April 1, 2016 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:09:11
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Paris, San Bernardino, Jerusalem, Brussels. | ||
| It seems not a day goes by without another murderous assault on innocent civilians. | ||
| Last Sunday bore witness to one of the most horrific attacks in recent memory as a Taliban-affiliated group bombed a park in Lahore, Pakistan, killing scores of women and children celebrating the Easter holiday. | ||
| These attacks only seem to be getting more brazen, more coordinated, and more effective. | ||
| People all over Europe are worried and with good reason. | ||
| It seems governments all throughout the European continent have been ill-prepared to deal with the growing threat of radical Islamic terrorism. | ||
| Please note I once again said radical Islamic terrorism and not all Muslims. | ||
| I think I've done that once or twice before. | ||
| This distinction is becoming increasingly exhausting to have to point out, but one I continue to make. | ||
| Unfortunately, many on the right refuse to separate the nominal average person from the radicals, and many on the left refuse to acknowledge there are a few of us who do make that distinction over and over. | ||
| While I've now conceded that the far left will never accept any good faith critique of Islam, and will always excuse and sometimes even endorse its terrorism, I know that many good people are waking up to this nonsense every day. | ||
| This is one of the themes the Rubin Report has been all about, and I'm glad to say that we're ahead of the curve on it. | ||
| So one more time, it is radical Islamists, a subset of people who believe in Islam, who are blowing up airports, trains, and parks. | ||
| They don't care whether the people they murder are men or women, grandparents or children, black or white. | ||
| They want to sow chaos and destruction in the name of their religion. | ||
| Don't take my word for it, by the way. | ||
| Read the statements the jihadists issue after each terror attack. | ||
| These statements are all filled with religious reasons quoting doctrine to kill infidels and non-believers. | ||
| This is a good time to remind people once again what a religion is. | ||
| It is a set of ideas. | ||
| A religion isn't built into you like your sex or your color. | ||
| A religion is just a bunch of ideas only made a reality by people who practice its beliefs. | ||
| Any set of ideas is worthy of critique whether these ideas are religious, political, or personal. | ||
| So if you would be against throwing gays off roofs, making women wear burkas, and treating minorities as second class citizens if a political party had those ideas in its platform, then you must be against those ideas when a religion has them in its doctrine. | ||
| And for the billionth time, this doesn't mean you should be bigoted against all people who practice that faith because there are a multitude of ways of being part of any faith. | ||
| What it does mean, however, is that at the very least you must be against the ideas that you would be against if they came from anywhere else besides religion. | ||
| Actually, you should be much braver than just being against bad ideas. | ||
| You should emphatically stand for good ideas, or one day the violence you silently condone will be at your doorstep. | ||
| This is why the regressive left is so dangerous. | ||
| They've tricked decent people with good intentions into thinking that their legitimate fears about terrorism are somehow bigoted or racist. | ||
| Not only is this pure nonsense, but it has also fueled the rise of the right-wing parties in Europe and Donald Trump here in America. | ||
| The ideas of the regressive left have gone from wrong to malicious. | ||
| Screaming about the Crusades every time there is a jihadist attack is pointless. | ||
| Focusing on one random atheist who committed a mass shooting is irrelevant. | ||
| These regressives are trying to guilt and confuse you into accepting their backwards thinking. | ||
| We in the West fortunately can't stand up to jihadists face to face, but we absolutely must stand up to those in our own societies who will excuse people who would kill us due to their misguided sense of protecting a religion. | ||
| Ironically, this disease of the mind, which regressive thinking really is, is the furthest thing from progressive values, but also is an added bonus for the jihadists. | ||
| They can kill scores of people, and then their western allies will do mental gymnastics to excuse and explain why they did it. | ||
| The more the jihadists say it's about religion, the more the regressives say it isn't. | ||
| Generally, I find jihadists to be more honest than regressives, so I'm going to take their word for it. | ||
| The world is at a precarious point. | ||
| We can debate how much foreign policy has enabled jihadists or whether America's toppling of Saddam Hussein led to ISIS. | ||
| Of course we can go much further back in history to the British Empire or the Ottoman Empire or even further. | ||
| These blood feuds have gone on for thousands of years and will probably go on until after we're all gone. | ||
| The question is, will we in Western societies now stand together and no longer accept excuses for terror? | ||
| If you feel the need to make an excuse when a bomb goes off in a Paris theater, you're inviting terrorism to your farmer's market in Los Angeles. | ||
| People will always have a grievance, and if you tell them that it's acceptable to murder innocents because of your Western guilt or misguided sense of justice, then you are condemning yourself to a world where there are no rules. | ||
| We will all live between terrorists trying to kill us and authoritarians who will promise us safety. | ||
| It's a false choice, but it's exactly where we are headed if good people won't stand up now. | ||
| I'm not sure how many jihadists watch this show, but I'm pretty sure many good and decent people do. | ||
| Start calling out this regressive thinking in your own world. | ||
| Stop being cowed by false cries of racism or bigotry. | ||
| Start beating their self-flagellation with the truth about why Western society is good. | ||
| The Islamists are in bed with liars and regressive conmen. | ||
| Their ideas will spread faster if we don't wake up now. | ||
| And if you think this is a job for someone else, then this evil alliance has already won. | ||
| I don't think it has, but I know we need more vocal allies. | ||
| One such ally is my guest this week, Julie Lennars. | ||
| Julie is a terrorism expert and director of the Human Security Center in London. | ||
| She's on the front lines of calling out radical Islam for the danger that it is. | ||
| I'm looking forward to talking to her about some difficult topics, and maybe I'll even ask her about those pesky Crusades. | ||
| Remember, if you're still upset about the Crusades which happened a thousand years ago, then you should be at least equally upset about the ones happening right now. | ||
| Julie Linares is the Executive Director of the Human Security Center and a principal consultant to the European Parliament Intergroup on Religious Freedom. | ||
| Julie, welcome to the show. | ||
| Hello, Dave. | ||
| So good to be here. | ||
| I'm really excited to talk to you because I've been following you on Twitter for probably three years or so, and you've really been ahead of the curve on calling out Islamist extremist terror, or Islamic extremist terror, or jihadist terror, or whatever phrase you want to use. | ||
| I'll let you break down some phrases. | ||
| You've been ahead of it, and one of the people that when I see the things that you tweet, I'm always like, she gets it, she understands it. | ||
| So let's start. | ||
| What brought you to this spot? | ||
| How did you get involved in being one of the people that studies this, that talks about it, that consults about it? | ||
| Well, I read my first book on politics when I was 12, and I know that probably makes me sound like a complete geek, but I read my first book on politics when I was 12 about the conflict in Ireland, about Northern Ireland and I was interested in why people were killing for their beliefs and for their ideology. | ||
| And of course, Ireland was more about nationalist terrorism rather than religious terrorism. | ||
| I mean, there was a religious component in the sense that you had the IRA on the one hand that was Catholic, and you had the UDA and the other paramilitary organizations that were Protestant on the other hand. | ||
| But anyway, I mean, that's how I got interested in conflict and why people were killing for holiness and people for their beliefs. | ||
| And then two years later, of course, 9-11 happened. | ||
| And I was 14 at the time. | ||
