Proclaiming Justice with Laurie Cardoza Moore

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Dexter Van Zile: Tucker Carlson had Nick Fuentes on. Fuentes basically said that he was an admirer of Stalin and Hitler. At a certain point, it's like, come on. Why went to Dearborn a while back, and I asked him, I said, "So how many of these people support Hezbollah?" And he said, "90%." If you're a supporter of Hamas, you don't get in the country. You're out. That's my attitude. Goodbye.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: I'm Laurie Cardoza Moore, and this is Proclaiming Justice Podcast. Ladies and gentlemen, we're back with Dexter Van Zile, who is a journalist. He is the managing editor of Focus on Western Islamism, and he is working with the Middle East Forum.

I know a lot of our supporters are very familiar with Middle East Forum. Of course, PJTN relies heavily on a lot of the information that comes out of Middle East Forum. So a lot of the information you'll see in our programs are directly connected to this organization. And Dexter, I've been a big fan of his, followed him for many years. So it's a great honor to have you here at the NRB.

Dexter Van Zile: It's wonderful to be here.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: So Dexter, there's a couple of things we're going to talk about. We're going to talk about this Christian influencer issue, but we're also going to talk about Islamism and the infiltration of Islamists into the West, specifically into the United States of America. But it's not just us. A friend of mine from South Africa sent me a picture of government officials in South Africa who were having their photo taken with a bunch of Islamist Palestinian supporters in South Africa. This is a huge problem.

But let's start with Christian influencers, because I think the Islamists are influencing those influencers.

Dexter Van Zile: I think you might be right. Historically, I spent an awful lot of time writing about pretty marginal people, and maybe I invested too much time into them. I would write about people like E. Michael Jones, who was a Roman Catholic from Notre Dame that went to Iran and visited with the Iranians and went to a conference where they denied the Holocaust. And he at one point said that Iran was the leader of the free world.

The thing was that maybe I paid too much attention to him because he didn't really have that much traction, but at the same time, it was horrifying. And then there was another guy named Owen Benjamin. He was one of these kind of failed actors that started a podcast. But now we've got people like Tucker Carlson and Owen Benjamin that are essentially mainstreaming some of the most anti-Semitic ideas that we've seen in years.

Fortunately, there are people on the right that are doing everything that they can to police those folks and say, "Look, we cannot have these people involved with mainstream conservative politics." The question is what's going to happen in the upcoming election. Are they going to have growing influence or not?

One of the things that I tell people is I say, "Look, when you support people who demonize the Jewish people and demonize the Jewish state, you are basically lending credence to the same people who have been demonizing the United States and Western civilization for the past few decades, and they're using the same techniques."

So that's really one of the things. When Tucker Carlson had Nick Fuentes on, Fuentes basically said that he was an admirer of Stalin and Hitler. At a certain point, it's like, come on. The problem is that a lot of young people have basically been exposed to information about the Holocaust, and the thing is that I think the young people, and I don't want to disparage the concern over the Holocaust, but they're tired of hearing about it and they're worried about their issues.

One of the things that I have told people is that we need to come up with a new way to promote American concern for issues in the Middle East that transcend the Holocaust. One of the things that I can say is look at the mistreatment of Christians in the region. To tell people we need to transcend the Holocaust is just horrifying to me because I'm one of those people that thinks that it's a signature event in Western civilization.

The problem is that the events that took place between 1914 and 1945 opened up, and Rusty Reno wrote about this in his book called The Return of the Strong Gods, they opened up a lot of concern, legitimate concern for human rights, but then what happened was that the Left came in and used that concern to create the idea of an open society.

The problem is that you cannot maintain a civilization that is always guilt-ridden and is always basically embracing the notion that its history is uniquely evil. I think that's one of the reasons why Nick Fuentes has gotten so much support on the part of young people. Young men go to college, they're exposed to college professors who tell them, "Oh, you're a white guy, settler colonialism is evil, everything that your ancestor did is evil."

Look, I have ancestors on the Mayflower, and I'm saying, "Look, the English-speaking peoples of the world brought an end to slavery." And even people who are critical of the United States understand that the anti-slavery movement was in many respects kind of the foundation for a lot of the ideas that have been used to proclaim justice to the nation, so to speak.

