Defending Faith, Family and Freedom Podcast

Gary Bauer: Hi, this is Gary Bauer, Senior Vice President for Public Policy and Culture at the James Dobson Family Institute. Welcome to our podcast, Defending Faith, Family and Freedom. I'm glad you're with us. Tell your friends about us, please.

Well, I want to have a conversation with you today about Islam. Islam is in the news a lot these days, of course. We're in a conflict right now with the Islamic Republic of Iran, but even before that conflict broke out, there's been debate and a lot of news related to Islam, Muslims, and a lot of other different issues.

Of course, we all remember and know that New York City just last year elected their first Muslim mayor, Mayor Mandami. The mayor during the campaign was accused, not surprisingly, of antisemitism. Regardless of the charges, or sadly, maybe even because people thought he hated Jews, he won the election. Now that he's taken office, he's proven some of those charges. In fact, sadly, his wife appears to be a bigger antisemite than he is.

New York City electing a Muslim as mayor, I don't know, a lot of people think there's a lot of symbolism in this. This year will be the 25th anniversary this coming September of the 9/11 attack on New York, on the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., and on the plane that ended up crashing in a field in Pennsylvania. Some folks are troubled. I'm troubled by the fact, even though Mandami obviously didn't have anything to do with any of that, I don't like the symbolism that at a time when radical Islam put a bullseye on New York City, that just 25 years later, we've got a Muslim mayor.

I'm told that in the Islamic world, in the radical Islamic world, the fact that New York City now has a Muslim mayor is seen as further evidence that Allah is blessing them and that they are destined to rule the world. What next? A Muslim mayor of Washington, D.C.? Who knows?

London has had a Muslim mayor for many, many years, and the experts say that London and now New York will be followed by many other major Western countries over the next decades. The reason is clear: the Muslim population is growing all over the world, but it's particularly growing in the West, not only because of birth rates, but because of massive migration from majority Islamic countries, third-world countries, all over Western Europe and into the United States and into places in Asia. As that migration continues and these new members of these countries become citizens or become qualified to vote, it stands to reason they will vote for people that represent their values.

In recent decades, the Muslim population in the United States has increased dramatically. There were, by some estimates, about 120 mosques in New York City in 2000. Today, the estimates are there are at least 350 mosques in New York City. Some people say the number is higher than that.

Before I go any further, I want to say what some of you are thinking about, which is it's hard these days to have a conversation about Islam, about radical Islam, about jihad, because there are a whole lot of powerful people in the media that run special interest groups, even some in Congress, mostly on the left wing of the Democrat Party, who will immediately label you an Islamophobe if you start asking questions about the wisdom of massive Muslim immigration into Western countries when those immigrants often refuse to become part of the community in one way or the other.

In some parts of the United States, the Muslim population has been very concentrated. One place is in part of Minneapolis, Minnesota, that's known as Little Mogadishu. Mogadishu is a city in Somalia where, tragically, we heard the name of that city when a group of American soldiers' helicopter crashed, and they had to fight a horrible battle in that city. They were eventually overcome, many of them were killed, and then they added insult to injury. My blood boils when I think about this: the naked bodies of our sons were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu as the population cheered their approval.

Now we've got an area of Minneapolis that has so many Somalians in it that it's known as Little Mogadishu. There are similar communities in Dearborn, Michigan, and even, I found out recently, in the Dallas-Fort Worth metropolitan area in Texas, there is now a fairly large Muslim population. In these areas, when the population is concentrated, Muslims are often not only refusing to assimilate, but increasingly we're hearing about efforts to establish little caliphates, little areas that are governed under Muslim rules and Muslim law known as Sharia law.

Sharia law is not a good thing. It is a comprehensive framework derived from the Quran for governing virtually all aspects of life according to Islamic principles. The Taliban followed a form of Sharia. The Islamic Republic of Iran, the mullah leaders, are guided by Sharia law. Under Sharia law, women are treated like second-class citizens at best. Religious freedom is nonexistent. Freedom of speech is severely restricted. There are laws against blasphemy against Islam or apostasy. In some countries ruled by Sharia law, converting to Christianity is a crime punishable by death.

There's a growing number of mosques in America preaching a hard-line fundamentalist view of Islam, and that's raising, as it should, greater and greater concerns. Think about this: if you can name a country that has a majority Muslim population, even countries that are friends of ours. The Gulf countries have made some alliances with us, have signed some treaties. Places like Saudi Arabia and Qatar and the United Arab Emirates, these are obviously majority Muslim countries, and they've made some treaties with us, but in those countries, there are no synagogues. There are no churches. You do not get to practice religious liberty in serious Muslim-majority countries. You only get to practice religious liberty when you come to the United States of America or those places in Europe where religious liberty is still practiced at least to some extent.

