On December 10 Srdja Trifkovic was interviewed by Mike Church—who presents a nationally syndicated radio talk show—about his article “Defeating Domestic Jihad: A Program of Action,” published on this site on December 4. We bring you the transcript of that interview.

MC: Let’s talk about your essay that you have published on Chronicles magazine website, “Defeating Domestic Jihad: A Program of Action” . . . Do you mean an American plan of action?

ST: American, of course. My analysis of the problem posed by the jihadist networks  is primarily focused on how the United States can and should defend itself from what in Europe, unfortunately,  is literally getting out of control. What I am suggesting as an American program of action is more or less out of question in Europe, now that we have a wave of roughly one million so-called refugees—in reality illegal migrants. They are pouring into an unprotected, demoralized, and politically inane Europe, from both the Middle East and North Africa. This is throwing the security services in Western Europe into a total quandary.

America is not there yet, but it might get close to that imbroglio unless some measures are taken to prevent the disaster from developing. My essay was really an attempt to define the issues in value-neutral terms, to look at them not in terms of an emotional response to St. Bernardino but to develop a realist approach. Of course it will be decried as “xenophobic” and “Islamophobic” by the liberal elite, but it is nevertheless the only way to think about it and talk about it.

MC: You say, number one, that spying on Muslims is necessary, legal and justified, and I agree with that. How do you convince the American government, with all the trouble that candidate Trump is going through for even suggesting that there should be some kind of moratorium on importing Muslims?

ST: First of all, the precedent for what I am suggesting already exists. It was considered perfectly legitimate for the United States’ authorities to spy on members of the Communist Party and various affiliated front organizations, both before and during the Cold War. It is justified if a group professes an ideology which is fundamentally opposed to the basic principles of the U.S. Constitution, opposed to the notion that the Constitution is the rock bed, the foundation of the American political system. No believing Muslim can ever aver to respect the U.S. Constitution above all other systems or documents, because it would be an act of apostasy. It would be a mortal sin, because the Sharia—to a believing Muslim—is the only universally valid, eternally valid law of any land. The Sharia system is of course based on the Kuran and the Sira, the example of the “prophet.”

Ever since the time of Muhammad and his four immediate successors, the first four caliphs in the seventh century, the model of the eternally valid political, legal and religious authority was established. Islamist revivalists have tried to emulate it ever since. What I am saying is that if you are seriously committed to the Muslim faith then you cannot be a “regular American.” You cannot swear the oath of allegiance as a naturalized U.S. citizen, as I did some 15 years ago. You cannot owe allegiance to a system based on what is, essentially, a man-made document. To a believing Muslim, the only source of authority, the only bearer of legitimate sovereignty, is Allah and his anointed representative in this world, the Caliph. That was the model established by Muhammad when he conquered Mecca. It has been followed ever since by his various successors, in Damascus, in Baghdad, in Egypt, in Spain, and of course in the Ottoman Empire from the early 16th century until its collapse in the aftermath of World War I.

What I am saying is that for legal purposes it is necessary to regard Islamic activism, which necessarily entails the advocacy of Sharia law, as an inherently seditious political activity—so that no one can raise the objection of the suppression of “religious” beliefs, “violating human rights,” and all that nonsense. We are talking about a very clear, very coherent, long-term plan of political action, which postulates that the world is divided in a Manichean black-and-white manner, into the “world of faith,” Dar al-Islam, and the “world of war,” Dar al-Harb. Whatever is not under their rule is automatically, by default, Dar al-Harb. This existential historical drama can only end with Dar al-Islam prevailing upon the whole of humanity, and the Sharia system governing the lives and conduct of all seven and a half billion people in this world.

This may sound melodramatic, but this is literally what they [Muslims] believe. What I am saying is that those who believe that should be supervised—just as stringently supervised as the Bolsheviks, Trotskyites, and other groups with their cataclysmic end-of-times agendas had been supervised over the decades. I do not believe that there is anything strange or extreme about that. The only reason why the dominant discourse in the United States is opposed to this notion is that it is in the hands of people who do not know Islam, do not know its teachings, have not read the Kuran, have not read the Hadith (“Traditions of the Prophet”), and do not realize that, ultimately, Islamist ideology derives its authority from these texts—and not from any notion of inherent human rights, or sovereignty of the people, or democracy.

