‘The West is empowering radical Islam’

Islamic blasphemy laws have arrived in Europe. Two men in Britain have been arrested in the space of month for allegedly burning the Koran. Both were apparently acting in solidarity with Salwan Momika, an Iraqi refugee and outspoken atheist, who was murdered last month in Sweden while burning the Muslim holy book. Had the Islamist mob not got to him first, he would have stood trial for his supposed blasphemy. Either way, he would have been silenced.

Yasmine Mohammed – ex-Muslim and president of Free Hearts Free Minds – joined The Brendan O’Neill Show last week to discuss this unholy marriage between the Western authorities and hardline Islamists. What follows is an edited extract from that conversation. Listen to the full thing here.

Brendan O’Neill: What do you make of the recent spate of Koran-burnings?

Yasmine Mohammed: I normally wouldn’t burn a Koran. It’s not really my form of protest. But I very happily burned one recently, after Salwan Momika’s murder last month. I’m grateful to see that so many brave people have done the same thing. The best way to push back against these murderers, terrorists and bullies is to do exactly the thing that causes them to have their tantrums. When we capitulate and pander to them, and when we do things like criminalise Koran-burning in Scandinavia, we are empowering Islamists. We are encouraging them to continue with their bullying.

That’s why I love the fact that people have been burning Korans in response to Momika’s murder. We saw similar things after Samuel Paty was killed in France, the French schoolteacher who was accused of showing his pupils a cartoon of the Prophet Mohammad. People in France took those images from Charlie Hebdo, the images that were so offensive to the people that murdered Paty, and put them all over buildings across France. That’s what we need to be doing. We need to fight back against their violence and their aggressive, terrorist activities with free expression and free speech. We need to show them that we are not going to bow down. We are not going to lose our values in order to appease them.

O’Neill: Would you say there is a kind of neo-blasphemy law creeping into Western societies?

Mohammed: We have been seeing that for a very long time. Unfortunately, that is the situation right now. When the Islamists came up with this term ‘Islamophobia’, this is exactly what they had in mind. For years, the Organisation of Islamic Cooperation (OIC) – the largest non-governmental body other than the UN – has tried to encourage the spread of blasphemy laws. It wants to criminalise criticism of Islam. That has not been successful. So what the OIC did instead was create the term ‘Islamophobia’. It very stealthily created it so that it would sound like xenophobia or homophobia – things that progressive people would immediately want to rally against.

A lot of those who stand against ‘Islamophobia’ think they’re being good. That they’re protecting and defending Muslims. But they’re not – the road to hell is paved with good intentions. They are protecting and defending the ideology of Islam.

Once this term was spread, it essentially turned into bottom-up blasphemy laws. They couldn’t do top-down laws, like in Iran, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Afghanistan and everywhere else. They can’t arrest people in the West. They can’t lash them in the streets. They can’t behead them. They can’t imprison them and kill them. So they created this term and propagated it among the useful idiots. They knew that progressives in the West would use the term and police people for them. And it has worked like a charm, unfortunately.

O’Neill: What is it that makes people not only accept the idea of Islamophobia, but also turn themselves into warriors against Islamophobia?

Mohammed: That’s really the million-dollar question. Why are they so eager to commit social suicide?

Just recently in Australia, there were two nurses who said on camera that they would happily kill Israeli people in their hospital. Of course, there was an outcry from all normal people. And yet 50 Islamic organisations from Australia wrote publicly in support of these two nurses.

This is what you have to understand. The person who murdered Salwan Momika is a drop in the ocean. He has a tsunami of support behind him. When those two nurses spoke up – so empowered, so comfortable, so confident – about how they wanted to kill Israelis in their hospital, it’s because they know nothing is going to happen to them. They know there are many among the two-billion-strong ummah behind them supporting them.

Radical Islam is a cult. I was a part of this cult. It is a hive mentality. I describe in my book how it’s like a school of fish. Everybody has to move in unison. Everybody has to follow and do what they’re told. You shut off your brain, you shut off your thinking, you shut off your heart, you shut off your feelings, your emotions. You shut off everything, because all of that is from the devil. You just do as you’re told. It’s mind control.

The West empowers radical Muslims. We don’t even know what we are up against. We are facilitating and empowering them under the guise of diversity and inclusion and multiculturalism. We don’t even know what we’re doing. We don’t even realise how badly we are leading ourselves to our destruction.

Yasmine Mohammed was talking to Brendan O’Neill on The Brendan O’Neill Show. Listen to the full conversation here: