Robert Spencer is a writer, speaker, and podcaster who has been deemed dangerous by the U.S. government for his anti-Islamic views. He has been banned from entering the United Kingdom and the United States, and has been blacklisted by Mastercard for his criticism of Islam.
00:02:08.440It is kind of a Muslim travel ban, except it's the opposite.
00:02:12.000I criticized Islam, and thus I was banned from entering Britain, yes.
00:02:16.080What is that like to not be allowed in the country of England, a Great Britain?
00:02:20.680It's a nuisance because American Airlines is tied to British Airways.
00:02:24.560And so every time I fly American Airlines, which I avoid at all costs, they give me the third degree to make sure I'm not going to somehow sneak into Britain.
00:02:50.060But Patreon dropped me because MasterCard complained, and MasterCard only explained that it did so because I had illegal content on my website.
00:03:00.300Now, the only conceivable way I could have illegal content on my website is by the criteria of Islamic law, not American law.
00:03:09.240Are you concerned about what I called the digital ghettoization of ideas?
00:03:17.220I'm deeply concerned about that, as very much so.
00:03:19.940I wrote a book a few years back, as a matter of fact, called The Complete Infidel's Guide to Free Speech and Its Enemies, and warned about what's happening, that the social media giants have more control over the means of communication than the Soviet Union had at its height.
00:03:35.680And if you get the banking industry, you're on an island.
00:03:44.720Why, with you, why, what is it that you say that is so dangerous?
00:03:52.020Well, when the U.K. banned me, they kindly sent a letter that explained that I had said in a 2002 documentary that Islam has doctrines of warfare against unbelievers.
00:04:04.660And because I was likely to repeat that in Britain, I was not to be allowed in.
00:04:09.100Now, Islam does have doctrines of warfare against unbelievers, but truth was no defense.
00:04:52.280I said that both the Israelis and Palestinians had committed inexcusable acts.
00:04:57.940And that gave the impression that I was considering them to be equivalent, when in reality, if you look at Palestinian television, there are calls for genocide on a routine basis.
00:05:07.960And incredible anti-Semitism and all sorts of horrible things people wouldn't expect would be broadcast anywhere.
00:05:16.680And there's nothing like that in Israel.
00:05:18.660What I was referring to was the fact that there have been Israeli soldiers who have committed excesses, but they were prosecuted, which is very different from how the Palestinian terrorists are actually celebrated as heroes.
00:05:49.080You know, I remember in the 90s, one time, a group of friends and I were going on vacation, and they were packing novels and such to read on the beach, and I packed the Quran.
00:06:01.020But the interest ultimately comes from my family.
00:06:04.220My grandparents were actually exiled from the Ottoman Empire in 1918.
00:06:07.980In 1918, they were given the choice of conversion to Islam or get out, which was in a certain sense generous because they could have said convert or die.
00:06:17.900Although they did kill my great-grandfather as they were leaving, the rest of the family was able to get out.
00:06:23.960Now, the funny part about this story is that when I knew my grandparents and they were very old, they would talk about how wonderful it was over there.
00:06:34.400And my grandmother and Barack Obama are the two people I know of who say that the Muslim call to prayer from the minaret is the most beautiful sound that they've ever heard.
00:06:44.240And so I would ask her, well, then why did you leave while we were exiled?
00:06:50.720I don't know if they couldn't tell me or wouldn't tell me or didn't even know themselves, maybe, all the circumstances that they were told that they had to get out.
00:07:02.620This led me right into Islam and the Quran because the history of that period in that area is all about, as I explained before, the infidels at war with Islam and how they have to be killed or they have to be exiled because we have to purify the land of them.
00:07:19.820And so this led me into reading the Quran and studying all this.
00:07:23.460And then, of course, you can't understand the Quran on its own.
00:07:26.200And so I started to study the Hadith, the Hadith of Bukhari and Muslim primarily, but also Abu Dawud ibn Majah on Nassai and the tafsir, the primary tafsir, the commentaries on the Quran of Qurtabi, the two jalals, al-Jalalain, and ibn Kathir.
