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Alright y'all, welcome back to the show.
It's Antiwar Radio.
I'm Scott Wharton.
Our next guest on the show today is Suhail Khan.
He is the Senior Fellow for Christian Muslim Understanding at the Institute for Global Engagement, and a Washington, D.C.
-based attorney.
He used to work with, he was Press Secretary and Policy Director for U.S. Congressman Tom Campbell, and is a Republican activist.
Welcome to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, good.
Thanks for having me on.
Well, I really appreciate you joining us today.
You're in the New York Times.
You guys apparently wrote an open letter to the leadership of the Republican Party.
Is that right?
That's right.
That's right.
We just kind of really were growing concerned that a lot of this rhetoric surrounding the center and proposed center in New York City was beginning to spill over into kind of crazy talk, not only from some of the fringe that we've been used to hearing from, particularly post-9-11, but from what we would consider otherwise responsible leadership within our party, that they were coming out not only opposing the construction of a center in New York, which, of course, is a controversial issue, but opposing the construction of mosques around the country.
Some were calling for a moratorium on Islamic centers, and it's really starting to kick sand in the face of the Muslim American community here in the United States.
And so a lot of us that have been working in the trenches for the last 20-odd years got together and drafted it and published that open letter to the party to say, hey, guys, let's just take a step back here and not go down that way of kind of demonizing one particular religious minority.
Well, and, you know, the New York Times points out here that it's a very select list of cosigners here, that you decided not to reach out in any kind of broad way.
You decided to make it all hardcore Republican Party activists, right?
Well, yeah, basically what it was, I mean, first there was the issue of timing.
We could have put together a letter and circulated it and taken days, if not weeks, to get all kinds of numbers of signatures on that, and that would have been one way to do it.
But we thought in the interest of timing, because the issue was raging on, and every day another, you know, Republican official, in some instances even Democrats, like we saw with Harry Reid and Howard Dean, were coming out and saying silly things.
So we thought, why not get together this list of folks that are very well known in Republican circles?
We work with, you know, House and Senate elected officials every day.
We deal with the RNC, and so we may not be household names across the country, but folks know us inside the beltway from our work, both in the last...
I worked in the last Bush administration for all eight years, and some of the signers worked for Reagan and worked for George H. Walker Bush, and so we've been around and kind of know the folks, so we thought, let's just get this letter together, let's get it out.
The people that, you know, again, the responsible adults in our party will see this letter, and we hoped, and that's coming true, we'll, you know, begin to pull some of this back, and that's been happening.
We've had a positive response from Republican officials, from Republican leadership, and from the rank-and-file.
Folks have been calling and emailing me since we got the letter out earlier this week, saying right on, you know, we're glad somebody's saying this, and folks like Ed Gillespie, just yesterday Ted Olson came out in support, so the response has been very positive, and we just want to keep pushing.
Well, you know, you mentioned the heat of some of this rhetoric, and it really does seem... well, it's surprising to me, I have to tell you.
I really am kind of taken aback at how far this has gone.
As you mentioned, even some prominent Republicans talking about a moratorium on building mosques anywhere in America?
I mean, what are we talking about?
What?
It's just scary, and, you know, from a purely philosophical perspective, it was just shocking, because, I mean, I became a conservative because I favored, you know, limited government, individual liberty, including religious liberty, you know, personal property, the right to own personal property and control your own personal property, state and local government, as opposed to giving power to the feds.
And here, in this instance, all these principles, religious liberty, liberty, state and local government, rule of law, these are all being turned on their ear by some within the party in the name of political expediency, because, unfortunately, the polls do show that a lot of Americans do oppose the construction of the mosque at Ground Zero, and I understand that.
There's a lot of emotion surrounding the tragedy of 9-11, and I completely understand that, but to use that emotion for partisan ends by some is not only wrong, it's just, you know, that is something that I argue also to our folks within our party is not only wrong morally, wrong constitutionally, and on an American, but also just from a purely partisan perspective, you know, it's just the wrong way to go.
We might win something in the short term, but we'll lose in the long term when it comes to our democracy.
Well, it seems like it's logically wrong, too.
I mean, none of the people involved in this mosque did 9-11, right?
Right, exactly.
The folks involved with this mosque in New York City are exactly the perfect antidote for the hijackers.
These are guys that have been working with the Christian and Jewish communities in New York.
