On Wednesday, California Democratic Rep. Loretta Sanchez told Larry King that up to 20% of Muslims are willing to do anything to anything to achieve the dystopian dream of a caliphate.
“We know that there is a small group, and we don’t know how big that is — it can be anywhere between 5 and 20%, from the people that I speak to — that Islam is their religion and who have a desire for a caliphate and to institute that in any way possible,” stated Sanchez. “They are not content enough to have their way of looking at the world, they want to put their way on everybody in the world. And again, I don’t know how big that is, and depending on who you talk to, but they are certainly — they are willing to go to extremes. They are willing to use and they do use terrorism.”
The California Democrat’s pronouncement is perhaps more straightforward than anything heard by the Republican establishment, let alone liberals. Sanchez is certain to send shock-waves through the Left, although they may excuse her “outburst” because she is a Hispanic woman, a “female person of color (POC),” as the Left patronizingly puts it.
Throughout her interview with Larry King, Sanchez reiterated the self-evident truth that a substantial number of Muslims, albeit not all, are “willing to use and they do use terrorism” to achieve religiously motivated goals.
Sanchez is right. Today’s Muslims, especially refugees from Syria, come from relatively unstable, Islamic-centric societies where religion is both a public and private exercise. The wall of separation between personal Islamic faith and public Islamic law is virtually non-existent in Muslim-majority countries. Islam encompasses every aspect of life from marital relations to government administration.
As a result, Muslim refugees may have sympathies and views antithetical to Western values. According to a recent Pew Research Center poll highlighted in The Daily Caller, a significant proportion of Arab Muslims endorse sharia law as the ideal legal code for society and favor harsh punishments for non-believers that violate the tenets of Islam:
86 percent of Muslims in Pakistan, 84 percent in Afghanistan, 81 percent in the Palestinian territories, 80 percent in Egypt, 65 percent in Jordan, 57 percent in Iraq and 54 percent in Malaysia and Bangladesh favor stoning as a lethal punishment for adultery. A majority of Muslims in several countries also support the death penalty for Muslims who convert away from Islam, including in Afghanistan (79 percent), Egypt (88 percent), Pakistan (75 percent), the Palestinian territories (62 percent), Jordan (83 percent) and Malaysia (58 percent).
Sanchez’s full interview with Larry King is posted below: