I’m Milo Yiannopoulos, thank you for coming. Tonight I have two objectives. The first is to be issued with a fatwa, which I surely will be any day now if I’m doing my job properly.
The second is to give you a more sober assessment, with the benefit of distance, about what happened in Orlando in June.
I was supposed to speak here at UCF back then. Following the terrorist attack at Pulse nightclub, I was planning on delivering a speech in the nice air conditioning of UCF on the dangers of Islam to the west.
But the speech was cancelled. The police felt they couldn’t protect me from many threats they received. I was perfectly happy to go on with the show; my primary concern was speaking. Orlando isn’t Sweden….yet.
Since I couldn’t speak at UCF, I delivered an address on Islam at ground zero, mere yards away from the Pulse night club.
The speech has been seen nearly a million times on my YouTube channel and over 5 million times in total.
A sober assessment, free of righteous indignation, doesn’t mean we can’t be funny.
One of the first things to disappear in the wake of a terrorist attack is humour. That’s one of the things they want. They want to make us afraid.
When we’re afraid, we don’t dare laugh in case it’s the wrong thing to do.
But laughing is one of the ways we show we’re okay, and that there can be a future beyond what has happened.
We aren’t going to beat Islamic terror only with tanks and bombs. We’re going to beat it with ideology. We’re going to beat it with laughter — by showing the people who live in countries ruled by dictators and thugs that they will not make us afraid.
By showing them that the West is best.
That’s how the Berlin Wall fell. People in East Germany knew that West Germany was better.
The freedoms enjoyed in this country, the best country, are, or should be the envy of the world. And when people are truly free, they laugh. They laugh about everything.
It’s often said that in order to find out who is in power, you have to find out who you’re not allowed to laugh about.
Today that’s feminists, Black Lives Matter and Islam. Those are the groups that will get you into trouble if you crack jokes about. You’ll have your newspaper column taken away. You’ll be banned from Twitter.
Of all these groups, Islam is the most inherently hilarious.
Their outfits are hilarious. Ridiculous. Is there anything more comically sinister than the sight of a herd of women swathed in black bedsheets?
Anything more unintentionally ironic about a religion that hates gays that gets its men in a room together 5 times a day to stick their asses in the air?
Is there anything more richly amusing than the crybully faux-victimhood of those who worry about “islamophobia” and hijab-pulling in the wake of terror attacks that leave dozens dead?
Is there — and perhaps this is just my gallows humour — anything more darkly funny than a religion so thin-skinned that cartoons designed to provoke it give rise to deadly shootings, as though to prove the point of those French cartoonists?
Is there anything more preposterous than the phrase “The Religion of Peace”?
Islam is really funny.
But it’s also sinister. And as a gay man, I really don’t like it very much.
It’s easy to bleat about Christianity. It’s low-hanging fruit. It’s more difficult, and it takes more bravery, to criticise Islam with sincerity and seriousness. And with jokes.
That’s what I’m here to do today.
Now originally I was going to call my talk 10 Things I Hate About Islam.
But on the way over here I got carried away and couldn’t bring myself to keep it to just 10. So I changed the name of my talk.
There are few people in the western world, save perhaps Daddy, Donald Trump, who have been falsely accused of sexism as much as I have. I mean, I championed GamerGate for God’s sake — and they still won’t shut up about it.
But to be honest I think I’m more feminist than most feminists. I mean sure, I think birth control was a mistake and women are happier in the kitchen, but that’s just my opinion. If women want to ruin their lives with the Pill and a string of unsatisfying one-night stands, that’s up to them.
I’ll always be here to comfort their unhappy ex-boyfriends.
Because I say things that offend feminists, the left considers me the number one threat to women today. But Muslims do far more than offend feminists, or offend women.
They’re actually enslaving them, forcing them into marriages, slashing their genitals — which, unlike the male genitalia, aren’t improved by a little trim.
Muslims think they own women to such a degree, that they think women who wear shirts above their ankles in European countries are fair game to be raped. That’s real rape culture, right there — not the bogus one on college campuses.
So, as long as I’m speaking out against Islam with a louder and more forthright voice than any feminist in America today, I feel justified in considering myself far more feminist than them. Even if I do hate abortion.
You’ve got a religion, in Islam, that not only bans alcohol, but bans bacon too. At least Jews are sensible enough to ban just one of those things.
