May 19, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| All right, I wanted to do something a little different this week | ||
| and catch you guys up on some insider stuff going on over here at the Rubin Report. | ||
| First off I just want to say how pleased we are, not only with the growth of the show in terms of numbers, but also in terms of the content that we're putting out every week. | ||
| We're on track to crack 500,000 subscribers in just a couple weeks, and our watch time is about 15 minutes per video, which is pretty much unheard of on YouTube. | ||
| Our audience engagement is also equally great, and even the comments section right here on YouTube hasn't totally devolved into the abyss of hate like so many other channels have. | ||
| More importantly though, I'm incredibly proud of the conversations we're continuing to foster around here. | ||
| From last week's interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali to the week before with Jordan Peterson and before that with Yasmin Mohammed and Brandon Turner, I think we've managed to have wide-ranging, important conversations which leave you with something to think about instead of feeling empty and enraged like so much content out there is designed to make you feel. | ||
| Many of you have asked me about the YouTube demonization issue, which I've addressed a bit on Twitter and Facebook, but I wanted to discuss here as well. | ||
| For those of you just catching up, about 6 weeks ago, YouTube lost about $750 million | ||
| in ad sales after a bunch of stories ran across mainstream media about how ads were being | ||
| played on "offensive" content on the YouTube platform. | ||
| Putting aside what's actually offensive, or that you rarely associate the ad playing before | ||
| the video with the content itself, YouTube found itself in a tough spot. | ||
| $750 million isn't chump change, even to a company like Google, and suddenly there were | ||
| less ads to go around the entire platform. | ||
| I should pause here and say that as a private company, of course, YouTube absolutely has | ||
| the right to do whatever they want with their business. | ||
| And in this case, if there aren't ads to go around on all the content, well, nobody's forcing me or anyone else to create videos here. | ||
| At the same time this demonetization was happening, there was also another problem unfolding for channels such as this one. | ||
| Some of our videos, which deal with certain controversial topics, aren't getting served ads at all. | ||
| So, for example, videos we've done with people from Lauren Southern to Bishop Barron to Yasmin Mohamed, there's some real diversity in that group, aren't being served ads due to the nature of their content. | ||
| Again, that is within YouTube's right to do and it isn't censorship | ||
| because they aren't stopping us from putting up those interviews, but eventually every | ||
| creator has to make a dime. | ||
| Creators will eventually self-censor if they know that certain topics won't make them any | ||
| money. | ||
| Since I try to be as transparent as possible with you, I want to tell you a little bit | ||
| more about how our economics work around here. | ||
| Our interview with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, which was done on location in another city due to security issues, cost us over $5,000 between studio rental, flying my crew to another city, hotel rooms, and some other ancillary costs. | ||
| The four videos that we put up with Ayaan have made us less than $1,000 back on YouTube. | ||
| I'm no economist, but even I know that's not a sustainable business model. | ||
| In this case, not doing the interview with Aion would have been the prudent business decision, but of course I'm thrilled and honored that Aion took the time, and in my view, was worth the financial hit we took to make it happen. | ||
| The truth that Ayaan speaks about female genital mutilation, the left's alliance with Islam, and the power of the individual as a lynchpin in a free and western society are all messages that I think must be heard and amplified. | ||
| I'll continue to have those important conversations, regardless of the financial implications, as long as we can possibly do so. | ||
| I mentioned all of this insider stuff to you, not for your pity or even for your money, but just to give you a little insight into how complex content creation is these days, and how there are often behind the scenes issues that have little to do with the content, but a lot to do with how we're able to make it. | ||
| So I'll end this with another thank you to all of you who've continued to support us via monthly pledges on Patreon or through one-time pledges on PayPal. | ||
| You guys are the ones who make it possible to do this show and allow us to make decisions based on the conversations that we want to have without solely looking at the bottom line. | ||
| We're going to continue to find new partners to work with and other out-of-the-box ways to monetize our content, but without you we simply couldn't do what we do around here. | ||
| Alright, so enough business, let's get back to the conversation. | ||
| Joining me today is Brigitte Gabriel. | ||
| Brigitte is the founder of Act for America, the country's largest grassroots national security organization. | ||
| She has an incredibly fascinating personal story of growing up as a Christian in Lebanon during their civil war, and is now a strident defender of women, minorities, and western values. | ||
| Will our videos be monetized on YouTube? | ||
| Well, there's only one way to find out. | ||
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| Joining me today is a New York Times bestselling author and national security expert | ||
| and founder of Act for America, Brigitte Gabriel. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you, I'm so delighted to be with you. | ||
| I'm delighted to be with you. | ||
| What an honor, what an honor! | ||
| Do you know that just the two of us sitting down, before we even say anything, is going to trigger a lot of people? | ||
| There's gonna be some outraged people just because we're sitting here, before we've even said anything. | ||
| Hey, you know what? | ||
| If you can't cause problems while you go through life, you're not doing something right. | ||
| Indeed. | ||
| So you have caused some problems for some people. | ||
| I find you to be on the right side of most stuff and someone that's doing it with a bit of a sense of humor and attacking the right people. | ||
| And we have some enemies in common who we'll get to shortly. | ||
| But first, let's just start with your story. | ||
| You grew up in Lebanon. | ||
| People don't know much about Lebanon. | ||
| Tell me a little bit. | ||
| No, they don't. | ||
| And this is why I am so passionate about this issue, because terrorism affected my life personally in Lebanon. | ||
| You know, people ask me all the time, Brigitte, where does this passion come from? | ||
| And I tell them, because terrorism changed my life. | ||
| I was born into a country, Lebanon, that used to be a majority Christian country when I was a child. | ||
| We were open-minded. | ||
| We were fair. | ||
| We were tolerant. | ||
| We were multicultural. | ||
| We prided ourselves on our multiculturalism. | ||
| We had open border policy. | ||
| We welcomed everyone into our country because we wanted to share with them the westernization which we had created in the heart of the Middle East. | ||
| Muslims used to send their children to study in our universities. | ||
| They graduated and worked in our economy because we had built the best economy in the Middle East. | ||
| Yeah, didn't they call Beirut, Beirut was the Paris of the Middle East or something? | ||
| Paris of the Middle East, exactly. | ||
| Unfortunately, all that began to change as the Muslims became the majority and the Christians became the minority. | ||
| And that's when my life changed. | ||
| I remember we used to go to Beirut for Christmas to visit with the rest of my family. | ||
| I lived in the south with my parents. | ||
| And we stopped going, and I would ask my father, why we're not going to the family for Christmas or Easter? | ||
| And he would tell me, well, we decided to stay home this year. | ||
| And I couldn't understand, you know, why we decided to stay home. | ||
| You have to understand I was an only child to an elderly couple. | ||
| It was very boring. | ||
| And then I later learned that the reason why we stayed home is because the radical Islamists and Palestinians would set up a fly-by-night checkpoint and would stop cars traveling. | ||
| And they would ask people for their IDs when they would stop them. | ||
| And in Lebanon, our religion is written on our national ID. | ||
| You are either a Christian, a Muslim, or a Jew. | ||
| So, when they find out that you are a Christian, they would get everybody out of their car and shoot them in cold blood. | ||
| It became known as identity killing at the time. | ||
| Thomas Friedman talks about it in his book, From Beirut to Jerusalem. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That changed our lives. | ||
| But really, the turning point was in 1975, when radical Islamists blew up my home, bringing it down, burying me under the rubble, wounded, as they shouted, Ten years old. | ||
| I ended up in a hospital for two and a half months. | ||
| And as I laid in a hospital bed going from surgery, one surgery to another, I would ask my father, why did they do this to us? | ||
| And my father would tell me, because we are Christians, the Muslims consider us infidels and they want to kill us. | ||
| So I learned since I was a 10 year old little girl that I am wanted dead simply because I was born into the Christian faith. | ||
| Whether I practiced it or not, it was irrelevant in my enemy's eyes. | ||