So that's the interesting thing. When I tell people, "Thank you for assailing Candace Owens and Tucker the way that they have," it's very clear. We'll see what happens in the years ahead, but I'm confident that we're in much better shape than frankly the Left is. The Left has an anti-Zionist, anti-Israel problem that they were the ones who basically drove Jews into hiding on college campuses after the October 7th massacre. That was not Tucker, that was not Candace Owens, that was Students for Justice in Palestine. And who funded them? That's really the question that we need to figure out.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: These are all extremely important issues that we have to understand because this connects to the dots of Islamism and the rise of Islamism. But before we go there, one of the things I'm really concerned about is a growing number of Catholics that are new converts to Catholicism. We have Fuentes, we have Candace Owens, we have this new girl who just shows up on the scene, Cary Bolen, out of where she comes.

But we also have people like Kevin Roberts, who is also a newbie to Catholicism. He's the president of the Heritage Foundation, and he endorsed and embraced Tucker Carlson and would not remove Tucker Carlson from the Heritage Foundation, which is a huge affront to conservatism, to Western civilization. I mean, the Heritage Foundation is Apple Pie for our country, basically. So how did we get here?

Dexter Van Zile: Well, Cary Prejean Bolen, I saw that. Just so you know, I converted to Catholicism in 2008. I grew up a member of the United Church of Christ, which was the congregationalists. I've got ancestors on the Mayflower, and there were two groups of people that we had disdain for. One was the Roman Catholic Church, and the other one was Evangelical Protestants, and here I am at NRB.

One of the interesting things that I saw was that one of the reasons why I felt safe into going into the Catholic Church was because of Nostra Aetate in 1965. It was a document that basically said we are no longer going to hold the Jews accountable for the death of Christ on a collective level. There were other points, and to be fair, I think we may need to revisit what Nostra Aetate said about Islam. I think that the Catholic Church is going to have to kind of really start to think seriously about its relationship with the Muslim world.

In that document, one of the things that it said is that we need to kind of forget the quarrels of the past. I think that there are issues that we really need to look at because there are fundamental differences between the God that is worshiped in the Catholic Church and in the Christian world and the one that is propounded in Islam. That's a real difference. People in the Catholic elites will say no, we worship the same God. I'm not a theologian, but I'm not so sure that's the case.

The reason why that's important is because that is going to put pressure on Muslim elites to start to update their faith. The only way that Muslim elites are going to update their faith is when their power, property, and prestige is put under challenge. Then what will happen is just the same way that the Christian elites, their power, property, and prestige was challenged after the Holocaust because their reputations were at stake.

If you look at the catastrophes that have taken place in the Islamic world since 9/11, it's very clear that somebody needs to challenge the Islamic elites and say, "Look, things aren't going so well in the Muslim world. You're going to have to do something about it. Look at the hostility towards Israel, look at the disaster that it brought about for the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip, look at the disaster that it brought about for the Iranians."

The Iranians don't have enough water for their capital city, but they had the money to invest in a war against Israel. They had the money to send to proxies like Hamas and Hezbollah, but they didn't have enough money to protect their own citizens from essentially a drought in their capital city. So that I think is crucial.

Going back to the Catholics, all of these newcomers, and I'm a relative newcomer, they will say Christ is King, and my response is yeah, and He's a Jew. I'm going to probably get in a lot of trouble about this, but I'm going to say, "Look, Jesus Christ was present at the Creation. That means that there was a Jew present at the Creation."

So what does that mean? That means that to a certain extent, and I'm getting a little sarcastic here, but that the universe itself is kind of a Jewish conspiracy and Christians are in on it. We have some sort of obligation to Creation itself, and it comes to us through a Jewish Savior.

So when they start to talk about these things like the blood libels, at a certain point it's like, did you just come into the Catholic neighborhood just so that you could engage in this type of anti-Israel propaganda? Because you're not welcome here. But it's not my place because I don't wear the collar, I'm not a bishop, I'm not a cardinal, I'm just another guy in the church. But the one thing that I do know is that if you're a Christian, you think that God did all good things through Jesus Christ, who is a Jew.

