Three distinguished guests recently joined The Glazov Gang, Frontpage’s television program, to shed light on The High Price of Telling the Truth about Islam — the title of Eric Allen Bell’s recent Frontpage article. Our guests were Eric Allen Bell, a writer and filmmaker who was recently fired from the “Daily Kos” for telling the truth about Islam, Nonie Darwish, author of the new book, The Devil We Don’t Know: The Dark Side of Revolutions in the Middle East, and Mark Tapson, Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. Below is Part I of a three part series. We will run Part II in tomorrow’s issue.

To get the whole story on why the Left suppresses the truth about Islam, read Jamie Glazov’s book, United in Hate: The Left’s Romance with Tyranny and Terror.

Three distinguished guests recently joined The Glazov Gang, Frontpage’s television program, to discuss the GOP presidential race. The guests were: Sonja Schmidt, a conservative political analyst, Evan Sayet, America’s #1 conservative comedian and Kevin Hand, CEO and President of Hand & Associates. We run all three segments of the three part series below.  Part I deals with the sinister designs of Occupy Wall Street, Part 2 focuses on the persecution of truth tellers about Islam, and Part 3 deals with Romney’s lead in the GOP presidential contest.

[For the whole story behind Occupy Wall Street and how this movement marks a new phase in the rebirth of the communist Left, read the new broadside by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, Occupy Wall Street: The Communist Movement Reborn. This essential pamphlet exposes the roots, leaders and hidden agendas of the radical movement and its war on capitalism and free societies.]

Part 1: The True Face of Occupy Wall Street

Part 2: Fired For Islamophobia

Part 3: Romney Rising

Three distinguished guests recently joined The Glazov Gang, Frontpage’s television program, to discuss the rebirth of communism on American soil. The guests were: Sonja Schmidt, a conservative political analyst, Evan Sayet, America’s #1 conservative comedian and Kevin Hand, CEO and President of Hand & Associates. We run all three segments of the three part series below.  Part I deals with the sinister designs of Occupy Wall Street, Part 2 focuses on the persecution of truth tellers about Islam, and Part 3 deals with Romney’s lead in the GOP presidential contest.

[For the whole story behind Occupy Wall Street and how this movement marks a new phase in the rebirth of the communist Left, read the new broadside by David Horowitz and John Perazzo, Occupy Wall Street: The Communist Movement Reborn. This essential pamphlet exposes the roots, leaders and hidden agendas of the radical movement and its war on capitalism and free societies.]

Part 1: The True Face of Occupy Wall Street

Part 2: Fired For Islamophobia

Part 3: Romney Rising

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Daris Long, Father of PV2 William A. Long, who was one of the two soldiers shot at the Little Rock Recruiting Center on June 1, 2009. William Long died of his wounds. Daris Long testified on December 7, 2011 in front of the joint House/Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing, stressing that no federal terrorism charges have ever been levied against the perpetrators of the only two successful attacks on US soil since 9/11 (Little Rock Recruiting Center and Fort Hood).

The above picture of Daris Long was taken during the Committee hearing on Dec 7, 2011. The item he is holding is his son’s Identification Tags that he was wearing when he was killed. The man behind his right shoulder is Dr. Charles Jacobs — who came down from Boston to support Mr. Long during the hearing.

FP: Daris Long, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I am very sorry about your son and I speak on behalf of everyone here at Frontpage in giving you our sincere and heart-felt condolences.

Let’s begin by you telling us about your testimony on December 7, 2011 in front of the joint House/Senate Homeland Security Committee hearing. You made it powerfully clear that this is an irregular war and that, despite the wall of silence and denial put up by the administration, army leadership and media, there have already been casualties on our soil.

Long: My position has always been that the War on Terror has not been isolated to what has been historically deemed the battlefield. We are not fighting against a foe that represents a government or territory. We are fighting against an ideology that is transnational in nature and doesn’t recognize territorial boundaries. In this case we are up against an ideology that divides the world into two spheres, the Land of Islam and the Land of War. The opponents we face are not clearly identified by openly carrying arms nor do they wear uniforms which clearly identify them as part of an organized force as defined in the Laws of War. They can easily hide in the open and only become visible when they decide to perform their act of terror.

I was asked to speak at the hearing because I have been open about the ridiculous position that the government seems to have. It trumpets its success in thwarting terror related attacks. The authorities have been successful in identifying those who have planned to go to the Middle East and join the “jihad” such as the fourteen Somalis from Minnesota in Jun 2010 and the two New Jersey men in August 2010. Both plots resulted in the arrests and indictments under Federal terrorism statutes.

They were able to stop bombing plots, NY subway system, Brooklyn Bridge, Springfield, Illinois, and Dallas, Texas; they even stopped a similar planned attack to what happened in Little Rock in the Seattle Recruiting Center plot. They went so far as to say they stopped the Christmas Day and Times Square bombers. Those were after the fact captures of perpetrators whose bombs failed to function. Good law enforcement but nothing was thwarted. Of course, both had Federal fingerprints all over them in how they have been pursued in court. Just recently another potential terrorist was captured and arrested in Yemen trying to cross into Somalia and join Al Shabaab. Upon his return to the U.S. he was arrested and charged in Federal Court with material support for terrorism.

This case is particularly grating. The Feds were fully aware of Abdulhakim Muhammad’s adventures in Yemen and actually interviewed him on at least two occasions while he was still in a political prison in Yemen. It was reported in the L.A. Times by Richard Serrano on Feb 9, 2011, that the Feds knew Muhammad was dangerously radicalized before he was ever deported back to the United States on Jan 29, 2009 at the request of the State Department and the American Embassy. He was interviewed again in Nashville by the same FBI agent who interviewed him in Yemen. I have been told that he was to have a polygraph test but failed to show up for it. At that point, I don’t understand why he was not picked up.

I was also told that three FBI Field Offices were involved in the investigations of Muhammad. I believe two, Nashville and Memphis were active before the shooting in Little Rock and that the Little Rock Office got involved after the attack. In reading the Senate Homeland Security Report on Fort Hood, “A Ticking Time Bomb,” it was identified that these Field Offices don’t play well together and there are some real issues about territory and whether they actually pass information along which is why the Homeland Security Department was established. I believe that was the case before the Little Rock attack. Of the 33 attempts that specifically involve the military, only two resulted in deaths of Americans at the hands of people who unabashedly claim it was jihad and a religious duty. Of those 33 cases, only the ones where the government can claim they thwarted the plots and did not result in the killing of American soldiers on US soil resulted in formal Federal indictments. Where there were casualties, Little Rock and Ft Hood, they were relegated to State and military jurisdiction. I wanted to identify this disparity.

Daris Long’s son, PV2 William Andrew Long. This picture was taken about 2 weeks before he was killed on June 1, 2009. He had just completed the final field problem in his training at Fort Benning. The date of the picture is around May 15, 2009.

FP: Your thoughts on the Obama administration’s role in all of this?

Long: Our Constitution allows for the redress of grievances. I do not believe that this administration has kept faith with the dead and wounded of these attacks. Both perpetrators had clear ties to Yemen but that is lost on the DOJ. In my testimony, I tried to highlight the absurd position of the government which is ruthlessly editing out any reference to what may be deemed offensive to some, but those same words are used by the terrorists themselves to define what and why they did. Unless you can specifically identify the enemy’s threat doctrine, how can you work out a strategy to defeat him? I am amazed that the point man of the effort to scrub “offensive language and materials” seems to be CAIR, an unindicted co-conspirator organization which renamed itself, from the Holy Land Foundation terrorist funding trial.

Why are they still unindicted? I was struck by the unabashed position of the DOD at the hearing that they will not state the motivation of who they are at war with. In my 27 years of service in the Marine Corps, when we went into harm’s way, we made sure we knew as much about the threat as possible, especially motivations for why and what the enemy was doing. In every one of the instances I mentioned, the threat has been from people who have a particularly militant view of their beliefs. I think this has a great deal of bearing on how we should respond. It seems that the Army has a view that all threats are now generic which is dangerous. I was asked about the Army’s movement to “behavioral indicators” as the means to identify the threat.

My response was that I am a father, that my kids would hide what they were doing if they didn’t want me to know what they were into. It could be weeks before I would find out if they were messing up because of that. In the Marines, we had two missions. In the offense we were to close with and destroy the enemy by fire and maneuver, in the defense we were to destroy the enemy by fire and close combat. The behavioral indicator approach tells me that they are willing to cede the advantages of being on the offensive, to wait until the bad guys are in amongst you so you can observe them and then get rid of them through close combat. It makes no sense to me.

FP: What are your conclusions on this wall of silence and denial that you have discussed? What does it mean for our nation and for this war we are in?

Long: Over the past ten years, through two administrations, the position has been to extol the peaceful virtues of Islam, while completely downplaying the violent political aspects practiced by the very people who have been fighting. John Brennan, in a speech given at CSIS in May 2010, identified terror as only a tactic and that jihad is the battling against the inner self to attain private holiness and devotion to Allah’s path. I understand that the source of this statement is from the Koran.

The problem is that in Islamic jurisprudence, jihad means to war against non-Muslims. It is contained in the Reliance of the Traveler, Supra Note 10 at 599. This book is the major source for Islamic law. It does not refer to the issue of an inner struggle. Umdat al Salik, Islamic Sacred Law, which has been certified by leading Muslim Brotherhood front groups International Institute of Islamic Thought (IIIT) and the Fique Council of North America, also identify jihad as war against non-Muslims and include this as Muslim Brotherhood Doctrine.

