Shillman Journalism Fellow gives reasons for optimism at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Editor's note: Below are the video and transcript to Shillman Journalism Fellow Daniel Greenfield's June 16, 2015 speech at the David Horowitz Freedom Center.
Daniel Greenfield from DHFC on Vimeo.
Daniel Greenfield: So we're going to be talking about a fun, happy, cheerful subject -- Islamic terrorism. Not just Islamic terrorism, but the next generation of Islamic terrorism. You know, Islamic terrorism is already pretty bad; why do we have to talk about the next generation of Islamic terrorism? Which I'm going to surprise you by telling you that it's going to be even worse.
But here we are. We're going to sip some drinks, and we're going to talk about the next generation of Islamic terrorism, which is going to be worse, and that's a good thing. Why is that a good thing? Stick around for the next five, 10, 50 hours, and I'll tell you all about it. Because I guarantee you that by the time we're done here, which is going to be about 1 o'clock in the morning, based on my usual speaking time -- hope you all have babysitters -- you're going to feel good about Islamic terrorism, and it's time that somebody besides Muslim terrorists felt good about Islamic terrorism.
Why, how, again, does this make any sense at all? Because the thing is, every setback -- and we've seen plenty of setbacks -- every lie that's been told about Islamic terrorism, everything that seems to have gone wrong -- the Arab spring, the Iran deal, ISIS, all that -- is really part of what's bringing us to the next level. It's getting us -- it's not moving us backward; it's getting us to the point where we need to be in order to win. Because that's the real topic here -- how we're going to defeat the next generation of Islamic terrorism.
Tonight we're going to discuss the future of Islamic terrorism. And I have good news, and I have bad news. Which would you rather hear first -- the good news, or the bad news? Show of hands, anybody? Bad news. You know, you're a lot like me. Because I love bad news. And I love delivering the bad news. So, let's do the bad news first. The bad news is Islamic terrorism is going to get worse. The good news? Islamic terrorism is going to get worse.
Am I confused? Often, but not at the moment.
Because the two are really one in the same. Why are we actually losing this war? America isn't weak. Sure, our military is using outdated equipment, morale is poor. But we could destroy the world several times over. We could level entire cities. A bunch of terrorists with AK-47s really a threat to us? Does the US military lack the ability to defeat them? Obviously not.
What is the actual strength of Islamic terrorism, and what is our weakness? The strength of Islamic terrorists is not that they have good weapons, it's not that they have WMDs, it's not that they have planes or jets. This isn't Vietnam. It's not Korea. They have no ability to match us on the battlefield whatsoever. Zero ability. These guys are not the Viet Cong. On a straight fight, they lose every single time. Even ISIS, no matter how often it's talked up -- they're losing very badly anytime they come up against the US military. There's no actual contest here.
So what's the problem? Think about what just happened in Orlando. Think about -- you've seen the news coverage -- think about what is the topic in the news coverage. Why did he do it? We don't know why he did it. I mean, certainly we know it can't be Islam. It can't be a Muslim terrorist. What's the actual cause? Well, we don't know, maybe he was abused as a child.
Back in the day, when he was making terrorist threats, the FBI investigated it. The FBI decided there was nothing there. He was just suffering from Islamophobia. People at work were really mean to him. It couldn't be Islamic terrorism. Maybe gun violence. The guns did it. The guns walked off the shelf, and they shot a bunch of people. So if we just ban the guns, then they won't walk off the shelves and shoot people anymore.
The problem obviously can't be Muslim terrorists. So even though Omar told everybody from the 911 operator to all his Facebook friends, Ahmed and Mohammed, why exactly he did it, we're not going to listen to him. I mean, what does he know? He's just the guy who did it. He's not an expert.
So we have this lovely little ambiguity in which we pretend we don't know why this is going on. We have absolutely no idea. And the tiny minority of extremists narrative, the one that says the vast majority of Muslims are terribly wonderful people and we need their help in order to defeat Islamic terrorism -- that requires ambiguity. When the media can say they don't know why they did it, okay, we don't know. But when you have something that scales all the way up to the level of ISIS, there's no more ambiguity anymore. When you have an entire country -- is it a country that's a tiny minority of extremists? That's a really big minority of extremists. It's a fact it's actually a majority of extremists. That's what a country, by definition, is.
When Muslim terrorist groups get stronger, the ambiguity is much harder to maintain. When ISIS first showed up -- I mean, how did all this happen? ISIS first showed up, they took Fallujah. Obama said they're just a JV team. We don't need to worry about them. Then they were marching on Baghdad. And then even he had to bomb them. I mean, he's doing the least possible bombing of ISIS that he can possibly get away with, but he still had to do it.
Because that's the thing: Muslim terrorists are actually strongest when they're weak. They're not strongest when they're strong. They're not strongest when they have more weapons, when they have more manpower, when they have more territory. They're actually weaker, because they're more vulnerable. And they're more vulnerable because they lose our sympathy. We sympathize with Muslim terrorists. We sympathize with bad people in general when they can claim to be oppressed, when they can claim to be weak, when they can claim to be needy, when they can claim to be victims of our foreign policy.
Muslim terrorists now -- they can't make that claim. Not at the ISIS level. Individually, they can get away with it. But the stronger Muslim terrorists get, the harder it is for them to make that claim. Their greatest strength of Muslim terrorists is weakness. So ISIS is the next step in Islamic terrorism. It's the future of Islamic terrorism.