00:07:42.860And then, of course, in the 90s, this became something that people wanted to know about, and I was in a position to tell them.
00:07:50.400When you read the Quran, it's important to know how to read the Quran.
00:08:06.020And the way that it is organized is essentially, but even this is not uniform, from the longest chapter to the shortest, starting with the second chapter.
00:08:15.720And then the second chapter is very long, the longest of the book.
00:08:18.900And then chapter 114, the last chapter, is very brief, just a few lines.
00:08:22.960Now, the subjects change without any notice.
00:08:29.020And also, another very great difficulty in reading the Quran is that it's as if you're having a conversation with a close friend, and you've had many shared experiences, and you don't have to explain because your friend knows what happened.
00:08:43.220And so, there are many, many things that are referred to in the Quran that are like that, where you have no idea what is being said, unless you consult the Hadith, the Tafsir, the Commentaries on the Quran, the Hadith, the Reports on the Words and Deeds of Muhammad, which contains a great deal of Tafsir, the Commentary.
00:09:01.200And so, as a result, when you're reading the Quran, you can't, you might, things will fly by, and you have no idea of their significance.
00:09:10.880Can you give us a big, significant example?
00:09:14.560One good one is chapter 66, verses 1 to 5, where Allah is scolding two of Muhammad's wives, and there is no reason given for what they have done.
00:09:28.900But he's threatening, he's saying he can divorce you and get better wives, and so you better toe the line.
00:09:35.360And there are two divergent Islamic traditions that explain what this passage is all about.
00:09:40.780One of them is that he was eating honey, and it was on his breath, and he lied about it because his wife didn't like that he ate honey and had bad breath.
00:09:52.140And the other story, which is more likely because it is a bit more damaging, and so it's unlikely that it would have been invented,
00:09:59.920is that he skipped the turn of one of the wives who was angry.
00:10:06.160He stayed the night with one of his wives each day, and they had a rotation.
00:10:12.960But he spent the night with Mary the Copte, his concubine, instead of Hafsa, one of his wives.
00:10:18.860And then Hafsa and Aisha, another one of his wives, were angry, and they are being scolded in this passage.
00:10:26.360The passage really makes very little sense, unless you know the background.
00:10:30.920And if you don't know it, then you might read this and think, this is just incomprehensible.
00:10:38.020And there are many, many passages of this kind.
00:13:18.100Khalifa is successor of Muhammad as the military, political, and spiritual leader of the Muslims.
00:13:23.440And if you go through the book from the beginning, you have the period of the four rightly guided caliphs, Abu Bakr, Umar, Uthman, and Ali, the four immediate successors of Muhammad.
00:13:34.060Then you have the great Islamic empires, which were all caliphates, the Umayyads, the Abbasids, the Ottomans, the caliphate of Cordoba in Spain, the Fatimid Shiite caliphate in Egypt.
00:13:46.440And these were all the engines of the jihad, because in Sunni Islamic theology, and remember the Sunnis are 85 to 90 percent of Muslims, the caliph is the only one who's authorized to declare offensive jihad.
00:13:59.860So since 1924, when the secular Turkish government abolished the Ottoman caliphate, all the jihad groups, as well as groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood, have been trying to restore the caliphate so that offensive jihad can again be waged and that the Muslim world will ostensibly be reunited instead of being disunited in all these artificial nation states that the jihad groups blamed the West for establishing.
00:14:26.980So the caliph is like Moses or a prophet.
00:14:31.560He's not a prophet in the sense that he can bring new revelation.
00:14:39.700So, but he speaks for, once that's established, then he speaks for all Muslims and can call, if they're attacked, if the caliphate is attacked, he can call on all Muslims to come and they feel that it's their duty to come?
00:14:53.200Defensive jihad, you don't even need a caliph for.
00:14:55.200Defensive jihad, when a Muslim land is attacked, that's why they're fighting now.
