Lecture
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17
Social Justice
Islam, A Coherent Social Justice Tradition | Omar Suleiman | 16th MAS-ICNA Convention
22
Jurisprudence (fiqh)
Appreciating Scholarship: Intro to Islamic Law - Tesneem Alkiek | Yaqeen in NY
26
Islamophobia
How Yaqeen Heals Internalized Islamophobia - Dalia Mogahed | Making Principled Progress
29
Education
How Yaqeen is a Resource for Our Community - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Making Principled Progress
34
General Psychology
Spiritual Personality - Zohair Abdul-Rahman | 2018 Yaqeen/MAS Academic Conference
35
Social Justice
Conflict Resolution: The Line Between Justice and Peace - Sh. Omar Suleiman | Lecture
47
Identity
Keeping Masculinity from Trending Toxic - Dr. Jonathan Brown | Reframing the Gender Question
Transcript
This transcript was auto-generated using AI and may contain misspellings. The theme for Second Community this year has been Owning our violence and affirming non-violence. We have had some very powerful conversations about violence and non-violence from religious faith leaders of many traditions. Tonight we are very, very pleased to have Imam Omar Suleiman whose title for the evening is Islam to blame for ISIS. I think we probably know the answer to that question before we start. But anyway, the answer is no. So I am so pleased to know Imam Suleiman and to call him a friend for the last several years. I believe we first met at a vigil against gun violence down at the Martin Luther King Center. We have bumped into each other at various marches. He is really becoming quite one of the most influential faith voices in Dallas, Texas, in my opinion, frankly in the nation. And shows up for stuff. He shows up and speaks up on various causes. Imam Suleiman is the president of the Yaqeen Institute for Islamic Research, the resident scholar for the Valley Ranch Islamic Center, and one of the tri-chairs for the Faith Forward Dallas at Thanksgiving Square group. There is a Muslim, Christian, and Jewish chair. I am honored to be a part of that and to serve under him and our other two co-chairs. That is a good group too. Wonderful, lovely interfaith group. So without any further ado, would you welcome our friend Imam Omar Suleiman. Good evening, everyone. It is an honor to be here and to see this type of crowd.
I honestly wasn't expecting this type of crowd. So many people to come out at an event like this. It's a testimony to the leadership of this church. It's a testimony to the history of this church. It's a testimony to the goodness that exists in each and every single one of you to come listen to me speak tonight. I wanted to say a few things. Eric is a wonderful friend and he's a wonderful faith leader in Dallas as well. I'm certainly undeserving of many of the things that he said. I stand in solidarity with him tonight in not wearing a tie. I told him that I usually wear a tie. But as I was getting dressed for the event, I was like, I don't think I've ever seen Eric wear a tie. So I said I'm not going to outdo him at his church. So I decided to dress only up to what Eric would wear. But... All right. It's a pleasure to be here. And I would like to seek your forgiveness from the very beginning because I'm going to speak with some bluntness. Obviously, we live in very troubling times. We live in times where the rhetoric has become more and more destructive. And I actually plan on opening my heart today as a Muslim. And my guess would be that the Muslims that you see scattered in the crowd would be nodding their heads when I echo some of the sentiments that we feel as a Muslim community. I used to not get offended by the question, do you condemn terrorism? Do you condemn ISIS? Do you condemn Al-Qaeda? That question used to be a simple question and the answer used to always be no, and it continues to be no. But somewhere along the line, I started to get offended by that question because I started to realize that the place from where that question comes sometimes is a very bigoted place. That for you to even have to ask me, a New Orleans boy, born and raised in New Orleans,
I'm an immigrant from Louisiana, here in Texas. For you to ask me that question means that in many ways you may have ingested many of the stereotypes that are present in the media today that are very ugly and that continue to push a narrative that is simply untrue. And in many ways we found ourselves, even in the political discourse, in this battle between the good Muslim and the bad Muslim. And I remember meeting a faith leader, and as that faith leader introduced me to his wife, he said, don't worry, he's one of the good ones. And I laughed about it, but then I went home and I thought to myself, that was pretty inappropriate, he's one of the good ones. Because there is this growing idea of the good Muslim versus the bad Muslim. And in many ways Muslims are being portrayed on either side of the aisle as either political instruments in the war on terror, so we can't be racist or bigoted against Muslims because we need them in the war on terror, or they're all terrorists. So we find ourselves in this political football game where we're always the football, and we don't actually have a chance to be represented in an authentic fashion in a way that truly talks about us, beyond being informants or terrorists, beyond being effective allies in the war on terror, or the enemies in the war on terror. Who is this group of people, particularly Muslim Americans, and do they have anything to do with the threat of quote-unquote Islamic terrorism or radical Islam? Are they themselves responsible in any way, or is their religion responsible for the deviated forms and perverted forms of their faith, which do not resemble their faith in any way whatsoever? So for one thing, 10% of physicians in America are Muslim. 10%. How many of you have had a Muslim doctor before? Okay, you must have gone to the other 90%.