If the chief counter terrorism advisor to the President refuses to see the term jihad as what our opponents define it as, I can only conclude that it is a willful and purposeful omission. During the testimony of Mr. Stockton in front of the Joint House /Senate Homeland Security hearing of December 7, 2011, he refused to identify the enemy as violent Islamist extremists, but said we are at war with Al Qaeda.  During previous hearings on the Hill, both the Attorney General and the Secretary of Homeland Security appeared to almost be apoplectic in their refusal to even mouth the words terrorist or terrorism despite clear and repeated questions on the subject. We received a letter of condolence from President Obama dated 5 June 2009. These letters are only sent, by a policy began under the Clinton Administration, to the families of military members killed as a result of hostile action.

Editor’s note: The world is at this moment witnessing a horrific phenomenon: Islamists coming to power throughout the Middle East under the guise of a supposed “Arab Spring” – while the President of the United States is facilitating the entire process. Indeed, President Obama is reaching his hand out in solidarity to Islamists and enabling their solidification of power throughout the region. While displaying a disastrous weakness with Iran and allowing the Mullahs to move ahead aggressively with their nuclear weapon program, the Obama administration is helping the Muslim Brotherhood take over Egypt and the Taliban regain power in Afghanistan.

In these tragic and disturbing circumstances, the editors of Frontpage felt it timely and relevant to rerun the video of Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov’s interview with Erick Stakelbeck on CBN News in May 2009, in which he discussed his book “United in Hate,” which crystallizes why the Left is in league with our deadly jihadi enemies. The interview explains precisely why a leftist like Obama is pursuing a disastrous foreign policy that is helping Islamists gain and consolidate power throughout the Middle East. Below is the second part of the two-part interview. We ran the first part in our next previous issue. 

Part II:

Editors’ note: The world is at this moment witnessing a horrific phenomenon: Islamists coming to power throughout the Middle East under the guise of a supposed “Arab Spring” – while the President of the United States is facilitating the entire process. Indeed, President Obama is reaching his hand out in solidarity to Islamists and enabling their solidification of power throughout the region. While displaying a disastrous weakness with Iran and allowing the Mullahs to move ahead aggressively with their nuclear weapon program, the Obama administration is helping the Muslim Brotherhood take over Egypt and the Taliban regain power in Afghanistan.

In these tragic and disturbing circumstances, the editors of Frontpage felt it timely and relevant to rerun the video of Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov’s interview with Erick Stakelbeck on CBN News in May 2009, in which he discussed his book “United in Hate,” which crystallizes why the Left is in league with our deadly jihadi enemies. The interview explains precisely why a leftist like Obama is pursuing a disastrous foreign policy that is helping Islamists gain and consolidate power throughout the Middle East. Below is the first part of the two part interview. We will run the second part in our next issue. 

Part I:

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Dave Bray, the lead singer of the new openly conservative rock band, Madison Rising. The band’s self-titled debut album was released on October 17, 2011 and has already charted in the top 100 best selling rock albums on both iTunes and Amazon.com. The overarching theme of the band’s music is that of liberty, independence, smaller government and personal responsibility. Visit the band’s site at MadisonRising.com. They are playing this Tuesday, January 17, in Washington, D.C.

FP: Dave Brave, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Thanks you for joining us today.

Bray: Sure. Happy to be here.

FP: Congratulations on your debut album and all your great success.

First, let’s begin with your admirable background. I noticed is that you’re a Navy veteran. Can you tell us a little about that part of your background? And thank you for serving this country and for putting your life on the line for us and our liberty.

Bray: Thanks Jamie.

I served as an 8404(FMF) Corpsman for STA platoon, 2nd battalion/2nd Marines out of Camp Lejeune, NC. It was an honor to serve side by side with the USMC!

FP: So when it comes to being a patriot, you’re definitely the real deal.

Bray: Absolutely. The stars and stripes fly high at my house!

FP: And the band itself is patriotic and all of you describe yourselves as pro-American. Tell us what that means to you and was that a conscious decision on your part?

Bray: Well, pro-American simply means we’re glad to be Americans. We’re grateful for all the things we have in this country and we’re damn proud of all that we’ve accomplished as a nation. We know that that’s the complete opposite of most people in the music industry, and the entertainment industry in general, but that’s who we are. And yeah, it was definitely a conscious decision. The guys all recognized the fact that there was no great pro-American rock music out there and we decided we needed to change that. There was a huge void and it was about time someone had the guts to stand up and fill it.

FP: So what message in general are you stressing in your music?

Bray: Our message is pro-American vs. anti-American. Hard work vs. entitlement. Creating as opposed to destroying. Personal responsibility as opposed to government dependency. We’re about what this country was founded on – integrity. Not whimpering or whining, but actually doing something. And not only do we have an overall message as a band, but each of our songs themselves has a specific message as well. Like “Soldiers of America” which is a rock anthem for the men and woman who serve our country and the sacrifices they make. Or “Rally the Youth,” a motivational song about the need for young people to take action, get informed, and to create a better future for themselves.

FP: The first song in the album is called “Right To Bear” — tell us about that song.

Bray: “Right To Bear” is a really guitar heavy rock song about protecting the 2^nd amendment, which for some reason is always under attack from the Left. Our new video will be coming out very soon. I love that song and the video rocks!

FP: It looks like you have some videos out already. Which songs are those and why did you choose those?

Bray: We do have some videos out: “Walking through that door,” “Where was the media then,” and “Honk if you want peace.” We thought they were the most relevant.

FP: Media bias is a concern for a lot of conservatives. Tell us a bit about your song, “Where was the media then.”

Bray: Well, that’s probably our heaviest song musically, but also one of the most interesting thematically. It’s really a song that compares and contrasts how much attention the media gives to situations based on who is involved.  How the media hides anything the liberals do that would make them look bad, and how they vilify and blow everything conservatives do way out of proportion. We think we did a pretty good job telling the story and also writing it on a fairly intelligent level.

Editor’s note: A mother accused of murdering three of her daughters and her husband’s first wife in an honor killing recently testified in an Ontario court in Canada. Tooba Mohammad Yahya, 41, is accused of conspiring with her husband, Mohammad Shafia, 58, and their eldest son, Hamed, 21, of running one of their family cars into a canal with their four relatives inside. See Pamela Geller’s coverage of the trial here.

In these tragic and disturbing circumstances, the editors of Frontpage felt it timely and relevant to run the video of Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov’s speech in March 2011 to the San Fernando Chapter Valley Chapter for “Act! for America,” in which he brought attention to the victims of Islamic honor killings and shed light on why the Left is in league with the Muslim murderers and turns a callous blind eye to the Muslim female victims. The phenomenon crystallizes the Left’s contemporary unholy alliance with radical Islam. Below are the four parts of the 4-part speech:

Part I:

Part II:

Part III:

Part IV:

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle: Click here. 

Editors’ note: The world is at this moment witnessing a horrific phenomenon: Islamists coming to power throughout the Middle East under the guise of a supposed “Arab Spring” – while the President of the United States is facilitating the entire process. Indeed, President Obama is reaching his hand out in solidarity to Islamists and enabling their solidification of power throughout the region. While displaying a disastrous weakness with Iran and allowing the Mullahs to move ahead aggressively with their nuclear weapon program, the Obama administration is helping the Muslim Brotherhood take over Egypt and the Taliban regain power in Afghanistan.

In these tragic and disturbing circumstances, the editors of Frontpage felt it timely and relevant to run the video of Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov’s speech in May 2009, in which he discussed his book “United in Hate,” which crystallizes why the Left is in league with our deadly jihadi enemies. The speech explains precisely why a leftist like Obama is pursuing a disastrous foreign policy that is helping Islamists gain and consolidate power throughout the Middle East. Below are the final two parts of the 4-part speech. We ran the first two parts in yesterday’s issue.

Part III:

Part IV:

Editors’ note: The world is at this moment witnessing a horrific phenomenon: Islamists are coming to power throughout the Middle East under the guise of a supposed “Arab Spring” – while the President of the United States is facilitating the entire process. Indeed, President Obama is reaching his hand out in solidarity to Islamists and enabling their solidification of power throughout the region. While displaying a disastrous weakness with Iran and allowing the Mullahs to move ahead aggressively with their nuclear weapon program, the Obama administration is helping the Muslim Brotherhood take over Egypt and the Taliban regain power in Afghanistan.

In these tragic and disturbing circumstances, the editors of Frontpage felt it timely and relevant to run the video of Frontpage editor Jamie Glazov’s speech in Los Angeles in May 2009, in which he discussed his book “United in Hate,” which crystallizes why the Left is in league with our deadly jihadi enemies. The speech explains precisely why a leftist like Obama is pursuing a disastrous foreign policy that is helping Islamists gain and consolidate power throughout the Middle East. Below are the first two parts of the 4-part speech. We will run the last two parts in our next issue:

Part I:

Part II:

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Elisabeth Sabaditsch-Wolff, a free speech activist who was charged last year in Austria with “denigration of religious beliefs of a legally recognized religion” for asserting that “Mohammed had a thing for little girls.” In February of this year she was convicted, and will have to pay a fine of up to €480. Just recently, on December 20, 2011, her conviction was upheld by the higher court. If she refuses to pay the fine, she may spend a maximum of two months in jail. She grew up and lived in Muslim countries and experienced Islam first-hand.

FP: Ms. Sabaditsch-Wolff, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

I would like to talk to you today about your trial and where it stands now. But let us begin with a bit of background about yourself.

Sabaditsch-Wolff: Thank you Jamie.

My father was posted at the Austrian Embassy in Tehran before the Iranian Revolution. I was also there, a child of seven, and I experienced the pre-revolutionary Iran, a beautiful country with friendly people, great food and even greater skiing. I attended the German school and generally enjoyed myself.

Then came the revolution and everything changed. There was religious fervor in the air, chanting, demonstrations featuring black-clad women. And one day in late 1978 my mother, my sister and I were forced to leave Tehran, and we joined the thousands of desperate men and women scrambling to get out of the country, the only difference being that we had a country to return to. I still remember all this as if it were yesterday.

