Transcription
So the real question is, is Islam a religion of peace? And in order to find that out, we have today a video of Bridget Gabriel, who is a Lebanese-American activist who's going to, in 15 minutes, help us answer that question. If I were you, I would stick around until the end of this video. Don't skip, don't leave, watch the whole thing, be patient, because at the end of this, you might be able to answer this question too. Let's get into it.
So what I'm going to do right now is I'm going to crunch 1,400 years of Islam history in five minutes and make it as exciting as I can possibly make it, because I hated history when I was a little girl. At this age, I appreciate history, and now I understand why they say those who don't learn from history are doomed to repeat it. In order for you to understand why Western Civilization is very different than the Islamic world, you need to understand the history of Islam.
When Prophet Muhammad supposedly revealed his revelation from the angel Gabriel that he is supposed to be the last of the prophets, in the early 600s, he started preaching in his own city, Mecca. He tried to recruit friends and followers to be able to spread his religion, and he tried for 12 years and failed. And after 12 years, he was only able to recruit his immediate family and friends. So he decided, if I go to Medina, which was the Jewish hub of Arabia, the business hub where the Jews lived, if I go there and preach my religion to them, if they accept me, that will buy me respect and stature between my own people, and they will accept me.
So Prophet Muhammad started borrowing a lot from the Old Testament to make his religion more palpable to the Jews, to make it a lot similar. This is why you see a lot of similarities between Judaism and Islam. For example, Jews don't eat pigs; Muslims don't eat pigs. Jews pray a few times a day; Muslims pray a few times a day. Jews fast on Yom Kippur; Muslims fast on Ramadan. And this is why you started seeing a lot of good writing in the beginning of the Quran when Prophet Muhammad was saying all the good things about the people of the book. He took his message and went to Medina, trying to recruit the Jews, talking about the people of the book, talking about how similar the two religions are. When they refused to accept him and follow as the last of the Prophet, that's when he turned against them and started killing them and started expelling them. That's when Islam went from a spiritual movement for the first 12 years of Islam into a political movement cloaked in religion.
After the year of the Hijra, after Muhammad went to Medina and the Jews did not accept him, he became a military warrior and declared war on them and started expelling them. Jews and Christians became dhimmi, or second-class citizens. They were only allowed to stay alive and not be killed only by paying the jizya, or that protection tax. So they had a choice: convert to Islam, or if you want to stay alive, you have to pay the jizya, or protection tax, living as dhimmi in the Islamic nation. Christians and Jews could not ring a church bell; Jews could not blow the shofar; Christians could not ring church bells. They could not pray publicly. Christians and Jews could not gather together and build new churches or new temples. And the way they paid the jizya, or the protection tax, was in a monthly ceremony where they would get together downtown, and the Jew would kneel on his knee and hand his goods to the mullah, who would take the goods as the price for buying the protection. And in many areas, Jews and Christians were given necklaces to wear as a receipt that they paid their jizya, or their protection tax. Jews considered nasis under Islam; nasis is bodily fluid; nasis is garbage; nasis is dogs; nasis is dirty. So Christians and Jews were treated as second-class citizens.
Islam continued to grow. As Islam grew, more people became dhimmi, or second-class citizens. Jews and Christians were given identifiable clothing, the yellow star, which was given to the Jews that most people think is a German invention; it was actually an Islamic invention in the 9th century in Iraq by the second Khalifa of Iraq, who invented the yellow star for the Jews to be identified as they walked down the street, because Jews were considered nasis. If a Muslim man or a Jew walked on the same side of the street, the Jew had to cross the other side so the Muslim man can walk so he's not dirtied by the filth of the Jew. Christians were given the zunnar, the belt, which most of you men are wearing right now; that was an Islamic invention for the Christians. Islam continued to grow; they went all the way to Jerusalem; they conquered Jerusalem. Christians couldn't ring their church bells in Jerusalem. The Pope in Rome, in 1090, told the Christians, "How could you sit idly by and allow your brethren to be suffer to suffer like this in the Holy Land? You need to go liberate the Christians; you need to go help the Christians." That's why the Crusaders were launched. The Crusaders, the Crusaders were not launched because they just felt like waking up in the morning and going and converting a bunch of Muslims or beheading them. The Crusaders were launched to liberate Jerusalem, and they were able to liberate Jerusalem for less than 100 years before Saladin took it back, and Jerusalem remained under Islamic control until 1967, when the state of Israel liberated Jerusalem, where Christians, Jews, and Muslims could pray under the same sky.
The Crusaders continued fighting Islam, and for 300 years they tried and failed. And by the 1300s, the Crusaders disappeared because they could not win against Islam. Islam continued to expand; they went all the way to Central Europe; they went all the way to China; they went to India; they conquered Spain; they changed the name of Spain from Spain to Andalusia, and they started as, as they advanced, as they conquered more nations, more people paid the jizya, or the protection tax, and this is how the Islamic empire grew. It went all the way until they were stopped at the gates of Vienna on 911—9, I mean, 9/11 is not a date that Osama Bin Laden just picked out of a hat. 9/11 is a symbolic date in the Islamic calendar.