It is Dallas, but we do have Muslim doctors here too. 10% of doctors in this country are Muslim. 40% of Muslims in the United States have college degrees. So it's a very educated population. The overall population, 29% of Americans have college degrees. The second highest earning class of women in this country are Muslim women, slightly behind Jewish women. So you have Muslim women lawyers, you have Muslim women politicians, you have Muslim women doctors as well. It's not just 10% all male doctors. We have Muslim women in every sphere of politics. Obviously with the fallout after, or not the fallout, well it was sort of a fallout, the Khizr Khan, the old star family, you have over 3,000 Muslims that do serve in the armed forces. And in many situations, once again, you have Muslims that are your average neighbors, Muslims that like the same foods that you do. If you have a Muslim that was born in Texas and raised in Texas, they're probably Cowboys fans. I am not a Cowboys fan because I'm from New Orleans. So I'm a Saints fan, dedicated, even when we stink. I stick to my team. But it's the average person. Now bigotry, and the reason why I introduce, or I start off with this, bigotry is often built on extremely crude oversimplifications of people. Stereotypical simplifications of people. I was on my way from the Muhammad Ali funeral, and I had the blessing of attending that. Not just one of the greatest Muslim Americans, if not the greatest Muslim American in history, one of the greatest Americans in history. And as I saw ESPN and the news cycles portraying Muhammad Ali, I thought to myself, maybe this is a moment where we wake up and we see that they're not all the same,
that there are wonderful Muslim contributors that are as American as anyone else. And then of course the shooting in Orlando happened less than 48 hours after that, and suddenly the narrative shifted once again. So when it comes to bigotry, it often has very crude oversimplifications of people. And I want to start off by eliminating that narrative before we discuss anything about ISIS or we discuss anything about terrorism or radicalism. It is unjust to a people to stereotype them by the worst of them. Those that would not even fit in with them. Those who would not be claimed even by the overwhelming majority of them. In the situation of ISIS, those who are usually the victims of ISIS being portrayed. And it was ironic, there was a woman in New York, who I know who was walking in Times Square, and someone set her hijab on fire and ran off. And that was a woman whose cousin was killed by ISIS in Iraq. And I thought to myself, you know, the irony of the situation. Getting killed in Iraq for not being ISIS, for being Muslim, because ISIS doesn't like Muslims, they tend to kill Muslims. And here a person can yell a derogatory remark at someone, a racist remark, a very bigoted remark, and set them on fire. And in many situations, a person can be killed with the uptick that we see in hatred, hate crimes towards Muslims as a whole. Now, in this oversimplification as well, and from the tactics of bigotry, is that a Muslim is a good Muslim if they don't really believe in all the tenets of their faith. So when you hear politicians now speak about Islam and they speak about Muslims, yes, Muslims can be good Americans if they don't believe in X, Y, Z. As long as they reject this, as long as they basically reject the Quran, then they can be good Muslims. And when an authentic Muslim comes forth and says,
