Stephen and Yusuf discuss the Muslim Brotherhood's attempt to take over the world, the hijab, and why it's a bad idea to have a lesbian Muslim friend on the show. They also debate whether or not Islam should be more progressive than it is now.
00:00:41.000We've invited TalkIslam on the show, who personally issued critiques of me with millions of plays, the biggest Islamic non-profit on YouTube.
00:00:54.000Annie Cyrus on the show, who's a former Islamic child bride.
00:00:57.000We had a woman named Q, we have to call her Q, on the show, who left her husband.
00:01:01.000Again, a Sharia court here in the United States.
00:01:03.000It was not recognized by the state, abused her, tried to take the children, and she is in hiding right now because he just needs to say divorce, divorce, divorce, and she has no recourse to get her kids back.
00:01:10.000This is very common in Dearborn and in the United States.
00:01:30.000Come on, you have to acknowledge a lesbian blogger who wears a hijab is not representative of Islam.
00:01:34.000And when I say hundreds of millions and you say, but there are some who don't, it's not a valid counter-argument that you have a lesbian Muslim friend.
00:01:41.000It's like saying I have a black friend.
00:02:43.000Once upon a time in this country, you could be criminalized for having anal sex.
00:02:49.000I don't know, I didn't see that as a...
00:02:52.000Right, but the point is, we progressed, right?
00:02:54.000We progressed in our religions, we progressed in our laws, we progressed in our norms.
00:02:57.000You wouldn't have taken a snapshot of Christianity, Judaism, and the American value system at that moment in time and said, oh, you know what, that's inherently...
00:03:06.000Okay, so what snapshot should we take then to be fair to Islam?
00:04:46.000Why wouldn't you want to support, support the progressive, forward-thinking Muslims, the modern Muslims, in their efforts to reform and lead their faith in a better...
00:05:58.000Hold on, this is like when conservatives, the dumb arguments, where they go like, well, my neighborhood hasn't been hotter, so there's no global warming.
00:06:05.000It's also silly for you to say, I went to Dearborn and I didn't get beheaded, so Dearborn is a hotbed for terrorism.
00:06:12.000Not yet Jared knows, I won't bring him in because it's not fair, the restaurant that I went to was caught funneling money to Hezbollah, called Lashish, and now they just changed it to another place.
00:06:22.000It is so common in Dearborn, everybody knows it.
00:06:25.000So that's a great example for you to use.
00:06:30.000I don't understand why you don't apply the same standard to Islam as you do to Christians.
00:06:33.000I mean, you blame the Orlando shooting on Christians, the Colorado shooting on Christians, mass shootings on Christians.
00:08:08.000You know, I'm an Old Testament girl as a Jew, and the God I read about in the Old Testament was a pretty scary dude.
00:08:17.000Did some pretty awful things, you know?
00:08:20.000Drowned all of humanity at one point, firebombed all of Sodom, right?
00:08:25.000Like, did some call for people to be murdered for this and that, like, imposed some pretty harsh, you know, the penalty for, like, jealousy.
00:08:35.000And, I mean, like, really ugly, harsh penalties, right?
00:08:38.000I'm going to hold you to the question, but yes.
00:08:40.000I mean, I don't, I don't, that to me, right, is, I don't therefore say, oh, God is a right-wing force, right?
00:09:02.000Because you talk about some guy who has an inbred congregation of 12 people as though it's this grave concern.
00:09:07.000Meanwhile, you have the founder of the feast, Muhammad, who beat his wife...
00:09:12.000Who advocated for the deaths of Christians and Jews, who beheaded people, who committed mass terrorism.
00:09:17.000You're worrying about a guy with 12 people, most of whom are inbred kids with flippers, and you're not worried about the guy who 1.6 billion Muslims follow.
00:09:28.000What I'm trying to say, Stephen, is, first of all, you know, please bring on someone who actually is a believer, not a skeptic, not a critic, but who is an...
00:09:37.000I mean, I'm happy to suggest to a long list of people who are actual scholars and on the different interpretations of Muhammad.
00:09:57.000Answering your question, which is to say, first of all, this isn't just about the Westboro Baptist Church, you know as well as I do, that extreme homophobia, misogyny, all of these things have unfortunately been part of mainstream, mainstream Christianity and Judaism in their history.
00:11:07.000Because the point is, hey, isn't it great that Christianity and Judaism by and large, although not entirely, have progressed further, have moved forward.
00:11:15.000I, by the way, love this conversation because we're arguing in favor of progressivism and against these regressive and oppressive norms.
00:11:44.000And there is nothing that's a better fail-safe For that and the Constitution.
00:11:47.000And to see that usurped by people in Sharia courts as we've seen in Europe, as we've seen in the Islamic world, I think would be a catastrophe for both you and myself.
00:11:59.000We have governments keeping institutions in check, and look.
00:12:02.00075% of marriages in the UK aren't even recognized.
00:12:06.00020% of women who report it are abused in Islamic marriages.
00:12:10.000Here in the United States, half of these spousal abuse situations are settled in some form of a mosque or sharia court because they're not allowed to go to the law.
00:13:48.000A majority of Muslims do support some form of Sharia or apostasy laws or spousal abuse laws in some case where there should be recourse in a Sharia court, not in a secular court.
00:13:57.000A good point is, let's say the UAE right now.
00:15:02.000And yet you want to write off places like Uganda, which have implemented equally egregious and offensive and backwards laws under the explicit citation of Christianity with the encouragement of churches in the United States.
