Canada Free Press:

Accuracy in Media recently interviewed Brigitte Gabriel, the founder of ACT! For America, a grassroots national security movement in the U.S., and the author of They Must Be Stopped: Why We Must Defeat Radical Islam and How We Can Do It, and Because They Hate: A Survivor of Islamic Terror Warns America. Ms. Gabriel is a leading expert on radical Islam and Islamic terrorism, and has given briefings to the Australian Prime Minister, to Members of the British Parliament, the U.S. Congress, the U.S. Special Operations Command, and the FBI.

She described her firsthand experience with the forces of radical Islam, growing up as a Christian in Lebanon, and how the civil war in Lebanon fortuitously took her to Israel, and helped open her eyes to the realities around her.

What follows are excerpts from the interview which took place on July 9, 2012. You can read the complete transcript of the interview, or listen to it here.

GABRIEL: We are engaged in a war with radical Islam.  The war has been declared against the United States by the radical Islamists.  They initiated it.  We’re not fighting a “War on Terror.”  Terror is only a tactic.  The radical Islamists are rising throughout the world.  As I’m speaking with you right now, Roger, there are 44 conflicts around the world between Muslims and non-Muslims, regardless of what nationality these non-Muslims are, or what language they speak, what passport they hold, or what region of the world they live in.  44 conflicts.  Look what’s happening in Djibouti.  Look what’s happening in Chad, what’s happening in Mauritania.  Americans don’t even look at these countries.  It’s not even on our radar screen.  So a war has been declared on the West by radical Islamists who want to bring back the Islamic Caliphate.  They are empowered.  The revolution started with Iran in 1979, with the coming of [Ruhollah] Khomeini, who birthed, basically, life into the Islamic radical movement worldwide.  The sooner we wake up and identify the enemy we are fighting—how they think, what their goal is, what’s their strategy, who are the key players in this war, who are the financiers of this war—that’s when we’re going to be able to make progress and come up with a plan where we can actually defeat our enemy.  But President Obama, right now, is in the process of deleting from the lexicon anything relating to radical Islam out of our counterterrorism strategy, whether at the FBI, whether at the Pentagon, whether at the CIA, whether at the State Department.  I mean, they are doing it now down to the local first responders’ training.  They are taking out words such as “Islamic jihad,” “Islamic terrorism,” “Islamic radicalism.”  How can we fight a war declared on us by a group called Islamic Jihad if we’re not courageous enough to even identify them by name so we can win the war?  This is why I encourage people to join us—go to our website, actforamerica.org.  We are now putting pressures on members of Congress to stop this insanity, to make sure that we do not mess with changing the training manuals at the FBI and for our first responders.  Let’s not insert political correctness into our counterterrorism strategy.  Otherwise, we are endangering the lives of millions of Americans in the name of political correctness, because we are afraid to identify our enemy.  This is the time to act and take action, so I encourage our listeners to go to actforamerica.org.  Sign up to get our E-mails and Action Alerts so we can reach you when there’s an important legislation coming down, or an Action Alert where we need you to pick up the phone and call your elected officials, where your voice matters most.

ARONOFF: So you attribute this to political correctness, why we are removing these terms—jihad—from, from the government handbooks and things.  Go into that a little bit more.  What is the real motivation here?  Why are we removing that language?  Why aren’t we trying to wake people up to what threatens this country?

GABRIEL: Because we have foreign forces and Islamic front groups representing the Muslim Brotherhood operating in the United States that has infiltrated our society on every level—including government—who are now influencing policy.  To give you an example—ISNA, the Islamic Society of North America.  They are now advisors to President Obama about foreign policy.  Is it any wonder why President Obama is throwing Israel under the bus, for example?  Now, why we should be so concerned about the groups like ISNA and CAIR [Council on American-Islamic Relations]—because they are mentioned in The Muslim Brotherhood Project, which was presented as evidence in the Holy Land Foundation trial, which is the largest terrorism trial ever in the history of the United States, where the United States took to court the Holy Land Foundation, where our government handed down 108 “Guilty” verdicts against Muslim-Americans or Muslim-American organizations who were raising money in the United States and sending it to the Middle East to fund terrorist operations in the Middle East.  In that lawsuit our government introduced evidence called the “Muslim Brotherhood Project,” which is a 100-year plan for radical Islam to infiltrate and dominate the West.  In the Muslim Brotherhood Project, the last page of the project lists 29 front Islamic organizations set up in the United States by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to “sabotage the miserable house of America from within,” according to their words.  Part of the names mentioned in that project are ISNA, Islamic Society of North America; the MSA, the Muslim Student Association; NAIT, the North American Islamic Trust, which owns the deeds to the majority of mosques in the United States; IAP, the Islamic Association for Palestine, which later became CAIR, the Council on American Islamic Relations.  So what we have right now is, these groups who are our enemy, groups set up in the United States with the specific purpose of sabotaging America from within, are now consulting with the media—you always see CAIR on television giving interviews as supposedly the spokespeople on behalf of the Muslim community, ISNA advises President Obama about Middle East policy, MPAC and other organizations like this are putting the pressure on our government to clean up this type of language from our counterterrorism training manuals and threatening lawsuits if we don’t: That’s the reason why we are changing the language.