| I remember it as it as it was yesterday. | ||
| I wasn't in school that day. | ||
| I was at home. | ||
| I was ill. | ||
| I was sitting on the couch. | ||
| I was watching random television. | ||
| And suddenly this horrific images. | ||
| appeared on my screen and obviously my first reaction was this was a terrible terrible tragedy and accident but the moment the second plane hit the towers I think everybody knew that whatever it was and at the time obviously we were still lacking the rhetoric to describe what just happened I realized that this was a game changer that the world would never be the same again And that is true. | ||
| I mean, the world was never the same again after 9-11. | ||
| And then, obviously, Afghanistan happened and Iraq happened. | ||
| And when we went into Iraq, I was 16 at the time, and I think that was really the moment I would describe as my awakening, in the sense that I realized we were not just fighting the enemy from the outside, but also the enemy within. | ||
| And I'm not talking about the people who opposed the war for perfectly legitimate reasons, moral reasons, strategic reasons. | ||
| I'm talking about the people who hijacked the anti-war movement and who were happy to call George W. Bush and Tony Blair war criminals, while at the same time turning around and embracing people like Hamas, a terrorist organization that preaches genocide against the Jews, and people like George Galloway, who was on record I'm praising Saddam Hussein's courage, strength, emphatic ability. | ||
| And that was the moment when I realized, guys, we really have a problem and we need to talk about this. | ||
| Yeah, so I really want to dive into that, because it's so related to everything we've been talking about here. | ||
| This sort of moral confusion that people seem to have, and a lot of it, unfortunately, does seem to be on the left. | ||
| The right's got plenty of moral confusion itself. | ||
| But yeah, we seem to see a lot of it on the left. | ||
| That's interesting, because you were young around the time that 9-11 happened. | ||
| I'm a little older than you. | ||
| I lived in New York City at the time, and of course I had studied politics before. | ||
| But of course it was a defining moment for me and for literally millions of people as well. | ||
| So all that happens. | ||
| And then when did you actually start working in this field and really sort of talking about this publicly and making that your life's work? | ||
| Well, I actually started writing a personal blog at the time that the war in Iraq happened. | ||
| And I talked about it a lot. | ||
| I mean, that was the first thing I really talked about publicly a lot, about the reasons why, even though, as I said before, I always had great respect for the people who opposed the war for perfectly legitimate reasons, that I, however, felt there was also a moral and legitimate case for the war. | ||
| I mean, look at the torture chambers and the concentration camps and the genocide against the Kurds. | ||
| I think it was A former Kurdish president who once said that Iraq was a concentration camp above ground and a mass grave beneath. | ||
| And that was true. | ||
| It was one of the worst dictatorships on earth. | ||
| And that's when I really got involved in this debate and was exposed to the wider public. | ||
| And that was also the time really when people started attacking me for my views. | ||
| Yeah, so when people talk to you about the Iraq War now, I mean, the meme in America is that, you know, had we not toppled George W. Bush, had George W. Bush not toppled Saddam, that ultimately, had we not gone into Iraq, that that would have That ISIS wouldn't be here, basically, is the idea of it. | ||
| And, you know, as I've talked to some experts in this, a lot of people are saying, well, Saddam, as you just said, was doing some pretty horrific things. | ||
| So, despite knowing now that there weren't weapons of mass destruction, or at least that we never found them, do you still, in your mind, do you feel that what we did was still a moral case? | ||
| And what you guys did as well, obviously, you know, Tony Blair had something to do with it. | ||
| Yes, I still believe. | ||
| I still believe after everything that it was right to topple this regime. | ||
| And you know, some of the things that people were saying, why we shouldn't intervene, like at least Saddam Hussein contains Iran, for me really never was a moral argument. | ||
| You cannot contain one dictatorship with a theocratic regime and vice versa. | ||
| And for the Kurds, it was a liberation. | ||
| I mean, look at Kurdistan today, Iraqi Kurdistan, and they're a beacon of hope in the entire region. | ||
| I obviously acknowledge that we did something terribly wrong, which led to bloodshed and chaos, the dismantling of the Iraqi army, the debasification, all of the big things, really, I think were catastrophic. | ||
| And I'm really happy to admit that. | ||
| But it doesn't change the fact for me that this was a genocidal dictator. | ||
| I mean, he committed a crime of all crimes. | ||
| 95% of Kurdish villages were exposed to chemical weapons during the al-Nafal campaign. | ||
| And that is still the reason why I still believe after everything that it was the right thing to do. | ||
| Yeah, and that's not even to talk about what he was doing to dissidents and freethinkers and secularists and all sorts of other people. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, all of them, yeah. | ||
| Yeah, so tell me a little bit about the type of work that you do now. | ||
| What's actually the base work that you're doing? | ||
| Well, we do different things. | ||
| We work with governments, of course. | ||
| We work with non-governmental organizations. | ||
| We work with the media. | ||
| We work with the public. | ||
| So we do public outreach. | ||
| One of the things that we're currently doing is we're working with the European Parliament Intergroup on Religious Freedom. | ||
| And what we're doing for them, basically, is once a year, we are looking at the worst violators of religious freedom across the world. | ||
| Everything, really all continents, from Latin America to Asia to Africa. | ||
| And we look at the sources of persecution. | ||
| We look at why religious minorities in that particular country are targeted and by whom they are targeted and what we can do to help these people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
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All right. | |
| So who's doing most of the targeting? | ||
| Well, first of all, it is a phenomenon that affects all countries across all continents, really, and it also affects all religions. | ||
| Of course, you have, for instance, the brutal persecution of Muslims in Burma by Buddhist extremists, and you have the persecution of Muslims by Christian militia in the Central African Republic, or you have the persecution of Christians by Hindu nationalists in India. | ||
| But the vast majority of religious persecution we see in the world today has some kind of relation to the religion of Islam, whether it's by a state actor or a non-state actor. | ||
| Okay, so I had a feeling that's what you were gonna say. | ||
| So because we're the good guys in this case and we try to separate people from ideas, how do you guys, when you're studying this and you're learning about this, how do you separate what is done in the name of religion, in the name of doctrine, versus just the geopolitical realities on the ground? | ||
| Well, I mean, We look, for instance, at the law of the country and the constitution of the country. | ||
| And what you will find in many of these countries is that the constitution in itself already discriminates against minorities. | ||
| So, for instance, the president of the country can only be Muslim. | ||
| And that is, of course, not just something that is purely decided on religious grounds. | ||
| It's also a strategic decision, right? | ||
| I mean, they want to keep power to themselves. | ||
| But then you also have completely irrational persecution of minorities who can't do any harm whatsoever to the state, because they are tiny minorities and they are deprived of all their rights. | ||
| And that is, of course, when it's no longer strategic and when it really comes down also to religious doctrine. | ||
| And I'm talking, for instance, about the Ahmadiyya Muslims, the Bahis, in Sunni Muslim states it's often the Shia. | ||
| Again, that is both related to religion and geopolitics. | ||
| So often it's also a mixture of both. | ||
| And it's very difficult to tell whether it is for political or religious reasons | ||
| that people are being persecuted. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, there definitely is a problem that we have with religious inspired persecution | ||
