 Good afternoon. I'm Dr. Gregory Gatis and welcome to another session of Global Connections. Tonight I'm hosting this discussion with a distinguished professor from Y Pacific University, Pierre Asselin, who is a graduate, a doctor of the University of Y as MI. His was in history, mine is in political science. In fact, this particular session in Global Connections is a continuation of a sort of something that I and Dr. King did in which Christine Hansen did, in which we're looking at Dr. King, I call the collapse of industrial civilization, threats to our society. And we identified many. Dr. King especially talked about overpopulation, resource depletion, peak oil, globalization of the up. Weather changes that are coming about from climate change and many other things. I brought up the electromagnetic pulse that hits us every 140 years from the sun and were due for one, which would fry the electronic grid and if it were to happen, according to Ted Koppel who wrote a book called Lights Out, if they did fry the grid, which is by the way considered the greatest accomplishment in human history, the North American grid encompassing Canada and the United States, 90% of us would die within a year, simply because we need that to move food and et cetera, things like that. Nothing is going to work, no electricity, no elevators. Those living in high rises had better camp out there at the park with the homeless because there's no going up and down 40 stairs with your water every day and trying to flush your toilet. At any rate, two weeks ago, Christine and I looked at infectious diseases in an age of globalization because we're in a very dangerous situation where diseases are in danger of getting out of control, such as mirrors and SARS and the superbugs that are now resistant to the penicillin, et cetera, et cetera. We looked at how close we're coming to maybe running into an epidemic or a pandemic, sort of like what happened after World War I when the flu devastated, I mean more people died in that flu than died in World War I, it was really quite devastating. But now we're into today looking at something called immigration in the age of globalization. Suddenly people are transferring across borders in a way that we didn't really anticipate earlier. When we said globalization, we meant that goods would cross borders. We meant that ideas would cross borders. We meant that money could cross borders and that would make us all richer and more self-sufficient. It didn't encompass people, but now people are going carrying those diseases, which is bad enough, but now we're worrying about are they carrying ideas that could bring about collapses of civilization. And so Dr. Esselen is an expert in everything historical, so he might have some ideas here about to what extent we can continue to allow people to migrate because they want to. There is among the liberals among us this idea that anybody can go anywhere. Others who are on the conservative side say no, a nation is an organic entity that has a set of values and you can go into that country providing you endorse those values and be a part of it. So let me ask now Pierre, how serious a threat do you think people crossing the borders, our southern border or other borders, is a threat to America if they don't assimilate into our society? I don't think it's a threat at all. I think that the fear we have of outsiders is certainly understandable, but in terms of it actually constituting a threat relative to other threats that we face, including some of the things you've mentioned like environmental degradation, we're creating here an issue that really shouldn't be. Again, looking at history, right? So now there's this fear that Muslims will do this, this and that. Go back a hundred years or so, mid-19th century, we have more or less the same fears about the American Republic being compromised, but this time it involves Catholics. As I'm assuming you know, there was this Arabid fear of Catholicism in the United States during the mid-19th century. We have this so-called know-nothing party, the Native American party, that effectively calls for a ban on Catholic immigration. We burn churches down to the ground. We beat up, we even kill Catholics. So, you know, looking back, well, it maybe was an overreaction. And I can't help but think that in 50 and 100 years from now, we're going to probably feel the same way about how some people in this country feel about the threat coming from Muslims. And speaking of Catholics, I want to point this out because it's so interesting. Things got so bad for Catholics that during the Mexican-American war, a bunch of American Catholics actually formed a battalion to go and fight on the side of Mexico against the United States. So, you know, we had a sense of right then. So, you know, we create these fears. We're not comfortable with what we're not familiar with. And eventually in time, we realize that, oh, maybe we exaggerated the threat. And I think that looking back, eventually we'll feel the same way about this so-called threat caused by outsiders or Muslims specifically these days. Well, I'd like to push back a little bit here. I think that if you, everything you said is true, by the way, about the no-nothings and Catholics and so forth and Asian Exclusion Act and so on. So, we've always been a little worried about these people coming in and always successfully integrated because we've always had a policy of assimilation and there's a public school and we took people from around the world and we put them through the meat grinder of the public school and they came out Americans no matter what they went in. They're not like their parents that came here, the parents might have babushkas, but they don't wear babushkas anymore and so on and so forth. So, that has worked very well. Unfortunately now, there's a new disease out there called multiculturalism, which is replacing Americanism here. And the tenets of this are such that you can go to another country and you take your