In order to fight the threat of Islamism, three myths must die: 1. Only a negligible minority of Muslims are Islamists. 2. Not everyone who is non-violent is a non-Islamist. 3. The West has no part in pushing Islamic reform inside Islam. That's why it was so egregious for President Obama to simply declare an "Arab Spring" and do nothing to support actual moderate forces. Finally, we must fight the perception that we can't kill enough terrorists to make a difference. We certainly can, and we must also take measures designed to protect ourselves at home, including President Trump's extreme vetting. But the true battle, the one that will last decades, is about what happens inside Islam itself. And we must get active in that battle. Ben Shapiro is the host of The Ben Shapiro Show on Fox News Radio and host of the conservative radio show Accuracy in the Middle East. He is a regular contributor to The Weekly Standard, The Daily Caller, and The New York Times. He is also a frequent contributor to the Financial Times, The Huffington Post, and the Wall Street Journal, and has been featured on CNN, NPR, and many other publications, including The Daily Beast, among other publications. He has a regular column on global warming and climate change, which you can read on The Daily Mail, The Atlantic, The New Yorker, and other publications on the left-wing website Global Warming, and on the BBC Radio 4, the New York Magazine. Ben is a frequent guest on the radio show on Radio New York, The Hill, and Fox News, and is a host on the Tonight Show, and CBS Radio, and he's a regular on ABC Radio, CBS Radio and CBS Evening News. and the BBC World, and BBC Radio, among many other radio stations. You can catch Ben Shapiro s latest podcast on his new show on the Four Corners, The FiveThirtyEight radio show, wherever he is available on the airwaves, and radio stations in the United States, including his website, The Four Seasons, and his new podcast on the West Wing, wherever you get the best of it is available, including on the most authentic and unfiltered, Ben Shapiro's podcast is the best, most authentic, the most modernist in the best in the most of all, you can find him on the best and most authentic in the greatest of all of his work, and most of his tweets are the most beautiful, he's got it all.
00:00:00.000The threat of Islamist terrorism is absolutely real.
00:00:02.000The attacks in London weren't unpredictable or undefined.
00:00:05.000They were carried out by a cell of terrorists who believed that global Sharia law ought to be implemented, that the Dar al-Harb, territory of war, must be turned into the Dar al-Islam by forceful means.
00:00:15.000In order to fight the threat of Islamism, three myths must immediately die, and we in the West must do all we can to put them to death.
00:00:22.000Only a negligible minority of Muslims are Islamists.
00:00:25.000It's simply not true that the vast, vast, vast, vast, vast majority of Muslims don't believe in the goals of Islamism, even if they're unwilling to participate themselves in the Jihad.
00:00:34.000Bernard Lewis explains, quote, significant numbers of Muslims are ready to approve and a few of them to apply this interpretation of this religion.
00:00:40.000As Muslim moderate Zuhdi Jasser puts it, it's a political movement of 30 to 40 percent of Muslims globally and 80 to 90 percent of establishment leadership due to petro-Islam of Saudis and Qataris.
00:00:52.000Not everyone who is non-violent is non-Islamist.
00:00:55.000President Trump has spoken out about the nature of Islamism, but he made the mistake of doing so in Saudi Arabia, ignoring the Saudi support for Wahhabism all over the planet.
00:01:04.000In doing so, he lumped Islamists in with moderates, a crucial mistake.
00:01:07.000American groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations and the Islamic Society of North America also reflect an Islamist worldview.
00:01:14.000Dr. Jalal Zubairi, director of the Center for Islamic Pluralism, says, quote, they support Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
00:01:20.000Yet these organizations are routinely utilized as points of contact for governments on the local, state, and federal level.
00:01:25.000The seedbed for terrorism is a far larger community of people who agree with terrorist views and tut-tut their means.
00:01:33.000The West has no part in pushing Islamic reform.
00:01:35.000The notion here seems to be that only the Islamic world can produce reform inside Islam.
00:01:39.000That's true, but the federal government and Western governments around the world have an obligation to help identify reformers and moderates and provide them with support while excising everyone else.
00:01:49.000This doesn't mean we can't engage in real politic, but it does mean we can't blather about the threat of Islamism while standing in the middle of Riyadh next to one of the greatest sponsors of Islamism on the planet.
00:02:00.000We took an active role in promoting democracy in Western Europe rather than communism in the aftermath of World War II.
00:02:05.000We should be playing a similar role in the Muslim world now.
00:02:07.000This is why it was so egregious for President Obama to simply declare an, quote, Arab Spring and do nothing to support actual moderate forces.
00:02:14.000Finally, we must fight the perception that we can't kill enough terrorists to make a difference.