| of minorities in the Muslim world. | ||
| Yeah, so I know you do a lot of work with and for the Kurds. | ||
| We've been talking a bit about the Kurds here. | ||
| It's an incredibly under-reported story, especially in the States. | ||
| Are they the best example of a persecuted minority? | ||
| Because they're a minority in at least four countries, they never got their state when the whole thing was carved up, and they're basically treated incredibly poorly by Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and Syria. | ||
| So are they really the best example for you when you're talking about this kind of stuff? | ||
| Well, you know, I was joking a couple of weeks ago that I should get myself a t-shirt saying, I supported the Kurds before it became fashionable. | ||
| Because now, obviously, you know, a lot of people talk about them. | ||
| And don't get me wrong, I'm really, really pleased that people are finally giving them the attention and exposure that these wonderful and open-minded and largely peaceful and brave people deserve. | ||
| And yes, I honestly believe that probably since the formation of the State of Israel in the 1940s, that what we're seeing with the Kurds, the struggle for self-determination, is probably the most promising democracy experiment in the Middle East. | ||
| Because look at what the Kurds are doing. | ||
| I mean, if you take Iraqi Kurdistan as an example, which is a semi-autonomous region in the north of the country, they have their own president and prime minister and parliament and the Peshmerga, which is the army of the Kurdistan region. | ||
| I mean, they have taken in hundreds of thousands of people. | ||
| From Syria, from Iraq, persecuted by the Islamic State, hunted by the Assad regime, including tens of thousands of Christians who otherwise would have been slaughtered or at least enslaved. | ||
| They were able to celebrate Easter in safety and in peace. | ||
| And it's not just that they are providing basic needs to these people. | ||
| They are going a step further. | ||
| They are actually trying to support the rights of these religious minorities. | ||
| And last year, the Kurdistan region of Iraq did something that I feel is absolutely unique | ||
| and historic. | ||
| They decided to give to each of the minority communities, religious minority communities | ||
| in Iraqi Kurdistan, their own official representation. | ||
| So they all have their own representatives now. | ||
| And not just the Muslims and the Christians, no, also the Jews and the Ba'i's and the Shabaks | ||
| and the Ahmadiyya Muslims who are persecuted all across the Muslim world. | ||
| And you know, These are not just token appointments. | ||
| These guys are really doing work. | ||
| The first Jewish representative just comes back from a visit from Israel, where he met with lawmakers and was trying to really find ways to build bridges between Israel and Kurdistan. | ||
| And this is absolutely unique in that region. | ||
| And it's fascinating if you think about the fact that just miles away from Erbil, where the Kurdish parliament sits, | ||
| the Islamic state is in place. | ||
| And that is of course the most fundamental manifestation of radical Islam. | ||
| Yeah, I had a few weeks ago, I had Bayan Sami Abdul Rahman, | ||
| who's the KRG rep to the United States. | ||
| And we were talking about that border and how close everything is. | ||
| And it's really crazy because basically the Kurds, the Peshmerga, they're fighting. | ||
| The ISIS on one side, and then they're also fighting Turkey on the other side, and Turkey is a NATO ally. | ||
| Can you explain a little bit of the complexity there? | ||
| Because it's really complex because there are also Kurds in Turkey, and they have a political party, and they're trying to negotiate with Turkey. | ||
| It doesn't sound like it's going that well. | ||
| Well, you have to make a distinction between the Kurds in Iraq, and the Kurds in Syria, and the Kurds in Turkey, and the Kurds in Iran, because they all have different goals, and they all have different relationships with | ||
| Turkey as well. | ||
| The relationship between the Kurdistan region of Iraq with Turkey is actually not that bad. | ||
| It's the problem with the PKK in Turkey that is, well, for many years now, entrapped in | ||
| a brutal conflict with the Turkey state. | ||
| And of course, the PKK is allied to the GPJ in Syria, which now controls almost the entire | ||
| border with Turkey. | ||
| And Turkey is bombing the Kurds, the same people we are working with, the US is working with, to fight the Islamic State. | ||
| So what we're actually seeing is that the US-led coalition Is at war with itself. | ||
| Yeah, so what is that then? | ||
| Because it seems like this is now an open secret that this is happening. | ||
| The Kurds are fighting ISIS on the ground. | ||
| They're basically the only fighting force on the ground fighting ISIS and Turkey is bombing them and we are a NATO ally with Turkey. | ||
| So how is this secret being allowed? | ||
| It's out and we're not doing anything about it. | ||
| Europe needs the cooperation of the Turkish state because of the refugee crisis. | ||
| Turkey in many ways is the gateway from Syria to Europe, and they need Erdogan to play along. | ||
| And that is one of the reasons why so many governments in Europe are hesitant to criticize the Turkish government for the way they are treating the Kurds, both in their own country and also in Syria. | ||
| Yeah, so Turkey basically is having their cake and eating it too, in that they're letting the fighters in through Europe, right? | ||
| They come from Europe, they go through Turkey, they go in, and then Turkey is then bombing the Kurds, because they're not thrilled with the Kurds, so it's good for them, and then we have to play ball with them because they're also the buffer zone. | ||
| So really, that's like one of those cases where you can really see how complex this stuff is. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, basically what you can say is that Turkey is more afraid of a Kurdish state than it is of the Islamic State. | ||
| And that's exactly, I mean, if you look at their policy and the way they react in the region, I think that's crystal clear. | ||
| And we can't really deny that. | ||
| And I personally agree with you that it's absolutely shameful that a NATO partner is bombing Yeah. | ||
| organization, the group of people that is most efficient in fighting the Islamic State. | ||
| Now, I'm not condemning by any means the terrorist attacks that we've seen inside Turkey by the | ||
| PKK. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No, no terrorism is ever justified against anyone. | ||
| I reject that when the Islamic State is doing that. | ||
| I reject that when the IRA was doing that in Northern Ireland. | ||
| I reject that when the PKK is doing that in Turkey. | ||
| But it's more complex than just the PKK and the Turkish state. | ||
| I mean, this goes way beyond Turkey just taking action against the PKK. | ||
| They are really using this to sort of justify an entire crackdown on the Kurds within Turkey | ||
| and the Kurds in Syria. | ||
| And this basically goes hand in hand with an increased authoritarianism inside Turkey. | ||
| If you look at the crackdown on the media, free speech, activists, this all goes hand | ||
| in hand. | ||
| It's not just the Kurds that are being targeted. | ||
| free thinkers, everybody who dares to criticize President Erdogan. | ||
| So I want to back up to something that you said about the Kurds a moment ago, that they've sent a representative to Israel. | ||
| And I know that there are supposedly some other sort of behind the scenes relationships there, but does that sort of prove that at the end of the day, regardless of what religion people are, that really that having sort of the base human freedom and respect for minorities and things like that, that that's what will make these countries succeed or fail. | ||
| It's not a coincidence. | ||
| Well, absolutely, and I think what you say is absolutely true. | ||
| The Kurds are the best example, because let's not forget, they are Muslims. | ||
| The vast majority of Kurds are Muslims, and yet they practice an Islam that is inclusive and respectful to other people. | ||
| And it is possible. | ||
| It's not mutually exclusive to be Muslim as a person and be open-minded towards others. | ||
| And the Kurds have a long-standing history and culture of tolerance and peaceful coexistence. | ||
| So in that way, yes, the Kurds really are the best example and a beacon of hope in a region that is otherwise drowning in blood and maya. | ||
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Right. | |