00:14:59.7809-11, as far as they're concerned, was defensive.
00:15:02.260And this is why jihadis like Osama bin Laden, they always list all these grievances, all these terrible things that the West has supposedly done, because that situates their jihad as defensive and justifies it.
00:15:13.700The defensive jihad is obligatory upon all Muslims everywhere in the world to aid in some way if a Muslim land is attacked.
00:15:21.640But the offensive jihad, the Quran says in chapter 8, verse 39, fight until religion is all for Allah.
00:15:31.500It doesn't say fight if you're attacked, fight if you were just defending Muslim lands, but fight until religion is all for Allah.
00:15:38.980The offensive jihad is the province in Sunni Islamic theology of the caliph only.
00:15:44.800And so it cannot be pursued unless there's a caliph.
00:15:47.740Tell me about Muhammad, who he was, and what Islam was like when he was alive.
00:16:06.200Muhammad, according to Islamic tradition, all of this is shrouded in legend and its historicity is doubtful.
00:16:11.660But according to the traditional story, he was born in 570 and died in 632.
00:16:16.640He was an Arabian merchant in the year 610, troubled by the polytheism of his native land, his native town, Mecca, the city of the Quraysh tribe, of which he was a member.
00:16:30.620He was praying on a mountain outside Mecca, and the angel Gabriel appeared to him and told him to recite.
00:16:38.280And he said, I can't recite, I can't read.
00:16:40.440And the angel insisted that he recite.
00:17:16.960And the book was transmitted perfectly to Muhammad over those 23 years.
00:17:20.660The Qur'an becomes violent and bellicose when Muhammad emigrates from Mecca to Medina after the Qur'an rejected his claim to be a prophet and things grew very antagonistic.
00:17:33.44012 years into his prophetic ministry, around the year 622, he moved to Medina, a little ways away, and began to get revelations calling for warfare against the unbelievers.
00:17:44.900Went to war with the Quraysh, conquered them.
00:17:47.080Went to war with the other Arab tribes, conquered them.
00:17:50.500By the time of his death in 632, the Muslim armies that he had amassed and the Muslim force was able to take advantage of the exhaustion of the Byzantine and Persian empires, the great powers of the day, which had exhausted each other in a series of wars just in the decades before this.
00:18:10.720And so they were able to pour out of Arabia and conquer the Middle East and North Africa with astonishing speed.
00:18:16.260I don't know how many people understand that they believe in Jesus, they believe in Moses and the Bible and Abraham, and it is Isaac and Ishmael, correct?
00:18:34.200Tell that story for anybody who doesn't know.
00:18:35.960Well, of course, in the Bible, you have the story of Abraham and Isaac and the sacrifice where God tells Abraham to sacrifice Isaac and then stops him at the last minute, and it's taken as a sign of how great Abraham's faith was that he was willing even to sacrifice his son.
00:18:52.260In the Islamic tradition, the sacrificial son is Ishmael, not Isaac, and the Muslims are considered to be the children of Ishmael.
00:19:04.760Islam is the original religion of Adam, and it is the religion of all the prophets that are enlisted in the Bible as well as others that are not in the Bible and that are recounted in the Quran like Hud and others.
00:19:32.880Now, how could Abraham have been a Muslim when he lived before Muhammad?
00:19:36.080The premise is that all the prophets were Muslims.
00:19:39.060The original religion of mankind was Islam.
00:19:41.660But the followers of the prophets, they twisted the messages that they received from their prophets to create the religions of Judaism and Christianity.
00:19:55.120In chapter 61 or 62 of the Quran, 61-6, I think it is, he says that there's going to come a prophet after me whose name is Ahmed, Muhammad.
00:21:18.500But what he did do when he went to Medina, and this is the second part of his prophetic career,
00:21:25.980he tells his followers, first, invite the unbelievers to accept Islam.
00:21:30.740If they refuse, invite them to pay the jizya.