ARONOFF: And why do you think, for instance, President Obama brings these people in as advisors, as consultants?  What is his motivation in doing this?

GABRIEL: That’s a very interesting question.  I cannot answer what’s going on inside President Obama’s head, but I can tell you one thing: Actions speak louder than words, especially when you are the President of the United States and you are making decisions whether to protect your own citizens and put the interests of your own country before anybody else in the world, or whether you listen and are influenced by foreign forces that you know for sure are in our country to do our country harm.  Obviously our President has regular intelligence briefings.  I cannot imagine our President not being briefed on the Muslim Brotherhood plan, or the Muslim Brotherhood Project in the United States, and about the Holy Land Foundation trial, which took place in Dallas, Texas in 2007 and 2008.  Obviously he knows the information, he knows what these organizations are—and for him to know all this information and still bring these types of shady characters and hire them as his advisors, to work with him on coming up with our foreign policy and our policy in the United States on counterterrorism, is something very concerning, to say the least—very alarming to put it, to put it mildly—because right now, we have a President who is practically endangering the lives of Americans by putting foreign interests first, before America, while ignoring what needs to be done in order to protect and secure the United States of America, the same country he took an oath to protect—he’s not doing the job.  As a matter of fact, he is sabotaging the job of protecting the United States, and that is very, very alarming, and I do hope that people this November will take into account all the information that is out there—whether on the Internet, whether through blogs, whether through radio, whether through national security organizations like ourselves—and make an informed decision before they go to vote, because the future of our country depends on their vote this coming election.

ARONOFF: How do you view the media’s participation or involvement in this?  Are they keeping us well-informed on this infiltration, the influence of these Islamist groups?  How do you see our mainstream media’s involvement in this?

GABRIEL: Well, certainly the mainstream media is not going to give us the news that you and I are sharing right now on this broadcast!

ARONOFF: Why not?

GABRIEL: You know—you read my books, Roger—

ARONOFF: Right—

GABRIEL: —and you know in my book I discuss how the media has been influenced, starting in the college, by all the influx of the money flowing from Saudi Arabia and the Islamic countries into our universities, brainwashing our students, setting up Middle East policy, Departments of Political Science department, and appointing professors who are anti-Israel and anti-America, who basically have been brainwashing our students for the last sixteen, twenty years, graduating out of our universities into believing America is bad, Israel is evil, and the Islamic world is under pressure by American imperialism.  So what we have today is a new generation of Americans who are the decision makers when it comes to media—who are the news anchors, the news writers, the opinion shapers, the opinion makers, the foreign policy makers—and this is why, when you watch CNN or any of the mainstream media, they are very sympathetic to the Islamic world, they are very sympathetic to the Islamic cause, they bend backwards and forwards accommodating Islamic radical groups and their views, like CAIR, for example.  You always see CAIR interviewed on CNN and MSNBC—I mean, even Fox News!  But at least with Fox News, you get fair and balanced debate.  But when it comes to CNN and ABC and MSNBC and CBS and NBC, basically, you are not getting nothing but a whitewashed version of the truth, and many issues are not being covered.  But again, that’s why the media is at this point, because our enemy has been very smart, and they began at the university level and brainwashing the students.  We’re paying the price today.  And what’s scary, Roger, is they’re doing the same thing right now in middle and high school, changing the Islam curriculum and inserting their own view of how Islam is being taught at the middle and high school, which is going to impact the next generation of Americans.  I discussed this in my book They Must Be Stopped, but Act for America Education just came out with a report that is now posted on our website—our sister organization, actforamericaeducation.com—on how Islam is being portrayed in public schools in sixth and seventh grade.