This is meant to be an open cultural center with an interfaith component for conversation with various neighbors.
They've gone through the process locally, the legal process, and have gotten all the approvals they need to.
They've purchased the property openly.
And so that's the rule of law.
I think it's just the situation that because there is a lot of concern and a lot of animosity by some towards the Muslim American community, that low-level chatter that was kind of on the Internet for months surrounding the center has now suddenly kind of morphed into a national conversation.
And again, because the poll numbers right now reflect that a lot of Americans are concerned about having a mosque near ground zeroes, not on ground zeroes, but most people would have you believe, but rather near ground zeroes, that that's enough to kind of demagogue the issue for partisan purposes.
And that's just something that we couldn't stomach as committed Republicans and, more importantly, as committed Americans.
Well, you know, oftentimes with party politics and stuff, real issues get buried under simple narratives that are easy to get across because, after all, politicians are trying to collect the most number of voters.
And it's easy to see why.
You know, people are struggling.
They've got to put food on their families and things like this.
And a lot of people don't have much time to sit around and read about what's going on.
If the basic narrative seems to be that maybe somehow the Muslims figured out a way, you know, foreigners figured out a way to somehow make their guy our president, and now they're building a mosque on top of ground zero.
And it seems like maybe there is an Islamofascist caliphate that's coming for us.
If Tom Ridge says we ought to get duct tape and plastic sheeting, you know, it must be serious.
Yeah, and that's exactly the narrative out there.
And it's a two-way street.
The Muslim American community has to, you know, really redouble their efforts to get their story out there.
You know, I was in the White House for 9-11, and I know that there were hundreds of Muslims that died on 9-11 in the towers.
There were Muslims serving in the New York Fire Department and in the New York Police Department that were the first responders.
And, you know, the terrorists, and it's sad that I have to remind some of our friends this, but the terrorists want to divide our country, and they want to make this into a religious war.
And it's up to us as Americans to unite as Americans, regardless of our faith, to fight terrorism and to fight these extremists and not let them dictate the agenda that we're suddenly going to try to paint one religious minority with a broad brush and really divide our own country and compromise our own constitution that has served us so well for over 200 years.
Right.
I mean, after all, this is the heart of the First Amendment.
I mean, forget free speech and free press and everything else.
The right to practice one's religion, I mean, this is the first thing I learned about America, and it was before I ever heard of a constitution or a Bill of Rights when I was very, very young.
That's what makes America America, is anybody can believe and practice their religion however they want.
That's the core of what makes us us.
Yeah, and, you know, it's interesting that you bring that up, because that's what made us Americans, that, you know, the early Americans were people escaping religious persecution from Europe.
They came here to practice their own faith.
And, indeed, if you look at the early history of New York, when the British were in control of New York, they had a ban on synagogues, believe it or not, in New York City.
So it's interesting that some friends from the Jewish American community, particularly in the New York area, who remember that or know about that history, have been the first to come to the Muslim American community and say, hey, we've seen this movie before.
This is wrong.
We want to help you.
And it's been very heartening.
But that's just, you know, what we're facing right now in the way of this challenge.
And as Republican activists, we're just trying to say, look, there's an election coming up.
All right, hold on, Suhail.
We've got to hold it right there and go out to this hard break here.
We'll be right back, everybody, with Suhail Khan.
Talk a little bit more about Islam in America after this.
This is the Liberty Radio Network, broadcasting the latest Liberty-oriented audio content 24 hours a day at LRN.fm.
All right, y'all, welcome back to the show.
This is Anti-War Radio.
Talking with Suhail Khan.
He's a Republican activist.
He's got a letter that you can read in the New York Times today.
It's on a blog there.
Muslim and Arab Republicans take issue with GOP on mosque, is the headline there at the Times.
And you can read about Suhail Khan at GlobalEngage.org.
He is the senior fellow for Christian Muslim understanding at the Institute for Global Engagement.
And now, Suhail, here's the thing about this, really, is that the underlying premise here is that Islam attacked us on September 11th.
And that whoever those people were, whether it was maybe a radical fringe interpretation of Islam or not, depending on, you know, who's doing the talking, it was still the religion that made them do it, the religion that mandated that they attack us for otherwise no reason at all.
Right?
That's an unfortunate narrative, and it's pervasive out there.
And it's, you know, all I can say is for those that buy into that narrative, the only people that join them in believing that are at Al-Qaeda.