| And it also, it's a beautiful thing because it shows that Religions don't always have to be their extremist parts, and that there's strategic reasons in that area that they might want to partner up with Israel on things. | ||
| So it gets the religion out of it, and it gets some of the geopolitics out of it. | ||
| Yes, and it's quite interesting if you go to Kurdistan and you talk to people about Israel and about America, you don't get this hostility that you get in many Arab countries, you know, where they perceive Israel and America as the worst of everything. | ||
| And no, you get a very different attitude in Kurdistan, where they are looking at Israel and looking at America and they're looking at our science and technology. | ||
| You know, leave aside politics for a moment, look at everything else. | ||
| The pluralism that we have, the freedoms that we have, freedom of speech, everybody, you know, has the right to do whatever they say and want. | ||
| They admire that. | ||
| They inspire to be like us, not in the sense that they are giving up their own culture, but having an open-minded view of the world that is compatible with the 21st century. | ||
| Yeah, alright, so let's shift, I mean we could spend, it's so complex all that we could spend the rest of the hour talking about it, but let's shift to some of the other stuff going on right now. | ||
| So obviously there was the attack in Brussels last week, just a few days ago there was the attack in Pakistan. | ||
| It seems to me that these things are starting to become more frequent and there's just a feeling That now, you know, I saw something this week that they're saying that there's probably 400 ISIS operatives in Europe ready to partake in whatever the next event is going to be. | ||
| So can you just break down Brussels a little bit? | ||
| Because I know for weeks before, people were saying this was about to happen. | ||
| So they obviously had good intelligence and it still happened. | ||
| And I think that's what the really scary part is. | ||
| Yes, I mean obviously what happened in Brussels is absolutely horrific, but it was not, to me at least, it was not a surprise. | ||
| You know, it was coming, we knew that. | ||
| And you were just saying that obviously we had good intelligence. | ||
| You have to distinguish there, because obviously the Belgian authorities didn't have the intelligence that they were supposed to be having, and that is a problem that people like myself have raised for quite a long time now, that the very weak nature of the Belgian state. | ||
| I mean, it's sometimes even problematic to speak of Belgium as a state, because it's so torn apart internally. | ||
| The state of the Belgian secret services and intelligence services, they are ill-equipped, they are massively undersized, and they simply don't have the resources to monitor all the people that they are actually supposed to be monitoring. | ||
| Because let's not forget that Belgium has the highest percentage per capita of foreign fighters with the Islamic State in the entire European Union. | ||
| And it's no coincidence that these people have chosen Belgium as a place where they can gather and plan and carry out attacks. | ||
| Because, of course, they are well aware of all these weaknesses that I've just listed. | ||
| And, you know, by failing their own people, Belgium is putting everyone else at risk. | ||
| Because, obviously, these people do not appreciate nation states. | ||
| Someone in France, someone in Germany or the UK. | ||
| It's just as much an enemy to these people as the people of Belgium. | ||
| And it can openly cross borders. | ||
| I mean, we still have the Schengen area in Europe where people can cross borders without showing their passports or any form of identification. | ||
| And that's why we are seeing the terrorism that we see. | ||
| And that's also why we see a network really spamming from Paris to Belgium. | ||
| And this was the first time ever That one terrorist cell managed to attack two Europeans. | ||
| Capitals. | ||
| Yeah, did you hear any... I saw a story that I saw in one place, and then I didn't see it picked up anywhere else, so if this is not true, please stop me. | ||
| But I heard that when they were going to arrest the guy in Belgium just a week ago, that apparently that in his community, that about 200 people were trying to stop the police and the anti-terror people from arresting him. | ||
| They were throwing bottles at the police and all kinds of stuff. | ||
| Did you hear about that? | ||
| And is it being reported in Europe at all? | ||
| I heard about that as well. | ||
| I think some media outlets reported that there were riots taking place when they arrested him. | ||
| And to be honest, it's not surprising to me at all because you have to understand these people don't work in isolation. | ||
| They're embedded in communities. | ||
| And if you look at these notorious neighborhoods like Molenbeek in Belgium, it's not just the terrorists that are the problem. | ||
| It's the wider society in which they live Who maybe are not jihadists themselves, and who not engage in violence themselves, but who are at least to a certain degree described to the Islamist ideology. | ||
| Which brings me to the overall problem, really, that it's not good enough to say this is just a problem with a fringe, because yes, there is only a tiny minority that carries out violent attacks, but there is a larger minority We are talking about 15 or 16 million people. | ||
| and an even larger minority, a significant minority, that practices conservative Islam | ||
| that is not compatible with the modern world. | ||
| And we are not talking a few hundred or a few thousand people here, | ||
| we are talking millions. | ||
| And even if you say that just 1% of all Muslims in the world are jihadists, | ||
| we are talking about 15 or 16 million people. | ||
| people. I mean wrap your head around this for a moment. | ||
| Yeah, no, it's incredible, and I know that many people, like Sam Harris, who I've had on this show, have gone out of their way to talk about these concentric circles, and you have the nominal people who don't necessarily care about religion or following doctrine, and then it sort of extends outward from that. | ||
| So what do we do with that? | ||
| Because this is where the conversation gets Difficult. | ||
| So you've obviously just laid out there that you don't think all Muslims are doing this, but you do see, you know, certain amount of problems. | ||
| A certain amount of people are going to use violence. | ||
| A certain amount of people are going to condone that violence. | ||
| A certain amount of people are going to see it brewing in their communities and not do anything. | ||
| And then it just keeps, it's like an onion. | ||
| There's just more and more layers. | ||
| So how do we in the West Well, I think one good example is your show, really, because you equip people with the rhetoric to engage in just daily life in these debates as well, and to make the distinction between the religion of Islam, which is a set of beliefs, and Islamism, which is an ideology, which partly derives from | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Don't you get exhausted by making the distinction, though, because it almost doesn't win you any friends on the left? | ||
| Because that's how I feel. | ||
| So I think that's first of all a distinction that's very important to make because it also | ||
| makes it easier for people like ourselves to reject charges of racism and bigotry and | ||
| Islamophobia. | ||
| Don't you get exhausted by making the distinction though because it almost doesn't win you any | ||
| friends on the left? | ||
| Because that's how I feel. | ||
| But I'll continue to do it. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| I mean, I don't really have another choice, right? | ||
| I mean, the other option would be to join Donald Trump's camp and just generalize and stigmatize all Muslims, and that's really not what I want to see. | ||
| I mean, that is precisely why I'm not a bigot and not a racist, because I don't want to engage in these generalizations and sweeping statements and brushing everyone over the same I don't want to do that. | ||
| And that is why I keep explaining to people there is a difference between a religion and Islam is a religion like any other religion. | ||
| It is a set of beliefs and we should have the right to criticize particular beliefs within the faith if they are harmful and incompatible with our modern way of life. | ||
| And you know I sometimes call Islam the virgin amongst faith. | ||
| Because you are not allowed to touch it. | ||
| You are not allowed to touch virgin. | ||
