[Order Michael Finch’s new book, A Time to Stand: HERE. Prof. Jason Hill calls it “an aesthetic and political tour de force.”]
Below is the video of remarks given by prolific author and Jihad Watch Director Robert Spencer at the Freedom Center’s Las Vegas Retreat. The event was held Sept. 11 & 12 at Fontainebleau in Las Vegas. Don’t miss it!
A transcript follows.
Transcript:
Thank you very much, Mike and everyone, for being here. I think that really, we can’t really call it a weekend if we don’t have a little current study. So, I wanted to give you a few quotes. Just a little inspiration to take away from this evening. One of them is the eighth chapter of the Quran, verse 22:
“The worst of all animals in the law of sight are the deaf and dumb who will not understand, and who are the deaf and dumb who will not understand.” Chapter 98 verse six says, “the unbelievers among the people of the book, that is, Jews and Christians who don’t become Muslims are the most vile of created beings.” And chapter eight, verse 55 says that they are “worse than animals for disbelieving in Allah.”
So that’s us. And the reason why I mention it tonight. Let’s hear it for the most vile of created beings!
Because I was reminded of those quotes, actually, when I saw the reaction in the House of Representatives and the European Parliament to the request that they observe a moment of silence in honor of Charlie Kirk. And not only, you know, when I read the story, I don’t know if you’ve seen the video, but it’s frankly shocking that when I read the story and it said, there were there was anger that broke out in the house of Representatives in the European Parliament when the right wing, far right legislators said “Let’s have a moment of silence for Charlie Kirk.”
But if you watch in particular the European Parliament video, it’s not just that they’re saying, no, we won’t we, you know, in the House of Representatives, they were saying, no, no, no. In the European Parliament, they’re banging on their desks and yelling and screaming as if they wanted to show how much hatred and contempt they had, not just for Charlie Kirk, but for anyone who would dare to think that he was worthy of being honored.
In other words, they think that Charlie Kirk and all of us are lower than animals, are the most vile of created beings, are not to be accorded basic human respect and the simple decency of a man who is murdered, who’s a young man who leaves behind a widow and small children. Basic decency of honoring him. It’s beyond them.
And so we see what we are up against. We see what we are dealing with. We are dealing with not just a faction or a political disagreement. We are dealing with pure evil. This morning I said, it’s not a matter of left versus right or Republican versus Democrat. It’s a matter of good versus evil. That’s what we are dealing with.
And that’s not to say, of course, that every one of us is perfect and or that all of them are all evil in every way. But the fact is that the goals that they have for our society, the things that they have in mind for us, are frankly evil. And there is no doubt about that. If you said to any one of the Democratic leaders, if you said to Zoran Mamdani, for that matter, who could well be the next mayor of New York, very likely will be.
What is your ideal society? If you could tell us, in all honesty, you in first place don’t lie to us. But they probably would. But if we got them, gave them truth serum or something, and got them to tell us what their ideal society would be, what do you think it would look like? Well, I’ll tell you what it would look like because it’s very clear they are socialists, internationalists.
Mamdani himself is a Marxist who has said that the ultimate goal is to seize the means of production; to seize the means of production means the government owns everything, and you are a slave to the government, and you can work all day and all night, and you can say, I’m going to work two jobs so that I can get ahead and provide for my family better, or live in a nicer house.
And they say, it doesn’t matter. You can work hard, you can be lazy all day, but you’re going to get the same wage and you’re going to get the same wage. No matter what, which is why socialist economies never work. And they always go into the tank because they destroy human initiative and take away the impetus for that human initiative, so that nobody has any incentive to do anything. So why bother?
Now there’s a corollary to that. If nobody has any incentive to do anything, then how is it that the Soviet Union, for example, lasted for 70 years? How is it that communist China is still going? Well, obviously it’s by means of another thing that they have in common with Islam, and that is the use of terror that you can say, well, there’s no point in working, no point in trying to get ahead because the government’s going to give me the same wage, whether I work hard or I sit at my desk all day and waste time.
However, if the Commissar is looking at you and seeing that you’re not doing work, you could end up in the gulag. So you have to do enough, at least while he’s looking, to avoid that. But even then, you can’t always avoid it. Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the great Soviet dissident, tells in The Gulag Archipelago all about how the Soviet Union would arrest people who had done nothing at all.
Now they arrested plenty of political prisoners. All of us, they would have arrested just for being here. But when they came in here to sweep us and get us all into the police wagons, they probably would have arrested a few of the waiters and some of the people in the staff as well, who have nothing to do with us.