Anti-Semitism is contrary to the faith. Catholic intellectuals were some of the people who came out and railed against anti-Semitism first. Have you read any of this stuff? One last thing, and this doesn't have anything to do with Evangelical theology, this is a Christian thing. Catholics, we have the seven sacraments and you're supposed to basically give Jesus all of your enmity and hostility in confession. You're not supposed to project it onto the people in your life.

That's a Christian practice, and the Eucharist is basically a demonstration of the peace between these Catholics and the rest of the world that comes to us through Christ. So, I can't say that I've been a very good Catholic because I haven't been at peace with most of humanity for most of my life, but I try to make it so that if I'm in some sort of intellectual combat, that I play by fair rules of the game.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: I'm so glad you're bringing this up because I have been in communication with Bill Donohue with the Catholic League. He's a great guy. I interviewed him years ago on the issue of anti-Semitism and what Catholic belief teaches. He said to me at that time that you can't be a good Christian or a good Catholic and be an anti-Semite. He brought up Nostra Aetate, that the Catholic Church dealt with this issue of anti-Semitism, what had happened in the past with the Inquisition and some of the pogroms.

But I recently sent him an email asking for a quote because I was doing a piece on Candace Owens, who says like Cary Bolen, that Catholics are not Zionists. And so he sent me back a message. I said, "What would you say about Candace Owens? She's speaking at Catholics for Catholics in Washington, D.C." He sent me back a quote. He says, "I will have nothing to do with her."

Dexter Van Zile: Right. And the church acknowledged, the Catholic Church acknowledged Israel's legitimacy in the 1990s. And so if you believe that what comes out of the Vatican is decisive for your response to the world, then you have to essentially affirm Israel's right to exist. And so for them to say, and I think in years past one of the popes, it might have been Pope Francis, said that if you're an anti-Zionist, you're basically contradicting the faith.

Look at the spiritual aura of a lot of these anti-Zionists. They're very unhappy people who can't really tell us that Christ's presence in their life has really made them so much happier than they were before. And when you look at it, it's just like anti-Zionism, and the thing is that it's like if the central element of your faith is to be hostile towards Israel, my response is look, what gospels are you reading?

Laurie Cardoza Moore: Jerry McDermott basically says that if you look closely at the Gospels, you will see support for Zionism as a movement, for the recreation of the Jewish state. Jesus was not an anti-Zionist. He may have been very critical of his fellow Jews, but he was not an anti-Zionist. And he may have been thinking more about other issues than that, but the idea that somehow he would want the Jewish state eradicated...

The disciples, I can't remember where it is, I think it's in the book of Luke, the disciples, when Jesus was getting ready to be carried up to heaven, they asked him the one question. They believed he was the Messiah, but the one question they had for him was, "Will you at this time restore the kingdom back to Israel?"

What is a kingdom? It's a nation. It's a nation with laws, it's culture. So they were concerned about Zion coming back because God said he was going to write his name on Mount Zion, which he has. So it's hard to listen to these people spew their hatred, professing to be Christians, whether Protestant or Catholic, but they think that they are legitimate in their statements. But you're right, I see the same thing in these people. There's no love and there's no joy in their lives because of the relationship with Jesus Christ.

So we need to continue this conversation because I've got some ideas about what I think we need to do. Because our goal is always to try to reach Christians, to educate them to stand against the rise of anti-Semitism. We saw it with Martin Luther, it got passed on through the Protestant religion. Hitler quoted from Martin Luther's writings to legitimize the slaughter of the Jews. So we've got issues. But truth is the best way to confront, combat the disinformation.

Dexter Van Zile: Right.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: But there's an interesting twist now because some of these very same people that we talked about, like Tucker, it appears that Qatar seems to be spreading the wealth around and buying this influence with these people, like what happened with Cary Bolen. She came out of nowhere. Someone did some research, and I think they used Grok to search back how many times she had used the word Zionism. She just started to use the term.

