10/10/14 – Will Grigg – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, you guys.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
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All right.
Our guest today is our good friend, William Norman Grigg.
He keeps the blog Pro Libertate at freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
Freedominourtime.blogspot.com.
And usually he's writing about police abuse and just absolutely out of control domestic police state here in America.
But boy, oh boy, am I glad that you decided to tackle this topic.
Done as only you could have done it, Will.
It's just great.
Crushed the seed of Ishmael.
A final solution to the Muslim problem.
Obviously echoing the Nazis rhetoric about the Jews in the Holocaust in World War II.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing there?
I'm doing great, Scott.
Thank you so much for your kind words.
Well, you know, you're just the best at writing stuff.
And this is a topic where, you know, it's really usually liberals and left wingers who are good on this.
And so it's good to have your, I think, kind of formerly right wing now more libertarian, but still never left liberal point of view to take on this problem here.
And maybe in a way, explain it in a way maybe that people can understand.
Maybe people who are predisposed to kind of, you know, more or less at least accept some of the premises of the arguments that you're attacking here, if not their conclusions.
So anyway.
I hope so.
Yeah, very important stuff.
So who's Ishmael?
Who's got to crush him?
And what Muslim problem?
And what are you talking about?
What am I talking about?
In the book of Genesis, we read about Ishmael as being Abram, the future Abraham's son, by way of a concubine named Hagar.
And Ishmael is conventionally considered to be the father of the Arab ethnic cohort.
And if you talk to a devout Muslim, chances are he will identify himself as a child of Abraham by way of Ishmael.
Now in some, but by no means all, precincts of evangelical Christianity, you'll find people who will assert that because of this dodgy bloodline that Arabs in general, Muslims in particular, have to be looked upon as the inveterate enemies of God and of God's people, meaning Christians and Jews.
And there is a rather splenetic character who deems himself some kind of a pastor by the name of Gary Cass, who used to be associated with a number of very high-profile ministries, who has written an essay in which he says that it is nothing less than the sacred duty of Christians to crush the seed of Ishmael, the vicious seed of Ishmael, in order to bring about the triumph of God's purposes.
And what that means is that we have to recognize, supposedly, that all Muslims everywhere are irreducibly the enemies of Christians and of all decency.
They are at best latent ISIS-style deranged killers, and at worst, of course, they give full reign to those impulses.
In any case, we have three potential ways of dealing with the problem of Muslims living in the United States.
The first is to convert them, and according to Mr. Cass, this is impossible because they are of the completely incorrigible seed of Ishmael.
They are genetically predisposed to be vessels of wrath.
They were created for that purpose.
And we're not going to see a mighty move of God among them because God has ordained that these people are irredeemable.
So there may be one of a family and two of a city who would be receptive to the message of the Christian gospel, but we shouldn't believe that this would be in any sense representative of a potential mass conversion.
Besides that, we've heard from no less an authority than Phil Robertson, who is the patriarch of the Duck Dynasty clan and hence one of our foremost public theologians, that our choices are either to convert them or kill them, and he's not optimistic that the former is going to avail us.
So we can scratch option one off that list.
The second possibility is either mass sterilization of Muslims in order to deal with their fecundity, or mass expulsion of Muslims because they tend to propagate themselves faster than we can sterilize them.
Given the fact that nobody is going to consent to be sterilized against his or her will, and given the fact that we're dealing with millions of people, that's not a particularly good option either, according to Mr. Cass.
He, by the way, created a rather charming acronym for this element of his agenda, D-A-M-N, DAM, meaning Depart All Muslims Now.
So that leaves us with what he considers to be the only biblically sound approach, which is mass violence, meaning not only, of course, defensive violence.
I am not indisposed toward the idea that there are circumstances where purely defensive violence is justified.
I have great respect for pacifism.
I don't happen to embrace that perspective.
So I do believe in the right of armed self-defense where necessary, although I'll go to extreme lengths in order to avoid that eventuality because that is a tragedy any way you look at it.
But he's talking about the idea, literally, of a war of extermination that would know no boundaries.
Because as long as these people exist in the same physical continuum with us, and as long as they are possessed of this ideology that he finds to be incurably vile, and as long as they are cursed with a genetic legacy that he considers to be dispositive, we will never know freedom or safety or peace.
