Latest / The Lila Rose Show / E303: How I Escaped My Muslim Arranged Marriage w/Sabatina James | Lila Rose Show

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E303: How I Escaped My Muslim Arranged Marriage w/Sabatina James | Lila Rose Show · The Lila Rose Show

• 0:00
  In Islam, apostasy is punished with death.
• 0:02
  That's not just some random aberration, that's the law.
• 0:05
  We flew to Pakistan and when we got there, I realized it was a
• 0:07
  trap. My passport was taken away from
• 0:10
  me. My aunt called me into a room.
• 0:12
  She announced that I'm going to get married to her son.
• 0:14
  In the history of our family, no girl had ever objected to a
• 0:18
  marriage. One night, in desperation said
• 0:20
  to Allah, Who are you? Buddha, Allah, Krishna, Jesus.
• 0:24
  And if you're so all powerful, why are you not answering my
• 0:26
  prayers? I just opened the Bible at
• 0:28
  random. My parents are sleeping.
• 0:30
  I read a line and it was written in bold.
• 0:32
  I had to basically decide, am I willing to become homeless
• 0:36
  without a family, Without friends?
• 0:37
  And that's what I became. I'd rather be homeless with
• 0:41
  Jesus than have everything without him.
• 0:43
  Did you fear for your life? Oh.
• 0:44
  I did fear for my life and I also feared for the life of my
• 0:46
  parents. In Islam, Muslim women have few
• 0:49
  rights. Christian women have no rights.
• 0:51
  What do you mean by that? I invite the Christians in
• 0:53
  America to give up their therapeutic Christianity.
• 0:55
  The cross you carry can become someone else's resurrection.
• 1:03
  Sabatina James, welcome to the podcast.
• 1:05
  Thank you for having me, Lala. I'm so excited for your book,
• 1:08
  The Price of Love, The Fate of a Woman, and A Warning to the
• 1:11
  West. And I think your story is
• 1:15
  incredibly powerful. It's inspiring, your courage is
• 1:18
  inspiring, but it's also, it is a warning to the West.
• 1:21
  So thank you for coming in to share it.
• 1:24
  So I thought we would start with your background.
• 1:26
  You were born in Pakistan. Tell me about your childhood in
• 1:29
  Pakistan. I was born in a tiny village in
• 1:34
  Pakistan and life was not like in LA.
• 1:41
  We had no warm water. Their electricity would go out
• 1:47
  every two hours, and there were hardly any cars, so people used
• 1:53
  to arrive on horse carts on dusty roads burned by the sun.
• 1:59
  And my mother, who raised four children, had, of course, no
• 2:05
  dishwashers or washing machines. And so the women in the village
• 2:10
  used to sometimes meet at a little stream and they would
• 2:16
  wash a mountain of closing. I mean, you must imagine the
• 2:19
  average size of the family's like, 8 kids.
• 2:23
  So they were washing this closing at the stream.
• 2:27
  And in addition, they used to collect wood from the forest to
• 2:34
  make fire in the oven that they used to cook on.
• 2:39
  But we were lucky because we belonged to the people who had a
• 2:44
  toilet. A lot of people didn't have a
• 2:46
  toilet. So imagine it's midnight and you
• 2:52
  really need to use the washroom. Then you have to walk 15 minutes
• 2:57
  in the dark to reach the field. And then you need to be careful
• 3:02
  where you sit down because there could be poisonous snakes
• 3:06
  lurking around, of which we had many.
• 3:10
  But All in all, you know, it's, it was extremely simple.
• 3:13
  Most people were very poor. And still it was happy because
• 3:23
  my childhood was spent with the large family.
• 3:28
  You know, family in Pakistan is not the nuclear family.
• 3:32
  It's multi generational and it's large and the village was like a
• 3:40
  family. But we had a special status
• 3:47
  because my grandfather was the spiritual leader and so wherever
• 3:52
  he went, people used to just grow silent in his presence.
• 3:58
  And we used to receive a lot of food donations and there was a
• 4:03
  lot of respect for our family. But he was also very proud of me
• 4:10
  because I was an eager student of the Quran.
• 4:13
  I learned it very early because I really wanted to go to
• 4:17
  paradise and learned it in Arabic.
• 4:21
  Most Muslims study the Quran in Arabic without understanding
• 4:26
  what they're reading. And it's how I read it as well.
• 4:30
  And he was proud of me. And he used to always speak
• 4:33
  Allah's blessing on me. What was what was shocking
• 4:37
  though, was when the rules of the Quran were applied to daily
• 4:43
  life, especially towards women. Hey everybody, if you're
• 4:47
  enjoying this episode, please make sure that you hit that
• 4:49
  subscribe button and if you're really enjoying it, leave this
• 4:52
  video a like and share it with a friend.
• 4:54
  Thank you all so much. Sometimes I would just be
• 4:58
  playing with my friends, you know, climbing the trees or
• 5:03
  jumping from roof to roof. That was a thing because the,
• 5:07
  the roofs are flat. So that's what we used to do.
• 5:11
  It was the thing. And then all of a sudden there's
• 5:13
  this cry, there's this screaming voice of a woman.
• 5:17
  And he would just be shocked and and just frozen.
• 5:21
  What is this? And it's, it was usually a woman
• 5:23
  who was beaten and tortured by her husband.
• 5:27
  And they used to cry out aloud in search for help because and
• 5:32
  they were thinking that maybe the villagers will help them
• 5:35
  because there was there were no police to call and the villagers
• 5:40
  would arrive. But the problem is that the
• 5:46
  society in Pakistan that this sort of violence were so
• 5:50
  systematic in the 1990s when I was growing up as a child and so
• 5:55
  widespread that even if the villagers or the police would
• 5:58
  arrive, what can they do? The Quran says in Surah 4 verse
• 6:03
  34 that disobedient women can be beaten and even the police can't
• 6:10
  do anything about that. So I developed a fighter spirit
• 6:17
  from very, very early on. I had this strong sense of
• 6:22
  justice and the will to stand up for myself and for others, even
• 6:29
  if it meant getting myself in trouble.
• 6:32
  So yeah, I used to go to this one woman, for example, that
• 6:38
  everyone called dirty and I used to go into her house and I used
• 6:41
  to eat at her house just to show everyone I have compassion on
• 6:46
  this woman. Why was she called dirty?
• 6:49
  Well, women are responsible in Pakistan for keeping the rules
• 6:59
  and that what the honour of the family depends upon and the
• 7:05
  rules can be anything. I mean, I what particularly the
• 7:09
  reason was in this case? I don't remember but she was
• 7:14
  called dirty and her husband used to live in Greece and
• 7:18
  whenever he came back he used to beat her so badly that I I was
• 7:22
  afraid he's going to break her bones.
• 7:24
  You would see this husband. She was our neighbor.
• 7:26
  I would hear her and it's it was awful.
• 7:29
  It was absolutely awful, but no one would go and people would
• 7:32
  just ask. She's dirty.
• 7:33
  So you know, it can be anything. Sometimes you go outside and
• 7:37
  you're not wearing a headscarf, You're cold, dirty, sometimes
• 7:39
  just because you're not keeping your household the way you're
• 7:42
  supposed to. And in Pakistan, women can be
• 7:46
  called dirty and sometimes being murdered just because they
• 7:50
  looked over a wall and looked at a stranger.
• 7:52
  There are cases like that. So it could have been anything.
• 7:57
  I was a child, I was about 8 years old.
• 7:59
  So I don't really remember what the particular reason in her
• 8:04
  case was. I just remember the cries, the
• 8:07
  pain that she was in and she used to cry.
• 8:11
  And that's where I developed sense of, of, of justice.
• 8:21
  You know, you just, I felt it was not right and I had not read
• 8:24
  the Quran or in, in Urdu, but something within me just said
• 8:30
  it's, it's wrong. So.
• 8:32
  You were at this time, so you're a little girl.
• 8:35
  Life is fairly sweet. You have this extended family.
• 8:38
  You're growing up in this little Pakistani village.
• 8:41
  You're not personally experiencing violence, yet you
• 8:45
  are getting to see the sweet side of being in this larger
• 8:47
  family. You did start to notice that the
• 8:50
  girls did the work and the boys weren't required to work the
• 8:53
  same way the girls were. So you write about this in your
• 8:56
  book. And then you also begin to hear
• 8:58
  about women suffering from beatings from their husbands,
• 9:02
  and you don't see anybody intervening, so they're left
• 9:05
  alone to suffer. They're left alone to suffer.
• 9:07
  You know, The thing is in Pakistan that you go through a
• 9:11
  lot of hardships, you go through a lot of sufferings and then you
• 9:16
  call it life. No one comes you and tells you
• 9:19
  I'm sorry and you need to go to therapy for this.
• 9:22
  There's no therapist in your back village growing up.
• 9:25
  No, there is. There is great suffering, but
• 9:30
  there is also I, I sometimes felt these women are made like
• 9:33
  there's an iron will to go through life because of the
• 9:37
  strength they had to still cope with everything.
• 9:40
  You know, as I described to you, the average size of the family
• 9:44
  back then was like 8 kids and, and that was just normal and,
• 9:50
  and women had to cope with all that.
• 9:52
  And then they did not have any comfort as I described what life
• 9:56
  was like on a daily basis, right.
• 9:59
  And our life was also one of strict religious observance.
• 10:04
  Everyone fasted during Ramadan, so even if temperatures exceeded
• 10:11
  100 Fahrenheit, no water, no food would pass our lips from
• 10:17
  dawn till dusk and. Even for the children.
• 10:21
  Well, children do not have to fast.
• 10:24
  I, of course did because I wanted to be very special to
• 10:29
  Allah. And I did.
• 10:32
  And I almost fainted when I came back from school because it was
• 10:37
  far away. And we, we had to walk.
• 10:38
  My mother couldn't drive. And we, as I said, there were no
• 10:41
  cars in the village. And yeah, so in the recent
• 10:46
  month, people, sort of recent years, people have died in
• 10:50
  Pakistan and still they're fast. And, you know, I recently had my
• 10:57
  friend, she invited me over and she was saying, yeah, you know,
• 11:00
  actually I'm fasting from Swedes and I'm just good.
• 11:03
  It's really nice that you're telling me your, your, your,
• 11:07
  your secret sacrifice. Don't tell it to your Muslim
• 11:11
  neighbor because they, they don't take this fasting
• 11:15
  seriously. It just just the entire village
• 11:21
  was Muslim. There was no one who wasn't.
• 11:26
  How did you see God growing up? You mentioned you wanted to
• 11:28
  please Allah. You're memorizing the Quran in
• 11:31
  Arabic. You don't fully understand what
• 11:33
  you're reading yet though, because your native language is
• 11:36
  Urdu. But you desperately wanted to
• 11:39
  please Allah. Yes, Allah is distant and it
• 11:50
  heavily depends on your good works.