The only thing more prescriptive and tiresome than Islam is my personal trainer.
Want to go to a strip club? Nope, sorry, haram.
Want to smoke cigarettes? Nope, ISIS will behead you for that.
Are you a tourist? Do you want to admire some historical monuments?
Nope, sorry, blown up.
Snogging on a beach?
As a Catholic, I can ask for forgiveness for my sins.
Muslims have their hands chopped off. Or worse.
The thing I always miss in discussions of Islam is what Muslims actually believe about God.
Christians believe in God, the Creator of heaven and earth, who loved his creation so much that he entered into it through the womb of a woman to become one with his creatures in their suffering.
This understanding of God has huge implications for the society that forms with Christianity as it foundation: we believe in a creator who made us in his image.
The Christian God invites us to make beautiful things in his honor, and the great pantheon in the west is an expression of this divine permissiveness. Art, literature, music and drama in the west are expressions of the licence given to Christians to explore themselves and their relationship to the ineffable.
Islam does not see God in this way. Allah is said to be Compassionate and Merciful, but he does not, in the words of a medieval historian friend of mine, enter into his creation.
He does not invite his creatures to be fellow creators. In fact he forbids it. He forbids much of what we in the west know is responsible for all the best art.
He forbids creativity in robust, dangerous, experimental ways. This, I think, rather than any petty sexual restriction, is what means there can be no accommodation made for Islam from gays whatsoever. We are society’s engines of chaos, pushing the limits of what can be thought and said, testing the boundaries of creativity and acceptability, sketching out social norms for the rest of you.
In the west, art is mainstream. In Islam, it is law and submission and the incredibly prescriptive rules laid down for life that guide how society is ordered.
The Muslim commander who conquered Alexandria asked the Caliph Umar what to do with the immense library there. According to one anecdote, told by Muslims, the Caliph Umar replied: “If what is written in the books agrees with the Koran, they are not needed. If it disagrees, they are not wanted.”
So the commander burned the library. Now this may be apocryphal but this story was originally told by Muslims and later repeated by famous Muslim writers.
People accuse me of being a self-hating homo because I say that if I had the choice, I probably wouldn’t have chosen to be gay.
Once again, that’s just an opinion. There are many things about being gay that I don’t like, like not being able to make mini-Milos.
But I don’t want to be thrown of a building. Or stoned to death. Or beheaded.
I’d quite like someone to threaten to do that to me. Or pretend to. I mean, I’ll be honest, it’s tough for me to get off without a knife to my throat or a gun to my head these days.
But Islam really means it, and the Left refuses to see the danger.
America’s gay Establishment spent all of last week having a hissy fit because Out, a gay magazine, decided to write a reasonably balanced profile of me.
Hordes of homophobic Muslims are being imported to the west so they can shoot up gay nightclubs, and the left says nothing — except to blame it on “toxic masculinity.”
I’m the self-hater? No. The whiny gay leftists who cry when I say something offensive but are silent in the face of an existential threat are the self-haters. They hate themselves so much they want to commit suicide — suicide by Islamic immigration.
Now, let’s get theological again for a moment. The difference between submitting to God as Mary did and the way in which Muslims submit themselves to Allah is important. God, as Christians encounter him, takes his creatures as beloved and elevates them to share in his divinity, restoring them to the image and likeness in which they were created.
This kind of relationship is unthinkable in Islam.
In other words, Muslims find it offensive to think that God could have lowered himself to become incarnate, but they find they find it even more offensive to think that God would elevate his creatures to share in his divinity.
What does this have to do with women and gays? Well, the God of Christianity, the God of the Old Testament and of the New, is a God of fire, consumed with love for his creatures. So much so that he enters them as he did Mary and Rupert of Deutz, a 12th-century Benedictine.
What does this have to do with Islam and its attitude toward women and gays? Islamic men cannot bear to think of submitting themselves in this way to God, they can only imagine themselves as dominating women, and they hate gays because gays submit in a way that they never can, which is why I think they find homosexuality so frightening.
How else to explain the unique viciousness of Islam toward homosexuals? 100 million people live in Muslim countries in which the penalty for homosexuality is death. The reason is subtle, but important, and if we don’t understand it, we can’t fight it.
