3882 The Ugly Truth About No Go Zones | Raheem Kassam and Stefan Molyneux
"No Go Zones. That's what they're called. And while the politically correct try to deny their existence, the shocking reality of these "No Go Zones"—where Sharia law can prevail and local police stay away—can be attested to by its many victims.""Now Raheem Kassam, a courageous reporter and editor at Breitbart.com, takes us where few journalists have dared to tread—inside the No Go Zones, revealing areas that Western governments, including the United States, don't want to admit exist within their own borders.""With compelling reporting, Kassam takes you into Islamic areas you might not even know existed—communities, neighborhoods, and whole city districts from San Bernardino, California, (a No Go Zone of the mind) to Hamtramck, Michigan (essentially an Islamic colony in the Midwest); from Malmö, Sweden, to the heart of London, England—where infidels are unwelcome, Islamic law is king, and extremism grows."Raheem Kassam is the Editor in Chief of Breitbart London, a senior distinguished fellow at the Gatestone Institute and the author of “No Go Zones: How Sharia Law Is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You.”Order "No Go Zones" Now: http://www.fdrurl.com/no-go-zonesTwitter: twitter.com/RaheemKassamYour support is essential to Freedomain Radio, which is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by making a one time donation or signing up for a monthly recurring donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio here with Raheem Kassam.
He is the Editor-in-Chief of Breitbart London, a Senior Distinguished Fellow at the Gaystone Institute and the author of What We'll Be Talking About Today, No-Go Zones, How Sharia Law is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You.
You can follow him on Twitter at twitter.com forward slash Raheem Kassam.
That's R-A-H-E-E-M-K-A-S-S-A-M. We'll put all the pertinent links below.
Raheem, thank you so much for taking the time today.
Thank you for having me But instead,
it was full of some rather startling information.
So how did the book come about for you and what propelled you to do it?
Because for those who don't know, like writing a book, I mean, it makes having triplets look easy because it's a long and involved process.
So what generated the idea and sustained you through it?
It's such a great question, Stefan, because actually the book was an accident, and I'm really sorry to let you guys down with the lack of Thai fighters in there, but I figured what did end up going in there would be slightly more upsetting to the liberal left, and so I kept it in. That's always the starting point for me.
Actually, yeah, the book was a total accident.
I was just literally just catching up with a friend of mine who works at Regnery Publishing, the publisher of the book, and he turned around to me at the end of the lunch and he said, oh, you must have an idea for a book then.
Assuming that that's why I wanted to see him, I said, absolutely not.
I couldn't think of a worse person to write a book than me.
I have zero attention span.
I wouldn't be able to get it into on time.
I'd be far too expensive for you in the first instance.
And he said, no, come on, you must have an idea.
I said, I don't have any idea about what to write about.
He said, what annoys you?
And just suddenly, like a vision similar to the one Mohammed had on the mountain, I had a picture of Anderson Cooper's face in my mind talking about how there weren't these no-go zones in Europe.
And I blurted it out, and Harry Crocker at Regnery said to me, that would be an amazing book.
You have to write that book.
And I said, oh my goodness, do I really, really have to?
And I almost felt immediately like, yeah, I actually really do have to do that.
Because as you say, it's something that was classed as a myth for so very long.
And for anybody that knows those neighborhoods, for anybody that knows Europe, really, major metropolitan areas and their suburbs, we know it's not a myth.
We've lived it. We've rubbed alongside these places.
So there you go. That's how it came about.
And you are correct.
After I wrote that book, I said to myself, I will never, ever, ever write another book again.
And here I am, not five months later, already four chapters into the next one.
Yeah, no, I mean, people sort of ask me, how do you know when a book is done?
It's when you'd rather gouge your own eyes out with a plastic fork rather than read it again.
Like, then if it's good or not, if it's right, it's just, it's got to go.
Like, it's more like an exorcism than it is a release of intellectual property.
So, the question is interesting because when people look at immigration across the generations, there is of course generally a bit of an oil and water occurrence that occurs with any group that comes to a new country.
You look at expats in Japan.
Well, the British expats tend to hang out together.
And if you look at Japanese people in Canada, there's a little Japan, there's a little Italy, there's a Chinatown, there's various places where people from the first generation who maybe aren't that comfortable with English, who are trying to adapt to the culture, they kind of come over because they want opportunity and freedoms to some degree, but they kind of look back they kind of come over because they want opportunity and freedoms to some degree, but they
And then what happens is, in my experience, there's kind of a little bubble that happens with the immigrants, because let's say you come from Greece in the 1960s, you bring that chunk of Greece from the 1960s over with you, and then Greece continues to evolve in various ways, generally leftist, but Greece continues to evolve.
And you've got this kind of little broken off asteroid of 1950s or 1960s Greece that you kind of come over with.
And that's too small to you contain your children, which is why they tend to break free of that historical shard and make their way into the general culture.
And that has been the general process that has been occurring before.
But as you point out, the Pew Research Center has found that the Muslims in the West are not quite following the exact same path.
And there's a variety of reasons for that we'll get into.
But let's have the big picture overview of why you make that claim.
Well, because I lived it.
I was raised in a Muslim family.
And luckily... For me, it was a pretty liberal sect of Islam called Ishmaelism, but even so, growing up, it was a relatively ghettoized existence.
You know, we were encouraged to only hang out with people of our own similar backgrounds.
My parents immigrated from And really, we were told to make friends within that same East African Muslim community.
I remember thinking at the time that was strange.
I remember wanting to be friends with all my friends at school, with my best friend, Peter, and my other best friend, Byron, and then going into secondary school with Kev and Dave and Duncan and all these guys.