That means that we have to move toward the idea of killing as many people as necessary in order to make a better world, meaning from his perspective and not mine, a Muslim-free world for our children and grandchildren.
And this fellow who has a caricatured gravity-defying pompadour descends upon pulpits across the country and has a great deal of influence within that strain, and it's one strain among many I hasten to specify and emphasize, of evangelical Christianity.
I believe he's of Presbyterian or Calvinist background himself.
But his message resonates with the sort of people who consider Bill O'Reilly and Sean Hannity to be fountains of wisdom.
And their numbers are many, and they're happily, I think, located toward the decaying edge of the demographic curve.
I mean, you're talking about people who are not on the sunlit side of 50 for the most part.
But there is, unfortunately, a large and fairly formidable club these people wield.
They punch well above their weight to alter the metaphor.
When you talk about electoral politics, people in that demographic cohort vote, and they mobilize people to vote, whether you're talking about defending Social Security or supporting the warfare state.
And that's one of the reasons why I think that what this person has said and written, and he doesn't have a whole lot of influence beyond that demographic, but within that demographic, he's a heavyweight.
And it's because of the fact that he can leverage that influence within the Fox News constituency and voting bloc that I think that's worthy of our attention, especially given that he's not exactly an outlier.
We have people like retired Lieutenant Colonel James Zumwalt, who's a Marine who was involved in Vietnam and the invasion of Panama and the first Gulf War.
And he's somebody who's constantly on television or writing for journals that deal with public and military policy.
When he uses the expression, final solution, non-ironically, and talks about the need to hasten the extinction of Muslims, not merely Muslim terrorist groups, and he gives us the entire litany of all these terrorist groups, including people like al-Shabaab, who are not a threat to the United States by any definition.
As far as I can tell, this is a revolutionary response to American imperialism in Africa that doesn't pose any threat to the homeland, as now we're prompted to refer to it.
But not merely terrorist groups, but also Muslims who are victimized by terrorist groups because they're possessed of what he considers to be the same death wish.
And so it's a form of severe mercy from the perspective of Lieutenant Colonel Zumwalt to kill people indiscriminately because in that way, we're granting the fondest wish not only of the suicide bombers who crave martyrdom and the jihadists who are likewise motivated, but also their victims who aspire to the same afterlife.
And so presumably, we'll be doing the world a favor and doing them an individualized favor by consummating their religious aspirations.
This is the mindset of people who are discussing these things openly in the United States of America many of whom profess to be Christians and some of whom have very large audiences.
And this is happening, of course, amid the threat, the perceived and much overhyped threat of ISIS and in conjunction with events like the murder in Moore, Oklahoma that had no colorable connection at all whatsoever to Islamic theology but yet is being treated as if it were the opening salvo in a domestic jihad by the fifth columnist among us.
All right, we'll be right back with Will Grigg after this, y'all.
Scott Horton here to tell you about this great new book by Michael Swanson, The War State.
In The War State, Swanson examines how Presidents Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy both expanded and fought to limit the rise of the new national security state after World War II.
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Just click the book in the right margin at www.thewarstate.com All right, you guys, welcome back.
I'm talking with Will Grigg from the blog Pro Libertate freedominourtime.blogspot.com His book is Liberty in Eclipse.
Boy, you know, Anthony Gregory pointed out that Bush had really kept the lid on anti-Muslim bigotry in America by insisting that this is not a war against Islam.
These are just some kooks who perverted the name of Islam in order to justify attacking us.
So we're going to show them but your Muslim neighbors are your friends and neighbors so don't get them confused.
But boy, once he was gone it was like taking the lid off the pot and the damn thing just boiled over where now, you know, what is delusional is no longer marginal.
I was going to ask you but you answered it.
Just how much influence do these people have on the right?
I don't keep track of my different TV preachers and how big their audiences are and this kind of thing.
It's a specialty I don't have.
But what you're saying is this guy is listened to by the same group of people that listen to O'Reilly and Hannity and that's not marginal.
That's pretty conventional Republican politics.
So let me ask you this then.
What's the Republican Party say about these guys?
Anything at all?
Do they disavow any of this stuff?
When people are talking about a final solution killing a billion plus maybe a billion and a quarter people in the world so there's nobody left that believes in Mohammed are they just talking about killing Arabs or they don't distinguish or what?