MC: Something else that you wrote here is that we should “refuse or rescind citizenship to Islamic activists.” That sounds at least like one of the components of what candidate Trump is saying that until we figure out all this and the way to go, how to deal with it, we shouldn’t import any more people from Muslim countries. Is that fair to say?

ST: It is, rather. I am mildly amused by Donald Trump out-trifkovicing Trifkovic. I do not know if Trump reads articles from the Chronicles site, or perhaps some of his advisors might . . . The oath of allegiance when you become a U.S. citizen is a contract where you commit yourself to respecting a legal document par excellence, which is the U.S. Constitution, in preference to any other source of legal authority . . . which excludes and trumps (excuse the pun) all others. If we find out that a naturalized Muslim has engaged in the promotion of Islamist supremacy, of the Sharia law and Islamization of America and everything that goes with it, he has really violated this legal contract. Accordingly it should be made null and void, and the person deported to his country of origin. I believe that my position is eminently logical and reasonable. It does not seek to violate anybody’s human rights. Swearing the oath of allegiance to become a U.S. citizen is a voluntary act. You don’t have to do it if it is in conflict with your conscience.

MC: Dr. Trifkovic published his Chronicles essay on December 4. Candidate Trump made his now-famous statement on denying entry to Muslims into the United States on December 5. So there’s a one-day divide there. We don’t know if Trump or Trump’s people read Chronicles, but now you can easily call it not “the Trump plan” but “the Trifkovic plan”?

ST: I am still waiting for the phone call . . . (chuckle). It simply means that certain ideas have come of age. What I used to say or write some years ago—I outlined a similar plan of action in my book Defeating Jihad which was published in 2007, and was severely criticized by some of the PC police—is becoming an increasingly legitimate, common-sense view of many Americans. We have been force-fed so much pap on the “religion of peace and tolerance”—and in this respect both Gorge W. Bush and Barack Hussein Obama are equally guilty—that the gap between the politically-correct propaganda and the ugly reality has become obvious.

The schism is so yawning that reasonable people are no longer willing to swallow the myth. I think it is necessary to start systematically thinking through a long-term strategy of defense. If it is not done, if Obama is able to import those so-called Syrian refugees, in reality migrants, and if the security services are burdened both by the shackles of non-profiling and by the exponentially rising numbers of potential suspects and culprits, then the situation will become untenable. It is already impossible in Europe, as I said a minute ago. America is not quite there as yet, but America needs to do all that is possible to prevent the problem from reaching the level of real and present threats that exist today in, say, France or Britain.

MC: The Guardian is reporting on the cloistered society of Islamists who have immigrated into Great Britain and who now systematically refuse to assimilate. They are saying “No!” They don’t want to be Englishmen, they are Muslims, they are practicing Sharia, and they are not leaving. OK, if they are not leaving, and they are practicing Sharia, and their numbers are growing, what does that mean for us—and as you just said, that means implementation, ultimately, of Islam, rising out of the desert as a perversion of some heretical sects of Christianity and Judaism . . . And in view of Syria, are we heading for a world war?

ST: My answer is somewhat paradoxically optimistic. For as long as Obama is president, the danger of an uncontrolled escalation is less than it will be if Hillary Clinton becomes president, or if some of the gung-ho candidates of the Republican Party, Rubio or Jeb Bush in particular, make it. Obama is primarily interested in revolutionizing the American society, in making America irreversibly un-American. I am putting in shorthand, but I am sure your listeners will understand. He is less focused on some foreign adventures that may lead to uncontrollably escalating conflicts, even though I do not exclude the possibility that some elements of the American “deep state” had a hand in telling the Turks where exactly and when the Sukhoi-24 will be, and letting them do their own thing. If this woman becomes president, with her modus operandi and her world outlook, her system of values, then—oh, my God!—it will be a very bumpy ride, and we should be prepared for the worst. Paradoxically, let me repeat, it is exactly because of his focus on the irreversible alteration of the nature of the American polity, of the American society as we know it, with his insistence on the amnesty for illegal immigrants in pursuit of which he was even prepared to deploy extra-constitutional means last year, that Obama has been less of a trigger-happy interventionist than his predecessor.