well, my religion doesn't represent that, so I am a dedicated and devout Muslim, and because of that I reject violence, because of that I reject terrorism, because of that I reject extremism, because of that I embrace coexistence, because of that I embrace equality, and so on and so forth, the answer would be, you're lying. You don't know your faith like I know my faith. Why? Because I heard some guy on TV who's never studied your religion, who's probably never even studied, period, but happens to have a microphone and happens to have the airwaves, and they told me this about your faith. And so we've fallen into this twisted realm where you can't trust a Muslim because he's either a peaceful liar or he's an honest criminal. So if he tells you or she tells you that that's not what my faith represents, and I do believe in values of peace and justice, that I believe are deeply grounded in my faith, then you don't know your religion properly or you're hiding your religion. Mistrust. Don't trust the Muslim next door. Behind that smile is really death to America and Allah Akbar, they're going to try to kill you and it's only a matter of time. Don't eat their food, right? Because if you eat their food, you know what's going to come next, you know what's going to happen. You never know. And so the portrayal is always that the Muslim that you think is just your average citizen, your neighbor, your friend, really could turn out to belong to a terrorist group 8,000 miles away, and this entire niceness, this front of niceness, and all, you know, the millions of Muslim Americans have all settled themselves, and they're all part of this worldwide conspiracy to overthrow the American government, and we need to pass bills now to stop that, because less than 1% of the population is going to successfully overthrow the government if we don't hurry up and pass bills and criminalize their religion now.
Think about the bigoted assumption that that comes from, and the fears that are stoked, and the paranoia, and usually what leads to the manifestation of fear from a policy perspective is the abandonment of freedom, often willingly, by the citizens who are told that we have to protect you. And so we need to do away with your civil liberties and the civil liberties of everybody, because if we don't, those nice Muslims around you, those 10% of Muslim American doctors, the two Muslim congressmen, right? The Muslim president. He's not really Muslim. I hope you guys actually know that. The Muslim in the White House. They're all going to come after you. They're all going to kill you. And so we've got, you know, it's for that reason that we have to wage wars, destructive wars, that we have to invade countries, that we have to do this, all for your protection. And that's venturing into politics, and I'm not going to get into that right now. Simply, the premise that I'd like to start off with, and I think that was a 15-minute introduction, is that bigotry comes from a place of oversimplification, and it often leads to policy that is not in the favor of anyone in this country, and often leads to the willful submission or forfeiting of your own civil liberties and your own rights. And I'll share with you all a few studies. This one's from the 2010 Gallup report, Religious Perceptions in America with an In-Depth Analysis of U.S. Attitudes Towards Muslims and Islam. And this is very interesting, because it reads, the variable most strongly linked to self-reported prejudice towards Muslims is self-reported prejudice towards Jews. Respondents who say they feel a great deal of prejudice or extreme prejudice towards Jews are about 32 times as likely to report feeling a great deal of prejudice towards Muslims. So bigotry comes from a familiar place.