I knew that this had to do with religion, with Islam. I knew what “Allahu akhbar” meant, just as I knew that our Iranian housemaid set fire to our house because she no longer seemed to like our Western ways much. (Although I was in the house at the time with my mother and sister, we survived the fire.)

My father returned to Austria just shortly before the war between Iran and Iraq broke out.

In the coming years my life would touch the Islamic world, sometimes more, sometimes less. My father was posted to Baghdad in late 1982, so we joined him for Christmas and New Year. I experienced life on the other side of the war, Saddam’s side. What I don’t remember is Islam, strange as it sounds. The Iraq of the early 1980s was a secular country, albeit a war-torn one. My mother had to “pack” food and other staples in her luggage so we could celebrate Christmas properly. I also remember attending Christmas mass in Baghdad.

After a few years of high school in Chicago, we returned to Vienna, where I graduated and became a ski instructor. In the summer of 1990 I spent three months at the Austrian Embassy in Kuwait, thereby returning to the Middle East for the first time since 1982/3. Memories flooded my brain, everything seemed so familiar. But then Saddam returned to my life: I was in Kuwait on August 2, 1990, when Iraq invaded Kuwait. I was unable to return to Austria until August 26, 1990, but that is another story.

In February 1997, I once again traveled to Kuwait, this time as a visa officer at the Austrian Embassy. During my nearly four years in Kuwait, I was able to experience the true Islam for the first time. Because I was older — in my mid-twenties — I reflected more strongly on what I saw and heard. I saw and heard a lot, and I also experienced a lot first-hand.

Two examples: First, Ramadan. The first one was sort of fun, a different experience, something new. The second one was a nuisance, especially after I heard reports of harassment, especially of the one against the Coptic husband of my colleague, who was chided for licking the stamps for the Christmas cards. Ramadan coincided with Christmas back in the late 1990s. And the third Ramadan forced me to rebel: I started eating salami sandwiches in the visa section, in plain sight of the fasting applicants. I got away with it because the Austrian Embassy is legally Austrian soil.

I started asking myself: what was the point of Ramadan? Our Jordanian translator, a devout Muslim and heavy smoker, suffered greatly during Ramadan, but he was unable, maybe even unwilling to quit during that month of abstention. I did not understand the purpose of his fasting and abstaining if nothing good came of it. This sentiment was furthered by newspaper articles about Ramadan and a Q&A. One question remains with me forever: “I accidentally swallowed a fly while riding my bicycle. Is my fast still acceptable or do I have make it up?” Unbelievable.

The second example concerns the relationship between Mohammed and Aisha, a relationship that earned me the conviction in court. Part of my job was to read the two English-language newspapers. I don’t remember what the article was about, but it must have been something about Mohammed’s marriage to Aisha and the subsequent consummation of the marriage. I clearly remember my shock. I got up from my desk and went to our translator, who was also my friend and confidant. “Hussein,” I said, “Is it true what I just read about Mohammed and Aisha? Did he really have sex with her when she was nine? But that, that, that’s…” Hussein looked at me sternly, “Do not ever talk about this again. Do not mention this again.” Now, he did not deny it. He just ordered me never to speak about this. Though I did not know about it at the time, he was actually enforcing Sharia law.

Slowly, but surely I started to educate myself. I opened my eyes. I saw the suffering of homosexual men in Kuwait, not just the expats, but also the Kuwaitis. I experienced the indifference of Kuwaiti women towards women’s rights.

But the time had not yet come.

I got married and moved to Tripoli, Libya, where I spent a long and hard year. A year of Sharia law in action, from the embassy driver’s fondling of my breast to my landlord’s blaming the Jews for the September 11 attacks. And then I had enough and moved back to Vienna.

After I became a mother, I had more time at my hands. A book entered my life, a book in German, but one that has since been translated into English. It is called “Gabriel’s Whisperings” (in German) and recounts the history of Islam and Mohammed as told by Islamic sources, nothing else. The content of this book is devastating. I was shocked, dismayed and very scared.

By chance I was invited to a small district gathering here in Vienna, a podium discussion about Islam. I felt very alone going in, but I was no longer alone when I left. My knowledge about Islam — very limited in comparison to what I have today — had earned me the respect of the already organized but tiny group of Austrian critics of Islam. From that day on I was no longer on my own, but embedded in a group of staunch supporters and defenders of democracy, universal human rights and freedom, all of which, as you know, are completely contradicted by the teachings of Islam.

In May 2007, I was a guest on the Gathering Storm blog radio show. What I said must have resonated in the United States because in late September I was invited to represent Austria at the Counterjihad conference in Brussels, the one that took place in the belly of the beast. My speech shocked the delegates and other speakers. And thus my work was cut out for me. Of course, my English skills are helpful in this context.

At home, the Austrian Freedom Party approached me regarding seminars about Islam to be held at the party’s educational institute. [Note: every political party has one of these institutions, funded by taxpayers’ money, which is the main reason for the government’s rage about my seminars.]

My seminars began in early 2008, before a group of no more than six or seven people, most of them party members and sympathizers. The seminars were set up to consist of three parts: “Introduction to the basics of Islam”, “The Islamization of Europe”, and finally “The impact of Islam” (Sharia Law, Cairo Declaration of Human Rights in Islam, OIC, Eurabia).

Over time these seminars drew the interest of even more people, and in October 2009 there were more than 30 men and women from all walks of life who listened to what I had to say. The reactions of these people were nearly always shock and dismay: for the first time they had answers to their questions; they finally understood what was and is happening around them; but they were also distressed because they saw just how the doctrine of multiculturalism and Eurabia were so firmly entrenched in Austrian society. I was not of much help. I am not a politician and thus unable to provide any solutions. It is my job and duty to inform citizens about the doctrine of Islamic supremacism and its disastrous effects on our free societies.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Paul Sperry, former Washington bureau chief for Investor’s Business Daily and author of The Great American Bank Robbery: The Unauthorized Report About What Really Caused the Great Recession.

FP: Paul Sperry, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Sperry: Thank you, always a pleasure, Jamie.

FP: I would like to talk to you today about the root causes of the financial crisis and why we can’t seem to get it behind us. What can you tell us?

Sperry: It’s complicated, but I’ll give you the Readers Digest version:

The government forced banks to rubberstamp home loans for lower-income folks who couldn’t otherwise qualify, and then blamed Wall Street when those high-risk loans failed in a classic case of government creating a problem and then blaming the private sector. The crisis was the inevitable outcome of more than a decade of bad housing policy in Washington. And now some of the same radicals are doubling down on the same stupid mistakes they made before the crisis.

FP: So this goes back to the 1990s and Clinton?

Sperry: As a matter of fact, he’s the prime suspect. But he had several accomplices — and many of them have returned to the scene of their financial crime. Because they were never held accountable, they’ve managed to land key jobs inside the Obama administration where they’re formulating more reckless housing and banking policies.

FP: Like who?

Sperry: Well, like Eric Holder and Tom Perez, who are leading a new bank shakedown at Justice for affirmative-action mortgages. And then there’s Shaun Donovan and Bill Apgar, who are picking up where they left off at HUD. They’re the geniuses who originally plunged Fannie and Freddie into the dangerous subprime securities market. I identify several other repeat offenders from the old Clinton gang in my book as well. But Clinton was the mastermind. Now he’s covering up his role by blaming Republicans and Wall Street.

His hubris never ceases to amaze me. He’s out there right now on a book tour trying to be the hero and save the economy that he himself murdered. It’s his own bad policies we need saving from. His housing regulations actually created the subprime bubble and started the feeding frenzy on Wall Street.

FP: What’s your evidence?

Sperry: Studies show the subprime bubble began in 1997 after Clinton’s lending mandates went into effect. But you don’t have to take my word for it. Before the crisis, Clinton and his regulators actually bragged about inventing the new subprime market on Wall Street. As I document in the book, they were all for subprime mortgages before they were against them. Clinton also bragged about shaking down banks for nearly $1 trillion in risky multicultural loans. The historical record is clear, and so is Clinton’s guilt.

The great irony is that back then, everyone was worried about Clinton socializing the health-care industry. Only he was busy socializing the mortgage industry, and almost nobody paid attention.

FP: What was his motivation?

Sperry: Boosting minority home ownership, and locking in their vote. He declared traditional underwriting standards “racist,” and enlisted no fewer than 10 federal regulatory agencies to crack down on prudent lenders. He named his anti-bank SWAT team the Interagency Task Force on Fair Lending, and that regulatory infrastructure remained in place throughout the 2000s.

The goal, shocking as it may sound, was to deliberately drive down mortgage underwriting standards in the name of diversity. This was the official policy of the United States government. Let me repeat that to be perfectly clear: The federal government, for the first time, made it a policy to gut time-tested rules for evaluating credit risk in the banking industry.

FP: Is there any truth to the charge that banks were discriminating against minorities?

Sperry: No. Clinton’s minority crusade was based on a lie — that lenders systematically and intentionally discriminate against minorities. Economists discredited the 1992 federal report that gave birth to the lie, but Clinton ignored their warnings and hired the leftwing activist who constructed it. He appointed her to a key position at Treasury to help lead his crusade. By
forcing banks to make hi-risk loans to folks who couldn’t afford them, they only ended up hurting the minorities they claimed to help.

Clinton was a home-wrecker in more ways than one, and he has a lot to answer for. History should deal more harshly with this impeached president than it has already. Of all the scandals, this was by far his worst. It’s just that no one could see the damage until the bubble burst and he’d long left office.

FP: But the bubble burst on Bush’s watch. Did he contribute to it?

Sperry: Bush continued Clinton’s reckless housing policies and that was a big mistake, and i don’t let him off the hook in my book. But it was Clinton who changed the rules for lending and fundamentally changed the home-finance market for the worse.

FP: Is there a solution?