But that doesn't mean that ISIS will win or that it's going to be around for even another few years. Maybe tomorrow everybody in ISIS will just decide to walk away and get jobs working at cafeterias. Probably not going to happen.
But the thing is, the Islamic terrorism, the kind that we're used to, the kind that we saw in Orlando, it's just a phase. It's phase one. Phase one: terrorists bomb, they shoot, they carry out various attacks. But these attacks are not just about random terror. They're moving to phase two.
To understand what phase two is, we have to understand what ISIS came from. Back when ISIS was being called al-Qaeda in Iraq, it was doing all the stuff. It was bombing. It was suicide bombing. One day, with a suicide bomb, it hit an Iraqi police station. We go, "Okay." The news would report 49 dead, 69 dead, 29 dead. Okay, let's move on.
Now, what was really happening here? They were destroying the authority system. They were destroying police. They were destroying the military. Eventually, they took over entire cities. And that's phase two.
In phase two, Islamic terrorist groups aren't just randomly blowing things up; they're controlling cities, they're controlling -- eventually, at phase three, they're controlling countries. At phase two, they have a military. They have cities. At phase three, they have the country. That's what ISIS is -- it's phase three. The phase three of the Islamic State.
And that's a good thing. Because again, ISIS is much more vulnerable. It's also way less sympathetic. As Islamic terrorists get stronger, as they move from phase one, where they're just poor, misunderstood or maybe they're just random people; they're just a whole bunch of lone wolves, they become much more vulnerable. Once they have a country, they can be bombed. Just like a real country.
And that's really the challenge that we're dealing with here. Islamic terrorists want to get stronger. They don't want to be weak. They don't want to be pathetic. They don't want to be objects of pity. They can occasionally play that game, but they don't want to do it in the long term.
And you know, there's a lot of history behind it. It's not just Islamic terrorism.
If you think about Nazi Germany, initially, the Nazis claimed to be the victims. Germany was being victimized by -- they were the victims in World War I. They were weak. They were poor. They have no military. They can't possibly do anything. And we've forgotten all that. Because our image of Nazi Germany is swastikas and storm troopers, and all these tanks flooding. But originally, people said Germany is no threat at all. They barely have a military. They've lost everything in World War I. They're the victims here. And then, they attacked us. They lost whatever sympathy they had.
Imperial Japan -- same thing. They were suffering from colonialism in Asia. They were protesting racism. They're really social justice activists. Then they bombed Pearl Harbor, and they lost the sympathy.
The Soviet Union also -- Americans loved Uncle Joe Stalin. He had a great mustache.
He was implementing socialism. He was just like Bernie Sanders. And then, the Soviet Union directly came out against us. They were no longer allies. They really showed how much they hated us. Khrushchev got here, and he banged his shoe on the podium -- "We will bury you." That was unambiguous, even for most leftists. They got the message. These guys are not our friends.
And when these people -- when they actually lose our sympathy, when they make it clear that these guys are not our friends, that they're the enemy, it's all over. It might take a while. But then we're ready. Ready to fight them. We're ready to take them on.
And you know what the best thing about ISIS is? That's hard to choose. It might be the beheadings. It might be burning people alive, dipping them in sulfuric acid, or making them pass tests on the Koran. But really, the best thing about ISIS is they're just so hard to sympathize with. ISIS is Islamic terrorism unmasked. And even the biggest bleeding heart, the biggest liberal, has trouble defending ISIS. You won't find that many people defending ISIS. That's not just because ISIS is very mean. ISIS is obviously very mean. But you know, Islamic terrorists in general are kind of mean.
Hamas shooting an antitank missile at a school bus full of Israeli children is just as bad as anything that ISIS did. But the world sympathizes with them because Hamas has learned that it has to play weak. It has to play the sympathy card.
ISIS does not play the sympathy card. ISIS never plays the sympathy card. ISIS never pretends that it's weak. And that is why it's so popular in the Muslim world. It's not just that it's a bigger terrorist organization. It got so big because it has no desire to be pitied. That's what projects trends. That is why ISIS is so popular. And that is actually going to be its undoing.
Our greatest weakness in the past was that we were divided. The defenders of Islamic terrorism in the West, both Muslim and non-Muslim, could always offer excuses for Islamic terrorism. There were always reasons why we couldn't hit them as hard as we had to. But the stronger Islamic terrorists become, the stronger we become. The more we can get to a point where we can hit them without apologizing, without feeling sorry, without feeling like we're beating up these nice people, or -- oh, these poor people who just have an AK-47, and they have nothing at all, and their only choice is to shoot at us, because they have no future whatsoever. The stronger they get, the more they lose our sympathy. The stronger they get, the stronger we become, actually, because we can fight them. That is the most important point to remember.
Once you become a country, then you have to be out in the open. At phase one, Islamic terrorism, the most basic kind -- anybody can do it. Put on a bomb vest and blow yourself up. It's not that hard. Any idiot can do it.
Any idiot can do it, and lots of idiots have done it. What's hard is actually controlling territory. You have to be out in the open. You need an army and you need to turn money into services. You have to do all the hard, dirty work of government. And you know, even if you do them as badly as badly as Governor Brown, you still actually have to do them.
A cell of three people somewhere in New Jersey is really hard to disrupt because you don't know about it. Secrecy is the greatest weapon of Islamic terrorists. It goes out the window when they have a state.
