Transcript

RABBI JONATHAN HAUSMAN: I normally don’t like to speak about this, but a few people have imposed upon me and you’re going to have to listen to a couple of words that I have to say at the moment. My father was a decorated veteran, highly decorated, in World War Two. For those of you who are Jewish and know Zionist history, my mother was a Birkson girl. And they raised my brothers and me to believe in an ideal. And the ideal was the United States of America. Here we are, decades later, my parents have passed away, and when I sit and talk to my family, and speak to the next generation down – my nieces and my nephews and my young cousins, and they want to know about my parents, I sort of nod with a wistful feeling in my eyes – if you get my drift – and I feel sorry for the world that they’re going to inherit. And knowing how my father served this country, and knowing that my mother fought as a teenager for Jewish survival and Jewish peoplehood, I wasn’t going to sit back and do nothing. And I was – please, we asked no photographs, please. And please turn off your cell phones. Because, my friends, there are core principles that we should all hold. Whether as Jews or Americans or both. And when you consider the history, at least from a Jewish perspective, Germany, throughout central and eastern Europe, Russia, or the Jewish experience in the Middle East under Islam, or Islamic governments, and how can you sit back? We have a situation in the United States where the First Amendment is under assault. Under assault. And we’re lucky we have a First Amendment.

Cause trust me when I tell you, Lars Hedegaard did not have a First Amendment as his protection. It doesn’t exist in Denmark, at least not the way we think of it. And Geert Wilders does not have such protections guaranteed unalienable rights granted to him by his creator as we do here in the Untied States. Enshrined by our Constitution. Neither does Lars Wilks, Mark Durie is a slightly different story. All these people have been brought to Boston. Some of them have spoken here. And principle mainstream organizations. Like ISNA, the MSA, CAIR, prominent groups working inside how many administrations? My friends, it’s not just this one. Nine universities, you know, nine universities in the United States have specific religion only prayer rooms. Muslim only prayer rooms. Stanford, Emory, University of Virginia. Shariah compliant swimming pool at Harvard. At Harvard. If you go down to New York City, I don’t know, maybe you’ll go down for the camera function next month, maybe. And you can hear Lars Hedegaard speak there. Maybe you’ll go down on the specific afternoon, cause there’s one afternoon a week where city traffic is closed while people get down on their knees to pray. Did you know that? Ever see it? It’s there. In New York City. All the while, pastors are muzzled, the anti-Semitism grows, but those of us who want to point to it, recrudescence [PH] again, the virus that never seems to go away. Still here. Christian prayer not allowed, crosses removed. And yes, this is a rabbi who’s talking about crosses being removed. Closest personal assistant to the former secretary of state, from a family whose father professed, advocated the imposition of shariah, mother, brother, active members in Brotherhood groups, most of you live in Massachusetts here tonight.

How about a native son of Massachusetts? Grover Norquist. Enabling access to the highest powers in Washington. High profile Republican registered support for the Ground Zero mosque. The Koran in how many places? And I’m talking doctrinally now. Okay? Doctrinally. From the sacrilized – from Islam’s sacrilized texts. Speak about the right and duty to make war on the kuffar. I got news for you, guys. That’s all of us. Christians, Jews, Hindus, any kind of polytheists. Atheists. Wherever they should be found. The United States is the great Satan. You know who the little Satan is? Israel. I don’t think this is the America for which my father fought. I don’t think this is the America to which my grandparents came. I think that the founding fathers had envisioned statesmen to serve in congress as a sacrificial patriotic duty for a short term, always remembering that service is about the public good, not self-aggrandizement. And service is not an occupation. It is not an occupation. With perks and benefits often temptations for greed, the ultimate goal always to be reelected by whatever means. Seems that that has become the goal rather than the goal of representing the people. I was asked to give this introduction so you know that I do this because I think time is short. Because I was blessed to be born here. And I don’t mind America changing but not into some third world tin pot fifth water – fifth world backwater like I experienced in Cairo in ’77 and ’78. There are good statesmen around. There are good leaders around who have backbone to protect and defend Western Civilization and our way of life. Who understand that education, that growth is about freedom of inquiry. Free thought. The ability to look at an issue critically. To argue from a point of view not how you feel but from facts. And thankfully, that’s the kind of panel I’ve been able to put together for you this evening. Warriors who refuse to be silenced. Our moderator for this evening, talk radio host, writer, and political commentator, my friends, please welcome Michael Graham.

MICHAEL GRAHAM: How you doing? So glad you’re here. Look, I’m not going to talk long. We have a brilliant panel and they’re going to grab their seats up here. In fact, do I even need a mike in here? I’m the loudest person ever in the history of the world. I just want to say a couple of things. Thank you to Marco Rubio for loaning me this before I came out tonight.  I thought that was a very good move. All of you who brought these with you, two things. Number one, it should be on silent, vibrate, or whatever. If we hear it, I’ve already been pre-authorized by the Defense Department for a drone strike.  I want to thank president Obama for that. Secondly, you should be using it to listen to the Michael Graham show. Noon to three, weekdays. Michaelgraham.com. It’s on your phone, it’s on four radio stations, none of which reach here. I’m sorry to say. But if you’re out in Worcester or on Plymouth or up in Concord, whatever, we’re there. But it’s michaelgraham.com, noon to three, blah, blah, blah. I want to do that commercial for you. And I really am thrilled to be here and I also want to say for years I denied that there was a vast Jewish conspiracy designed to suck us all in and control our lives. Alas, I have now been captured by it.  I married a Jewish woman two and a half years ago. And so, you’ve got me.  I’m in and I can’t get out. I don’t know  Thank you, no, no. Thank you very much. Trust me, I’m lucky in this one. She’s still – the matzoh, I don’t get that. I don’t get what’s the deal with the big crackers? I’m sorry, why?  You do know when you eat these things for a day you don’t go to the bathroom for a month? You do know that, yes?

Forty years in the desert, they never had to stop once. That’s why?  No one told me. And I have a Jewish mother in law, so excited. No, it’s great. I haven’t had an individual thought of my own in two and a half years. And that – really, apparently I am going to have some more of the salad, okay.  I didn’t know. No one told me. But no, so I obviously am thrilled to be here, happy to be here. I just want to say one thing before we bring up the panelists, because I wrote about this event in the Herald today, in my Herald column, talked about my radio show, and whenever I talk about the issue of free speech and the threat that shariah presents to free speech and the threat that the current state of Islam in the world represents to free speech, I always get the same answer. Ah, it’s never going to happen here. Never going to happen here. And Rabbi Jay brought up some examples, but there’s a contemporaneous one today. In Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, which by the way, normally is a city that I wish all possible ill on I can. I hate the Eagles, despise the Phillies and I’m happy for them to suffer. But they have a local liberal magazine, in fact, it’s owned by the same company that owns Boston Magazine. They wrote a piece on what life was like in white neighborhoods that abut predominately black neighborhoods. And they let white people and black people speak their minds and speak freely. Okay? So you know that’s going to be a problem right there. No problem. Okay, fine.  Some people didn’t like it. Okay. No problem. That’s fine, isn’t it? I heard a rumor that the point of free speech was to defend the speech you find offensive. That you don’t need the First Amendment for a speech everyone agrees with. You don’t need the First Amendment for popular stuff. You know, for, you know, the Barney the – okay, I would actually pan Barney the Dinosaur. That’s me. But you need it for the unpopular stuff. So who cares that someone didn’t like this magazine article in the Philadelphia magazine? Who cares that the mayor, democrat, Michael Nutter didn’t like the magazine article and the statistics it presented about crime rates and the statistics it presented about arrest rates and the opinions presented by the people who live in Philadelphia? Who cares that the mayor doesn’t like it? Until the mayor wrote a letter two days ago that you can read at michaelgraham.com. Asking the city’s human rights council to investigate and prosecute the magazine.