Sperry: Get government out of the mortgage business. That means, for starters, gradually privatizing Fannie and Freddie and abolishing their affordable housing charter. And at a minimum, defanging the Community Reinvestment Act, the antiredlining regulation Clinton added teeth to and that Obama’s now expanding. The CRA corrupts the flow of capital by rechanneling it into largely unprofitable investments.

We also need to repeal or at least defund Dodd-Frank and the powerful new bank watchdog agency it created. The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and its army of diversity cops are gearing up next to socialize small business loans, which pose even more risk than mortgages. The prescription that Barney Frank and the other affordable-housing zealots sold as “reform”
is simply more poison.

FP: Speaking of the Community Reinvestment Act — how big a factor was the Community Reinvestment Act?

Sperry: One Federal Reserve study estimated that as many as half the subprime loans were at least “indirectly attributable” to the CRA. Virtually everything ties back to Clinton’s major CRA revision, which fully went into effect in 1997. It’s the central thread running through this scandal – from banks to subprime lenders to Fannie and Freddie to even Wall Street firms who’ve taken the fall for the crisis. You’ll see it written in all the rules and regulations governing these entities. And by the way, all this is documented in the book as well, included among the 50 pages of footnotes, data tables, charts and other supporting evidence located in the appendix.

FP: How do you answer critics who say Countrywide Financial and other independent mortgage lenders unregulated by the CRA made most of the subprime loans?

Sperry: Countrywide wasn’t directly regulated by the CRA, but it was regulated by HUD. And it underwrote nearly $800 billion in subprime loans to meet HUD’s soft quotas. This and other red herrings are all litigated in my book. Without getting too far into the weeds, CRA’s apologists also don’t count the trillions of dollars in subprime loan commitments made by regulated banks to buy off CRA shakedown artists holding up their merger plans.

FP: What about the role of the Federal Reserve and interest rates in the crisis?

Sperry: The Fed poured fuel on the easy-credit bonfire ignited by bad housing policy. But the bubble started long before Greenspan started slashing interest rates. So clearly something else was at work, and that something was the weaker lending standards that government imposed on both private bankers and Fannie and Freddie, who in turn set standards across the entire mortgage industry.

FP: But the housing bubble was global, right?

Sperry: Actually Australia and Canada weren’t swamped by subprime loans. They kept lending standards relatively tight.

FP: What role did Obama play, if any, in the crisis?

Sperry: He helped ACORN and NPA (National People’s Action) shake down banks for risky multicultural loans. I looked up some of the clients he claimed were “victims” of lending discrimination and they all had bad credit. Every one of them. They were turned down for mortgages for the simple reason they posed too high a default risk for the bank. It had zero to do with the color of their skin. But that didn’t stop Obama from crying racism and shaking down Citibank and other lenders. Now he’s using the power of the entire federal government to shake down allegedly racist banks for the same kinds of risky loans. Some 70 banks are now under investigation, and several have already settled by among other things, agreeing to relax mortgage underwriting standards for minorities. So here we go again.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Nina Shea, Director of the Center for Religious Freedom at the Hudson Institute. She is the co-author (with Paul Marshall) of the new book, Silenced: How Apostasy and Blasphemy Codes are Choking Freedom Worldwide.

FP: Nina Shea, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Tell us what inspired you to write this book with Paul Marshall.

Shea: We have been tracking and opposing the punishment of religious minorities and Muslim reformers in many Organization of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) countries under apostasy and blasphemy codes for decades.  As religious freedom advocates, we saw a horrific and spreading pattern of human rights violations that is being ignored in US foreign policy and in the media – though particularly egregious individual cases have been sporadically reported without much attention to their overall effect.  This pattern of human rights violations should especially concern us because the practices and policies it evidences undermine the individual freedoms essential to liberal democracy.  Even our national security is compromised since apostasy and blasphemy codes are used by Islamic radicals to crush their opponents and thus pose obstacles to moderation within Islam.  So, it undermines a number of critical American interests.

FP:  What does Silenced do that no book has done before?

Shea: It does two things: It surveys in descriptive and overwhelming detail the limits coercively imposed in the name of Islam on fundamental freedoms of religion and speech in about twenty key OIC countries. It also links this phenomenon to a new trend in the West. The OIC is waging a campaign to have those same limits enforced by the West within its borders and that campaign  is making substantial headway, particularly through self-censorship in establishment organizations and through the adoption of hate speech laws in many countries.

FP: Tell us about the political effects in Muslim societies of blasphemy and apostasy laws.

Shea: One effect is that criticism of anything and anyone claiming Islamic legitimacy is essentially forbidden and, in the more Islamicized societies, such as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, northern Nigeria, Pakistan and Afghanistan, those accused of apostasy and blasphemy sins can be punished by death.  Since Islam prescriptions reach into every realm of life—personal dress, social relations, arts and culture, science, politics, etc. — these codes preclude genuine democracy, shut down debate and intellectual inquiry, stifle scientific and economic innovation, and stagnate culture, as the late Indonesian President Wahid wrote in the Foreword to Silenced and as the UN Arab Development Report also documented.  Those who propose to abandon such codes, such as an Afghan journalist, an Iranian ayatollah, and a Pakistani governor and a cabinet minister recently did in their respective countries, are brutally crushed.  Muslim converts to Christianity and members of religions that come after Mohammed, such as the Bahai’s and Amadiyas, are viewed as de facto insulters of Islam and killed or harshly punished and discriminated against. These apostasy and blasphemy codes should be one of the main concerns posed by an Islamist takeover of Egypt, Libya and Tunisia, not the banning of alcohol and movies that our media tends to focus on.

FP: What is happening in terms of the move toward new blasphemy laws in the West — and the trend to stifle truth-telling about Islam in the West?

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Ibn Warraq, an Islamic scholar and a leading figure in Qur’anic criticism. He is a Senior Research Fellow at the Westminster Institute, VA. He has addressed distinguished governing bodies all over the world, including the United Nations in Geneva, and Members of the Dutch Parliament, at The Hague.

In 2007, Mr. Warraq completed a critical study of the thought of Edward Said, Defending the West. Paul Berman, author of Terror and Liberalism, described the book as “a glorious work of scholarship, and it is going to contribute mightily to modernizing the way we think about Western civilization and the rest of the world”.

Mr. Warraq was goaded into writing his first book, Why I am Not a Muslim (1995), when he felt personally threatened by the infamous fatwa pronounced on Salman Rushdie for his book that satirized Islam, its founder Muhammad, and his family. He felt that only a ferocious polemic against Islam as a totalitarian system would wake up Western intellectuals to the dangers that the Iranian theocratic regime posed to our own freedoms in the West. Since this passionate attack on Islam, Mr. Warraq has edited, with long introductions, a series of more scholarly works on the origins of the Koran, and the rise of Islam, works such as The Origins of the Koran, 1998,  The Quest for the Historical Muhammad, 2000, What the Koran Really Says, 2002, and the recent Which Koran?, 2011.

Ibn Warraq’s new book, Why the West is Best: A Muslim Apostate’s Defense of Liberal Democracy (Encounter Books, December 2011) carries on the defense of the West started in Defending the West. He defines, describes, and defends Western values, strengths and freedoms far too often taken for granted. This book also tackles the taboo subjects of racism in Asian culture, Arab slavery, and Islamic Imperialism. It begins with a homage to New York City, as a metaphor for all we hold dear in Western culture — pluralism, individualism, freedom of expression and thought, the complete freedom to pursue life, liberty and happiness unhampered by totalitarian regimes, and theocratic doctrines.

FP: Ibn Warraq, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Let’s start with this question:

What does this book do that is unprecedented?

Warraq: First, thank you for inviting me to Front Page; it has been a while since we talked.

I do not think there are many books on the market that are unashamedly pro-Western, defending, without apologies, Western values, and talk without reserve of the superiority of Western Civilization, and which take on such taboo subjects as Asian racism, Arab anti-Semitism, Islamic Imperialism, the role of Islam and the Arabs in the Slave Trade, the complicity of Black Africans in the enslavement, and later selling of fellow Africans to Arabs, Persians, Indians and Europeans. There also cannot be any books on the market that defend Western Civilization that begin with a walk down Tin Pan Alley in New York City.

FP: What qualities of Western societies make them superior to those societies that have not adopted Western values?

Warraq: The self-evident superiority of the West stems from certain principles inherited, and further developed and refined over two millennia, from Athens, Rome and Jerusalem. We can, perhaps, subsume these principles under the abstract terms rationalism, universalism, and self-criticism, and then unfurl them in the following more substantial manner. Under rationalism, one would include the notions of truth, objective knowledge, and intellectual curiosity. Under universalism, I would include the idea of the unity of mankind, openness to “the Other” (an unfortunate phrase borrowed from recent anti-Western polemics), other ideas, other customs, other people; and finally under self-criticism the willingness to submit all of the West’s traditions to rational scrutiny. Under curiosity, I include all those examples of disinterested study. Other great ideas of the West which further help define its character and explain its success are: the separation of church and state, the rule of law, equality before the law, freedom of conscience and expression, human rights — in short, liberty and individual dignity which must never be sacrificed for some spurious collective, totalitarian goal.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: this triptych succinctly defines the attractiveness and superiority of Western civilization. In the West we are free to think what we want, to read what we want, to practice our religion, to live as we choose. Liberty is codified in human rights, a magnificent Western creation but also, I believe, a universal good. Human rights transcend local or ethnocentric values, conferring equal dignity and value on all humanity regardless of sex, ethnicity, sexual preference, or religion. At the same time, it is in the West that human rights are most respected. It is the West that has liberated women, racial minorities, religious minorities, and gays and lesbians, recognizing and defending their rights. The notions of freedom and human rights were present at the dawn of Western civilization, as ideals at least, but have gradually come to fruition through supreme acts of self-criticism. Because of its exceptional capacity for self-criticism, the West took the initiative in abolishing slavery; the calls for abolition did not resonate even in black Africa, where rival African tribes took black prisoners to be sold as slaves in the West.