| They are happy to discuss with you gender inequality when it comes to orthodox Judaism, and they are quite happy to discuss with you bigoted views on the fundamentalist Christian right about abortion and women and gays. | ||
| Don't forget about the Crusades. | ||
| Don't forget about the Crusades. | ||
| They love the Crusades. | ||
| Of course, that's what they say all the time, but don't forget what we did 200 years ago. | ||
| They talk about the persecution of Muslims in Burma by Buddhist extremists, and they don't hesitate to call them Buddhist extremists and make the link to the religion of Buddhism. | ||
| But when it comes to Islam, It's off topic. | ||
| You are not allowed to touch Islam. | ||
| The moment you touch Islam, you're a bigot. | ||
| You're a racist. | ||
| No matter what distinction you're making between the religion and the ideology and jihadism, you're a racist. | ||
| That very moment, you want to talk about Islam. | ||
| Yeah, so basically you'll continue to make this distinction because we sort of have no choice. | ||
| I mean, that's how I feel too, because I don't want to hand it to the far right. | ||
| But that's a good segue to a lot of what's happening in Europe right now. | ||
| So you mentioned earlier that because of the European Union, you know, that people don't have to use passports to go all over the place. | ||
| So this is why the ideology can spread and it's why people can go from Paris to Brussels. | ||
| So two questions here. | ||
| One is people seem to want, there's a certain amount of people that want to break up the EU altogether. | ||
| And secondly, I want to talk about immigration as a whole. | ||
| So why don't we start with the first one? | ||
| Well, yes, obviously there is a debate going on everywhere in Europe about open borders because many people feel like it's no longer an asset and rather aiding those people that we are trying to contain. | ||
| I mean, I always, as a European myself, I always felt it was great that I could just cross the border. | ||
| When I left Germany, I thought it was great to just cross the border into the Netherlands or Belgium or France without having to show my passport. | ||
| It's great. | ||
| But the problem is, if you have a system like open borders, you also need adequate security to back this up. | ||
| And what the Belgium example shows you is that right now we are not having The security apparatus that can safeguard us whilst having open borders. | ||
| Because if Belgium is failing to contain the threat, and that's what they are doing and have been doing for a long time, and these people can travel freely across the entire European Union. | ||
| It's a little different with the UK because you have to cross some water and it's more complex. | ||
| But into France or Germany or the Netherlands, then we are having a problem and we have to talk about it. | ||
| And I'm not even, I'm not very partisan when it comes to this entire yes EU, anti-EU debate, but I do think that we have to honestly talk about the liabilities of open borders at the moment, and that is true for terrorists as much as it is for refugees. | ||
| Do you know, is the vetting process for the migrants and the immigrants, is it the same in each country? | ||
| Because if they're all, let's say they're coming through Greece, if Greece has more lax processes by which they can get in, well then if you, once you're in Greece, if you can then get anywhere in Europe, I could see why you would be pretty pissed if you were in France and Greece had lax, you know, ways to get people in. | ||
| Well, the truth is that all of these countries are actually overwhelmed. | ||
| They cannot process all these people in time that they are arriving. | ||
| And the truth is also that many of them are just throwing away their papers. | ||
| So you have no way to even, you know, check who they are, where they're coming from. | ||
| And the truth is also that many of them are actually not coming from Syria. | ||
| They are also coming from countries like Afghanistan and Eritrea. | ||
| And I feel like The biggest problem at the moment is that we are only treating the symptoms. | ||
| We are not treating the root cause. | ||
| Because what is the plan for Eritrea? | ||
| Nobody is talking about Eritrea. | ||
| What are we going to do about the situation in Eritrea to make sure that not more people are coming? | ||
| I mean we have to look at these countries and the situation in these countries and we have to ask ourselves what can we do to change the situation on the ground and to help people within their own region Because the truth is that even a large country like Germany, a welcoming country like Germany, cannot take in all the people that need help. | ||
| And how do you explain to someone from Libya that yes, we're taking in people from Syria and Eritrea and Afghanistan, but no, you're a Libyan, please stay away. | ||
| We can't discriminate there. | ||
| And the truth is that we cannot take in all these people. | ||
| And my fear is that Angela Merkel has sent a very dangerous message in the sense that people now believe everybody can come. | ||
| And if you look at the situation in Germany at the moment, you see they are already struggling. | ||
| I know that the government is not willing to admit that. | ||
| But if you look at the situation on the ground, they are really, really struggling. | ||
| And the opposition within even her own party is growing by the day. | ||
| Yeah, so this is an example where, when I hear this, I always say, well, the road to hell is paved with good intentions. | ||
| So Angela Merkel, her intentions, by bringing these people in, were to help immigrants, right? | ||
| Help migrants, help people that needed help, integrate them into society. | ||
| Obviously, Germany has a long history of xenophobia and the Holocaust, so they were trying to do the right thing. | ||
| I don't think, you know, I've talked to people who think that she maliciously is trying to destroy the country. | ||
| I don't quite think it's that. | ||
| I think she was trying to do something good here. | ||
| But then, because of, I guess, the questionable vetting process, or just allowing too many people in, these people come in, and then the system just can't take it. | ||
| And then when people in other countries see what's happening in Germany, they don't want it happening there. | ||
| So this whole thing has just snowballed. | ||
| And is it too late? | ||
| Have we already left this that the only resolution will be that far-right parties are going to win throughout Europe? | ||
| Well, first of all, I agree with you that I don't think this is an evil master plan of Angela Merkel to destroy Germany or the European Union. | ||
| I don't believe that. | ||
| I believe, for whatever reasons, she believes this is the right thing to do. | ||
| The problem is, I recently spoke to friends of mine who sit in the German Parliament for her party, for the CDU, and he said, even now, we are still not having a discussion about Quota. | ||
| You know, there is no end to this. | ||
| Even the people within her own party don't know where it stops. | ||
| And that, of course, gives people like the far right in Germany, and we see, you know, the Pegida movement, and we see what is called the Alternative for Germany. | ||
| These people are really gaining support and really gaining ground. | ||
| And these are, of course, not the people that we want to hand the debate over to. | ||
| And I know that there are people who try to romanticize movements like Pegida and say, oh, you know, they are just concerned citizens who take to the streets and exercise their right to free speech. | ||
| But, you know, I'm quite familiar with the neo-Nazi scene in Germany, and I looked at footage from Pegida demonstrations, and you see very well-known people from the neo-Nazi scene taking part in these Sure. | ||
| demonstrations. And I'm not a fan of guilty by association. | ||
| I mean, you cannot always control who comes to your demonstrations. | ||
| But it goes further. I mean, this guy gave an interview to one of Germany's well-known | ||
| political magazines and very openly admitted that the NPD, which is the neo-Nazi party | ||
| in the country, helped Birgitta to organize this particular demonstration in the east | ||
| of Germany. So you see already, you know, the lines blurring between the populist right | ||
| and really the extreme right. | ||
| Yeah, I'm curious. | ||
| Let's dig into Pegida a little bit more because I had Tommy Robinson on the show and, you know, a lot of people were very angry at me. | ||
| I got a lot of hate mail for even just talking to the guy. | ||
| Now, I think in the context of the hour of our conversation, he did basically make the distinction between ideas and people and all of those things. | ||