And what’s interesting about it, he says, the First Amendment in all rights is not unfettered. And he acknowledges, I realize that the First Amendment exists to protect the press from government censorship. But then he says, you know, they’ve gone too far. That writing a magazine article I don’t like is the equivalent of shouting fire in a crowded theatre. And so the citizens of Philadelphia, today, not in some far off future, not in some, you know, dystopia that’s invented by people like me to try to scare people, but Philadelphia today, the liberal city government of the liberal city of Philadelphia is going to investigate a liberal magazine using the human rights commission accusing them of hate speech and therefore hate, if not crimes, hate parking tickets. Hate civic – you know, whatever they can get away with. Because it is only the First Amendment that stops them from making this a crime. It would be a crime, but they know they can’t get away with that. So they’re going to investigate and punish the magazine for the expression of opinion. Now, let me tell you something that I have learned in my years in talk radio – did I mention I’m on the air noon to three? You can go on the air and you can say that Catholics do X and the – whatever horrible, you can paint the entire Catholic church in broad brush. You can say the pope is a bigot because he doesn’t support issues on marriage or whatever. No one will bat an eye. No one will raise an eyebrow. It is not the case that offensive speech is bad. You can go on the air and because I do a radio show in Israel every week and engage in debate there and you can say things about the nation of Israel and accuse the nation and the Israel government itself of being a terrorist government and of killing people and of starving children and you can accuse the citizens of Israel of making cupcakes out of blood and all this stuff, no one will raise an eyebrow. It is not offensive speech that’s the problem. And of course you can go on the air and talk about sex and inappropriate things, which I do, every day, noon to three. You can talk – the problem, the question is, did you offend the wrong people? And that’s why, when I wrote my Herald story and I wrote about Lars, who you’ll be hearing from later, I wrote about Philadelphia.

Because the premise is the same. Your speech is protected, your offensive speech is protected, your stupid offensive idiotic speech is protected until you offend the wrong people. That is why it’s a crime. Not offense, not ignorance, but the special protection that the state – in this case, the city of Philadelphia, have given people. And the special protection that institutions across the West have given to specific people. I live in the world of criticism. I take criticism every single day. Did I mention I married this Jewish lady?  Criticism is the essence of the West. You start with the notion that nothing is known, that everything is questioned. That is the premise of the West. And that is the premise that our loony lefty friends are calling into question by saying everything is questioned except for this. And except for that. Once you can – are told that you cannot question, you cannot ask, you cannot make this statement, then the entire conversation is over. And that is what is really happening right now in the liberal United States of America. Let’s bring up our first speaker today. How about a round of applause for all the speakers we have?  She’s been a journalist in Washington, D. C. She currently is an editor with The Blaze, please welcome Tiffany Smith, aka Tiffany Gabbay.

TIFFANY GABBAY: Hi. Well, thank you very much for having me. First, it really is an honor to speak alongside people who are much more knowledgeable than I am and who I really am proud to consider colleagues and mentors of mine. I come to this conversation, yes, as a journalist.   Sure. So I come to this conversation, yes, as a journalist and a commentator who has a vested interest in free speech who writes about Islam and the Middle East and would never refrain from speaking the truth or writing about it because I was afraid. But also sees friends and colleagues who have come under threat for doing that very thing. I also come to this conversation as an Iraqi Jew who knows what Islam is about. Who knew it far before 9-11 came along. I grew up with my father’s story of how he and his family survived a very bloody pogrom in Baghdad in 1941 called the Farhud [PH] It was organized by the grand mufti and it was inspired and aided by the Nazis. So actually Islam – Islamists have been posing problems and threats for quite, quite some time. Long before 9-11. In fact, as my friend Andy knows very well, the entire mantra or aspersions that Jews are descendants of apes and pigs was not something that was coined by the Nazis in Nazi time. It was actually a verse taken out of the Koran and as we’ve heard Muhammad Morsi, president of Egypt recite on numerous occasions, he is definitely living up to that Islamic ideology of Jews and other infidels. This is something that the mainstream media doesn’t cover. Doesn’t ever talk about.

And it’s really – it’s astonishing when you think about it. Journalists are supposed to speak the truth and uncover atrocities. We sit and we clamor for human rights and social justice, gay rights, women’s rights, yet we are actually not just turning a blind eye, but I would say emboldening and in fact enabling these atrocities from actually happening. By rewarding Islamists who do carry out violence when people like Lars speak the truth. At best, Islam seeks to silence our speech and at worse, you know, it wants to see us dead. As Lars is unfortunately all too well aware. A New York Times article that was not in the op-ed section, but actually in the regular section of the New York Times defamed Lars after his assassination, after surviving this assassination attempt, it said that he was spewing anti-Muslim bile. That’s how they categorize people like Lars or Andy or people like Geert Wilders, anyone who dares speak the truth about Islam is not rewarded but the journalists who are exercising their free speech as well, they’re actually castigated and, well, they attempt to shame people like Lars into silence. The issue is that Islam’s view of free speech is very different from that in the West. Islam views free speech through the lens of the Koran. And people like Robert and Andy will be able to speak to that in greater detail.

But basically, you know, after the Benghazi incident in which our US diplomatic outpost was set ablaze, our ambassador was killed and two Navy SEALS and an additional civil servant, everyone was saying that the catalyst was a low rate You Tube video critical of Islam. We all know that was a ruse and that was not the real reason for the attacks. Yet it served as a great lynchpin for Islamists’ push to basically penalize anyone who dare speak out against Islam. I interviewed a very prominent imam in New Jersey named Imam Katanani who basically did say, absolutely, anyone who speaks out against the prophet, that this is absolutely unacceptable. You could slander Muhammad, you could slander Jesus, but you cannot slander the prophet Muhammad. And anyone who does so should be, you know, basically prosecuted or investigated by the Department of Homeland Security.  So they’re seeking to apply shariah law and the tenets of the Koran in Western, you know, society. And we’re basically letting them. And some people will laugh and say, well, you know, we’re never going to give up our Constitutional rights. We’re never going to give up our, you know, our First Amendment. But we absolutely are. If you look, you see they shut down the person who made that You Tube video. There is, you know, the writing is on the wall and we’re basically handing over our rights very willingly. So I think that’s something that this panel is going to discuss. Unfortunately, cowardice is a very big – is playing a very big role in this. There are people who are just genuinely afraid to speak out. And I think there is also the idea that, you know, it’s kind of like what Winston Churchill said, an appeaser is someone who feeds the crocodile, hoping he’ll eat him last. And unfortunately, we have not learned our lesson when it came to the Holocaust, when it came to 9-11, that it doesn’t matter how much we appease people who are bent on our destruction. They do not look at life or values in the same terms that people in the West do. And, you know, this is something that I grew up with being from a Middle Eastern family. But this is something that, you know, again, Americans learned, unfortunately, in all too grim detail after 9-11. And we would think that those lessons would not be so easily forgotten just over a decade later. But unfortunately, they have been. So we have people like Lars who attempt to remind us on a daily basis or a regular basis of what’s actually going on in the world. What’s going on in Europe. How they’re giving over their, you know, their country and their rights. And it’s happening here in America as well. With our own acquiescence and our own reticence, particularly in the media. So I guess that’s what we’re going to be discussing tonight and I’m just very happy to be a part of this panel. Thank you.