There's growing concern about the population trends. There's growing concern about Sharia law. Our friends at a group called the Middle East Media Research Institute have documented many disturbing anti-Western sermons being preached not in Tehran or Baghdad, but in New York City, Detroit, Chicago, Orlando, San Diego, in mosques there and across our country.

The problem is causing enough concern in Congress. Not the problem of the preaching, but the problem of how we deal with a growing Muslim population, some proportion of which is radicalized, that legislation is being introduced in Congress and in some states around the country, mostly by conservative Republicans, making it clear that Sharia law cannot and will not be tolerated in the United States because it contradicts our Constitution.

The liberals would object to this. Our Constitution was written by our founders along with the Declaration of Independence and our other founding documents, and our founders based the ideas in it from the Bible. Our Constitution and our Declaration of Independence says that we are all created equal and endowed by our creator. That's not Allah; that's the God of the Bible. Because we're made in the image of the God of the Bible, we all have dignity, value, and worth. That's the basis of all the laws that we pass. Sharia is completely different, and Sharia by definition would mean that the Constitution would be trumped over governance by Sharia law.

House Speaker Mike Johnson, who I'm sure you know is a devout Christian, an evangelical, commented on some of this recently. He was having a press briefing, and there were some hostile media questions about Republican efforts to ensure that our law is not based on the Quran but on our Constitution and founding documents. I thought Speaker Johnson handled it very adeptly. Let me just play a brief clip of what he said in answer to that question.

Speaker Mike Johnson: Look, there's a lot of energy in the country and a lot of popular sentiment that the demand to impose Sharia law in America is a serious problem. That's what animates this, and that's the language that people use. It's different language than I would use, but I think that's a serious issue. Sharia law and the imposition of Sharia law is contrary to the US Constitution. Our Constitution is the greatest in the world. It's the longest-surviving Constitution on the planet, and we're 250 years into this great experiment in self-governance.

One of the principles that we believe in, stated first in the nation's birth certificate, is that all of us are created equal by God. That means every single person has inestimable dignity and value. We respect everyone's beliefs and their right to live out their beliefs and to speak freely about their beliefs and have that conviction. But when you seek to come to a country and not assimilate but to impose Sharia law, Sharia law is in conflict with the US Constitution. That is the conflict that people are talking about. It is not about people as Muslims; it's about those who seek to impose a different belief system that is in direct conflict with the Constitution. That's where I think that comes from.

Gary Bauer: Now, I know most of you are not focused on Sharia law. I know how busy I am. If I make a list of all the things I'm worried about, if I just start with the things in my own family, we're all worried about our daily lives: how we're going to pay our bills, how we're going to get our kids to school on time, how we're going to save to put our kids through college. But sadly, because we're so often distracted, it's one of the reasons that periodically we wake up and look at something and go, "Whoa, how in the world did that happen? Where was I when that was going on?" I'm afraid this may be one of these issues if we don't start paying attention to it now.

There's another congressman on Capitol Hill, Chip Roy from the state of Texas. He's been very concerned about what's going on in his state with the growth of the Muslim population and some efforts in Texas to set up specific little communities that only Muslims will be allowed to live in. That's probably a violation of laws against religious discrimination. Chip Roy is concerned about this, and he recently had a hearing on the growth of Sharia law around the country and specifically in his home state of Texas. He made a very long opening statement. I'm just going to give you the beginning of it because he really lays it out very logically about why this is something to be concerned about. Listen to Congressman Chip Roy.

Speaker Chip Roy: There's a movement afoot across the United States that seeks to overthrow our legal system and the Constitution to replace it with a foreign legal system that upends our American way of life. It seeks to replace these foundational elements of our constitutional order with Islamic law known as Sharia. The principles of Sharia are at odds with the Constitution and the laws of the United States. Sharia fails to include due process, treats non-Muslims as second-class citizens, and prescribes barbaric punishment.

All the while, polygamy, misguided corporal punishment for perceived violations of Islam, and acts of violence and terrorism on behalf of Sharia are promoted by its adherents. Sharia encourages violence, silences dissent, rejects religious freedom, and subjugates women and children. Let's be clear: this is not about having the freedom of worshiping a religion of one's choosing, such as Islam, but forcing a foreign legal code that is incompatible with our laws and legal system that provides unwanted consequences to the American people.

It's everything we've fought against for more than 250 years. Thomas Jefferson recognized this problem at the beginning of the 19th century when he confronted Islamists in the Barbary Wars to keep trade lanes open and end Islamic religious slavery. When envoys and future presidents John Adams and Thomas Jefferson inquired by what right the Islamic Barbary states preyed upon American shipping, enslaving both crews and passengers, America's two foremost envoys were told by Tripoli's ambassador, "It was written in the Quran that all nations who should not have acknowledged their authority were sinners, that it was their right and duty to make war upon whoever they could find, and to make slaves of all they could take as prisoners, and that every Muslim who should be slain in battle was sure to go to paradise."