00:02:37.000Alrighty, so, lots to talk about today.
00:02:40.000I want to talk about President Trump's tweets, I want to talk about the nature of Islamism, I want to talk about global warming, so a lot to get to today.
00:02:46.000But before we get to any of that, I first want to say thank you to our sponsors over at Texture.
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00:03:51.000Okay, so, big terror attack happens in London on Saturday.
00:03:56.000Killing seven people, wounding another 45.
00:03:58.000A group of radical Muslims apparently just walked down the center of London Bridge, started stabbing people, knifing people, attacking people, people running away.
00:04:09.000They had no capacity to defend themselves because guns are basically illegal in Britain, so people who were at bars that were under assault were actually throwing beer mugs at the terrorists.
00:04:17.000The police had to run away and come back with guns.
00:04:19.000There was an eight-minute delay between when this started and when the police were actually able to put these terrorists down.
00:04:41.000Instead of looking at that and saying, well, maybe we ought to take a look at the standards for vetting immigrants coming in from Muslim countries.
00:04:48.000Maybe we ought to look at the impact of Wahhabi money coming in and impacting the mosques.
00:04:52.000Maybe we ought to take a look at better surveillance inside the Muslim community, because not all Muslims are terrorists, but these radical terrorists are all Muslims.
00:05:00.000Instead of doing that, the left has decided it's very, very important instead to go after President Trump.
00:05:06.000Again, he just tweets what's on his mind, which is not a wonderful thing.
00:05:10.000I want to talk about whether this is effective or not in a second, but the first thing to note is that the left is using President Trump's tweets as a way of avoiding having to talk about the real issues that are cropping up inside the Islamic world.
00:06:14.000Ann Coulter, who's a big Trump supporter, obviously, she wrote in Trump We Trust, Ann Coulter said, right, this is why we elected you, to do these things, not to blather about them.
00:06:21.000And then he also tweeted, at least seven dead and 48 wounded in terror attack, and Mayor of London says there is no reason to be alarmed.
00:06:28.000And here he's talking about the mayor of London is a guy named Sadiq Khan, who is a Muslim guy who has downplayed the threat of terrorism in the recent past.
00:06:36.000The mayor of London said, there's no reason to be alarmed because of the extra police presence.
00:06:54.000Okay, and finally, do you notice that we are not having a gun debate right now?
00:06:57.000That's because they use knives in a truck.
00:06:59.000Okay, that's true, but the way that he phrases that makes it sound like it would have been better if they had guns so we could have a gun debate, which is weird, but in any case...
00:07:07.000Is any of this really egregious stuff?
00:07:12.000I'll discuss the effective point in a second, but the point I really want to make is that the left is jumping on Trump's tweets in order to go after Trump.
00:07:19.000So, you have idiot Reza Aslan on CNN, who is just an awful, awful commentator.
00:07:25.000A guy who's eaten human brains, by the way.
00:08:38.000Also, I'm weirded out by the fact that she lumps in all religion together.
00:08:41.000This is something the left likes to do so they can avoid having to talk about the real threat of radical Islam and the fact that Islam has a unique relationship with terrorism that does not exist in Christianity or Judaism.
00:09:02.000Again, anything to avoid discussing the real issues here.
00:09:05.000The real issues of what percentage of Muslims are actually radicalized, what percentage of those radicalized Muslims are actually terrorists.
00:09:11.000Susan Rice of the Obama administration.
00:09:16.000She came out from a national security advisor and she says that Trump's travel ban isolates Muslims.
00:09:21.000So she's again attacking Trump as opposed to talking about what strategy should actually be used with regard to combating radical Islam.
00:09:28.000Well, George, there's really no evidence to suggest that by banning Muslims, or banning Muslims from a particular set of six countries, that we would make ourselves here in the United States safer.
00:09:40.000And that's, I believe, one of the major reasons why the courts thus far have been very skeptical of the travel ban.
00:09:48.000Moreover, I think there's a very real risk that by
00:09:53.000Stigmatizing and isolating Muslims from particular countries and Muslims in general, that we alienate the very communities here in the United States whose cooperation we most need to detect and prevent these homegrown extremists from being able to carry out attacks.
00:10:11.000She's been all of her time arguing about the travel ban against Trump, and it's all about Trump's tweets, because if Trump hadn't said anything, then right now we'd be talking about the nature of radical Islam and what we actually have to do to fight it.
00:10:21.000But instead, because Trump tweeted all this stuff, the left is jumping on that.
00:10:24.000Sally Cohn, she tweets, political correctness.
