Michael Coren: It's not just what happened last week and it's still continuing to happen all over the world, it's also the reaction of people you think should know better to this. They, they're blaming the, that idiot who made this stupid film. That's not the issue, for goodness sake! The issue is mass violence murder, hostility, craziness, and …. Steve Emerson has been writing and commenting, commentating on these issues for so long now and really predicted this would happen. Steve, welcome to you. It's always good to have you on the show.
Steven Emerson: Hi, Michael. Good to be here with you, and you're right, and actually, in the 17 years I've been working on, I did a documentary in 1994 called "Jihad in America" and in 1996 I got my first death threat. This is way before today. Today's New York Times, you know, gave all the grievances; why Muslims are angry. None of the grievances happened in the 1990's and yet the '93 World Trade Center bombing happened, you know, 17 years ago. So, the bottom line here is the issue is not the film. The issue is the fact that the Muslim Brotherhood and their like don't believe in the First Amendment., don't believe in free speech, and the irony of course is that the, the liberal pundits in this Administration said, "Well, if we have democracy in the Muslim world, it'll satiate their political anger. They'll chatter within the political system. What they're doing is they're imposing a totalitarian system on their own people, and now they're imposing it on us.
COREN: Yes. This is so significant. We may never win over people in the Middle East. The Islamic World may always believe that censorship is the order of the day, but it's beginning, as you say, to influence people in the West. People who have called themselves liberals for so long, are saying, "Well, you shouldn't provoke them, that the moviemaker was in the wrong. We should change our way of life to accommodate theirs.
EMERSON: This is, listen, Michael. This is big. Hollywood now feature any more Islamic terrorists or protagonists. In fact, they submit their scripts to Muslim Brotherhood front groups. Publishing houses, like the one doing on the one on the Danish cartoons, won't republish the Danish cartoons, right? So, we're self censoring ourselves. We have this culture or relativism that Western values are no longer superior, that the First Amendment, I mean that the way we reacted was, we regret the fact that we have a First Amendment, and then most reporters started investigating the crazy guy that did the film., when the real investigation should have been about the fact that these people insist that their values which is, are totalitarian should be applied to our system, and the President should have stood up, and instead of saying, demanding that our diplomats be protected, should have said, "We have the First Amendment, that's a sacred right of this country, of the West. It's the bedrock of Western civilization, and unless you respect tha, t we're not going to deal with you.
COREN: You mentioned, and for those who are not aware of this, you mentioned the Danish cartoon. There is an entire book written about the Kurt Westergaard cartoon of Muhammad. The entire book is devoted to that subject. There is not one single cartoon in the entire bloody book.
EMERSON: Yeah, well, that's right, I mean. And in this country, by way. And in Europe, in sympathy to the Danish cartoonists,. newspapers around Europe published the cartoons. In this country, out of the 300 newspapers, only two newspapers republished the cartoons. And the book that's being published, of course, you know about South Park, the televisions comedy series. They censored, you know, a whole series that featured a satire on Muhammad. They satire all religions. The reality is that, that they, empowering them now has given them the right to basically impose values and also it has stoked new violence that we've never seen before. This is not going away. This is the beginning of a new chapter, and in fact in the next four years, I'm going to predict this right now: that you, that we will now see the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood, a whole, it's going to take away. It's going to replicate the sphere of influence that the Soviet Union once had. It'll be the Muslim Brotherhood Union. They'll have Iran on their side. They'll probably have nuclear weapons. And, and the world will be a much more dangerous place
COREN: Well, it's interesting that you say that because the Soviets were who they were, we knew, and there was a certain consensus of, of aspiration if you like. And they probably also acknowledged that their sphere of influence stopped at a certain place. They did want to survive. They didn't want Armageddon. They valued life over death as opposed to the Muslim Brothers. This is a very, very different confrontation now. And they are winning. And we have this Fifth Column that is incredibly large. Are there are liberal journalists, any journalists on the left who are standing up and saying, "Hey, guys, what are you doing here? We believe in freedom of speech."
EMERSON : Well, there are some, interesting enough, there are some. Well, there aren't many. I'll tell you the truth. I mean, you won't find in the New York, the irony of course is that liberals and the ACLU should be standing. The ACLU for example, the American Civil Liberties Union, was founded on the basis that there shouldn't be any blasphemy laws, and yet in the last ten years they've appointed members of the Muslim Brotherhood in the U.S. to all their boards, who believe in blasphemy laws. And the reality is, we are essentially implementing them, although we don't admit it, these type of self censorship, blasphemy laws. People won't publish books. People are, I'm doing a new documentary. It's coming out in the next week, it's called "Jihad in America: The Grand Deception." It's about the Muslim Brotherhood front groups in the United States. I cannot tell you the reactions I've gotten from major cable channels who are afraid to air it. They won't admit it, but they're afraid, right? And that's affecting our freedom of speech already, without openly admitting that they're being intimidated. So we're already being affected by it.
COREN: Of course, and it does come down to this. It really does. Blasphemy laws. People will try and twist and turn and say, "Well, provocation and offense, Many things which are offensive and provocative. We have certain laws such as
EMERSON: You know what? Being not a Muslim, being not a Muslim is offensive. I was just reading a transcript – and we do a lot of undercover work – and I was reading a transcript of a group based in New York, but they're Jamaat e Islami, called the Islamic Circle of North America, and they admitted their entire mission in North America and around the world is Da'wa, to convert others to Islam and they freight it however in the cultural neutral term of trying to be, to open people eyes to another religion, but they admit in this conference that, our purpose here is to convert everybody to Islam, and in fact Islam was on top of the world until they lost at the gates of Vienna, and then they've been on the bottom of the world. And how do they explain this? The West and the United States now is, has been involved in a conspiracy to subjugate Islam. So no matter what we do, Michael. No matter what year, they'll always have grievance. OK? And they believe we are at fault for the fact that they are at the bottom of the totem pole in the world today. And the reality is, you know, the great scholar Bernard Lewis wrote a great piece after 2011, after 2001, called "The Roots of Muslim Rage." And I recommend that for everybody. And it shows that, that, you know, the New York Times story that they're angry about Gitmo. They're angry about the Iraq War. They're angry about Afghanistan. I tell you, those things are, yes, they're angry about that. They're also angry about the fact that the United States, you know, has freedom of speech.
COREN: You know, I wish we had more time. Saddam Hussein was hated by Islamic Fundamentalists. He was a secularist who dealt with fundamentalists in a way, well, maybe others should have, but hey had no time for him at all. This nonsense about conspiracy and persecution. What you say, it comes down to blasphemy. The very people who consummate dramas about how evil the Medieval Church was and blasphemy, are the very same people who just open the door to Islamic fanatics and say, "You have more blasphemy laws, we'll accept them because we're too frightened and intimidated to actually stand up to these people, and say, 'Enough is enough.'"
EMERSON: Michael, when was the last time a Westerner or US mob or Canadian mob attacked a, embassy, Muslim embassy or consulate for the tens of thousands of videos on YouTube and on Internet site with Islamic clerics calling for the killing of Christians and Jews? I can't remember one.
COREN: It's never happened, and it never will. Steve, a great pleasure as it was We'll have you back in the show very soon. Thanks so very much.
EMERSON: You're very welcome.