00:21:33.860Now, chapter 9, verse 29 of the Quran says,
00:21:35.840fight against those who do not believe in Allah or the last day, and do not forbid what he has forbidden,
00:21:41.580even if they are of the people of the book, which is the Jews and Christians primarily,
00:21:45.560until they pay the jizya with willing submission and feel themselves subdued.
00:21:49.940That jizya is a tax, that's what the word means, and the idea is that the Jews, the Christians, and the other people of the book are to live in a state of subjugation to the Muslims,
00:22:00.260paying a tax and being denied basic rights so as to remind them every day of how they have rejected the true faith,
00:22:07.480make them suffer in this world as well as in the next.
00:22:09.920But he's, so getting back to what Muhammad taught, he said, first, invite them to accept Islam.
00:22:17.100If they refuse, invite them to pay the jizya, that is to submit.
00:22:20.920And third, if they refuse both, seek Allah's help and fight them.
00:22:25.140So, it is a missionary faith, as Christianity is, but there's also an or else after the invitation to accept.
00:22:34.140If you don't accept, then you have to accept subjugation or war.
00:23:36.520They might have been, as you say, they might have been enslaving Muslims of another sect who they did not think to be sufficiently Muslim.
00:23:42.900But much more likely they were taking pagan Africans and selling them because that, as far as Islam is concerned, is completely permissible.
00:24:06.120It's solidified at 680 at the Battle of Karbala in Iraq, where Yazid, the son of Muawiyah, the Sunni caliph, is confronted by Hussein, the son of Ali, who was the previous caliph before Muawiyah.
00:24:24.020But he has been passed over, just as Ali was passed over for the caliphate.
00:24:29.500And Yazid kills Hussein, and the split was solidified forever.
00:24:34.260This is actually when you see Ashura celebrations or commemorations, when the Shiites cut their heads and the blood pours down and they whip themselves and they're all bloody.
00:24:44.260You see the horrible pictures of this sometimes.
00:24:46.060That is mourning for the death of Hussein at Karbala and punishing themselves for not being able to save him.
00:25:07.880Right from the beginning at the death of Muhammad when Abu Bakr was chosen, there was a party, a Shiite Ali, that said Ali is actually the one who was chosen by Muhammad.
00:25:20.360But Aisha, Muhammad's favorite wife, hated Ali because Aisha was at one point accused of adultery, and she was going to be executed, stoned to death.
00:25:31.160And Muhammad was very upset because he really liked this girl and his famous child bride.
00:25:37.200And Ali got irritated and said to Muhammad while Aisha was standing there, what difference does it make?
00:26:21.040In Shiite Islam, the Imamate is what corresponds to the caliphate.
00:26:26.460They don't call them caliphs, but they do consider them to be the leaders of all the Muslims, although, of course, the Sunnis, who were most of the Muslims, they discount that, and they killed most of them.
00:26:36.120But there were 12 successors of Muhammad after Ali, and they all have to be a member of Muhammad's household because Ali was Muhammad's son-in-law.
00:26:46.980He had married Fatima, Muhammad's daughter.
00:26:49.760When Ali died, the Shiites considered that their imams had to be in his family.
00:26:58.200So it was a hereditary office that was passed down from father to son.
00:27:03.220In the case of the last imam, the 12th, he was a little boy.
00:27:21.860There was a group of adults who were actually running the show for the Shiites at this time, and they claimed that he wasn't dead, that he had just gone into occultation.
00:27:40.340He's going to reappear at the end of the world when the Muslims are more persecuted than they have ever been.
00:27:45.400And so Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, when he was president of Iran, he took that very seriously.
00:27:52.620And he actually had a highway built from the city where the 12th imam is going to reappear to Tehran so he could get right to Tehran and get to work.
00:28:03.800And what he's going to do is with Jesus and the Mahdi, they're going to kill the non-Muslims or convert them, and the whole world will be Shiite Islamic.
00:28:12.560But the problem is that this is predicated on the persecution of the Muslims.