• 11:54
  I was told that there is a scale so on which allows ways your
• 11:59
  good works and your bad works. And so at the end of the day, if
• 12:02
  your good works are greater than your your your bad works, then
• 12:06
  you may go to heaven. But there's no guarantee.
• 12:08
  The only guarantee to go to paradise is to die killing an
• 12:12
  infidel. And that never left me because
• 12:16
  usually it's the men who go to jihad.
• 12:18
  Women are not even required to go to jihad.
• 12:22
  I wanted to. I wanted to die for Allah.
• 12:26
  There was no place for me to die for Allah, and I probably
• 12:30
  wouldn't have the courage to do so, but the desire was still
• 12:34
  there. Because you were taught as a kid
• 12:36
  this is the ultimate aim is to go to heaven with Allah and the
• 12:40
  the surest way to get there is martyrdom.
• 12:42
  But martyrdom, was it always martyrdom by the taking of
• 12:45
  another life, the life of an infidel?
• 12:48
  Because in Christianity martyrdom is you don't take
• 12:52
  life. No, you're, you're, you're
• 12:53
  restricted from ever taking an innocent life.
• 12:55
  It is evil. You die of love to others.
• 12:58
  Yes, you die to save life. That's Christianity.
• 13:01
  In Islam, you're dying in order to spread Islam through conquest
• 13:05
  and sometimes by killing the infidel.
• 13:08
  Yes. And you know, the way this
• 13:10
  happens is that this indoctrination, you don't, you
• 13:15
  don't need the mullahs to teach you that.
• 13:18
  It comes through the minaret of the mosque.
• 13:21
  Every child hears it. When on Friday the sermons were
• 13:25
  read about the treatment of the infidels by Muhammad.
• 13:31
  And so I developed this hatred towards non believers at a very
• 13:35
  young age. And I wasn't alone.
• 13:37
  No one liked the unbelievers. It was called kafir and it was
• 13:40
  an insult. And in Pakistan, the kafir, the
• 13:43
  Christians, they live in separate colonies and they are
• 13:47
  targeted, persecuted. They're not allowed to drink in
• 13:50
  the same glass of water. If a Muslim has touched it
• 13:53
  before and it's his glass, people go to prison for that,
• 13:58
  just for drinking out of a glass that belongs to a Muslim not
• 14:02
  supposed to do that. So that's tolerance.
• 14:05
  And in according to Islam in these countries.
• 14:08
  And people make the mistake of thinking, oh, you know, these
• 14:11
  are just a few people. No, people get charged for
• 14:16
  blasphemy, for little things. And then they imprisoned them.
• 14:20
  I know of a woman who spent ten years in a death row just
• 14:24
  because she drank out of a glass that belonged to a Muslim, 10
• 14:29
  years of her life in Pakistan, in Pakistan.
• 14:33
  And yeah. And so, so this is, this is what
• 14:37
  a lot of people don't understand this, that these are the laws of
• 14:40
  the country that you can't question Islam, you can't say
• 14:46
  any doubts. Sometimes even just speaking
• 14:48
  about the Trinity can get you into prison.
• 14:52
  So as a girl growing up you this is all normal to you and it's
• 14:56
  not as explicit like you shared you're learning the Quran, but
• 14:58
  in in Arabic, but you don't necessarily know everything
• 15:00
  that's being said when it's. Lived.
• 15:02
  But it's lived. And when you mentioned you heard
• 15:04
  this teachings of Muhammad talking about the infidel, was
• 15:06
  that in your native language so you could understand what it's
• 15:08
  being said? So you heard about how the
• 15:10
  infidels were these enemies, etcetera.
• 15:12
  All right, now we're going to get into your first hand
• 15:16
  experience of now, not just injustice that you saw in other
• 15:19
  women in the village, but your experience of injustice because
• 15:22
  this would begin a turning point for you to begin to question the
• 15:26
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• 17:05
  Tell us about the first moment that you saw something in your
• 17:08
  family that you felt this is an injustice because you were
• 17:13
  seeing things outside of your family.
• 17:14
  You loved your family, you loved your family.
• 17:16
  You're seeing injustice outside of your family as a girl, but
• 17:19
  not so much in your family yet. In my extended family, from the
• 17:23
  early beginnings, eyes did see that girls were beaten very
• 17:31
  often just for being girls. That's unfortunately the case in
• 17:36
  Pakistan. That when the girls are born,
• 17:41
  often it's considered as a curse and I don't think it has changed
• 17:47
  so much. I recently heard the story of of
• 17:50
  this little girl Zainab. And Zainab was one of two
• 17:59
  children when she was born. Her father was very unhappy that
• 18:02
  she was a girl. And then when the next baby was
• 18:05
  also a girl, one day as they were walking alongside the
• 18:09
  river, little Xenopt, she was one year old, started to cry.
• 18:15
  And her father took her and just threw her in the river.
• 18:19
  And this is the last memory of that mother of her child
• 18:23
  struggling in the water, trying to hold on to life.
• 18:28
  And her mistake was that she was born as a girl.
• 18:33
  And I saw this in my family that sometimes girls were beaten just
• 18:41
  because they weren't boys. And it was heartbreaking because
• 18:47
  they would cry because and they didn't know why they were the
• 18:50
  mother was beating them and they were so little.
• 18:53
  And then I also knew that, you know, in my case, when I was a
• 19:02
  child, my mother had promised her sister that one day I will
• 19:08
  marry her son. Your cousin, my cousin your your
• 19:12
  parents betrothed you to your cousin as a girl.
• 19:14
  Yeah. And I was at that time living in
• 19:18
  Austria because my my father immigrated to Austria and he
• 19:24
  took us with with us later. And when I arrived there, I
• 19:29
  mean, it was a a very different world.
• 19:32
  How old were you when you first left Pakistan and went to?
• 19:34
  Australia. It was about, I think, 9 or so,
• 19:37
  yeah. And we arrived there and my
• 19:42
  goodness, I mean, it was also a little village close to Salzburg
• 19:48
  that a lot of people know from The Sound of Music, and that's
• 19:54
  where we basically ended up. And what I found most
• 19:59
  fascinating in this village was wherever you went, there was
• 20:07
  this man on the cross, wounded and suffering in the classrooms,
• 20:13
  wayside shrines, people's homes. It was just everywhere and.
• 20:19
  The crucifix. The crucifix, yes.
• 20:22
  And so his gaze was upon me everywhere.
• 20:26
  And you know, it's how Jesus basically entered my life, not
• 20:33
  as you sometimes hear it, and it's a display of great miracles
• 20:37
  or, or dreams, but through his cross.
• 20:43
  And I think it's just because he knew the calling he had for my
• 20:46
  life was not to receive his gifts, but to suffer His passion
• 20:50
  with Him. And He made that clear from the
• 20:54
  very beginning. I think this is going to be your
• 20:57
  life, yeah. So were you.
• 21:01
  So you're a little girl in Austria.
• 21:03
  You're living in this Muslim family.
• 21:04
  Your father moved there for work, took your family.
• 21:06
  You still have a lot of ties to Pakistan.
• 21:08
  Your extended family is all there.
• 21:10
  You're beginning to have this encounter with Christianity
• 21:13
  through Jesus Christ on the cross.
• 21:14
  You don't fully understand it, but you see it everywhere.
• 21:16
  You're you're getting this taste of freedom in Austria in the
• 21:18
  culture. But then you have this
• 21:20
  experience where your mother and your father have different plans
• 21:24
  for you than you have for yourself as a girl that's not
• 21:27
  coming of age. Yes, well, it started when I
• 21:32
  wanted to live like all the other girls.
• 21:35
  I wanted to go swimming, listen to the Backstreet Boys and have
• 21:46
  the little freedoms sit in a cafe with friends.
• 21:50
  But my parents considered these things deeply immoral.
• 21:54
  And then there was always a big fight.
• 21:58
  And when I pushed back, it turned into a very painful
• 22:05
  experience for me because my mother used to beat me and it
• 22:09
  wasn't just a slap. She used to grab me by the hair,
• 22:14
  drag me to the apartment and it became so bad that the social
• 22:19
  services intervened and I ended up in a shelter.
• 22:24
  I was 15 or 16 at that point and.
• 22:29
  Can I interrupt you for a quick moment before you share about
• 22:31
  that experience in Pakistan? Had you ever experienced being
• 22:34
  beat beaten? See, I don't even call that
• 22:39
  beating because getting slaps and, you know, for disobedience,
• 22:42
  that was just the most normal things that mothers do in
• 22:45
  Pakistan. I'm not inviting anyone to do
• 22:48
  this by the way, but this was just very different.
• 22:55
  This was punching, hitting, hair pulling.
• 22:57
  There were bruises. Yeah, there was all one incident
• 23:00
  where my mom just took a water bottle made of glass and just
• 23:05
  smashed it on my head. It was it.
• 23:07
  It was a lot. And then I would have never left
• 23:10
  my home otherwise because I love my family too much.
• 23:14
  Despite the violence. You know, Muslims have very
• 23:18
  great attachment to their families because we are so
• 23:21
  close. We don't grow up in daycares.
• 23:26
  We have very strong ties to our grandparents, to the family that
• 23:32
  we grew up with. And so the attachment is very,
• 23:34
  very strong. I mean, it's partly also the
• 23:36
  reason I think that the children in the third world are more
• 23:41
  resilient, you know, because they have this foundation of
• 23:45
  attachment. But the problem is, you know,
• 23:47
  then this violence comes, comes in and, and so that's the
• 23:52
  negative side. And I was experiencing that.
• 23:55
  And I went to this shelter and I spoke to the social workers
• 23:59
  there and I said to them, I, I can't, I can't make any choices
• 24:04
  for my life, and that in fact, not even my heart belongs to me.
• 24:09
  That had already been claimed too, that I was promised to my
• 24:15
  cousin when I was a little child and that now my parents said
• 24:20
  that I was ready to get married. At 15. 15 1/2, sixteen, that was
• 24:27
  sort of part the age. And so when the conversation
• 24:31
  started, basically, and and then, yeah, there was this
• 24:37
  vacation planned to Pakistan. The social worker sent me back
• 24:41
  because my parents said nothing like that will ever happen.
• 24:45
  She has all the choices she wants and she can do anything.
• 24:50
  And I went back and we flew to Pakistan.
• 24:56
  And then we got there. I realized it was a trap.
• 24:59
  My passport was taken away from me.
• 25:01
  I was not allowed to go outside and my aunt called me into a
• 25:06
  room and she announced that I'm going to get married to her son.
• 25:14
  And in the history of our family, no girl had ever
• 25:19
  objected to a marriage. And I was the first one to break
• 25:23
  that cycle. And I knew it will take a lot of
• 25:26
  suffering, and I did. I announced before everyone else
• 25:31
  that I will not marry Salman, my cousin, and it was so hurtful
• 25:42
  and painful what I went through that day when my mother beat me
• 25:46
  in front of all the relatives. Did anyone intervene?
• 25:51
  I was so wishing that my uncle from Spain, who lived in Spain,
• 25:56
  who saw all the freedoms of the women there, would intervene.