And my mother was always like, no, you know, you don't want to hang around with those people.
They'll always let you down.
You know, stick to your own. And so for me, it's very raw.
And as a child, you know, that can be quite strange and somewhat damaging.
And so walking around these areas like Tower Hamlets and like Rinkeby and Olney, I saw the very same things going on.
And I didn't necessarily think that these young people, I say young people, people could have been anywhere from From eight years old all the way up to 18, 19 years old, I didn't necessarily think that even they were picking their friends only to be of a similar background, but they had been brought up with this mindset of, these people are the other, we have to stick to our own.
And that really hasn't happened with the examples that you gave over generations.
As many people point out to me, Yeah, when the Irish came to the United States, they ghettoized, and the Italians came to the United States, they ghettoized, and when the Jews came to the United States, they ghettoized.
Yeah, but over the next two generations, they successfully integrated and moved out of these little areas, take Hamtramck in Michigan as an example, very, very heavily populated Polish migrant area, where in fact,
after the World Wars, the Poles moved, when they came back, Moved out, moved into Detroit, moved into neighboring cities, bought their own homes, became Americans by almost every, if not every sense of the word.
That's not happening in the Muslim population.
Not only does the data prove it, but the lived experiences prove it.
The lived experiences prove that, you know, young people, young Muslims in the Western world are actually more inclined towards insularity, ghettoization, and therefore extremism than their parents were.
I have a number of colleagues of mine who I grew up with, who I went to university with, who were far more radical.
I mean, I say radical. I mean fundamentalist than their parents or their grandparents were.
In fact, their grandparents and their grandparents probably moved because they didn't want to be anywhere near that sort of thing.
And that's the real sad thing about it.
And the data suggests the same thing.
I mean, when you look in the book, I've got Pew polling, I've got Ipsos Mori polling, I've got BBC polling.
You run the gamut of all of this stuff, and none of it suggests that there is integration going on.
You can even look to hypermodern examples.
Look at Germany today.
This is a nation that is welcomed Turkish and more recently Afghani, Bangladeshi, Somali and Syrian migrants.
Are they even getting jobs on the whole?
No, absolutely not.
Not even learning the language, refusing to learn the customs.
Down to the point, by the way, Where you have swimming pools that are forced to put up migrant-specific rules because they really just don't want to be a part of that society.
I don't think, by the way, that that can be picked at.
And the reason I don't think that that can be picked at is an assertion.
It's because this book has actually been out since August the 15th.
And I know that almost every single oppositionist organization, all the Soros-funded organizations, be they the Southern Poverty Law Center or the Hope Not Hates, all the news outlets, the Guardian, I know they've all read it.
And if they had read it and found flaws in it, by God, we would have heard about it by now.
Right.
And this is fascinating to me as sort of question, one of the things that you point out in the book.
So I'll just give you a little quote.
And I just wanted to point out that for a challenging subject matter, you have an elegant pen and a great way of mixing the statistical with the personal, with the historical.
And it really is a very, very good and accessible tapestry and well worth reading.
But so you write here, when Europe's migrant crisis was in full flow in 2015, instead of welcoming Syrians into Saudi Arabia, the Saudi government pledged to build 200 mosques in Germany.
These mosques and their leaders often promote anti-Western sentiment, anti-Jewish sentiment, and push a hardline interpretation of the Koran and Islamic jurisprudence, which we have come to know as Wahhabism or Salafism.
And this to me is interesting because the whole argument, other than humanitarian reasons, is what wonderful economic additions the migrants will be to the West.
Now, as you point out, there's like You know, 50 out of 100,000 sometimes getting jobs.
But if they are so economically valuable, why on earth wouldn't the Saudi government want to snap them up and use them to fuel the growth of their own economy?
Well, and that point almost speaks for itself, but here's the real kicker.
If they are the doctors and the engineers and all of that that Angela Merkel pretends they are, then what is she doing raping those countries of those people?
Right. Who's left to build?
Who's left to grow? Who's left, you know, if they're the smartest, the best, and the brightest, then who's left in the home countries?
And then, of course, what happens is when the smartest, if they are, if the smartest leave the country, which is already in trouble politically and economically, then if the smartest leave the country, the country's economy further collapses, more corruption wends its way into the political environment, and then the second smartest leave the country, and then there's just one guy left who doesn't know how to push a button.
The Poles know this.
Even the Polish government knows this.
They've experienced a brain drain from Poland to the United Kingdom.
A lot of their talented people migrated to the United Kingdom in the early 2000s and they want them back.
Well, they may be getting them sooner rather than later if things go as they seem to be.
Because the Poles, again, have been fantastic at integrating into England.
Very, very hardworking.
If I want a manual labor job done specifically in West London, for instance, you can bet your bottom dollar I'm going to a Polish builder or a Polish plumber or something like that, and they're incredibly...
They are well integrated, incredibly polite.
The prices are low. But at the same time, you know they're displacing the English worker.
They're displacing the English job.
But that's what happens when you have open borders combined with welfarism.
Combined with a regulatory state.
And it's sad, but it would be completely disingenuous to say to somebody, for me to say, or any London person to say that they haven't benefited from it.
Of course we have, but the rest of the country is suffering immensely.
Well, you may benefit in terms of lower wages and lower prices of goods, but in terms of taxes and unfunded liabilities and national debt, it simply is deferring the problem, which is one of the reasons why Well, hold on.
That's really interesting. It's a really interesting point because I'm not going to sit here and pretend that I'm not part of almost an elite, right?
The only difference between me and the CNN elite and me and the BBC elite is that I can admit that this is going on and I can admit that I can benefit from the state's profligacy in terms of both migration and all of this stuff and indeed on taxpayers' behalves.