Why would they have done that? It was not a mistake. It was a concerted effort to terrorize the population. The whole idea was that the innocent people would be arrested. They’d go to the gulag. Their friends and relatives would come and say, you know, there’s been a terrible mistake. My wife or my husband or my son was arrested and he did nothing, and they would get no satisfaction, because the whole idea was that the story about how he had done nothing and still was arrested would go all around the city, and all the people there would know, I can just do nothing at all. I can be minding my own business and they’ll still arrest me, so I better not give them even the slightest opportunity to think that there might be anything deviant about my behavior.
I will toe the line with exactitude and scrupulosity so as to try to avoid this fate. That’s the reign of terror of communist tyrannies, that you are absolutely frightened out of your wits, because you know that the government is arbitrary and irrational, and it hates you, but you have no power against it. And so you just try to keep your head down and do what they want and hope they don’t notice you.
Now, it’s exactly the same thing in the Islamic world. You all know that in Islamic law, if you commit a theft, they’ll cut off your hand. If you commit adultery, you’ll be stoned to death. If you do any number of other things like insult Muhammad or say something critical about Islam, you’ll be beheaded. The Islamic Republic of Iran has a crime on the books.
It’s part of the legal code. It’s waging war against the law. Now, how do you wage war against the law? What? Do you shoot arrows at them? You can’t. How do you. Where is he? You can’t wage war against the law. You can only wage war against the regime. But they associate the regime with the law. Once you wage war against the law, then they, in the judgment of the Islamic Republic, then they can put you in prison, torture you to death.
Women, they often rape while they’re in prison so that they will go to hell because a law blames the woman for a rape. It’s her fault that she wasn’t able to prevent the men from being tempted. And so she goes to hell. They rape the women who are in prison, then they kill them and they go straight to hell.
So they get them every which way. What is that terror? It’s the rule of terror in both the left and the Islamic world. And this is one of the reasons why they have such a close alliance, when it seems like, you know, we’ve got all these men who think they’re women and all these crazy delusions on the left.
And in Islam there’s a very strict morality, although it actually is far less similar to Judeo-Christian morality than most people think. But nonetheless, they have it. And a lot of people think, how could these two groups, people have asked me for 20 years or more, how could these two groups possibly alive? Well, they are alive. One of the reasons why they aligned so well is because they both rely on terror.
They’re both terrorists. They are terrorist organizations. And the celebration over the death of Charlie Kirk, the celebration of the murder of Charlie Kirk, the self-righteous posturing by people who politicians who have just finished calling for violence and saying, we have to fight the, the, the Trump supporters in the streets and so on, as Hakeem Jeffries said, and queasy on for May and many others.
These people are terrorists. They are in favor of terrorizing the population into submission. And this is one reason why they react to the death of Charlie Kirk in the way that they do, because they know that if the ideas that Charlie espoused and that we espoused here, that we espouse here now, if we win, then their stranglehold on power will be broken and they will not be able to exercise terror over the population.
Why do they want to exercise terror over the population? Because it secures their power. Why do they want power? Because then they are in control. They can act like God. They can decide life and death. In other words, I’m coming, right?
Back to what I said a minute ago, that this is a battle between good and evil.
And as we stand for humane values and as we stand for traditional ideas of what is right and what is wrong, and for basic common sense like, well, no, men cannot actually become women or vice versa, then we are in their crosshairs because they want to replace all that with their own construct. In both cases, in the Islamic scheme of things and the left, and they are hoping that they will frighten us into submission.
And so the main thing I wanted to do here tonight was to thank you all for being here, because it was an extraordinarily traumatic thing that happened on Wednesday. And there are I’m hearing that there were several people who were slated to come here who canceled. And I hope that’s not true. But if it is true, it’s perfectly understandable.
But what it is, is, is in a certain sense, you understand, it’s a capitulation to terror that the, the, the kid who shot Charlie Kirk. It wasn’t just that he hates Charlie Kirk. It wasn’t just that he wanted Charlie. Kirk silenced. It was also that he wanted to send a message to all of us that if you keep doing what you’re doing, you’re going to be on the list.
If you keep standing against them, then one day they’re going to get around to you. So I commend you for being here anyway, because you showed that you were not willing to capitulate to terror. You were not willing to give in to this kind of violent intimidation.
And that is what we need to win this battle.
I’m not intending to make this a religious talk, but there’s a very simple and direct quote from the New Testament, the Epistle of Saint James. Not very well traveled, part of the Bible, and it says, resist the devil, and he will flee from you. And that’s a very simple thing, that we stand up against this evil and show that we refuse to be cowed.