• 25:59
  He was there. Not even he intervened.
• 26:03
  My cousin came over then and just pushed my mother away and
• 26:11
  they just punished me by leaving me back in Pakistan.
• 26:17
  Your parents left you and went back to Austria with your
• 26:19
  brothers and your other sister. So sorry you're at 16 at this
• 26:23
  point. And where did they leave you?
• 26:26
  At my cousin's house. And then it was decided, I think
• 26:31
  it was my grandfather too, who was part of this, who made this
• 26:34
  decision. The problem is they just
• 26:38
  announced these decisions to me. I don't know who who made them
• 26:41
  right, because I can't. And so I was set, informed.
• 26:45
  I'm going to go to a madrassa. What is a madrassa?
• 26:48
  Madrassa is an Islamic religious seminary.
• 26:54
  Or it's actually more like a prison.
• 26:57
  I have never seen any prison in the West who is worse than a
• 27:04
  madrassa or the madrassa that I went to anyways, you know,
• 27:09
  outside there were guards standing who would watch how
• 27:13
  women were dressed. We would learn and sleep in the
• 27:19
  same room on dirty carpets and the teacher was always behind a
• 27:26
  curtain because men and women are not allowed to look into
• 27:29
  into each other's eyes. And sometimes when girls became
• 27:35
  disobedient because it is very hard to sit the entire day, 12
• 27:40
  hours a day, you are being indoctrinated with the Quran.
• 27:44
  What you do in the madrasa is you learn the Quran by heart and
• 27:47
  you learn the hadis. What is the hadith?
• 27:51
  Basically the deeds and the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad.
• 27:55
  And and what was so awful was then they used to punish the
• 28:03
  girls that were disobedient, and the punishments were so hard
• 28:07
  that no one else would dare to even disobey.
• 28:13
  So if you're in Hadassah, you're sitting in this kind of dirty,
• 28:16
  maybe very hot room if it's the summer, right?
• 28:18
  Yes. Reciting the Quran and the
• 28:20
  hadith for 12 hours a day, yeah, can't really go out move.
• 28:25
  No, there's no vacation, there's no holiday.
• 28:27
  There's there were three bathrooms for dozens of of
• 28:32
  girls. And you know, then sometimes you
• 28:36
  would go into the shower and there no water comes out.
• 28:38
  And the shower was a little thing like a tap, you know, and
• 28:45
  there was a line and you are in there you and and then the
• 28:48
  already the next woman is knocking on the door.
• 28:53
  And our meals were like meager lentils and flatbread.
• 28:58
  And what was leftover was served in the morning.
• 29:01
  And I became extremely sick, which was my way out of that
• 29:09
  madrassa, because they called my aunt and said you have to take
• 29:12
  her home. And that's when I realized the
• 29:16
  only way to get back to Austria is to marry this guy.
• 29:20
  And then I'm going to divorce him when I go there in Austria
• 29:23
  because I knew they wanted a ticket for him to go back to
• 29:26
  Austria. So part of marrying you was to
• 29:28
  get you get him through your father to get access to Austria
• 29:33
  too. Yes, they wanted.
• 29:35
  Yes, he wanted to be in Austria and work there and and so my
• 29:42
  father came back after six months and he took me with him.
• 29:49
  They did not it it there wasn't a marriage because he couldn't
• 29:52
  afford to get the entire family back again and plan a whole
• 29:55
  wedding. But he was satisfied that I was
• 29:58
  ready to get engaged to him and my whole demeanor had changed.
• 30:02
  I was, I was broken after this experience there and there are
• 30:07
  also things that happened that were extremely tragic towards
• 30:12
  me. And I have talked about this in
• 30:14
  my book. I do not like to really go into
• 30:16
  this the podcast, but that abuse for me was something that really
• 30:25
  broke me. Sexual abuse.
• 30:27
  Yes. At the hands of family or the
• 30:29
  people in the madrasa. My cousin.
• 30:33
  And this is the one that you're betrothed to, and now he felt he
• 30:37
  had a right to abuse you. And yes, and then my father came
• 30:42
  back after six months and he brought me to Austria.
• 30:48
  And in Austria I went back to school and there I met Joseph,
• 30:54
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• 32:48
  I went back to school and there I met Joseph, an evangelical
• 32:53
  Christian who who, after I've told, told him all my problems,
• 32:58
  gave me a Bible that was his solution.
• 33:00
  And I'm going, OK, so you know, I tell him all these things and
• 33:04
  he gives me this Bible with a map of Israel in the back.
• 33:09
  And I'm going Do you know how much we love the Jews?
• 33:13
  But he didn't. That's a joke.
• 33:15
  How much you love the Jews you're saying you want to burn,
• 33:18
  I mean. Yeah, I mean, that's that's an
• 33:21
  open secret in the Muslim world that people hate the Jews.
• 33:24
  That's everyone hates the Jews. And if they tell you something
• 33:28
  else, they're lying. It's just most normal thing.
• 33:32
  And so I took the Bible home, even though it was an I'll
• 33:38
  incalculable risk. And I one night in desperation
• 33:45
  said to Allah, who are you? Buddha, Allah, Krishna, Jesus.
• 33:52
  And if you're so all powerful, why are you not answering my
• 33:56
  prayers? And I just open the Bible at
• 34:02
  random. It's at night time and my
• 34:04
  parents are sleeping. And when I open the Bible, I
• 34:08
  read a line and it was written in bold.
• 34:11
  You will seek me, then you will find me, then you will seek me
• 34:16
  with all your heart. I closed it immediately because
• 34:23
  that answered a question. I wasn't used to this.
• 34:27
  We don't talk to God and then God answers.
• 34:30
  We just fulfill the roots to one day go to paradise.
• 34:35
  But to ask a question and receive an answer, that's that
• 34:39
  was normal for me. And so a relationship started
• 34:43
  developing because I then became curious and read the New
• 34:51
  Testament, as this evangelical Christian told me to start with
• 34:55
  the New Testament. And I started to make mental
• 34:57
  comparisons between Muhammad and Jesus, you know, and especially
• 35:08
  the story of Mary Magdalene. But that was what moved me a lot
• 35:14
  because I saw myself and the women of my country in my
• 35:18
  mandolin who had a mob eager to execute her.
• 35:25
  And here comes Jesus of Nazareth and sets her free.
• 35:29
  In Islam, she would have been executed.
• 35:31
  And I know you guys read the story 100 times.
• 35:35
  Some people are super bored hearing it.
• 35:36
  And you know, yeah, I know about it.
• 35:40
  But when you are imprisoned in a madrasa in a country where to
• 35:48
  this day women are burned alive just for refusing a marriage,
• 35:55
  being set free like this is a whole different thing.
• 36:02
  You understand this passage very differently.
• 36:07
  And I think people here are already benefiting from this
• 36:10
  revelation and the fruit of this revelation, and that's why
• 36:14
  they're taking it for granted. But for me, that's the first
• 36:20
  time I felt what love must be like.
• 36:26
  And so in the mental comparisons there is there was Muhammad was
• 36:33
  an adulterous woman brought to him and execution for the woman.
• 36:39
  Muhammad ordered execution for a woman caught in adultery.
• 36:43
  And the same is brought to Jesus.
• 36:45
  And as we see mercy, you know Muhammad said kill the infidels
• 36:48
  wherever you find them. Jesus said love your enemies and
• 36:53
  pray for those who persecute you.
• 36:55
  And Muhammad said, I have been commanded to fight till people
• 37:02
  believe that he's basically the messenger of Allah.
• 37:06
  And Jesus says blessed are the peacemakers.
• 37:13
  Muhammad was a warlord who participated in countless
• 37:17
  battles. And Jesus said my Kingdom is not
• 37:21
  of this world. So the list went on and on and
• 37:24
  on and on. For me, finding Jesus was like
• 37:30
  finding a true treasure and, you know, a rare treasure, you know,
• 37:34
  and, and I think it's the Gospel of Matthew where he says what
• 37:39
  Jesus says the Kingdom of God is like a merchant seeking for fine
• 37:44
  pearls. And when he found one of great
• 37:47
  value, he went away, sold everything he had and bought it.
• 37:55
  And I realized God is inviting me to a challenge.
• 38:00
  He's not just a sweet Jesus was setting people free, There's a
• 38:05
  great sacrifice. And that, for me, was choosing
• 38:13
  him over my family. Because you loved your family
• 38:17
  and you still love your family. My family for me was absolutely
• 38:20
  everything, despite the violence, despite everything.
• 38:23
  And I, I said to myself, I cannot do this.
• 38:27
  I, I cannot do this because Jesus has basically asked me to
• 38:32
  die in order to live for him. Am I, am I ready for this?
• 38:38
  And is he worth the sacrifice? And burdened by this weight, I
• 38:48
  chose to speak with someone who I thought would be able to help
• 38:50
  me. I went to a Catholic priest and
• 38:55
  I told him about the experiences that I was having with Jesus,
• 38:58
  experiences that I have not shared in this podcast.
• 39:01
  It would take too long. I've shared them in my book.
• 39:05
  And I told him about what was happening.
• 39:07
  And he said to me, it could be that Muhammad was also a prophet
• 39:11
  and he did not invite me to be catechized or, you know, that I
• 39:17
  need to be baptized or anything like that.
• 39:19
  He sent me home. Oh no.
• 39:22
  And this was the the time when Pope John Paul had, I think,
• 39:27
  kissed the Quran and it was all about interreligious tea
• 39:30
  parties, you know, So we're all the same.
• 39:32
  I'm going, no, you're not. And, and what happened after
• 39:43
  this is that I had to basically decide on my own, why am I
• 39:52
  willing to become homeless and without a family, without
• 39:59
  friends? Because I knew my family will
• 40:01
  reject me and my my community will reject me as well.
• 40:04
  And I will be by myself on the street.
• 40:07
  And so I said to myself, I would rather be homeless with Jesus
• 40:16
  than have everything without him.
• 40:20
  And that's what I became. I became homeless after I had
• 40:26
  not told my family yet, but my mother had forced me to sign the
• 40:29
  marriage certificate to invite my cousin to Austria.
• 40:34
  And when I refused that, she packed my clothing in bag and
• 40:40
  just threw it out and spat on me.
• 40:42
  And she said, if I had known that you will turn out like this
• 40:47
  one day, I would have killed you as a child.
• 40:50
  And there I was. I was on the street.
• 40:54
  I had no idea where to go. And I ended up in a homeless
• 40:57
  shelter. And that's where I was.
• 41:04
  And I've had troubles just breaking up the contact to my
• 41:11
  family. The social workers were saying
• 41:14
  you're going to beat you and so on.
• 41:15
  But I just, I just always, I wanted to visit them.
• 41:18
  And then one day when I received a call from my home, I went back
• 41:22
  to see them and there was my cousin sitting in the living
• 41:27
  room. And they had signed the marriage
• 41:32
  certificate themselves and invited him.