But if you're making an average wage in the United Kingdom, you are suffering as a result of it.
If you have children in the United Kingdom, your classroom sizes are growing.
You know, your child isn't getting as good as an education.
I have a private insurance scheme in the United Kingdom, which most people don't.
And if you're going to the National Health Service, you're going to the NHS, and if you're taking public transport, your waiting times are increasing, your prices are going up, your commute is becoming more and more on top.
Not because there are migrants on it before anybody says that, but because it's more cramped, because more people are using it.
That is simply just the case.
And, you know, I came from the bottom, and I am lucky enough to have a little bit of disposable income right now, but for the people that don't, it's a nightmare scenario.
Well, the funny thing is, is that if a If a population grows organically through births of whoever's in the country, you have time to plan.
Why? Because you can see how many kids are being born.
And you know, well, you know, in a couple of years, we're going to need some school.
We're going to need some more doctors.
Like, you have time to plan. You have time to build it.
But when you have wide varieties of, and of course, if people are born domestically in general, you don't have the same language issues.
And I'm from Canada, or at least I live in Canada, so language issues are very expensive, and that's when there's just two.
When there ends up being dozens, particularly in school situations, it becomes very expensive and consumes a lot of resources that otherwise would be helping kids.
But you don't really have time to plan.
This is why the infrastructure gets so burdened.
You don't have time even to zone and build houses to accommodate.
Because, you know, if someone gets born, they need a house by the time they're 25.
You've got a quarter century to plan.
But when people are pouring across the channel hundreds of thousands of years, they need stuff now.
And there's no time to plan.
There's very little time to build.
And anything you build now is going to be swamped by next year's immigrants.
And this is what we talked about, the rape and the pillage of the nations that we're talking about these people coming from.
It also impacts the dignity of the migrant.
It's almost as if the leaders of these European nations have forgotten that these people are human beings too.
How do they end up living when they come into the Western world?
They end up living, five, six, seven, eight people, maybe even more, to a tiny little apartment in a government-funded A block that is usually run down, in some of the cases that I saw, completely dilapidated areas.
If you look at the think tanks, the NGOs, the government organizations, the big corporate CEOs that want all of this taking place, I don't see how you can describe it as anything but a servitude, a slave-like system.
So let's come at it from both ways, because the left is very reluctant to listen to us when we talk about how it impacts the native-born population.
Let's talk about how it impacts the migrants themselves.
It completely strips them of all human dignity.
Well, dumping people into a situation where they don't have the honor and dignity of productive labor often, where the West that they saw on YouTube is a mirage that they cannot reach.
The West is like one of those Tinder photos.
Hey, here's me 10 years ago and 40 pounds lighter.
They actually meet the West, and it's grim Soviet-style concrete Kleenex boxes with no capacity to have a family, no capacity to integrate, no capacity to have a job, and with a population that is somewhat alarmed at your presence.
It is not as the brochure indicates.
And of course, by the time you've done that journey and that grueling transition and spent all that money to get there, it's kind of tough to say, well, you know, maybe this was a bit of a mistake because, of course, the income you get.
I mean, I think that the average welfare in Germany pays 10 times what you can get in a manual labor job in the Middle East.
So it's way too much money, way too little opportunity, way too much growth.
And as we all know, young men without opportunities, without the capacity to start families have been a potent source of discontent, if not downright revolution in every single society throughout history.
Are you saying that East London is nothing like the French Riviera?
I think you might be right.
So, let's talk about the satellite dishes.
And we will get to the no-go zones.
You know, we're just taking the slow boat to China.
But the satellite, I think that's really fascinating too, because my mom, who's German, when we came to Canada...
She had to wait like two weeks for some thumb-eared German newspaper to show up in the local library and it really became more work than it was worth it after a while.
And now, of course, the one thing that makes integration a challenge is you can absolutely surround yourself 24-7 with all the media and language and culture Of where you came from.
And, you know, well, 19th century, there were immigrants.
Sure, there were absolutely immigrants who got no news from their home country, who got no updates.
You know, it took six weeks for the boat to get across, even with, you know, the week before's newspapers.
But now you can completely immerse yourself in everything that you came from.
And that is far easier than attempting to learn the ways, means and language of your host country.
Yes, I'd love to say that I was the first one to notice this.
I may have been the first person to write about this, but actually, during my research, I noticed that there were these huge satellite dishes mounted to almost every single balcony of every single migrant dominated apartment complex across Europe.
Then I came and did the American part of the book, which, as I say, took me out to a place called Hamtramck, a 2.1 square mile city just east of Detroit.
And I noticed the same thing.
And I thought, well, hold on a second.
There's something going on here.
My contention at the time was that that was going on, that people were moving into the country, erecting these huge satellite dishes and only consuming the news channels, the television channels from whatever their home country was.
And I started to Google around this, and I found on some obscure Google-cached archive some local people from about 10 years ago noticing the very same thing.
So the local population knew what was going on.
And isn't that always just the case?
I mean, you know, but the average person isn't listened to.
It's only, unfortunately, when you put it in a book like this and deliver it, hand deliver it, by the way, as I did to CNN Studios, That people start to pay attention.
And by the way, I've had CNN people, because I left it in their green room.
I left a copy of my book in their green room.
I've had people reach out to me since and say, hey, this is actually a really great book, and it's got this really interesting information.
And one of the things they always pick up on is the satellite thing.
And like you say, It's almost as if we are treating immigration today as we treated immigration 100 years ago, as if there hasn't been technological advancements, as if there's no television, no internet, none of this stuff.
