By Jonathan Sacerdoti: Why the West Should be Suspicious of Islam

This past week the Oxford Union debated the question “Should the West be Suspicious of Islam?” Jonathan Sacerdoti was one of the brave people daring to take on the yes answer. Here is a rough transcript of his remarks.

Thank you. Well, it’s very uh good to be back in the Oxford Union. I just want to take up a few points that we’ve heard from the other side, which is really their strongest argument appears to be that anybody that’s done something bad in the name of Islam actually wasn’t really Muslim or wasn’t really carrying out the true scripture of Islam. Uh, and indeed they are non-believers, but even those people Islam has some pretty vile treatments in store for. So on that basis alone for non-believers of Islam I would query whether or not we should be suspicious of it and and I I must say again I must echo the thanks to the president for her hospitality in bringing us here tonight. I have admiration for her holding this debate. She was also a wonderful host at the dinner last time they sat me almost outside. But she had me on the high table. Indeed she offered me some wine. But I thought that Allah had cursed wine. its drinker, its server, its seller, its buyer, its presser, and the one for whom it’s pressed, the one who carries it, and the one to whom it is carried. So, I hope that she still counts as a Muslim, given that her version of Islam is one that sounded much nicer than the one that many of us are familiar with.

Five minutes before Salman Adi detonated his bomb, killing 22 people at an Ariana Grande concert in Manchester Arena, he was spotted by Kyle Lawler, an 18-year-old security guard. And after the bombing, Kyle told the Inquiry, “I just had a bad feeling about him.” Kyle had been suspicious, but he didn’t act. He didn’t raise the alarm. Why? Here’s what he said. I felt unsure about what to do. That’s what he told the inquiry. I’m being branded a racist. It made me hesitant. 22 people were killed. This is a lesson in ignoring suspicion. And it’s one that the West needs to learn urgently.

I’ve had phone calls this week from friends, family, colleagues. Some called to praise me for my courage, others to question my sanity for coming back here. and one or two who begged me not to speak with you tonight. Why? In what way does it take courage to come and speak at a student debating society? Why would it be foolish for my safety to debate at the invitation of a Muslim woman with two Muslim men and a mock Victorian Catholic knight? We all know why. Which bit is mocked? Well, the Victorian

We all know why. It’s why there’s quite a lot of security here. It’s why there’s a bit of electricity in the air. It’s why this debate generated news coverage before it even happened. It is because of Islam. Now, I’m not a Muslim for the purposes of full disclosure. I’m a Jew and a Britain. So, I’m not here to speak for Muslims and what individual Muslims do or don’t think or feel or believe. I’m not here to argue over Quranic verses and hadith. I’m here tonight to represent the other side of this debate, Western values.

I’m here to talk about how Islam has encroached on our lives. I would love not to be here, especially at this time.

I would love never to talk about this topic again, never to talk about Islam. It’s not my faith. It’s not my ideology, but over and over again, it has confronted me coming for my life, for your lives.

I am not motivated by hate. Whatever those people outside say, the only person in this debate who has made physical threats was over there. I am motivated by love. Love for freedom, love for life, love for debate, for discussion, love for the West.

The West is a civilization of defiant liberty and fearless truthtelling. And that is why I’m here now. Now, I often ask people what their first conscious memory of Islam was. For me, it was as a child of eight or nine when Salman Rushi published the Satanic Verses. What followed was a global eruption of Islamic fury, book burnings in the streets, a death fatwa from Ayatolla Khomeini, and a trail of terror that crossed decades and borders. My own father, a book seller who believed in the fundamental western right to read and write, even offensive ideas, was forced to sell copies from behind the counter for fear of his own life. Translators were stabbed, publishers shot. And over 30 years later, in 2022, a young Muslim assassin, Hadi Matar, nearly murdered the elderly Rashi on stage in New York, blinding him in one eye because he wrote a story. Yet in the face of this medieval intolerance, Rashi struck back with the West’s greatest weapons, his pen and his mind. Writing a new book, Knife. He fought violence with art: Western. They fought art with violence: Islamic.

But you don’t need to be a writer to have suffered the violent intrusion of Islam into your life. On September the 11th, 2001, 19 hijackers cried, “Allah Akbar!” as they murdered nearly 3,000 people in the name of Islam, flying planes into the Twin Towers. On the 7th of July 2005, four British Muslim suicide bombers slaughtered 52 commuters on London’s tube and a bus, declaring, “We are at war and I am a soldier.” In 2013, Michael Adibilario beheaded the young British soldier Lee Rigby in broad daylight on a Woolitch street and then proudly told police and cameras his hands dripping in blood, “I’m a soldier of Allah.” Theo Van Gogh stabbed, shot, nearly decapitated in Amsterdam for criticizing Islam. his killer pinned a note to the body declaring it was done quote by the law that commands me to cut off the head of anyone who insults Allah and his prophet.