• 41:34
  And so basically I was married without knowing it.
• 41:38
  And in that room, they had a Muslim scholar, sort of that I
• 41:45
  knew from my childhood. And they had found out that they
• 41:51
  knew that I had become a Christian, although I had not
• 41:54
  been baptized yet. And in Islam, apostasy is
• 41:59
  punished with death. That's not just some random
• 42:04
  aberration. That's the law.
• 42:08
  And, you know, sometimes people speak about Islam, and they come
• 42:14
  from these minor sects from within Islam that don't even
• 42:18
  represent 1% of the entire Muslim population.
• 42:23
  We were Sunnis. 90% of the Muslims in the world are Sunnis.
• 42:29
  OK. And I think that's very
• 42:31
  important to know that if you want people to speak about
• 42:37
  Islam, don't choose the sects. It's like having the Jehovah's
• 42:41
  Witness speak for Christianity, you know, So apostasy in the
• 42:47
  Sunni Islam is punishable by death.
• 42:49
  Is it punishable by death as well in the nation of Pakistan?
• 42:54
  Well, officially Pakistan doesn't say that they will kill
• 42:59
  people for apostasy, but they say that any criticism of Islam
• 43:04
  or the Quran will be punished with death penalty or lifelong
• 43:09
  imprisonment. And it's usually the mob that
• 43:15
  carries it out anyways. So the laws on paper mean
• 43:20
  nothing. They're here to impress Western
• 43:24
  nations, to receive a lot of money for those countries.
• 43:28
  But in reality, there are so many people that I know of that
• 43:35
  get murdered just because of refusing a marriage.
• 43:38
  What do you think is going to happen when you leave Islam?
• 43:41
  That's the worst thing you can commit.
• 43:44
  I personally haven't seen anyone being murdered because of that
• 43:49
  because there are hardly any conversions.
• 43:50
  I know we always hear these stories of all thousands are
• 43:53
  converting. I think that's fake news, by the
• 43:55
  way. There aren't thousands
• 43:57
  converting because if that was the case, you would see a lot
• 44:00
  more executions. And I hear of executions of
• 44:02
  girls because they were forcefully married.
• 44:05
  But these numbers that are always put out, I think that's
• 44:09
  very misleading. Of about Muslim to Christian.
• 44:12
  Christianity, I think it happens.
• 44:14
  I think Iran is one of those places where it does take place.
• 44:17
  It happens, but there are no facts.
• 44:20
  I mean, I look at the facts and one of the studies are trusts
• 44:24
  are those of Pew Research. You know, they, they, they put
• 44:27
  it out and you see Islam is rising, rising, rising.
• 44:31
  It's the fastest growing religion in the world and, and
• 44:35
  there are hardly any conversions towards Christianity.
• 44:40
  And, and, and that's not just my experience.
• 44:44
  I just recently asked my friend who has been working with girls
• 44:50
  that are forcefully married Muslim girls.
• 44:52
  And I said, you have helped thousands of girls over the
• 44:55
  years. This is what you do.
• 44:57
  How many of these girls have converted to Christianity?
• 45:02
  And he said you're the only person I know.
• 45:05
  So I want to explore more the question of how the Western
• 45:09
  world sees and treats Islam, how the Islamic world sees
• 45:14
  Christians and the Western world, not that the Western
• 45:16
  world is totally Christian, but it's majority Christian, at
• 45:19
  least Christian and name. And I want to explore your
• 45:23
  perspectives on that more. You've already touched on it
• 45:26
  already this moment that you're in this room and you are now
• 45:34
  confronted with a marriage certificate you did not sign.
• 45:38
  But it's your marriage certificate to your cousin that
• 45:42
  you said you did not want to marry, that they've now brought
• 45:44
  from Pakistan to Austria, and you're sitting in this room.
• 45:47
  Did you fear for your life? Oh, I did fear for my life, and
• 45:51
  I also feared for the life of my parents because the
• 45:53
  psychological pressure that put on me was so heavy.
• 45:56
  You know, one day my father leaned leaned over the 7th floor
• 46:03
  black balcony and he's threatened to jump if I don't
• 46:06
  marry my cousin and I was just scared what's he going to do to
• 46:10
  himself that I will? My worry was even more for my
• 46:13
  parents. And even to this day, even
• 46:16
  though I have gone through, I think some suffering, their pain
• 46:23
  matters more to me still because I know that they're rejected by
• 46:27
  the community. And some people wrote to me and
• 46:31
  said, you know, your father was in Pakistan.
• 46:33
  No one spoke to him. Because their daughter is seen
• 46:39
  as an infidel. Yes, so you know, for for
• 46:45
  Muslims to convert is to die. That's what it is.
• 46:50
  And you know, sweet death for Jesus.
• 46:56
  I'm, I'm so grateful and I know of this, this woman from
• 47:01
  Pakistan, she's, she's converted and she was going through a lot
• 47:05
  of pain and, and one of her family members died in Pakistan
• 47:08
  and she was not able to say a last farewell.
• 47:11
  And there was no last embrace. And her life was, she was
• 47:16
  struggling in so many ways. And, and she said to Jesus, I
• 47:20
  gave up everything for you. And this is what you give back
• 47:23
  to me. And Jesus said to her, If I gave
• 47:28
  you a life of ease and the power to resurrect your dad or suffer
• 47:36
  my passion with me, what will you choose?
• 47:41
  And she said, she said to him, I will go with you where you're
• 47:46
  most alone. I'll go with you to Golgotha,
• 47:50
  where the crowd leaves you, and I will gather roses on the way,
• 47:56
  which are the tears of my sacrifice.
• 47:59
  And so Jesus was very satisfied when he heard that.
• 48:04
  And that gave me courage, you know, to say Christ appeared in
• 48:11
  my life through his cross for a reason.
• 48:15
  And even though later on, especially when I became
• 48:18
  Catholic, I have seen things so extraordinary, and I wish that
• 48:26
  every Catholic would know what happens at every Mass.
• 48:30
  They would kneel down and they would never stand up again.
• 48:34
  And still I think that the least adversity suffered for Jesus is
• 48:41
  worth more than any extraordinary revelations
• 48:45
  because that's where the union takes place.
• 48:47
  That's the most valuable thing, is to suffer for Christ Jesus.
• 48:53
  Yes. It sounds almost like God
• 48:57
  allowed. God allows.
• 48:59
  He permits evil. He permits our free will.
• 49:01
  The free will is a gift to choose good and love.
• 49:03
  But we choose evil often and other people choose evil because
• 49:06
  of our wound. Right?
• 49:08
  But God allowed in. In a sense it sounds like you're
• 49:10
  the Muslim upbringing you had and even that experience of God
• 49:14
  as Allah stern rejecting you if you did wrong, you had to die
• 49:20
  and take other lives if to go right to heaven as a martyr and
• 49:23
  you discovered no Christ died for me and he invites me in a
• 49:28
  way to die with him to then be resurrected again.
• 49:32
  And the same courage you had as a little girl to say, well, I
• 49:35
  want to be able to die for Allah now.
• 49:38
  It was no, I'm I'm willing to die with my Lord because I love
• 49:42
  him out of love for others. See this thing?
• 49:45
  Yes, yes. See, The thing is, when you
• 49:48
  unite your suffering with the suffering of Jesus, it doesn't
• 49:54
  destroy you, it redeems you. And what redeems you can heal
• 49:59
  someone else. And many times the the cross you
• 50:05
  carry can become someone else's resurrection.
• 50:08
  I've seen it through my life that today thousands of people
• 50:12
  are helped because I went through what I went through.
• 50:15
  And it isn't this way that when our pain is united to Christ, it
• 50:23
  becomes an act of redemption. And that's the beauty of the
• 50:26
  cross, to suffer for others, not just that Jesus suffered for us,
• 50:30
  but that we too suffer for others.
• 50:32
  You know, just like our sins hurt and damage other people, so
• 50:38
  our suffering united with Christ benefits others because they
• 50:44
  come become like this continuation of His passion
• 50:48
  within our souls. And I think God is choosing
• 50:51
  souls right now to suffer with Him for the sins of mankind.
• 50:57
  And suffering can make you very bitter.
• 51:01
  I know a lot of people who are very bitter.
• 51:04
  Or it can make you redemptive. The difference is what you make
• 51:08
  with it, right? And I didn't know all these
• 51:12
  things back then, but as I reflect upon it, this is what I
• 51:18
  can see. And so I was threatened with
• 51:24
  death. My entire community rejected me.
• 51:28
  They used to spit on me on the way when they passed.
• 51:33
  One man drugged me, put drugs in my drink in a restaurant that I
• 51:39
  used to go to. And I had two attempts of rape
• 51:43
  by Muslim men that I used to know and who said that they're
• 51:46
  going to be mediators between me and my family.
• 51:48
  And that's what happened. And God helped me to get out of
• 51:52
  those situations before anything bad happened.
• 51:56
  And. The community knows Sabatina is
• 51:58
  converting to Mary, her cousin, and she's converted to
• 52:01
  Christianity. That what came after the
• 52:02
  conversion, that was the punishment for the conversion
• 52:05
  was that was just the worst thing that can happen.
• 52:07
  And now I had become like the Christian girls in Pakistan.
• 52:11
  And you know, in Islam, Muslim women have few rights.
• 52:16
  Christian women have no rights. What do you mean by that?
• 52:20
  What I mean by that is that let me give you an example.
• 52:25
  In Pakistan recently a 13 year old Christian girl was abducted.
• 52:32
  Her parents file a police report and they figured out that a
• 52:38
  Muslim man had abducted her. He was sexually assaulting her,
• 52:43
  using her as a sex slave, but he married her so they went to
• 52:51
  court. The parents went to court and
• 52:52
  the court just ruled that the Muslim man can rape her as much
• 52:56
  as he wants because he has forcefully converted her to
• 53:00
  Islam. This is what's happened so many
• 53:03
  times. This just happened in Pakistan.
• 53:04
  Yes, and it's legal. Yeah, it's legal.
• 53:06
  It's the court. They just said, yeah, that's
• 53:08
  fine, that's fine. And this is happening thousands
• 53:13
  of times with Christian girls and some Hindu girls.
• 53:17
  They're abducting these girls and forcefully converting them.
• 53:19
  I was a few weeks ago at the Michael Knowles show at the
• 53:23
  Daily Wire. I presented to him a case of a
• 53:26
  six year old Christian girl who was abducted and the Muslim man
• 53:30
  who raped her at six at 6 was so brutal that he tore her uterus.
• 53:38
  And it's just a few weeks ago. In Pakistan.
• 53:42
  In Pakistan I have another girl what already her.
• 53:46
  Sorry, was she? Was she rescued?
• 53:48
  We yes my I have a foundation and the people that I work with
• 53:52
  in Pakistan are helping her right now.
• 53:55
  We are we are taking care of her family and her and with and not
• 54:01
  I already have two more cases. One is 6 year old, one is 7 year
• 54:05
  old, 6 year old. The same thing happened with
• 54:08
  her. The seven-year old.