But the vast majority of the world, a billion and a half Muslims, don't believe that.
You have 68 million Muslims that live in this country that are loyal, law-abiding Americans that don't buy into that and just want to live their lives as everybody else does, send their kids to school and put food on their table and just be American and enjoy the rights and liberties that we all enjoy.
And I think that when some buy into that narrative that we have a war with this faith, it's just something that is, you know, first of all, not real.
It's just an imaginary narrative.
And more importantly, you know, we don't want to be at war with a billion-plus people in the world.
We'll be at war for the rest of our existence.
So we just need to take a step back and kind of, again, remind ourselves that we're Americans and that we can defeat this enemy, but only do that, as Lincoln said, if we're united and not divided.
Well, you know, my boss, Eric Garris at AntiWar.com, likes to say facetiously, you know, you've got to learn to discriminate, you know, and examine the differences between who you're talking about.
And, in fact, you know, I want to be a little bit more narrow because, you know, when you talk about, boy, if Islam's our enemy, we're talking about a sixth of the population of the world, and that is extremely problematic, especially considering, as you said, the 6 to 8 million American Muslims who would have to also be rounded up, I guess, and shipped off to the moon or wherever.
But then the other thing is, though, to hear many of the neoconservatives describe the problem, they'll say, no, no, it's radical Islam that's the problem, and that's only about 10% of that billion people, which is still, if we have to kill them, that's more than a Holocaust worth of people who have to die.
So I was thinking maybe we could even discriminate a little bit more carefully than that and figure out, you know, what exactly is radical Islam, how many different flavors of it are there, and how many of them are actually a threat to the American people, and maybe we could narrow down our war to that.
Exactly.
And maybe we could find out what other motivations they have besides some twisted interpretation of the Koran.
Right.
Absolutely.
And that's why it's important to ask those questions, and it's important for American Muslims and other Muslims around the globe to stand up and basically take the religion back from the extremists who are trying to use Islam to further their own political agenda.
I mean, if you take the worst of the worst, Osama bin Laden, obviously he has a problem with American troops being on Saudi soil, and he has gone from that complaint and added to that list of complaints the issues of Iraq and Afghanistan and the conflict between Israel and Palestine, and tried to put together this narrative that Muslims around the world need to unite against the West.
But that is a fringe interpretation, and he's smart.
While people don't believe that, most Muslims here in the United States and around the globe don't believe his narrative, there may be some sympathy for the individual political causes that he tries to exploit to get support.
So, of course, most Muslims are concerned about what's happening in Israel-Palestine, for example, and they want an end to the conflict in Iraq or the end to the conflict in Afghanistan.
And so he cleverly uses those political conflicts and the concern that many have for those conflicts in general to exploit a very evil agenda.
And that's what American Muslims and other Muslims need to unite against, and they're doing that.
But it's important for Americans in general to make those distinctions, just as you outlined.
Right.
I mean, that's the whole thing, is that here they're handing Ayman al-Zawahiri the topic for his next podcast, which is, see, I told you their enemy is Islam.
They say it's not, but look at what they do.
And this was something right after September 11th.
There was a big pogrom in India, and I think it was 10,000 Muslims were killed or something like that, and the State Department said nothing.
And Osama bin Laden put out a thing that said, see, they only care about killing when it's other people, but when it's Muslims, meh.
And so this is kind of playing into that narrative.
In fact, I'm sure you saw in the Post, the guy who was arranging this Islamic community center in New York, he actually was on his way to the Middle East to explain how great religious freedom in America is, to do his PR for the empire.
Exactly.
That's exactly right.
I was just in Europe last week and talking to faith leaders in Europe from the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim community, and 201, they were looking to the United States for direction, because they were saying, you're the country that's got it right.
You have a separation of church and state, but you still allow for full religious freedom.
But then this mosque issue started coming up, and they started kind of getting them to ask questions, and saying, wait a second, I hope you guys can figure that out, because we're looking to you for direction to figure out our own challenges.
And that's why, again, going back to the letter, we're just trying to get Americans, particularly people in the Republican Party, to say, hey, let's just go back to the Constitution, and we'll be fine, it's served us well, and it'll continue to serve us well.
But if we drift away and try to make things up as we go along, and turn the Constitution on its ear, and twist or have a more grotesque interpretation of what religious freedom means, in other words, just for a select few, but not for the minority, then we'll get into trouble, and we'll really give our country a black eye, and we'll really just be selling the Constitution short.