Victimhood becomes hard. It's why the PLO and Hamas don't really want a Palestinian state. They keep demanding -- give us a Palestinian state. They do not want a Palestinian state. If they wanted one, they would've had one by now. They want to demand one until the camels come home, and they want to blame Israel for it. Because once you have a state, you have to be responsible. You get treated like a country, and you get bombed like a country.
In war, your own weakness often matters more than the other side's strength. Our weakness -- and this is really huge -- is that we want to be nice guys. We want to be the good guys. We want to be the people everybody likes. We worry: why don't they like us? During the Bush Administration: why doesn't Europe like us? Now it's: why don't the terrorists like us? Why do they hate us?
This is the most ridiculous question in the world, by the way. We ask why do the terrorists hate us. Do you think Muslims sit around asking, "Why do the Americans hate us? Why? Why don't they like us?"
This is a question that people who want to be liked ask. And the fact that we're asking it shows that we're really nice people; also shows that we're kind of insecure.
We want to be liked. And we should not want to be liked.
Their weakness is they want to be tough guys. They want to be the big bad wolf. They want to be the guys who scare us. And the closer they get to that point, the worse it becomes for them. Our weakness keeps us from finishing the fight. But their weakness neutralizes our weakness. The greatest threat to the victory of Islamic terrorists comes from Islamic terrorists. Islamic terrorists, like all forms of evil, always undermine and sabotage themselves. They make it impossible for themselves to win because they don't understand us. And we don't beat them, because we don't understand them.
The cycle plays out a lot. We see it in Israel. We saw it quite a bit in Israel. And it's happening in America, it's happening in Europe. We think that a compromise can be achieved, we can make peace with them. The Obama Administration said we're going to negotiate with the moderate Taliban, you know, or the nice Taliban, who only stone women halfway to death. The ones who only chop off half of heads.
But actually, Vice President Joe Biden, the smartest man in the Obama Administration, did say -- we are going to negotiate with a moderate Taliban. Those negotiations have gone really well. We actually -- Obama officially ended the war in Afghanistan two years ago. Now he's sending in more troops, as usual, just like in Iraq. Because, you know, he's great at this "mission accomplished" stuff.
So we're a cooperative society. We want to get along with people. We want people to like us. We want people to be nice to us. The Muslim world is a hierarchical society. They want to be in charge. They don't want to cooperate. It's like the kindergarten. There are the kids who know how to share the toys -- they don't want to share the toys. They want all the toys.
And the two are just not compatible. You can't coexist that way. The cooperative society starts committing suicide when it tries too hard to cooperate, which is what we're doing in compromise. The enemy, the other side, the hierarchical society, grows in strength by pretending to be weak while we wait for a compromise. But at some point, we realize there's never going to be a compromise. We realized that with Nazi Germany. We were realized that with the Soviet Union. We realized that with Japan. There was never going to be a compromise here. And that's when the real conflict actually begins.
Now, we're dealing with ISIS, which is the future of Islamic terrorism. It's the next generation of Islamic terrorism. Now ISIS tomorrow might vanish. It doesn't really matter whether they get jobs as cafeteria workers or wedding photographers or whatever. But ISIS is the fundamental model that was built into the DNA of Islam. ISIS did not just appear from somewhere. It did not appear from nowhere. It came exactly out of the Koran. It's replicating exactly what Mohammed did to build his civilization. It's replicating what the Saudis did to build their country. We've just kind of forgotten about that. The Saudis, by the way, abolished slavery in 1962, around the JFK Administration. And these are our close allies in the Middle East. So the idea that this part of the world is progressive, that ISIS is some sort of aberration, is of course a ridiculous joke.
What's happening here is that we're entering a new age of Islamic terrorism. It's state terrorism. There are going to be terror attacks at home, and some of these are going to be lone wolf attacks supposedly, like the Orlando attacker. But you know what? There've been a whole lot of these lone wolves. And if you have a whole bunch of lone wolves, they're not lone wolves anymore. They're an army. You can't have more than one lone wolf. By definition, it's not possible.
Now, what's the goal of all this? What's the program here? They're part of a process of building an indigenous Islamic terrorist group in the United States. That means al-Qaeda in America. That means ISIS in America. That means building a local group that's going to do the same things in Europe, that's going to do the same thing in the United States, that they've tried to in Iraq and Syria. That means takeover. Turn no-go zones into no-go cities. That is their ultimate agenda, and very obviously they're going to lose.
But that's the endgame here. And the closer they get to that endgame, the more we're going to have to do something about this.
We, at the moment, like to believe that everything is going to work out. That we're going to get along well with the terrorists. That we're going to find the really moderate ones --so far the moderate al-Qaeda, the moderate ISIS. And then we're going to make peace with them. Obviously, it's not going to happen.
But here's where things get interesting. Because about this narrative, the narrative that there's a tiny minority of extremists, that there's ambiguity, that Islamic terrorism doesn't exist -- the more this happens, the more the narrative begins coming apart. Because there's another name for that narrative. It's the big lie. You've heard of the big lie.
We're living inside a big lie right now. If you've watched the Orlando coverage, you're familiar with this. There is a big lie here. The big lie -- well, we've discussed it already. But that big lie is under strain. Every Islamic terrorist attack in America places that big lie under more and more pressure. And that big lie is going to crack. It's going to crack, just as it gets cracked everywhere else.