Dexter Van Zile: Maybe somebody's coaching her. This is one of the things that we see. I think that Qatar has clearly, and I don't think that we can assert that there are any direct connections between Qatar and some of the people who are promoting this. I do know that one of Tucker's investors was basically tied to Qatar or has good relations with an Islamist.

I don't know all the details there because these people are not the folks that I am paying attention to. But it's very clear the Middle East Forum has done a huge amount of research about Qatari influence on higher education. They have poured billions of dollars into Western democracies. Historically, anti-Zionism has been a unifying political agenda in Arab nations.

One of the things that we saw historically was that there were times when they would dial back on it because they needed American and Israeli help to deal with Iran. The problem is now Iran is essentially, even if we were to not do another thing to Iran between now and the next ten years, Iran's ability to terrorize the Middle East has diminished substantially.

So the people who were relying on the United States and said, "Okay, we're going to dial back the anti-Semitism," and the people who were relying, they looked at Israel as basically a counterpoint to Iran. Well, now that Iran has basically largely its ability to influence events in the region has gone down, well now they don't need Israel as much as they used to, so they can go back to beating up on Israel.

We're seeing greater hostility towards Israel, expressions of hostility towards Israel on the part of the Saudi leaders. The people that I talk to and listen to indicate that that may or may not be their ideology, but they think it's in their interest that they can get away with it now. One thing we always have to understand is that in the realm of politics, sometimes anti-Semitism is just a political instrument. It is something that you can use to get your base going, it's something that you can use to whip up support.

On the Left here in the United States, the same techniques that were used to delegitimize Israel from basically 1967 on were used to delegitimize the United States and Western democracies as well. That's one of the reasons why I shifted away from basically confronting anti-Israel propaganda in the media and in the churches to basically defending the West in general, largely because I started to recognize everything was basically about trying to diminish Israel's ability to maintain a monopoly on force in its own territory.

When you could not defend it, it couldn't defend itself. That was the goal. Anytime that it basically used a weapon to defend itself, it was basically engaged in settler colonialism and it was engaged in genocide. Well, that whole notion of undermining the ability of Western democracies to exercise their and maintain the monopoly on the legitimate use of force, that's been going on for years as well.

European countries can't defend their borders to immigration without basically offending people on the Left. Western democracies couldn't enforce the law against immigrant populations, the rape gang crisis in England. Why? Because they didn't want to be accused of racism. This has been an issue for decades, and it came to fruition in part during the BLM protests.

The police retreated from many neighborhoods. Did the lives of African Americans improve as a result of that? No. And they came up in Ferguson, the narrative of "Hands up, don't shoot," that was a complete lie. But that narrative was used to basically demonize police officers throughout the country, just the same way that the Mohammed Al-Dura story, in 2001, where Israel was falsely accused of killing a young Palestinian boy in Gaza Strip. That imagery from that tape was used to basically incite the Intifada. After 9/11, the Intifada spread throughout the world.

The reason why the Left has had such a pernicious impact on human rights is that the Islamist ideology of Muslim male supremacism is the human rights issue of the 21st century. There's no question about it. The problem is that if you try to raise that issue, you are an Islamophobe. The folks on the Left who should be worried about the mistreatment of women in Muslim-majority environments, who should be looking at the impact of Islamism on non-Muslim minorities in the Middle East, and on the safety of women and Jews in Europe has collapsed.

You would think that the Left would be concerned about that, but because they look at the perpetrators as victims of Western colonialism, they will let it go. They will let it go. But if you want to talk to me about what is the biggest colonialist movement around, I would say Islamism is the biggest settler colonialist movement around.

If you look at what's going on in Europe, we see settler colonialism in those countries. It's from Muslim-majority environments. They come in, they change the mores and the rules associated with how women are treated, and they basically bully Western elites into not enforcing the law.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: Sharia Law. Look at how they're trying to push Sharia Law into our country.