While the rest is history, with American Marines victorious on the shores of Tripoli as their anthem rings, the American people and this Congress must recognize the same issue our founders identified and defeated over 200 years ago. Islamists are forcing their legal code onto non-believers by violence or the threat of it by any means necessary.

Gary Bauer: Well, I can't say it any clearer than that. Now, there's something you couldn't tell by listening to his statement, and that is for the most part he was speaking to a committee hearing room in which virtually all the members of the committee that were sitting there were Republicans. The Democrats literally boycotted the hearing. Now, tell me why that makes any sense. Why would a Democrat member of Congress not even want to attend a hearing to debate the question of whether we should be allowing Sharia law to be the governing law in any jurisdiction in the United States of America?

As you can imagine, some of the Democrats were asked why they didn't go to the hearing. Do you know what their response was? You better sit down for this. I think they must have been given a memo because a number of them gave the same answer. "Well," they said, "Sharia law is not the problem. That's not the extremism we're worried about. The real problem facing America is not Sharia law; it's Christian Nationalism." The real problem is you and me. Sharia law is not a problem. Setting up jurisdictions that are governed by the Quran, that's not a problem. But Americans who love Jesus and love America—that's a Christian who loves Jesus and an American that loves America—Christian Nationalists, those are the problems.

Representative Roy during that hearing said that he has talked to women in Texas that live in the Fort Worth metro area. These American women have told him that there are now places in Fort Worth controlled by radical Islamist neighborhoods that they will not go into because they fear what could happen. In Europe, these kinds of places have been called no-go zones. Not even the police go into them. There are no-go zones in places in London and other Western European cities. My friends, there should never be a no-go zone anywhere in America for American law and American women to be afraid to walk in in the United States of America.

Sharia law needs to be debated. Legislative efforts need to be made. I know from my conversations at the White House, the President's concerned about this. I know the Secretary of War is concerned about it, the Secretary of State. But this issue is going to get more headlines. There will be more controversy, and there will be more attempts to keep you from saying anything about it because that would make you an Islamophobe. That's the very reason you need to speak up and urge your pastor to speak up too, because this is something that should be important to all American citizens and particularly to Christians.

Now, I want to go away from Sharia law and deal with another aspect of all this that sadly has been in the headlines already way too much this month. Since March 1st, there has been a wave of threats and terrorist attacks on our homeland, on the United States. As Christians, we should not let this violence cause us to become fearful or to engage in hatred, but we also must understand what's motivating these attacks because it will help us deal with a whole lot of other issues coming toward us in the years ahead.

One attack was done by a man who was a naturalized US citizen from Senegal. He came to the United States legally and became a US citizen. He opened fire at a popular entertainment spot in Austin, Texas. He killed three people and wounded 13 others. On March 7th, two men attacked a peaceful demonstration in Mayor Mandami's New York City. They threw improvised explosive devices at a peaceful demonstration that was going on. Their parents came to the United States legally from Afghanistan and Turkey. The two young men appeared to have been radicalized here in the United States.

On March 12th, we had a very dark day indeed. There were two more radical Islamist attacks. One was carried out by Muhammad Jala, a naturalized citizen from Sierra Leone who attacked students on the campus of Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. I live in Virginia, our offices are in Virginia, and many of the founding fathers came from Virginia. How I would love to hear what they would think about this. This guy had served for a time in the American military in the National Guard. It was discovered he was inspired by ISIS and wanted to kill his fellow soldiers. He was arrested before he could do that. He was found guilty. He was sentenced to jail, and he got early release on good behavior. Tell me how that makes any sense.

One year after early release, this guy walks into a classroom and asks in the classroom, "Is this the ROTC?" This is at Old Dominion University. "Is this the ROTC?" That stands for Reserve Officers' Training Corps. These young men and women are on a path to becoming officers in the United States military. When the professor, Lieutenant Colonel Braden Shaw, said, "Yes," thinking this might be a student interested in joining, the guy yelled, "Allahu Akbar," and immediately opened fire. Lieutenant Colonel Shaw, who was just months away from his retirement, was killed instantly. Two other cadets were wounded, and one of them died later. We still don't know all the details that followed, but we know how it ended. The ROTC cadets in that room, praise God, overcame the jihadist before he could kill anyone else. He was pronounced dead when police arrived. These future military officers engaged in combat, and they eliminated the enemy.

Later that same day, a man named Aman Muhammad Gazali, a naturalized US citizen from Lebanon, another majority Muslim country, crashed a truck into a synagogue in West Bloomfield, Michigan. Why would he crash a truck into a synagogue on a Thursday? That's when the attack took place. The Jewish Sabbath is on a Saturday. There wouldn't have been any Jews worshiping at the synagogue. Was he just trying to make a statement that he just wanted to hurt the building? Oh no, his motivations are much more evil than that.