00:10:26.000Remember, Trump tweeted a few minutes ago about political correctness being a problem.
00:10:30.000Sally Cohn tweeted, political correctness is simple idea.
00:10:33.000Everyone should be treated with equal dignity and respect.
00:10:35.000It's not cause of terrorism, it's antidote.
00:10:38.000First of all, political correctness is not the idea that everyone should be treated with equal dignity and respect.
00:10:42.000That's called the biblical golden rule.
00:10:44.000But the idea that political correctness is crippling us is because if you treat terrorists with dignity and respect, if you treat radical Islam with dignity and respect, you're actually forwarding their agenda.
00:10:54.000She says political correctness isn't the cause of terrorism, it's the antidote?
00:10:58.000Okay, number one, Islamist terrorists don't deserve respect and they're not killing Londoners because people were mean to them.
00:11:04.000But then she said, look, Oregon, between an Islamophobic attacker and men who stood up to him, who do you believe in being politically correct?
00:11:13.000And then she said, of those multicultural kids in Manchester versus Maniac Bomber, who do you think believes in treating everyone with equality and respect?
00:11:20.000Well, the good guys, but that doesn't mean that they would treat attackers and Islamists with equality and respect.
00:11:27.000And I said, please name the situation in which tolerance and equality rather than resistance has defeated hate.
00:11:33.000The point I'm making here is that tolerance and equality toward terrorists does not defeat terrorists.
00:11:38.000What political correctness does, the reason political correctness is wrong is because it insists that we apply respect and dignity to people who deserve none of them.
00:11:48.000Resistance is all—and some people were saying to me, well, you know, tolerance and equality defeated intolerance during the Civil Rights Movement.
00:11:58.000Political correctness cripples you from resisting the bad guys.
00:12:01.000But again, all of this is just about—all of this
00:12:06.000Unfortunately, is just about anti-Trumpism as opposed to anti-Islamism.
00:12:11.000They would rather have conversations about how Trump is terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible, than have conversations about what we can do to actually stop the growth of radical Islam.
00:12:21.000Now, with that said, as I say, the left continues to be the real obstacle to fighting Islam, but President Trump is not making things any easier when he does silly things.
00:12:35.000This morning he gets back on Twitter and he's been watching apparently Morning Joe and Fox and Friends and he gets back on Twitter and he issues this series of tweets.
00:12:51.000The reason that he's saying this is because he was watching Morning Joe this morning and they ran a montage of people inside the Trump administration trying to say it's not a travel ban, it is a travel ban, so now he's going to clarify because it's very important that he respond to Morning Joe, a show with presumably nine watchers, seven of whom are actually on the set.
00:13:07.000He continues, the Justice Department should have stayed with the original travel ban, not the watered-down politically correct version they submitted to Supreme Court.
00:13:15.000The Justice Department should ask for an expedited hearing of the watered-down travel ban before the Supreme Court and seek a much tougher version.
00:13:20.000In any event, we are extreme vetting people coming into the U.S.
00:13:23.000in order to help keep our country safe.
00:13:27.000And then he flipped over to Fox & Friends and tweeted, Dems are taking—he tweeted at Fox & Friends, Dems are taking forever to approve my people, including ambassadors.
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00:16:14.000As I was saying, President Trump got on Twitter this morning, and this is an ongoing problem for President Trump.
00:16:20.000I agree with many of the things that he says.
00:16:22.000The travel ban, as I've said before, I don't think it's fantastic, I don't think it's terrible, I think it's insufficient in some ways and overbroad in others.
00:16:31.000It covers some people who ought not to be covered, and it doesn't cover people coming from Britain, where these terrorists are from, or France, where many terrorists are from, or Germany, where many terrorists are from, or Saudi Arabia, where many terrorists are from, or Egypt, where many terrorists are from.
00:16:43.000It covers a series of countries that are high terror, but high terror mostly inside the country, not necessarily exporting terrorism to other countries, per se, in mass numbers.
00:16:53.000So, what Andrew McCarthy has said, and I think this is correct, is that if you actually want to stop importation of terrorists, what we actually need to focus on is less the travel ban, and more on the extreme vetting Trump talks about.
00:17:03.000And this would be increasing standards with regard to vetting of people coming into the country, screening for ideology, screening for values, screening for, yes, which mosque did you go to, and was that mosque funded by Saudi Arabia, for example?
00:17:16.000These are questions that ought to be asked.
00:17:18.000Instead, Trump is focused on this travel ban.
00:17:20.000And his tweets, as I mentioned before, are actually counterproductive.
00:17:23.000They don't help implement the travel ban that even he wants.