MICHAEL GRAHAM: Thank you, Tiffany. I just got a text from the White House. The Obama administration says don’t worry about your First Amendment rights, we’ll protect them just as strongly as we do your Second Amendment rights. So  I think everything will be fine. Let me tell you the best thing I can tell you about Andy Bostom. I’ll let him talk about the books he’s written, the fantastic books about the legacy of Islamic anti-Semitism. The best thing I can tell you about him is when I met him the first time in Harvard at a bar, he bought the drinks. So what else do you need to know? He’s a profound scholar who does the core work going to source material to lay out what the Koran and other Muslim teachings truly say. You can choose to pick conclusions, your own conclusions, but you can’t dispute the data. Please welcome Andy Bostom. Andy, come on up.

ANDY BOSTOM: Leave it to Michael to remind me of some of the most difficult calls during residency. During the Passover season where you had to do the disimpactions.  If I had to sort of put to music what the scene of the unfortunate attempt on Lars’ life was, forgive my crooning, but it would be blasphemy, blasphemy mucho. That’s what we’re dealing with. We’re dealing with, believe it or not, we’re dealing with a global campaign to impose Islamic blasphemy law. One of the most astounding statements I ever heard a politician of any ilk make was before the United Nations when Barack Obama, almost out of context, made a statement, the future does not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam. It was a jaw dropping statement. It’s in the text of all the speeches. Other than right wingers, it was barely discussed. But it’s an absolutely astounding statement by a president of the United States. What on earth did he mean? Well, unfortunately, I think I know what he means. There is a campaign to literally take instruments that are being developed within the United Nations and apply the alternative human rights paradigm, which the Organization of the Islamic Conference, now known as the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, it cooperates, is using these various human rights forum to incorporate shariah based blasphemy law which comes out of the tradition, basically, that any Muslim who insults the prophet or aspects of the Muslim faith is an apostate and therefore according to the shariah should be killed automatically. It’s one of the so-called mandatory or hadd [PH] punishments. And alternatively, a non-Muslim who dares to criticize aspects of Islam, Islam’s prophet Muhammad, is a blasphemer. And according to the major Sunni schools of Islamic law, the Shiite schools of Islamic law, that person’s, too, fate – there may be some sort of tribunal, but that person’s fate is pretty well sealed and the punishment is death. So it’s actually astonishing that the president of the United States would give some credence to these kinds of liberty crushing sentiments. And I guess the public was probably at least, for a period of time, best acquainted with the impact of Islamic blasphemy law during the period when Salman Rushdie wrote The Satanic Verse and Ayatollah Khomeini issued a formal fatwa sanctioning his death and also saying that if any Muslim happened to lose his life in attempting to kill Rushdie, that they would become a martyr. Now what’s less known about that, first of all, we remember is the mayhem that that created. In Europe and as far flung as Japan.

Translators, people involved with the production of the book were assassinated. But there was actually a mass riot in Turkey that resulted in the killing of thirty people. And I think of equal importance is the fact that this was not just Khomeini being an extremist, a radical, this was the mainstream doctrine. And various Islamic conferences that included not just Shiites, but Sunnis from around the world, endorsed his viewpoint. The only mistake he might have made is that he didn’t allow for Rushdie to come before a shariah tribunal. And this was the sort of nuance that was picked up, of course, by the press, saying that, oh, well, the fatwa is not really valid. Khomeini was absolutely right in terms of the law as many, many councils discussed. During that period. And moreover, there’s a variant in terms of Shiite law where anyone who witnesses an act of apostasy is supposed to sort of act like a vigilante. And kill right away. So there was that aspect that he was tapping into. And if we look at the impact of this kind of mindset and this kind of religio-political law in the Islamic world, we have data from the Pew Center demonstrating that – it’s a report that was issued in August, 2011, it’s called Rising Restrictions on Religion. And one of its conclusions is that eight in ten countries in the Middle East, North Africa, have laws against blasphemy, apostasy, or defamation of religion. The highest share of any region. And that these penalties are enforced at least sixty percent of the time. So this is a living doctrine. Now what becomes terrifying is when you have a situation like with the Innocence of Muslims trailer. And if you look at the trailer, it’s kind of a bizarre, amateurish film. But if you have an understanding of what they’re trying to depict, the creators of that product are simply reproducing in their own crude way themes from the sacrilized Muslim biographies of Muhammad, from the so called hadiths, etceteras. There’s nothing that’s really out of context there. But be that as it may, an Egyptian state security court showing that shariah is not meant at this age, at least, to be applied to simply Islamic countries, on November 28^th, 2012, it issued a verdict and sentenced to death expatriate Coptic Christians and everyone’s, you know, bad boy in this area, Pastor Terry Jones. This is an Egyptian state court sentencing to death expatriates living in the West. And again, I think this – what this reflects is that the seriousness of this global campaign to enact shariah blasphemy law as part of UN based instruments.

And again, there is this alternative – the universal declaration of human rights in Islam. When we move quickly to the United States, I’m very concerned when I see that there’s a mainstream Muslim organization called the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America and it is mainstream as reported by Muslim newspapers. It is also mainstream by virtue of the fact that its members sit on – in academic departments, train imams across the United States every year at their annual conferences. And online issues fatwas, issues judgments to guide Muslims in America. Well, when it comes to the issue of blasphemy, and I know this sounds bizarre to people not attuned to this kind of religious law really being a living law, the Assembly of Muslim Jurists issued a fatwa in 2009, basically – and I’ll read it, these extracts for you, those scholars who say the repentance of a person who insults Allah or his messenger shall not be accepted. They mean the repentance does not lift up the set punishment for cursing and insulting the prophet. I.e, execution. Because the prophet is the one who is actually wronged and insulted and he’s no longer alive, therefore he cannot practice his right to forgive the blasphemer and therefore no Muslim or non-Muslim is authorized to forgive and the person should be put to death. If – how prevalent are these attitudes? And I’ll end with this really ominous set of polling data. Where a sample of six hundred Muslims – and it wasn’t a random sample, it wasn’t a perfect random digit dial sample, it was taken off trade lists, but it turned out to be a very high socio-economic status group that was sampled of six hundred Muslims across the country, fifty-eight percent felt that there should be no criticism allowed of Islam or Muhammad. As high as twelve percent literally admitted to the – in the survey – that such offenders should be put to death. These are American Muslims of high socio-economic status. This is a very significant problem that seems to be growing in the American Muslim community. And I think we see the expression of this at its most extreme level in an assassination attempt on my dear friend Lars Hedegaard. And it’s something that we better wake up to. Thank you very much.

MICHAEL GRAHAM: Thank you, Andrew. Great job. Also love your work in the TV show, Breaking Bad. Okay, you know, when you have the history with Islam that I do having been fired down in Washington, DC and on and on and on, you’re used to being called names, hater, etceteras, etceteras. It is such a delight to have someone in the room who is in fact hated more than I am.  When I talked about the fact that I was coming here to my radio listeners, no big deal. When I talked about it, posted it on my website, no big deal. When I mentioned that Robert Spencer was going to be here, whoa! The floodgates opened up. He does outstanding work, vital work, at Jihad Watch. Please welcome Robert Spencer.