And what we often see, which by the way, in the last four years, the membership of the Ku Klux Klan has gone from 5,000 to 8,000, that many of the groups that promote Islamophobia also promote anti-Semitism, also promote white supremacy, also promote very, very ugly things about black people in this country, about Mexicans and Latinos, and so on and so forth. In fact, Pamela Geller, a prominent Islamophobe who held the event in Garland last year, she has actually written an article arguing that Barack Obama is Malcolm X's love child. She actually believes that. And there are people that would actually believe that. So bigotry often comes from a familiar place, and we have to call it out as we see it. Now there are a few things that also come as a result of this. Number one, it's dangerous. And according to the FBI, the only group in 2015 which had an uptick in hate crimes against it is the Muslim community. We're the only faith community, according to the latest study that was reported in the Washington Post, that's more unpopular than atheists. Brookings Poll showed that 61% of Americans hold an unfavorable view of Islam, and 46% hold an unfavorable view of Muslims. Now here's the other thing that study showed, that roughly one half of Americans, 50% of Americans, say they don't know any Muslims. So what does that tell you? Fear also comes from a place of ignorance. And at times it's as simple as asking that Muslim that you see, can you tell me about your religion? And trust me, we love that. It is so amazing, you know, amongst all the go-back homes and the middle fingers and the people yelling things at Muslims when they're coming out of a grocery store or at a restaurant with a rude waiter, when someone comes up to a Muslim or goes up to a Muslim and says, hey, I want to ask you a question about your faith. Now don't do that to a Sikh, because unfortunately Sikhs have been on the receiving end of many of the hate crimes
that are directed towards the Muslim community because people think they look like Muslims. Which shows you again how base the ignorance of our community truly is. So with that 60 plus percent of people that hold an unfavorable view of Islam, 48% that hold an unfavorable view of Muslims, but 50% have never known a Muslim, it shows you that the cure to this disease first and foremost starts from a place of knowledge, and I congratulate each and every single one of you for coming out today to actually get to know a Muslim and hear a Muslim out. Another study showed that over 25 years, the New York Times has portrayed Islam and Muslims more negatively than cancer, cocaine, and alcohol. So we're in good company. Last night, after the presidential debate, if you want to call it a debate, last night after the spectacle that we saw on TV that I would not allow my children to watch, after one of the presidential candidates suggested that the reason why we have Islamophobia is because Muslims don't report stuff that they should be reporting, well, the solution clearly is not to get more Muslim spies because the Orlando shooter, Omar Mateen, was reported by the Muslim community before, not to mention all the other nuances that came out from that story, that surfaced from that story after the public had already judged what his motivations were and what that was all about. Ahmed Rahimi in New Jersey, who thankfully was not able to kill anybody, but planted bombs in New Jersey and New York trying to hurt people, his father says he called the FBI and told the FBI that my son is off and you need to come and get him and you need to deal with him. So clearly that's not the solution because many times these future terrorists or people that go on to become terrorists are actually reported. In fact, a Duke University study, which is called Anti-Terror Lessons of Muslim American Communities, states,
and I quote, Muslim American communities have been active in preventing radicalization. The people that would go on to kill in the name of Islam tended to not attend any mosque whatsoever, were completely alienated from their mosque leadership, had no association whatsoever with their local mosque, and in many cases were not even practicing Muslims. I'll read to you a quote from The Guardian, which said that, far from being religious zealots, a large number of those involved in terrorism do not practice their faith regularly, many lack religious literacy, and could actually be regarded as religious outliers. Very few have been brought up in strongly religious households, and there is a higher than average proportion of converts. Some are involved in drug taking, drinking alcohol, visiting prostitutes. The MI5 says there's evidence that a well-established religious identity actually protects against violent radicalization, meaning there's a significant connection between a person going to their mosque and being attached to their leadership in this country. There's a significant connection not between that and radicalization, but rather the opposite, that Muslims that have a well-established identity and that are going to a place of worship, that are going to their mosques, that associate with their congregation, that are not involved in drugs or prostitution or those types of things, are most of the time not the ones that would be prone to radicalization. Rather, radicalization takes place on the internet usually, after many other factors that go into it. So the question is, is fear of Islam and Muslims rational? According to Gallup, half of Americans are scared of being victims of terror. Now, according to Gallup as well, you're more likely statistically to be shot by a toddler than by an Islamic terrorist. So the solution, first and foremost, is to make sure that we deport all toddlers
and we don't let any of them in this country anymore, because clearly they pose a legitimate statistical threat. You're also more likely to be killed by your furniture than by a Muslim in this country. That's not to completely downplay the threat, but that's to say that you need to watch your couch, you need to watch your bed, because you don't know what it's planning to do against you. Now, there are a few studies on a serious note. There is a study of 1,000 Americans in the weeks after 9-11 that showed that the average person believed that they had a 20% chance of being injured in a terrorist-related incident in the next 10 years. But they would not have faced that even if there was a 9-11 every day for that year. This is from David Cole, who wrote Less Safe, Free Night, 194. These are all statistical things, and I'll just go through them for a reason. Between 1980 and 2005, only 6% of terror attacks in the US were by Muslims. 2010 Europol report showed that from 2007 to 2009, 99.6% of all terror attacks in the European Union were done by non-Muslims. So when you think of, we don't want to become Europe, which I understand for other reasons as a whole, that's the pro-American, anti-Europe part of me coming out. But on a serious note, statistically speaking, the idea that Muslims pose a more significant threat to society than anyone else is a completely baseless claim. That's not to downplay the threat of radicalism. It's not to downplay the threat of terrorism. However, are we looking at all forms of terrorism equally? Are we looking at all mass shootings equally? There were over 300 mass shootings in the year 2015. Two of them were done by Muslims.