| And that's why people in America don't understand. | ||
| They think, when people say, especially from the Middle East, you know, I'm a Christian or I'm Muslim. | ||
| In America they think, well, I'm a Christian only if I'm practicing Bible thumper, holy roller, speak in tongues, that makes me a Christian. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| Well, for us in our region of the world, whether you're practicing or not, you belong to the Christian race or group. | ||
| And that's why they want to kill you. | ||
| It doesn't matter whether you practice your religion or not. | ||
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Right. | |
| Even though, of course, a religion isn't even a race, but you're saying it that way to illustrate the point that... | ||
| You belong to that group. | ||
| In other words, if your grandparents were Christians, it doesn't matter if you have been two-generation atheist. | ||
| You are a Christian. | ||
| That's how your enemy looks at you. | ||
| ISIS, Al-Qaeda, all these terrorist organizations, all these radical, devout Islamists look at you, look at America as a Christian nation. | ||
| Not because we practice Christianity. | ||
| Look at you as a Christian. | ||
| Whether you practice Christianity or not is irrelevant. | ||
| Your great-great-great-great-great grandparents were either Jews or Christian, therefore you belong to either one or two of that sect. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You could be the biggest heathen atheist on the planet. | ||
| Doesn't matter. | ||
| They wouldn't like you for that either, but... Doesn't matter. | ||
| You belong to that. | ||
| You're an infidel. | ||
| So it's interesting. | ||
| I think in the couple years that I've been doing this show, the only other person from Lebanon I've had on is Professor Gad Saddup in Canada, and he's Jewish, and his story is very similar to yours about when things changed and his family having to get out and his parents were kidnapped. | ||
| By PLO terrorists, they actually survived, which is sort of incredible, and now he fights for a lot of the same things you fight for. | ||
| I'm curious, though, when Islam was increasing in Lebanon, because we now see this in Europe and partly what's happening all over the world, were people talking about it? | ||
| Was your family, like, what were the moments that they thought, there's something culturally happening here that it's not the same? | ||
| We were afraid. | ||
| I was a child. | ||
| I was 10 years old when the war started. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I remember my parents trying to hide. | ||
| And I remember hiding with my parents in the basement or trying to flee our neighborhood before we lived permanently in the bomb shelter. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because, you know, I lived in a bomb shelter underground for seven years of my life, from the age of 10 to the age of 17, hiding to survive. | ||
| But we went through a period of about six months where we would flee our home in the middle of the night and run downtown to hide at my cousin's home. | ||
| And we would hide. | ||
| They had a basement where nobody could get to it. | ||
| And we were afraid because we knew that our Muslim neighbors were turning against us. | ||
| People who we would used to barbecue with the weekend before were all of a sudden massacring us the next weekend. | ||
| So, everything changed so fast, and it's not that you didn't know who you can trust, because enemy turned against neighbor. | ||
| Neighbor turned against neighbor. | ||
| Once the call of Islam, once the call of Jihad was declared, because Lebanon was immediately divided in two sects, the Muslims, once the call of Islam was declared, especially with the Palestinians, All the Muslims went with the Palestinians and literally the army split and they took their from the military bases whoever drove a tank the Muslims took it home with them literally home and the Christians took whatever weapons they can have in whatever tanks to protect ourselves and this is how the country became divided and that's when we started realizing we were different. | ||
| So in the midst of all this war, you had a really strange experience with some Israelis that kind of changed your feelings on things. | ||
| Can you talk about that a little bit? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| When I was a child, when the war broke out, even when I was a child going to school, we were taught that Israel is the enemy. | ||
| Now, at my home, I was never taught hate because we're Christians. | ||
| We don't teach hatred. | ||
| Plus, we have more things in common with the Jews. | ||
| I mean, we share the same Bible, so it's different. | ||
| But by the time I was a child, Lebanon was majority Muslim, so the anti-Semitism, the hatred for Israel was rising, especially with the Palestinian issue, especially with the influx of Palestinians into Lebanon. | ||
| It was what I heard on television, what I heard on the radio. | ||
| But when the war started, All of a sudden we were trapped. | ||
| We ended up living in a bomb shelter. | ||
| And I remember my father saying, all the world Christian nations are going to come see what's happening to the Christians and save the Christians, because that's when the Muslims started massacring the Christians, literally. | ||
| And we thought, America is going to come, Australia is going to come, Britain is going to come, France is going to come. | ||
| And nobody came. | ||
| And finally, a few people from my town got together and they said, we've got to go to the Israeli border and beg for help. | ||
| We lived five kilometers from the Israeli border. | ||
| And we knew if we go to Israel and beg for help, the Jews are not going to slaughter us because we had more shared values with them than we had with the Muslims. | ||
| So a few people from my town go to Israel and wave down an Israeli patrol in the middle of the night. | ||
| And they say, listen, we are surrounded by the Muslims and Palestinians, and the majority of Palestinians were Muslims, who want to slaughter us. | ||
| You either come in and help us or they're going to be at your border. | ||
| So Israel started coming in the middle of the night and started bringing ammunition to the military, food for the children, because Muslims cut off all food supplies to our towns. | ||
| And Israel would bring literally bomb shelters to those who did not have bomb shelters, blankets, everything. | ||
| And Israel would take Christian men to Israel and teach them how to fight because the Christians were the educated ones. | ||
| And we learned very quickly, David, that you can have all your degrees, professional degrees on your wall, your accounting degree, your medical degree, your law degree. | ||
| None of that will do you, as they say in Texas, diddly squat. | ||
| When you are faced with an enemy bent on killing you in the name of Allah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So Israel would take groups of Christians, train them how to fight, and this is how we survived. | ||
| I remember at the age of 13, we had been living in the bomb shelter for three years. | ||
| And one of our militia friends came by and he said, Brigitte, I just want to tell you that we heard a lot of chatter on the radio and we're going to be attacked tonight. | ||
| And he said, I don't think we're going to last. | ||
| I think our town will fall. | ||
| And he said, if I don't see you tomorrow, I wish you a merciful death. | ||
| And he left. | ||
| And I remember, David, at the age of 13 years old, putting on my Sunday best, my Easter dress, because I wanted to look pretty when I am dead, because I knew that when they come to slaughter me, there would be no one to bury me. | ||
| And I remember sobbing as my mother combed my long black hair down to my hips and tied the white ribbon in my hair as I begged her, I don't want to die. | ||
| I'm only 13 years old. | ||
| Please, I don't want to die. | ||
| And there was nothing my mother could say to me. | ||
| And we sat on the corner of our bomb shelter that night and my father said to me, he said, listen, we lived a long life. | ||
| You are a young child. | ||
| When they come to slaughter us tonight, you just run towards Israel and you never look back. | ||
| We'll create a commotion. | ||
| You just run towards Israel. | ||
| Thank God I did not have to make that decision that night, because that's the night when Israel came in physically into Lebanon and established the security zone, and set up artillery bases around our town to protect us so the Islamists will not be able to come in and slaughter us. | ||
| And we went on living like this until 1982, another five years, until Israel invaded Lebanon in 1982. | ||
| And Israel invaded Lebanon, working with the Christians in Lebanon, trying to help the Christians take back their democracy, reestablish control of the country and kick out the radical Islamic element that had taken control of the country at that time. | ||
| Because by 1982, we had 11 Islamic terrorist organizations operating out of Lebanon, including the PLO. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so let's pause there because there's so much politics, but what obviously shines through is your personal story. | ||
| And it's so interesting to me, I find this when I talk to certain guests who've lived through a lot. | ||
| You talk about a bomb shelter and it's almost like, oh, I lived in a bomb shelter for three years, like it's just, it is what it is, as opposed to it's impossible for me to even fathom what that could be like. | ||
| How much do you feel like your own story here Has sort of been hijacked. | ||
| I guess that's sort of a operative word here. | ||