Today, many non-Western cultures follow customs and practices that are clear violations of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948). In many countries, especially Islamic ones, you are not free to read what you want. Under Sharia, or Islamic law, women are not free to marry whom they wish, and their rights of inheritance are circumscribed. Sharia, derived from the Koran and the practice and sayings of Muhammad, prescribes barbaric punishments such as stoning to death for adultery. It calls for homosexuals and apostates to be executed. In Saudi Arabia, among other countries, Muslims are not free to convert to Christianity, and Christians are not free to practice their faith. The Koran is not a rights-respecting document.

FP: What in your mind are the greatest achievements of the West?

Warraq: Not only is the West so successful economically, but it leads the world scientifically, and culturally (one only has to look at the list of Nobel Prize winners in science, and literature to gauge the overwhelming triumph of the West in these domains; or at the influence of the Western arts on the rest of the world- both High Culture and Popular entertainment, from Classical music to cinema).

The great ideas of the West—rationalism, self-criticism, the disinterested search for truth, the separation of church and state, the rule of law, equality before the law, freedom of conscience, thought, and expression, human rights, and liberal democracy- quite an achievement, surely, for any civilization-—remain the best, and perhaps the only, means for all people, no matter of what race or creed, to reach their full potential and live in freedom.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness: defines succinctly the attractiveness and superiority of Western civilization. We are free, in the West, to choose; we have real choice to pursue our own desires; we are free to set the goals and contents of our own lives; the West is made up of individuals who are free to decide what meaning to give to their lives-in short the glory of the West is that life is an open book,^[1] while under Islam, life is a closed book, everything has been decided for you: God and the Holy Law set limits on the possible agenda of your life. In many non-Western countries especially Islamic ones, we are not free to read what we want; in Saudi Arabia, Muslims are not free to convert to Christianity, and Christians are not free to practice their faith — all clear violations of article 18 of the Universal Declaration.

This desire for knowledge, no matter where it leads, inherited from the Greeks, has led to another institution that is unequalled-or very rarely equaled- outside the West: the University. Here the outside world recognizes this superiority; it comes to the West to learn not only about the sciences developed in the West in the last five hundred years — in all departments of Physics, Biology and Chemistry — but also of their own culture. They come to the West to learn of the Eastern civilizations and languages. Easterners come to Oxford, Cambridge, or Harvard and Yale, the Sorbonne or Heidelberg to receive their doctorates, because they confer prestige unrivalled by similar doctorates from Third World countries.

A culture that gave the world the spiritual creations of the Classical Music of Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner and Schubert, the paintings of Michelangelo, and Raphael, Da Vinci and Rembrandt, does not need lessons from societies whose idea of spirituality is a heaven peopled with female virgins for the use of men, whose idea of heaven resembles a cosmic brothel. The West has given the world the symphony, and the novel.

To paraphrase Alan Kors^[2], instead of the rigid, inhuman caste system of India, we have unparalleled social mobility in the West. Western society is a society of ever richer, more varied, more productive, more self-defined, and more satisfying lives; it is a society of boundless private charity; it is a society that broke, on behalf of merit, the seemingly eternal chains of station by birth. The West has given us the liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction.

FP: How do you define the West in your book?

Warraq: I define the West through its values of liberty, and rationalism, and then look at their historical origins. The origins of the modern West are often seen in the Enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth century, but the roots of the Enlightenment can be found in habits of mind cultivated in Athens, Rome, and Jerusalem, and the institutions that grew from them. The Greeks gave us the city and the notion of citizenship, the ideals of democracy and liberty, rationalism and science, philosophy and history. The Romans systematized the law, defined private property, and emphasized individual responsibility. Judeo-Christianity added a sense of conscience and charity, tempering justice with forgiveness, and the concept of linear rather than cyclical time, which allowed the possibility of progress. The Middle Ages brought a deeper synthesis of Athens and Rome with Jerusalem, laying the foundations for the scientific revolution, the industrial revolution, the Enlightenment, and pluralistic liberal democracy.

FP: How is New York City a metaphor for the greatness of the West?

Warraq: In New York, I show the principles of the United States Constitution being applied in a real, vibrant place. I give the term “Western civilization” a physical context in the very concrete of the city. The details of New York’s streets and structures create a believable, breathing image of Western civilization, just as Dickens created believable, breathing characters. See this building, I say—it’s an example of beautiful architecture, one of the glories of New York, and as integral to Western civilization as the works of Shakespeare. See that building—it’s the New York Public Library. Inside the Beaux Arts masterpiece is an institution that embodies key aspects of Western civilization: philanthropy, education, the love of knowledge, the preservation of all the best that has been written and published. Each time you admire the façade of the New York Public Library, you are paying homage to Western civilization. Each time you consult a book in the magnificent Main Reading Room, you are participating in the maintenance of Western civilization. By working and living in New York, you are breathing Western civilization, continuously reminded of its benefits and its values.

Describing a New York street that became known as Tin Pan Alley and the area known as Broadway led me into the Great American Songbook, created by composers and lyricists who were born and lived and worked in that great city. Discussions of Western civilization are too often confined to works of high art that reflect a relatively narrow element of public taste and experience. I maintain that Western popular culture at its best is worthy of respect and should be cherished as much as the operas of Wagner. The work of composers like George Gershwin, born and bred in New York, embodies Western ideals over and above the aesthetic principles of the music itself. I could have written at length about various artists associated with the metropolis—Fred Astaire, P. G. Wodehouse, George Kaufman, the Marx Brothers (born in the Yorkville section of the Upper East Side)—and their contributions to Western popular culture, with creations that are witty, graceful, inspired, and at times touched with genius.

New York, like life, is its own excuse. Nonetheless, no other city in the West—or indeed, in the world—so well exemplifies the inexhaustible possibilities of a modern metropolis, where the inven­tive and enterprising put into practice the many freedoms guaranteed under the U.S. Constitution. The implausible, well-nigh-miraculous functioning anarchy that we know as New York is adorned with every excellence of Western art. It is a city of manifold suggestions, which ministers to every ambition, engenders a thousand talents, nurtures ingenuity and experimentation.

FP: What changed within Western societies that allowed them to so dramatically outperform other societies over the past 500 years, when that wasn’t the case beforehand?

Warraq: What has made the West successful economically while so many countries in other parts of the world fail to provide adequate food and shelter for their citizens?  The short answer is the Scientific Revolution of the Seventeenth Century, and the Industrial Revolution of the Eighteenth Century, both depended on European Culture, Economic and Political Freedom, that is the institutions and habits of mind developed over two millennia.

Thus we can no longer defend the notion that Western prosperity is founded on the exploitation of poor people in the Third World. The rich countries are rich because of their practices at home, and because of their readiness to adopt and adapt new things, such as Chinese inventions or New World crops. Jared Diamond concluded that the “proximate factors” in Europe’s ascendance were “its development of a merchant class, capitalism, and patent protec­tion for inventions, its failure to develop absolute despots and crushing taxation, and its Greco-Judeo-Christian tradition of empirical inquiry.” Ironically, given Diamond’s otherwise anti-Western animus, some readers disparaged this view as ethnocentric, or as “utterly conventional Eurocentric history,” in James M. Blaut’s words. But Diamond, in fact, was pointing to some key ingredients of Western success; and behind those proximate factors were culture, ideas, and attitudes.

Many scholars have emphasized geography as an explanation for different rates of cultural development and for disparate levels of economic well-being in the modern world. In particular, they point out that the advanced industrial nations are located in the temperate zones, while the great majority of poor countries lie in the tropics, which are said to have most of the disadvantages. Clearly geography plays some part in explaining the economic success of certain countries over others. But as Deirdre McCloskey points out, geography does not account for why England had an industrial revolution in the eighteenth century whereas the Chinese people of the temperate zone did not. Lawrence E. Harrison points to the more recent economic success of Singapore and Hong Kong, both in the tropics, and Taiwan, which lies halfway in the tropical zone. He also notes the prosperity of the Chinese minorities in tropical Thailand, Indonesia, Malaysia, and the Philippines, as well as the Japanese minorities in tropical Peru and Brazil. Geography alone cannot explain why Haiti, once the richest colony in the Caribbean, is today mired in poverty and misery, while Barbados, a former slave colony, is now prosperous.

A corollary of the geography argument is one that highlights the “germs” in Jared Diamond’s title, Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fate of Human Societies. Scholars have noted the prevalence of disease in the tropical ecozones, where so many poor countries are located. But McCloskey replies that “northwestern Europe initiated the modern world when still debilitated by cholera and smallpox and tuberculosis and especially by the malaria so devastating to modern Africa,” called “ague” at the time. This latter disease was at its peak in the nineteenth century, while Europe was industrializing.

Another variant of the geographical theory is a focus on natural resources. But as white South Africans, for example, came to understand, “merely having a stock of gold and diamonds in the ground does not make for a modern economy,” especially if a substantial part of the population, or “human capital,” is kept uneducated. On the other hand, some countries with few natural resources—Denmark, Hong Kong, Japan—have managed to develop modern industrial economies. Natural endowment is far less consequential than the ability to use it productively, and that ability is an outcome of culture.

“If we learn anything from the history of economic development, it is that culture makes all the difference,” argues David Landes. By way of illustration, he mentions the relative success of various expatriate minorities in comparison with the dominant population: “the Chinese in East and Southeast Asia, Indians in East Africa, Lebanese in West Africa.” He also points to the Jews and Calvinists as successful cultural minorities in much of Europe. In other words, “Max Weber was right on,” Landes adds, referring to the thesis that Weber made famous in The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism (first published in 1904). The economic and technological success of the West began with culture, and with principles embodied in its characteristic institutions.

FP: Tell us about creeping Sharia in the West. How is Sharia incompatible with human rights and the U.S. Constitution?