The danger will arise if—as unfortunately seems likely—Hillary Clinton does become president. As demographic changes in some of the key states over the past four years, with naturalization of the automatic voting bloc for the Democrats, make probable. It will mean that, for the first time in U.S. history, we’ll have a truly deranged person as our chief executive. It is a horrible prospect, which raises all sorts of geopolitical and strategic issues. Unfortunately, this prospect cannot be analyzed in a rational way, because we are dealing with a fundamentally irrational and insane person . . .

You mentioned something very interesting in the previous segment, the ghetto-minded Islamic diaspora in Great Britain in connection with The Guardian article. This is actually very important. What we see all over Western Europe is that, regardles off where the Islamic diaspora comes from, it behaves in exactly the same way. To be specific: in Germany, most Muslims come from Turkey. They came as Gastarbeiters, “guest workers,” in the 1960’s and 70’s, and they formed compact ghettoes in the suburbs of the big cities, such as Stuttgart, Munich, West Berlin and so on. In France they mainly come from Algeria, and they behave in exactly the same way in the banlieus of Paris, Lyon, or Marseille, which is an almost majority-Arab city today. In Britain they came mostly from the Indian subcontinent, from Pakistan and Bangladesh and from India itself—and they have behaved in exactly the same way. The same applies to the Moroccans, Somalis and others in the Benelux and Scandinavia.

This was not so with the immigrants from culturally similar countries—the ones that share the same European civilizational genes, Poles, Hungarians . . . There was a massive wave of Hungarian immigrants after the 1956 Hungarian revolution—or Russians and Ukrainians. They all quickly assimilated. Even if they preserve a modicum of collective remembrance of their background, culture, habits . . . they certainly do not establish any compact residential areas. These areas [created by Muslims], whether they are in Malmö, in Rotterdam, in Antwerp, Birmingham or Marseille, are the ones from which the native European population—whether French, Swedish, Dutch, Belgian, German or English—run away. They do not want to live there, they are made unwelcome. In some of these areas, notably in Sweden’s Malmö or in parts of Belgium’s Antwerp, you need at least two police cars, one to intervene after the call and the other to protect the first. These are de facto shariatized areas. In France they are euphemistically called “areas of special sensitivity”—if you’ll please! This means that if a girl does not wear the hijab she can get a “smile.” This is a sarcastic euphemism for a cut with the knife from the angle of the lip to the earlobe. She is disfigured for life, and called a “whore.”

French police routinely refuse to investigate such incidents. The assumption is that if a girl lives in that kind of area, she should make the compromise and wear the hijab. Likewise the Swedish “Minister for Integration and Gender Equality”—what irony!—ten years ago said that Swedish girls should dress more “modestly” to avoid the danger of rape, because there was an epidemic of rapes by Muslim immigrants against Swedish women at the time [which still continues]. In his words, dressing more modestly is a small price to pay for the benefits of living in a multicultural society . . .

There is no “human right” to come to the United States. I cannot scream it loudly enough! What kind of idiocy is it to assume that the call for the exclusion of a certain group from entering the United States, on the grounds of its members’ inability to conform to American norms and American legal requirements, is a “violation of human rights”? Countries belong to people who live in them, who are their citizens, who have a continuous record of sharing historical memories and myths and songs and endeavors, past triumphs and sufferings. Muslims don’t give a hoot for 1776, for 1812, for the War Between the States, for Manifest Destiny, for everything that America is all about. Likewise, their coreligionists in France don’t give a hoot for Corneille or Racine, for Voltaire or Jean-Jacques Rousseau, hate them or love them, or for Victor Hugo and the glory of the French civilization.

In that sense it is absolutely infuriating to see headlines in U.S. papers, “Frenchman suspected of carrying out the bombing,” or “Belgian mastermind of the Paris attacks.” What “Frenchman”? What “Belgian”? Legal status of a person as a citizen does not imply that he is a true member of the national community. That community is defined by culture, by language, by collective memories, and by emotional allegiances. As a naturalized American I can freely claim to be “an American” because I partake in this emotional sense of historical experience that harks back to the early settlements in Virginia, and which has produced such marvelous fruits, in terms of culture, science and technology, as well as political institutions over the centuries. This legacy is now being denied by the people who run the United States, who have no sense of community with their own people

 

[Link to audio here]