The Daily Signal - Victor Davis Hanson: The Sudden Rehabilitation of Radical Islam

Episode Date: May 15, 2026

There has been a growing effort by commentators, podcasters, and public figures to recast Islam and the Muslim world in a more favorable light while increasingly directing criticism toward Israel. From 9/11, the USS Cole bombing, the Beirut barracks attack, Fort Hood, San Bernardino, and the Boston Marathon bombing to the war in Gaza, many in the West are ignoring decades of Islamic terrorism and adopting a new political framework rooted in anti-Israel sentiment, identity politics, and cultural revisionism. Some commentators have even gone so far as to argue that Iran should possess a nuclear weapon to create “balance” with Israel, despite repeated threats from Iranian leaders calling for the destruction of the Jewish state, argues Victor Davis Hanson on today’s edition of “Victor Davis Hanson: In a Few Words.” 👉 The Daily Signal cannot continue to tell stories, like this one, without the support of our viewers: http://dailysignal.com/donate 👉Don’t miss out on Victor’s latest short videos by subscribing to The Daily Signal today. You’ll be notified every time a new piece of content drops: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/dailysignal?sub_confirmation=1⁠  Also on Spotify: https://megaphone.link/THEDAILYSIGNAL9753340027  👉Want more VDH? Watch Victor’s weekly, hour-long podcast, “Victor Davis Hanson: In His Own Words,” now! Subscribe to his YouTube channel, and enable notifications:  https://www.youtube.com/@victordavishanson7273?sub_confirmation=1👉More exclusive content is available on Victor’s website: https://victorhanson.com Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Hello, this is Victor Davis Hansen for the Daily Signal. We're experiencing another strange phenomenon right now. There's been a number of high-profile podcasters and others, and I can't list them all, that have said that they have now changed their mind and they have a very sympathetic view of Islam and the Muslim world, which is fine. That's all to the good, but it's often juxtapose to derision of Israel. in comparison. And it's kind of a recalibration or revisionism of the United States relationship with Islam the last 20, 30, 40 years.

I don't quite understand it, but I'm going to make an attempt to. Tucker Carlson, just to give, I don't want to pick on Tucker. I knew him. I liked him. But in one case, he thinks that Iran should have a bomb because Israel has one. And that would have creative tension and deterrence and might make the Middle East. more peaceful, but Israel has never said that they were going to preemptory, in a preemptory fashion, hit Iran with a nuclear weapon, because they could have done it for the last 25 years.

They haven't. All they have said about the use of a nuclear weapon, there will be no second Holocaust, and people can draw their conclusions. That's not true of Iran. One of their presidents, Mr. Ahmedijad, said he was going to wipe Israel off the map. That would only be possible by a nuclear weapon. Rafanjani, remember him, I think 15 years ago, said the nice thing about Israel is one bomb could take care of it. One bomb.

All the Jews were put into a confined space. And, of course, Kameney, the recent Supreme Leader, said that the scientists' entity would no longer exist. So to say that you might want them to have a bomb is to be ignorant of recent history. What was 9-11 about? It was about radical Islam trying to cripple or destroy the United States, killed 3,000 more people. What were the earlier attacks? Who did the attacks on the Beirut embassy and blew up over 240 Marines? Radical Islam.

Who attacked our two embassies in Africa, radical Islam, who tried to blow up the USS coal, radical Islam. here in the United States. What were the Sarnoff brothers about the Marathon, Boston Marathon? Radical Islam. What was Ford Hood about radical Islam? What was San Bernardino about? Radical Islam?

What were killing two Jews at a museum in Washington, D.C. about radical Islam? I could go on forever. I can't say there's a radical Hindu group or Sikh group that's doing this. they're not. I can't say there's a radical Jewish group that affiliates itself with radicals that's doing this. They're not. I can't say that there's a radical group of Mexicans or South Americans that are killing people, maybe the cartels, but it's not a political cause. It's only one group. So why all of a sudden are people very sympathetic to the Quran? Do they understand the Middle East? There's 500 million Muslims in the Middle East, the vast majority of them are Arab, and all of those countries, and we're friendly with many of them.