00:15:16.000And you say, no, no, no, not going to blame Christianity there.
00:15:41.000And in fact, anyone who doesn't believe that, not only are they a minority, but I'm going to like, I'm going to disagree You know, discourage them or disempower them or whatever by being like, oh, no, no, you're just the fringe of Islam.
00:15:52.000You're not even legitimate Islam because legitimate Islam is only this thing.
00:15:57.000And by the way, you want to know the only other group that agrees with you?
00:16:00.000That would be friggin' ISIS. That's their message.
00:16:03.000Their message is, you want to be a Muslim?
00:16:05.000This is the only way to be a Muslim is to believe these things.
00:16:30.000Now, again, the context, if you want to talk the context, and we're talking about leaders here in the United States saying, we can't allow the kind of laws, the mindset, the cultural issues that plague every Islamic country to permeate the United States if they have Europe.
00:16:43.000You've said, well, there are some progressive examples.
00:18:07.000Again, please reach out to someone like Abdullah al-Nayyim who would argue vociferously, and in fact, many scholars of Islam would say that no, in fact, that the politicization of Islam is in fact, that it's impossible, that in the Quran you can't actually take the faith and implement it politically, that it's an impossibility under the writings of the Quran.
00:18:33.000Ask me more than that, and I'm going to send you to someone else.
00:18:57.000And, again, to say that, well, in the United States, because we like our laws, therefore that's Judeo-Christian, we're sort of happy to proclaim that, but in Cuba or Venezuela, we're not going to say it's Judeo-Christian because we don't, I mean, those are also Judeo-Christian states, or in fact Christian states, right?
00:19:16.000They're influenced by Christian laws and Christian lawmakers who then adopted their beliefs into all of Latin America, right?
00:19:51.000The United States, for people who were deeply personally deistic, Christians, whatever you wanted to call them, is the same as a system of law based expressly on the Quran and Hadith and Muhammad's word.
00:20:06.000You cannot find Jesus' quotes for the laws of our country.
00:20:10.000In Latin America, where, you know, they follow a different, right, the prosperity gospel, and I mean, it's very much, right?
00:20:17.000There are laws, actually, and there are, right, strains of Christianity.
00:20:21.000They follow the prosperity gospel in Latin America?
00:21:42.000To take your exact point, talking about the United States Judeo-Christian rules.
00:21:47.000Now you're having it on both sides of the coin.
00:21:48.000You cannot compare when Islamists have power, when Muslims have power and are able to create and maintain their own systems and governments for centuries.
00:21:58.000You can't compare that with people who have no political power or legislative ability in the United States where a vast portion of them are secularized Muslim like your lesbian Muslim friend who wears a hijab who would get stoned in any Muslim country.
00:22:12.000Calling them secularized is insulting.
00:22:15.000And it's reinforcing, as I said, the ISIS notion of Islam that the only true Islam is right-wing fundamentalist Islam, number one.
00:23:05.000And so my point is, these people would be better served to acknowledge the problem, to reject the teachings of someone like Muhammad, Muhammad himself, and move into the new world.
00:23:16.000They're rejecting the fundamentalist backwards interpretations of their faith.
00:26:59.000No, I was wondering your thought on this, because we've talked about some issues.
00:27:02.000We were on the Alan Colm show on the Free For All, and even I would say someone like you, even though I think you're grossly wrong on Islam, there's a new breed of leftist LGBTQAIP who are unbelievably offended at everything.
00:27:18.000And it seems like there's been even more backlash against the gay community because of it.
00:27:24.000How have you been dealing with that lately?
00:27:26.000Because you don't strike me as that way.
00:27:27.000You're like, oh, okay, this guy's an ass, and you can ignore it, and you don't need to start a march.
00:27:33.000Uh, well, you know, I've been around the block a little bit, right?
00:27:38.000So from CNN and before that being the openly gay lefty on Fox News.
00:27:42.000So I had to develop a bit of a thick skin.
00:27:45.000But, you know, the truth is, listen, I am also a very big proponent of Treating people decently.
00:27:51.000And, you know, I do think, yes, we can always, sometimes we go too far, outrage, culture, whatever.
00:27:56.000But at the same time, it also seems like some people are trying to go out of their way to offend people and to do so to make political points.
00:28:08.000And if someone comes up to me and says, you know what, that's offensive, I'm going to try to do my best to listen with an open mind and learn.
00:28:14.000Which is, by the way, How I came to learn more about Islam.
00:28:19.000Speaking of Fox News, though, I always wondered, because you were gay.
00:28:37.000You would walk in and you'd be like, is this Abercrombie?
00:28:43.000I remember wondering, because the only lesbian I knew at Foxy, I'm like, I wonder what Sally thinks of this, because she's got to be conflicted, because she's a lesbian, but she also doesn't want to see people hired for their looks.
00:28:57.000I mean, listen, though, I don't know where to go with this one.
00:29:00.000Okay, alright, but you know what, come on.
00:29:03.000But you're Foxy, and you know, I was glad that you were a good looking dude at Foxy.
00:29:07.000Well, they always ask me to put on a sports jacket.
00:29:09.000I'm not comfortable enough in my lesbianism to say that.
00:30:27.000I ascribed it to them being backwards assholes.
00:30:30.000Yeah, the difference is we had all kinds of honor killings and stuff, and we have all kinds of wife beatings and kidnappings because of Islam in Quebec.