• 54:10
  That's so heartbreaking. Her mother died when she was
• 54:13
  three years old. Her, she's one of six children.
• 54:18
  Her father sells vegetables and earns around $3 a day.
• 54:22
  And he put her in a hostel because he couldn't take care of
• 54:24
  her. And now she was raped.
• 54:26
  So this is happening every single day.
• 54:29
  So these Muslim men in Lintz, where I was, they were just
• 54:34
  trying treating me the way they would treat those girls.
• 54:37
  I want to pause here a minute to get the psychology because it's
• 54:42
  not like, oh, you know, men are more naturally evil in Pakistan
• 54:47
  or in one of these other countries.
• 54:50
  They're trained and raised to be this way.
• 54:53
  They weren't designed or made for that behavior.
• 54:56
  I want to look at for a moment in Iran, because there's a lot
• 55:01
  of news about Iran right now, obviously with the war that we
• 55:04
  are now engaged in between the United States and Iran.
• 55:07
  And a teaching went viral recently, at least on X, on
• 55:14
  social media that most people were shocked by.
• 55:17
  And this is from the Ayatollah Khamenei's manual of Islamic
• 55:20
  law. And this is the original supreme
• 55:24
  leader of the new of Iran as we understand it.
• 55:27
  Obviously, there's another, another Ayatollah who took his
• 55:29
  place that was just assassinated.
• 55:31
  Now the Sun, it seems like might be taking his place.
• 55:34
  But this Ayatollah Khamenei wrote this.
• 55:38
  It's his words. And he says, and this is
• 55:41
  shocking. And so there's going to be a
• 55:42
  content warning here on what I'm about to read.
• 55:46
  Intercourse with a woman is not allowed unless she attains the
• 55:49
  age of 9, regardless whether the marriage is permanent or
• 55:53
  temporary. And by the way, marriage does
• 55:56
  not require the consent of course of the woman or the 9
• 55:59
  year old or in some cases even the parents if it's if it's a
• 56:01
  Christian like you're saying. Regardless whether the marriage
• 56:04
  is permanent or temporary. There is however no objection.
• 56:07
  And other sexual enjoyments like touching lasciviously, hugging
• 56:10
  and rubbing the thighs even with a suckling infant.
• 56:14
  It also goes on to talk about how if the man perforates the
• 56:19
  child's genitals ultimately and and the birth canal ultimately
• 56:25
  and creates so that the girls basically her her, her inside is
• 56:33
  broken. The the cavity's separating her
• 56:35
  anal, the anal area and her rectum and her colon is is
• 56:42
  broken apart by force that it's wrong to do that, but there
• 56:47
  should be no punishment. Yes, I mean you can also in
• 56:51
  Iran, you can also kill your wife because of honor and go go
• 56:56
  punish then free. That's that's just normal.
• 56:59
  And if you convert, you die. This is and what I what I find
• 57:05
  most surprising is that we have people in the US that are
• 57:12
  actively defending this regime. I'm just going, OK, I don't want
• 57:18
  to get into the politics of what's going on right now, but
• 57:21
  you really can't defend the ayatollahs and be their
• 57:25
  spokespeople, right? The spokespersons here, that's.
• 57:29
  But this is the way young men and women grow up hearing this.
• 57:35
  And that's why they become these monsters.
• 57:41
  They think they're doing a good deed.
• 57:45
  It's in the news a lot right now, the war with Iran and the
• 57:49
  United States, relationship to the state of Israel.
• 57:53
  And I'm seeing among Catholics in the United States, some
• 57:57
  Catholics, not all, but some, the special anger towards some
• 58:01
  Jewish people and certainly towards the nation state of
• 58:03
  Israel, that the Jews are leading the world somehow in a
• 58:08
  conspiracy to exert power, that the Jews mistreat Christians,
• 58:15
  that Israel has tricked us into wars.
• 58:18
  And you know, Israel is called the synagogue of Satan by some,
• 58:22
  not all, but a few Catholics. And they're saying this is not
• 58:26
  anti-Semitic. These are just facts.
• 58:27
  I'm just saying facts. As a woman who was raised in the
• 58:31
  Muslim world in Pakistan, who converted to Catholicism and who
• 58:35
  has a different perspective on all of these dynamics, what do
• 58:39
  you think the right posture should be of Catholics to the
• 58:43
  Jewish people, both ethnically and also religiously?
• 58:48
  First of all, I find it very hard to believe that there are
• 58:52
  some Jews sitting where somewhere conspiring against the
• 58:55
  world. Because in my experience, and I
• 58:57
  know some Jewish people where there are three Jews, 2 Jews,
• 59:02
  there are three different opinions.
• 59:04
  They can't be united somewhere doing this.
• 59:07
  And the other thing is, I think it's I believe it's a, it's a
• 59:11
  great distraction. It's the only Jewish state in
• 59:14
  the world. And especially now with Iran, I
• 59:17
  mean, we know we know in Europe how many times the Iranian
• 59:22
  regimes have has sent people to kill the critics of the regime.
• 59:26
  Even if they lived in in the exile.
• 59:29
  The European leaders know that they call that regime A
• 59:32
  terroristic regime. They are behind Trump, President
• 59:36
  Trump on this, but they don't do anything.
• 59:40
  The difference with President Trump is he sees and goes
• 59:44
  terroristic regime. You need to do something about
• 59:46
  this. And I don't understand all the
• 59:50
  politics here, but to me, a lot of the the the news anchors and
• 59:58
  podcasters are sounding like the ayatollahs.
• 1:00:02
  You're saying that Western news anchors and podcasters are
• 1:00:05
  sounding like the Ayatollah of Iran?
• 1:00:07
  Yeah, they are. I mean, and, and they sound the
• 1:00:10
  same as, you know, when growing up in Pakistan, the hatred
• 1:00:15
  towards the Jews and I know of, of friends, I have even met some
• 1:00:20
  Palestinians and you know, in Gaza, they do math and it goes
• 1:00:24
  something like this. If you have 4 Jews and you kill
• 1:00:31
  one Jew, then how many do you have left?
• 1:00:34
  That's math for children. OK.
• 1:00:36
  And. In the Gaza school.
• 1:00:38
  System, Gaza, school system and the very people that are
• 1:00:41
  defending Gaza at the moment, they wouldn't survive 24 hours
• 1:00:45
  with their lifestyle in that area of the world.
• 1:00:49
  And what I find most disturbing is that a lot of these people
• 1:00:54
  are daring to talk about Islamic regimes, although they have
• 1:01:02
  never themselves suffered under oppression.
• 1:01:06
  It's so easy to speak like this when you have never broken the
• 1:01:09
  law of Sharia. It's so easy.
• 1:01:11
  You're not. You don't have the death
• 1:01:13
  sentence. It's super easy for you to speak
• 1:01:14
  like this. Talk to my friend who spent time
• 1:01:18
  in the Evin prison in Iran, who was sentenced to death for
• 1:01:25
  converting to Christianity. Talk to my friend Mina, who
• 1:01:29
  lives in Germany and who fought against the regime and they
• 1:01:32
  killed and hanged her husband, you know, So it depends on your
• 1:01:38
  perspective. You know, for I think for a lot
• 1:01:40
  of the Iranian people, this is a bittersweet fight for freedom.
• 1:01:46
  And for a lot of Westerners who are already enjoying freedom,
• 1:01:50
  who have all the freedoms of the world, it's just unnecessary
• 1:01:52
  spending. So we'll see.
• 1:01:56
  I pray that they have the the courage to rise up and get rid
• 1:02:00
  of this regime. And I hope that I don't get
• 1:02:03
  killed myself for criticizing this right now.
• 1:02:06
  I see this particular preoccupation that you're
• 1:02:09
  speaking to among American media elites.
• 1:02:13
  Let's call them a preoccupation with what they consider Jewish
• 1:02:18
  elites who are their arch enemies.
• 1:02:20
  And the perceived sins are sins of Israel as a nation and the
• 1:02:24
  sins and sins of Jewish Jews as a people and a complete wash
• 1:02:28
  over of the threat of Islam or their own sins are problems.
• 1:02:34
  And I think, you know, the definition of anti-Semitism is a
• 1:02:40
  lack of measure in criticism. I think it's a big.
• 1:02:44
  Cancer in in our society right now.
• 1:02:46
  That's I mean, I grew up in Pakistan and in Germany.
• 1:02:51
  I mean, both, both are not big friends of the Jews, you know,
• 1:02:54
  or weren't big friends of the Jews.
• 1:02:57
  And I remember this one moment when I was standing in a
• 1:03:02
  concentration camp and I was Muslim and I was standing in
• 1:03:07
  front of the oven where they used to burn the Jews.
• 1:03:11
  And that moment, even with all the hatred that was, I was
• 1:03:16
  indoctrinated with just the same sense of justice that I had as a
• 1:03:20
  childhood. This is wrong.
• 1:03:22
  This is wrong. And I'm seeing in Berlin,
• 1:03:26
  everywhere around the world, Jews are being targeted again.
• 1:03:30
  And that's a very bad sign. And I I really pray that the
• 1:03:37
  church is stronger in her condemnation towards
• 1:03:42
  anti-Semitism and that the advocate for the persecuted
• 1:03:46
  Christians as well. That is important.
• 1:03:51
  I think a good litmus test, I would say, is if your favorite
• 1:03:53
  podcaster and news host is spending more time condemning
• 1:03:59
  Jews than advocating for persecuted Christians in Nigeria
• 1:04:06
  and other parts of the world where they are at the risk of
• 1:04:08
  jihadists. Ultimately, that's who's killing
• 1:04:10
  them. Then are you really speaking out
• 1:04:15
  of a place of love and faith? Are you speaking from a place of
• 1:04:19
  special hatred for a particular group that you have been taught
• 1:04:23
  to fear and hate? Yeah.
• 1:04:28
  And I'm seeing it and I'm very scared.
• 1:04:32
  I'm seeing it and I'm very disturbed by it.
• 1:04:34
  It's not a new problem. You know, anti-Semitism grips
• 1:04:37
  the the western world leading up to the Holocaust.
• 1:04:41
  It led to the Holocaust. It's good for clicks, it's good
• 1:04:44
  for clicks well, because anti-Semitism is a cancer in the
• 1:04:47
  Muslim world. You will get a lot of following
• 1:04:49
  for that and but it's not the truth and you know, Jesus had
• 1:04:57
  has less followers than Satan, but that doesn't mean that he's
• 1:05:01
  not the truth right? And at the end of his his life
• 1:05:07
  on this earth, he had just a handful of followers going to
• 1:05:12
  the passion, you know, but this is what we forgot.
• 1:05:15
  It's even if you have influence, it's important to use the
• 1:05:19
  influence for good and not for evil, you know, to not, Yeah.
• 1:05:28
  You share in your book Sabatina, the relationship you have with
• 1:05:33
  your brothers who you love very much, and they were your
• 1:05:35
  playmates. You love, you love them.
