Victor Davis Hanson: The Double Standard of Islamist Immigrants Who Attack America

Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal senior contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for the Daily Signal. 

As we head toward the midterms in this last month of October, it’s time to reflect on who are the leadership of what we would call the democratic socialist-Islamist new basis or alliance with or absorption of the Democratic Party. 

We’ve talked about one element. These are upscale people with college degrees, 85% white, in blue states, blue cities especially, who feel that their social science degrees, public policy degrees, psych degrees should earn them a salary in which they could buy a home in New York or a condo in Los Angeles or have a family in San Francisco.  

And they rub shoulders with very wealthy people, financiers, insurance, CEOs, and they feel they’re in that same echelon, and yet they can’t, given their student debt and the decisions they made to major in those fields and then expect to be highly marketable. That anger, that discouragement, has fueled a rejection of the whole capitalist system. 

But they also have a second group, and I call that the Islamicist element. What’s funny about these people are most are first- or second-generation immigrants. They came over here from failed states. They were welcomed by the Left, and upon arrival they have a whole list of complaints against the United States, and yet they had never been discriminated against, oppressed by the United States. If anything, they came here for our security, prosperity, and freedom that was lacking in their own country. 

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Let’s just take a look at two or three of these people as emblematic of this new direction of the Democratic Party. [New York City] Zohran Mamdani gave a Fourth of July address on our 250th birthday. He had just reiterated, as he did last week, that he would arrest, he thought, Benjamin Netanyahu, the Israeli prime minister, any time he came into the United States to visit the U.N., which is impossible because he’s given federal immunity. But it was a good bombastic campaign trope. 

But in this speech, he said that the United States was victimized. As he said, Mamdani said, there was terror in the streets. We were controlled by monopolies. It was an unfair society run by elites. So he had a whole writ of complaints. 

But Mamdani is a dual citizen, both of Uganda, where he was born, and of the United States, where he was naturalized. Does he ever have any self-awareness of that? Because Uganda has been ruled by Yoweri Museveni, a president who has been in power for 40 years. He’s a dictator. Did the Mamdani family ever object to that? Does he object to it now? 

Imagine, he has complaints, half of his citizenship, he has complaints about the oldest democracy in the world. But the other half of his citizenship, his mom … 

Well, you’re gonna say he doesn’t go back there. Yeah. Yes, he does. He was married in Uganda just a few months ago, and he was married at the family estate with a beautiful view in Kampala of Lake Victoria. He’s a very wealthy guy. His parents, his mother is a distinguished filmmaker. His dad’s an endowed professor at Columbia University. 

So, when he says all of these things about genocide and apartheid and settler colonialism, why doesn’t he look at his half-citizenship and say, I fought for egalitarianism in my native Uganda, and I said to my Indian community, you’re 1%, and you’re settler colonialist, and you control 60%. We’ve got to spread the wealth. Just like he said in New York, we’re gonna go after richer, whiter neighborhoods. 

Why didn’t he say that our Indian community lives in self-appointed enclaves that are segregated? They’re not segregated de jure, but they are de facto. Why doesn’t he say, let’s move out and integrate and assimilate to the Indigenous people? 

Does he ever say the Indian community in Uganda was a British imperial project to keep the indigenous population in check? 

My point, he has a whole list of characteristics about his adopted country, but he says nothing using the same standards about his native country. 

So, is it a settler-colonial country that you allege Israel is? Is it an apartheid country you allege Israel is? Think about it. 

He’s not the only one. 

Hasan Piker was born for a moment in the United States by Turkish parents and went right back to Turkey where he was raised. His family is very, very wealthy. He’s a multimillionaire. He bought a $3 million home. That’s a theme with this group of Islamicists, and he drives a $200,000 Porsche. 

He has said that, I’m quoting literally, I hate the United States. And he said that we deserve, quote, 9/11. But you would think that, and he won’t really tell us whether he is a dual citizen or not. But under Turkish law, under the jus sanguinis, that if you’re born anywhere to Turkish parents on both sides, that you are a Turkish citizen, at least a dual citizen. 

Does he ever criticize Turkey in the way that he criticizes us? Under Recep Tayyip Erdogan, it’s become almost a dictatorship. Has he spoken out against it? I don’t think so, because his parents have, what, sizable investments and corporate activity and profit-making in Turkey. 

Has he ever said this: My country, my parents’ country, my grandfather’s country went into Cyprus and attacked it and planted a settler colonial movement to join the Turkish population and then appropriated 40% of the richest part of Cyprus in 1974, and then colonized it with additional colonialists from Turkey, and no other country in the world, not China, not Russia, not North Korea, not Iran, recognized that colonial project. 

Can he have one word about that? Can he say: “I object to the Americans’ history, and that’s why I hate the United States. But to be fair, I must say that when I go back to Turkey, I’m going to tell them that they have done a lot of bad things, such as the Armenian genocide, in which 1 million Armenians were killed, mostly civilians, by the new Turkish army.” 

And I’ll have to add as well that in 1923, during the Turkish-Greek War, the Turks surrounded the ancient city of Smyrna, now called Izmir, and burned it and everybody in it, incinerated it. And people say maybe 15,000, some say 50,000, some even say 100,000 Greeks were incinerated. 

The American ambassador to Greece has a wonderful or tragic view. He watched it happen from a boat  and picked up people who swam. 

Can he ever say something about Turkey in the same vein that he does about his adopted country? 

And then we come, I’ll give you one more example. [Rep.] Ilhan Omar. She said that this country is trashy and it’s, quote, the worst country, the worst of all countries in the world. She said that. She’s a representative in the U.S. House of Representatives. 

Do we ever hear her say, “I came from Somalia that was war-torn, ravaged, a complete failed state because a dictator for 10 years named Siad Barre had murdered 200,000 people of the Isaaq tribe who wanted to break away and get away from his dictatorship and form an enclave called Somaliland versus Somalia”? 

Does she ever say that? 

Better yet, does she say, “And I have another disclosure to make. My father was a well-known colonel in that army of aggression, and there have been accusations that he participated in the type of tactics that led to this genocide.” 

Or she could have said, “Many of us who came from Somalia came when Siad Barre’s regime fell, not during the war, not during the genocide, when it fell, because we were afraid that we had ties to that genocidal regime, so we fled to America because if we had stayed in Somalia, there would have been retaliations from the people that we committed genocide upon.” 

In other words, she could say, “I can’t really criticize my adopted country as trashy or the worst in the world because it saved my life coming here because my family was involved in committing a genocide of the type that I accuse Israel of committing.” 

What am I trying to say? 

I’m trying to say that this socialist, Islamacist group has a whole list of complaints about this country that we’re supposed to listen to and a whole list of complaints about the only democracy in the Middle East, Israel, that we’re supposed to listen to.  

But many of these fiercest critics are dual citizens, and when they’re in their other country, they say nothing about its sins, and there are plenty, from settler colonialism to genocide to apartheid to war crimes. But they do blast the democracies for those very sins. 

What’s the whole point? 

We don’t have to listen to this anymore. Anytime Mamdani, anytime Abdul El-Sayed, anytime Ilhan Omar, anytime Hassan Piker starts listing a list of grievances about their country, our first or second generation, we just say: Look in the mirror and then talk to us. 

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