culture with you and you just practice it there. You're not assimilating anymore. You're going to live in your little ghettos and this is happening all over Europe. It's happening in America where people are doing not as much in America. We still assimilate to some extent. But a lot to a great extent, especially across the southern border, there are people flooding in where they don't want to give up their language, for example. And always you had to give up your language, in other words, to be part of America. So, I would think that we have to look at this as a little bit different. It's wrong, I think, to call Islam, which is the primary threat, a religion like Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity and so forth. We're committing fallacy of the logical types that Bertrand Russell talked about. When he wrote Wikipedia Mathematica in 1908, he developed his theory of logical types in the introduction. And in this theory, he said that you must never treat something of a different order on the same level. You shouldn't say, oh, I like apples, oranges, grapes and fruit because you committed an error because fruit is another higher logical type than these others. I think we're doing the same thing with Islam. Islam is not a religion, per se. It's partly a religion. But if you really take the Quran seriously, it's really an ideology. It's something of a higher level. It's a total worldview. And if you let people in who have this devotion to this higher worldview and not to their religion, now Catholics still admire the Pope, but they're not going to follow the Pope rather than follow Trump, I don't think. But a real serious Muslim has a commitment to Islam, not to America. They don't believe in nations, they believe in Islam, and that should conquer the world. That's part of their credo, written in the Quran. Now, here's the problem. Most of us have Muslim friends, I suppose you do, I do, but they're bad Muslims, meaning they don't be the Quran. They don't say, oh, I'm not supposed to be friends with the Jews and the Christians. I think that's the question. So what's a good Muslim? What's a bad Muslim? What's a good Catholic? What's a bad Catholic? So, French-Canadian, I was born Catholic. I go to church once a year at Christmas. I wouldn't call myself a bad Catholic, although in the eyes of radicals, I certainly would be so. So I think we have a tendency here sometimes to focus on the extremists and see these individuals as a reflection of something larger. And I think that's definitely the problem with Islam. Most Muslims, I know here that I've encountered in my travels to the Islamic world, kind of feel about their religion in a number of ways the way I kind of feel about Catholicism. It's part of your identity because you're born into it. And you take it seriously to the extent that current circumstances warrant. So I don't know. I see your point. And certainly there are individuals who kind of fit the description that you've provided. But I think applying that to Muslims generally and to Islam specifically, I'm not sure I would agree with you on that. Okay. Well, you're taking a modern attitude here. And it is true that Islam has... That's sensible, but I'll go with modern. Islam has been quiescent for the last... Oh, since they were defeated in 1689, I guess at the gates of Vienna when the king of Poland saw them off. Was it Suleiman the Magnificent? Yeah, Suleiman the Magnificent. Yeah, it was sent in Vienna. Sent him back to Turkey there. That was their second jihad, the first jihad going up through North Africa. And meeting Charles Martel at tour where he turned them back there. Okay, so they went into decline and they've been quiet for 300 years. And so we're used to thinking of Muslims as just being nice, humble people, going to the mosque and praying and being nice people. And to the extent that they were then, no one would have any objection because we would tolerate that. That's what America would stand for, that kind of freedom. Only if it would compete with Americanism, if it would compete with our freedoms of democracy and so forth, I have a loyalty above that to Allah and the thing you know my duty here is to take the world into Muslims. Now I know, again, going to the Muslims, you know, and I know, I mean I have a friend who actually is from Iran and he went back to Iran after he graduated from UH and then he got trapped by the revolution in 79. And then he couldn't get out, but he finally got out because his sister got sick and she has to have be escorted if one goes anywhere. So he took her to England and then when she was fixed up, she went back on her own and he went to Canada in fact for years now. But he told me that when he was there, he doesn't really follow Ramadan and things like that. And so you're not supposed to eat or drink during the day, right? And so he was there and he was making some coffee which you're not supposed to do. And then the coffee exploded and then the woman next door heard that and she calls up the revolutionary guard. We have a kind of revolutionary planning bombs or something. So they came in and looked around and it better happened. And then they saw it was just a coffee bag and they said, ah, you all middle-aged women are calling us for this nonsense here. They didn't even chew them out for that even though he was violating it and they just sort of laughed at it and passed him by. So he's the kind of good guy that we would want to have. And there were other good Muslims. Zudi Jarrah? I think the guy who is the head of the Islamic reform movement, he wants to take Islam and reform it so that Muslims read the Quran and all these passages are there. There are nice passages at the beginning. Towards the end they get more and more militant but he wants them not to see their duty to go about and kill people if they don't accept Islam. And part of the Quran says never make friends with Christians and Jews unless you want to pretend for a while but it can't be sincere. Well, that