And it seems to me like quite an easy fix, if you're talking about integration, to say to these people, look, you're living in a government-funded building You may not erect any sort of structure on the balcony.
That is against planning laws, zoning laws, health and safety.
Under whatever auspices you want to do it, you can do it.
And that, I think, would make such a huge difference.
It would make a far bigger difference than what they currently do, which is government-funded English language lessons, which nobody ends up going to, or they just end up making paper airplanes in the back of the classroom.
And by the way, it doesn't impinge upon, because I'm naturally, you know, I have this predilection against regulation, but it doesn't impact that because, let's face it, you have so much, so many vast swathes of regulations that apply anyway, that one little thing about not being able to put satellite dishes up is scarcely an affront or an attack on how people live their day-to-day lives.
It is an encouragement to be part of a wider community and a wider culture.
And, you know, I took this book into the White House.
I've presented this book in front of members of the European Parliament, and they say, well, what is the biggest takeaway that you have from us, from this book?
And I say, stop letting them put satellite dishes up.
It really is. It really, really is.
I mean, the other stuff speaks for itself.
The data in there speaks for itself.
The terror threats speak for themselves.
But it's one of those things where you fear that people actually might just gloss over that.
But it's a bigger issue than I think people realize.
Well, and of course, the backup of the internet is a way that they would get data or information without that, but it certainly would be one.
I disagree.
I disagree because the people who are doing it, the people who are putting these dishes up are not of an age.
They are older.
They are not of an age whereby it would be so easy for them to slap on a VPN onto their Google Chrome and then dial into whatever arrangement.
...in television show that they want to watch.
It makes it that much more natural and instinctive for them to sit down at the end of the day, turn the Swedish language television on, and actually start to learn the language.
And you'll find that when people start to learn the language, they are more likely to go out to a coffee shop that isn't run by another like-minded Iranian migrant and all this sort of thing.
And I know it sounds small, But it's actually the small things that would make this work a lot better.
Not by the way that I want the current levels of immigration to stay the way they are, but I haven't seen much to show us that it will be subsiding anytime soon.
Well, and another way, of course, which you mentioned earlier, Rahim, was that you have this economic moat of the welfare state, which seals people off from the need to integrate.
You know, it's funny because the leftists come from, you know, they're sympathetic a lot of times to Marx who said, he who does not toil shall not eat.
Whereas now it's like he who spends 18 hours a day on satellite TV gets all the food and health care and goodies that they want.
Because if you go to a country and you have to find some way to economically survive, then you have no choice but to integrate or go home.
To some degree or another. Not 100%, but you have to learn the language.
You have to find ways to provide economic value within the environment that you're in.
And the welfare state, of course, takes that away completely.
And that is one of my big concerns.
Because if you don't learn, I mean, it's not like there's a lot of John Locke in Arabic, you know, or a lot of sort of the Western canon of political thought and free speech and so on is not necessarily easily available in the languages that these people are coming from.
And so if you don't learn the language, it's really, really tough to get the mindset that would be necessary for productive integration.
And it's exactly what Teddy Roosevelt said and what we must demand of the immigrant.
And it's that you integrate, that you learn the language, that you assimilate, that you work, that you have something to provide.
These crazy ideas that actually...
Interestingly, the Brexit vote was won on we fought a campaign based on an Australian-style points system.
And the Australians, ironically, require that you don't have a criminal record, require that you have a skill or a trade.
Require that you don't have a long-term communicable disease and speak the language and you get points for all these other things.
And look what happened after the election of President Trump here in the United States.
You had what they now call a merit-based immigration system plan.
This is becoming a reality as far as, you know, I say mainstream politicians.
I'm not sure if you can quite call Nigel Farage and Donald Trump mainstream politicians yet, but at least the politicians that are winning across the Western world, the people who are winning in the Czech Republic, the people who are winning in Poland, the people who are in power in Hungary, they are all starting now to talk about what is effectively a merit-based or points-based immigration system.
And I would argue, and I would have this argument with anybody that wants to have it, That that both maintains the dignity of the native and the dignity of the migrant.
All right. So let me toss a little analogy your way and see if it sort of helps to explain as we sort of get closer to the no-go zone question.
So I was sort of thinking the other day that, you know, let's say we're playing a game of Monopoly.
And someone comes along and says, well, I'd like to join your game of Monopoly.
And we assume that they know the rules.
And I don't care if they have their own little piece.
You know, it doesn't really matter. They can have a dice.
They can have whatever, a piece of wood.
I don't care. As long as they're going to play by the rules, they're welcome to join the game.
However, if somebody comes along and says, I want to play checkers, well, then we can't play the two together.
If it's a different game with different rules, that is a very different situation.
And I think one of the challenges with varying degrees of intensity regarding Islam is that Islam is, of course, a religion, but it is also a legal and political system.
And I think my concern is, given that that's fairly unique among the immigrant population, that if you're coming in saying, well, I want you to have freedom to practice my religion, I'm going to submit to the criticism of the free market of ideas and open to free speech and so on, that's one thing.
But if you're coming to an existing legal structure, if you're coming to a monopoly game and wanting to play checkers...
That can't really work.
You can even adjust the game.
You know, monopolies say, oh, when we land on go, is it 200 or 400 bucks?
You can sort of negotiate that kind of stuff.
But if you're coming into a political system with a different and often opposing political or legal system, that to me seems just a little bit trickier in terms of integration.
Yeah, I think it's a great analogy.
I think in some of the most extreme cases that you see in some of these migrant-dominated neighborhoods, you might be coming to the table trying to play Monopoly.
They want to burn the Monopoly table down.
Compromise becomes a challenge.
Yeah, well, absolutely.