00:30:17.020I think it would be very hard to put it over because this is going to be some sort of – it has to be some sort of a numinous eschatological being,
00:30:24.320not just some kid that they pick and dress up in a robe.
00:50:41.180How is it that we get – how is it we get to knowing exactly what this is, to President Clinton being the first one, and then George W. Bush, all of them now, are coming out and saying, no, no, no, jihad is an inner struggle.
00:50:57.780There has been an extensive public relations effort.
00:51:01.040This is probably the most successful public relations propaganda effort in the history of the world.
00:51:06.760Now, maybe you could say selling Hitler to the Germans or something.
00:51:09.900I understand that that was also the use of very skillful propaganda.
00:51:12.700But this is something on that scale, that Islamic advocacy groups have been able to portray themselves as victims, to portray Muslims in the United States as a despised, persecuted, harassed, victimized class that deserves special accommodation and attention.
00:51:30.460Now, of course, no hate crimes against anybody are ever justified.
00:51:33.560But the idea that Muslims are the victims of wholesale hate crimes in the United States is sheer fiction.
00:51:38.500The FBI statistics show that they're way far down on the list of those who are commonly victims of hate crimes.
00:51:45.400And yet there's much more attention given to them because this is in order to score political points and to manipulate people into thinking that to oppose the Muslim Brotherhood groups in the United States, to oppose Islamization, to oppose Sharia, even to oppose jihad terror is somehow to endanger innocent Muslims.
00:52:02.860And thus we must not and always must say how wonderful Islam is whenever we are saying anything in this subject matter at all.
00:52:10.240So I wrote the book, It Is About Islam.
00:52:29.720I believe there is a difference between the people who, because I have friends, Zutty Jester is a good friend of mine, who, they're Muslim, they read the book the way they want to read the book, and they are, they leave out, just like many people leave out Christians, will leave out the Old Testament.
00:52:58.340And if you don't understand the relationship of the Old Testament and the New Testament, you don't, you can't say that you're fully Christian because you don't understand Jesus was a Jew.
00:53:16.400Or Jews that read the Old Testament, and, you know, they're not taking an eye for an eye because they have, they read it in a different way.
00:53:24.320The difference here is there are two groups, in my opinion, those who are Muslim and read it the way they want to read it in a more of a reformed modern way.
00:53:37.620And those who are Islamists, who say, that's not what the book says, and it has to be this way, because it's always been this way, and we will take you back to the 7th century, because that's what it says.
00:54:09.520It's kind of like the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks.
00:54:11.840The Bolsheviks were never the majority party in Russia, but they were the organized, energized, vanguard, and they were ruthless.
00:54:18.540And so they were able to carry the day.
00:54:20.720And you may be able to say that jihadis were never the majority of Muslims, but they are organized, energized, and ruthless, and they have carried the day.
00:54:30.260And also, as you have noted, they do have the texts on their side, and so they can always point to Muslims who don't pay attention to those inconvenient passages and say, you're not being loyal, you are not being obedient.
00:54:41.940I don't think Zudy Jasser has any doubt that if the peaceful Muslims don't stand together, he'll be the first to go.
00:54:54.560I mean, they'll come, you know, and yeah, sure, they'll blow us all up, but when they make a long list, first on Santa's naughty list, are people who are saying, no, that's not what Islam is.
00:55:06.180Well, look at Mahmoud Muhammad Taha, 1985 in Sudan.
00:55:09.760He taught that the peaceful passages of the Quran should supersede the violent ones instead of the other way around, which is traditionally the way that they've been interpreted in Islamic theology.
00:55:19.340And he was hanged as a heretic by the Sudanese government.
00:55:21.700There's also a great man in Morocco right now, Ahmed Asid, who is a human rights activist who has said the same thing.
00:55:28.860And because he said the same thing, that the peaceful passages should supersede the violent ones instead of the other way around, he now lives under death threat.
00:55:36.400They've been fatwas calling for his head, and he can't move around freely.