| That for people like you and Ayaan and Yasmin Mohammed, who I had on a couple of weeks ago, people that have lived through some of this stuff, these stories really don't get told anymore because they somehow, because you're using all the buzzwords when you say Muslim or this or that, that people are afraid to talk about this. | ||
| And all you've done so far is tell your own personal story. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it's the story that shapes my life and my outlook. | ||
| I was robbed of my childhood. | ||
| People ask me, where does this passion come from, Brigitte? | ||
| I tell them, you know how Holocaust survivors walk around with tattoos on their arms? | ||
| I walk around with scars. | ||
| I still have shrapnel in my bones. | ||
| This is what I look at when I take a shower every morning. | ||
| And I am reminded of what happens when people turn a blind eye to evil, thinking it's not going to happen to me. | ||
| I am the Anne Frank who lived to tell about it, and I'm trying to warn the world. | ||
| In my situation, in my life, living with crawling under the bombs, digging out grass to eat, digging out dandelions to eat. | ||
| One of my jobs, if you want to call it jobs, at the bomb shelter we lived with my parents, it was only me and them in this hole six feet underground, no sunshine, always in the darkness, mildew on the walls, literally white mildew covered the walls, and we would sit there, dirt floors. | ||
| And one of my jobs was breaking chickpeas, old, dry chickpeas that my mother would soak overnight in water because we didn't have any food other than whatever Caritas would bring a box of food. | ||
| And I remember they had bugs in the chickpeas, and my job was to break the chickpea in half and with a little needle take the bugs out and put them on the side of the dish so we can eat the chickpeas. | ||
| I remember I had long hair and I remember as a child, people see me today and they think this glamorous lady and they think, oh wow, what a life, you know? | ||
| They don't realize what carved the character of the person you see today. | ||
| I remember as a child sleeping on the floor on the dirt and getting lice in my hair. | ||
| And I remember my mother putting kerosene on my head so it will kill the lice and combing | ||
| my hair. | ||
| And I remember closing my nose and my eyes are burning and my mother would say, "It's | ||
| okay. | ||
| This will kill the lice." | ||
| And this became our life. | ||
| We went from as a child, as an only child, to a successful businessman with a live-in servant and a chauffeur to drive me to school, was sitting with my parents, breaking chickpeas with bugs, digging out for dandelions to eat, and my mother combing lice out of my hair by killing it by putting kerosene or mezut or benzene on my head. | ||
| We didn't have any medication. | ||
| I don't drink alcohol. | ||
| People ask me all the time. | ||
| Oh, why don't you drink it? | ||
| They think it's a religious thing. | ||
| Well, the bomb shelter, because my father owned a restaurant, the bomb shelter was a storage room for all the liquor and wine because obviously six feet underground, it's temperature controlled. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we didn't have any medication and we didn't have any doctors to go to. | ||
| The hospital was bombed out and And we used alcohol as medication, so when I would be sick once a month, and I didn't have any pills or any medication, and I would be in extreme, terrible pain, and my father would pour me a shot of whiskey, Johnny Walker 777, and he would say, oh honey, just jug it, this will take your pain away. | ||
| So in my mind as an adult, I associate alcohol with medicine. | ||
| So I don't even drink anything. | ||
| It changes your life. | ||
| New Year's Eve, it took me 50 years to figure out why I cry every New Year's Eve, why I feel utter sadness come into me as people get so excited at midnight. | ||
| And I couldn't put my finger on it. | ||
| People would be so jubilant and so excited and I would look around and I would always tear up. | ||
| And I learned the scars of war Growing up in a bomb shelter, when you don't have anything to smile about or laugh about in your formative years, you don't know how to be happy. | ||
| Those wires that connect people excited and learning how to be happy as you're developing, as your brain is developing, to know what it's really to be happy, happy, happy, that exuberant joy where people are just let loose and be happy. | ||
| I don't have that. | ||
| I was robbed of that. | ||
| So when I would watch people on New Year's Eve being so happy, that's when it hit me that I couldn't get that happy, and I didn't know why, and I couldn't even recognize it. | ||
| Until I got to be 50 years old, I started learning about my background and what shaped me. | ||
| Those are the untold stories that people do not want to bother hearing. | ||
| It's like when you talk to Holocaust survivors. | ||
| They come here, they're successful, they're brilliant, they own great businesses, like Lebanese, like me! | ||
| I am living the American dream. | ||
| I made lemonade out of lemon. | ||
| Like many Holocaust stories you hear. | ||
| And you don't hear the details because people do not want to bother hearing what shaped the person to become the strong person to be able to move forward in life and become productive and do great things in life and become philanthropist and change the world and make it a better place and put a smile and shine joy to the world even though you're dealing sometimes with hard issues like I do. | ||
| Yeah so let's get to that part because that's the that's the part of you that I know as the public person is this exuberant person who's passionate about what they do and smiles and all this stuff. | ||
| Making up for lost time? | ||
| Yeah all right that that's great though that's what it's all about right so when did you come to America and how quickly did you realize how great things are here it seemed even right now when I say that things are great here I always know there's a certain amount of people In America, they're like, oh, he's being just a blind patriot saying things are great in America. | ||
| But as someone that lived through some shit, can you say things are great here? | ||
| Oh my God! | ||
| America is God's gift to the universe. | ||
| There is no place better than America. | ||
| Actually, I ended up moving to Israel, not to America. | ||
| I ended up living in Israel from 1984 till 1989. | ||
| Wow, somehow I missed that part in the bio. | ||
| So how did you get there? | ||
| You've got to read my story. | ||
| I've got a book titled, Because They Hate. | ||
| For those of us, for people who are watching us right now, they can get the book and read my story. | ||
| It's my memoir, Because They Hate. | ||
| Fantastic. | ||
| It's a great, encouraging story about the tribe of the human spirit. | ||
| So, after we came out of the bomb shelter when Israel invaded Lebanon, my mother became wounded. | ||
| We ended up going to an Israeli hospital where I spent 22 days with her. | ||
| And those days changed my life. | ||
| It made me realize Israelis were completely different than anything I'd heard about. | ||
| And I vowed that one day I would go back to Israel. | ||
| And I ended up moving to Israel in 1984 and becoming news anchor for World News in the Middle East in the 80s, covering world events and reporting on world events. | ||
| And actually, you know, as I reported on world events, I started realizing there was a pattern developing. | ||
| Because no matter where the terrorist activity took place, the name of the perpetrators were always Muslims. | ||
| Ahmed, Mohammed, Hussein, Ali. | ||
| The name of the victims were always Westerners, Christians and Jews. | ||
| Terry Wade, Terry Anderson, Colonel Higgins, the Akeli Lauro, the TWA flights. | ||
| I can go on and on. | ||
| And I started realizing That what I used to think was a regional problem, where a majority Muslim Middle East trying to kill or expel the minority Christians and Jews had become a worldwide problem, but the world was not paying attention. | ||
| Anyway, from Israel, I met an American war correspondent, and we fell in love, and we got married, and that's how I left Israel and came to America, and I came to the United States in 1989. | ||
| Yeah, so you get to the United States. | ||
| I get to America. | ||
| And even though you had been living in a democracy, now I know that, for a couple years, it's a completely different democracy here and the plurality of people we have here and all of that stuff. | ||
| The opportunity in America is incredible. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| We came here and we started our own business, a TV production company. | ||
| So, I remember when we were starting our own business, we went to the Chamber of Commerce, and there is SCORE, which is Retired Executives, who actually consult with you on how to start your own business. | ||
| And I remember going there, and you can sit with them, and these are retired CEOs who would advise you, who will mentor you on, this is how you start your own business, this is what you need to do, this is the capital you need to raise. | ||
| And they would literally hold your hand, and the Chamber of Commerce had brochures. | ||
| And I remember looking at my ex-husband, and I remember looking at him and saying, For free? | ||
| Are you telling me they're going to teach you how to start your own business? | ||
| And I started learning about America and how it operates, the opportunities. | ||
| In America, you can be anyone you want to be. | ||
| The sky is the limit. | ||
| There is no excuse. | ||
| None whatsoever. | ||
| Even today, even those who are coming here today to this country, the opportunities are limitless. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| But I thought we're an evil, patriarchal, racist society that's bent on white supremacy or something. | ||