ROBERT SPENCER: Thank you very much. Actually that has everything to do with what I wanted to talk about with you tonight. And that is the fact that none of this would be happening if it were just a matter of shariah, of Islamic law. We have heard a great deal already this evening about how Islamic law forbids criticism of Islam. Forbids people to say anything negative about Allah, about Muhammad, about Koran. Upon pain of death. But we’re standing here – this is Massachusetts. This isn’t Cairo. This isn’t Karachi. Why is this an issue? Why are we having this discussion about Islamic law in Massachusetts tonight? That is not because of Islam. That is because of the political left in the United States. And the political left in the United States, for various reasons, has allied with the forces of the proponents of Islamic law in order to impose those blasphemy codes upon us under the guise of hate speech, so called. And they have done that – I would suggest to you tonight – primarily because the left and Islam, for all their superficial differences, and you think, well, why on earth would they get in bed together, so to speak, when you have the gay rights people on the one side and these puritanical mullahs on the other, and how can they see eye to eye?

Well, it has to do with the totalitarian impulse. It has to do with two groups that are essentially authoritarian at heart. If you think about the hard left – now we never really identified the political left in America with the hard left, the far left, the communists, Stalin, Lenin, Mao Tse Tung, Pol Pot, we’ve never thought of those guys as being of essentially the same character as Harry Reid or Nancy Pelosi. But now really I think things are coming to a head. And we see that maybe there was more convergence between the two than we thought. And that is because whenever the hard left has come to power, they have enforced their utopian vision of society by means of a reign of terror. And they had this vision of a society of perfect justice and harmony that they would kill in order to bring about. And commit mass murder in order to bring to the world. Now that has a funny convergence with Islamic law. Islamic law is the perfect vision for society. Islamic law gives you the ideal understanding of how society is supposed to be ordered as far as Muslims are concerned. And if you get out of line, they’ll chop off your hand, they’ll cut off your head, they’ll stone you to death, whatever. It’s the slow motion reign of terror, but it’s still a reign of terror. It’s still an earthly utopia enforced by a reign of terror. So I think that this ugly authoritarian impulse is what’s really behind this. And that both are foes of freedom of speech. Both would rather discredit and eliminate, destroy their enemies rather than engage us on the field of rational debate. And this brings me to the most important point that I wanted to leave with you this evening. And that is what happened to Lars Hedegaard when the Muslim assassins shot at him represented the next level of the war against the freedom of speech. That so far in the West, there have been killings of opponents of Islam and Islamic law and Islamic oppression and so on. Theo Van Gogh, Pim Fortuyn, and others in Europe. There has never been before, however, the attempt to kill a foe of Islamic oppression who had first been subjected to their other strategy, their other tactic. Which is character assassination.

As my colleague Pamela Gellar says, in America, they don’t assassinate you. They just assassinate your character. They will try to destroy you by making you out to be such an evil person that nobody will come close. And you hear what Michael said. They’ve done a good job on me. That when they heard that I was coming, what have I done? Well, for ten or eleven years I’ve written twelve books and about forty thousand blog posts and tried in every one to defend the freedom of speech, the freedom of conscience, the equality and rights of all people before the law. So what is the problem? Why would it stir up his listeners that I would be here? Because what these groups do – as you well know – is try to portray anybody who stands up for those rights, stands up for these things that are contradicted by shariah, as some kind of a villain who must be secretly fascist or must be secretly something, that means that all decent people must really shun him. And it’s not just me. There’s a very illustrative incident going on right now in San Francisco with some ads that Pamela Gellar devised to counter this cynical whitewash campaign about jihad. Jihad is getting in your exercise, jihad is making friends, jihad is romping through the daisies, jihad is blowing milk bubbles through your straw. You know, that kind of thing that’s being sponsored by the Hamas linked Council on American/Islamic Relations. In contrast to that, Gellar devised a series of ads that quote Osama bin Laden. And quote the prime minister of Turkey and quote other actual Muslims who are actually waging jihad. Saying what it is. And so these ads ran on San Francisco buses. All these San Francisco officials were up in arms so to speak and condemned – had a press conference condemning the ads. So in other words, if you talk about how Islam threatens – how jihad violence threatens infidels, then you’re anti-Muslim. Okay. Well, hold that thought. You talk about how jihad violence threatens infidels, you’re anti-Muslim.

Now then, because San Francisco is San Francisco, she devised a new campaign that has Islamic authorities, some of the highest Islamic authorities in the world, the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Sheik Qaradawi, and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, president of Iran, talking about how homosexuality gets you the death penalty in Islam. Puts those on the buses. And there – those just hit. And all over the San Francisco – it’s on the front page of the San Francisco Examiner today, and all over the media in San Francisco, they’re saying new anti-gay ads come out in San Francisco. Now wait a minute. So if you talk about how jihad violence threatens infidels you’re anti-Muslim. And if you talk about how jihad violence threatens gays, you’re anti-gay. So wait a minute. Doesn’t that mean if you talk about how jihad violence threatens infidels, you should be anti-infidel? And not anti-Muslim? But there’s no consistency in this. And the common thread is, is that Islam must not be criticized. And Islam must not be criticized because for whatever reason and whoever is behind it – and I’m not saying there’s some sort of shadowy conspiracy, this is actually quite open and obvious, there are leftist elites who are in government and in the media who have decided that the Islamic shariah agenda must be aided and abetted. And I think the ultimate goal is to extinguish the freedom of speech so that their tyranny can reign unopposed. And so it is absolutely imperative that we resist this. And the right, the conservative movement in the United States has been terrible about this. And you know, the left performs these Alinskyite tactics, Saul Alinsky, the great leftist strategist, he said, you want to eliminate somebody who’s saying things you don’t like. Then you demonize and marginalize them, cut them off so nobody will have anything to do with them. So they do that on – to various people who are fighting for freedom and so many people in the mainstream conservative movement say, oh, you don’t want us to talk to that guy? Oh, okay, yes, sir. We won’t. Sorry. And so you may have heard that I was given an award or supposed to be given an award at the Conservative Political Action Conference this past weekend. And they called – called me up beforehand and said, well, we don’t really want you to speak about the Muslim Brotherhood and Islamic supremacist influence in the conservative movement if you get this award.  Okay, well, they said, were you going to talk about that? And I said, no, but I am now.   So no soup for – no award for me. But we have to – this is not, these are personal anecdotes, but this is a much larger issue. Anybody who sticks his neck out about these things is going to get the same treatment. Maybe you have if you have dared to speak to your friends or families or co-workers about the reality of jihad and Islamic supremacism and were called a racist Islamophobic anti-Muslim bigot. Well, there’s nothing racist about standing for freedom and if we don’t now, it will all be lost. And on that happy note, thank you very much.

MICHAEL GRAHAM: See why they hate him? See? You know, one of my – I get to do a fair amount of public speaking. One of my favorite things is when someone says, our next guest needs no introduction, then he spends fifteen minutes introducing me. I’m not going to do that because our next guest doesn’t need any introduction. Instead, I’m going to make a request. And that is, I would like to hear from Lars himself the story of the day that the buzzer rang on his door and he looked out the window and he saw someone dressed as a parcel delivery man coming to visit him. Would you share that story with us, please? Lars Hedegaard.

LARS HEDEGAARD: Well, thank you. Can you hear me? Well, trying to say something – think of something useful to say. I don’t know if you are aware of the fact that tonight you have been listening to  not only the two preeminent authorities on Islam in the US, but worldwide, Andy and Robert.  You also have the benefit of a wonderful rabbi, we don’t have the likes of him in Denmark or anywhere in Europe.  Rabbi Hausman. So you wanted me to talk about an incident, so be it. It was in the morning of February five this year that somebody rang my door. There’s a door phone. It doesn’t work, fortunately, so I can hear somebody buzzing it, but I cannot buzz them in, nor can I talk to them. So it was twenty past eleven in the morning. I was about to leave my home to go to Malmo, Sweden where we have our offices for Dispatch International. The newspaper that I am honored to be the chief editor of. So as I could not open the front door, I opened a window in my apartment and I could look down on the front door.