Are we analyzing the facts properly, or are we analyzing them through the prism that is given to us by our favorite cable news network? And that is the problem with us, that many times we choose to focus on not what's actually happening around us, but what the news tells us is happening around us, and those things that are overblown and what is pumped into us, and driven by agenda politics, is what we are going to shape our lives after, shape our identities after, and proportion our fears and normal daily lives after by what is fed to us by the media. As of June 2005, two times as many Americans had been killed by right-wing extremist groups as by Muslims. 48 by right-wing extremist groups, 26 by Muslims. That's a study from the New America Foundation. And again, as I mentioned, the 300 mass shootings. But what about the other ones? These are the ones that are actually labeled as terror attacks. These are attacks that are labeled as terror attacks. Many times, other things are not labeled as terror attacks. So one of the issues that we have in regards to our polemics and in regards to our labeling is that if it's done by a Muslim, it's a terrorist attack. If it's not done by a Muslim, it's not a terrorist attack. We have shifted effectively the definition to just that. Right? So before we know the nuances of a case, before we know anything about a person's personal life, such as the attack in France, a man who was a non-practicing Muslim, who identified loosely, who really was born to Muslim parents, used to drink, go to clubs, had nothing to do with his local mosque, and the first person he ran over with his truck was a Muslim. A Muslim grandmother, in fact, was the first person that he plowed through. One-fifth of his victims in France were Muslims. But immediately was dubbed an Islamic terrorist attack. Very quickly. Before any of the facts come out about that case.
Now in the case of other attacks, if it is not a Muslim, no matter what ideological motivations are found, that will not be dubbed a terrorist attack, and that has frequently been the case over and over again. I can give you some examples. Andres Brevik, who perpetrated the Norway attacks, on the 22nd of July, 2011, he first killed eight people by detonating a van bomb in Oslo, and then he shot dead 69 participants of a workers' youth league summer camp. He cites in his manifesto Thomas Jefferson ten times. He cites Robert Spencer, who was a prominent Islamophobe, 47 times in his manifesto. It was not dubbed a terrorist attack. Michael Page walked into a Sikh temple, murdered six people in New York. It was not dubbed a terrorist attack. Dylan Ruth in Charleston murdered nine African-American worshippers in a church as they worshipped. Clearly had ideological motivations in his manifesto, from his Facebook page, and so on and so forth. It was never called a terrorist attack. Robert Deere, who attacked a Planned Parenthood clinic and killed two people, called himself a warrior of Christ. This was the day before San Bernardino. It was not called a terrorist attack. Robert Gugger, a Tennessee pastor, who planned a massacre of Muslims in New York. His manifestos claimed that Christ called him to kill Muslim men, women, and children. He had a stockpile of rifles, machetes, bomb-making materials. He was let out. In fact, he walks free today because he did not succeed in perpetrating that attack. So, when we talk about motivations, and we talk about people killing in the name of their religion, in the name of their faith, and what constitutes a terror attack, there has been a great discrepancy and a great double standard in how we assign those terms. And not only does that frustrate the Muslim community,