Dexter Van Zile: Now, one of the things that we have to understand about Sharia is that for some people it's a personal thing, it's an Islamic thing. The problem is that when you try to ban Sharia, there are going to be some Muslims on your side that are going to say, "Look, Sharia is for me," okay? But I think for sure, if you're an adherent of Al-Qaeda, you don't get in the country. If you're a supporter of Hamas, you don't get in the country. If you support Jamaat-e-Islami, Lashkar-e-Taiba, you don't get let in the country.

You're not allowed in, and if you are on a visa and it's demonstrably provable that you support those institutions or those movements, you're out. That's my attitude. Goodbye.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: I agree. Well, you know, we have social media to be able to check these people out. It's not like we can't vet these people when they want to come into our country. How in the world do we open up the doors? I mean, we know why Biden did it and why, of course, but Biden and Obama also were credited for removing immigrants from our country, but they allowed Islamists.

Dexter Van Zile: In some instances, they did. Now the real issue was, why didn't we really go after the institutions and investigate the institutions that supported terrorism here in the United States? And I'm not saying explicitly supported, but the people who pulled off terrorist attacks, somebody helped them out basically making their way through American society. Somebody provided the 9/11 attackers with the logistical support that they needed. Who were those folks here in the United States? That's a crucial issue.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: I think we had one of them located right here in Nashville. The protege of the one-eyed Sheikh was the imam at the 12th Avenue Mosque here in Nashville, Tennessee. He was whisked out of this city the day after 9/11 happened. No planes were leaving except a Saudi plane, and they took him out. So he must have been a Saudi Muslim. They took him out of the country and who knows.

Dexter Van Zile: I don't know anything about that. But I think that's one of the things that we have to remember is that prior to the 1980s, a lot of the mosques that were here in the United States were basically controlled and attended by people who were very glad to be here in the United States. They had no interest whatsoever in basically bringing Sharia Law or bringing some sort of Islamist revolution to the United States.

Then what happened was that with the Saudi money, this happened in the Boston area, slowly but surely, people took over the mosques and they replaced the imams, the moderate imams, and the moderate boards of directors with people that were much more anti-Western and much more aggressive against the United States.

The thing is that happened, I think, one of the reasons why the Saudis did that was to put a lid on Islamism in their own territory, because they were regarded as essentially not really being good Muslims. That was Sayyid Qutb, actually all of them. They basically thought that Arab and Muslim leaders really weren't Muslim when they founded the Islamist movement. Their first target wasn't Western democracies; their first targets were leaders of Muslim-majority countries because they were jahiliyyah, they were supporters of jahiliyyah.

Once those leaders understood what was happening, they said, "Go to the West, go to the West, leave us alone." So I think that's one of the things. The one thing that I fear the most is that there's going to be a significant population of Muslims who historically in the United States did not support Islamism who now, I went to Dearborn a while back and I went to a mosque in the city.

I sat down with one of the members and I said, "So how many people attend this mosque?" He said 400 to 500 people, and that might have been an exaggeration, but it was a pretty well-attended. I watched it; there was a fair number of people there on a weeknight. And I asked him, I said, "So how many of these people support Hezbollah?" And he said, "90%."

The thing is that Hezbollah is an institution that has murdered Americans. It's killed American soldiers in Beirut, and they kidnapping, precursor to that organization, kidnapped Benjamin Weir. Benjamin Weir was a prominent Presbyterian back in the day. He was in their custody for a year, in their captivity. He comes back, he becomes elected moderator of the Presbyterian Church USA or one of its precursors, and what did he do? He basically helped initiate the BDS campaign, the anti-Zionist propaganda in that church.

That's why the Presbyterians became anti-Israel. People asked him and he said, "Well, I don't like Hezbollah either," but his activism was all directed at Israel. He didn't say anything about Islamism. And so that was how the Left would regard the Islamist as basically an extension of this anti-colonialist agenda.

These people are not religious supremacists. They're readers of Frantz Fanon. They're readers of all of the anti-colonialist stuff. Fanon's writings were read by some of the Islamists. Frantz Fanon was essentially an anti-colonialist that legitimized violence against the West.

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Laurie Cardoza Moore: Wow. So we've got our work cut out for us. How do we win? What do we do?