kind of thing, we wouldn't want it to have happened. So that's the fear that the people who take it really seriously read the Quran literally and say, oh, we've got to go out and do Shir Haid. So here's the thing. As it turns out, most Muslims can't read the Quran. I mean, technically, there's been the hour. So growing up in Quebec, my father couldn't read the Bible because it was only in Latin, right? So you trust the Padre. And that's the problem with organized religion and in this case, Catholicism in Quebec 30 years ago and Islam today is that the developed Muslim technically cannot read the Quran in languages other than Arabic. So unless you know Arabic, you can't read the Quran. And Arabs are actually a minority within the Islamic world. So people who are literate and Arab can actually read the Quran. Everyone else can't unless they study Arabic, which happens to be one of the most difficult languages to learn. So that's a very problematic element and I think it makes some people susceptible to the interpretations of hardline elements, right? To the interpretations of Imams and scholars and basically like Muslim Padres. So there's that element. So the idea that reading the Quran will create these views is problematic because again, the majority of Muslims will never be able to read the Quran. That's why people memorize verses from the Quran, right? The one thing I do want to point out, Greg, is you know when you talk about Muslims, right? In my experience, Muslims never assert that they have their primary identity. You know, I think just like, you know, I mean, as I was saying, I'm Catholic but I don't want people to think of me as Catholic. I want them to... I'm Quebecois above all and you know, I like ice hockey and then, you know, my religion is, and to me, most Muslims, perhaps if we talk about religion, we'll identify as Muslims, but beyond that, people who happen to be Muslim will more often than not identify as Algerian, identify as Libyan. And then beyond that, they'll identify as a member from that clan, from that family in Southern Libya, you know? I know that in recent trips in Algeria, trying to have these discussions about what it means to be Algerian was fascinating because you take for granted that okay, we are Muslims so that doesn't even come into the conversation about identity. It's all about are you Arab? Are you what they call Israel or Berber? And then if you're Quebelle, what part of Algeria? So all of these things condition identity and I think it's overly simplistic of us. Thanks for watching Think Tech Hawaii and look forward to seeing you at Education Matters on Tuesday with me, Carol Manly. Hi, I'm Tim Apachella. I'm the host of Moving Hawaii Forward, a show dedicated to transportation issues and traffic issues here on Oahu. Join us every other Tuesday at 12 noon to discuss how we try to solve our traffic headaches not to include just the rail but transit and carpooling and everything in between. So join us every other Tuesday Moving Hawaii Forward. Thank you. Aloha Kako. I'm Marcia Joyner and I'm inviting you to navigate the journey. We are discussing the end of life options and we would really love to have you Wednesday morning at 11 am right here. We're back here with Pierre Asalan our distinguished professor of history at Hawaii Pacific University and he's giving us a good tutoring here on Islam and why we need not fear it as we let people in. Of course, just yesterday we had this guy who from England I forget his name who killed a policeman, ran some people down I guess the car is the latest weapon given up for the sword for the car and so our Muslims migrating to a society, a free society, a danger or not and you're pointing out I think correctly that they do have a lot of identity with nations even though they're not supposed to if you read the Quran you're supposed to only be loyal to Islam you're not even supposed to have nations and so Bernard Lewis said that true Islamists think that it's nations there's a world of Islam and nations within it whereas most people think that they're nations in which they practice religions like Christianity and Judaism and so forth so the jihadists who are motivated by what they learn at the mosques and so forth coming under the radical preachers that are sent out from Saudi Arabia because Saudi Arabia has this most extreme version of that to get radicalized by them or on the internet from the Anwar al-Sadat presentations that he made calling on them to have jihad so there's going to be a continual supply of these people the what is it, Sadiq Khan who's now the mayor of England London this is a liberal attempt well for nice to make a Muslim a mayor but they don't say oh how nice they are let's be a British they say Allah is the hand of God he made Sadiq Khan the mayor to pave our way to taking over so they see that as their avenue to taking over the societies and those Muslims who meet in the park and scream and say go home we're taking over the society and so forth there is that element there we really don't want that element there do we if you have a loyalty to something else that's hostile to your country you shouldn't be in that country if you want to be in that country you should acclimate I have here something that I always teach my classes from Aristotle's politics here and he talks about the reasons where we have revolution and he gives 17 causes the primary one being economic inequality but one of the reasons he says another cause of revolution is differences of races who do not at once acquire a common spirit for a state is not the growth of a day any more than it grows out of a multitude brought together by accident hence the reception of strangers in colonies either at the time of their foundation or afterwards has generally produced revolution for example the Achaeans who joined the Trozenians in the foundation of Cyprus becoming later the more numerous expelled Cybrites hence the curse found Cyprus at 30 the Cyborites quarreled with the