00:55:39.840Explain why, explain why that, that law, how that law works, that's the most violent.
00:55:47.840Chapter 2, verse 106 of the Quran says, whenever we abrogate or cause to be forgotten a passage, then we will give you one that's just as good or better.
00:55:55.860Now, this is obviously sounds to me like somebody's trying to paper over his mistakes, that he's saying that I'm going to have to cancel some things that I told you before, and I'll give you some things that are better instead.
00:56:37.120Ibn Ishaq, Muhammad's first biographer, in the middle of the 8th century, wrote that there are three stages of development in the Quran's teachings on unbelievers.
00:56:47.780First, we tolerated them, but then came the commands to defend ourselves against them when they are attacking us, and then finally the command to fight until religion is all for Allah, and that's offensive jihad.
00:57:00.480That is the, he said, the situation that prevails for all time, whereas the others are only for particular places, or particular situations.
00:57:11.640If the Muslims are a weak, small, powerless group, as they were when Muhammad first started, then they preach tolerance.
00:57:18.440But then the other stages will kick in later.
00:57:20.300Can we go off the chart for just a sec?
00:57:24.180One last question, then I want to come to today.
00:57:29.040My first understanding of Islam as, you know, a man in his 50s and, you know, not paying attention most of his life was 1979.
00:58:05.360The novel, of course, is based on a genuine incident from Islamic tradition in which Muhammad was very troubled by the fact that he had not been able to convince the Quraysh, his native tribe, to believe in his prophetic claim.
01:00:35.520So you don't really know if that happened.
01:00:37.260I actually wrote a book a few years ago called Did Muhammad Exist, where I examined this at length.
01:00:42.860And I think that there was probably a person named Muhammad, but that virtually everything we know about him is legend that we cannot verify.
01:00:50.800Because for the first 60 years of the Islamic conquests, there's no mention of a new religion, a new prophet, or a new holy book.
01:01:00.780For example, when they entered Jerusalem, Sophronius, the patriarch of Jerusalem, wrote numerous sermons and essays about the conquerors and how they had laid waste and burned churches and how terrible what had happened was.
01:01:13.120And he never mentions Islam, the Quran, or Muhammad.
01:01:16.660He never gives a hint that they have a new religion.
01:01:18.820And that is universally true of all the early historians who write about this at the time.
01:01:24.740It's only much later we start hearing about Muhammad and Islam.
01:01:28.740And even later than that, do we get all these stories?
01:01:32.220And people say, well, it's just oral tradition.
01:01:35.760But if it were oral tradition, then somebody would have at least mentioned its existence.
01:01:39.520But wouldn't have, I mean, couldn't you say the same thing?
01:01:41.380I mean, the only outside evidence of Christ from the time is Josephus.
01:02:12.900Christianity may be complete fiction, but that's irrelevant to the question at hand.
01:02:17.760But in any case, now that we're in it, the fact is that the New Testament writings were all extant and were being quoted by Clement of Rome,
01:02:27.120Ignatius of Antioch, the people at the end of the first century and the beginning of the second.
01:02:31.440And they got some of the New Testament and they're quoting it.
01:02:34.760But there isn't any internal evidence for Islam.
01:02:37.880There is no writing from the first 60 years.
01:02:41.300There isn't – people say, well, the Koran was written then.
01:05:17.920Because the defendant's lawyers claimed that the whole thing was about Islamophobia, and the judge fell for it.
01:05:25.600This shows this power, what I was talking about, about this victimhood posturing.
01:05:29.420It's very powerful, and it can get you things like getting these people free when they should not have been freed.
01:05:35.800But no thinking person can see the guy who testified as a character reference for the blind shake and was like, no, no, he's just doing what Allah told him to do.
01:05:46.740And his grandchildren have to be moved to the middle of the desert because they're too radical for Western society.
01:05:57.980That his son is raising the grandchildren in this training camp, and there's a body buried.
01:06:05.420What part of this doesn't reason click in and go, you know what?
01:06:10.960That probably had – there's probably a lot of truth here.