| Am I wrong on that? | ||
| Have I made a mistake? | ||
| Absolute baloney! | ||
| Listen, I came to this country in 1989, and I had my own TV production company, I worked so many jobs, you know, I... | ||
| I have never felt as a second class citizen or persecuted or that I am different in any way shape or form whatsoever. | ||
| America is an amazing place. | ||
| America is a land. | ||
| If there was ever a place where anyone can belong, It's America. | ||
| Because we came here from everywhere and everybody, from all walks of life, whether your father was a janitor or your father was a mega-millionaire. | ||
| You come to America and you have a fresh start, fresh identity. | ||
| Nobody cares what your father's title is. | ||
| It's what you make of yourself. | ||
| And you can be anything you wanna be. | ||
| This is America, it's amazing! | ||
| I'm so fortunate to live here. | ||
| Yeah, I lived in New York City most of my life, and when I go back now, every time I go on the subway, I just look around for a second, and you quite literally see everybody. | ||
| Every shade, color, religion, ethnicity, nationality, and even if we're not all constantly fawning over each other, we live together. | ||
| Just that in and of itself is an incredibly beautiful thing as someone that comes from a place | ||
| that unfortunately saw the reverse of that. | ||
| Yeah, America is different. | ||
| And I can tell you, I was in Europe, I go to Europe. | ||
| And so two years ago, I took my children on a cruise in Europe and we went and we cruised around and everything. | ||
| And we missed so much coming to America. | ||
| You know what we missed the most? | ||
| Being able to have the variety of food that we have in America, all in one street. | ||
| You walk down one street in America, you can go one night eat Chinese, one night eat Japanese, one night eat Lebanese, one night eat Italian. | ||
| I mean, one night eat Thai. | ||
| The variety! | ||
| America is so rich in culture that truly melted into one pot. | ||
| It's very different than anywhere else in the world. | ||
| So it's not cultural appropriation when I eat Chipotle that's supposed to be that way? | ||
| I'm telling you, America is an amazing place to live and to thrive. | ||
| And anybody can come here and thrive. | ||
| All right, so let's pause for a second and shift sort of to your politics before we go into some other stuff, because from the critics of yours, they say she's a right-wing maniac and she's a hardcore right-wing blah, blah, blah. | ||
| Now, people are saying that about me, too, and I find... Oh, do you run right-wing crazy, you? | ||
| Yeah, and it means nothing. | ||
| It just means that you're not a complete leftist whatever, so they just say you're a right-wing whatever. | ||
| We chatted for just a second before we started and basically you said you're socially liberal and what's thought of as right with you is just that you care about national security. | ||
| Is that pretty much... | ||
| Yeah, I'm a 9-11 national security conservative. | ||
| The New York Times did an interview with me for my second book titled They Must Be Stopped, and I mentioned in it that I voted for Al Gore, and a lot of my friends were like, you voted for Al Gore? | ||
| I said, yeah, I'm a 9-11 conservative. | ||
| 9-11 made people realize that we are fighting for the survival of our civilization. | ||
| We are dealing with people that want to kill us. | ||
| The national security issue is an American issue. | ||
| It's not a Republican issue. | ||
| It's not a Democratic issue. | ||
| It's not a Libertarian issue. | ||
| It's an American issue. | ||
| America has been attacked under different administrations by radical Islam, regardless of the politics of whoever was living at the White House. | ||
| America was attacked the first time under the Carter administration in 1979, a Democrat, with the hostages in Iran. | ||
| America was attacked again under the Ronald Reagan administration, a Republican, in 1983 with the blowing up of the Marines in Lebanon. | ||
| America was attacked under George Bush's senior administration. | ||
| America was attacked under the Clinton administration. | ||
| The first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993 was under President Clinton, a Democrat. | ||
| It was actually under President Clinton that the Taliban trained 10,000 Al-Qaeda members in Afghanistan. | ||
| Now, these people were not being trained for entertainment. | ||
| They were trained to attack the United States of America. | ||
| America was attacked under George Bush Jr. | ||
| administration, a Republican, on 9-11. | ||
| The only difference between the attacks of 1993 and 2001 is the buildings didn't come down. | ||
| And then people thought if we just elect President Obama, all our sins are gonna be forgiven, the whole world is gonna sing Kumbaya. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Obviously that did not happen. | ||
| So do you think that's his biggest failure, that when he gave that Cairo speech, and it was sort of the reset of this whole thing, that he sort of offered an apology for America's foreign policy and whatever else, and that it bought us no goodwill. | ||
| It didn't do anything. | ||
| And actually, and then you can argue about the red line in Syria and a whole bunch of other things, that when we're quote-unquote nicer, even though he was at war every day of his presidency in Afghanistan and drone strikes in Pakistan and all that stuff, that the niceties just don't fly in reality. | ||
| No, because it's not about niceties. | ||
| We are dealing with an enemy bent on our destruction because of their ideology. | ||
| And as a matter of fact, President Obama was working, he did not understand the Middle | ||
| East or was complicit working with the Muslim Brotherhood because he thought they are a | ||
| moderate organization. | ||
| Actually the person that wrote President Obama's speech, which he delivered in Cairo, the first | ||
| major speech to the Arabic world, was written by the head of ISNA, the president of ISNA, | ||
| the Islamic Society of North America, which is an unindicted co-conspirator in the largest | ||
| terrorism trial ever in the history of the United States in 2007-2008, which took place | ||
| in Dallas, Texas, the Holy Land Foundation versus our government, or our government versus | ||
| the Holy Land Foundation. | ||
| So, this happened immediately before he came into office. | ||
| And he started working with the Muslim Brotherhood. | ||
| He actually forced President Mubarak, who was our ally, because we got the majority of our intelligence out of Egypt and Jordan, other than Israel. | ||
| And he literally threw Mubarak under the bus and forced Mubarak to accept having the Muslim Brotherhood leadership in the first two rows attending his speech in Cairo. | ||
| To the chagrin of Mubarak because he wasn't understanding what was going on, and he basically empowered them to basically become so belligerent and advance their cause. | ||
| So do you think Mubarak saw the writing on the wall then that he was on his way out no matter what? | ||
| Oh, absolutely. | ||
| You think he knew it? | ||
|
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Absolutely. | |
| Because it wasn't, Tahrir Square was a couple years later, but at that point, Obama basically said he has to step down. | ||
| Then they democratically elected the Muslim Brotherhood, and then it was worse for a year, and now they have sort of another version of Mubarak. | ||
| Obama undermined Mubarak and Mubarak knew it because Mubarak knew how close Obama was working with the Muslim Brotherhood and Mubarak knew that the Muslim Brotherhood is a terrorist organization. | ||
| You know they are classified in Egypt as a terrorist organization. | ||
| Somehow they're verified on Twitter. | ||
| I don't know if you know they've got the blue check the Muslim Brotherhood on Twitter. | ||
| They're a terrorist organization in Egypt. | ||
| Yeah, but they assassinated President Sadat, who signed the peace treaty for Israel, and killed him because he signed the peace treaty with Israel. | ||
| That's how Mubarak came to power. | ||
| And Mubarak had his thumb on them. | ||
| So, Obama thought, oh, Mubarak is a dictator, he's got his thumb down on these wonderful people who are just trying to express their opinion. | ||
| America did not understand the Middle East, so Mubarak knew what was coming, and Obama emboldened them. | ||
| Yeah, okay, so let's pause on the Muslim Brotherhood stuff, because you've given an incredible speech about that that has about a million views, and I would highly recommend that everyone watch it. | ||
| We'll link to that as well. | ||
| But the Egypt one is an interesting one to me because it shows sort of the crappy situation we've found ourselves in, that Mubarak, even though I can see you support him in certain ways, he obviously wasn't a great guy and was doing a lot of things against him. | ||
| The press and he was running, he was ruling via the military, but then they got worse. | ||
| It was worse for the democratically elected year of the Muslim Brotherhood. | ||
| So what then is a sensible solution? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| If the choices are between military and then a democratically elected group that's gonna be worse than the military, what is a sensible option for a country like Egypt that is, you know, really right in the thick of this thing? | ||
| Well, the answer lies back 40 years. | ||
| And what happened in the Middle East in the 60s and 70s, that's when we started seeing the Muslim Brotherhood strengthen. | ||
| And remember, the Shah of Iran, Iran was a very liberal society. | ||
| Afghanistan was a very liberal society. | ||
|