fellow colonists thinking that the land belonged to them they wanted too much of it and were driven out at Byzantium the new colonists were detected in a conspiracy and were expelled by force of arms the people of Antisa who had received the Achaean exiles fought with them and drove them out and the Zancleans after having received the Samians were driven out by them out of their own city the citizens of Paloiana at Zuinine after the introduction of a fresh body of colonists had a revolution the Syracuseans after the expulsion of their tyrants having admitted strangers and mercenaries to the rights of citizens quarreled and came to blows in other words he is a scientist he is the first scientist really like Plato who is just a philosopher and he looked in the world and saw what he saw and he said hey this is worrisome don't let people in unless they have a common spirit and so I'm not against Muslims coming here as long as they get assimilated into our ideas it's a valid point but again if you look at the U.S. right as much as people these days are calling for foreigners to come in and kind of assimilate let's not forget that segregation was officially sanctioned in this country until the mid 1960's we had laws in place so you know as much as we like to talk about in our country when you come in the history is not consistent with this self perception so just as we've made mistake and we're trying to rectify them certainly coming from the outside seeking to assimilate it does take time it's always it's always a little challenging to a new environment and kind of get the lay of the land and so first generation always struggles but eventually I'm confident I'm confident that the people from Latin America from the Islamic world who come to the U.S. next week within difficult as the adjustment might be within a generation or two will be as American looking as you are technically first generation French Canadian I'm not there quite yet there's something you said earlier Greg I think it's very interesting when you quoted Lewis you talk about true Islam that's the problem I think people assume that there's a true interpretation of religion the problem is everybody thinks their own interpretation is the true one we need to recognize that organized religion is just that organized religion after 9-11 President Bush came out saying this wasn't real Islam this wasn't true Islam that's also incorrect it's just a religion you can make it whatever you want it to be it's like Christians saying well Buddhism is the world's most peaceful religion absolutely not again you find conflict fueled by Buddhism there's no religions don't exist in absolute form it's all relative it's all how we choose to interpret them and I think that's the root of the problem is that religions allow for all kinds of interpretations ridiculously open and liberal and peaceful ones and at the other extreme ridiculously rigid and violent and mean ones but the problem is it's not like God will appear and tell us actually the real one is French Canadian Catholicism so we have to recognize the relativity of what we believe in and allow for the possibility that we're wrong which unfortunately the true believer does not allow himself or herself to do let me just interrupt here for a second though you just made another violation of the theory of logical types to wrestle you said I'm sure that the coming across the southern border those Catholics and Muslims are all going to become Americans and so forth again I think that's true for anybody the only religion in the world the only one as part of its creed if you read it that calls for constant warfare until it's conquered the world is Islam it's separate that's why if you look around the world at all the fights that are going on whether it's in India or Afghanistan or wherever it is Central African Republic it's always Islam that's there as the source of it because some jihadists now it's a minority I agree but even if it's 1% let's say it's 1% of 1 million that's 13 million that means 13 million jihadists are running around the world with that interpretation and they're going to be a problem now this Sadik Khan is ridiculous I heard him this morning on television he said well this terrorism is just there you just sort of have to expect that in urban society no you don't have to expect that I said that last year but it was tweeted by Trump's son but yeah that's something he said last year but you know this whole idea right I mean look at Christianity I mean Christianity has something akin to jihad or Christianity has the idea of just war of just struggle and depending on the time and the circumstances religious authorities will use that to their benefit exactly blame the Catholics not Jesus you see Jesus didn't say just war go out and kill the enemy but the way we construe the Old Testament we construe the New Testament we basically but you know what I mean right Christians Muslims Jews Buddhists have within their scriptures justifications to to go to war to do horrible things and have actually used their scriptures to those to those very ends well the Jews only to get the Holy Land that was there you can go out and kill kill everybody in Jericho to get to the Holy Land that's that was the path that they made with God Christians nowhere in scripture does Jesus ever give anything but turn the other cheek right he's a very peaceful guy actually well assuming that see as I understand it I don't remember much from Catholic school but as I understand it being Christian implies both the Old and the New Testament and I remember as a kid reading the Old Testament and being terrified because it's such a violent book and but even the the other cheek I mean I mean technically if we really kind of live closely by the terms of the New Testament I think we'd all be communists but the people who consider themselves most Christian are bore that that kind of thinking that's a Gallitarian thinking you scored a lot of points here we're running out of time