Now, when we see the entire cover-up, the denial, the lies about it, that's the strain showing. You can see the sweat on their faces.
For example, John Kerry makes a special point of not calling the Islamic State the Islamic State. He doesn't call it ISIS. He calls it Daesh, which is kind of treating it like Voldemort. If you don't say its name, it has no power. This is magical thinking, and this is an administration that builds everything around magical thinking.
Because the thing is you can't actually ignore a phase three Islamic State. Obama tried. It did not work. ISIS is very good at getting publicity. If you try to ignore them, they release a viral video setting somebody on fire or dipping them acid, or forcing them to listen to the collective speeches of John Kerry.
I've done it. Trust me, being dipped in acid is much better.
Now, the people in charge of the foreign policy of our country -- even Democrat in many cases; even Republican -- they want Islamic terrorists to be at phase one, where they can ignore them. Islamic terrorists, when they get to phase two and phase three -- when that happens, the narrative gets under strain. At phase one, a terrorist attack happens, there's a memorial and a T-shirt. And the President, the Prime Minister, gets up and makes a speech and tells us how sad we are. And now, you know, tomorrow go back to shopping. Go back to work. Forget this ever happened.
But in phase two or phase three, when terrorist groups get bigger and bulkier, the attacks come much more frequently. If you've noticed, Islamic terrorist attacks in America have actually increased. The volume of attacks have increased. These so-called lone wolves -- there's a whole lot more of them. There are herds of these lone wolves roaming the United States and roaming Europe. There's a lot more of them, there's going to be even more and more of them. And when you deal with somebody like ISIS, it just can't be dismissed with a memorial service and a slogan -- "Boston strong," "Orlando strong," or whatever strong it is now. You actually have to deal with it.
Now, Obama, the rest of the terrorism denial gang, which covers Europe, Australia, much of the world -- they don't want to fight Islamic terrorists. They want to conduct outreach to them, they want to make friends with them. But the Islamic terrorists are going to force them to fight. If they ignore them with phase one or phase two, the way Obama did -- he withdrew from Iraq; he pretended that al-Qaeda in Iraq wasn't a problem -- they're going to fight them when they get to phase three. It's inevitable.
And this is the real war on terror that's happening. It's not about beating the terrorists for our leaders. It's about keeping the terrorists from becoming so powerful that they break the narrative. It's not about defeating the terrorists; it's about keeping them under phase three and stopping them from setting up states. Now, when you understand this, you're going to understand much of what happened in the war on terror until now.
So what happened with the Arab Spring? The Arab Spring -- our leaders tried to make a deal with political Islam in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood. That was the actual Arab Spring. The idea was that the Muslim Brotherhood would win democratic elections. It would have legitimate phase-three Islamic states, where women could be stoned fully legally. This did not work out too well. But the plan here was there would be elections, and then we could go back to living in the narrative that Islamic terrorism isn't a problem. There would be nice, peaceful, friendly Islamic states that would run under Islamic law. And the terrorism would go away, and most Americans could pretend that it doesn't exist.
The Muslim Brotherhood, once it took over Egypt, looked a whole lot like ISIS. Christians were massacred, dissidents were tortured, women were raped, and ISIS set up its own base in the Sinai with the aid of the Muslim Brotherhood.
Political Islam was a jihadist disaster. On September 11th, 2012, multiple American diplomatic facilities came under attack. You probably noticed Benghazi and Libya the most, but it also happened in Egypt and Tunisia. And you know what happened in those countries? The wonderful Islamist governments that we helped put into power? The friendly Islamist governments? The moderate Islamist governments? (I love the "moderate Islamist" phase, as if there's such a thing as moderate theocracy.) They did nothing when the US embassies came under attack.
In Tunisia, the Islamist government just let it happen. Hillary Clinton, who had been the proud parent of the Arab Spring -- this was her big asset for running for President; she was behind the Arab Spring -- had to call up the secular president of Tunisia instead of the Islamist leaders and beg him to send his presidential guard to save the US embassy. And then she had to thank him for it in public. Because the big, Islamist, friendly, moderate government that she had put into power was in bed with the terrorists.
And in a way, this is an even bigger story than Benghazi that's been overlooked. Political Islam failed; it failed miserably. The Muslim Brotherhood got forced out by political revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia, and it lost battles in Syria. I mean, that whole push to get us into Syria was about putting the Muslim Brotherhood into power. But the Muslim Brotherhood has already lost on the battlefield.
In Libya, their status is shaky. They got their asses kicked in Yemen. So the Muslim Brotherhood taking power and averting this kind of phase-three Islamic state, this kind of ISIS caliphate, is a dead end. What did the people responsible for that mess do? Well I mean, of course, they recognized the error of their ways and decided we're actually going to have to fight Islamic terrorists because what we're doing doesn't work. Anyone believe that was going to happen? That was not going to happen.
So instead, we ended up with the Iran deal. The Iran deal was less about nuclear weapons and more about forming an alliance against phase-three Islamic states. And that's really the Muslim country that Obama's now closest to. America's closest ally used to be Saudi Arabia. For a while, it was Qatar. Now it's Iran. Not just because the White House hates Israel and sunshine and all the good things in life. Hating Israel for Obama is actually a sideline. It's something he does on the side. He has other, bigger agendas.