• 1:05:38
  But you share an example about how at one point your mother was
• 1:05:43
  beating you and your brother. You looked at him thinking
• 1:05:47
  perhaps he would defend you. Can you share about that moment?
• 1:05:52
  My brother was complaining about his friends saying bad things
• 1:05:55
  about me, the way I am dressed and I carry myself and, and he,
• 1:06:03
  I think he said something like that, that I look like a
• 1:06:05
  prostitute or and, and I found that so hurtful.
• 1:06:09
  And there was a newspaper and I just threw it on him.
• 1:06:13
  And then my mother came and she just grabbed me at the hair.
• 1:06:16
  So what she used to do and then she pulled me down on the floor
• 1:06:20
  and she started to kick me and I was trying to cover my head.
• 1:06:25
  And then, yeah, my brother came and I thought he's going to help
• 1:06:28
  me and he kicked me too. That was the most devastating,
• 1:06:34
  one of one of the most devastating moments in my life.
• 1:06:39
  And I went out and I just completely broke down and
• 1:06:44
  someone had to pick me up. Just I was so weak.
• 1:06:46
  I couldn't even walk. That's I was just on the street
• 1:06:50
  and I didn't care. People passing by, they were
• 1:06:51
  very worried what was happening to me.
• 1:06:54
  You felt betrayed and you were betrayed.
• 1:06:56
  I mean, I was attacked. I wanted to be loved by my
• 1:07:01
  family. That was my greatest dream, to
• 1:07:03
  be loved by my family for just who I am.
• 1:07:07
  I think there is a tendency to in the Western world, especially
• 1:07:13
  in the United States, to think that there's extreme Islam,
• 1:07:18
  there's genocidal or terrorist Islam, right, militant Islam.
• 1:07:23
  And then there's moderate Muslims, some of them who we
• 1:07:26
  work with, who are, you know, I believe very good hearted, who
• 1:07:31
  are Westernized. They look Westernized.
• 1:07:34
  Maybe they will celebrate Ramadan or they will, you know,
• 1:07:38
  go to the mosque. But they are not in any way,
• 1:07:40
  shape or form practicing anything close to what you're
• 1:07:43
  describing. And so I think a lot of
• 1:07:45
  Americans think, OK, Islam is not the issue.
• 1:07:49
  The issue is a particular practice of Islam very far from
• 1:07:53
  here in the Middle East. OK, I think that's comes back to
• 1:07:57
  what people think about interpretation.
• 1:07:59
  They think that Islam probably is a good religion, that people
• 1:08:02
  are just misinterpreting that that's how people think.
• 1:08:04
  But according to Islam, there is only one right interpretation
• 1:08:12
  and that is the life of Muhammad, the founder of Islam.
• 1:08:16
  The Quran says that he is the greatest role model for all
• 1:08:21
  mankind. Muhammad was about 50 years old
• 1:08:26
  when he married a six year old child.
• 1:08:28
  His youngest wife called Aisha, one of his multiple wives.
• 1:08:35
  And I made the comparisons between Muhammad and Jesus.
• 1:08:38
  Islam's problem is Muhammad. So Muhammad raped How old was
• 1:08:44
  Ayesha when he? Raised her.
• 1:08:45
  When he married her she was 6 and when he had intercourse with
• 1:08:50
  her she was 9. According to Islamic tradition,
• 1:08:54
  yes. And this is the objective truth
• 1:08:57
  of Islam. This is the.
• 1:08:58
  Objective truth for Sunni Islam which presents 90% of Muslims
• 1:09:04
  anyways. So I I don't speak for the sects
• 1:09:07
  or other religious. So if I was talking to a
• 1:09:10
  moderate American Muslim who was of the Sunni traditions and I
• 1:09:15
  asked him you admire Muhammad, he is the prophet.
• 1:09:19
  You, you know, Revere him, you follow his teachings, Yes.
• 1:09:22
  And the person say yes. And I say he married Ayesha at
• 1:09:26
  six and he consummated, he raped her.
• 1:09:28
  I mean at 9. Do you, how can you support
• 1:09:32
  that? When you say you do you support
• 1:09:36
  that and what? What would they say?
• 1:09:38
  I think they would just deny because most Muslims have never
• 1:09:40
  bothered to even read their own scriptures and they have no clue
• 1:09:45
  what they're talking about. Or they would just lie and in
• 1:09:50
  some cases lying for the Islam for the sake of Islam is not
• 1:09:54
  even considered a sin. At least this is how many
• 1:09:58
  Muslims grow up, think, you know, it's it's an infidel.
• 1:10:00
  So for spreading Islam, that's I mean, especially we were talking
• 1:10:05
  about Iran. Takia is all around.
• 1:10:07
  You can never trust what an Ayatollah is saying to you
• 1:10:09
  because he's allowed to lie. And even now, you know, when
• 1:10:13
  we're into this war for the Ayatollahs, this is not a war
• 1:10:16
  against America. This is a war against Satan.
• 1:10:21
  That's why they will lie. They will lie to you because
• 1:10:24
  they consider you Satan and. Islam.
• 1:10:27
  You're saying the Islamic leaders, like in Iran, the
• 1:10:30
  supreme leaders, you know, we are Satan?
• 1:10:33
  Yeah, we are. America is absolutely so, and
• 1:10:36
  lying to to to Americans is absolutely okay.
• 1:10:41
  And Takia is a provision in Islam that you can represent
• 1:10:45
  yourself falsely, you can lie, you can pretend things are the
• 1:10:48
  case when they're not, in order to ingratiate yourself with
• 1:10:51
  other people, to protect Islam or to spread Islam.
• 1:10:54
  Yes, that's, I mean, I in a way saw that growing up.
• 1:10:59
  We had a teacher once and and she was very liberal.
• 1:11:03
  She used to wear a headscarf, but she was very liberal still
• 1:11:06
  and perfect German. And she was the role model for
• 1:11:10
  everyone. And a lot of people funded her
• 1:11:16
  to be at a school for the Muslim kids in Austria.
• 1:11:20
  And and from the outside she was completely westernized.
• 1:11:28
  And in the classroom she would teach Sharia.
• 1:11:34
  And this is the problem. And she was funded with Western
• 1:11:37
  money. I went to moderate.
• 1:11:39
  Yeah, yeah. I went to her because I I sought
• 1:11:42
  help and I said to her, I'm forced to marry my cousin and
• 1:11:47
  she's westernized. She was supposed to help me
• 1:11:49
  integration, right? And she said your parents just
• 1:11:52
  want the best for you. And, and it it happens, it
• 1:11:57
  happens so many time. And, and I mean, we can talk a
• 1:12:03
  lot about the Muslim world, about the Muslim world has been
• 1:12:06
  imported into the West and we have imported their problems
• 1:12:11
  into the West as well. And we see this a lot in the UK
• 1:12:16
  where they have Sharia courts now, where the thousands of
• 1:12:20
  victims of forced marriage grooming gangs that take little
• 1:12:24
  British girls, white British girls and rape them.
• 1:12:28
  They raped them for years and decades and these were all
• 1:12:31
  Pakistani Muslim men, that almost everyone was Pakistani
• 1:12:36
  Muslim that raped these girls and they walked free.
• 1:12:43
  Police knew, social workers knew, but no one wanted to say
• 1:12:46
  anything because because they were scared of being called
• 1:12:50
  Islamophobic. And so they let the victims
• 1:12:53
  suffer for years and years and decades.
• 1:12:56
  And this is, I mean, this is coming to the West.
• 1:12:58
  You see it in sorry it this is coming to America as well.
• 1:13:01
  You see it what's happening in Minnesota.
• 1:13:04
  You have Mandani governing the the largest city of your country
• 1:13:11
  and people still think they don't have a problem with Islam.
• 1:13:14
  You wait, have 20 years and you're going to be going to the
• 1:13:18
  same crisis that I warned people of in Germany and in Austria.
• 1:13:23
  I was one of the first one to come out and warn them and
• 1:13:27
  what's going to happen. You will have a parallel
• 1:13:29
  judiciary system. And now police can't even
• 1:13:33
  control certain areas in Berlin and other parts.
• 1:13:38
  And the classrooms are a disaster.
• 1:13:40
  I had one teacher who said that in his classroom 90% are
• 1:13:45
  immigrants, and of those are, I think about 70% of Muslims.
• 1:13:50
  And during Ramadan, it has become a thing now that the
• 1:13:54
  Muslim children forced the Christians to not eat.
• 1:13:58
  And that's now a debate right now in Germany because there are
• 1:14:01
  so many incidents of Germans being discriminated by Muslims.
• 1:14:05
  I read a report actually that the school was not permitting
• 1:14:08
  the Christian children to eat. Because you have to.
• 1:14:11
  Respect the the Muslim majority in the school.
• 1:14:16
  There's so much to unpack there. And obviously everything we're
• 1:14:19
  saying is very politically incorrect today.
• 1:14:21
  It's very politically incorrect. It is labeled Islamophobic to
• 1:14:25
  talk like this, even though you're just describing factually
• 1:14:29
  what is happening not just in the Muslim world and what has
• 1:14:31
  been happening, but what the impact is now having on the rest
• 1:14:35
  of Europe and increasingly coming to the United States.
• 1:14:40
  I want to explore it more. In your story timeline, though,
• 1:14:44
  how did you break free? You mentioned being homeless in
• 1:14:47
  the homeless shelter. You ended up going back.
• 1:14:49
  You're in this room. There's obviously this profound
• 1:14:52
  rejection you experience. You're afraid for your life.
• 1:14:55
  You talked about two Muslim neighbors, people that you knew
• 1:14:59
  who tried to rape you. You were able to escape those.
• 1:15:03
  Yeah. There weren't neighbors, but
• 1:15:05
  there were people from from the community, yes, from the
• 1:15:08
  Pakistani. Community and this was in.
• 1:15:09
  Austria. This was in Austria, Yes.
• 1:15:11
  I fled Lintz when police started investigating my parents and
• 1:15:18
  after the death threat and. Where did you go?
• 1:15:22
  I went to Vienna with a friend of mine who was a model and he
• 1:15:25
  thought that there are some photographers who who may take
• 1:15:30
  interest and this is maybe the way I could earn some money.
• 1:15:33
  And I didn't really do much of it.
• 1:15:36
  I did a few sessions and I didn't like it, so I didn't go
• 1:15:39
  that route. But I was seeking God.
• 1:15:47
  I went to a, you know, within my heart, there was always this
• 1:15:54
  still small voice leading me to the Catholic Church.
• 1:15:57
  Although I was evangelized by Protestants and and I let myself
• 1:16:05
  be baptized by my own thing. I just went to a Catholic Church
• 1:16:08
  and said, please, can you baptize me?
• 1:16:10
  That was a priest who came to my press conference because I
• 1:16:14
  started. I published my story in Vienna.
• 1:16:17
  How many years ago was this? A.
• 1:16:18
  When you publish your first book, you have multiple books.