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Egypt wasn't. | |
| It's incredible seeing the pictures of women back then at universities that were dressed like Westerners. | ||
| Absolutely, like Westerners. | ||
| Egypt was a liberal society. | ||
| Syria was a liberal society. | ||
| Now, Iraq was a liberal society. | ||
| So when you look at these so-called, what we call dictators, who had their thumb, like | ||
| the Shah in Iran, having his thumb down on the Khomeini followers, the Shah knew that | ||
| these are the radical Islamists who want to establish the Islamic caliphate. | ||
| They want to resurrect the caliphate. | ||
| They do not want to have anything to do with westernization. | ||
| They want to oppress women. | ||
| They want to put women in chadors. | ||
| They want men to grow beards. | ||
| They were the radical ones. | ||
| So you have people like the Shah or Hafiz al-Assad before Bashar, now the son. | ||
| Remember, Hafiz al-Assad, the father, killed 30,000 of them in Hama. | ||
| In Syria, in the 70s, 30,000 Muslim Brotherhood radical Islamists trying to rise in Syria. | ||
| Sadat did the same thing to them in Egypt. | ||
| The Shah tried to do the same thing to them in Iran. | ||
| So they were rising all over the Middle East, wanting to establish the caliphate, wanting to bring back what we have today in Iran under Khomeini, or under ISIS right now, what they're doing, or what Hezbollah is doing in Lebanon with the radicalization. | ||
| And we did not understand what these liberal leaders, we thought of them as dictators, but they had to be what they had to be in trying to put their thumb down on the radicals. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's funny you describe them as liberal, but in that sense, they were liberal. | ||
| Maybe not by our Western standards, but they were, there was some movement there. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But if you talk to anybody in the Middle East back then, whether it was Sadat, Sadat signed the peace treaty with Israel. | ||
| King Hussein signed the peace treaty with Israel. | ||
| Now, It takes a liberal leader to be able to think, I do not want to have anything to do with that radicalism, I want to reach out and sign a peace treaty. | ||
| And now look how the deterioration of the situation, whether in Jordan looking, Abdullah has 2% support. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| How much of them, without getting too far into the Israel part of this, because that could take us another 27 days, how much do they just sort of need the hatred of Israel? | ||
| So the two most stable states in the Middle East are Jordan and Egypt. | ||
| It's not a coincidence that they have peace treaties. | ||
| But how much do these countries just need the idea of a conflict and then perpetuate it? | ||
| So for example, in Jordan, they say there's anywhere from 40 to 70% of the Jordanians are actually Palestinians who don't have equal rights. | ||
| Or in Lebanon, aren't there something like, 40 or so jobs that Palestinians aren't allowed to have and they have trouble getting citizenship and all that like they need this conflict to Keep the eye off what their own governments are doing | ||
| They don't need the conflict. | ||
| They can get the jobs they want, they can grow, they can accomplish, except I can tell you about Lebanon, my own experience. | ||
| In Lebanon, in the refugee camps, in the Palestinian refugee camps, when- I don't mean the Palestinians in the refugee camps need the conflict. | ||
| I mean the governments need it, because they have to keep everyone focused on Israel instead of dealing with what's going on internally. | ||
| Well, they hate Israel in the Middle East. | ||
| They do not want Israel in the Middle East. | ||
| But you have to understand, the Middle East is majority Muslim. | ||
| And the Jews are classified in the Quran as najis. | ||
| The word najis in Arabic means filth. | ||
| Filth is dogs. | ||
| That's why Muslims hate dogs. | ||
| They think it's najis. | ||
| Bodily fluid, feces, that's najis. | ||
| The Prophet Muhammad on his deathbed, on his deathbed, his last statement, commanding the Muslims to fight the Jews and kill them until the Day of Judgment. | ||
| That's Prophet Muhammad's last commandment because he was poisoned by a Jewish woman three years earlier. | ||
| So, in the Muslim mind, the Jews are eternal enemies. | ||
| They do not belong in the Middle East because they are soiling Arab land. | ||
| That's why they want them out. | ||
| So, Israel could withdraw out of all of Israel and leave only Metulla, just a sliver. | ||
| The Arabs will not be happy with that. | ||
| They're going to go after Metulla. | ||
| Trying to kill every last Jew. | ||
| That's the problem. | ||
| It's not about geography, it's about ideology. | ||
| And that's the problem that people in the West don't understand. | ||
| Okay, so speaking of ideology, so now we've mentioned the Muslim Brotherhood a bit. | ||
| As I said, you gave this incredible speech about it. | ||
| For people that don't really understand what it is at all, can you sort of do Muslim Brotherhood 101 and what this ideology that's really spreading across the world right now is up to? | ||
| Well, the Muslim Brotherhood is the oldest Islamic terrorist organization in the world. | ||
| It was founded in 1928 in Egypt by a group of mullahs. | ||
| And today, the Muslim Brotherhood has 70 offshoot Islamic organizations, including al-Qaeda, Hamas and also ISIS. | ||
| You know, Al-Zawahiri, who is now the head of al-Qaeda, was imprisoned and exiled from Egypt as a leader of the Muslim Brotherhood. | ||
| Al-Baghdadi, the head of ISIS right now, was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood in our prisons as early as 2011, because he was a member of the Muslim Brotherhood. | ||
| So, the Muslim Brotherhood, its members are the most highly educated members. | ||
| They are the lawyers. | ||
| Al-Zawahiri is a surgeon. | ||
| Al-Baghdadi is a Ph.D., has a Ph.D. | ||
| in Islamic theology. | ||
| Osama Bin Laden was a businessman engineer. | ||
| Mohammed Atta, the ringleader of the September 11th attack, was an engineer. | ||
|
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So, the Muslim Brotherhood was founded... But I thought this was about poverty. | |
| That's what people on the left will always say. | ||
| It's about poverty. | ||
| They just had the same opportunity. | ||
| It has nothing to do with poverty. | ||
| It has to do with ideology. | ||
| This is why you see people like Osama Bin Laden leaving all their wealth, all their millions, and going living in a cave in Afghanistan. | ||
| This is why you see Al-Zawahiri, a surgeon, living in a hellhole in Afghanistan. | ||
| This is why you see people like Mohammad Atta or Ziad Jarrah, the second in command of the 9-11 attack, blow themselves up. | ||
| He was a doctor. | ||
| It has nothing to do with money. | ||
| See, we in the West think, if you have the swimming pool, the Mercedes, the nice big house and the nice zip code, why would you want to kill yourself? | ||
| Because we are judging everything according to Western values. | ||
| But the Muslim Brotherhood was a response to the ending of the caliphate by Ataturk | ||
| in 1924 in Turkey, when President Ataturk gave rights to women to vote, gave rights | ||
| to women in education, gave rights to women to choose whatever they want to do, whoever | ||
| they want to marry. | ||
| So the Muslim Brotherhood was launched. | ||
| And when it was launched, people thought, oh, Islam is over, Islam will never be resurrected. | ||
| And when it was launched, people thought, "Oh, Islam is over. | ||
| Islam will never be resurrected." | ||
| So the Muslim Brotherhood kept growing and growing and growing and organizing. | ||
| So the Muslim Brotherhood kept growing and growing and growing and organizing. | ||
| And two things happened in the Middle East that made the Islamists explode worldwide. | ||
| And two things happened in the Middle East that made the Islamists explode worldwide—the | ||
| The discovery of oil in the Middle East, and then Ayatollah Khomeini coming to power in 1979. | ||
| That gave them the money and the spiritual covering to explode on the world stage. | ||
| In 1982, the Muslim Brotherhood wrote a plan, a 100-year plan for radical Islam | ||
| to infiltrate and dominate the West and establish an Islamic government on Earth. | ||
| Yeah, and this is what your video's about that I've been mentioning. | ||
| In the counter-terrorism circles, the plan became known as The Project. | ||
| And what makes The Project so unique is it gives tactics and proposals as to how to use our open-mindedness against us, how to use our multiculturalism against us. | ||
| They even talk about certain words that will make Westerners lay down their guard, words like diversity. | ||
| Tolerance. | ||
| Multiculturalism. | ||
| Interfaith. | ||
| Does that sound familiar? | ||
| Right now, I mean the word Islamophobia, which is a completely nonsensical idea. | ||
| No one's afraid of the word Islam as an ideology. | ||
| You're afraid of what the adherents might do. | ||
| By the way, Islamophobia was concocted at the United Nations by a group of Muslim organizations saying, well, we need to vilify anybody who's going to talk about Islam or criticize Islam. | ||
| Well, we in the West debate. | ||
| I mean, people like us who come from the Judeo-Christian world, the Bible says, come, let's reason together. | ||
| And Judaism, they have people that go to seminary, all they do all day long is debate. | ||
| That's their job. | ||
| That's debate! | ||
| And that being said, I don't think that anything that we're doing here is based in any sort of biblical ground. | ||
| You're giving me secular thoughts on historical events. | ||
| Absolutely, exactly. | ||