What I fail to understand about the political elites across the Western world, and I've preferred some ideas about why I think they're doing this, a very contentious idea, but it surrounds the fact that they don't seem to understand that people's lives, both the migrants' lives and, you know, whoever the native-born people living in these neighborhoods, Southampton, Portsmouth, you know, whatever, their lives are changing so inexorably.
I believe it genuinely stems from now, Yeah, no, I thought of that too.
Yeah, you look at Emmanuel Macron, you look at Theresa May, you look at Angela Merkel, you know, just go step by step through every major European economy.
These people don't have any what I call skin in the game.
And for some people, it's unfortunate.
Theresa May is unable to have children.
And, you know, it's not an attack on her.
Macron could have a child, but I think it would be a species of velociraptor.
So I'm not sure that that would be the same.
But you see what I mean. I mean, when there's no skin in the game, and by the way, I don't even have skin in the game yet, and I'm already het up about this.
I also believe that I'm somewhat of an anomaly in that regard.
But I mean, just imagine when I have a child, how much more intense my will to leave a better country behind than the one I inherited will be.
And it's almost as if these people just don't care.
And I look for all sorts of things.
We look at the corporate stuff.
We look at the economic stuff.
We look at... The lack of political philosophy that a lot of these people have.
We look at, in a sense, a lot of them are our second, third stock types.
You know, without the first and second world wars erasing so many of our great political and philosophical thinkers in the United Kingdom, we would have never had Tony Blair.
We would have never had to endure that because the premiership would have gone to somebody of a lot better stock and talent.
And you look at all of those things and yes there's something in all of those but I really do believe and I'm increasingly of the belief that actually it comes down to the fact that these people don't have kids.
Well, and it's spreading, of course, because I certainly know, as I'm sure you do, Rahim, people who say, well, I'm holding off having kids because I don't know where society's going.
And so it almost becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Not a lot of the immigrants, but a lot of the natives are sitting there saying, well, you know, it's really expensive and school quality is down.
I have to work. I'm not going to get to see my kids that much.
They're going to... Be in ethnically tense situations in school and, you know, the commute is getting slower and, you know, people, it's like this slow sludge of infertility that's just barring people from fecundity, which is really tragic.
Don't forget our own narcissism as well.
We're being urged to tend to and allow to grow with the tinders and the bumbles and all this kind of stuff.
We now can live these transient lives where we have a different person in our beds every other day.
And that plays into it a lot as well.
The psychology, the mentality of popular culture is by no stretch of the imagination an increasingly deviant one.
Right, right. And this kind of laxness almost, in a sense, invites a kind of strictness into the environment, just as kids will push their boundaries until they get boundaries.
So, okay, let's turn to the no-go zones.
And this is a term, as you point out, comes out of the military.
And let's start with a rough definition of the content of the book regarding no zones.
What would you call the no-go zones so people could really understand them who've never visited?
Yes. Well, and I both encourage and discourage people to visit in the sense that it is fascinating to go to these places and see what's going on there, but also make sure you're very careful and safe and are not going like I did in the middle of the night in some of these areas.
And don't smoke, as you point out.
Well, it's tough, that one.
But look, I'll get onto that in a second.
Look, what is a no-go zone?
A no-go zone for me, and I think a broadly accepted now definition of this, and by the way, even German newspapers are using this phrase now.
They wouldn't have dared two or three years ago.
I'll take some credit for it.
There are places where you would feel more naturally threatened because of your background, the color of your skin, the way you dress, perhaps even the god you pray to, than you would in any other, on average, place in that nation.
They happen to be, and you know, they are both a consequence of, but also happen to be, predominantly Muslim-populated migrant neighbourhoods across the Western world.
There might be places where the police either don't go or have to go in large numbers if they go there, where the ambulance services or fire services need a police escort, where you might have to have the approval, either directly or tacitly through a long-standing agreement,
Of a local community leader, whether that is an imam or whatever it is, that to me is a pretty decent working definition of a no-go zone and I think one that you can't really, nobody at least in the establishment media will push back on because it's relatively comprehensive and fair.
The smoking thing was very interesting because I tend to smoke both as a nervous tick, as a stress reliever, and to sort of Show that I'm not this sort of uppity, uptight English type who's strolling into a neighbourhood in a three-piece suit with my hair slicked back and things like this.
There is still some street cred associated with smoking.
And so it tends to be a fallback to, if in doubt, whip it out.
I mean, a cigarette. So wait, what you're saying is that smoking is a health measure for you.
It's a misunderstanding and aggression prevention.
You know, it may give you lung cancer in the long run, but it's not going to give you a shiv tomorrow.
Well, exactly that.
But I was told when I was walking through one of these Parisian suburbs that actually smoking will attract more attention to me than my usual tactic of standing outside of a bar and smoking to try and integrate amongst people.
And by the way, smoking like that is an old intel organization tactic as well.
We were always taught in my intelligence studies I was told not to smoke in these areas specifically because these young migrants will target you And increasingly, if you're smoking, because it gives them an in.
It gives them, oh, hey, do you have a cigarette?
You whip out a cigarette and give them a cigarette.
Then they're like, oh, hey, do you have 10 euros?
You start saying no to them, they start getting very belligerent and very angry.
And I experienced this firsthand. It wasn't with them asking for money, but it was them trying to ply me with hashish.
And usually, I'm quite amenable to being plied with hashish.
But in that circumstance, in that scenario, I was told that, firstly, you're not going to get anything like hashish.
And secondly, it's just a way of them seeing if you've got money in your pockets, then they'll rob you blind.
So it was fascinating how that sort of My long-standing familiarity tool was almost turned against me.
And it is interesting, too, because the definition that you point out and the one that I read in the book, Rahim, is...