ARONOFF: And with your Act for America, why don’t you tell people about your conference coming up, what they could expect if—will they be able to view it online, or do they have to attend?  Also, what your group does is, they go into different states and get involved in these efforts to keep sharia law from being considered as part of the American justice system—tell us about that.

GABRIEL: A great question, Roger.

ARONOFF: Okay.

GABRIEL: A great question.  Thank you.  You and I have known each other and have, you know, talked before on different broadcasts.  You and I understand that there’s a lot of information out there about radical Islam.  When I started speaking out a few years ago, when I started, ten years ago in 2002, I would speak to groups from 100 to 10,000 at a time, and the same question kept coming up: Now that I am informed, what can I do?  Now that I’m educated—just like people who listen to us on this broadcast—now that I know all this information, I’m more frustrated.  What do I do?  Give me something to do.  I learned very quickly, Roger, when I heard this question over and over again, that while education is important, education is not sufficient.  Education must be coupled with action.  That’s when I launched ACT! For America.  ActforAmerica.org is now the largest national security grassroots movement in the United States.  We have 230,000 members nationwide, 700 chapters nationwide, and a full-time lobbyist on Capitol Hill.  We are actually creating the NRA of national security.  We are creating the most powerful citizen movement dedicated to national security that will put pressure on elected officials to do the right thing.  In our upcoming national conference on the 27^th, 28^th, and 29^th of June, we have eighteen elected officials coming to speak on our conference about national security—what they are doing behind the scenes, legislations they are working on—and the reason why they’re lining up to come speak at our conference, because they know we have become the most powerful national security organization in the United States.  Our members tackle issues and legislations coming down for a vote. We monitor the votes and the bills coming down on Capitol Hill.  We send an E-mail out to our members telling them, “Tomorrow there is a bill coming down, H.R. 1640 sponsored by Congressman Such-and-Such or So-and-So, this is what the bill says, we want to make sure we alert you so you can call your elected official and express your opinion—either ‘Vote for it!’ or ‘Don’t vote for it!’”  We give them the information and we empower them to make a phone call.  At certain times we have had over 30,000 phone calls go to Capitol Hill, to a certain Congressman’s office in one day—which shut down their phone system.  That’s the type of people power that our government needs to see in order for our elected officials to do the right thing by the American people.  Our philosophy is this: If our elected officials are not willing to see the light, we’re going to make them feel the heat because the only language they understand is pressure, and getting reelected—and that’s exactly what we’re doing.  So we have our chapters nationwide, who get involved, who are very organized, who meet with their elected officials, who do events in their community, who monitor what’s happening in their community, and they are very, very active. To give you an idea of the type of activities that we do, for example, ALAC—American Laws for American Courts—which is a legislation that will ensure that only American laws will be considered in American courts, and no foreign law will be applied when it contradicts our Constitution.  Right now we have introduced this bill in twenty states and we already passed it in three states, Louisiana, Tennessee, and Arizona.  Now it has been introduced in six other states in the Republican Party platform, as a topic the Republican Party’s going to push for.  So that’s the type of things that we do.  I encourage people to come and learn more about us at our national conference in Washington, D.C. on the 27^th, 28^th, and 29^th, and for more information and details, you can go to actforamerica.org—make sure you sign up to receive our E-mails and Action Alerts.  We want to be able to reach you, to empower you to make a difference for our country.

ARONOFF: Our guest has been Brigitte Gabriel.  The time has gone very fast.  Again, her two books are They Must Be Stopped and Because They Hate, and she’s just given the information on Act for America.  What about websites for the books?  Of course, Amazon and the usual, but is there any other website you want to give us before we sign off here, Brigitte?

GABRIEL: Thank you Roger.  Yes, the books are available in all bookstores nationwide, as well as with any bookstore online.  Both books are New York Times Bestsellers.  They are also available in audio CDs, on Kindle, and everything else, so that you can find them very easily.  I encourage you to get the books, read them—and donate them to a library in your community!  Help me educate others about this issue.  You can also go to our website, actforamerica.org. You can get the books through the website for a donation, and I encourage you to do that, because we can certainly use your help much more than Barnes and Noble, so you will not only be able to be getting the book, but you will also be able to help us financially, in order for us to continue doing the work that we do.  I’m so grateful for U.S.  And, Roger, I’m so grateful for your having me on your show, and giving me the time to share with your audience the important information that we just discussed.