It's a little bit unclear as to what these people aspire to do because obviously there's not going to be an all-encompassing fully war of extermination globally where you'd actually have any realistic prospect of killing one billion people and just targeting that cohort.
If you have that type of a global conflict then of course you're going to have a great deal of so-called collateral damage and that's a prospect that I think that even these people might flinch from but I do think that what they're talking about is imposing domestically a set of strictures that would make life very, very miserable for perfectly innocent people of the Muslim faith.
How much influence do they have in the Republican Party?
What does the Republican Party say about these people?
As little as possible.
In terms of the influence, I mentioned that Gary Cass had been involved with D. James Kennedy actually alluded to that and the Coral Ridge Ministries and that's a pretty prominent ministry here nationally in terms of its influence on social policy.
In localized Republican precincts, I'm thinking now specifically of Oklahoma, you have people like John Bennett who's a state representative who's the chair of the counter-terrorism caucus in that state.
That's not an inconsequential Republican or conservative state particularly in the realm of social conservatism.
This is a fellow who has for the last several months been descending upon Tea Party groups and telling people that their Muslim neighbors are part of an internal cancer that must be cut out and telling them in so many words that no matter how benign these people appear that they're seething with expressed and unconsummated desires to kill every infidel within their field of vision.
And so after the killing at the Vaughn Foods plant in Moore, it was carried out by somebody who had spent maybe a couple of months attending a mosque in Oklahoma City, then whose religious views are deliriously eclectic.
This is a guy who would combine Arab expressions of greeting with Hebrew expressions of greeting who apparently had been rolling around in this yeasty ferment that included the black Hebrew Israelites and whose Facebook page included quotes, as far as I can tell, from the Satanic Bible.
He's a thoroughly confused guy, violent ex-con, paroled ex-con, who according to the imam of this mosque, the Greater Islamic Society of Oklahoma City, was somebody who had distinguished himself by expressing vehement dislike for white Americans.
This guy is about as representative of Islam as...
Jeffrey Dahmer would be representative of WASPs, as far as I can tell.
And the killing that took place at the Vaughn Foods plant had as much to do with Islam as the Nicole Brown Simpson murder had to do with somebody having a background in, I think, Southern Baptist, Protestant Christianity, which I think was O.J. Simpson's background, assuming of course that he was the murder rather than the others unknown.
But you have a literal incident of workplace violence that occurred just a couple of hours after he had been fired, or I think suspended from his job because of his irrepressible hatred for white people.
He comes back armed with a knife and attacks somebody he held responsible for that discomfiture.
And that had nothing to do with the reported fact that he had been propagating on behalf of the Islamic religion to which he had just recently become an adherent, and possessed with the zeal of the recent convert.
But within the mosque, he was certainly an outlier.
He wasn't well-liked.
Even if there was a little bit of copycat from watching CNN, that still doesn't have a thing.
I mean, that you'd have to take another leap and say ISIS is representative of Islam in the sense of the way that they do their beheadings too, which is also a bunch of crap on its face.
Sure.
I mean, you've got in ISIS something that more resembled Khmer Rouge than anything else.
But this John Bennett guy, this...
Back to the Republicans, because let me just add this real quick as part of the setup.
In 2007, Giuliani had a fundraiser who was, I think, a pretty powerful guy at the state level somewhere who was caught on camera saying, well, we've got to prevent the rise of the Muslim.
And that was all he said, which was stupid and collectivist and retarded and everything.
But he didn't say by killing them all and their babies because they like being victims anyway, it's okay.
I mean, he didn't...
He's not going around saying every Muslim in your neighborhood is out to get you.
His implication was still over there, the Islamofascist caliphate were bombing or whatever over in Iraq.
Not all Muslim neighbors in American cities should be considered a fifth column, which is what you've got this Republican office holder saying and getting away with it.
Yeah.
Saying it repeatedly and defiantly and impenitently, doing so on camera, doing so in radio and television interviews, saying explicitly that all Muslims are just as bad as ISIS, and doing so as the chair of the counter-terrorism caucus in a fairly significant state, Republican-dominated state government, and not in any way being reined in or rebuked or corrected by the Republican leadership of that state.
It's interesting that one of the people I didn't have a chance to interview for this piece is an ordained Baptist minister who actually visited Iran during the hostage crisis to try to free our people and had a personal audience with the Ayatollah Khomeini.
