The Three Ex-Terrorists Speech at UC Irvine

Three former terrorists Walid Shoebat, Kamal Saleem and Zak Anani spoke last week to 1,300 people at the Orange County, California campus at UC Irvine. An excerpt from Lee Kaplan's The Three Ex-Terrorists Speech at UC Irvine:

Walid Shoebat then spoke about Western misperceptions of the roots of terrorism. He explained how in speaking abroad, from Chile to Mexico to the UK, he was told terrorism is the result of poverty and bemoaned the equivalency of the West with acts of aggression based on concepts of jihad that ignore historical and social realities in the Middle East. He explained how what the world is experiencing today is the old Islamic Caliphate of the Ottoman Empire, trying once again to rise to world dominance. He cautioned that the West is not recognizing the threat to its own civilization as news agencies like Reuters declare Hamas “a viable organization,” and explained how Al Qaeda was founded by Abdullah Azzam, a Palestinian from Jenin.

“Al Qaeda is the same as Hamas,” he warned. He then gave the audience, mostly college students, a history lesson of Arab Muslim alliances with the Nazis during World War II. He criticized college professors who do not teach their students the true history of the Middle East which promotes false notions about why America is under attack.

Shoebat knows his stuff. His historical information about the PLO was dead on. And he differentiated for the students that part of the PLO terrorism mechanism is made up of Christian Arabs of the PFLP. He praised Israel for building 35 universities for the Palestinians and how a family member told him that life in the West Bank under Israeli occupation was the golden age he wished he could return to and how life under the Palestinian Authority was hell. When asked by Walid if his family member preferred there not be a Palestinian state, he replied absolutely not. When asked why not, the family member replied, “We don’t want the Jews lording over us.”

Shoebat then explained how the root of the Israeli Palestinian conflict is not about land, but in fact about Jew hatred. “I hate terrorism, he said, I will speak against it all of my life” and questioned why the West found it acceptable that while Israel allows 1.2 Muslim Arabs to live as equal citizens in Israel, the West accepts the Palestinian idea that a Palestinian state must be Jew free. Citing Arab media polls, he explained how western leaders keep speaking about “moderate Islam” when in fact such polls show the majority of the Islamic world in favor of violent attacks on the West in the name of jihad and cautioned against a precipitous US withdrawal from Iraq. He then warned about the Muslim Students Union on 150 campuses in America, financed and led by Saudi Arabia that he considers a subversive jihadist movement that wants to indoctrinate the next generations of young Americans and urged the audience to resist its influence in America. He admonished the audience to “Never give in” and stand for appeasement in place of pro-actively fighting jihad in America.