• 1:16:20
  2000, I think it was 2003 and. It was very brave of you to do
• 1:16:25
  this. Yeah, I was the first woman to
• 1:16:27
  to do this. To publish a book about leaving
• 1:16:30
  Islam and to detail the forced marriage and abuse that you
• 1:16:36
  endured as a Muslim woman. It was the headline in the
• 1:16:40
  German speaking world at that time.
• 1:16:43
  And my book was became a bestseller.
• 1:16:47
  But my parents sued me for the affirmation and said everything
• 1:16:51
  that I'm saying is wrong. And then I had to prove
• 1:16:55
  everything. The court ruled in my favor and
• 1:17:00
  then they appealed against it again.
• 1:17:02
  It it was, it was awful, the whole experience.
• 1:17:04
  Sorry. How did you prove?
• 1:17:07
  Well, a lot of these things are heavy to prove, especially the
• 1:17:09
  things that happened in Pakistan.
• 1:17:11
  But you must remember my story is not just written in a book.
• 1:17:14
  It's written in files and files of shelters and police, social
• 1:17:21
  workers. So all of these people were
• 1:17:23
  invited and they were scared to speak.
• 1:17:26
  The social workers did not speak, but they handed over the
• 1:17:29
  notes to the judge. So that was very helpful.
• 1:17:33
  And there was one man that I knew who has Muslim parents and
• 1:17:38
  he testified actually he just how scared I was.
• 1:17:41
  He was, yeah, he was a non practicing Muslim.
• 1:17:44
  Did he get in trouble? I don't know, I have no contact
• 1:17:48
  with him and I never did after that but.
• 1:17:52
  That was very brave of him. Yes, it was.
• 1:17:55
  And I know at one point he was thinking of getting himself a
• 1:17:58
  weapon and he was struggling and how to get a weapon because it's
• 1:18:01
  not America. You can't just get a pistol.
• 1:18:05
  But it was, Yeah. And then, you know, when the
• 1:18:10
  book came out, it was then all the published in Germany had
• 1:18:13
  become very popular discussion there now because all of a
• 1:18:17
  sudden other women started to come out and saying the same
• 1:18:20
  happened to me. Not the conversion, but the
• 1:18:22
  forced marriage and the child bride Think that's that's very
• 1:18:27
  common. There are 2 billion Muslims in
• 1:18:29
  the world. Yes, there are.
• 1:18:31
  And there are 1,000,000 upon millions who are married as
• 1:18:34
  children just in Afghanistan. I mean, I have, I recently
• 1:18:38
  watched this video of this poor sweet girl.
• 1:18:41
  She's four years old and she's given to a man.
• 1:18:45
  In. Afghanistan and.
• 1:18:48
  And it's highly likely he would have sexually abuse her.
• 1:18:50
  I mean, yes, it's it's approved by Islamic clerics, including
• 1:18:54
  the Ayatollah leader of Iran, to sexually abuse an infant.
• 1:18:59
  Intercourse is not permitted until they're 8 or 9.
• 1:19:03
  But intercourse may happen or you may still rape.
• 1:19:05
  They can. Rape them to death.
• 1:19:06
  I mean, these, these things happen and no one will notice.
• 1:19:09
  And even if that happens, it will never make the headline of
• 1:19:12
  the New York Times. What's so crazy to me, Sabatina
• 1:19:15
  is the most vicious and approved sexual abuse of children is
• 1:19:23
  happening in the Muslim world and we are totally blind to it.
• 1:19:30
  You're totally blind to it. And you know, I when when I went
• 1:19:32
  to Michael Knowles, some people were saying, yeah, well, we also
• 1:19:35
  have Epstein. But you know what?
• 1:19:38
  I don't know one Christian or Jew who says that what Epstein
• 1:19:42
  did was right, and I don't know one apostle or Jesus Christ
• 1:19:48
  Christ who said that that would be OK.
• 1:19:51
  No, we all consider it sinful what this man did, and we think
• 1:19:56
  it's bad. In the Muslim world, this is
• 1:19:58
  happening every single day. And you know, what really gets
• 1:20:01
  to me is that when the moderate Muslims come, they attack those
• 1:20:05
  who speak about it. You've been attacked by moderate
• 1:20:08
  Muslims. Yes.
• 1:20:09
  Why do you speak about our religion?
• 1:20:10
  This has nothing to do with our religion.
• 1:20:12
  And then I just tell them, you know, who of us went to a
• 1:20:14
  madrassa? Where?
• 1:20:16
  When did you read the Hadith? What do you think about Prophet
• 1:20:18
  Muhammad doing this? And that's when they deny it.
• 1:20:20
  Oh, it's not written there, but it is written there.
• 1:20:22
  So sorry, these are Muslims in the western world.
• 1:20:25
  The Western never grown up in a context of violence and sexual
• 1:20:28
  abuse, and they have a sincere love and affection and loyalty
• 1:20:32
  for their westernized Muslim upbringing, and they assume that
• 1:20:37
  you must be lying about yours for some nefarious reason.
• 1:20:42
  Not just lying, I I just think they're embarrassed and they
• 1:20:46
  can't leave Islam because Islam is not just a set of rules, it's
• 1:20:49
  an identity. And it takes a lot of courage
• 1:20:52
  and pain to leave it. And they're not ready.
• 1:20:55
  And so when they and it and it also Muhammad killed his
• 1:21:00
  critics, you know, he had them killed.
• 1:21:02
  And so when someone comes and openly criticizes these vicious
• 1:21:10
  rules against women and unbelievers or non believers,
• 1:21:15
  they attack them. If they can't kill them, they at
• 1:21:17
  least attack you. Happens to me all the time.
• 1:21:19
  There is no solidarity. There's no solidarity from these
• 1:21:23
  Muslims. And they will say what you're
• 1:21:24
  saying is right. We need to change that.
• 1:21:27
  They always defend their their religion, not the victim.
• 1:21:31
  I I have, you know, we have received a few letters from the
• 1:21:34
  show on this topic, a few from Muslims who say, why are you
• 1:21:40
  sharing stories about people that have left Islam?
• 1:21:45
  You should, you know, more properly represent Islam.
• 1:21:49
  You know, we don't believe any of this stuff, basically these
• 1:21:52
  things that are very objectively wrong, you know, that we're
• 1:21:54
  discussing, you know, but I don't see, you know, when
• 1:21:58
  objectively speaking, in Pakistan, in most of the
• 1:22:02
  majority Muslim world, apostasy is a crime.
• 1:22:06
  The sharing of the Christian faith, faith is a crime.
• 1:22:09
  This is in moderate Muslim nations too.
• 1:22:11
  Even in Saudi Arabia, you know some people consider it moderate
• 1:22:14
  depending on how you define. Asia is the most moderate Muslim
• 1:22:17
  country in the world. And if in Indonesia, you divorce
• 1:22:21
  the parents, the children go to the husband.
• 1:22:24
  It's the most brutal thing I know of this one woman who was
• 1:22:28
  beaten so brutally by her husband in Pakistan.
• 1:22:32
  And then her family was kind enough to get her a divorce.
• 1:22:36
  And then her little baby went with the abusive father.
• 1:22:40
  OK. And she was crying and crying.
• 1:22:43
  And I just just, you know, on my shoulder.
• 1:22:45
  And she said I will never see her again.
• 1:22:47
  And I hear that she's abandoned on the streets and no one is
• 1:22:50
  taking care of her. But it's gone.
• 1:22:54
  Your heart doesn't matter. You have to just submit.
• 1:23:00
  It's what you're here for. First you submit to your father
• 1:23:03
  and your brothers and the men in the family, and then you submit
• 1:23:06
  to your husband. It's your life.
• 1:23:09
  You don't make the choices. And as I said, you know these
• 1:23:13
  great representatives, that of Islam in the West.
• 1:23:20
  Well, ask them, what do you think about Muhammad marrying A6
• 1:23:24
  year old girl? What do you think about his laws
• 1:23:27
  on apostasy? That's a that's written in, in,
• 1:23:30
  in the hadis and in the Quran. You can't go against that.
• 1:23:34
  I mean, I would work with these people.
• 1:23:36
  If they say let's change that, let's reform it.
• 1:23:39
  But all the reformers who have tried were killed or they're
• 1:23:43
  living in exile. That's what I see.
• 1:23:48
  Have you heard from your family since you won your court case
• 1:23:52
  against them in Austria after the publishing of your book?
• 1:23:57
  I think there was ones that they searched and searched for me and
• 1:24:04
  I and I found where I lived and that was during that court
• 1:24:07
  trial, trial. I was taken in the on the police
• 1:24:09
  protection. There's so much to my story.
• 1:24:11
  It's why I write books because there's so much.
• 1:24:14
  I lived on the police protection because I started to help girls
• 1:24:18
  that had similar stories. Help them escape.
• 1:24:20
  Help them escape yes this is and and help persecuted Christians
• 1:24:25
  in my country. I established 2006 the Sabatina
• 1:24:30
  Foundation, which is the friends of the passion is also
• 1:24:33
  registered in in the US now. But this is what we do.
• 1:24:39
  We help girls escape forced marriage in Switzerland too.
• 1:24:46
  And we have an orphanage in Pakistan where we take in girls
• 1:24:52
  who have either lost their their parents or are at risk of being
• 1:24:57
  abducted because there's no one to care for them.
• 1:25:00
  And we educate them, we give them a home and we are building
• 1:25:04
  a big shelter in Pakistan right now and another big one in
• 1:25:07
  Nigeria. And we help almost 2000 people
• 1:25:13
  every year. And I lived in police protection
• 1:25:20
  in Germany for a long time because I publicly defended the
• 1:25:27
  Christian faith and against the attacks of this of the radical
• 1:25:33
  Muslims. And therefore they used to show
• 1:25:37
  up at my lectures. And it became so dangerous that
• 1:25:43
  when I did my lectures, I had armed men guarding the the
• 1:25:51
  people that were there and protecting us.
• 1:25:54
  And even when I went to church, I had them standing outside the
• 1:25:59
  door. And that was my life for a long
• 1:26:01
  time. And I wasn't able to move safely
• 1:26:07
  anymore. Go on a train or bus and they
• 1:26:12
  would be standing there and one of them that was in Hamburg
• 1:26:18
  became so loud and threatened me that the police officer that was
• 1:26:23
  taking care of me, he said they do this to warn you that they
• 1:26:27
  can come very close. It's a warning.
• 1:26:30
  And I left, I left Germany, but before that happened, I heard a
• 1:26:43
  call from God to go back and help the most vulnerable people
• 1:26:51
  of my country. And I was so scared.
• 1:26:55
  I described the circumstances where this happened and how this
• 1:26:59
  happened, this calling to go back to Pakistan.
• 1:27:02
  And my police officer saw it. I have gone out of my mind.
• 1:27:08
  It was Pakistan was among the the most dangerous countries in
• 1:27:11
  the world at that time. And I was scared.