Because the idea of allying with Iran was to stop the emergence of a phase-three Sunni Islamic state, even though Iran itself is a phase three Islamic state, because it's an Islamic theocracy based on terrorism. But the thing is that Iran is a Shiite Islamic state, which means it can't expand very far. It can try to go into Bahrain. It can go into a few other places. It's deep into Yemen. It's got a mortgage on Lebanon. And it's wearing Syria and Iraq like gloves. But it can't really go very far.
Now compare that to ISIS. ISIS has pledges of support from around the world. It has pledges from Boko Haram in Nigeria, which is a huge, very lethal terrorist group that has killed thousands of people. It's got pledges from jihadists in the Philippines, Russia and Indonesia, which means it has global scope.
When you look at the possibilities of what ISIS can become, you see things like Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union. Because it has the scope to expand that far. Iran would not be able to do that.
So Obama has allied with Iran in the hopes of averting a phase three Islamic state, which would completely destroy the entire narrative. It would force us to acknowledge the existence of Islamic terrorism and what Islam is.
So we joined forces with Iran. We're acting, actually, as the air force for Shiite militias in Iraq. When you see all these news stories -- isn't it wonderful, we're taking back these cities from ISIS; we're winning victories; it's all very good; Obama's policy is working -- here's what's actually working. In many cases, Iranian Shiite terrorist militias, some who have murdered Americans, are actually taking over cities. And they're killing the local population.
Now, we've had a lot of speeches about homophobia and the massacre in Orlando. Do you know what else these Shiite militias like to do, besides killing Sunnis? They like to kill gay people. They've actually massacred gay people on a regular basis. We're acting as the air force for terrorist groups that have killed more people than Omar did in Orlando. That's the blood that Obama has on his hands.
But Obama doesn't care very much about what happens there, as long as the tiny minority of extremists narrative is preserved. If a whole bunch of gay people are being killed by Shiite militias that allied with the very moderate Iranian regime -- you know, the Iranian regime is very moderate -- he will do anything to preserve that tiny minority of extremists narrative. The Islamic terrorism is no big deal narrative. If a whole bunch of gay people have to be killed to do it, that's just the price you pay for it.
But you know what all this means? It's an act of desperation. They have been trying all sorts of things to keep this narrative going to prevent the emergence of an Islamic caliphate. And it's failing. All their plans are failing. Negotiating with the Taliban, the moderate Taliban, did not work. Withdrawing from Iraq did not work. Trying to withdraw from Afghanistan did not work. Even the campaign against ISIS empowering Iran, the Arab spring, did not work. The Iran deal -- all this has failed. All this is pushing us forward to the point where we're going to have to confront Islamic terrorism. And the stronger Islamic terrorists get, the faster we get there.
And in fact, most of the stupid things that Obama's done, most of the disastrous, failed things that Obama's done, has actually pushed it forward. Everything he's done to prevent that is actually bringing the day forward when we confront Islamic terrorism.
Of course, again, it's not just Obama. A whole bunch of governments in Western countries are invested in the narrative. But they're doing it by repeating the mistakes of the past. Denial is not going to win this war; only the truth can do that.
The entire narrative is built on hiding the truth. Don't talk about Islamic terrorists, or you'll create them. Don't call ISIS Islamic. Pretend that we can compromise our way to some sort of settlement. Blame Israel. Blame Islamophobia. Blame anyone who tells the truth about Islamic terrorism.
And the facade is really impressive. In the days after Orlando, you look at the media, you look at the various reporters, and the politicians were all repeating the same story. It looks very polished and seamless. And you wonder, how can we ever break through that narrative? How can we ever smash through it? How can the truth ever get out?
Well, you know what? The Soviet Union -- their narrative was also very impressive. They had total propaganda coverage in the country. Everyone was on message. Everyone was repeating the same things. Everyone was saying the same thing over and over again. The fact of the matter is the Soviet Union failed.
What happens is that at some point reality breaks through. No matter how many lies you tell, it doesn't hold up. Abraham Lincoln once said you can fool some of the people some of the time, you can fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time. This is as true today as it was back then.
No big lie can endure forever. The rise of ISIS has already punched a big hole in this narrative. It's hard to see that from up close. But, in fact, the cracks are there. They're forming. They're spreading. When Hillary Clinton is actually willing to talk about Islamic terrorism, you can see the cracks that are already there.
The Left is really great at creating these imaginary worlds. They create these reality distortion fields. There are theories and word games and specific words you use. And it's very ideologically consistent. But in fact, it's an imaginary kingdom. It's a fairy tale tower in the sky.
Now, if your economy is imaginary, eventually reality will destroy it. That's what happened to the Soviet Union. Right now it's happening to Venezuela. And Venezuela, which is a wonderfully leftist state -- big fan of socialism, Bernie Sanders -- the chief economist in Venezuela does not believe in inflation. He doesn't. He doesn't think that inflation is a real thing. But you know what? Inflation believes in him.
Obama doesn't believe in Islamic terrorism, but Islamic terrorism believes in him. When you see the denial around you, when you see the constant lies around you, this is the important thing to remember: No lie, no spin, no scam can beat reality. Reality is always going to win. Everything we've gone through since September 11th, the long road that we've journeyed, and even before September 11th -- all the times we've heard there's no such thing as Islamic terrorism -- we can't talk about this; nobody but bigots ever talks about this.