| And after the interview, which I thought was pretty fruitful, people did send me tweets that he sent out years before where he was talking about all Muslims, and there clearly was an element of bigotry to it. | ||
| I can't vet my guests' tweets from five years ago, unfortunately. | ||
| But what do you make of someone like him that I think, from what I can tell, He's trying to make the distinction. | ||
| And I know he's left organizations when it's gone too far, right? | ||
| Or when they were bigoted against black people. | ||
| I guess that just shows the complexity of this, that these organizations, they have all kinds of people in them. | ||
| Yeah, I mean Tommy Robertson is a very tricky example and I don't want to dive too much into this because, to be fair, I'm not familiar with everything that he's doing at the moment. | ||
| What I know is, because we work with Quilliam as well and I know Majid Nawaz, that he was really trying to get him away from the EDL. | ||
| and at least making an attempt to engage with him and explain to him the difference between | ||
| the religion of Islam, which is a set of beliefs, and Islam as an ideology, and Muslims as people, | ||
| and Islam as a system of beliefs. And I think to some extent, if you're listening to what he's | ||
| saying now, he has definitely made some progress. But I don't want to approve of everything that he | ||
| says, because I still believe that some of the views that he holds are problematic, to say the least. | ||
| And for instance, his involvement in the Pegida movement, that is something that I do not approve of. | ||
| And I do not believe that Pegida is a legitimate political... Well, legitimate in the sense that these people have the right to speak their minds, but not legitimate in the sense that I would ever support Sure, and that's why I wanted to have him on the show, because I can't figure out what someone thinks unless I talk to them, and maybe he secretly was harboring ideas that he didn't allow me to hear, but I think we got a little closer to the truth maybe by talking to him. | ||
| I'm curious, you brought up Majid, and Majid has been on the show and we've become friendly. | ||
| Do you think his Job here is the hardest. | ||
| Do you think it's much harder than what I'm doing or what you're doing or what Tommy's doing? | ||
| Because he's trying to reform the religion from the inside, and I see the most hate and the worst things that people on the left, white people on the left in America, say about Majid, a brown Muslim man from Egypt. | ||
| So he's getting it the worst from everybody, I think. | ||
| Is his job the toughest? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't envy him by any means. | ||
| I mean, I get a lot of hate mail and all of that, but that is nothing compared to what he goes through. | ||
| And if you look at some of the things that people say to him, you know, you and I would never get away with saying something similar to a brown man. | ||
| I mean, we would rightly call the racist and a bigot and an Islamophobe. | ||
| So I hugely admire what he's trying to do. | ||
| And obviously there are two types of people that I admire enormously. | ||
| You have on the one hand, you have people like Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who's left her faith and is now campaigning really for people to have the right to leave Islam and to criticize the religion. | ||
| And then you have people like Majid, who's obviously had a change of heart, but is still a Muslim and who wants to reform his faith from inside. | ||
| And, you know, these are Probably one of the most important people at the moment that we should support and align ourselves with. | ||
| Because let's be under no illusion whatsoever, we cannot win this fight without the support and the friendship with people from inside the community. | ||
| We need Muslim leaders, we need Muslims themselves within their communities. | ||
| To speak up for a form of Islam that is compatible with the modern world. | ||
| And we see, basically, we see similar things happening in Jordan and Egypt, where President Sisi and King Abdullah are now finally, you know, finding the words to address some of these problems. | ||
| And that is hugely important. | ||
| Whatever else you maybe think about what President Sisi is doing to journalists and to human rights activists, and I certainly don't approve of that, but I think he plays an important role In fighting Islamist extremism. | ||
| Yeah, so that, again, that goes to the precarious position that people that really care for human rights are put in. | ||
| So Sisi is doing terrible things for human rights and minorities and he's basically a military leader that took power by a coup after they had the actual democratic elections that sort of ended up going the wrong way. | ||
| But we have to play ball with him because at least Egypt is a stable country. | ||
| So if you care about human rights, it's like you have to play ball with these strongmen, and then at the same time the strongmen do terrible things. | ||
| It almost sounds like a repeat of Saddam Hussein, not to say he's doing the types of violence to his own people that Saddam was doing, but is that just the best we're ever going to get out of this part of the world? | ||
| Well, you know, it's always a mixture of optimism and realism. | ||
| In the Middle East, there are no Pretty solutions to anything. | ||
| I mean, even if you look at the Kurds, who I greatly support, there are still problems within Kurdish societies that need to be addressed. | ||
| So you do not find a perfect regime or country in the Middle East, not even Israel. | ||
| I mean, I'm a huge supporter of Israel. | ||
| I'm a self-declared proud Zionist. | ||
| I love the Jews. | ||
| I love the state of Israel. | ||
| I think it's a beautiful country and a democratic country. | ||
| But Israel is not perfect. | ||
| And I disagree with Israel on certain things. | ||
| Now, obviously, Egypt is a much more extreme example. | ||
| But I think people have the intellectual capacity to make a difference and say, I completely disagree with this human rights record, but I do acknowledge that he is trying to, you know, trigger a debate about Islam in the Muslim world that we really, really need. | ||
| And the only option that we then really have is to say, like, We cooperate with him on that, but we don't stop criticizing him when he arrests journalists or human rights activists or anyone else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you make of the West's fascination? | ||
| Or the left's fascination, I should say. | ||
| Well, it's everyone's fascination. | ||
| Everyone's fascination with Israel. | ||
| I mean, this is a piece of land that's the size of New Jersey. | ||
| It has one international airport. | ||
| You can drive east and west of it, border to border, in a couple hours, I think like four hours. | ||
| North and South in like six or eight hours. | ||
| I mean, it's an absurdly tiny piece of land that gets all the media play, that people are obsessed with. | ||
| You know, I feel similarly to how you just described it. | ||
| And of course it's not perfect. | ||
| And they're in a very precarious place. | ||
| It's hard when you have a tiny little border. | ||
| And the Middle East is a mess and sometimes people die. | ||
| But when you make it just the fascination and the endless, the United Nations' endless assault on The one tiny little democracy there. | ||
| Yeah, it's absolutely bizarre. | ||
| And I know I'm going to get a hundred hate mails just calling Israel a democracy and not an apartheid state that engages in the genocide of the Palestinian people, which, by the way, would be the only genocide ever to take place in history where the victim population increases, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| So just to be very, can you just really lay that out? | ||
| I mean, the population of Gaza since 1967 is sometimes something like four times bigger. | ||
| Or even eight times bigger, I think, than it was back then. | ||
| So this is not, it's the reverse of a genocide. | ||
| Not to say everything's perfect, but it is certainly not a genocide. | ||
| It's the only genocide in history where the victim population has, the alleged victim population has increased. | ||
| That goes for both Gaza and the West Bank. | ||
| And if you look at the standard of living and something like healthcare and life expectancy, This has all improved over the years. | ||
| Now, I'm not saying that the Palestinians are not suffering and that, you know, Israel is always right in the way that it deals with the problem, not at all. | ||
| But to say that Israel is engaging in a genocide, I mean, the word genocide is a very, very serious allegation. | ||