You know, fundamentally kind of enraging.
That you sort of look at a neighborhood, and they have big, substantial neighborhoods that used to, as you point out, be populated by Polish or native white British or whatever.
And now it's like the police need permission to enter something that is supposed to be part of a country.
How the hell is it still part of...
I mean, that's sort of fundamental, you know, the police need permission to go and arrest someone in France.
They need permission to go and investigate someone in France.
So how fundamentally is it still the same country if you need permission, for all practical purposes, to enforce the rule of law in a neighborhood?
Well, a France 2 team of journalists went with some...
Muslim women around one of these Parisian suburbs and were doing a piece about how women weren't allowed into the cafes.
And they walked into the cafes with these women and a camera, a hidden camera.
And the owner said, you know, you need to get out.
No women allowed. Middle of the day in Paris, right?
And the person who was with them said, how can you say that?
This is France.
And the cafe owner laughed.
You're not in France anymore.
Right. And it was the same thing when I came out of the metro in Paris, having come back from the outskirts.
And my guide who I had with me, we walked out of the metro station and she said something along the lines of, voila, you're back in Paris.
But you're not in France.
And that really stuck with me.
That was a sure sign, if anything, that the answer to your question is they aren't part of these nations anymore.
They don't want to be part of these nations anymore.
And in a place like Hamtramck, where you can hear the call to prayer out on the streets, like I said, 2.1 square miles, right?
17 mosques is the upper count.
That's a mosque every third or fourth street corner, by the way.
When you hear the call to prayer out on the streets and you ask the local officials what they did, this was an issue going back to 2004.
What did you do to maintain the peace?
What did you do to solve this problem?
Because many residents were very unhappy about it.
They said, oh, it's fine.
We solved it. The mosques gave a $500 donation to rebuilding the local park.
So you sold your neighborhood for $500 because the call to prayer is still playing out on the streets.
Right. And this is, I mean, troubling on a whole number of levels.
Because if you have a very confident culture, it's the other thing about 19th century immigration, which is the comparison it's always made to.
The 19th century was, for better and for worse, the height of Western self-confidence in culture and political institutions and religious institutions.
You had muscular Christianity.
You had...
You know, again, better and for worse, you had this imperialistic domination of the world with the attempt to bring what was perceived to be, you know, and in some ways was sort of peace, reason, and civilization to places like India and lots of other places around the world.
So you had the height of self-confidence of Western civilization in the 19th century.
And so when other civilizations came in, they met very robust, stern, strong, self-confident, absolutist thinking.
Now, everyone's getting trained in this goopy, weird, brain-foggy relativism and subjectivism and so on.
And when you bring a very muscular and assertive ideology or belief system like Islam, and it comes crashing into, or not even crashing into, kind of sailing through...
This post-modernistic relativistic fog nonsense, it seems like that makes it all the tougher.
What the hell are they supposed to integrate into?
What self-confidence is there being displayed that would even make it desirable to do so?
This is why the phrase British Muslim really annoys me.
You are British, right?
You may practice Islam, but you're British, okay?
That's the way we should look at it, but instead we say British Muslim.
In America, they've got it even worse.
They don't say American Muslim.
They say Muslim American. Which one's coming first?
And so we're giving up the idea of identity.
We're giving up the idea, again, as Teddy Roosevelt said, that you have but one loyalty, and that is a loyalty to your home nation, the nation in which you choose to make a life.
We're giving that all away.
And here's the thing. I don't want to speak for you, but I assume that when we see all of this very strange stuff being taught to our children, you know, police going into schools teaching about what it is to be trans and all of this stuff, you and I want to cry.
I want to cry.
I think it's deeply saddening that this relativism has taken root.
But what do you think the average Imam is doing in the United Kingdom?
They're laughing. They are laughing at us.
They are laughing at the fact that we are so at war with ourselves, that we don't have a grip on reality, that our young people are being indoctrinated into this gibberish And they know it makes it much easier for them to therefore recruit because at least they have an ideology, as hateful and nasty as it is, that is firmly rooted.
And what do kids look for?
As you said earlier in this discussion, strictures, structures, discipline.
You know, and that's why, by the way, that's why conversion rates are so high as well.
They always talk about Islam, the fastest growing religion in the world.
Yeah, unfortunately, unfortunately, and I hope somebody quotes me on this, radical Islam is sexier than liberalism.
Yeah, yeah.
And the, in a sense, lack of integration to me spreads very widely and deeply across what used to be objective standards or universal standards.
You pointed out that the cafe where women aren't allowed.
You know, try starting a golf course and not allowing women.
I mean, it would be insane, right?
And so there's this horrible double standard that's occurring.
Where if you're white or non-Muslim and so on, or any of these other groups, you try and do what they do, man, you're going to be in for a rough ride.
But nobody wants to talk about that.
And this splintering of a central ethos is, to me, one of the most dangerous things that is occurring.
And I don't blame the Muslims for this at all.
I really don't. They want to do what they want to do, of course.
That's natural. But I blame the hypocrisy of the people who have these double standards.
I mean, looking at all of the horrible, horrible things that occurred to the young white British girls in the northern towns in Rotherham and so on that went on, what, 10 years, 15 years in some cases because the police were afraid of provoking racism as if Islam is a race, which is not 15 years in some cases because the police were afraid of provoking
But if this had gone the other way, you know, if white Christians had been grooming and raping Muslim girls, I mean, the skies would have parted with the rampaging thunderbolts of mainstream outrage.
And this kind of appeasement, double standards, you know, what's good for the goose is not good for the gander, that further to me splinters or reveals the impotence of Of liberalism, and I hope that we see that and can learn to robustly reinforce the values that we can find that are good and universal, because right now, they're just being splintered like there's no tomorrow.