Dexter Van Zile: I think first of all, one of the things that we have to do is that we have to put pressure on Islamist leaders and say, "Look, you can no longer broadcast." If you support Hamas, if you support Hezbollah, if you support Al-Qaeda, and you're not a U.S. citizen, we're going to take your visa away. You're going back home. I think that's really what the agenda should be.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: So do we have Al Jazeera operating here in the United States?

Dexter Van Zile: People should look at our website. I think they can broadcast anywhere they want because of the internet. But so if you're asking me, then also, the Middle East Forum recently did a forum about Saudi Arabia's pivot against Israel in the United States on February 13th. You can go to our YouTube channel.

One of the messages that I came away with is that the United States needs to put pressure on Qatar and put pressure on Saudi Arabia and say, "You want to do business with us? Then you gotta tell Al Jazeera to settle down, stop promoting hostility towards the United States and Israel." And we need to say the same thing to Saudi Arabia.

There's a fight in the Middle East. The modernists, the United Arab Emirates, the UAE, they want the Abraham Accords. Why do they want the Abraham Accords? Because they no longer want to use anti-Semitism and hostility towards Israel as a unifying political agenda for their country.

The Israelis who died on October 7th and the foreign workers, they were martyrs to the cause of Arab modernity. That's the way I look at it, because Hamas and Iran and Hezbollah, they basically they want to keep the Middle East in the ideological backwaters. That's what they want to do.

When I was in Dearborn, we have people here in the United States that are promoting that agenda. This is ArabCon. This was a conference that took place in Dearborn while I was there in September, and it was organized by the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC). On the face of it, that is a legitimate thing. You have every right to advocate for the civil rights.

But then when you go to the exhibition hall, this is the type of stuff that is on sale. Outside of ArabCon, there was a truck from a guy that was an American convert to Islam who basically he hates Israel and he accused Israel of genocide. Then there was this one of the t-shirts that you could buy at the conference. I don't mean to offend you, but this is what's going on in places like Dearborn.

Then here was another one of the hats that was for sale at ArabCon.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: Totally removing Israel.

Dexter Van Zile: This is calling, I actually bought it so that people would know that I actually bought it. And then I found this hat at the Arab American Museum in Dearborn. There was anti-Israel propaganda there. So the thing is that it's not just the Islamist or the Muslim community in Dearborn, but it's the Arab community.

Are they just, and I don't want to put them on the spot like this in general, because I know that they're all law-abiding people and they have the right to the First Amendment and they have a right to promote...

Laurie Cardoza Moore: But not to incite violence.

Dexter Van Zile: There are anti-Israel rallies or anti-American rallies where people in that from that community have shouted and chanted "Death to America" and "Death to Israel." And they will do that in front of the Henry Ford Museum.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: Of course, because Henry Ford was Hitler's buddy.

Dexter Van Zile: Well, and see now that's the irony. And the Ford Motor Company, they did everything they could to distance themselves from Henry Ford's anti-Semitism. They did. They really did, to their credit they did. But now all of a sudden in Dearborn and in places like Detroit, you see enormous hostility towards Israel, towards Jews. I talk to people in the Jewish community, I say, "Would you go to Dearborn?" and they say, "Are you kidding?" They don't feel safe.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: I wonder why.

Dexter Van Zile: The people who are in Dearborn who are most effective and most understanding of the issue are Evangelical Protestants who operated and did church work, not necessarily missionary work, in Muslim-majority countries. They understood how Christians are being mistreated in Muslim-majority countries and they want to respond and deal with this issue in as irenic and as forgiving a way as possible.

But they will stand up. Ted Berhem, he was a pastor, he challenged the mayor over they named a street corner in Wayne County right outside the city limits of Dearborn after one of a local guy by the name of Osama Siblani who publishes Arab American News, which promotes all sorts of hostility towards Israel and Zionism. At one point he was at a rally and he said that he wanted to send Netanyahu back to Poland. This is the type of stuff he says.

Ted Berhem, he went after the mayor about this, and the mayor overreacted and said, "You're an Islamophobe and when you leave the city, I'm going to host a parade."

Laurie Cardoza Moore: Oh my God.