The first thing I'd just like to, I guess as a comment for right now, is I've never heard of this website, Global Engage, or this organization, the Institute for Global Engagement, and you're the Senior Fellow for Christian Muslim Understanding here, and I think, of course, obviously that gets right to the root of it, is the mistaken idea that there's us and them, we and they, which I guess would mean that American Muslims are they, here, you know, like a communist under the bed, a fifth column, a danger to us from within, because the larger narrative is that Islam and Western society are incompatible, that there's this clash of civilizations going on.
So I'd like to give you a chance to maybe explain a little bit about Islam, and why it is, apparently, that you think it's not incompatible with Western society, and why people should not be scared of Islam, and believe that it somehow mandates the destruction of what we hold dear here.
And, you know, that's going to take a little while, so that's the question, and we'll talk about that when we get back from this break.
It's Suhail Khan.
The website is GlobalEngagement.org.
And check out the letter today in the New York Times.
You can sign up for the Liberty Radio Network email updates at updates.lrn.fm and join us on Facebook at facebook.lrn.fm.
Alright, so welcome back to the show.
Welcome back to the show.
It's Anti-War Radio.
I'm Scott Horton.
I'm talking with Suhail Khan.
He's a Republican Party activist and Senior Fellow for Christian Muslim Understanding at the Institute for Global Engagement.
That's GlobalEngage.org.
And now, so, when we went out to break, I was asking about the inevitable clash of civilizations between the West and, I guess, the Mideast, between Islamistan and Christendom, and whether it's going to have to come to hydrogen bombs or not.
What do you think?
Well, I hope not.
I think it doesn't.
You know, I can tell you that I've grown up, born and raised in this country as somebody who loves freedom, and I think as a committed Muslim and a committed American, I think they're very much compatible.
Well, please explain, because I think the common understanding is, uh-uh, you want to, what's all this Sharia law?
Right, right.
Well, I'll just bring it kind of home to my own personal story.
My parents were both immigrants from South India, and my dad, in the 50s and 60s, was trying to get a higher education, and he had an opportunity to study in two places, the University of Moscow or the University of Wyoming, in Laramie, Wyoming.
And he chose Wyoming because, as his father told him, he said, the United States is a free country, they're a democracy, and they respect all freedoms, including religious freedom, you need to go there, as opposed to Moscow, which was a communist country in the middle.
This was the middle, of course, of the Cold War.
So my parents came to this country looking for freedom, as committed Muslims, because they wanted to come to a country where they could get an education and get a good job and raise a family, and raise a family as Muslims and Muslim Americans.
So I've always felt, and the vast majority of Muslims feel, that democracy and individual liberty are very much compatible with Islam, and that's just never been a conflict.
Unfortunately, there are some, as we talked in the last segment, who have this twisted interpretation of Islam, and they have their own political grievances, and they've melded the two to try and define this clash of civilizations, as you articulated, and that's what freedom-loving people of all faiths need to fight.
Well, you know, I think I agree with you.
It seems like if we live up to our ideals, then that would be us being at our best, and that would be the thing that would best protect us.
After all, if it's a fourth-generation war and the battlefield is the whole Earth and the hearts and minds of the population of it, then celebrating religious freedom above all else, even in the worst of times, which 9-11 was nine years ago, but anyway, even in the worst of times, sticking to our principles above all and winning the admiration of people like your father around the world, would be the best way to protect us from violent attacks, it would seem.
Absolutely.
Which kind of brings us back to the war as it exists now, not just September 11th and how we got into this mess, but of course we've had a Fort Hood shooter and an attempted Times Square bomber, and we've had Somalis from Minnesota, Somali-Americans, traveling to Somalia to fight in the war there, and it seems to me like, well, for example, it goes back to the question of whether Bin Laden and his people can credibly, whether truthfully or not, credibly claim that America really is at war with Islam, because if they can credibly convince people that that's what America's policy really is, then we're going to see nothing but more Fort Hood shooters and attempted Times Square bombers from now until forever, right?
And isn't it time for the Republican Party especially to get on board to end these wars, to ramp this whole thing down, rather than continuing to accelerate it into Pakistan, maybe Iran, and on and on?
I agree, absolutely.