You see, there was a kindergarten that meets at the synagogue. There were 140 Jewish children there, six and younger. He wanted to kill the Jewish children. Two brave security guards rose to the occasion and stopped him before he could reach his goal. One was wounded when the truck rammed the building. The other stood his ground and took down the attacker. Dearborn Heights Mayor Mo Baydoun said the attacker had family members who were killed recently in Lebanon in an Israeli airstrike against Hezbollah.

The mayor appeared to be saying that this somehow excused or explained what this jihadist did at the synagogue. Some people in the media seemed to take the story and suggest that this justified the attack. Israel has been engaged in a battle with Hezbollah in Lebanon for years. Hezbollah is another Islamic terrorist group funded by the Islamic terrorists that run Iran. But when his relatives were killed 6,300 miles away, the jihadist's mindset was to massacre Jewish children. You can't come up with a better example of raw evil antisemitism. We've since learned, by the way, that his brother in Lebanon that was killed by the Israelis was the commander of a Hezbollah missile unit that had fired repeatedly at civilian targets in Israel. So his brother died in a war with Israel, and this guy thinks that logic makes it absolutely clear he needs to go kill a neighborhood Jew. Do you understand what we're dealing with here?

Well, let me explain it in case you don't understand it. This is not a war between nation-states or a nation battling a terrorist organization. In the minds of these Islamic attackers, this is a religious war, and they are obligated to wage it against Jews and Christians and other infidels. This is outrageous, of course, but it should cause a serious debate in America about immigration policies, about how many people should be allowed in from what countries. What are we doing to assimilate people? Could we please stop saying diversity is our strength?

The motto of our country is not diversity is our strength. The motto of our country is e pluribus unum. E pluribus unum: out of many, one. Not diversity is our strength. This right here is diversity. This phrase: diversity, diversity, diversity makes us stronger. This is what's justifying the mass migration into Europe and the United States of millions of people that do not share our values, do not share our culture, often follow an extremist version of their faith that requires them ultimately to kill us. If we can't have a serious debate about this, what can we have a serious debate about?

Now, I want to end this dark subject on a high note. I am encouraged by the heroic actions against the evil that was launched at our fellow citizens in recent weeks. In the New York City attack, two police officers responded instantly and courageously without hesitation. They pursued the Islamist who threw bombs at innocent bystanders. They tackled him, they arrested them. The officers reacted without any thought about their own safety.

In the incident in Texas, police arrived on the scene of the bar shooting in less than a minute. They immediately engaged with the attacker, and they eliminated him. At Old Dominion University, the ROTC cadets fought back, and they showed the kind of leadership we will want them to show when they are officers in our military. In Michigan at the synagogue, a well-trained good guy with a gun stopped a bad guy with a gun, sparing the lives of many little innocent Jewish children.

We're going to have to brace ourselves. This didn't end earlier this month. There will likely be more jihadist attacks. As I said, this year is the 25th anniversary of the terrorist attack on the US on 9/11. I think there is a new America emerging, one that contradicts everything the radical secular left says about our country. The left in America is doing everything it can right now to undermine our effort to destroy the threat posed by the Islamic Republic of Iran that wants a nuclear weapon. What do you think people that believe what these attackers believe, what do you think they would do with a nuclear weapon?

Average Americans, many of whom may not completely agree with the decision to confront Iran, are doing exactly what we hope every American will do right now. They're waking up every morning prepared to risk their lives to protect their country and their fellow citizens. They're praying for our men and women in uniform and hoping we win, we succeed in stopping the mullahs of Iran from getting nuclear weapons. Anybody you hear in elected office that sounds like they don't want us to win, they don't care whether we win, or if they're predicting that our military can't possibly win, write them off the list of anybody you could ever possibly vote for.

Now, when I'm frustrated or emotional or seeing a big problem in the country, I often repair back to the guy that most formed my political views, and that's Ronald Reagan. I voted, I worked for him for eight years. Ronald Reagan said this quite a few years ago. By the way, he had a lot of experience with radical Islam. He rescued the US hostages being held at the US embassy by the radical Islamists in Tehran in 1980. In 1988, he ordered the sinking of most of Iran's navy, just like Donald Trump recently did. And his worldview about the responsibility of free men and women was very clear.

He once said this: "Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction. We didn't pass it on to our children in their bloodstream. It must be fought for, protected, and handed on for them to do the same. Or," listen my friends, "or one day we will spend our sunset years telling our children and our children's children what it was once like in the United States when men were free." This is Gary Bauer with Defending Faith, Family and Freedom. It's a pleasure to be with you. Come back again.