Between the 1600s, by the 1600s, Islam had covered more of the Earth's surface than the Roman Empire did at its peak. Between the 1600s and the 1800s, the Europeans were experiencing the European Industrial Revolution, where the Europeans were able to invent products on factory lines, where they are able to make money and sell products, which gave them the money to build a strong army in order to fight the Muslims, and that's how they were able to stop them at the gates of Vienna. On 9/11, the Europeans started the push back against Islam. They pushed them out of Europe; they pushed them out of all the way to the Middle East and North Africa. By 1924, the Islamic empire ended. In 1924, the Islamic caliphate ended in Turkey by President Atatürk, who was a secularist. He ended the Islamic empire, and he gave women the right to vote; he gave women a right to education, a right to work, a right to choose a husband. He forbade women from wearing the hijab; he forbade men from wearing the beard. The Muslims hated him so much that they consider him a Jewish agent because they believe that his mother, in her bloodline, was Jewish, and that was the influence on Atatürk.
By the time the Islamic empire or the Islamic caliphate or the Islamic State ended in 1924, the Islamic caliphate had existed for 1,400 years, and it ended less than 100 years ago. By the time that Islamic caliphate ended in 1924, 270 million people around the world were killed by Islam—270 million—and we didn't have weapons of mass destruction and there were nuclear weapons. All of these people were killed, butchered by the sword, the people in the world less than 100 years ago. How many people knew this history? Please raise your hand. We in America have failed to educate our children about history. We in America failed to educate our population about history. Our children in high school—you take any 17, 16-year-old kid, 18-year-old kid, and ask them about World War II; they can't even tell you what happened in World War II. For them, it's ancient history, and we still have our World War II veterans walking among us. That's how little we know of history.
Islam ended in 1924, the caliphate. People thought Islam will, the caliphate will never be resurrected; the caliphate will never come back. But two things happened in the Middle East in the last century that made the Islamists be able to resurrect the caliphate. Number one is the discovery of oil in Saudi Arabia, which we were able to discover and were stupid enough to allow them to nationalize it. That's right. And number two that happened was Ayatollah Khomeini coming to power in 1979, that gave the Islamists the money and also the spiritual covering in order to explode on the world stage. And people say, "Oh, well, the Wahhabis exported their Wahhabi radical religion." The Wahhabis are the name of Wahhab; they're not a different sect of Islam. They follow the authentic preaching of Prophet Muhammad, the way Prophet Muhammad lived and practiced his religion. This is why neither you nor me nor any infidel can step a foot in Mecca, because as far as they're concerned, we are filth, and as infidels, we're not allowed to step a foot—not President Obama and not anybody else. As a matter of fact, Al-Qaeda used to use Saudi Arabia and its success as an excuse to recruit members, as the example to show them how Allah has blessed Saudi Arabia because of the way they adhered to the tenants of Islam. And today we talk about ISIS. ISIS is not a new invention. ISIS resurrected the caliphate that ended less than a hundred years ago, except we are too ignorant and too uninformed to understand why what ISIS is doing and why ISIS is succeeding.
Two things you need to understand about Islam and the principles of war in Islam: one is the law of taqiyya, which means lying and deception. It means that a Muslim man can lay his hand on the Quran and swear that he is telling the truth, knowing that he is lying, but also knowing that the Quran will forgive him because he is advancing the cause of Islam. The second thing you need to know about is the Treaty of Hudaybiyyah, which is an Islamic principle of war and a model on how to deceive your enemy when you have to sign peace treaties with your enemy, and it is based on an example by Prophet Muhammad. Prophet Muhammad was attacking the Meccans and their caravans when he was living in Medina. One day he attacked them because this is how he got the goodies; he would attack them, rob them, and spread the goodies among his men, and this is how he was able to recruit, because this is how people made money without working. And so he attacked the Meccan caravans. When he realized he's not able to defeat the Meccans in that city of Hudaybiyyah, in that place, he signed a 10-year treaty with them. Does that sound familiar? Yes, a 10-year treaty with them that says he will not attack them; he will have peace with them; he will not declare war on them. Muhammad used the treaty for two years to build his military, strengthen his army, and when he realized he was strong enough to attack his enemies when they least expected it, because they thought they had a peace treaty with Muhammad, he broke the treaty, attacked them two years later, and Mecca fell within 2-4 hours because they were not expecting the attack, and that became a principle of war in Islam. And to give you an example of how that is practiced, this is why anything signed with Iran means nothing to them. And to give you an example of how this law has been put to use in the last, in recent history: Yes, Arafat, who's not an Islamist but he is a Muslim, met with the Israelis and signed the Oslo Accord in 1993. Remember all the hand-shaking at the lawn of the White House? The Oslo Accord. Yasser Arafat used the peace treaty, the Oslo Accord with Israel, to get Israel to bring him back and give him his territory, finance his military, train his police, and give his police the weapons. Yasser Arafat broke the Oslo Accord eight years later, didn't even wait 10 years, and declared the second intifada in 2000, and all hell broke loose. He used the same treaty to win and deceive against his enemies and deceive his enemies. When