00:17:26.000So, in order to understand this, you need to understand that when the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals knocked down the second executive order travel ban,
00:17:33.000Their justification for doing so is they said, one, it's a Muslim ban.
00:17:37.000Two, it's the same as that first executive order that we knocked down, which was overbroad.
00:17:41.000And it's just another way of doing that backdoor, basically.
00:17:46.000He comes out and he basically says, it's a travel ban.
00:17:49.000And then he says, he links it to the London attacks.
00:17:51.000By linking it to the London attacks, which have nothing to do with any of the people from these particular countries, it makes it sound like he actually would like to implement a Muslim ban.
00:17:59.000Which is what the courts were saying, so he should shut up, because stupid.
00:18:04.000And then, for him to attack his own Justice Department, understand, the first travel ban executive order goes down in flames, and Trump comes back with a second one, right, and he signs it.
00:18:14.000His tweet, he's now saying that it's the DOJ's fault that he signed it.
00:18:21.000The Justice Department should have stayed with the original travel ban, not the watered-down, politically correct version they submitted to the Supreme Court.
00:19:06.000Is he right in his general take on radical Islam?
00:19:10.000I think he is right in his general take on radical Islam, but he's going to need to do more than that.
00:19:15.000He's going to need to implement policies that make us safe.
00:19:17.000And if he thinks the travel ban is one of those policies, then why would you go on Twitter and undermine your own legal case at the same time that you're trying to argue it?
00:19:38.000And I know everyone on our side of the aisle, everybody on the right, is just overjoyed that he's saying a lot of the things that we'd like people to say.
00:20:01.000Whether people are saying the things you want to say, the question is, are they implementing the things that will keep you safe?
00:20:05.000Right now, President Trump's tweets are actually getting in the way of that.
00:20:08.000They're giving leftists something to swivel to, instead of having to argue on the ground that Trump had chosen.
00:20:13.000Imagine for a second, the London attacks happened on Saturday.
00:20:16.000And Trump, instead of tweeting out, just tweets, thoughts and prayers with the UK.
00:20:19.000We're going to do everything we can to help.
00:20:21.000And then he waits till Monday and he gives a national address.
00:20:25.000And he says, here's what the threat of radical Islam is all about.
00:20:27.000It's about the idea of imposing Sharia law globally.
00:20:30.000It is believed by a significant percentage of Muslims all around the world.
00:20:33.000And we have to distinguish between these so-called moderate groups like Karen Isner from actual moderates like Zutty Jasser, or like some of the other people who are discussed in a book I recommended last week about moderate Islam.
00:20:46.000There are plenty of moderate Muslims, reform Muslims, but they're not the ones the government goes to.
00:21:13.000Ooh, I'm glad that he said things that need to be said.
00:21:16.000They do need to be said, but they need to be said in a smart fashion.
00:21:20.000This is not 4-H-S what he's doing right now.
00:21:22.000It is just him watching Morning Joe and tweeting, and that is not good for his agenda.
00:21:26.000If you want the agenda passed— Look, I'm going to distinguish now, okay?
00:21:29.000Are you a conservative who wants the agenda, or are you just someone who feels good because Donald Trump is punching things?
00:21:36.000If you're just a person who feels good because Donald Trump, in random fashion, like the Hulk, is just breaking things, then let me suggest to you, you're not doing your job as a conservative.
00:21:45.000Your job as a conservative is to forward policy that makes your children safer.
00:21:48.000It is his job to implement that policy.
00:21:50.000If he's undercutting the implementation because he can't control himself, that is no better than saying the wrong thing.
00:21:57.000It's slightly better, but he's saying the right thing.
00:21:59.000It's better to say the right thing than to say the wrong thing and do the wrong thing, but it's not that much better than saying the right thing and doing the wrong thing.
00:22:05.000I'd prefer that he say the right thing and do the right thing.
00:22:07.000But that would require him to actually use his prefrontal cortex as opposed to his lizard brain that just wants to lash out at things on Twitter.
00:22:14.000I'm angry not because I think he has the wrong perspective.
00:22:26.000If they came in, if Mathis and Austin came in here every day and they said, Ben, your show is just great, and then they didn't play the audio at the correct times, cut off the show at the wrong point, and didn't allow me to read my ads, I would say you're doing a crappy job, you're fired.
00:22:41.000It is really stupid to act as though Trump doesn't have a job, or that his only job is to say things, and it's really stupid if you say his only job is to say things, but then when he says things, you say, well don't take him seriously, don't take him literally, take him seriously.
00:22:52.000So is it his job to say things, or is it to do things?
00:23:21.000I know everyone is very excited, particularly the employees who are used to having Fridays sort of off.
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