Let me just take that analogy one step further.
What would have happened if young Muslim girls were being groomed and raped by a majority of white men or Christian men in the United Kingdom?
But then what would have happened if somebody started up a group called the Muslim Defense League?
And started to talk about this and take to the streets and protest and do all that stuff about them.
Every Labour politician, every left wing politician, even probably most right wing politicians would have stood with them side by side and said it is absolutely right that they take to the streets and protest about these issues.
As would I. I mean, if you're preying on young, if you're raping children, I'm standing with you and opposing it.
I don't care where you're from or who you are.
Quite right. But when a group like the English Defence League was founded, by the way, if you look into the actual founding of the organisation, it was never meant to be a far-right organisation that did any of that.
They expressly immediately, from their conception, rejected the British National Party and real ultra-nationalists.
It was supposed to be a group that drew attention to the rape and grooming gangs that people were seeing taking place on their streets.
And what happened to them?
They were they were mocked, maligned, called all sorts of nasty names.
Jails at times.
Yeah, absolutely.
And continue, by the way, some of its members and former members continue to be prosecuted and persecuted by the state as a result of it.
it and it's it's it's no it's no surprise then that you actually have a worsening of conditions what they call social cohesion in the United Kingdom because you are trying to shut down opposition to one of the most heinous things in the world kiddie-fiddling right and the idea that one should be attacked as a group or a culture for
Thirsting for exposure of those who are preying upon your children and destroying their lives sometimes and threatening to set them on fire and handing them out for a fistful of pounds above a curry shop.
The idea that this would be something that must be vociferously opposed is going to provoke an extreme reaction.
And in fact, it's hard to even say that it's an extreme reaction given the extremity of the provocation.
If you can't protect your children You, whoever you are, have no future.
And when people are cornered in this kind of way, there's going to be blowback.
And I wish it wasn't the case, but it is inevitable.
And then, of course, everybody's going to focus on the blowback and not the provocation.
And it's going to then continue to escalate.
And this pendulum is going to swing wilder and wilder and wilder, as we've seen happen before in human history.
And not one person in a hundred is going to have any understanding of what caused it or how to alleviate it.
Yes. And I'm cognizant of the fact that mostly we've been speaking of problems.
There are solutions staring us in the face here.
Yeah, let's talk about some of that.
I mean, we'll talk another time perhaps about Sweden, but I need to gird my loins for that conversation because that's pretty gruesome.
But yeah, so let's talk about...
Some of the positives that come out at the end of your book, some of the solutions, some of the approaches, because we're all in this together.
We're going to have to find some way to get...
No one's going back to their corners.
Everybody has to find some way to live together in relative peace and harmony.
So let's talk about some steps that we can take in that direction.
Yeah, well, I think, look, the largest one for me now, and I've been increasingly convinced of this since publication of the book as well, Is driving the wedge between Muslims and former Muslims and ex-Muslims.
And by the way, reformists as well, of which the number is increasing.
There is a method out there, an attempt out there by Muslim groups and Southern Poverty Law Centers hand in hand with all of these other hard left organizations to try and shut down debate as it I'm sorry to interrupt,
but I've seen reformist Muslims and former Muslims be described as anti-Muslim, as Islamophobic, being painted with tar brushes, which is, to me, heinous, because all belief systems need refinement and improvement at all times.
I mean, mine, yours, Islam, Christianity, democracy, republic, everything needs property rights, everything needs refinement and reformation on a continual basis.
The science is never done, philosophy is never done, we always have things to improve, and those who are hard at work doing that should not be demonized in any way, shape, or form.
Sorry, sorry to interrupt your great speech, but I just wanted to get that point across.
You're absolutely correct, and I'm glad you did say that because I was going to leap just from there to the more extreme, which is House Muslim, to go along with House Negro, that black people were often called if they collaborated with white people.
They've called them House Muslims.
I've been called that. Uncle Tom's as well.
We've seen in recent years converts away from Islam who have had their cars firebombed, their houses attacked.
One man recently had himself attacked because he was wearing a poppy.
Now you're Canadian, you're in Canada, you know what a poppy symbolizes.
It is a memorial to our war dead, the people.
And Muslims attacked him for wearing that.
And this was a Muslim himself.
And this is all going on, and we don't address it.
And the only people, the only, I'm afraid, the only credible voices as far as most moderate lefties are going to be concerned with this is reformist, are reformist and ex-Muslims.
And, you know, that doesn't mean to say that I don't appreciate the work that non-former Muslims or non-Muslims are doing in this area.
But as far as convincing the people who were sort of inclined just because of the culture, it means, I'm afraid, I hate to say this because I hate trading off my name.
It means a lot more that Rahim Hassan wrote this book than it would if Dave Smith wrote this book.
And that's the wedge we need to drive.
There are increasingly a number of people out there.
I get messages almost every day.
From Hassan's and Mohammed's and Naseem's and all of that saying to me, you know, you're so brave for what you do.
I'm a former Muslim. My parents don't know about it yet.
Or I'm a gay Muslim. I don't feel comfortable saying it out there yet.
We have to encourage these people to speak out and speak up.
And the reason they don't is because they're not all as braggadocious as I am.
They're not all as loudmouthed as I am.
And a lot of them genuinely fear being attacked, being set upon, being excommunicated by their friends, their families, their communities, and the horror stories that we hear about the Assad shahs of the world, this Glaswegian shopkeeper who was murdered by the way the left called it an Islamophobic attack.
It then turned out to be a fundamentalist Muslim attacking an Ahmadiyya Muslim.