| So the Muslim Brotherhood started exploding, and they started in this plan talking about how to get democratically Muslim elected to the West, on all levels of the West. | ||
| How to get Muslim interns in governmental offices so they can have an insider view as to how policy is done on the highest levels. | ||
| They talk about how to work with like-minded organizations, progressive organizations, that share similar goals. | ||
| This is why when you see the ACLU working with CARE, You scratch your head and you think to yourself, how can these two people work together? | ||
| You've got a radical lefty organization, you know, pro-gay, pro-abortion, pro-this, pro-that. | ||
| You've got the Islamist on the other hand, but the ACLU is being used as the useful idiot at the hands of people like Kerr. | ||
| So that is incredibly obvious to me. | ||
| I mean, that what they're doing, this is intersectionality, this is the idea that we're all sort of oppressed, now we happen to like gays and women, and for care, or for some of these other organizations, we're gonna pretend as long as we need to so that we can gain power. | ||
| I think that's a great transition to your good friend Linda Sarsour. | ||
| Sarsour, by the way, what does it mean in Arabic? | ||
| Cockroach. - Cockroach. | ||
| Cockroach, okay. | ||
| I like you had to think for a second. | ||
| Cockroach, okay. | ||
| So let's talk about this woman because she's become a hero of the left. | ||
| I see Bernie tweeting, you know, I stand with Linda. | ||
| I've seen people like Van Jones claiming that her critics are bigots. | ||
| She really does not like you. | ||
| I mean, she had a tweet from a couple years ago that was genuinely threatening you if you were to live in her city, which maybe we'll put the tweet up. | ||
| And then she tweeted perhaps the most vile thing that I've seen on Twitter, which was something to the effect of that she would take away, that women like you, like Brigitte and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, don't deserve their vaginas, and that she would take them away. | ||
| Now, of course she knows that Ayaan has underwent female genital mutilation. | ||
| That Ayaan has lived her whole life to defend the Western principles that you're talking about here. | ||
| So this is pretty obvious to anyone that knows anything about this. | ||
| It's clear to me what she's doing. | ||
| She does not care about these women's organizations and yet she's lauded as a hero of the women's rights movement while they're out there in vagina hats. | ||
| What is going on here? | ||
| Linda Sarsour is a very smart woman. | ||
| I have to give her that. | ||
| Because she is a master manipulator knowing exactly how to manipulate the gullibles to advance her cause. | ||
| Linda Sarsour wants Sharia law If it was up to her to be the law of the land in the United States. | ||
| As a matter of fact, she tweeted many times about how wonderful Sharia law is. | ||
| How lucky women in Saudi Arabia to live under Sharia law just because they have maternity leave much better than us. | ||
| Did you see the response from the Israeli ambassador or something? | ||
|
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I know. | |
| It was brilliant. | ||
| She said something about how well under Sharia law in Saudi Arabia they have three months maternity leave. | ||
| The Israeli ambassador wrote back, he said, well our women have four months and they can drive. | ||
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Yeah, I like that! | |
| But what she doesn't mention is that these women in Saudi Arabia, yeah, they may have maternity leave, but were they impregnated by consensual sex or were they raped by their husbands? | ||
| Were they beaten into having sex by their husband? | ||
| This is where the touchy subject that Americans don't feel comfortable talking about even on television or radio or anywhere. | ||
| I think we can be more open even talking on the internet because this is an internet show where we can actually talk about, you know, semi-truths. | ||
| We can't even be too open. | ||
| But women in Saudi Arabia are nothing but chattel. | ||
| That's what the Quran talks about women. | ||
| Women are second hand. | ||
| The Hadith says women are like your field. | ||
| Plow into them as if you plow into your field. | ||
| Treat them like barn animals. | ||
| The Quran looks at women as a material object to you to be used for pleasure | ||
| and to be used to take care of the household to clean. | ||
| Basically a woman is a servant, a cleaner, a factory for making babies and taking care of the babies. | ||
| That's it. | ||
| And supplying the pleasure for the husband. | ||
| The husband can divorce her by saying three words, you're divorced, you're divorced, you're divorced. | ||
| She's divorced. | ||
| No papers required. | ||
| The women have no right. | ||
| A woman's testimony is worth half of that of a man. | ||
| So, this is the type of world that Linda Sarsour wants women in the United States to live under. | ||
| But the gullible women's movement in the United States, who came out, they hate the conservative movement so much, because the conservative movement is shining a light on what Islam is all about. | ||
| Because they have gone out of their way to defend everything on the left and the Islamic agenda, that in order for them to start even looking at what Sharia law is and how women are treated, would basically make them liars, would act on their face that they have fought actually to protect these rights, so they just ignore it completely. | ||
| They don't talk about it. | ||
| So when you see at the Women's March, these women wearing the hijab, or that picture of the girl in the niqab, in an American flag niqab, which I've mentioned this before, I was in West Hollywood a couple weeks ago, which is quite literally the gayest place on earth, and there was a bunch of gay guys that sell mannequins, and they were all naked, except the one they had dressed was the niqab. | ||
| And I thought, you guys, you're in the gayest place on earth, the freest place on earth, to do whatever you want with your life, and you're fetishizing something that would undermine your entire life, if not destroy your entire life. | ||
| So when you see the hijab at the women's march and all that, and knowing what you came from, it must absolutely enrage you. | ||
| Oh, it's very sad. | ||
| It saddens me. | ||
| Because when I see what the American public is trying to sell our daughters and our future generations as acceptable without recognizing the ramification of it. | ||
| Because Americans are not seeing the ramification. | ||
| When you start seeing hijab popping into a community. | ||
| That's a sign of radicalization. | ||
| That's not a sign of progressiveness. | ||
| That's a sign of going backward. | ||
| That's actually the first sign of a radicalization of a community because that means they're becoming more devout, more following the Qur'an to the letter, oppressing women. | ||
| A woman in a hijab means you are shameful to look at, you are dirty to look at, therefore you need to be covered because you are a walking sin. | ||
| So, if I am tempted to look at you or to rape you, you made me rape you because you made me see your ankle because it flashed a little bit under the hijab, and therefore you deserve to be raped, or you deserve to be beaten, or you deserve to be abused. | ||
| What message are we sending our daughters? | ||
| Yeah, so you basically think that there's malicious intent with Sarsour herself, but basically the other groups, the gay groups and the women's groups and these other progressive groups, They just don't know what they're doing, basically. | ||
| I would assume some of them do have bad intentions, I think, but I would argue that most of them just don't even understand this alliance that ultimately will eat itself. | ||
| You can't say you're for Muslims and for gay people if those people have competing things. | ||
| Now, I would hope that most of them would forget any of their prejudices and just live together, but the idea of we're for this group and this group, it throws out all of the individuals. | ||
| We've got to be able to look at the problem we are facing as a society. | ||
| We all came to America. | ||
| America is a melting pot. | ||
| We all came from all over the world. | ||
| We came here because we love everything America stands for. | ||
| You know, I may disagree with this person passionately. | ||
| I may disagree with Linda Sarsour passionately, but I will fight to the death to make sure that she has the right to say what she needs to say. | ||
| Even though it makes my skin crawl, she has the right to do that. | ||
| And look at me, I can't even speak on college campuses. | ||
| I mean, the last college campus I spoke at was the University of Detroit at Ann Arbor. | ||
| I had to have nine security officers and a K-9 unit to sniff the auditorium for bombs an hour before I spoke. | ||
| And that's an American university. | ||
| All right, you want to find a university we can go to together? | ||
| Let's find one we can go to together and just see what happens. | ||
|
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Oh my! | |
| I would love, can you imagine you and I on the road as a team, a conservative national security expert and you as a gay conservative on national security people? | ||
| Don't expect people like us to come out and stand for what we believe in, and that is the protection of our country. | ||
| That's what we care about. | ||
| People are welcome to come here, pray to whatever God they want, build whatever house of worship they want. | ||
| We are all for that. | ||
| Our Constitution gives them the right to do that. | ||
| I don't care what rocks you believe in, as long as you don't throw those rocks at me wanting to kill me. | ||