it portrays a very inaccurate picture of our society as it exists today. Where we focus and we hijack the fears that are manufactured by our politicians to move this country to a place that we have been before, which we don't want to go back to. Where people have the right to not only, you know, discriminate without being held accountable, not only make bigoted and racist remarks and profile without being held accountable, but we move to a discourse where we can openly speak about internment camps and we can speak about racial profiling, and that has devastating consequences, not just on our generation, but on the second, but on the generation that's coming up. We had a Muslim child of 11 years old hang himself, commit suicide last week, because he was being bullied in school. So, this, the devastating impacts of this inaccurate, inappropriate assignment of collective guilt to an entire community over the actions of an extremist group or extremist groups is dangerous to our society. It endangers our community and endangers everything that we're trying to do, and in many cases can be done away with by gatherings such as this, and by simply, you know, getting to know your neighbor, getting to know your Muslim neighbors. And one of the risks and one of the problems with the response to that, which has come from a place of bigotry, is that when you look at individuals that are prone to radicalism, they tend to come from a place of mental disturbance, they tend to come from broken homes, they tend to come from career frustrations, school frustrations, very, you know, gloomy world views. And when you pour pessimism into that world view and continue to invoke a class of civilizations and continue to feast on a person who's having a problem fitting in, who does not know what their cultural identity is,
then you only further stigmatize them. And when you further stigmatize a person who is already aspirational, then you risk making that person operational, which is why much of the election discourse that we've had this year has found itself not only in ISIS propaganda videos, but in Al-Shabaab propaganda videos in Somalia, they found itself in Boko Haram propaganda videos. Our election cycle has been used to create more terrorists, to generate more terrorists, to tell more young Muslims that America hates you, that it's only a matter of time, that you cannot be a good American and a good Muslim, that you have to choose one of those, you can't love both. And if you listen to what radicals say and if you listen to what Islamophobes say, they're saying essentially the exact same thing, you can't be a good American Muslim. Think about that. On one side, you can't be a real American if you're a real Muslim, because you will never be a loyal citizen. And on the other side, you have the exact same message that's being said. So when we talk about combating ISIS, and we talk about combating radicalization, what exactly does that mean? And where do these extremist groups come from? I want to refer to you for reading Dying to Win, a book called Dying to Win by Robert Pape, where Robert Pape examined more than 2,200 suicide attacks across the world from 1980 to the present. And his research revealed that more than 90% of suicide attacks are directed at an occupying force, or what's deemed an occupying force. He also analyzed that between 1980 and 2003, only 10% of suicide attacks were against American interests. Before that, the single largest group were the Tamil Telugu community, and the single largest group were the Tamil Tigers, who are not a Muslim group. According to Gallup, 93% of Muslims worldwide are moderates.