And if you give up, and you think this is hopeless, people are never going to know it, and we're going to be doing the same thing 20 years from now -- don't believe that. Every lie that's been told, every media story lying about Islamic terrorism, lying about Hamas and Iran -- every piece of propaganda used to support the narrative is the little Dutch boy with his finger in the dyke holding back the flood. And the flood is coming. In fact, it's already here.
You're witnessing the last days of the Soviet Union when the government lied frantically and desperately about what was going on, until reality crushed it. The next generation of Islamic terrorism will crush the lie. It will crush the lie we've been witnessing since Orlando. It will crush all the lies. And once Islamic terrorism is exposed, we're going to have no problem whatsoever crushing it.
That's going to be a bumpy road. I'm not going to lie to you. The Communist leaders in the Soviet Union didn't just shrug and walk away. They didn't decide -- okay, well, we're not going to be dictators anymore. We're going to get nice jobs in the flower shop. They did not do that. They tried every trick they could think of to keep things going.
And in Venezuela, the government, which doesn't agree that inflation exists, has fingerprint scanners for people buying milk. It sends soldiers to occupancy toilet paper factories and murder protesters.
But you can't beat reality. The Soviet Union couldn't do it. Obama and Hillary won't do it, either.
Israel is a microscopic example of what's going to happen. This has often been compared to a canary in the coalmine. Israel was pushing to making a deal with the terrorists. It was going to be a two-state solution: a Jewish state and a state run by very moderate -- very moderate -- reformed terrorists, who would like Jews. But the moderate terrorists, they just turned out to be terrorists.
Instead of peace, the peace process brought horrific waves of terrorism. The Left tried every excuse. It played on every emotion and it still lost. Today, Israelis don't believe that making peace with terrorists will work. And the Left keeps on losing election after election after election in Israel. We're seeing the first signs of that happening in Europe. It's also going to happen in America. It's going to take longer because our exposure to terrorism isn't as bad. The more we're exposed to terrorism, the more the process will move forward.
You can see it in Europe. And it's already coming to America. Americans have tried all sorts of different solutions. As Churchill said -- I'm going to paraphrase -- Americans would do everything before they do the right thing. We've tried everything. We've tried exporting democracy. We've tried appeasement. We've tried isolationism. But really, this is part of the process of solving the problem. In science, you have to do all the things that don't work before you find the thing that does work. We've been doing all the things that don't work. But that's leading us to the point where we're going to do what does work.
The country's been slowly waking up since September 11th. It's been looking for answers. And those answers are going to take a while because we don't really have the leaders that we need. But even without those leaders, we're going to arrive at a commonsense answer.
The rise of the next generation of Islamic terrorism is going to rule out all the other possible solutions. It will destroy the narrative, and it will force us to make the right choices. The narrative, the imaginary one, the one you see in the media after Orlando, is that it exists in a world that there's no such thing as Islamic terrorism. Islamic violence is a response to our colonialism. It's blowback to our foreign policy. If we change our behavior, the problem will go away.
That's not reality. It's magical thinking. It's like believing that you can stop someone from punching you in the face if you apologize hard enough. Then you try to reform the guy punching you in the face. But nothing works because you're not causing the problem. He is. You can't control his behavior. You aren't responsible for it. All you can do is fight back. That's the basic thing that our governments have to understand about Islamic terrorism. It's not something that we did. It's not on us. It's on them. Islamic terrorism is not a reaction like Nazism or Communism. It's a quest to build a better world by forcing everyone to live one way under one ideology, while killing everyone else.
It has over a thousand years of history behind it. It's a lot older than we are. It's a lot older than our foreign policy. It predates the United States and the modern republics of Europe, and all the things that we're supposed to feel guilty about. Islamic terrorism doesn’t exist because we did something. It exists because Mohammed told his followers to hate, conquer and kill non-Muslims. The jihad is an ancient idea. It predates us. And if we don't fight it, it's going to postdate us. It's not reacting to us. We're reacting to it.
Islamic terrorism is not the behavior of an oppressed minority. Muslims are not a minority. They're a global majority. And they're an aggressive, racist and supremacist majority. This is not a response to colonialism. It is colonialism. It's a colonialism that in the past reached out even into Europe. And now it's doing so again today.
When we recognize that, when we stop feeling guilty and stop believing that we can talk our way out of a fight, then the real war will actually begin. It won't happen next Tuesday. People don't stop believing lies overnight. And governments are an echo chamber. It takes great pressure for reality to break through.
The next generation of Islamic terrorism and rising awareness by ordinary people in what used to be known as the "Free World" is the pressure that's going to crack it. Every time you speak the truth, every time you share an article, every time you call a congressman's office, you're part of the pressure. You're adding another hairline crack to the glass. You're the drop of water wearing another indentation into the stone. You're the whisper that may start the avalanche.
We are still basically free, even in California. We're surrounded by the Left's propaganda as much as anybody living in the Soviet Union was. And as Abraham Lincoln said, the fooling-some-of-the-people-some-of-the-time time -- it's coming to an end. You're making that happen. Like the dissidents in the Soviet Union or the protesters in Venezuela, you're contributing to the collapse of a big lie. You're fighting on the side of reality.
Obama likes to claim that he's on the right side of history, even though he's on the Left. But history doesn't have a side. Reality does. Reality does not care about your politics. It doesn't care how great your theory is. It doesn't care how politically correct you are. Doesn't care how sensitive you are. It just is. Reality is consequences. It's as inevitable as the force of gravity on an accountant falling from the World Trade Center. It's as inescapable as the sum of two plus two or the shock wave from an explosion.