We refuse to be intimidated, and we refuse to submit. And then they’ve already lost, because terror is the only weapon that they’ve got. You know, in the Islamic Republic of Iran, they have had massive demonstrations against the regime. And there were massive uprisings just a few years ago. And so the only tool is if the Islamic Republic of Iran has a toolbox for how to deal with dissent, the only tool in it is terror, because that’s the only one the Koran gives them.
Strike terror in the enemies of the law. So they saw these women taking off their head. Headscarves, and they give them ten years in prison, and then they rape them in prison and execute them. And the people of Iran kept on coming. And ultimately they had to become so brutal and so horrendously violent that they were able to put down the uprisings.
But there is no doubt whatsoever that the more that the Iranian people continue to come at them, despite the cost, and to stand up against all the terror that they bring against them, that that regime will ultimately fall. But it depends entirely on whether people have the courage to do that. If it were to fall from external pressures, then it might not be the same thing.
We might end up with a regime that would be very similar. If the Iranian people can stand up to the terror, they will win. If we can stand up to the terror, we will win. I’m going to, finish up. I don’t really have a whole lot to say here. And I know we all want to have dinner, but I thought that, I’d tell you something that happened to me when I was six years old, and I was very interested in politics, and I went to my father was 1968, and I went to my father.
I knew that Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey were running for president. You remember that? No, I wasn’t born for another 30 years yet. But anyway. I asked him, who’s the good guy? Is it Nixon or Humphrey? Because, you know, I watched cartoons. I knew there was a white hat and a black hat, a good guy and a bad guy.
Sylvester and Tweety and, you know, it was very clear. And he said, they’re both good men. And I was kind of surprised. Wait a minute. How could they be both good men? Why are they fighting each other? And he said they have different ideas of what ought to be done for the country, what’s good for the country. But they both have good intentions and they both want what’s best for the American people.
And obviously, I’ve always remembered that. And I would have liked to have been able to say the same thing in a similar situation when I was the father and my son came to me and asked, but the fact is, that’s not the case anymore. That since then, for a variety of reasons, if it was even true, then it’s certainly not true now.
If the Democrats win in 2028, I don’t have to tell you. You know, that they will continue the totalitarian program they began to implement in the Biden regime with the Disinformation Governance Board, with the working with the social media giants to silence dissenters, with the classification of people like, Catholics, pro-lifers in churches, and what were the other ones? School board people? Parents at school board meetings protesting against the transgender business being forced on their children in primary school. And those people were classified as terrorists. All that will pick up again. Immediately. Because that is the goal of the left, as George Orwell put it in 1984. It’s the boot on the face forever.
Every day. That’s their vision of the perfect society. And so we, as the David Horowitz Freedom Center, as all of the people who are here tonight, as all of the organizations that are allied with us and friends and seeing things in a similar way. We are standing for the freedom of the human spirit against those who would extinguish that freedom and enslave us.
Now we know those regimes never last very long. They can’t because human nature being what it is, human beings yearn for freedom and they ultimately fight for it. And you know, I remember and remember also, it only takes one individual. Do you remember the early 80s, were any of you born yet? In the early 80s, I was in college, and we were taught that Ronald Reagan, of course, was a total idiot and that the Soviet Union was here to stay and that he was being needlessly belligerent with the Soviet when he should sit down and hammer out a deal with them.
And he was saying, the Soviet Union is an evil empire and its demise is imminent. And he was ridiculed. People said, what a dope. How could he say that in the first place? It’s tactically stupid to call this powerful nation an evil empire. And in the second place, they’re not going anywhere. They’re here to stay. And within a few years, he knew he was the only one who knew.
He stepped up the American arms program. The Soviets worked to keep up, and they wrecked their economy because their economy was built on slave labor to start with, it had no strength, and it could not stand the strength. He was the only one who saw it. And so I commend you again for being among the only ones today who see it, and who are here to stand for the freedom of the human spirit.
So I want to leave you with hope because you resist the devil. He will flee from you. Ronald Reagan actually defeating the Soviet Union is a terrific example of that. He saw it and he stood. He took the risk and he won. And because we know that the evil is not triumphant in the world. We know that if we stand in a similar way, we will also win.
And so this is, these are very dark days. Charlie was a great young man and he did tremendous work. And we will miss him. But now let’s stand in the breach and do what he did and more. And as we do that, and as we resist the devil, he will flee, and we cannot lose. Thank you.