Of the 7% who have radical sympathies, 6.7% give political reasons for their radicalization rather than religious reasons. Suicide attacks, terrorism, all come from a place of political frustration at an organized level that's historically been the case. And it's not just true for Muslims, it's true for the entire world. Now, surely in a church, you can appreciate this, that the claim that more people have been killed because of religion and history than anything else is also statistically untrue. For those of you that don't know, the 20th century was the deadliest century in our human history. Over a quarter billion people were killed, were murdered in the 20th century. Professor Rudolf Rommel, he notes that 62 million were killed under the Soviet regime, 35 million were murdered under Mao's Communist Party of China. And he writes, the much greater slaughter of the 20th century occurred because of two ahistorical sociopolitical experiments. One, fascism, especially in Germany, Italy, Eastern Europe, Japan, and China. And the other, communism. These absolutist, unrestricted, uninhibited ideologies murdered people in war and democide without compunction, without the inhibition of tradition, culture, or religion. So was radical atheism the problem in the 20th century? Because it wasn't religion, it wasn't radical Islam, it wasn't radical Christianity. It was actually competing ideologies that both deemed religion to be the opium of the masses and both deemed religion to be harmful, to be negative, to be the reason and the cause for much of the backwardness that we had in the world at the time. And so when we talk about today, systematic violence by man almost always involves the use of ideology to clothe that which is otherwise unjustifiable
with that which is whole. It's the way that we work as human beings. It's part of our savagery when we tend to that direction. And may God protect our country and protect us from ever falling to such a disease at a collective level. And if we're going to quantify our savagery as man over history, Islam has very little to do with most of the violence through pure statistical analysis. But when conflict breaks out, people rally around their identities as we see happening here. We are a very divided nation, and that's very clear in our political discourse. One of the most heartbreaking things is that no matter what happens in this election, we have two competing visions of American society often talking at each other and not talking to each other. People entrench themselves in very, very strong identities that often mean that they cannot coexist with people that belong to other identities. Now, is the solution to that, to further entrench someone who is being called to an identity that puts him or her at odds with this society? Or is it better for us to say in the face of Islamophobia, to say in the face of extremism and terrorists, whether they're overseas or they are domestic, that we will not be divided, that you can be a good American, a good Muslim, that you have a right to speak up, to speak your mind, to be frustrated, and that we will not allow your identity to be hijacked by someone that is overseas and that wishes you and I harm. So when we talk about militant groups, we're often talking about fraternities. And I want to end with this sentiment. There are legitimate frustrations in the world. There are legitimate frustrations that young people have about our politics, about our policy, not just as the United States of America, but in Egypt or in Iraq or in the United Kingdom.
We often have very serious concerns about policy because at the end of the day, we know that politics are dominated largely by economic interests that are usually corrupt. And so when young people have frustrations about the world and about policy, and we oversimplify their frustrations, or worse, we don't give them a healthy outlet to voice their frustrations and show them that we have a society that listens and that hears. As JFK said, those who make peaceful revolution impossible make violent revolution inevitable. And so we have to also look internally at our situation since World War II, 90% of the casualties of war have been unarmed civilians. A third of them have been children. So when we talk about drone strikes, or we talk about invasions of countries, or we talk about emboldening dictators, or we talk about supporting apartheid regimes, or we talk about doing things for our interests that are often to the detriment of other people's interests, you're going to have frustrations. And just like when you hear extremists and radicals overseas say that it is okay to kill thousands of innocent people for the sake of our political agenda, for the sake of our political benefit, when we respond and we say that we will carpet bomb entire countries, and when we respond and we say that, and we try to oversimplify the situation of Iraq, which has been very, very bad, the situation of Iraq, which has been bombed by four consecutive presidents, and think that ISIS came out of a healthy, functioning geopolitical situation, we're not being true to ourselves, and we are not giving an accurate analysis of the situation. So it's important for us to listen, to actually be honest with ourselves, to actually try to make our country better always, to make our policy better, to accommodate opposing voices,