When we speak the truth, we are on the side of reality. You're here because you choose to face reality. And that's the first step to victory.
Remember that. The road has been a long one, and it's not over. But it's not just won in places like Afghanistan or Iraq. It's not just done with bullets and bombs. It begins in rooms like these with people like you.
You may not think it can happen. Most people did not believe the Soviet Union could just fall overnight. Many of you probably didn't believe it. But when you get up close, you can sense the desperation of the leadership at the top. And you can see the crack spreading. You can recognize the volume of the lies. The crackdowns on the truth are actually signs of desperation. The big lie that prevents us from fighting and winning against Islamic terrorism is dying.
Thank you for coming out tonight. And remember that every time you speak the truth, you bring the Free World one step closer to victory. Thank you for being here, and thank you for sharing the truth.
Moderator: We have time for some questions. So I'll let Daniel point out. We don't have microphones. So Daniel, if you could repeat the question?
Daniel Greenfield: Okay. I'm sorry about that. Sir?
Audience Member: Daniel, I've admired your writing for many, many years. And I have two questions for you.
Daniel Greenfield: Go ahead.
Audience Member: You are an observant Jew, and you make no secret of that. Has your religion played some sort of a -- something to affect your worldview, your work ethic, how you see things, and how you express them? That's question one.
My second question is more pragmatic. There is another side of the forceful expansion of Islam through terrorism. There is the peaceful expansion, invasion going on in Europe. And just the other day, Prime Minister Cameron of UK was backing Prime Minister Erdogan of Turkey for joining the EU. And isn't that something we need to be more concerned about than the terrorism?
Daniel Greenfield: Well, I'm going to repeat -- I'm going to summarize the gentleman's first two questions. First of all, apparently he really hates my writing. And question one -- I'm sorry -- question one is that he'd like to know how my role as an observant Jew affects my writing. I think it provides spiritual support. It provides spiritual power. And it very much tells me that the momentary history is not it. We do have a long-term destiny. And a lot of -- a good deal of things are in God's hands, not just in our hands.
The second part of his question involves the integration of Turkey into the European Union. That's certainly a very serious threat. It would certainly do a great deal of damage to Europe. And in some ways, again, this would be described as the soft jihad, which is far more devastating in the long run than the violent jihad. And that's why, actually, violent jihad, terrorism, is actually not that bad of a thing compared to this kind of mass migration or the soft jihad. And the integration of Turkey into Europe would definitely be far more devastating than most terrorist attacks.
Sir?
Well, the gentleman would like to encourage people to buy the Koran in English. And that is something you can actually do. But I think I and many other people do try to excerpt the more violent portions of the Koran and to respond to the specific areas. Certainly, Robert Spencer is the premier authority on the subject. If you want to understand the truth about the violence in the Koran, Robert Spencer's a great resource. And again, I would encourage you to actually read Robert Spencer and some of his writings on Islamic terrorism.
Audience Member: I have.
Daniel Greenfield: That's good. Well, I would encourage everybody to read Robert Spencer.
Sir?
Daniel Greenfield: I certainly hope that it doesn't. But again, I think the Jews, for example, need to learn certain lessons, and that perhaps we haven't learned the right lessons from the Holocaust. The right lesson was literally "never again." It wasn't let's be universal and tolerant and bring certain refugees to the United States, most of whom think that Hitler was a really great guy.
Audience Member: This is a personal question. Did you have religious education?
Daniel Greenfield: Well, actually did have a religious education, and I had a secular education. But really, most of my education has been self-educated.
Sir?
Audience Member: Your talk was optimistic to a point. But I read an article not too long ago by Daniel Greenfield on why Muslims are violent. And when I read that article, it talked about the lack of cooperation, lack of feeling tied to their land because of the Arab environment, etc. It was actually very discouraging. And I wonder how that can sort of gibe with this. Because it seemed like that's an almost relentless source of expansion regardless of how we ultimately come to terms and finally recognize that maybe we're in the stage three. That article that you wrote not too long ago seems to maybe supersede it.
Daniel Greenfield: It does not supersede it. What the article does address is the fact that Islam is fundamentally unstable, and the Muslim world is fundamentally unstable for structural reasons. Nothing I've said here suggests that we're going to fix Islam. I'm not a reform Islam kind of guy. I'm not an imam.
What we can do is isolate ourselves from Islam. What we can do is isolate ourselves from Islamic terrorism and from the reach of Islamic terrorism. I'm not suggesting that we're somehow going to bring democracy, fellowship and goodwill to the Muslim world. Absolutely not.
Audience Member: In response to this man's question -- "Reliance of the Traveller" is a fortified version of the Koran. Yet it is authorized by the University in Egypt, Al-Azhar. You can buy it on Amazon -- "Reliance of the Traveller." Traveller is spelled T-R-A-V-E-L-L-E-R (inaudible).
Daniel Greenfield: The lady recommends people buy "Reliance of the Traveller," which is a classic text on the subject and really does get you into the jihadist mindset.
The gentleman over there?
Audience Member: Thank you very much. The focus of ISIS, which is to directly confront everywhere as much as possible -- you haven't gotten into al-Qaeda, which has a slightly different military strategy. Then you have Saudi Arabia and the Muslim Brotherhood, which are -- one hand is jihad with them, and the other half is dawa. And you know, they're infiltrating through migration, they're propagandizing to the soft-sell terrorism. It's all over the place.