And that's why we need to be vigilant and really stop some of these folks that are trying to push conflict, because they have a vested interest in conflict, and stop them in their tracks.
So many of these attempted terrorist incidents, and some of them, unfortunately, like the Fort Hood shooter, that was a successful one where people were, in fact, killed and murdered.
Those people are there, and they need to be stopped.
And the best people to stop them are people in the Muslim community.
If you saw the situation with the Times Square bomber, for example, it was a Muslim businessman, a small business owner who was the one that went to the authorities and said, Hey, this vehicle looks suspicious.
We had five kids in Virginia several months ago that had taken off for Pakistan, and it was their parents that called the authorities and said, Hey, we're worried that our kids might be involved with some extremists.
And if you remember on the Christmas Day bomber, it was his dad in Nigeria that called the authorities to say, Hey, my son might have got mixed up with some extremists.
So it's important that we don't buy into this narrative that it is a clash between Islam and the West, or between Islam and Christianity or something like that, but rather between people who love freedom and people who don't, regardless of their faith.
And in that way, the vast majority of Muslims, as they are, will police their own ranks and help the authorities to police their ranks to make sure that when there is somebody who is going the wrong way or mixing up with some extremists, that we can get them, stop them before they do others harm.
Well, I've got to tell you, you make a great spokesman for these issues.
You make your case so well, and I wonder how much success you have inside the Republican Party.
After all, Suhail, the Democrats are running the wars now, and there's a very Ron Paul-ian Republican opposition to Empire that can, you know, a case that can be made from the right.
Dana Rohrabacher recently said that virtually the entire Republican caucus in the House of Representatives regrets ever doing the Iraq war.
And, you know, I wonder if you think there can ever be a change inside the Republican Party from this seemingly permanent aggressive posture.
I think there can.
I think that we have to really just be ever vigilant and just keep fighting for the heart and soul of the party, that we need to go back to core principles, and that's, again, you know, those that are enshrined in our Constitution, and those on both sides of the aisle that have a vested interest in conflict and trying to pick fights with countries where we have no business going.
We just need to stop those guys, and particularly since, you know, it's our blood and treasure that will be spilled in these far-off lands, and we just need to come back.
We've had, you know, this experience now in Iraq and Afghanistan, and let's pray and hope that the American public will learn from these lessons that we can bring our troops home safely, and just really be careful, like you said, that we don't get involved in other foreign entanglements just because at some point over emotion or trying to beat our chest, we feel like we need to send troops willy-nilly and all kinds of harms away.
Well, and you know how it is with the Democrats.
They've got no spine whatsoever.
So assuming they ever want to engage in a rational policy, there always is the pressure to threaten more.
And so, you know, like in Obama's speech in November about how we're going to escalate into Afghanistan temporarily, but we're going to ramp the occupation down in 2011, he made sure to tack on at the end of the speech, Yemen, Somalia, you're next, because he's got to protect himself from John McCain.
Right, right, and that's the unfortunate nature of politics, and that is, you know, again, there is always the politically expedient, and folks sometimes, you know, feel like they need to pander to whatever constituency is part of their own constituency or that might be on the other side that might beat them up.
And so we've got to hold our elected officials accountable.
People like Ron Paul and others are out there trying to keep other politicians honest, and it's just really up to, you know, every American.
I know that we're all busy trying to live our lives to clean this economy, trying to put food on the table and keep, you know, a roof over our heads, but that's when, you know, these politicians, when they're not, it's like kids, right?
When you don't hear them, then you start to worry what's going on.
Right.
Anyway, with politicians, we've got to keep on these guys, and that's why it's more important than ever that we vote, and if these guys are not voting our, you know, interests, we've got to vote them out.
Well, and that's why it's especially important to take on these most silly, most ridiculous narratives.
I just don't know how else to characterize it, the idea that there's some terrorist conquering of ground zero going on here.
This kind of demagoguery has got to be stood up against.
It's great to see you guys within the Republican Party saying, hey, wait a minute now, I guess you guys have a midterm coming up and everything, but are you sure you want to go down this road?
They've got to hear that.
I mean, the Democrats are caving in already.
I don't know why any Republican would do the right thing at this point.
So they need that pressure from inside the party from you, and I guess we'll have to leave it there with me thanking you for providing that pressure.
I really appreciate it.
Hey, thank you.
Thanks again for the interview, man.
Hey, thank you.