to not turn people towards radicalism or extremism by our extreme hesitance to listen to what other people are saying. You know, I remember, because I actually listen to, or I read ISIS propaganda quite a bit, not because I'm joining, I can assure you that I'm not planning on joining ISIS anytime soon, but because I'm trying to understand their messaging so that I can counter it properly. And so, yes, by the way, they want to kill me. I don't think I mentioned that, but I'm actually one of the people they want to kill. But when we talk about that, and I keep on, I kept on reading this statement, just like they kill our children, we will kill their children. Just like they kill our children, we will kill their children. Listen to that sentence, and think about how that appeals to a person who may have lost their own family to a drone strike or to an airstrike. A young child that washed up ashore somewhere or whose family was lost at sea, and you saw those images of that young boy sitting in the back of an ambulance, wondering what happened. So when we talk about the lives that have been lost in the war on terror, this is according to a report from Physicians for Social Responsibility in 2015, that in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, you have over 1.3 million people, innocent lives that were killed in the process of the war on terror. So if all else were the same, here's my conclusion, if all else were the same, from a geopolitical situation, and Islam never was, would ISIS exist? The answer is yes. Would Al-Qaeda exist? The answer is yes. When there is a vacuum of power, when there are frustrations, when there are civil wars, when there are sectarian conflict, then in those vacuums, militant groups rise, mercenary groups rise, and they clothe and they disguise their ugly, ugly intentions and agendas that are otherwise unjustifiable,
often with the word of God. So whether we're talking about secular ideology in nationalism, sometimes communism, fascism, sometimes capitalism, if we're talking about religion, whether we're talking about ISIS or the Lord's Resistance Army, or we're talking about the Serbian genocide, or we're talking about Buddhist monks in Burma, or we're talking about whatever it may be, Boko Haram in Nigeria, whatever it may be, it is absolutely essential for us not to respond to that hatred with hatred and think that this is a war in which it's about killing and killing and killing, and the way that we're going to stop this is kill more of them. All right? The response to children being killed is not we need to kill more children, it's that we need to stop the killing of children, is that we need to have a consistent voice against the killing of innocent people, and we need to look to the root causes of wars and divisions, terrorist groups, extremist groups, and we need to hit at those extremist causes, and we need to not allow illegitimate groups to manipulate legitimate emotions. We need to not allow groups or agendas that manipulate vulnerable people and that take advantage of vulnerable people and in their desperation turn them to a path of no return that is detrimental to them, to their families, and to everybody around us, and that's something that I hope we maintain across the board here in our American society. If we love this country deeply, then it's not just about whether or not your candidate wins, it's about what our future is and what type of country we're leaving behind for our future generation. That's why I'm pleased to call Eric a friend and a partner, and to say that we're going to and so many faith leaders that are coming together as well to say, we want to make Dallas a model city of coexistence. We want Dallas to be a city that people can look at and can say overcame its societal ills.
Yes, we're up against many pessimists who would call themselves realists. We're up against quite a bit when we talk about the cycle, because what often happens is that America is inherently in a culture war. It's always been in a culture war. My master's degree is in political history, military history and political history. We always have an enemy. And as a country, we always identify ourselves by looking at our enemy. So we have to be at war with someone. And when we're at war with someone, that's how we craft our national identity. It has always been that case in American history. When we're at war with somebody, that's where we find ourselves. So we base our identity by our enemy, who we're fighting. Right now, it's the Islamic, the Islamic radical threat on the outside. Right? Before it was the Jews, before it was the Catholics, it was the communists. We had McCarthyism. We had Japanese internment camps. Where Japanese, over 120,000 American citizens were put in internment camps, because we can't trust you all. You look different, you're up to something. Right? And we cannot allow our country to go back to that base bigotry. We have to confront openly our ills of racism, of poverty, of militarism. And that's what makes us great Americans. That's what makes us good people. I often tell people, on your way to becoming a good Muslim, don't become a bad human being. And I say that to my Christian brethren as well, that you're a Christian and you're a human being. Being a good Christian should mean being a good human being. Being a good Muslim should mean being a good person. So if our religion leads us to be marginalizing, antagonizing, hateful human beings, then you're certainly not following Christ, peace be upon him, and I'm not following Muhammad, peace be upon him. That's not what we were taught. That's not what we're here for. So I pray that this lecture is part of, that this gathering that we have today is part of the solution, part of getting to know one another.
I apologize in advance if I offended anyone that came out tonight or if I took too long, or if I made you miss your dinner, or if I reminded you of that awful excuse for a debate that we had last night and you got a little sick to your stomach. But, you know, bless you all and thank you for being here, and I guess we'll move on to questions now. Thank you, Eric, and thank you to the church for having us.
Welcome back!
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