Warraq: In February 2008, the Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr. Rowan Williams, said that “the application of Sharia in certain circum­stances” in the United Kingdom was “unavoidable,” and he was not troubled by that prospect. In subsequent interviews, he asserted that a belief in “one law for all” was dangerous—one of the cornerstones of Western civilization, equality under the law, a danger! In July 2008, the Lord Chief Justice of England and Wales, Lord Phillips, also opined that Sharia principles could be the basis for mediation, and that national courts should recognize these decisions.

There are already eighty-five Sharia courts operating in Great Britain, many working out of mosques, applying Islamic law to resolve domestic, marital, and business disputes. These courts are intrinsically divisive, placing some Muslims above the law that the rest of the community has to obey, while denying certain rights to other Muslims, particularly women. The very existence of sharia courts threatens the system of laws passed by elected representatives in Parliament. Insouciant government officials assure us that these courts may not contradict the law of the land. But some decisions of the Islamic tribunals are already considered legally binding and could be enforced in civil courts in England and Wales. A report by Civitas, a leading think tank in London, revealed that the rul­ings handed down by Sharia tribunals have included some that went against the human rights standards applied in British courts.

The situation in Germany is equally worrying. Chancellor Angela Merkel said that Islamic law had no place in Germany, but a little research shows that in fact it has been applied there for years. Der Spiegel reported in 2010 that elements of Sharia are most often used in cases involving family and inheritance disputes.

Jordanian couples, for example, are married (and divorced) in Germany according to Jordanian law, which is partially based on Sharia. Furthermore, multiple wives in a polygamous marriage, provided the marriages were legal in their home country, have legal rights to alimony, social security benefits stemming from their husband’s occupation and a portion of the inheritance should he die. . . . A federal court in Kassel, for example, cited Islamic law in a ruling several years ago in which the court found that a widow had to share her husband’s pension with his second wife. Another case saw a court in Koblenz granting residency to the second wife of a man from Iraq. A Cologne court forced an Iranian man to pay his ex-wife 600 gold coins in “bride price” (money paid by the groom or groom’s family to the bride or bride’s family) upon divorce and cited the Shariah system applied in Iran. A court in Düsseldorf arrived at a similar verdict, forcing a Turkish man to pay 30,000 in bride price to his former daughter-in-law.

Hilmar Krüger, a law professor at the University of Cologne, called this all “a good thing.” Mathias Rohe, a lawyer and Islam expert in Erlangen, said it was merely a product of “globalization.” They seem to be unaware of the implications of accepting Sharia into the Western mainstream. Laws passed by democratically elected representatives are now being superseded by barbaric laws from seventh-century Saudi Arabia, putatively decreed by God. The prin­ciples of justice enshrined in Western constitutions and the rights achieved through centuries of struggle are to be given no precedence over a system derived from a very different worldview, one in which women are the property of men and where freedom of conscience is nonexistent.

Sharia is totally incompatible with Western liberal democracy and with human rights in general, because it is a totalitarian con­struct designed to control every aspect of the life of Muslims and even non-Muslims. It discriminates against women in many ways: their testimony in court is worth half of a man’s testimony (Surah II.282); they inherit half what men do (IV.11); they may be beaten by men (IV.34); they may not marry non-Muslims (II.221). Sharia pre­scribes amputation of hands for theft (V.38), crucifixion for spreading disorder (V.33), stoning to death for adultery (Reliance of the Traveler, p. 610), execution of homosexuals and apostates (XXVI.165–66; Reliance, pp. 109 and 665). In other words, Muslims want to rein­troduce practices that we in the West long ago deemed barbaric.

Moreover, Islamic law is considered infallible and immutable. In contrast to the fixed edicts of Sharia, Western law is bound up with the realities of human life and conflict. It allows the flexibility of making new law to accommodate changing circumstances, within a framework of fundamental principles. The Western constitutions and systems of law are magnificent creations; are we really prepared to jettison them in the name of multiculturalism and globalization?

Most troubling are the efforts to enforce Islamic laws against “blasphemy” throughout the world. The Organization of Islamic Cooperation is taking steps toward outlawing “defamation of reli­gion” (i.e. Islam) worldwide, and these efforts have, in effect, been abetted by Western governments under the guise of suppressing “hate speech.” As Islamic countries consolidate their hold on the UN Human Rights Council and demand national laws to suppress criticism of Islam, how long will it be before Western legislation for­bids research into the origins of the Koran or early Islamic history?

FP: Why does the Left in the West not stand up against Sharia? And why do you think the West has lost all self-confidence in its own values and is unable and unwilling to defend its own civilization?

Warraq: I think these two questions, and their answers, are related. One of the reasons why Westerners feel so shy about defending Western civilization was well-described by James Burnham, “When the Western liberal’s feeing of guilt and his associated feeling of moral vulnerability before the sorrows and demands of the wretched become obsessive, he often develops a generalized hatred of Western civilization and his own country as a part of the West….The guilt of the liberal is insatiable. He deserves, by his own judgment, to be kicked, slapped and spat on for his infinite crimes”

First there has been the influence of intellectuals and academics who have undermined the confidence of the West in its own values and strengths. For more than sixty years schools and universities in the West have inculcated three generations of the young with moral relativism leaving them incapable of passing moral or cross-cultural judgments, and unwilling to defend those values. Post-modernism and multiculturalism have completed the destruction of the West’s self-assurance.

Another reason was the intellectual terrorism of left-wing ideologues such as Edward Said, and his highly influential book, Orientalism, that bludgeoned Western intellectuals into silence. Post–World War II Western intellectuals and leftists were consumed by guilt for the West’s colonial past and continuing colonialist present, and they wholeheartedly embraced any theory or ideology that voiced or at least seemed to voice the putatively thwarted aspirations of the peoples of the third world. Orientalism came at the precise time when anti-Western rhetoric was at its most shrill and was already being taught at Western universities, and when third-worldism was at its most popular. Jean-Paul Sartre preached that all white men were complicit in the exploitation of the third world, and that violence against Westerners was a legitimate means for colonized men to re-acquire their manhood. Said went further: “It is therefore correct that every European, in what he could say about the Orient, was consequently a racist, an imperialist, and almost totally ethnocentric” (p. 204). Not only, for Said, is every European a racist, but he must necessarily be so.

As I have argued, Western civilization has been more willing to criticize itself than any other major culture. These self-administered admonishments are a far cry from Said’s savage strictures, and yet they found a new generation ready to take them to heart. Berating and blaming the West, a fashionable game in the 1960s and 1970s that impressionable youth took seriously, had the results we now see when the same generation appears unwilling to defend the West against the greatest threat that it has faced since the Nazis.

When shown that Said is indeed a fraud, his friends and supporters in academia sidestep the criticisms and evidence, and pretend, as did several reviewers of Robert Irwin’s book on Said, that Said may indeed have got the “footling details” wrong but he was, nonetheless, onto a higher truth. Said’s influence, thus, was a result of a conjunction of several intellectual and political trends: post-French Algeria and post-Vietnam tiers mondisme (third-worldism); the politicization of increasingly postmodernist English departments that had argued away the very idea of truth, objective truth; and the influence of Foucault. In effect Said played on each of these confidence tricks to create a master fraud that bound American academics and Middle East tyrants in unstated bonds of anti- American complicity.

FP: This is a toxic combination with Islam’s supreme confidence and agenda to exploit the West’s moral weakness and cultural confusion. Your comment?

Warraq: The West must wake up to the nature of the enemy. Islam is supremely confident in its values, and, of course, convinced that these values are blessed by God, and it is the God-given duty of every Muslim to spread Islam, until it covers the entire world. This is not right-wing paranoia of Western extremists but self-confessed principles everywhere openly proclaimed by the Muslims themselves. Only the Left refuses to recognize it, and is scandalously complicit in helping Islam take over the Western world. It is no less than civilizational suicide. It is perhaps already too late as, on December 13, 2011, the White House invited the OIC within its doors to plan how best to destroy the West from within.

FP: Ibn Warraq, thank you for joining Frontpage Interview.

Notes:

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is Leon Weinstein, the author of the new book, Capitalism 101.

FP: Leon Weinstein, welcome to FrontPage Interview.

Let’s begin with your background. Tell us about your life in Russia and how you ended up here in America. It was almost impossible to get out of the Soviet Union at the time you left (1974), how did you manage to get out?

Weinstein: In 1972-73 the Soviet Union experienced yet another shortage of food. “Deficits” of food and everything else is a typical thing for the socialist regimes on their advanced stages when all means of production are in the hands of the states. The Soviets came to the US and asked to loan them about one million tons of wheat. The US Congress approved the deal with a little provision that demanded from the Soviets to allow at least some limited emigration. About fifty thousand people got out of the “prison of nations”, as we called it. I was lucky to be among those first ones. You may consider me as one of the few who know their own price tag. If you would divide one million tons of wheat by fifty thousand emigrants, you will see that I was exchanged for twenty tons of wheat. Not a bad price! I doubt however that you can return me back. First of all, there is no Soviet Union any more, and second – I probably worth much less by now.

FP: How different was life in the USSR from the free world? Tell us about your observations and your intellectual journey.

Weinstein: We lived in a constant state of fear and apprehension. Be it at school, university or at work place, we had to be silent about our real views; we were unable to voice our opinions in public and even were not sure we can openly talk with our close friends in private. We knew that our mail could be opened or our phone conversations could be listened to. If you were suspected in a slightest dissent, you would not advance at work or you could be expelled from your place of study. And if you would become really vocal about your anti-government views, you could end up in jail or a labor camp, and your family, including distant relatives, would be thrown from their jobs. This is why we admired people whom you call “refusniks” – they were saying openly what we all were thinking but where afraid to say ourselves.