|
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It is the crime of all crimes. | |
| That is just absolutely bizarre and frankly it relativizes the concept of genocide and it relativizes the crimes of people that have actually committed a genocide. | ||
| And the most bizarre thing about it all is that the people who accuse Israel of engaging in genocide Right, so that's what I've tried to explain to people many times, because people say that somehow on this issue, I'm this right-wing maniac. | ||
| I'm for two states, but you have to have two actors that are willing to have two states. | ||
| If Hamas is only willing to have one state, you know, look, Israel left Gaza. | ||
| There's not one Jew in Gaza, right? | ||
| Hitler would love the place. | ||
| There's actually a store. | ||
| No, you're absolutely right. | ||
| I mean, if you're not just listening to what Hamas is saying, but also to what President Abbas is saying. | ||
| That's why it seems that's one of the ones where religion is so tied to it, because in | ||
| my opinion, they just simply, they just don't want Jews there. | ||
| No, you're absolutely right. | ||
| I mean, if you, not just listening to what Hamas is saying, but also to what President | ||
| Abbas is saying, I mean, if Bibi Netanyahu was saying the same things about Arabs and | ||
| Palestinians that the Palestinian Authority is saying about Jews, not just Israelis, Jews | ||
| I mean, the entire world would probably go up in flames. | ||
| It's completely ridiculous. | ||
| And what is also completely ridiculous is this bizarre interdependence theory that people somehow believe that if only we were to solve this problem in this tiny strip of land, that all the ills of the Arab-Muslim world would disappear | ||
| into thin air. | ||
| I mean, how is what we are seeing in Syria related to the problem in Palestine? | ||
| There is no relation. There is no relation. And this unhealthy obsession with Israel | ||
| is just - I can't wrap my head around it. | ||
| Because again, I'm not saying that Israel is perfect and I consider myself a critical friend of Israel that reserves the right to criticize Israel where Israel is wrong. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But if I look around in the region and I see what's happening in Syria and what the Saudis | ||
| are doing to women in their own country, why are we having apartheid weeks at our universities | ||
| for Israel and never for Saudi Arabia? | ||
| Why are we having mass demonstrations on European streets for the Palestinians in Gaza and the | ||
| West Bank, who are suffering, of course? | ||
| But that's nothing compared to what Bashar al-Assad is doing to them in Syria, starving | ||
| them to death, actually really engaging in mass slaughter of Palestinians. | ||
| No, you don't hear these people talking about it, because it's not really about Israel. | ||
| I mean, it's not really about the Palestinians, really. | ||
| These people are not really pro-Palestinians. | ||
| What they really are is anti-Israel. | ||
| Right, so that's the fascinating part. | ||
| I mean, there was the Yarmouk refugee camp in Syria, which means there should be no refugee camps in any of these Arab countries for Palestinians, but they've kept Palestinians in refugee camps. | ||
| They don't even let them become citizens. | ||
| Assad killed about 2,000 of them within the last two years. | ||
| Nobody seems to care. | ||
| So is part of that that people just don't care about history? | ||
| So, for example, they'll say, well, go back to 1967, but it's not as if there was peace before 1967. | ||
| And also, I'm pretty sure that the West Bank was part of Jordan and that Gaza was part of Egypt. | ||
| So it's not as if the Palestinians had a state then. | ||
| So it's like people just don't, people love narrative over fact. | ||
| And I'm seeing this bleed into almost everything these days. | ||
| Yes, and it's also, I mean, they call it Zionist and Zionism today, what they are attacking, but what they really very often mean is Jews. | ||
| You know, Zionism has just become a clean word to describe Jews. | ||
| So it actually still has a lot to do with anti-Semitism, which never really went away. | ||
| You know, it took different forms and different ways of describing it. | ||
| But it really comes down in many cases to the fact that people just don't want juice there. | ||
| Yeah, now you realize people are going to say you're a paid Mossad agent and I'm a paid Mossad agent and we're working together on this. | ||
| You know, I'm really angry now that you blew my cover. | ||
| I was trying so hard. | ||
| You thought you were being slick, but they don't pay me enough to really keep it a secret, that's the thing. | ||
| I get a call after the show, you know, and I have to explain myself. | ||
| All right, well, okay, so we only have a few minutes left. | ||
| I want to circle back a little bit to the European problem. | ||
| I saw that this week in Denmark, that they're looking into stripping citizenship of imams who are preaching hate and preaching things against the state in Denmark. | ||
| Now, my whole ethos is about free speech. | ||
| Everything that I do here is about free speech. | ||
| So I'm very torn on this one because I would basically say that people can say anything that they want as long as they're not inciting to violence. | ||
| Now it seems to me that these imams are probably going as close to the line on that as possible. | ||
| If they're preaching to take down the state, there's the at least inclination or hint that it may be through violent means. | ||
| Where do you fall on that? | ||
| Because I know you're huge on free speech and secular values also. | ||
| I am but I'm of course also of the belief that above all we have to safeguard the lives of innocent people living in our country and we just had a case in the UK this week that the imam of the largest mosque in Scotland praised the assassination of the anti-blasphemy activist in Pakistan a couple of years ago and then just hours later A shopkeeper who posted a message on Facebook congratulating Christians for Easter was brutally, brutally murdered. | ||
| By a Muslim? | ||
| By a Muslim. | ||
| Because he belongs to the Ahmadiyya Muslims, which is a largely peaceful and progressive movement within the Islamic community. | ||
| And within the Muslim world, these people are often called heretics. | ||
| and apostates. | ||
| And you don't have to be surprised that if the imam of the largest mosque in Scotland | ||
| believes it is perfectly legitimate to murder people for blasphemy, which actually means | ||
| it's free speech, but what these people call blasphemy, that we then see people actually | ||
| being murdered on our streets in the name of their religion. | ||
| And I know people will say now again, no, he was not a Muslim and it has nothing to do with Islam. | ||
| Well, it has something to do with Islam, because what this imam is preaching is based On Islamic teaching, and there is no way around it. | ||
| I mean, we can deny the problem, and many people still prefer to do that, but it is a part of Islam and we need to talk about it. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So now I know you've made this distinction several times even in the course of this interview, but that there's a political component to this. | ||
| So it's not just that the Islamists have to blow up things. | ||
| And then maybe force our governments to take away our own freedoms to protect us, but that there's a political ideology that they'll use the rights that the West grants them to preach these things, to turn their own populace against us. | ||
| When you start going down that route, it all starts sounding like a big conspiracy or something, that there really is this massive invasion and I don't want to start using the The fear mongering techniques that the right uses, but that's real, right? | ||
| That there's a political element that goes beyond violence here. | ||
| Of course, and I think it was Gaddafi who said years ago that, well, Muslims don't need terrorism to infiltrate Western countries. | ||
| They just do this by immigrating to these countries and then getting a lot of children. | ||
| Because that brings me back to what I said before. | ||
| We are not just fighting the jihadists, those who commit violence. | ||
| We also have to deal with the Islamists who want to impose their way of life On our societies, but also with the conservative Muslims who are maybe not Islamists and maybe not jihadists, but who at least to a certain degree with some of the things that these people are saying. | ||
| Because if you look at opinion polls, and I know this brings me dangerously close to what happened to Sam Harris on that show, you know, with Ben Affleck. | ||