01:06:15.460It's been ingrained in people now, especially on the left.
01:06:25.520Siraj Wahaj, the unindicted co-conspirator in the World Trade Center bombing.
01:06:30.420He's one of the most prominent and respected imams in the country.
01:06:33.140He gave the first Muslim prayer in the House of Representatives, and he's spoken at all the major Muslim organizations, CARE, ISNA, all of them.
01:06:42.780And Linda Sarsour calls him her mentor.
01:08:04.480But there was a young man in the audience.
01:08:06.440He had a sign that said, Queers Against Islamophobia.
01:08:09.140And so, I had a manual of Islamic law with me, certified by al-Azhar, the foremost institution in Sunni Islam, where Barack Obama went to give his outreach speech to the Muslim world in 2009.
01:08:21.520And I opened it up and I started to read about how the homosexual should be killed, should be put to death, both him who gives and him who receives, the whole thing, very set out.
01:08:31.160And the whole place started to boo and boo and boo.
01:08:38.300And a young man came over in a kufi and a kaftan with the beard, and he hugged the Queers Against Islamophobia guy and said, This is my best friend.
01:08:48.180And I said, Look, I didn't originate these laws.
01:08:52.040Gays are being killed, put to death in Iran, in Saudi Arabia, in the ISIS domains, elsewhere, anywhere where Sharia is implemented.
01:09:00.100And you're completely inured to reality here.
01:09:05.160But the thing is, I think that the left in America really does hate America so much that they see this force that has been arrayed against Judeo-Christian Western civilization for 1,400 years, and they see an ally.
01:10:34.740And I've just posted a video just recently of a woman in Saudi Arabia, I believe it was, the four women in a car, in a car, not wearing the hijab.
01:10:49.160And this woman stops, gets out, and she just starts berating them.
01:10:55.300And, you know, I think she's saying you should die for what they're doing.
01:10:59.520They're getting 10-year prison sentences in Iran for going without the hijab in public, which many women are doing, despite the risks, because they hate the regime so much.
01:11:08.200And yet this – and so that – they're the real women's rights heroes.
01:11:11.580But the idea that to wear the hijab is somehow compatible with feminism is a misunderstanding of what – you know the hijab is – what the hijab is for.
01:11:29.900So she's liable to get killed if the man goes ahead and rapes her anyway or attacks her.
01:11:34.680And so it's an extraordinarily misogynist statement, not a feminist one at all.
01:11:40.720I've heard some things that – I think it would make some people angry, some things that people would maybe disagree with, some things that people should do their own homework and go, wait a minute, he said this.
01:11:54.180Let me look that up and go to original sources.
01:11:57.460But I haven't heard anything here that makes me say – well, I don't know anything that would make me say this – that you should be silenced.
01:12:09.540Well, obviously I don't think I should.
01:12:11.380But I think that anyone who speaks honestly about the nature of this threat and the fact that there are elements of Islam that give rise to violence – this doesn't mean every Muslim is violent, but that the ones who are are able to justify their actions by recourse to the holy texts.
01:12:26.080Anybody who speaks honestly about that is nowadays systematically targeted and vilified with an attempt to destroy and completely discredit him.
01:12:45.600They may have worked under pseudonyms, but they could work.
01:12:48.840I mean I'm still doing this, but there's no chance I could get any other kind of work, even under a pseudonym, because it would be ultimately discovered and then that would be that.
01:12:57.600And the idea that speaking honestly about the derivations of the jihad threat and its nature and magnitude today renders one a social pariah, I think is ridiculous and evidence of how topsy-turvy the world is.
01:13:22.840That there is – what we have now is it's a kind of a mob, a Salem witch trials kind of atmosphere, hysteria, and you are either in the group or you're not, and if you're not, you must be destroyed.
01:14:01.640That strain of anti-intellectualism, it runs all the way through Islam, I think attributable to the centrality of the Quran and the idea that it's the perfect book that has everything in it that you need.