[interjection] Can you give me examples from the scripture directly in contact properly that would advise or point to the actions of any of these specific people? [reply] This is the crux of this point. I don’t need to give you those examples because all of these men who slaughtered westerners who slaughtered other Muslims gave their quotes from your holy book.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali who worked with Van Gough she’s lived with roundthe-clock protection ever since she was a Muslim who committed the crime of leaving that faith and criticizing it are you starting to see the pattern yet in 2006 Ilan Haleimi a French Jew was kidnapped, tortured for 24 days, and burnt alive by a gang who shouted, “Guess what? Allah Akbar, a rabbi, and three small Jewish children gunned down at a school in Tulus. A kosher supermarket in Paris, four Jews executed, a teacher at Batley Grammar School here, hounded into hiding by Muslim mobs, baying for his death for showing a cartoon.

Charlie Ebdo, Three Gay Friends in Reading, David Amos, MP, Streatham, London Bridge, Westminster Bridge, Parson’s Green, Manchester Victoria station, journalists, gay men, Jews, MPs, commuters, police, ordinary citizens. The list goes on and on. Dishonest people will tell you that this is not Islam, but extremism. Extreme what? extreme Janism, extreme Quakerism. The two converts to Islam opposite cannot deny that those killers were Muslim following their Islamic beliefs. They said it themselves. The list of Islamic contributions to our Western life demonstrates that human cost, the human cost that makes people in here afraid to even talk about Islam. That’s why we’re suspicious of Islam.

And don’t worry, I know that Islam is not all violence. It’s also political. In 1928, Hassan Albana founded the Muslim Brotherhood, a disciplined movement to reverse the fading of traditional Islamic life in Egypt. Building an entire alternative Islamic society. I I have another couple of pages which I hope you’ll give me the courtesy of. building an is an an entire Islamic society, mosques, schools, charities, youth groups, businesses, institutions, which they then spread to the west. And their devised strategy was one of patient Islamic transformation from within. A civilizational jihad. Don’t worry, that is not a far-right name made up by Tommy Robinson or me. That’s actually what they called it. And we know that because the FBI seized their 1991 explanatory memorandum setting out the plan to settle in the West, build Islamic centers as bases, infiltrate institutions, and work until, quote, Allah’s religion is made victorious over all other religions. No information. Nearly a century later, they are widely accepted across Europe and in the US and much of the West as a dangerous threat to democracy. So Islam doesn’t only attack with bombs. Sometimes it uses our own freedoms and our own land and our own institutions against us.

And Islam’s ambition to spread is not always so subtle. Historically, Islam is an ideology of conquest and expansionism. After Muhammad’s death in 632, its armies burst out of Arabia and within a century conquered much of the ancient Christian world, the Middle East, North Africa, Egypt, Syria. They pushed into Spain, alandelooi, where’s that name from? They reached France, halted at tours in 732.

[interjection] If the honourable gentleman will give way. May I remind him of what happened in 1492. The Muslims were expelled along with the Jews from Spain by Christians. [answer]: They were indeed. [interjection}: These sorts of wrongs have happened between all religions throughout history. [answer]: excuse me. Absolutely. And and if you would like to invite me back, Sir Reese Moog, I would be delighted to debate your religion and your faith and the wrongs that it has done my people as well. But that is for another evening.

Wherever they’ve conquered, Jews and Christians were reduced to dhimmis, defeated peoples living under submission, tax, and Islamic supremacy. Because at Islam’s core is political, theological dominance, not private internal faith.

They may try to hide it, but it is written in blood across the centuries until today.

For every other ideology, we can be proud of the positives and still suspicious of the negatives. But some people are so quick to list all the great things they say Islam’s contributed. The second speaker that he gave some money once to an old man who was in need. But they utterly reject any Islamic connection to all the dreadful things that I’ve mentioned tonight.

The bits they like, those are all Islam. But the bits they don’t like, well, not Islam. totally binary in an era when being non-binary is all the rage.

Everything today is on a spectrum… except Islam.

So, I’m asking you to believe your own eyes, to accept your own survival instincts, apply the same rational thoughts to Islam that you would and should to any other set of ideas and behaviors. Kyle Lawler, that Manchester Arena security guard, will live forever with the heavy weight of ignoring his suspicion. Don’t be Kyle Lawler. Don’t be afraid to call out an urgent danger that you instinctively identify just because you’re afraid.

What we have in the West is worth protecting. our freedoms, our culture, our ethics, this university, this country, all of it. And it can compete, it can win. But only if you stay curious, stay intelligent, stay suspicious, especially of Islam.