And that's a good thing. But there's not one consensual society among them. There's not one where free speech is allowed. The only place that that's possible is in Israel. You can't say that I no longer want to be a Muslim in Kuwait or Saudi Arabia. That's a crime. You can't go on TV and say, I don't like the royal level. family of Kuwait. I want to, I demand elections in the UAE. You can't do that. If you're a foreigner,

like Pierce Morgan in a celebrity, you can go anywhere you want and they'll treat you royally if you don't do one thing. You don't bring in an internal dissident and put them on your platform. If you do that, you're going to be persona non grata and escort it out. So there is a difference. And if you look at the Judeo-Christian tradition of the Old and New Testaments, not trying to be insensitive to the Quran, but I've read all three of them. And there is a different message. And the message, even in the Old Testament, is leading toward the New Testament. But it's turned the other cheek or sermon on the Mount in the New Testament or its tolerance.

But the Quran is very different. And you can say, well, these are just reflecting historical differences. True. But there has to be some sense that the history of Western civilization in some way has been an effort to stop the Islamization of Europe. Because it was a very different economic, political, military, cultural, and social system that was trying to absorb Europe. And it was defeated. And the result of that defeat was the British, Scottish, French, Enlightenment, the earlier Renaissance, and the Industrial Revolution.

So there's a big difference. So why are people doing this? And it's very closely related to what I said about Israel. If you are speaking now that you've been brainwashed or you have to recalibrate your view of Islam, it's usually predicated on that now Israel is very unpopular because of what has happened in Gaza. Of course, let me have a footnote here.

After people who have been working in your country, 20,000 of them come into your country to kill you, 20,000 guest workers had been working with higher wages than in Gaza inside Israel. There wasn't one Jew, not one Israeli, inside Gaza, when October 7th occurred. And when they came in and slaughtered 1,200 people, what was the Israelis supposed to do? I can tell you what they did. They said, we want all of the ringleaders and the murders who conducted this raid. And we hold Iran as the ultimate person, entity responsible, and we understand that Hezbollah and the Houthis will join in.

But for now we want all the perpetrators, and we're going to wait until we get them. They never handed them over. In fact, the people of Gaza cheered when over 240 hostages were taken and put into a $1 billion subterranean labyrinth of tunnels in which many of them were tortured, some were executed, and then they bargained over the bodies for hundreds of prisoners in Israeli jails, many of them convicted of murder. So then when Israel finally said,

you're not going to give them over, we're going to get them or kill them, what would you do with people who were dug down deep under the city, Gaza City, and they had three areas of exit and entries, mosque, hospitals, and schools. What do you do? You just say, well, we can't do anything because they're hiding behind schools. They don't care about the lives of their own people. They're inside mosque when they go into the tunnels. For us to rescue the hostages or to find the perpetrators, we would have to go in there

and to get there we'd have to attack. So nobody ever mentioned what would we do if a country of Canada or Mexico came across and butchered 1,200 people, and then the perpetrators retreated to a subterranean tunnel system across the border, and they said, we're not going to give up the perpetrators. How would we go do it? Well, the left would say, you can't do anything because you don't want to hit a hospital, a mosque, or a school, and that's where they enter and exit, or they would deny that altogether. Another reason then, besides being anti-Israel very quickly, is, again, the old DEI problem.

And that means that people who are in that binary, remember, the binary between oppressed and oppressor is racial, according to the Obama paradigm, and Biden who followed it. That means the oppressors and the victimizers are white, and the victims are non-white, but it has nothing to do with class. And the Arab Muslim community in the United States has a higher per capita income than so-called whites, at least for most of that community. Mr. Mondami can say all he wants, and he wants to go after whiter, wealthier neighborhoods, but as an Indian immigrant, he represents a demographic that is the highest in personal income in the United States. So if he really wants to go after an affluent community, he should go after his own Indian American community, but he won't.

My point is that Arabs and Muslims then fall on the non-Christian, non-white side of this arbitrary, ridiculous paradigm, and therefore they are free to criticize and not to be criticized. So people are wary. And that's why we have this weird word, Islamophobia, which Sweden, for example, has outlawed and said it's a ridiculous term. The money and the people are all on the side of the 500 million in the Middle East. And here the rising demographic of Muslim population is increasing much faster than Jews. And it's being pro-Muslim, as we see from people like Nick Fuentes and others,

it's an easy way to be anti-Semitic now. It's not a direct correlation, but usually people who say they've had a complete re-evaluation of the Muslim community and they're willing to forget all of these terrorist incidents inside the United States and 40, 50 years of attacks on Americans overseas by Islamic terrorists, Iranian terrorists, Palestinian terrorists, we're going to forget all that and say that we were misled and really the problem is Israel and Jews. And the unthinkable, the indescribable, the unimaginable, that is now the new normal. Thank you very much.

This is Victor Davis-Hansson for the Daily Signal. Thank you for tuning in to the Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website at victorhansen.com and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.