There was a person standing there or you call him a mailman I guess in the US. He had a red jacket as you will in Denmark with a logo on his back. And he said he had a package for me. So I said, okay, I’ll come down. I cannot buzz you in. I’ll come down and get it. I went down a flight of stairs and there he was. I opened the front door and he said, I have a package for you. He handed me a package. Turned out to be empty. Eventually, the police found out there was nothing in it. As I was holding it in my hands, he pulled out a gun and shot at my head. He was an idiot, of course. Because we were standing this close to each other and he missed.  So you know, as an afterthought, I’ve been thinking, maybe his god Allah is not all he is cracked up to be.   In any event, he didn’t hit me. The bullet passed by my right ear and lodged itself somewhere in the building. Then he was trying to cock his gun for a second shot. And he was sort of fumbling. Then I hit him in the face with my fist  And then he lost the gun. And it – somehow it ended inside the door, front door. I don’t know why. How that could be. But in any event, it was inside. Of course, I tried to close the door and he put his foot in the door. And he’s stronger than I am. Because he was about twenty-five. And I’m seventy. But he opened the door and got hold of the gun again. Then he tried to cock it. And we fought some more, you know. He didn’t manage and then he ran off. So I don’t know what to make of this. Except that he wanted to bump me off for some reason that I cannot fathom. Except for the fact that I’ve been a critic of Islam and been writing books – I’m a historian, by the way. I’m a quiet book man. I read books. I write books. I study things. I never thought – I haven’t even been a soldier. I was a conscientious objector.

Beacuse I was a socialist and I thought the army was for the capitalists against the working class. If I had been a soldier, but, you know, you do whatever you can. So I was trying to say something useful to you. I had about three points. I’ve forgotten most of them now.  I think what I want to say is how precious free speech is. Have you thought of that ever? Have you thought of the fact that if you do not have free speech, not only are you in chains, every one of you – you are, your kids are, everybody else is in chains. But if you have a society without free speech, you hjave a society where you cannot even discuss the problems. You cannot identify the problems in front of you. You cannot solve anything. Society will come to a standstill. And that is precisely what my friends here have come to understand about Islam. It stops everything. It freezes everything over for eternity. Every single thought in human history that has brought us forward has been deemed blasphemous if you think back to it. You can think back to the Bible. The Old Testament. The prophets who came out and said things that the king didn’t like. They brought things forward. Go to Galileo. I can never – I’m a historian, but I can never remember the – I think it was 1632, he was forced to retract his observation that the earth revolves around the sun. Nevertheless, it does. The abolition of slavery, blasphemous. The equality between man and woman, blasphemous. The emancipation of the working class, blasphemous. Every single thought that has ever brought mankind forward has been determined to be blasphemous. And every single thought that has been carried forward has been carried forward by brave people who didn’t give a damn and who were determined to carry on the fight. I can only urge you to stand by your rabbi. To stand by the best people in your society and to carry on the flame. Thank you very much.

MICHAEL GRAHAM:  We’ve got mikes. You can share. I’m going to go out into the audience and we’re going to ask you some questions. So I’ll start with a couple. And you guys think and maybe [UNCLEAR] I’m going to ask you the questions that are bothering me all night. I mean, here we are [UNCLEAR] anti-Semitic and we do have a lot of license in our society. [UNCLEAR] Europe, Lars, and you read the newspaper articles on this. The fact is, we have a lot of freedom right now. Why [UNCLEAR] You’re telling us today that we need to fight and we need to fight now. Things are really good. I mean, unless you’re a sheriff in [UNCLEAR] county and [UNCLEAR] president Obama.  Things are pretty good. I mean, [UNCLEAR] why are you [UNCLEAR] jump in and [UNCLEAR]

ROBERT SPENCER: The Obama administration has made it abundantly clear that they are foes of the First Amendment. Resolution 1618 that was adopted by the United Nations calls on member states to criminalize denigration of religions, religious hatred. Now, nobody is really in favor of real hatred. But what they’re calling hatred is any honest discussion of how jihadists use the texts and teachings of Islam to justify violence. And supremacism. And the United States signed on to that. And the United States in 2009, under the Obama administration, co-sponsored a resolution with Egypt that was very similar that got far less publicity. Also calling upon member states to criminalize criticism of religion. Sotomayer and Kagan on the Supreme Court are on record calling for restrictions on the First Amendment. There are numerous other officials throughout the Obama administration who have – are on record calling for restrictions on the First Amendment. All it takes, mind you, is – we already have, by the way, hate crimes laws. Now what’s the difference? If I – outside in the parking lot later – if I hit you and take your wallet, it’s a crime. But if I hit you and take your wallet and call you a racial slur,  that’s a hate crime. What’s the difference? Speech. So we already have hate speech laws in the United States because we have hate crimes laws in the United States. All it takes is five justices to uphold a challenge to that and say that hate speech, so called, is not freedom of speech, not protected under the First Amendment, and the First Amendment is effectively gutted. And we are very, very close to that.

TIFFANY GABBAY: Well, I can only revert to a quote by Martin Niemuller who was actually a a Nazi who ended up changing his stance later on and his quote said, you know, first – for people who are familiar – first, they came for whoever it was, the Catholics and the protestants and what have you and the gays and I didn’t speak out. Then they came for the Jews and I didn’t speak out because I wasn’t a Jew. And later they came for me. And I think that’s, you know, obviously a very famous quote, but it’s one of the ones that’s most telling in terms of how we relinquish our own rights every day by not standing up for something we don’t really feel affects us. But it does actually. It’s very much like with nanny state laws. Sometimes, we say, well it’s totally common sense. We should absolutely wear our seatbelts or we shouldn’t smoke in bars or, you know, transfats are really bad for you. And so we kind of turn a blind eye because we think it’s for the greater good. But what rights are we giving away tomorrow that we will care about. And I think that’s one of the main reasons.

ANDY BOSTOM: Yeah, there was some testimony that’s – it’s actually at the beginning of the film, Silent Conquest. Where Obama’s now – I guess he’s up for his nomination for his secretary of labor was asked repeatedly about would laws limiting free speech in any way targeting a specific criticism of religion, etceteras, be enacted by this adminsitration potentially? And he refused to answer that question during congressional testimony. So I think that gives you an insight into the larger process that Robert alluded to. Combine that with the fact that, again, as Lars points out in many of his talks that he’s given recently, no matter what was said in terms of vile Jew hatred, of calling for stoning of homosexuals or adulterers, etceteras, by imams in Scandinavia, in Denmark specifically, that was fine. That was free speech. But if Lars or someone else pointed out, well, that’s what the man said, that was hate speech. And so we have a parallel situation in this country as far as I’m concerned. I started to read you just a snippet of a fatwa that’s issued by the Assembly of Muslim Jurists of America where, yes, we know they’re not in power to do such things, but they are specifically calling for killing apostates if they’re Muslims who leave the religion. Killing people who they feel insult Islam or Muhammad if they’re non-Muslims. So we have these parallel phenomena of the application – as you put it, Michael, of restricted speech if it targets cherished groups. And then the ability of these groups themselves to say – to call for killing of people. So I don’t think that it’s an unfounded fear.