| You know? | ||
| That's what America's all about. | ||
| So we need to shine a light on the problems and we need our people, all Americans, to develop the backbone to start saying, let's step back and look at the problem that's threatening all of us. | ||
| Under Sharia law, gays are thrown off of buildings. | ||
| Women are stoned to death. | ||
| Women are whipped, you know, if they are seen kissing a man, or if they are impregnated out of wedlock, or whatever the case may be, women are forced to marry. | ||
| Women are allowed to be raped, and even in their marriages! | ||
| Is this really what we want in our society? | ||
| A woman can be raped and she needs four witnesses to basically, for the judge to agree with her that she actually was raped? | ||
| Four male witnesses? | ||
| And by the way, we are seeing this leak into Western society. | ||
| Just in the last couple of weeks, there's been a bunch of stories about, for the first time, people are being arrested because of FGM here in the United States. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But on the protest front, now protest in and of itself is fine, but how is this all connected to what's happening with the left, like this need to silence everybody, so that for someone like you to not be able to go to a college campus? | ||
| What is that? | ||
| I mean, that must, for you, knowing from where you came, has gotta be a pretty scary thought. | ||
| It is a scary thought, because I value freedom, because I come from tyranny. | ||
| I know what it's like to be muzzled, and not be able to say what you need to say, lest you be killed. | ||
| Where I come from, any country in the Middle East, I don't care how liberal it is. | ||
| Jordan, Egypt, so I'm going to give you the top two liberal countries in the Middle East, Jordan and Egypt. | ||
| If you say anything against the king, or you demonstrate against the king, or you don't agree with something against whatever leader, you are literally rounded on the street corner and thrown in jail. | ||
| Period. | ||
| Your family will never hear from you again. | ||
| You are tortured. | ||
| You are beaten. | ||
| You are raped. | ||
| You are sodomized. | ||
| Whatever it is, nobody will come to your aid. | ||
| And that's Jordan and Egypt. | ||
| So I understand how valuable it is to be able to come together and demonstrate and protest and express our opinion freely. | ||
| And we are losing that in our country. | ||
| And the irony is, we are losing that because the left, who supposedly stands for Tolerance and multiculturalism and open-mindedness and fairness are muzzling our speech to be able to say what we need to say and let people decide for themselves. | ||
| Right, because your story should be a story that the left would love. | ||
| Because you are dark-skinned. | ||
| You've come from oppression. | ||
| You're a feminist in that you are... I don't know if you consider yourself a... | ||
| I am a feminist, absolutely. | ||
| You're a woman, you're for yourself and for other women, okay. | ||
| But all of those things, they should love your story. | ||
| And by the way, what you're saying about Jordan, we just did a fan show where I interviewed 20 people from all over the world, and I interviewed a bisexual guy in Jordan who was happy to show his face. | ||
| He said there are gay bars there, and he said the one thing that you can't, he said he's not fully out like that. | ||
| But he said that the real risk is that, it's not that you would say something about the government, it's that you'd say something about the monarchy, which is exactly what you just said. | ||
| So I'm illustrating that just to say that you're not exaggerating here, you're making the point. | ||
| No, I mean, and those are the government. | ||
| When you look at the Middle East, you can identify, I mean, now things are changing, but back up until 10 years ago, when you look at the Middle East, you're looking at tribes with flags. | ||
| Those countries which we call countries, it's tribes with flags. | ||
| You can identify every country by one royal family or one dictator. | ||
| Saudi Arabia, the royal family. | ||
| Jordan, the royal family. | ||
| Syria, Assad. | ||
| Iraq, used to be Saddam Hussein. | ||
| I mean, Egypt, Mubarak, before him was Sadat. | ||
| I mean, literally every country by one royal family, which is basically the government. | ||
| And so we need to protect freedom of speech in America. | ||
| It is the most valuable thing we have, because they're losing it in Canada. | ||
| They lost it in Canada. | ||
| They are losing it all over the world. | ||
| And we cannot allow what's happening in Europe to happen in our country. | ||
| That's why I launched Act for America, my organization. | ||
| We are now the largest national security grassroots movement in the United States, with over half | ||
| a million members and over 1,000 chapters nationwide. | ||
| And I encourage people who are watching us to join us, become active, become involved. | ||
| Our members are Christians, Jews, Atheists, Buddhists, Hindus, gays, lesbians, people who put their differences aside. | ||
| I'm guessing you've got some Muslims in there too. | ||
| Oh yeah. | ||
| Absolutely, and we have moderate Muslims speak at our national conference every year. | ||
| Of course, the left never covers that, you know. | ||
| Right, right, right. | ||
| But we are people who are bringing Americans together. | ||
| We're having a march on June 10th coming up. | ||
| It's March Against Sharia, hashtag March Against Sharia. | ||
| And we already have 17 cities scheduled to have this march, and we haven't even announced it. | ||
| Actually, this is the first place I speak about it! | ||
|
unidentified
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Great. | |
| And we want people, because it coincides with the shooting at the Orlando, against the gay club. | ||
| It also now with FGM, we are calling FGM month, the month of May, to shine a light on what's happening in the country. | ||
| Half a million girls in America are subjected and under the danger of undergoing female genital mutilation, according to the CDC. | ||
| Either have gone or are at risk of going the female genital mutilation. | ||
| Yeah, and the feminists on the left just simply won't touch this. | ||
| And meanwhile, a conservative right-wing maniac is gonna talk about this. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| But we are organizing these marches. | ||
| Anybody who wants to get involved and march with us, go to our website, actforamerica.org, send us an email, put March Against Sharia, and get involved for more information in your city. | ||
| So do you see the best way to counter this is purely just the free speech thing? | ||
| I mean, we can talk about the ins and outs all the time and we can try to expose people like Sarsour and the rest of this, but that truly that the sword that we all have to die on is the free speech thing. | ||
| Is that really the only answer to this? | ||
| It's the only answer that I can come up with, which is why I do this show the way I do it. | ||
| Free speech and activism. | ||
| Our side doesn't act. | ||
| They sit around and say, oh my god, I can't believe they're doing this at Sanford. | ||
| How could they do such a thing? | ||
| Our side doesn't show up and demonstrate. | ||
| Our side doesn't show up and really come together to show a force by presence. | ||
| You know, show up on the streets. | ||
| The left shows up by the Thousands. | ||
| The tens of thousands. | ||
| We do a rally, you see a hundred people show up. | ||
| We need more people showing up. | ||
| We need more people active and engaged. | ||
| And that's why we named the organization ACT for America. | ||
| Now, think about America. | ||
| Now, hope for America. | ||
| Now, wish for America. | ||
| But ACT for America, because without action, nothing happens. | ||
| We have a national conference coming up in Washington, D.C., October. | ||
| I encourage people to go to our website and find out more information about it. | ||
| ACT CON 2017, our national conference. | ||
| We have 16 members of Congress every year speak at our National Conference. | ||
| It's the largest gathering of Americans of all backgrounds, meeting with elected officials, coming on Washington, D.C. | ||
| To remind elected officials, national security is important. | ||
| We are fighting for the preservation of our Judeo-Christian culture, where everybody can be free, everybody can do whatever they want to do, as long as they respect the Constitution and agree that everyone is equal under the law. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting to me that you make that distinction, that you're talking about Judeo-Christian culture, but what you're really asking for is that we just be governed by our laws. | ||
| I think a lot of people, even atheists, have a struggle with this, the idea that our foundation sort of is Judeo-Christian, but you're not asking that anyone be governed under the Old Testament or the New Testament. | ||
| A purely cultural, purely secular, when you look at Western civilization, Western civilization was founded on Judeo-Christian principles. | ||
| Don't call them the Ten Commandments, call them principles. | ||
| You know, do unto others what you want others to do unto you. | ||
| We are raised with that, whether we're practicing Christians or not. | ||
| My children were raised without the mention of God in my household, complete atheists. | ||
| They didn't know anything about the Bible. | ||
| They didn't know I didn't have a Bible in the household. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| My children were raised with do unto others what you want others to do unto you. | ||
| Be kind. | ||
| Forgive your enemy. | ||