Islam lacks authority. It’s headless, if you’ll forgive a cruel pun. So it lacks someone who can clean house or declare definitively that something is wrong or should be abandoned.
But despite lacking authority, Islam doesn’t encourage the kind of one-on-one relationship with God that you see in Christian traditions. Instead, Islam is collectivist, almost egalitarian.
You can see why so many lefties have a love affair with the religion. They’re the Borg in more ways than one.
Islam encourages its members to see themselves as part of a larger community of equals, the Ummah. The egalitarian strain can be seen clearly in how Muslims descend on Mecca to walk around the kaaba, rich men and poor men and men of different races (all men, of course) circling the great black mass like insects surrounding their queen.
Because of its emphasis on community, Islam is more cult-like than other religions. You aren’t supposed to turn to a priest or an authority figure for support or guidance — you’re supposed to turn to the rest of the ummah.
Islam encourages itself to treat everyone within the religion like a brother to be trusted and supported, and everyone outside it to be feared and suspected. It’s no wonder that it encourages tribal outbursts of violence, particularly against those who defeat and humiliate the tribe, like Israel.
If you take philosophy in high school, you might be taught about a little dilemma in political philosophy called the paradox of tolerance. Tolerance calls for, well, everyone to be tolerated — but what happens if you tolerate the intolerant?
The cultural Marxist Herbert Marcuse used this paradox to argue for the suppression of western conservatives — people who aren’t really intolerant, at least not anymore. However, you’ll still see leftists trying to purge conservatives like Mozilla founder Brendan Eich from mainstream society, seemingly oblivious to the real threat, which is Islam.
The Quran contains at least 109 verses that call Muslims to war with nonbelievers for the sake of Islamic rule. Some are quite graphic, with commands to chop off heads and fingers and kill infidels wherever they may be hiding.
Unlike nearly all of the Old Testament verses of violence, the verses of violence in the Quran are mostly open-ended, meaning that they are not restrained by historical context contained in the surrounding text, although many Muslims choose to think of them that way.
They are part of the eternal, unchanging word of Allah, and just as relevant or subject to interpretation as anything else in the Quran.
Islam is more insular and hostile to outside thinking than a gender studies department. So it gives us a clear answer to the paradox of tolerance: no, you cannot tolerate the truly intolerant.
If you give them an inch, they’ll take a mile, and rape everything inside it. And they won’t stop spreading.
There were 1.6 billion Muslims in the world as of 2010 – roughly 23 per cent of the global population – according to a Pew Research Center estimate. But while Islam is currently the world’s second-largest religion after Christianity, it is the fastest-growing one.
The growth of Islam should be one of the most disturbing things in the world for liberals. Here is a religion that forces women into submission, that executes gays, that tries to kill non-believers.
They’re the Westboro Baptist Church on steroids, except they’re not mental trolls from Kansas. They mean it.
And they’re spreading.
Islam preys on the most vulnerable in society, offering them a sense of higher purpose. It’s no wonder that gingers convert to Islam in such high numbers!
Islam today is like communism in the early stages of the Cold War. They’re presenting young, disaffected people with an idealistic, tribal, utopian vision that is drawing in millions. And like communism, it’s inspiring violence all around the world.
If there’s one thing we learned from the battle with communism, it’s that the west can’t compromise on its values. It can’t apologize for itself, like the left constantly wants us to do.
Like Thatcher and Reagan, we must present future generations with a vision of the west that is compelling enough to beat Islam’s warped vision of the good society.
It isn’t hard to do. The superiority of the west is self-evident. We just need to discover the courage to talk about it, like Thatcher and Reagan did. And we need to talk about it loudly.
We hear a lot about moderate Muslims, but in practice we don’t see them. All the moderate Muslims I know are ex-Muslims, or haven’t been to Friday prayers for months, or even years.
London has elected a Muslim mayor, Sadiq Khan, who is praised as a moderate But many have been left wondering just how moderate he is.
Khan banned sexy advertisements from the underground like the famous Protein World ads. Was this move really to combat body shaming, like feminists wanted? Or was it to make the underground more shariah-compliant?
It is one of those instances where feminism and Islam are right in line on women’s rights.