He's got a Ph.
D. in a couple of fields having to do with comparative religion and unlike John Bennett, this fellow has actually read the Quran and the Hadiths has actually spent time in the company of Muslims to find out what they think and what their theological viewpoints would be.
He's challenged Bennett to a public debate because Bennett claims that he's read the Quran and the Hadiths and all these other things to judge from his level of diction and his fluency with the English language.
I don't think he's read anything more intellectually challenging than a bazooka-drill comic strip, but of course Bennett has sought counsel to prudence in avoiding a public discussion with somebody who's actually a credentialed Christian theologian to discuss the supposed debatable merits of Islam or the supposed latent violence inherent in that religion.
But he's, of course, descending on every Tea Party gathering he can find to pontificate about his supposed expertise on Islam, and as far as I can tell his acquaintance with Islam comes from the fact that he was sent as a Marine to Iraq and Afghanistan to kill Muslims.
As far as I can tell, that's the only credential he has as an expert on Islam is that he's actually been involved in murdering Muslims in countries halfway around the world.
But the thing that I find most disturbing about all this is that this does resonate with certain people in Oklahoma.
Witness the fact that when people at this mosque were assembling signs and other protest paraphernalia for a public demonstration against ISIS, they were getting phone calls from local Oklahoma residents who were threatening to kill them, including by beheading.
This was before the Von Foods massacre.
The Von Foods murder, attempted massacre, I should clarify.
This happened weeks before that incident, and of course since that's happened they've been getting the same kind of messages.
And last January, this is an anecdote I share in the article that I thought was just illustrative of the delirious nonsense that's being spouted, the effect that it has on people who are not terribly tightly wrapped.
There was an incident in which a young woman wearing a headscarf was accosted by a large and apparently drunken lout who referred to her as, among other things, a Muslim bitch, threatened her with a knife, slashed her tires and hit her in the face.
Turns out that this woman was a Christian refugee from Lebanon who just happened to affect a type of headdress that to this person's uncluttered mind signified that she must obviously be a Muslim.
Exactly.
The thing is, if you embrace the Gary Kass worldview, then she, being presumably part of the offspring of Ishmael, really should expect that kind of treatment because she's genetically predisposed to be our enemy, whether or not she professes to be a Christian.
And that leads us to another question here.
Let's assume that these people come to power, at least obtain enough influence that they're able to put in place a version of what they're talking about, and you'd see them present a convert or leave or die ultimatum of the sort that ISIS has been delivering within their area of claimed jurisdiction, interestingly enough.
Let's assume that some Muslims do make a profession of faith.
On the basis of what these people are saying, they'd have to say that this is taqiyah, this is simply them lying for strategic purposes, and to be put to death, they're expelled anyway.
Let me ask you this, because this is important and I don't want to leave it out of the discussion here.
What does Muhammad say about how the rest of us in the world who aren't Muslims should be treated by people who are Muslims anyway?
And what kind of expert are you?
I'm not an expert on Islam.
I've read a great deal of the Quran, and I've spent a lot of time in the company of people who have read the Quran and know it authoritatively.
My exposure to the so-called war surahs leaves me with the impression that you're dealing with passages in their holy book that read in some sense quite a bit like the book of Joshua in the Old Testament or some parts of 1 Samuel, where you're talking about a time of war between antagonists who seem to be incapable of coexisting.
And in the context of that set of circumstances, there were some admonitions given that would be considered, I think, an exhortation toward total war, but only within those circumstances.
They do not necessarily translate into general application when you're not in a time of war with an enemy who's apparently implacable.
And in reading the war surahs that are constantly being invoked by these people I call professional mosque baiters, it seems to me that there are always qualifications here that make them apply in situations where they're finding what they consider to be a defensive war.
They're not talking about conquest, they're talking about self-protection and then ruthlessly dealing with people who have been ruthless toward them.
That's how these surahs, in any case, are interpreted by people I've spoken with who consider them to be authoritative, such as Imam al-Chassi, who's the head of the mosque there in Oklahoma City.
And I've listened to a great many of his sermons, and they're all available online.
You can go and download them and listen to them, probably five or six years worth of sermons.
They're about an hour long and a lot of them are delivered in mixed Arabic and English, which makes it somewhat challenging as a casual listener.