LARS HEDEGAARD:  Right. I think it’s important to – to consider the fact that laws in themselves aren’t worth anything. Unless people are willing to stand up for them and defend their rights under them. In Denmark, we have two articles in our penal code that are not very pretty. We have number 140, which is against blasphemy. Ridiculous concept. As if God needed men’s support to sustain his power. That’s an old one. Then we have one called 266B. Under which I was indicted and they tried to convict me for hate speech and racism. Now that was introduced, 266B was introduced in 1971 under the influence of the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union and its allies had tried for quite a few years to impose hate speech regulation on free societies and Denmark and other countries, including the US, opposed it. The US just never, of course, adopted that concept because you have the First Amendment. Nevertheless, after a few years of grinding, you know, you grind us down, you grind us down everyday.  It was accepted in 1971. This is the one that is being applied against people like me and others. Of course, Muslims can say whatever they want. If you want to say in Denmark – and they do – that of course lewd women ought to be dug into the ground and have stones thrown at them until they are dead, that’s okay. It’s also okay to say that apostates from Islam sbould be killed, fine. Great. Nobody has been prosecuted for that. And you can say pretty much anything you want including that homosexuals should have a wall tumbled over them until they are smashed to – I don’t know – ketchup. That’s fine. You can say that. But if I say that this is what they say, I’ll be dragged into court. Now I was lucky, fortunate, to have the best lawyer in the country working for me, pro bono. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have had a tie – would have been here in my underpants  and without teeth in my mouth. So I have the benefit of this wonderful man who can really read them the riot act. How many can do that? I mean, if you’re from the backwoods out in Jutland, and you can’t speak English or anything else, what do you do? You give up. So it takes a vigilant citizenship to uphold our fundamental rights. Don’t leave it to the politicians and do not, please, leave it to the journalists.

LARS HEDEGAARD: I find that my experience is limited, of course, to my own country. 5.5 million people. I find that the upholders of free speech are the common man. The elite, the intellectuals, the professors, the clergy in the Lutheran church, which is dominant in Denmark, the chief rabbi of Denmark, etceteras, are quite willing to give it up because they – I don’t know why, and this, by the way, one thing I can – one of the useful things I wanted to say if I remembered it, try to analyze the cui [PH] bono. Who benefits from this sort of repression? Somebody must have – think that he or she has an advantage from it. I find that the leading classes, the ruling classes, the elites – not only of Denmark, but of Europe – are not the upholders or defenders of free speech. It is the common man and woman.

ANDY BOSTOM:  I guess the one area where I remain somewhat hopeful is the blogosphere. The internet in general. You know, looking at your own experience, Michael, you know, moving to internet radio, thank goodness for that. But on the other hand, we know of efforts by major governments, I guess most prominently communist China, to control the internet, to control the blogosphere, so I guess even that could be subjected to restrictions.

ANDY BOSTOM: I’m afraid to say that I think that’s becoming an increasingly prevelant sentiment and on the other hand, I think that the people that cherish free speech are becoming more adamant about defending it. But I think there’s a vast apathy and a lot of fear that’s growing in the population. And it’s quite frightening.

TIFFANY GABBAY:  I think – I think the elite, academia, intellegentsia, members of the far left who really control the main pulpits, if you will, mainstream media, believe that they’re upholding free speech as they see it, as it suits them. And I think they’re arrogant enough to think that their voice is the only one that matters and that they control the narrative, that overriding narrative. So everyday people like us who do champion free speech and who do really adhere to its true meaning are increasingly marginalized. We are relegated to the blogs or new media. I mean, you see it even with more right leaning media. You will not see a lot of these stories published or publicized. And if you’re not going to see that in right leaning media, you’re certainly not going to see it in the mainstream that carries the loudest voice. So I think that that message and in terms of what free speech actually means is being controlled by some very arrogant and misguided people. And unfortunately, they are kind of controlling the direction of things.

ROBERT SPENCER: I think that there is less and less appreciation for the freedom of speech and that is partly because of the failure of the educational system to impress upon young people why it matters, why it’s important. And a point that I was actually intending to make earlier but lost it in the rush of all the excitement, was that the steps in which the critics of Islam and the suppression of Islamic law are being silenced, it’s a two step process. But we saw the second step for the first time with Lars and the assassination attempt. The first step is to demonize us to the extent that we’re poison and nobody will – everybody is afraid to deal with us. And then they tried to do that with Lars with the hate speech prosecution. But it didn’t work. It was one of the first times that it didn’t work and he was not silenced. He was acquited. And so it was more dangerous to them than ever. And then we see what is the next step in this process with the assassination attempt. There’s a great deal of fear behind it. Paradigmatic I think was a young woman in a bookstore, many years ago a man went in to a bookstore. He wrote me and he said that I tried to buy one of your books at some famous bookstore in San Francisco, maybe City Lights or something like that, and so he went in and he asked for it and the woman there said, oh, no, we don’t carry that racist bigoted sort of thing. And if we did, we’d get blown up. So you see how, in the second part of the clause, she agreed with the thesis of the book that she was denouncing in the first part of the clause. It’s racist and bigoted. That in other words, that there is a tendency towards violence in Islam and if you get out of line you will be physically threatened. But more and more people don’t realize, you know, give me liberty or give me death, you know, we pledge our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor – these are concepts that I think have vanished largely from the American body politic and people don’t think that there’s something worth risking  your life for. And so they think, well, these people – they’re going to destroy me. And make me into some sort of radioactive hate monger. And then they’ll kill me if I get out of line even further. Most people aren’t willing to take the risk. But I’ll tell you, if we aren’t, then they will certainly succeed.

LARS HEDEGAARD: I wanted to say something useful – I need a haircut, but I couldn’t have it before I left the country because I cannot walk freely in the streets of Copenhagen, so I thought I’d call my sister. She might then cut me a bit, but then I did manage to do that. Anyway, why are journalists  not looking out for free speech? I guess it’s because they think they don’t have anything to say that is in contravention of the shariah law. On the other hand, they make a good living cowing to the new powers that be. Look back in your own history and look back to the 30s when the lefties were prevalent in your press. The communist sympathizers. By the way, I used to be a communist until I was about forty. I’m sorry about that. I later changed my mind. But I know a bit about communism and I know quite a bit about Marxism and if you look back, you’ll see that the Western press was infiltrated and dominated by the left. And if you think that journalists are free spirits then you are sadly mistaken. They’re looking out for the next paycheck. And for the easy way to make a living and that is, you get to work at ten, you leave at three. And you write the same thing that everybody else writes. So it’s a kind of a – it’s a kind of a elite domination. It has nothing to do with what they are really supposed to do. Write the truth, investigate, research, etceteras. And I’m afraid that’s it.

TIFFANY GABBAY: I mean, it’s counter-intuitive, because most news outlets will want to publish the most sensational, the things that are going to garner the most amount of traffic. But I think that shows you that journalism in a large part is truly dead. These are not journalists today, at least in the mainstream outlets, these are propaganda vehicles. Journalists are quote unquote mouthpieces. I mean, if you read the New York Times, and of course, they’re the most easiest example to pick on, they actually defended Lars’ attacker. They defended the axe attack against, you know, one of the Danes who actually produced that cartoon. And this is a journalist who supposedly exercising his own freedom of speech and supposed journalistic integrity. I mean, it’s really laughable that there is this double standard. So I think it shows that mainstream media outlets, they are not embracing journalism. Journalists are supposed to live for the stories, uncovering injustices and atrocities and human rights abuses. In which case, they would be writing about Islam all day long. So I think it’s, you know, the answer is several fold. I think for some, for some editors, let’s say, they don’t view stories about Islam as all that surprising. I think it is actually a given for most people that Islam does support and perpetuate this, you know, violent them. So it’s not really considered all that sensational anymore, number one. So some outlets don’t really cover it because it doesn’t really garner the traffic that they think it should. I think in mainstream outlets they have a political agenda to push and so their writers are not going to cover those stories because it doesn’t fit that editorial agenda. And I think the few journalists who do exist, who do want to uncover these stories, are working for smaller outlets or independent bloggers. Then, of course, they are marginalized and their character is assassinated so that larger outlets will not hire them later. So I think that’s a little bit about what’s going on.