In the United States you have this unbelievable luxury of freedom that most of the world can only dream about. In a very short period of time the citizens of this great country built a world that allowed most of the population to live a decent life without being afraid of the rulers. I do not believe any such society existed anywhere in the world during the sixty five hundred years of the recorded history of civilization. I think it is very important to all of us to understand why this happened, what made this country flourish beyond belief. We need to fully understand this, cherish it and teach our children to love and preserve the country they were lucky to be born in.

FP: You are a theater director and playwright. Tell us what led you into this field. And what made you decide to write political articles?

Weinstein: I started writing stories when I was twelve. During high school years I was already writing dramas and attempting to stage them with my fellow students. In my college years I produced and directed plays, filmed short films and began to publish short stories. I graduated with a Master Degree in Performing Arts from the University of Culture of St. Petersburg. When I immigrated to Israel, I have organized an Educational Theater for Youth in Tel Aviv, wrote and directed plays for children, and continued with writings funny stories.  In Israel I was twice nominated for “the best show of the year” award. After an article about my method of staging children’s shows appeared in the Los Angeles Times, I was invited to stage two of my own plays in the Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts in New York and another one in the Los Angeles Theater Center (LATC) in Los Angeles. I loved it here, and when I received an offer to work in California for a TV/Radio production company I didn’t hesitate and accepted it.

My political writing started in 2008 when I saw a sudden shift in the mood of the country. The words that liberal wing of the Democratic Party began to throw into masses worried me. They talked about “equality of distribution,” about “fair share” and “rights of the working people”, and that resembled rhetoric used by socialists/communists elsewhere. But socialism failed in any and every place it was ever attempted. Usually it failed with tragic results. Why would Americans want to repeat such a bloodthirsty experiment? I was always asking myself this question. And then it donned at me – many citizens of this country have no idea what it really means. And as a person who had the firsthand experiences in a different social system, I felt I had an obligation to share those experiences with them. I started writing articles, open letters to politicians, and eventually wrote two books: one is an action-adventure in an Orwellian style called “Looking for Hugh” and another is my recent non-fiction called “Capitalism 101.”

FP: So now you have published “Capitalism 101.” Tell us what it’s about. Is it a kind of college course in economics or sort of like a monograph on capitalism?

Weinstein: None of the above. It is the simplest and, I hope, most entertaining explanation of capitalism that you would ever read. The book is full of stories, anecdotes and personal experiences, and it gives the readers a very fundamental understanding of why one system called capitalism works and brings great results, and all others including socialism never worked and never will.

There is one unintended consequence of the book that I was told by its readers countless times. I wrote it in order to share with my fellow Americans my firsthand experiences in different political systems, but quite unexpectedly it came out as a book that shifts paradigms and changes the reader’s mind and attitude and allows him (her) to become a successful entrepreneur. Hundreds of thousands of people read manuals and instructions on how to become rich, but they almost never apply what they learn. They get energized for a day, but don’t know what to do when a first roadblock appears. Then they read another book, go to some seminars or watch motivational videos – the same results. They get frustrated because nothing is working. They envy those who seem to turn everything they touch into gold. Is there an unfair advantage that achievers have? Yes, people who achieve their goals do it naturally. When a problem arises, they don’t have to consult with books. The problem solving is within them. So, it looks like I wrote a book that challenges readers to obtain this ‘unfair’ advantage and become one of them.

FP: What do you love about America?

Weinstein: I love that the individual here is more important than a collective. This is unheard of in the Old World. I love opportunities. I love that anyone who works hard and has the right values can achieve success. I love that the middle class here lives like only royalty live in many countries. And I love people. They are good people. They will always give you a hand. This country has taught us emigrants to live and let live. The country taught us, emigrants, that if one wins, it’s not necessary for someone else to lose. During my life in the USSR and then through all my travels around the world I’ve never seen what I often observe in this country: every time a group of emigrants celebrate something, one of the toasts they drink for is “For this blessed country, for our America!”

FP: What don’t you like about contemporary America?

Weinstein: I don’t like borders that are open to illegal immigrants, smugglers and terrorists. I don’t like educational institutions that have no competition and can’t fire or stimulate teachers, and stagnating because of that. I don’t like tenure in Universities. I don’t like Unions that force jobs out of the country. I don’t like minimum wages. I don’t like that Congress can take away any share of the money we, productive citizens earn, and imprison us if we don’t pay. I don’t like growing debt and inability of our government to slow this process down. I don’t like the fact that those who receive entitlements can vote and eventually will vote us into a socialist country. I don’t like politicians that want to fundamentally change this best country in the world …. I just started. Do you want me to continue? Or may be let’s talk about a bit less of an emotional issue?

FP: Your thoughts on Putin and the recent “elections” in Russia?

Weinstein: I met Putin in 1989 in St Petersburg, Russia. He was at that time an assistant to the Mayor of the city Anatoly Sobchak. I was visiting Russia and began to negotiate with Sobchak signing of the sister-city charter with Los Angeles. Putin was quiet, didn’t look into people’s eyes and spoke in an almost whisper. He was an embodiment of a KGB operative, and I remembered those folks quite well from my pre-emigration experiences. After our conversation I called my wife and said that if people like him will be coming back to power, I don’t want to deal with Russia anymore. Russia had her chance and was for a short period of time a free country. It is not free anymore. I think Putin likes the Chinese model of one party/one rule, at the same time allowing people to conduct private businesses but be silent politically.

FrontPage Interview’s guest today is Raymond Ibrahim, an Islam expert and author of The Al Qaeda Reader.  A Shillman Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center and Associate Fellow at the Middle East Forum, he writes frequently on all things Islamic, including Muslim persecution of Christians.

On Wednesday, December 7, Raymond testified before the Tom Lantos Human Rights Commission in the House of Representatives, in a hearing presented by Reps. Frank Wolf and James McDermott, titled “Under Threat: The Worsening Plight of Egypt’s Coptic Christians.”

Videos of Raymond’s testimony are below and then followed by our interview:

Raymond Ibrahim: Shariah, Dhimmitude & the Copts:

Raymond Ibrahim: Whitewashing Jihad, Shariah & Islam:

FP: Welcome Raymond.  Good to interview you again.

Ibrahim: Thank you, Jamie; happy to be back.

FP: The suffering of the Christian Copts of Egypt is getting worse, so it’s a great thing you were asked to testify at that hearing—and it’s a positive thing that they even had a hearing.  For starters, while we know of your professional credentials concerning Islam, can you tell us a bit about your Coptic ancestry?

Bosch Fawstin recently joined The Jamie Glazov Show to discuss how he uses images to wage his battle for freedom.

Fawstin is an Eisner Award nominated cartoonist currently working on a graphic novel, The Infidel, of which the first chapter is now available as a digital comic. Bosch’s first graphic novel is Table for One. He is also the author of ProPiganda: Drawing the Line Against Jihad, a companion to The Infidel, and the 1st print appearance of Pigman.

Listen to Bosch Fawstin on The Jamie Glazov Show by clicking here. Or go to:

http://www.blogtalkradio.com/radio-jihad/2011/12/07/the-jamie-glazov-show

Freedom Center pamphlets now available on Kindle. Click here.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is John R. Bradley, the author of the new book After the Arab Spring: How Islamists Hijacked the Middle East Revolts. He has been reporting from the Middle East for more than a decade. Fluent in Arabic and a frequent contributor to The Daily Mail, The Jewish Chronicle and The Spectator, his previous books include Saudi Arabia Exposed (2005) and Inside Egypt: The Land of the Pharaohs on the Brink of a Revolution (2008), which uniquely and accurately predicted the Cairo uprising.

FP: John R. Bradley, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Bradley: Thanks, Jamie. It’s nice to be back. The last time we chatted was back in 2008, when yours was one of the only media outlets that took my prediction of an imminent Egyptian uprising seriously.

FP: Thanks John, so let’s begin with your prediction of the Egyptian revolution.

Bradley: To be honest, it didn’t seem so much a prediction to me back in 2008, more like a statement of fact. I think I had a pulse on the reality because, firstly, I don’t have a TV, and I haven’t had one for more than two decades. So I’m not exposed to the dominant media narratives about the Middle East, which from what I can tell from watching the occasional clip on YouTube remain for the most part as shallow and pointless as they ever were. And in more than a decade of living and reporting in the region I’ve never met another Western foreign correspondent or Western diplomat.

Instead, in Egypt especially, I lived for years among ordinary locals in poor neighborhoods, speaking to them in Arabic and sharing their daily routines and life stories. A decade later, it was perfectly obvious to me when I published Inside Egypt that a revolution was going to happen very soon in that country. The Mubarak regime had consumed itself, and the impoverished and tormented masses had lost all hope that meaningful reforms would ever be introduced. What surprised me was not so much that the revolution happened pretty much as I predicted, but that until it did all the so-called “experts” on the region poured scorn on my idea that it was about to happen–the very same “experts” incidentally who again mocked me as an alarmist when I published articles at the beginning of the year warning that the Islamists would hijack the Arab Spring.

FP: Expand for us on the Arab Spring and the blind enthusiasm we saw in the early days that “democracy” in the Arab Middle East would somehow drain corruption, extremism, poverty and authoritarianism from the region.

Bradley: There was some cause for hope at the beginning, because there were indeed liberals among all those protestors from the outset, and the Islamists in early stages shunned the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt. These liberals are mostly young people who want greater freedoms and a secular state. And they do still look to the West as a model for their future. For them, freedom and pluralism are enormously attractive ideas, and their hopes and dreams are easily understandable and translatable in the West.

But it was misplaced hope, and now that they have failed to materialize these dreams look implausible in the Middle East to the point of madness. Collectively, the liberals are an ever-dwindling minority in the Arab world. We should remember that even during the revolutions the biggest demonstration in Tunisia drew just 50,000 to the streets, this in a country of 10 million. Some estimates put the largest gathering in Tahrir Square of Egyptians, of whom there are some 84 million, as low as 300,000.

