Brigitte Gabriel, president of ACT for America and author of They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It, was a guest on Wednesday’s Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Raheem Kassam.
Kassam asked Gabriel to expand on the article she wrote for Breitbart News on Monday, “The War on Girls.” The piece includes the harrowing account of a 16-year-old girl stabbed to death by her Palestinian father in a 1989 honor killing. A recording made of the incident captures the girl screaming and begging for her life while both father and mother order her to die quickly and quietly. The murder occurred not in the Middle East, but in Missouri; the girl was killed because her father thought she had become too “Americanized.”
“This is ‘honorable’ in Islamic societies, unfortunately, in many places around the world,” Gabriel said. “It is so sad that we in the West are starting to see such a rise in honor killings due to the rise of Islamic immigration into our countries.”
“I believe it is our duty to stand up for girls who are born in America, or England, or anywhere else in the world because they are Western girls,” she urged. “They want to adopt Western lives. They want to wear makeup. They want to get a job. They want to be able to drive a car and get out of the house with their friends to a coffee shop. But these are the sins that in some cases parents are killing their daughters for. That’s why this killed Tina, his daughter, because she got a job, she wanted to wear makeup, and he thought she was becoming too Westernized.”
Gabriel noted that in Europe, in 2004, “all European police associations held a meeting at the Hague to discuss the rise of honor killing in Europe.”
“The situation has gotten worse,” she said. “I know that in 2005, in London, in England, the British police reopened 1500 cases where originally they had thought it was just killing, just murder. 1500 cases were all reopened because they believed they were all honor killings, and the situation has just gotten worse.”
Kassam asked why the political Left seems to believe the defense of Islam takes priority over “the rights, and freedoms, and liberties, and lives of young women.”
“This is the perplexing question that we all are asking, and trying to figure out,” Gabriel replied. “I can understand why they’re not going to line up and say, ‘Oh my gosh, I don’t think we need to stop immigration, or we should be able to welcome refugees,’ et cetera. That’s fine. But when it comes to women’s rights, when it comes to genitally mutilating young girls – as young as six or seven years old – when it comes to killing women in the name of honor, you would think that the women’s movement at least would stand with us shoulder-to-shoulder to say this is not acceptable.”
“These are young girls – in the case of female genital mutilation, you are literally damaging the girl’s life for the rest of her life until the day she dies. The psychological effects, the medical effects, for years and years of misery to come. But they are not doing it,” she observed.
Gabriel suggested this was because “in order for them to admit that we’ve got to stand up for this, they’re going to have to shine the light or put the cause of this under the microscope.”
“People say well, it’s cultural. I say to them, if it is cultural – honor killing or female genital mutilation – how come we do not see Jews from North Africa or the Middle East genitally mutilating their daughters, or killing their daughter in the name of honor? How come we don’t see Christians from North Africa and the Middle East genitally mutilating their daughters or killing their daughters?” she said.
“The statistics speak for themselves. This is done almost 99 percent on Muslims by Muslims. It’s an Islamic practice, sanctioned in the Islamic code, for an Islamic religion,” she declared.
“For the lefties to basically say, ‘We need to stop this, what is causing this?’ to march against it will be literally standing up against and having to shine a light on the cause du jour for them, which is the Islamic cause, because they feel that Muslims are the underdog, and the oppressed, and we need to stand for them,” said Gabriel.
“What they call the right wing, or what they call wealthy business owners, they’re not poor. In the minds of the Left, you’ve got to be poor and downtrodden in order for you to be worthy of standing up for. This is why they are siding with the Islamic side instead of us,” she said.
Kassam suggested the Left pay attention to “the hard data that there is one case of female genital mutilation reported every hour in the United Kingdom,” and between 12 and 15 honor killings in the U.K. just last year. He said they should also be disturbed by the difficulty of obtaining solid numbers about such incidents in the United States.
Gabriel said the Left refuses to understand the problem, in part because “the Islamists in our countries, whether in Europe or whether in the United States, have perfected the public relations war.”
“They have perfected manipulating the media, which was already halfway there because, because as you know the Saudis and all the other money flowing from the Middle East into our universities has done an incredible job in brainwashing students in our political science departments and Middle East studies departments. By the time they graduate, they’re completely lock, stock, and barrel bought into the Islamic propaganda machine and ideas. They are today the news anchors, the news writers, the newsmakers, the policy shapers, the foreign policy makers. That’s why we’re seeing the attitudes and the resistance we’re seeing right now to our messages,” she said.
“However, we don’t have to stand back and wonder and watch them demonstrate, with us sitting on the sidelines talking about it and wondering why they’re doing this. We are organizing on our own. I can tell you that we in America, my organization ActForAmerica.org, this Saturday in just three days we are having rallies nationwide in the United States, in 29 major cities across the country, in 21 states,” Gabriel announced.
She said participants would “march against sharia, march for human rights, march for national security.”
“People can go to our website, ActForAmerica.org, click on ‘March Against Sharia,’ and find a rally near you,” she said. “We are the resistance movement that Europe did not have. America is not going to roll over and let the Islamists walk all over us, like what they have done in Europe. Here we are very organized, we are very passionate. We stand strongly behind our Second Amendment right, and we will defend ourselves.”
“We are applying pressure on our elected officials to do the right thing,” she added. “We have passed laws stopping sharia law from being instituted in many states in America. We have a bill called ALAC, American Love for American Courts, which has now passed in 12 states and is now introduced in another 10.”
Breitbart News Daily airs on SiriusXM Patriot 125 weekdays from 6:00 a.m. to 9:00 a.m. Eastern.