Daniel Greenfield: It is indeed all over the place. Well, I'm going to ask for the cooperation of the Lux Hotel so we can all be here till 1:00. Everybody's okay with staying till 1:00?
Okay. But to actually seriously answer your question -- al-Qaeda currently is being actually run by a splinter group of the Muslim Brotherhood. And the Muslim Brotherhood is the grandfather of ISIS, effectively. But all these groups are being superseded by -- and I'm going to use the term loosely -- "extremists." And this really means that groups that are more fundamentally confident about their abilities, more confident about Islamic apocalyptic prophecies, and more willing to directly confront this. And this has really been the trend.
So the Muslim Brotherhood was superseded quickly by al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda is being superseded by ISIS. ISIS might be superseded by an even nicer bunch of guys.
Audience Member: So where do we go?
Daniel Greenfield: Well, we fight them. And at the same time, we recognize that the emergence of more extreme and more violent Islamic groups -- and again, I'm using "extreme" in quotation marks -- is going to destroy the Muslim Brotherhood narrative. It's going to destroy the soft jihad. It's going to make it impossible to sustain this kind of political Islamic lie.
Audience Member: Saudi Arabia?
Daniel Greenfield: Saudi Arabia is already collapsing on its own, really.
Audience Member: Into what, though?
Daniel Greenfield: It's going to collapse into pretty much al-Qaeda. Or some version thereof. It's managed to stay afloat basically by handing out money hand-over-fist. Without being able to do that, it's losing its subsidy abilities. It's going to have a whole lot of trouble surviving. Really, the oil countries have basically done that. They've been handing down money nonstop to their own people. Egypt, by the way -- the Arab spring in Egypt happened because Egypt had to cut subsidies. That led to protests. Saudi Arabia is now having to cut subsidies. So you can see where this could potentially go.
The lady in red in the back?
Oh, absolutely. But the other thing to understand is it's not just lying. This is a culture where the concept of truth is itself foreign. Truth as we understand it is very much a concept of our civilization. We're dealing with civilizations in some cases which have no concept of honesty, integrity, or ethics; which are basically incapable of recognizing contradictory statements, or even knowing that they're lying. They say whatever is expedient at a given time, and they even believe it at that given time.
So effectively, you're dealing with functionally crazy people by our standards. But by their standards, this kind of behavior is really normal.
The gentleman all the way in the back?
Unidentified Audience Member: Indonesia is not going to become Hindu again. My question is question, just observation kind of, is that Christian countries, become Islamic seemingly forever. And it always seems to happen when there's division in the country, and when Christians hate each other more than they fear the Muslims. And that seems to be happening here, too, in Europe and in the United States.
Daniel Greenfield: That is indeed very true. And if you actually look back at the conquest of the -- early Islamic conquest, they actually pitted Christians against each other, from differing sects and different groups. They pitted Christians and Jews against each other, and they were very good at playing divide and conquer, which is really how they conquered so much territory in such a short time.
Moderator: I think we maybe have time for two more questions.
Daniel Greenfield: Gentleman over here?
Audience Member: You mentioned in time Islam will not be victorious. But I keep hearing "tick-tick-tick" -- a nuclear detonation. And how much time do we have? I'd be surprised if they don't even have the bomb already. So do you have any thoughts on the timeframe?
Daniel Greenfield: Well, I would be a fool to try and give you an exact timeframe. But you can see things already falling apart with ISIS. It's possible that at some point they will have nuclear weapons, that at some point they will use them. But they're not going to have them on a scale of the Soviet Union. This is going to -- this would be a major terrorist attack, I'm not going to lie to you. I live in New York City, which is really the major target for terrorist attacks. So I'm very well aware that I could be on the front lines of this.
But again, this is a war. World War II was a major war. The Cold War was a major war. And what we're going to be dealing with is something possibly in that scale. But at the end, we are going to win. And it's very important that we remember that.
Gary?
Audience Member: Yes. Do you see Iran carrying out its threats against Israel? Do you think they will act against Israel with nuclear or conventional weapons?
Daniel Greenfield: I think conventional weapons are more of a possibility. I don't think Iran is going to use nuclear weapons against Israel. And again, I think Israel has specific contingencies in place for that, which means a first-strike option. So again, I don't think that this is going to happen. And I think we can be reasonably confident even that without Obama's intervention, Iran would've already fallen apart.
I think in a new administration, Iran could very well be overthrown by its own people. And I don't mean the Hillary Clinton administration, either.
Moderator: You know, those were pretty quick. So we're going to let -- Ed, you had your hand up for a long time, so we'll let Ed get the last question.
Audience Member: We're relying on our government to protect us. And Obama won't secure the border. He doesn't care who sneaks in. And the Republican leadership doesn't care, either. They don't want to secure the border. So where does that leave us?
Daniel Greenfield: Well, we cannot rely on the government to protect us, certainly not this government or, frankly, quite likely, many other Republican governments. What we can rely on them to do is to screw up so badly that we're actually going to create an impetus for change. And arguably in this election, that has already happened. And even if this election doesn't work out, the next election will. Because again, the more they screw up, the more they open up the borders, the more they let the terrorists walk in, the closer they're bringing their own destruction.
Moderator: Thank you so much.