Dexter Van Zile: And Ted Berhem, he basically to his credit, he was very Christ-like. He's not one of these people that responds with venom. But what he did was he basically lanced the boil for everyone to see. He demonstrated, he showed people what's really going on. And the mayor, he looks like a good leftist. Most of the city's pretty well-run, it's well-taken care of. It's not like Mamdani's New York.

But when he got pushed, he got mad and he basically demonstrated he tried to put Ted Berhem in a position of dhimmi, like "You don't get to talk to me like that." Oh, yes he does because he's a citizen. This is a United States, you're an elected official and we got every right to confront our elected officials about the decisions he makes. He was one of the people that held Osama Siblani up as a leader. We've got I think unfortunately we have similar problems in other parts of this country. Texas.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: Texas, Minneapolis.

Dexter Van Zile: Even Florida.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: Even Florida and we're seeing it in Florida, and we're seeing it here in Tennessee. Back in 2010, when we exposed the mosque in Murfreesboro, Tennessee, tried to shut it down. They wanted to build a 52,000-square-foot facility. We did the research on the board members. Two of them were tied to Hamas, one of them was actively recruiting Muslims to kill Jews on his social media.

And so the people in the community filed the lawsuit. We helped them find the attorneys to file that lawsuit. And although they didn't get to build the 52,000-square-foot facility, they did build a 10,000-square-foot facility. And the judge ruled in our favor when he heard the testimony because we brought in John Guandolo and other experts back then to come and testify.

The judge gave his ruling, told the mosque you're going to have to go back through the whole process again. The people in the community need to be properly noted, you didn't do that. A higher court judge came in, slapped it down.

Dexter Van Zile: The problem is that if you ultimately try to go after Islamism with land-use lawsuits, it isn't going to work because the First Amendment gives people a right to gather. And so the real question is how do we put pressure on Muslim elites to say, "Look, you are going to have to figure out a way to square the circle."

On one hand, you propound a religion and the Quran tells us that you propound the existence of a compassionate, loving, and merciful God. And then yet there are other passages in the Quran that say 9:29 that says slay the disbeliever. What are you going to do? How are you going to do that? What are we going to do here? And until mainstream Islamic leaders say enough is enough...

Saudi Arabia, Qatar, at a certain point the elites in those countries are going to have to say, "Look, we are in a dead end." A while back the United Nations issued a couple of reports on Arab underdevelopment. Basically they said the Arab economy is not very productive. We don't invent much. And if you look at the whole imposition of dhimmitude, if it weren't for the oil, what would you be producing?

Dhimmitude basically they force non-Muslims to be productive for the Muslim community and to pay a jizya. And so we need to figure out a way and that's been modernized. I think we have neo-dhimmitude. Sociologists and historians, they've been talking about the social death caused by slavery for years. It's a legitimate source of subject. Well how about we talk about the social death caused by Islam?

That's really the issue because you deprive people of their agency, that's what slavery did. You deprive people of their ability to trust their fellow humans. That's what slavery did, that's what dhimmitude does. And I think that's really one of the things that we have to start talking about and then we need to go to the Muslim elites and say, "This is what your religion has been used to legitimize. What are you going to do about it?"

Laurie Cardoza Moore: I suspect that the people who are more knowledgeable and studied than I am, they don't know what's coming next. Is there an elite class in Iran that can bring the country out of Islamism and into modernity? I hope so. I have a friend in Bahrain and they're a very peaceful people. They're like the UAE. They're peaceful people.

So I appreciate you being here with us. Before we sign off, can you please tell our audience how they can learn more, find you, follow you?

Dexter Van Zile: You can go to the Middle East Forum's website, meforum.org, and also if you do the /fwy, which is short for Focus on Western Islamism. And also if you really want to know a lot of the insight, go to DanielPipes.org.

Laurie Cardoza Moore: Dexter, thank you so much for being here with us. Thank you again for joining me on this edition of Proclaiming Justice. Please share this podcast with your family and friends. For more information about how you can get involved, please visit our website at PJTN.org. As a PJTN Watchman, you can help us keep up the fight to preserve our freedom for our children and their children for such a time as this.

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