| But if you're looking at opinion polls, I mean, legitimate opinion polls, not some fringe, crazy, conspiracy, fear mongering opinion polls. | ||
| If you look at what people in the Muslim world think about apostates converting from the religion, leaving the religion, it's shocking. | ||
| It is shocking. | ||
| The percentage of people who believe it is legitimate to use violence against people just for leaving the religion or converting to another religion is, to me, absolutely shocking. | ||
| Yeah, do you think the West is fundamentally doing something wrong here? | ||
| That somehow, and I can even feel it when I'm talking to you, knowing that we go out of our way to make this distinction over and over, that we still feel we have to guard our words somehow in all this. | ||
| And again, as we've talked about, that sort of gives the strength to the right. | ||
| But that the West is doing something wrong in that we're not selling why freedom is good anymore. | ||
| There was a time where it was like, it was cool to really stand up for Western values, stand up for free speech and religious plurality and rights of minorities and all of those things. | ||
| And for all the faults of the West and for wars that we probably shouldn't have got into, although there were, as I said at the top of the show, there were thousand-year-old blood feuds going on in the Middle East. | ||
| Far before America was a country. | ||
| But that nobody really stands up. | ||
| There aren't public figures anymore that stand up and say, you know what? | ||
| What we're doing here in the UK is still good. | ||
| We still have more integration here than they do in most other places. | ||
| Certainly in the United States where people still want to come. | ||
| You think we're just not doing a good sell job anymore? | ||
| I think you raise two interesting points here. | ||
| One is that yes, indeed, every time I give such an interview, I think about what am I going to say? | ||
| Because I know there will be people out there watching and just waiting for me to slip, not even intentionally, just to slip and say something that can then twist and turn and make me sound like a racist and a bigot. | ||
| You know, there are people like Reza Aslan and Glenn Greenwald who do this on purpose and who have their own malicious agenda. | ||
| And they know quite well they are misrepresenting what we are saying, but they are saying it anyway because they are too afraid to debate us with ideas. | ||
| So all they can resort to is, you know, smearing us and trying to silence us. | ||
| That is one point. | ||
| And the second point that you raised about not selling ourselves anymore, absolutely. | ||
| And you guys in America are doing bit more of a better job at this than we do in Europe | ||
| because you're still proud. | ||
| Well, yeah, I mean if you look at it from a European perspective, I lived in Washington DC for half a year and I | ||
| was really surprised how proud the Americans really are about | ||
| America. I mean if you come from from Europe, it's still You still feel like there is this proud about America, at least compared to Europe. | ||
| And we have to depart from this perpetual sense of guilt, you know, and culture of self-destruction and self-blaming, that we are somewhat to blame for all the ills of the Middle East. | ||
| So I'm not saying the colonial or imperialist period was pretty and we didn't do terrible things to people. | ||
| But this is not the reason why people blow themselves up in Nigeria or Indonesia. | ||
| This comes down to the Islamist ideology. | ||
| And these people can deny that as much as they like, and they pretend it all comes down to us. | ||
| And again, it's what George W. Bush called, you know, soft bigotry of low expectations, because somewhat, you know, these brown people cannot be responsible for their own fate. | ||
| It must always come down to us. | ||
| It must always have something to do with us. | ||
| They can say that as long as they like. | ||
| It doesn't change the fact it's not true. | ||
| And that you can explain the global, and I believe Majid Nawaz calls it the global Islamist insurgency, you can only explain that at its roots with the ideology of Islamism and not with Western foreign policy. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's so funny. | ||
| So many of my guests have mentioned the phrase, the soft bigotry of low expectations. | ||
| And many times on the show, I kept quoting. | ||
| I thought it was Bill Maher that had coined the phrase, so I felt good about it. | ||
| Then I learned it was George W. Bush. | ||
| It was one of his speechwriters. | ||
| I've been saying it less, but maybe that's the phrase that George W. Bush gave us that we don't have to be upset about. | ||
| No, and I mean, it's quite funny, you know, I talked about Iraq before and, you know, there were actually people who would have been happier to topple George W. Bush and topple Saddam Hussein, and that really brings us back to the absurdity of the left and everything that we talked about today, for all his faults, and by no means George W. Bush was not perfect, but he was also not a Saddam Hussein. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so final thought to wrap all this up. | ||
| If you had a crystal ball and you were looking five or ten years into the future of where Europe's going to be, the state of jihad and of Islamism and all that, Are you hopeful? | ||
| It doesn't feel very hopeful right now. | ||
| The only grain that I can get that's hopeful is that these conversations are happening, and at least that the free thinkers aren't feeling as held hostage between jihadists and leftists. | ||
| So I think that's the hope for me, but I don't know how big, how really hopeful I can hang my hat on that. | ||
| Well, I am by nature an optimist. | ||
| I couldn't do the job if I were not an optimist. | ||
| And I do think there is reason for hope, because if I look at the emails that I receive, the tweets that I receive, the private messages that I receive, the feedback that I receive when I talk to people, people are waking up in our own countries. | ||
| I mean, I have many people who come to me and say, like, are you actually saying what I would like to say? | ||
| But either they're too afraid to say it because they'll be called a racist, or they don't have the rhetoric to really bring across their views, which is why shows like yours are so important. | ||
| But also people in the Muslim world. | ||
| I mean, the Muslim women that we work with, who really no longer want to live under oppression, who don't want to be treated as second-class citizens, who have the right to education and to opportunity in life. | ||
| The free thinkers, the poets, the journalists, the activists, Minorities like homosexual converts, atheists, these are the most important people in the Muslim world at the moment, and who deserve all the respect and support that we can give them. | ||
| And I think if we can forge a genuine alliance between those in the Muslim world who want to see change, and want to make Islam compatible with the modern world, and us, who are not afraid To speak out about the problems of the religion and about the ideology. | ||
| Because, you know, the irony is that by denying all of this, you are actually aiding the extremists. | ||
| Because you're taking away, you're taking away the justification for those who want to bring about change. | ||
| Why do they want to bring about change? | ||
| If you don't name the problem, if you take away the problem, what are these people going to do? | ||
| So that's something we need to realize. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| At the top of the show, I said, you know, as you've said, that a religion is just a set of ideas. | ||
| And if there was a political ideology, a political party, let's say that it was an offshoot of the Republicans here in the United States, and it said, we're going to throw gays off roofs and we're going to put women in burqas and we're going to oppress minorities. | ||
| Well, then the progressives would be going bonkers and they'd be, they'd be calling them the racist instead. | ||
| Uh, well, I think you know where I'm going with this. | ||
| Uh, well, Julia, it was really a pleasure talking to you. | ||
| It was my pleasure. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me on the show. | ||
| Yeah, thank you. | ||
| And you guys can find out more about Julie and the work she does. | ||
| Follow her on Twitter. | ||
| It's MsJulieLenars. | ||
| And check out her work at hscenter.org. | ||
| It's center spelled the British way. |
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