MICHAEL GRAHAM: [FAINT] university Muslim teacher saying that death for apostasy is not necessarily wrong. He wrote that it depended on culture, whereas [UNCLEAR] they could say it was wrong [UNCLEAR] I wasn’t that surprised that it was at a university [UNCLEAR] at Harvard University. [UNCLEAR] many years ago, what is the status of the assault on liberties that [UNCLEAR] the issue of Islam.

ANDY BOSTOM: Well, yeah, you’re referring to the chaplain who I believe is – was put on leave after that. And the story, frankly, would never have come to light were it not for some students, including Muslim students, who were actually appalled by his statements. It was considered hikma–  great wisdom– to kill apostates. And recently, this idea has been validated by none other than Yusef al-Qaradawi who’s the spiritual leader of the Muslim Brotherhood who gave an interview on al-Jazeera and said that he frankly felt that Islam would not have survived, period, if there had not been these apostasy laws, which of course run a hundred and eighty degrees counter to freedom of conscience. In the academy itself, you actually have a Canadian law professor who’s now deceased, an American who’s still alive, writing in law journals why blaphemy law is – I’m sorry, apostasy law is legitimate. Because they go back to the ancient argument that, well, it’s sedition. In other words, leaving, a Muslim American, Muslim Canadian, leaving the religion is a seditious act not in the 7^th Century, not in the 10^th Century, not, you know, two hundred years ago, now. And I think that those stories don’t get enough attention. Again, these are law professors that wrote this. And I think it’s up to the academy – another law professor, say someone like Alan Dershowitz, to come out and point out to these legal scholars just how insane this is, just how it runs counter to everything that this society is based upon. And yet we don’t see Mr. Dershowitz doing that. And in fact, Harvard in the law school that – at the same time that he gets awards for being a champion of separation of church and state, Harvard’s own law school has a program on shariah law there. And it’s not merely to give it sort of a descriptive, you know, study. They have lecture series there where the theme in the end is that shariah somehow complements our system of law and could perfect it. And so Mr. Dershowitz still sits there and says nothing about this. So there are grave problems inside the academy.

ROBERT SPENCER: We have seen really that the overarching value that is protected in American universities today is multiculturalism, which is essentially shorthand for saying utter cultural relativism combined with anti-Americanism and anti-Westernism and a hostility to Judeo-Christian values. And this has been the source of a tremendous inconsistency on the part of leftist academics of all stripes. Here again, the political left is in the ascendancy in the universities and colleges in the United States. And so we see the same kind of authoritarianism and the same hostility to genuine intellectual diversity that we see in the mainstream, in the public discourse. In the colleges, of course, they’re very concerned about diversity of every kind. And they want to have all sorts of genders represented and all sorts of races represented. And I do mean all sorts of genders, you know, not just two. And every kind of diversity except intellectual diversity. Where the only opinion that is allowed is that of the leftist orthodoxy. And so the inconsistency manifests itself in precisely this kind of thing. That not only does the idea of the freedom of conscience, the idea of free inquiry, which is the foundation of the university itself, have to be sacrificed to this idea of a multiculturalist relativism that allows for shariah blasphemy laws under the guise of being receptive to other cultures, but also I’ve seen again and again and again feminists – some very hard line feminists, some of great stature, including Naomi Klein and Naomi Wolf and Katha Pollit who have come out in various ways to defend the oppression of women in Islamic law. Because that again is their culture. And the women in there, they feel themselves empowered within that system and so therefore the oppression is okay. And so we see that multiculturalism trumps feminism, multiculturalism trumps free inquiry, but it’s all really in service of this leftist authoritarianism, again, in the academy.

MICHAEL GRAHAM: We want to take some – oh, take some questions from the floor.

MAN: [FAINT] This is for Andy and Robert. What – Mark Duriya [PH] suggested basically something about [UNCLEAR] basically requires [UNCLEAR] cannot criticize Mohammad, you have to basically protect Muhammad from injury because [UNCLEAR] some things have been written about Muhammad in the [UNCLEAR] documents, that he’s not going to come off very well, so you have to basically, you know, [UNCLEAR]

MICHAEL GRAHAM: Just sitting in the back, he’s asking is there writing in the Koran and other teachings that make the interpretation of Muhammad so weak that you can’t explore it?

ANDY BOSTOM:  Yeah  It’s very interesting. When – there was a great scholar of Islam who actually also was an Episcopal canon who lived for many years in Egypt, Gairdner [PH] and Gairdner was an outstanding Arabic linguist and translator and also a scholar, particularly of the Sufi, al-Gazawi [PH] but he once made a comment about forty years before this translation actually appeared. He said, you know, the answer to all these apologetic lives of Muhammad that appear in the West for prosylitazation purposes would just be for a good translation of the first Muslim – or the earliest Muslim biography of Muhammad by ibn Ishaq [PH] and fast forward about forty years and it actually was done by this scholar, Giam [PH] and I remember reading a review of it by another scholar, Jeffrey, who said that, you know, Canon Gairdner’s prayer had been answered and if you want to look at the character of Muhammad and have an alternative to these narratives, just read the Muslim materials on Muhammad. And one of the best, I think the very best in modern times was Robert’s. Robert wrote an absolutely brilliant, short, accessible analysis of Muhammad focusing on the things, frankly, that are most important to non-Muslims. And he just used the basic sources. It’s – the Truth About Muhammad.  I got that right?  The Truth About Muhammad. You know, so we have these materials and unfortunately, you know, when you hold them up to the light of day and just objective inquiry that we just take for granted in the West, it’s not a terribly compelling biography. I’m sorry, that’s just the way it is now. If it’s seen through a certain kind of pious prism, I guess you could come away with a different take on it. But if you view it and read it according to the standards that we’re, you know, used to be trained in anyway in terms of analyzing things objectively, it’s not a terribly compelling picture. And that is an act of blasphemy. To not appreciate it in a compelling way in the end is an act of blasphemy. In fact, blasphemy itself is really an act of war. If you look at what the jurists are saying about blasphemy for non-Muslims in particular, you are putting yourself and these kinds of criticisms, literally on a war footing and your life becomes licit.