These figures show that while the progressives had enough support to topple the dictators, mainly because they were able to bring the economy to a standstill, they didn’t have the massive popular support needed to fill the chaotic aftermath. In contrast, the Islamists can and do draw much vaster crowds. And the Islamists possess the ruthless political skills, and the simplistic campaign slogans, needed to gain power. They speak a language the masses instantly understand and relate to, especially in a country like Egypt where a large percentage of the population is illiterate.

In both Tunisia and Egypt, moreover, the young, tech-savvy revolutionaries had foolishly declared their revolts leaderless, having learned nothing from history about how revolutionary movements lacking a vanguard are crushed by more entrenched and better-organized forces in the aftermath of massive social and political upheaval. Most self-destructively, they had learned nothing especially of the 1979 Iranian revolution, likewise in its early stages drawing people from all walks of life but then hijacked by the Islamist mob. Essentially, Egypt is an action replay of the Iranian revolution, as I warned very clearly in Inside Egypt it would be.

More to the point: in the contemporary Arab world, the liberals have even less of a constituency than that which existed in 1970s Iran. The vast bulk of the protestors knew nothing of secular political ideology, Islamism being the only one on offer for popular consumption for decades. Polls have consistently shown that demonstrators were brought into the streets, not by a burning desire for free and fair elections, but by the awful economic circumstances in which they lived. For that they blamed their corrupt regimes, Israel, and, yes, the West, too, as they had long been accustomed to doing.

The final nail in the coffin of the liberal Arab Spring myth was the excesses and abuses of secular regimes like those of Saddam Hussein, Zine El-Abedine Ben Ali, Ali Abullah Saleh, and Hosni Mubarak. They only succeeded in giving secularism itself a bad name and, by extension, giving credence to the Islamist argument that godlessness was the cause of all their country’s problems. For decades, these regimes failed to nurture the imagination of young people with anything but dim-witted propaganda. The result was that fundamentalist Islam grew from the obsession of a few thousand straggly-bearded crackpots a few decades ago into the sole respectable political alternative many, perhaps most, Arabs are now capable of imagining.

FP: Share with us how Islamists exploit the chaos and fill the vacuum.

Bradley: The Islamists work on two levels. There are the so-called “moderate” groups, who claim to gullible Western journalists that they embrace democratic principles and secularism and freedom of expression. They claim that they do not want to impose strict Sharia law. This is the song sung by mainstream Islamists in Tunisia, Morocco, and Egypt, where they have triumphed in recent elections. But they work in tandem with more radical Salafi groups, sometimes officially and sometimes implicitly, who get their huge funds from Saudi Arabia and Qatar and who busy themselves by terrorizing the population into submitting to hardline Islamist dogma. The “moderate” front groups, in other words, don’t need to introduce Sharia to achieve their goal of an Islamist theocracy.

Frontpage Interview’s guest today is David P. Goldman, the author of the new book, How Civilizations Die (and Why Islam is Dying, Too), which Regnery brought out this fall. After 9/11, Goldman began writing weekly essays at Asia Times Online under the byline “Spengler.” At the time he directed a research group at Credit Suisse, and afterward ran fixed income research for Bank of America. After joining the masthead of First Things magazine early in 2009, he revealed his identity and devoted himself to writing, mainly on politics and strategy, but also publishing essays on religion, classical music, literature and mathematics. He left First Things early in 2011 to write his book.

FP: David P. Goldman, welcome to Frontpage Interview.

Let’s begin with what inspired you to write this book.

Goldman: Thanks Jamie.

It was 9/11 and the aftermath. I’m an old Cold Warrior; I consulted for Norman A. Bailey, the head of planning at NSC in the first Reagan administration. We were playing a deadly global chess game with a fairly rational opponent; when the Russians knew they were beaten, they caved.

Radical Islam is a different animal. Never in history have so many people committed suicide in order to kill large numbers of innocent people. And not since classical antiquity have so many cultures willed themselves out of existence by failing to have children. Countries and individuals who habitually destroy themselves to inflict harm on others have no rational self-interest. You cannot negotiate with them. Our world has a different and terrible set of rules, and policy has to change appropriately.

FP: You refer to the failure to have children. For the first time in history, the birthrate in the West has fallen below replacement level. Explain this to us. Why is it happening? Expand on the consequences.

Goldman: That’s one of the few important developments in the world on which liberal and conservative scholars agree. People of faith have many children, and secular people have few or none. Liberal observers are terrified that “the religious will inherit the earth,” as the liberal sociologist Eric Kaufmann put it. America is the last big industrial country with a religious majority, and the only one with a birthrate above replacement. But that’s mainly due to evangelicals and Hispanic Catholics. Mainline Protestants, loosely-affiliated Catholics and secular Jews breed like Europeans. And people of faith in Europe behave like religious Americans. There just aren’t too many of them.

For the Europeans, this means eventual economic collapse. Take Italy, which dominates our financial headlines at the moment. By 2050, three-fifths of Italians will be elderly dependents. We are struggling to reduce future entitlement spending in the US, where the workforce is still growing. Add a zero to our problems to get an idea of the size of Italy’s. It also means that it’s nonsense to talk about American decline. By mid-century Japan’s workforce will fall by a third and Europe’s by a quarter. We’re the only industrial country that will turn up for the rest of history. 

FP: Muslim leaders have perpetually boasted that they would defeat the West by numbers, and we are definitely witnessing the alarming growth of Muslim populations in Europe. Many Muslim males come to the West with four wives and have like 30 kids with them. Yet you are writing about a Muslim demographic winter. What are we missing? Has something changed?

Goldman: It’s true that the Muslim birthrate far exceeds the Western birthrate, but large parts of the Islamic world are catching up to the West’s demographic winter at startling speed. The Muslim world is passing from infancy to senility without going through adulthood. Muslim countries with a high literacy rate — Iran, Turkey, Algeria, Tunisia — have already fallen below replacement fertility. Islam is a religion of traditional society, where subsistence farmers have always had as many children as they could. The moment Muslims leave the traditional world — especially when girls get a high school education — their behavior changes radically. Most Iranians have six siblings, but will have one or two children.

Never has a national fertility rate dropped from 7 to 1.5 in a single generation.  Turks whose cradle-tongue is Turkish also have a fertility rate of only 1.5 — the same as Europe’s — while Kurds are having four to five children. That means the map of Turkey will be redrawn a generation from now. In Judea and Samaria, Arabs had eight children a generation ago. That’s fallen to three, the same as the Jewish fertility rate in Israel. As the modern world forces its way into traditional Muslim societies elsewhere, fertility continues to plunge. It tells us that Islam, as a religion, crashes and burns when it encounters the modern world. That’s not just a Muslim problem, I hasten to add. The same sudden collapse of fertility afflicted ethnocentric branches of Christianity, for example, Catholicism in Quebec.

FP: So how should the U.S. deal with Muslim decline?

Goldman: With a hard hand, in the case of Iran. The foreign policy establishment has always seen Iran as a rational player. That was the view that Robert Gates brought into the Bush administration, and the reason that the Obama administration refused, disgracefully, to support the democracy movement that erupted in Iran in the summer of 2009.

An individual, or a country, that knows it has no future has no rational self-interest. You can’t invert the population pyramid in a poor country within a single generation without economic collapse. Iran knows its time is running out. Ahmadinejad is giving speeches calling the low birth rate a “genocide against the Iranian nation,” and Iran’s press is warning of a “tidal wave of elderly.” That feeds the apocalyptic impulse of Iran’s leaders. There weren’t a lot of Communists in Russia outside the Politbureau, we discovered in 1989, and there may not be a lot of Muslims in Iran. But the Russian danger peaked in the early 1980s when the Politbureau realized that time was running out to make their move.

Demographic decline tells the ayatollahs that their window of opportunity is closing. But there’s a big difference. Deterrence worked with a nuclear-armed Russia. It won’t work with the apocalyptic Shi’ite leadership of Iran. As a practical matter, we must stop Iran from getting nuclear weapons, no matter how great the cost.

FP: How do you see the “Arab Spring”?

Goldman: The outcome, I predict, will be Somalia on the Nile. It’s an understatement to say that the so-called Arab Spring has disappointed its enthusiasts. We face the prospect of radical Islamic governments led by the Muslim Brotherhood or similar entities in Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and Syria.

I argued in February 2009 that the global rise in food prices triggered the demonstrations; it wasn’t simply that people were hungry, but that the old autocracies showed themselves unable to offer their people food security. Three generations of Egyptian dictators kept their people in backwardness. The result is catastrophic. Three-fifths of Egyptians are farmers, but the country still imports half its food. Nearly half of Egyptians are illiterate, a third of them marry cousins, and nine-tenths of Egyptian women undergo genital mutilation. It has a huge university system, but its graduates are unemployable. Egypt’s economy is in a death spiral. With the collapse of tourism and other sources of foreign exchange, cash reserves are down from six months’ import coverage to just to two months. The military government is a kleptocracy of African dimensions. We are less likely to see a stable but hostile Islamic government than starvation and social breakdown. Syria seems condemned to a long-term civil war with Turkey, Iran and Saudi Arabia supporting proxies.

FP: Your perspective on American efforts at nation-building in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere in the Muslim world? If these efforts are quicksand, then what are the alternatives?

Goldman: I supported the invasion of Iraq and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, but I shared Daniel Pipes’ view that we should have installed an amenable strongman and gotten our soldiers out of harm’s way. It is not within our power to stabilize societies that crash and burn on entry into the modern world. Americans often forget just how exceptional we are. Our founding premise is that God gave inalienable rights to every individual. The notion of a covenant in which every individual derives rights from God such that no earthly power can take them away begins at Mount Sinai. In Islam, it is absurd to suggest that God might limit his own power by a permanent grant of rights to every individual. The arbitrary, capricious and absolutely transcendent god of Islam would not condescend to a covenant with humankind. The institutions of representative democracy are a hollow shell without its covenantal premise.