But there is a constant thread woven through these sermons of forbearance in the face of persecution and a proportionality and of seeking objective mutually beneficial justice where there are disputes.
And he is expansively complimentary toward the Christian faith and toward Jesus as a personality because, like most faithful Muslims, he regards Jesus to be a prophet, not a Messiah, but as a prophet.
And he is predisposed toward a sense of amity with people he calls the people of the book, meaning Jews and Christians, fellow monotheists.
And all of this, Scott, is even more remarkable because this is a guy who's a Palestinian.
He's a Palestinian Arab who was born in Lebanon, whose family was numbered among those who have been expropriated and treated as second-class citizens who were otherwise persecuted and harassed.
He's somebody who came to the United States as a young man and got involved in entrepreneurial capitalism before he found his religious vocation.
And the way that he approaches his calling as an imam, as a cleric, is to preach to the faithful the need for defining their religious obligations in a way that recognizes the common humanity of people who are not part of their faith group.
It's the sort of thing where he's doing every single thing that the war party says that the Muslims never do.
He's always condemned terrorism.
For 25 years of his life, he's condemned terrorism.
He was in Oklahoma during the Oklahoma City bombing when, of course, we were told the Muslims had to be responsible for this.
He lived through that.
He lived through, of course, the horrors of 2001.
He's been dealing now with the aftermath of the Gulf War, the war in Afghanistan, and the war in Libya, and ISIS, and all of this.
And he's been preaching the same message consistently, which is, we have nothing to do with this.
We have nothing to do with aggressive violence.
If we see people among us who are trying to incite us toward violence of that kind, please let me know about it so I can rebuke and correct him.
And if he's somebody who's inclined toward criminal activities, call the police, for heaven's sake, because we want to have nothing to do with this.
And he gets no credit for it.
He gets no credit for the fact that he and his congregation have been involved in outreach on every front, including humanitarian outreach.
They were on the ground there more after the tornado a year ago.
Well, like you say, oh no, that's just all part of their PR stunt where Mohammed says it's okay to lie to trick the infidels into whatever, whatever.
And I'm going to have to let you go real quick, but I need you to answer about this, too.
Muslims in America, obviously, is the focus here, but there's also, the context is the entire terror war and the narrative of the other billion Muslims in the world who are all, never mind no man's land between Iraq and Syria, it's all one big Islamofascist caliphate coming to get us.
And I wonder whether you can really challenge the idea that this clash of civilizations, one way or the other, may be led by horrible bin Ladenite propagandists and neocon propagandists on either side, but still that the whole thing is just sort of destined to take place.
Like, what else are you going to do?
These two civilizations, there's just not enough room for the both of them around here.
I don't think that's the case, because where it's achieved stability, where the Islamic culture has found roots and managed to sustain itself, they've modernized, which means that they are no longer being governed by 7th or 8th century or 11th or 12th century presuppositions about the irrepressible violence that will result when you have Muslims and non-Muslims trying to occupy the same tract of land.
You can actually take a look at some phases of Ottoman history where there was a great deal of respect and protection.
In the 19th century in particular, before nationalism became such a plague upon the face of the earth and upon humanity in general, there was a growing understanding in Ottoman Turkey of the need to protect individual rights and protect property and to recognize the limits on what government can do.
The problem is that the United States has been abetting and propagating exactly the worst form of this with our alliance with the Saudis.
I mean, the Saudis really are implicated in promoting most of this stuff, either by way of paying the Danegel to groups that want to depose them, or using their influence to prop up terrorist groups they can deploy against Iran or others.
And I think that the best way to approach this is to understand that we're going to have disagreements, there's going to be confusion, there's going to be tension, but it's something that's manageable.
It doesn't need to become apocalyptic unless we insist that it has to be.
These people are craving an apocalypse.
The people I wrote about in this essay are the sort of people who eagerly look upon the prospect of eschatological violence as a way of bringing about the triumph of righteousness.
They're the mirror image of some of the worst elements that you find in Islam.
It's no accident all the people who believe in this clash happen to be a bunch of raving lunatics whose arguments make no sense.
Oh, not at all.
Yeah.
Alright, listen, I've kept you way over, and I've got to go, but thanks so much, Will.
I really appreciate it.
You take care, Scott.
Have a great weekend.
That's the great Will Grigg, everybody.
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