ROBERT SPENCER: All the things that you’ve heard about Muhammad are true. He waged wars. He ordered his enemies assassinated. He consummated a marriage with a nine year old when he was fifty-four. All these things and more are in the canonical biographies of Muhammad that are written by Muslims for Muslims and are the earliest available sources on which all others depend, all biographies of Muhammad ever since depend on these early sources. And so these are what Muslims know about what Muhammad said and did. But it’s important to note that Islamic blasphemy law specifies not that it is a death penalty offense to tell a lie about Muhammad. It is a death penalty offense, quote, to mention something impermissible about Allah, Muhammad, or Islam. In other words, there are a lot of things they would prefer you not know about Muhammad. Because Muhammad, according to the Koran, is the excellent example of conduct, the highest example to follow. If he did it, it’s good. And you should do it. So that means you can marry a kid. You can go out and have – and kill your enemies. Order them killed if you have the power. And so on. And you should do those things and more because Muhammad did them. But Muhammad also said, war is deceit. And to lull the infidels into complacency is a very important weapon in war. And one way they do that is to accuse those who have spoken about it, who have laid bare what is really in these canonical biographies of Muhammad, they say we’re making it up. And Professor Khalil Muhammad of the University of California, San Diego, he contacted me after my book The Truth About Muhammad came out and he said, I can’t believe you wrote this horrible book full of lies and you actually have said that Muhammad married his daughter-in-law. Well, you know, I thought that was amazing that I made that up, because that’s in the Koran, chapter 33, verse 37. And it’s extensively explained in these early – in Ibn az-Haq [PH] and the early biographies of Muhammad. So I’m pretty good that I was able to get that in there. My Zionist black arts cast into the Koran itself.  And so – I’m sorry, but just – the point is, that there’s a great deal of confusion about what Muhammad was really like, cause you have Karen Armstrong and these other paid apologists saying he’s like Gandhi. But you go back to the original sources and you see what he’s really like. And the thing is, Muslims are reading those and acting upon them. And that’s why the world is in flames.

MAN: [FAINT] It’s pretty obvious that we see that Islam uses our laws and our society against us. I mean, that’s at least what I see. You’re speaking to the converted. And it needs to be done and you are amazing. But my thought is this, and maybe [UNCLEAR] I would love to see someone, somewhere, somehow start a dialogue with these Muslim apologists and put this out in the open so that there could be an opportunity to really challenge them in a public [UNCLEAR] I have never seen anywhere – I would love to see that.

MICHAEL GRAHAM: We’ll start with Lars. Lars, what happens when you confront the apologists and present arguments? Are they willing to debate?

LARS HEDEGAARD: No, no. You can’t debate these people because they’re not willing to listen to arguments. So give it up. What you have to do is stand up and claim your rights, say what you want, and expose these people because they’re not willing to listen to arguments. I was listening to my friend Robert, all that is said about Muhammed is true. Well, the truth is, he never existed. As many people are aware, including, I believe, yourself and other eminent scholars, Professor Hans Jamen [PH] from Holland who wrote a very good biography based on Ibn Ishaq’s book from I believe 1751 —

ROBERT SPENCER: 750.

LARS HEDEGAARD:  Right. 751.  I’ve been making about sixteen speeches since I came to the US, so I get mixed up. This cannot be debated. You cannot debate the sources of Islam and the way we are used to debate anything else in our culture. Including, as you may know, that eminent scholars, for example, at the University of Copenhagen, claim that King David never existed. The Bible story about David and Solomon, etceteras, is a total invention. It is, of course, not an invention, because they found some things, archeological facts that indicate that they did exist. But it’s an honest argument. For God’s sake, let the experts and the specialists argue about that. We’ve had biblical criticism in the West for the last three hundred years. Back and forth, you are not even allowed to raise these questions within the confines of Islam. And that is the most troubling, very troubling, aspect of it. It is a total breakdown of our understanding of scholarship, our universities, our logic, it will all go down the drain unless we stand up and claim our rights to discuss and to elucidate. Thank you.

MICHAEL GRAHAM: [UNCLEAR] one or two questions in, we’re getting [UNCLEAR] to the time, so we’ll start with the gentleman in the hat right here.

MAN: [VERY FAINT] our educational system [UNCLEAR] established in 1794 [UNCLEAR] how many Americans know [UNCLEAR] Massachusetts [UNCLEAR] fed up with the United States government [UNCLEAR] 1.2 million dollars [UNCLEAR] really raising the ante [UNCLEAR] those are the lessons, I think [UNCLEAR] what happened when the [UNCLEAR] we tried diplomacy, we tried [UNCLEAR] kept upping the ante and got fed up. [UNCLEAR]

WOMAN:  [FAINT] I wast just wondering it sounds a bit like you’re saying [UNCLEAR] these people are irrational and how will we deal, our fight against irrationality? Do we do it singly or do we [UNCLEAR] I mean, I know you’ve been saying [UNCLEAR] is that what you’re saying? We should just do it individually?

ROBERT SPENCER: Yes, we’re fighting against irrationality. We’re fighting for individual rights against collectivism. We’re fighting for rationality against irrationality. Lars alluded to – that I’ve written a book called, Did Muhammad Exist? I wrote a biography of Muhammad. But then went back in another book, Did Muhammad Exist? And evaluated the historical value of those sources and there really isn’t much. There’s no real evidence that Muhammad the prophet of Islam ever existed. And the reason why I’m talking about this now is because I did debate this with Anjem Choudary [PH] who’s a very famous imam in Britain. And he said – he kept saying, of course, Muhammad existed. It’s in the Koran.  And this is what we have. There’s no tradition of rational discourse or free inquiry within Islam. The Koran tells you don’t question about things that are hard to understand. And it criticizes the Jews. It says the Jews say Allah’s hand is chained. And may their own hands be chained. What does it mean Allah’s hand is chained? It means that he is constrained. And he’s not constrained, which means that he’s absolute will. Whereas in the West, they were able to say that there might be some consistent and observable laws on which nature is based and science developed. But because in Islam there was this idea that Allah is absolute will and he can change anything that he wanted at any time, there was no point in observing the natural law and science, natural order of things, science never developed. Now what do we do against this great irrationality that is sweeping in the world? Well, it depends on where you are and what your own situation is. And what your talents are. There are many good groups to join. There is the American Freedom Defense Initiative of which I’m the associate director. There are many, many others that are fighting this fight. There are things that you can do in your own communities, individually and in groups. The Islamic supremacists are working and they’re doing something right where you are. Find out what it is, expose who they are, and stop them. You can do it. And nobody else is going to do it for you. And it – what you can do in your own particular situation depends on you and your own time and your own talent and your own abilities and your own perspectives. So only you can ultimately answer that question. But yes, it’s all up to us. And nobody is going to take care of this on our behalf.

LARS HEDEGAARD:  I am thinking about the question of irrationality. It can be described as Robert just did. You can also look at it from a different perspective. If you look at military theoreticians throughout the ages, you’ve heard about Sun Tzu perhaps, you may have heard about Clausowitz and others who have laid out the laws of war, strategies and tactics. But the supreme strategist in history is really this non-existent character called Muhammad. I don’t know who made up the Koran. It’s a late invention. If we think that Muhammad died in 632 – right, yes.  whether or not he existed is a matter of debate. But somebody over the next two hundred years or so made up a body of canonical texts describing this character and what he was supposed to have thought and done. The main characteristic of Muhammad or this fictional character as a strategist is that his war – and Islam is a war – does not depend on any organized body. It does not depend on state power. It does not depend on an empire. It is lodged in the head of every Muslim who’s a believer. Which means that Islam can wage wars without any state. It is incumbent on every Muslim who wants to go to paradise to conduct jihad. Holy war. Which is not war in our sense of the word. It is a – it’s incumbent on every Muslim to wage this jihad in every way that is possible and feasible. It could be done by demanding cultural rights, it is waged by demanding that schools only serve halal food, that boys and girls don’t swim together, that women wear the hijab, they wrap themselves up in meters of – yards of clothing, etceteras. You’ve got to understand that no society that I know of has ever been able to integrate believing Muslims in their midst. Whenever orthodox believing Muslims come into a society there is automatically a battle for the control of that society. And you’ve got to realize that and that’s why it is not enough that you individually do what you can, and you should, you’ve got to organize. You’ve got to stand up in organizations. You’ve got to back your rabbi. You’ve got to tell your Jewish leaders that this is a fight for our very existence and for the goodness of mankind and for all that we hold dear. You’ve got to understand that.