Sadiq Khan has met with a lot of shady and decidedly non-moderate Islamic types. He has associated with convicted terrorist Babar Ahmad, who is credited with inspiring the gang behind the 7/7 bombings. For those of you that don’t know, that was London’s smaller scale 9/11.
This is a mayor who says terrorism is “Part & parcel of living in a big city” but it shouldn’t be, should it?
England is one of the most illuminating examples of the lack of moderates.
A Gallup poll of Muslims in the UK found that not a single one of the 1,001 people polled thought that homosexuality was morally acceptable. Not a single one!
The entire world loves Malala, the Nobel Prize winning champion of education for girls. But look at her opinion, which passes in the media as moderate: “The more you speak about Islam and against all Muslims, the more terrorists we create.”
So Malala’s opinion is if we all just shut up and did what Islam wants, which is to submit, they wouldn’t need to shoot us, stab us, or blow us up.
Criticise us and we will kill you for your bad words. Great to know a Nobel prize winner has this sort of vision.
I can’t be the only person who reads that and takes it not as an exhortation to peace, but as a threat.
Muslim theology says God isn’t constrained, even by logic. If Allah wants to have 2 plus 2 equal 4 this evening but 5 tomorrow morning, he can.
Recall the Muslim outrage in 2006 when Pope Benedict XVI, the best Pope, gave a lecture in Regensburg on faith and reason. Benedict dared to quote a medieval dialogue between a Christian and a Muslim that made clear Christians think “not acting reasonably is contrary to God’s nature,” whereas Muslims don’t believe God is “bound” by rationality.
Curtis Yarvin, a Jewish entrepreneur and blogger, says that nonsense is a better organizing tool than the truth. “Anyone can believe in the truth,” he writes. “To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform.”
For many Muslims, the nonsense that is “Islamic science,” which holds that the earth is egg-shaped and that the stars are missiles created by Allah to throw at devils, is the only science they need.
Or consider the ascendant art of “Islamic creationism,” a batty spin on creationist theories forged in Turkey but funded by Saudi Arabia.
Scientific inquiry is virtually dead in the Islamic world. Arab nations stand near the bottom of every measure of human development. There is no world-class university anywhere in the Muslim world.
Spain translates more books in a single year than the entire Arab world has in the past thousand. Some people in Saudi Arabia still refuse to believe man has been to the moon.
I know some of you tonight probably don’t believe we’ve been to the moon either, but this is America. You are allowed to go against accepted opinion without being beheaded for it.
Historical revisionists and Islamic apologists like to bang on about the Golden Age of Islam, when the Arab world was the centre of learning and scholarship in the world. But this was a very brief moment in history, when the Arabs were translating Greek and Roman texts.
The Arab world had a brief period of scholarly advance because they happened to conquer some of the world’s leading libraries and translate the books. Big deal!
Many will talk endlessly about medieval Islamic doctors, scientists and mathematicians. But most of the men we think of were writing in Arabic because their lands had been conquered and they didn’t want their heads chopped off.
They were actually Jews, Nestorians, Byzantines, Hindus, Copts, and other non-Muslims.
Andrew Bolt on Sky News Australia, whose show I go on regularly because they get the lighting just right, perfectly encapsulated Islam’s integration problem in the west this week.
He recalled the case of Dr. Ibrahim Abu Mohammed, the grand mufti of Australia, who gave a speech to explain to Australians that they are wrong to think Muslims can’t integrate into Australian culture.
There’s just one problem. The Grand Mufti, one of the foremost Islamic scholars in Australia, delivered the speech in Arabic. He has lived in Australia for 19 years, and his integration speech is in Arabic. That’s what I call chutzpah!
I wish older people like the Grand Mufti were the real problem. But they’re not. What we have witnessed in Europe is the younger generation being more separatist and radical than the older generation, the opposite of what you expect from immigrant populations.
The differences in beliefs between Muslims in the west and the cultures they have moved to is striking.
In England, 52% of Muslims believe homosexuality should be illegal, compared to 5% of the general population.
And this isn’t just in Europe. It’s here in America, too.
In 2015 the Center for Security Policy commissioned a poll of Muslims in America. It found that:
- 30% of American Muslims believe it is legitimate to use violence against those that insult Islam
- 25% of American Muslims said that violence against Americans can be justified as part of global jihad
- 51% of American Muslims want to be allowed to be governed by Sharia Law
And here’s my personal favourite:
- 33% said that sharia should take precedence over the constitution if they clashed
That’s a lot of bad Skittles in the United States. Over a million of them.