And so that, for me, is the most important way we're going to move forward with this, is to build up and empower especially former Muslim voices.
I don't really buy all the reformists, by the way.
There are people out there that I think are just doing it for the clicks.
But the ex-Muslim voices, they are the most powerful voice in this.
And we have done nothing, I think, as our governments have done nothing to build those voices up and to give them a platform.
You know, you have the police going into schools talking about Islam to young students.
Why don't they take an ex-Muslim in with them as well?
I'll say something hopefully not too startling, but this is sort of my hope.
What is called the clash of civilizations does not have to be disastrous.
It does not have to result in wars or civil wars.
The clash of civilizations, if you look at the fertility that emerged from the Christian clash with the ancient Greek philosophers, you know, the fact that they did not simply...
Brand Socrates and Plato, and particularly Aristotle as heretics, but attempted to find ways to merge Christian otherworldliness with Greek materialism, produced the scientific revolution.
If people are willing to negotiate and people are willing to listen, what is called the clash of civilizations can be enormously positive to the Muslim world and to the non-Muslim world.
And that is my frustration at the moment.
I hugely respect the Muslim criticisms of foreign policy in the West.
And by God, they've got a right to be angry.
When you've got Barack Obama dropping 100,000 bombs on Muslim countries, when you see the destruction of Muslim countries, Libya, Syria, Iraq, and so on, by God, they've got reasons to be angry.
And we should damn well listen to that and reform ourselves.
The criticisms of relativism and subjectivism and all of this loosey-goosey promiscuity and so on, yes, there's a great set of points to be made and we should listen.
However, on the other side, there is separation of church and state.
There is free speech. There is engaging in the productive marketplace of ideas.
These are ideas that can cross-pollinate and we can end up with something fantastic if we're willing to negotiate.
Now, those who aren't willing to negotiate on both sides, to me, are in very much interfering in what could be potentially One of the most productive conversations that mankind has ever experienced.
And that is my frustration at the moment is the undertow of people saying extremism and violence.
And this comes from the left. This comes from the relativists on the left as well as the extremists in the Muslim world or other fundamentalists.
And we have a negotiation to have.
We're all in the West trying to live together.
This can be the kind of friction that breaks the wheel or the kind of friction that produces sparks of enlightenment.
And as long as we can continue to negotiate, I think nothing but good can come out of it.
And my frustration is how that negotiation process is being undermined by extremists from every stripe.
I tend to disagree.
By the way, I agree about the foreign policy stuff.
I agree with your naivety, I'm afraid.
But those things are so small in the grand scheme of things when we talk about Islam.
There is very little room for manoeuvre, and there is one reason there is very little room for manoeuvre.
Ah. And unless we get our heads around that, I mean, this is a specific version that will give you four or five different interpretations as you go through it.
But this, the Quran and the Hadith, those are the reasons why, you know, you could kowtow to every single foreign policy-laden demand from the Muslim world.
It wouldn't make a difference because this book tells them that they are destined to rule the world.
There is no overcoming that.
Do you not think that some of the recent potential moves by the Saudi clergy, by the Saudi imams, to soften some of the aggression in the ideologies that they talk about has some potential?
Not really, because the...
Look, I appreciate the fact that in the last couple of weeks, especially, we've heard from the Saudis saying, oh, you know, we want to moderate and we want to project a different type of Islam than we've been projecting.
Well, as far as I'm concerned, firstly, that's an admission of guilt.
That's an admission that for a very long time they have been doing something incredibly nefarious and there has been no comeuppance for them as a result of it.
In fact, if anything, they've benefited from it.
They've benefited from it in the West and they've benefited from it at home because we still keep selling them arms and keep buddy-buddying up with them on the world stage.
And I understand the geopolitical necessity To do that in the face of countries like Qatar and Iran, my enemy's enemy is my friend.
But what will tell me that there is a real adherence to that pledge, that promise to moderate, is if the bulldozers are taken to the most I'm afraid it's all a bunch of what my colleague Steve Bannon calls happy talk.
Well, or if at least the Saudi government were to cease their incessant funding of some of the more extremist elements in the West, that would be perhaps a good faith gesture that might not go unremarked upon?
You'd have to show me a mountain of evidence for me to even believe that it's beginning.
The entire, the nation and the religion that the nation is predicated upon, its survival, and as the Quran says, its need for domination, its will for domination, its belief in domination, is predicated on the things that they've been doing.
So why would they suddenly do an about-faith?
Unless they've started to say, well actually Islam and the Quran are imperfect.
And that's a conversation I'm willing to hear, but I don't think you're going to be hearing that from any of the Saudi rulers.
Right, right. Well, I want to strongly encourage people to pick up Raheem's book.
It's called No Go Zones, How Sharia Law is Coming to a Neighborhood Near You.
We will put the link to it below.
It is well worth reading. I appreciate the depth and breadth of the conversation.
I also appreciate being schooled by an expert.
No, always a great pleasure.
I thrill to that.
I didn't think I'd end up being to your right on this.
So, you can follow Twitter on twitter.com forward slash Rahim Kassam.
That's R-A-H-E-E-M-K-A-S-S-A-M. A great pleasure to chat with you.
I wish you the very best. Oh, do tell us, do tell us about the new book.
What's it on? Oh, that's a little bit of a secret at the moment, but I'll put it this way.
I'm doing a lot of traveling with the executive chairman of Breitbart News, and the book will be out ahead of the midterm elections in the United States next year.
So that should give you a little bit of an insight into what it's about.
All right. There's Raheem showing us a little bit of literary leg to whet our appetite for the next book.
Thanks so much, my friend. It was a great pleasure chatting.