Jordanian press, after Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Accord with Israel, and Egyptian press would interview Yasser Arafat, and they would say, "How could you sign a peace treaty with the devil? How could you sign a peace treaty with the Jews?" Yasser Arafat will tell them, "Remember Hudaybiyyah." That all he would have to say. The whole Muslim world knew exactly what Yasser Arafat was talking about. We in the West and the Jews in Israel, it was over their heads; nobody understood what Hudaybiyyah was referring to. And this is the type of deception that we are dealing with. So when Iran signs a peace treaty with the United States for 10 years, they are using us as useful idiots, as gullible ignorant people who are signing a peace treaty with the devil in order for Iran to continue her thing. That is why it is so important to be wise about who we're going to put in the White House next year. [Applause]
Sorry, that is absolutely—there's no words. I will, I will just say, the next time somebody tries to make the claim that the Arab-Jewish-Israeli-Palestinian conflict is about land, that it's about the small sliver of land the size of New Jersey, size of Massachusetts, size of Rhode Island, that the whole thing's about land, show them this video. Ask them what Prophet Muhammad would have wanted, and all of the following caliphs. Ask them what was the intention, what is the intention of an Islamic caliphate? Is it just land, or is it political power masked in religious ideology? Which one is it, or is it both? If it's about land, why is it that violent means against an ethnic minority or ethnic minorities, why is that the way to somehow get land? Because it didn't start in Judea and Samaria; it didn't start here. It's so obvious.
In the beginning of this video, she talks about how ignorant and uneducated people in the West are, not knowing history and understanding history. I happen to really agree with that sentiment. In fact, it's pretty telling when you ask people about the Middle Eastern conflict, because without that prerequisite, without that pre-calc to be able to actually study calculus, like you can't really understand what's happening over in this side of the world. You won't be able to—there's too many nuances. It's beyond land; it's also beyond religion. But what we have is, in many ways, a religion that does stem from ideas of hate. That's an issue; that's a very big issue. And I actually don't think you can necessarily change that. I mean, Islam, in the early 600s, Prophet Muhammad, should I say, when when he when he started to try and spread his ideology and how he saw the world, and it's, it's too late; it's too late to sit here and say that we have an opportunity to change religion. We don't have an opportunity to change religion; the damage has been done; you can't undo that. But what we do have as an opportunity is to educate, to change people from being ignorant to being able to understand things in its simplicity. And when I say simplicity, I'm just talking about what leaders have said throughout history about how they see the world and what they want to do with their ideology. You can't show me how the Declaration of Independence for the state of Israel was through leaders who talked about any other ethnic majorities, minorities being vanished. The state of Israel has attempted, Jewish people have attempted to incorporate other individuals who don't believe in the same God, practice the same religion, say the same prayers; they have attempted to live with them in their lives many times throughout history prior to the inception of the state of Israel, but it has not been reciprocated; it has sadly not been reciprocated. Because Jews, prior to 1948, through Islam, when they were considered dhimmis, second-class citizens, where they had to wear yellow patches on their clothing before the yellow star that Nazi Germany would use to throw onto the clothing of Holocaust survivors or Holocaust people in the Holocaust, it started with a religion of hate, an ideology of hate, a life in a way of hate. And I am not sitting here and saying that I'm Islamophobic or that I believe everybody who practices and believes in Islam is full of hate. No, in fact, I've met many people who don't agree with this way. You're allowed to condemn Judaism in ways that you don't agree with it, but Judaism is not a religion of hate; Judaism is not about a Jewish caliphate. We're too small; we've been a minority since since world since the world has started. If there was a Jewish caliphate, we would be an ethnic majority; we would be a supremacy; we would be the ones to condemn, and I'd say it right here, right now, loud and proud, but I can't and I won't, because that's not what Jewish people think of the world; that's not how we've lived throughout history. I, it's not, it's not a bias in my life because I'm Jewish. My best friends are all non-Jews. I've spent time in mosques; I've spent time with Muslims; I've been in houses that break the, the Ramadan fast; I've broken the fast with people during Ramadan; I've met people from Pakistan and Dubai and Morocco and Lebanon and Syria and Egypt and Jordan and Turkey. I don't want them dead just because they're Muslim; I don't consider them second-class citizens or Arabs second-class citizens, like, it's crazy to me because people say that the Middle Eastern conflict, it is complex; there's so many different layers to it, but like it's not that hard to understand when there's a good and there's an evil, like there can't be two evils here, not to the situation that we have today; there can't be two evils; there also can't be two goods, because if there were two goods, we wouldn't have a conflict. There are evil things that happen on both sides, of course. When people see the despair inside of the Gaza Strip, excuse me, and they see the videos coming out on TikTok at 12, 13, 14 years old, no wonder they call Israel evil. I understand; I understand. But remember, it didn't start on October 7th; remember, it didn't start in 1948. You can't open a book on chapter 4, and you can't skip the table of contents.
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