Something we can all agree on is that the First Amendment, guaranteeing freedom of speech, is America’s most basic right. So it is very telling to understand the opinions of Muslims in America on this topic.
According to a Wenzel Strategies poll in 2012:
- 58% of Muslim-Americans believe criticism of Islam or Muhammad is not protected free speech under the First Amendment
- 45% believe that those who mock Islam should face criminal charges
- 12% believe blaspheming against Islam should be punishable by death
You don’t only have to worry about the Muslims who commit acts of terror like shooting up a gay nightclub. You should also be worried about the Muslims who quietly endorse their acts. To say nothing of the ones who fund them.
Since Islam views God as a non-rational tyrant, the religion naturally tends to produce bloodthirsty, irrational tyranny – a category that nicely covers ISIS, the Taliban, and many other Islamic regimes, including of course many major donors to the Clinton Foundation.
It would be nice if Islam had a way to reform itself out of these problems. But the unlikelihood of that is due in large part to our next reason to dislike Islam:
Integration in the west is one problem, but we must also consider integration in the east. Muslims can’t get along with anyone, including other Muslims. Just consider Iraq, where Sunni and Shia Muslims are constantly at odds.
What we witness on a regular basis is that muslims insist on special treatment in the west, while treating minorities in their homelands terribly.
The hypocrisy is blatant and unapologetic. The same Muslim groups who protest the ban on minarets in Switzerland in 2009 have no comment on the fact that it is illegal to build Christian churches in Muslim countries.
200 Subway sandwich shops in the United Kingdom removed all pork products and now carry only halal meat after outcry from the Muslim population.
The Sunni Muslim Al Azhar University cut ties with the Vatican after the Catholic Church condemned persecution of Christians in the Muslim world. They considered it, quote, “interfering in Islamic affairs.”
Muslims in the west will decry any desecration of the Koran, but trust me you don’t want to be caught in the wrong place in the Middle East holding a bible.
In war-torn Syria, Christians face unimaginable persecution at the hands of the Muslim majority. It is a curious fact that only 3% of the Syrian refugees brought to America are Christian. Could be the subject of a talk by itself.
The best example of how Islam expects to be treated as a minority and how it then treats minorities is in Indonesia, which I wrote about along with my colleague Allum Bokhari.
Indonesia is the largest Muslim country on earth, but is considered “moderate”, a designation that is essentially mythical.
They’ve declared there is no room for gays in the country, which is no surprise as we’ve discussed earlier, but discrimination doesn’t end there.
Chinese christians in Indonesia have a long history of persecution, which often involves beheadings. They’ve gotten used to beheadings in Indonesia, and I find that horrifying.
Indonesia is a secular country, but a whole region is now ruled by Shariah law, resulting in a 60 year old Christian woman being caned this year for the crime of selling alcohol.
Does that sound like the type of treatment any minority deserves, anywhere?
I have no words.
This city, and this city’s gay community in particular, now understands the threat of Islam. If you’re all here at my talk, I’m guessing most of you understand too. But very few people out there do — the media refuses to talk about the problem, and will go to any lengths to conceal the background of a terrorist attacker or a rapist gang if that background is Muslim.
So it falls to us to wake people up. We are in an unenviable position — on the one hand, we’re defending America from the excesses of the left, and the threat they represent to free expression and freedom of association. On the other hand, we have to defend the good things that the left has achieved — women’s rights, gay rights, and tolerance — from the threat of Islam.
Feminists won’t thank us for protecting them from Muslim patriarchs and rapists. Leftist gays won’t thank us for protecting them from being thrown off buildings and attacked in the street. Leftist atheists won’t thank us for protecting them from murderous theocrats.
But I know we’re going to do it anyway, because that’s what conservatives and libertarians do — the thankless, miserable, back-breaking clean-up operation. And we’ll do it with a smile. Because if we don’t, they win.
Thank you very much.
Written from prepared remarks.
Follow Milo Yiannopoulos (@Nero) on Facebook, Instagram and Snapchat. Hear him every Friday on The Milo Yiannopoulos Show. Write to Milo at milo@breitbart.com.
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