okay?
Iran is so far away.
30 years he lived in relative peace.
And after 30 years, someone was still found to carry out that death sentence in New York City.
Stabbed his eye out.
Stabbed his eye out.
And this is what I'm talking about.
So we need to be peacemakers.
And peacemakers are people that engage in conflict.
And that people that do not remain silent, then it would be way easier to remain silent.
And this is actually one of the things I learned when that body was thrown on my car in Pakistan.
That there can be no courage without vulnerability.
You need to make yourself vulnerable for the sake of the truth.
Sabatina James.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Thank you for coming in.
It was a pleasure.
You have a book.
Yes.
People should all see the price of love.
You've written multiple books.
You have a foundation that doesn't raise money, but people are wanting to give you money.
Is there any way that they can do that?
Yes, they can, for now, reach out to you and you can forward it to us.
I'll offer it secretly.
Sabatina, thank you so much for coming.
Of course.
It was a pleasure.
They say he was a king in Dovid.
The son of a princess of lost Atlantis.
They say the future and the past are known to him.
That the fire and the wind tell him their secrets.
That the magic of the hillfolk and druids come forth at his easy command.
They say he slew hundreds.
Hundreds, do you hear?
That the world burned and trembled at his wrath.
The Merlin died long before you and I were born.
Merlin Emirus has returned to the land of the living.
Vortigen is gone.
Room is gone.
The Saxon is here.
Saxon Hengist has assembled the greatest war host ever seen in the island of the mighty.
And before the summer is through, he means to take the throne.
And he will have it.
If we are too busy squabbling amongst ourselves to take up arms against him, here is your hope.
A king will arise to hold all Britain in his hand.
A high king who would be the wonder of the world.
You to a future of peace.
There'll be no peace in these lands till we are all dust.
Men of the island of the mighty, you stand together.
You stand as Britons.
You stand as one.
Great darkness is falling upon this land.
These brothers are our only hope to stand against it.