| Forgive those who trespass against you. | ||
| You're above holding a crutch. | ||
| Move forward in life. | ||
| Just release them. | ||
| Focus on the good. | ||
| Make good. | ||
| Focus your energy on making the world a better place. | ||
| Those are Judeo-Christian principles. | ||
| Yes, they are founded in the Bible. | ||
| But they are Judeo-Christian principles that everybody in the Western world lives and abides by. | ||
| And we are truly facing a clash of cultures right now. | ||
| Yeah, so speaking of that clash of cultures, I thought I'd do you a little favor here, because when I was doing research about you, if I look at your Wikipedia, not that I trust, I mean, I don't trust anyone's Wikipedia, but there is this constant theme that you're somehow anti-Muslim, that you're an anti-Muslim bigot, or something to that effect. | ||
| So I thought I would give you the chance to say something about Muslim people. | ||
| I know you make the distinction between Islam as a set of ideas, you've already briefly mentioned this, and the people. | ||
| But if you say something publicly, maybe we can counter a little of the Wikipedia, because I don't sense bigotry from you. | ||
| I sense someone that's fighting for values consistently, whether the bad ideas were coming from Jews or Christians or wherever else. | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| So let's clean it up and see if someone puts this on Wikipedia. | ||
| Let's clean it up. | ||
| You know, Wikipedia, you know, anybody can say anything they want on Wikipedia, so never ever believe Wikipedia because it's a bunch of lies. | ||
| We talk to them, we try to change the profile, they will go back, immediately some leftist and they will change it back to whatever they See, they're trying to frame people like you and me in a certain way. | ||
| This is the war of ideas right now, and they are trying to smear our reputation by coming up with their own language. | ||
| I am not anti-Muslim. | ||
| I am anti-ideology that wants to kill free people and subjugate them in the name, right now, in the name of the Islamic religion. | ||
| I would fight with the same passion if crazy Christians were trying to do that, or crazy Jews were trying to do that, or whatever crazy religion is trying to do that. | ||
| I am for the human spirit and the individuality of the human spirit. | ||
| I am the perfect example of a woman who was raised in a bomb shelter, a feminist, who came to America, is living the American dream, started her own business. | ||
| I am all I can be as a person and trying to be better and trying to make the world a better place. | ||
| I love people. | ||
| There are Muslims in this world who do not want to have anything to do with the radicals, do not want to kill anybody, have never even read the Koran. | ||
| And I'll give you this, I'll tell you this. | ||
| My daughter just had a baby. | ||
| My daughter named her baby Laila, after her Muslim best friend. | ||
| So my granddaughter is named after her Muslim best friend who was with us on Easter Sunday, just a couple weeks ago, baptizing my grandchild, and who is from Pakistan. | ||
| So you tell me, am I a racist who hates all Muslims? | ||
| Which is absolute nonsense. | ||
| But this is how the left is attacking us. | ||
| The best thing we can do is move forward doing what we do, work with moderate Muslims who love the West as much as we do, who love our values as much as we do, who love our culture as much as we do, and work together to defend our culture against the radicals who want to kill us all. | ||
| Yeah, do you think that there's something particularly perverse with the left now? | ||
| Like for someone like me that's kind of only in this for the last couple years and I used to be a progressive and then I saw what was going on. | ||
| Does it seem worse to you now or am I just kind of new to this over the last couple years? | ||
| Like 10 years ago, do you think it was this? | ||
| this bad or just that the plans maybe hadn't kicked in yet? | ||
| It was bad, but it has gotten worse. | ||
| It was bad, but it was not this violent. | ||
| And maybe because they had Obama in office, and so they didn't realize it | ||
| because people on the right on this specific issue, I'm not gonna go out and smash windows and break windows | ||
| because I disagree with the speaker. | ||
| When Obama was elected, I didn't agree with Obama, but I respected him for the position that he held. | ||
| And I said, OK, here's our president. | ||
| We're going to give him a chance. | ||
| And what an amazing country we live in that we were able to elect a black president. | ||
| This is a testimony about how great America is. | ||
| I actually cried and I did not vote for Obama, but I had tears in my eyes watching the results of the election. | ||
| Even though it was a mixed emotion of sadness, but at the same time joy that we as a great nation were able to put our differences aside and be able to elect, despite the history, a black president. | ||
| And we said, you know what? | ||
| We're going to give him the best shot. | ||
| You didn't see people like me demonstrating, breaking windows. | ||
| So the left right now is so intolerant. | ||
| It's so vicious in their attacks to the point that if you or me or Milo or Ann Coulter or Ayaan Hirsi Ali say anything about anything, we are attacked physically. | ||
| And that's a shame that we are to this point in our country. | ||
| All right, so just a couple other things, and then we're gonna do one bonus segment with you. | ||
| That part of it, that you've put yourself out there publicly, and that people say bad things, or that you've had to have police take you at a university, or whatever it is, can you just talk about the cost of that? | ||
| I know every public person doesn't like talking about it, but there is a cost, and I can see as you sit here, and smiling, and how passionate you are about all this stuff, that it's not something you focus on, but, because I think people ask me about that a lot. | ||
| You know, like, what about putting yourself out there? | ||
| People are afraid to do it, but my feeling is we need more people. | ||
| I don't think I'm anyone special. | ||
| I'm one guy that's doing something that I believe in. | ||
| But for you, just the cost of the hate. | ||
| History remembers those who made a difference. | ||
| And And I believe every single one of us in life has a destiny, has a purpose. | ||
| And every single one of us in life is shaped by the experiences that we go through and every experience is a preparation. | ||
| Every experience is a stepping stone to refine us so we can be instruments of change as adults in our world to make the world a better place. | ||
| Some of us recognize their purpose and some of us live a lifetime without ever recognizing their purpose. | ||
| But if you do recognize your purpose and you are fortunate enough to realize the gifts that you have been given, even though you have gotten these gifts through going through hell, like I did, I know that this is my opportunity to be able to speak for my nation and make a difference. | ||
| I immigrated to the land of the free and the home of the brave, and I wake up every morning and I thank God and our founding fathers That I can fight sitting in my pajamas in front of my computer and don't have to brave the snow and valley forge the way our founding fathers suffered and starved and froze and some of them died broke, giving their life and putting their life on the line to give us the freedoms that we have today. | ||
| The least we can do is preserve those freedoms for our next generation. | ||
| You never really own freedom, David. | ||
| We only take care of freedom and preserve it to the next generation. | ||
| And I am doing my part, as an American, As a brave American, in the home of the brave, to make sure I follow in the footsteps of our founding fathers and do my part as they entrusted me with that which they have created. | ||
| I feel it is my duty to make sure to preserve it, to pass it to my children and their American children and many generations to come. | ||
| That's why we fight. | ||
| And I am so fortunate that through this fight, and it is a fight for freedom, for liberty, for democracy, for security, for human rights, I am privileged to meet the most amazing people that I would never otherwise meet, like sitting here with you today, and meet friends that have become lifelong friends, literally like family. | ||
| That I would never have otherwise met if it wasn't doing for what I do. | ||
| So do I get depressed doing what I do, talking about terrorism and national security? | ||
| Of course I do. | ||
| I'm human like everybody. | ||
| Sometimes I cry. | ||
| Sometimes I'm completely depressed over things that are happening. | ||
| Sometimes I hurt deeply by people who stab me in the back or say bad things about me or even reading my Wikipedia profile. | ||
| But what keeps me so energized is the American people and the American spirit knowing that we are making a difference. | ||
| We are growing. | ||
| We are changing our country. | ||
| We are fighting. | ||
| We have a purpose. | ||
| So when you and I die on our deathbed, we can look back and we can say, I made a difference, as we take our last breath. | ||
| And that's enough for me. | ||
| Well, I actually had a couple more questions for you, but that is how you end an interview. | ||
| We're gonna do a little more for our patron audience, and I thank you for this. | ||
| This was a pleasure. | ||
|
unidentified
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Oh, thank you! | |
| Especially the end, I'm feeling very energized. | ||
| For more on Brigitte and her work, check out... Are you tearing up? | ||
| You did something... No, it's... The lights are getting me. |
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