• 1:27:16
  I just said, no, no, no, I'm, I'm just hearing a voice of
• 1:27:18
  voices. No, this is wrong.
• 1:27:21
  And then I read the story of Joshua, who was afraid of the
• 1:27:24
  giants. I know what you're telling me.
• 1:27:28
  You always speak through this book to me.
• 1:27:33
  And. I, I took all the courage and I
• 1:27:38
  wanted to have the courage of Joshua and stand in front of the
• 1:27:42
  giants, even if the mob stands in front of me.
• 1:27:44
  And you know, it's very easy to speak these things, but very
• 1:27:48
  hard to carry out. But I did, I went back to
• 1:27:53
  Pakistan and this is how this entire mission started with
• 1:28:00
  freeing slaves and and helping orphans.
• 1:28:04
  Because in order to know what to do for the Christians, you need
• 1:28:08
  to listen to their voices, to their needs.
• 1:28:11
  And I described this entire journey in the book, especially
• 1:28:16
  this one incidents where a woman who was trying to meet me was
• 1:28:20
  shot on the way. And they told me it's very risky
• 1:28:25
  because they know where you are. And I sorry, where you are going
• 1:28:30
  to meet all these women. And I didn't want to go, I was
• 1:28:33
  too scared. And then my friend who
• 1:28:37
  accompanied me there, who was a convert himself, he said sink of
• 1:28:41
  Queen Esther, how she risked her life to save her people.
• 1:28:47
  And then I said, OK, what did she do?
• 1:28:49
  She said, if I die, I die, but I will fulfill the will of God.
• 1:28:54
  And it's what I did. I went there.
• 1:28:56
  And because of this, you know, this is what I noticed.
• 1:29:02
  When you follow God's will, there's an abundance of grace
• 1:29:07
  that comes, but it's usually involves a lot of sacrifice.
• 1:29:14
  And you need to take the steps. And now thousands of people are
• 1:29:20
  being helped. And.
• 1:29:24
  Yeah. And then I left Germany because
• 1:29:28
  it became too dangerous. There was one incident where I
• 1:29:32
  received and my colleagues received a message in Arabic.
• 1:29:38
  Watch your head and have your house guarded by the police.
• 1:29:42
  Sorry by by police and that's when I left.
• 1:29:47
  So I've got to ask, and I know some of this you share more
• 1:29:51
  cryptically because you're protecting people that you have
• 1:29:54
  that are doing some of this work to help the most vulnerable in
• 1:29:57
  Pakistan and in other places. But in Pakistan, when you say
• 1:30:00
  you have an orphanage and you were describing the story of
• 1:30:02
  this woman trying to meet you for rescue and she was shot
• 1:30:05
  along the way and you were terrified of going to the
• 1:30:08
  meeting place because you thought you'd get murdered or
• 1:30:10
  raped or something. What was this place?
• 1:30:16
  Was this a safe house? No, it was not a safe house.
• 1:30:19
  It was just a meeting point where the people that had
• 1:30:22
  organized that just had all the people come there.
• 1:30:25
  So I would come and take down their stories and see how I can
• 1:30:28
  help the different people, yeah. And how are you able to operate
• 1:30:33
  in Pakistan when you are an apostate and you have, you know,
• 1:30:38
  a black mark on your name and, you know, hits out on your life,
• 1:30:41
  How are you able to still operate in Pakistan?
• 1:30:44
  With faith and with courage and with a man who has a weapon and
• 1:30:51
  sitting beside me all the time. But.
• 1:30:55
  Are you allowed back into the country?
• 1:30:56
  I would not go back now unless God asks me to.
• 1:31:01
  But you're able to have team go there and the Pakistan
• 1:31:05
  government has allowed, the government of Pakistan has
• 1:31:08
  allowed you to have some sort of an orphanage to, to care for
• 1:31:12
  these abandoned girls. We're not doing anything that is
• 1:31:17
  against the law there. We are trust, helping Christian
• 1:31:21
  people. We are not going out to Muslim
• 1:31:25
  girls, evangelizing them or anything like that.
• 1:31:28
  Our mission is to rescue the girls and bring them back to
• 1:31:32
  their families, those especially that have been abducted, that
• 1:31:35
  they can come back to their parents and to fight their cases
• 1:31:39
  before the court. Even if it is hard and even if
• 1:31:42
  there are failures, there are also successes.
• 1:31:44
  And even one child rescued. That's the world to that mother.
• 1:31:49
  And yeah, I mean, there are thousands of these cases.
• 1:31:54
  But yeah, I left Germany and I after the the, the threat and I
• 1:32:02
  came to the United States where everything is hectic, noisy and
• 1:32:09
  sometimes very transactional. I'm getting used to that.
• 1:32:15
  Yeah. Just what I have seen though,
• 1:32:18
  you know, we have talked about the Muslim world and the things
• 1:32:21
  that are going wrong. I must say I'm also pretty
• 1:32:26
  shocked of what I've seen in America, especially what is
• 1:32:29
  happening to toward children. What do you mean?
• 1:32:34
  I went to the doctor recently and my appointment was
• 1:32:38
  cancelled. Oh, she had a baby.
• 1:32:42
  OK. I said well, congratulations.
• 1:32:46
  And she said, well, you can come back in six weeks.
• 1:32:50
  My Pakistani heart just just just just kills me to see that
• 1:32:57
  children are given away in this country sometimes at six weeks.
• 1:33:03
  And then I've seen this, you know, they go from daycare to
• 1:33:10
  preschool, from preschool to kindergarten.
• 1:33:14
  So at age 5, most kids in this country are already doing a 40
• 1:33:19
  hour corporate worker week. And I asked myself, where does
• 1:33:27
  the moral guidance of these children come from?
• 1:33:30
  It doesn't come from their parents because they're not
• 1:33:33
  there. It comes from equally old,
• 1:33:37
  stressed out other children. And that's who they're trying to
• 1:33:41
  make sense of the world from, you know?
• 1:33:45
  And this is the big difference between the Muslim world and
• 1:33:50
  here. This is what we can learn you're
• 1:33:53
  saying? Exactly.
• 1:33:54
  From the Muslim world in terms of family presence, attachment
• 1:33:59
  and bonding. And that's why the children in
• 1:34:02
  those countries with a lot of the problems are much more
• 1:34:06
  resilient than here. You know, I have this girl.
• 1:34:09
  She has the best parents, a university degree and she's got
• 1:34:16
  a job. Her parents have a big home that
• 1:34:19
  she's going to inherit one day and she's depressed.
• 1:34:22
  And you know, in my own Pakistani way, I just asked her
• 1:34:25
  why are you depressed? She did not like that.
• 1:34:29
  So why are you depressed? I just really genuinely try to
• 1:34:31
  understand what I'm seeing is, and I've lived in university
• 1:34:35
  residences and I see a lot of weak men and depressed young
• 1:34:40
  women and I think it has a lot to do with their upbringing.
• 1:34:45
  They have no home. And when you have these schools
• 1:34:52
  that are, you know, in the lower grades, I mean, demanding that
• 1:34:58
  the child spend a working week in school, where's the family?
• 1:35:05
  Where's the attachment? The attachment is to friends,
• 1:35:08
  and that's why the parent, when they're growing up, have no
• 1:35:10
  authority in our culture. What grandma says, that's a
• 1:35:14
  story. It doesn't matter what the
• 1:35:15
  culture says because that's who you grew up with.
• 1:35:19
  It's such an interesting thing that you're sharing and I so
• 1:35:22
  appreciate your just willingness to call out what you see.
• 1:35:27
  You're very, you could say an honest broker you're going to
• 1:35:31
  call. I mean, that's that little girl,
• 1:35:33
  that sense injustice. You're going to say when you see
• 1:35:34
  something that seems wrong, you're going to say it as best
• 1:35:36
  you understand. And we you were talking earlier
• 1:35:39
  about the Muslim identity and how just powerful that identity
• 1:35:43
  is to the point that some people will even practice jihad.
• 1:35:46
  Muslims kill themselves and take out other lives because of their
• 1:35:50
  identity. And it's very difficult for a
• 1:35:54
  Muslim to leave their identity of Muslim.
• 1:35:57
  And you know, there's the beauty in that because there is
• 1:36:01
  obviously the darkness of some of these tenets of the Islamic
• 1:36:04
  faith that are so destructive and this false view of God.
• 1:36:07
  But the but the thread in there that there is beauty in there,
• 1:36:11
  as you're describing, is this fierce loyalty and presence of
• 1:36:18
  the family and the family and the intergenerational family
• 1:36:21
  unit, the larger family unit that this is my family, my
• 1:36:24
  sister, my brother, my son, my daughter.
• 1:36:26
  And obviously it, it, it, it, it, it, you know, steps over
• 1:36:29
  into control and violence and, and can do evil, of course.
• 1:36:32
  But the but the goodness that is there is the sense of strong
• 1:36:36
  commitment. That's why Islam is growing and
• 1:36:38
  we are not. That's why Islam is growing and
• 1:36:41
  we who is we Christians and Christians are not Wow.
• 1:36:44
  Christians are not, because this is the power that they have.
• 1:36:47
  We have lost the family. The family that I see here is
• 1:36:51
  just a nuclear family, which is not a Christian concept, by the
• 1:36:54
  way. And we we think it is, but it's
• 1:36:57
  not. But.
• 1:36:59
  What do you mean by that? Nuclear family is like, you
• 1:37:02
  know, there's mom, dad, a kid or two living in a suburb.
• 1:37:07
  That's a family that's after the industrial revolution that we
• 1:37:12
  call that family. The family was multi
• 1:37:14
  generational. Even in the West.
• 1:37:16
  Grandma, grandpa and we have traded, you know, we have traded
• 1:37:19
  that for, we need the space for the garage.
• 1:37:21
  So they have to go to the nursing home, you know, and in
• 1:37:27
  my village where I grew up, there was nothing like that.
• 1:37:29
  There's no daycare, there's no nursing home because everyone
• 1:37:32
  takes care of their family members.
• 1:37:35
  And in an extended way, we take care of those who don't have
• 1:37:38
  anyone. We had a blind woman.
• 1:37:41
  I used to take her to the fields because, you know, she didn't
• 1:37:44
  have a toilet either. I used to take her and I don't
• 1:37:47
  know how many times she prayed for me.
• 1:37:49
  I think probably God heard her prayers.
• 1:37:50
  She was so sweet and she was so grateful.
• 1:37:53
  But this is how it worked. We were one big family, as I
• 1:37:57
  said to you, women coming together, washing laundry and
• 1:38:02
  even the bread that was big, there was a communal oven where
• 1:38:05
  they would meet and bake the bread.
• 1:38:07
  And, and what's happening here? I'm seeing the children is
• 1:38:13
  American children have lost their mothers and that's why
• 1:38:17
  they're depressed at such an early age.
• 1:38:20
  And, you know, the German pediatrician did a study and
• 1:38:25
  they measured the stress hormone of children, cortisol levels at
• 1:38:29
  pickup and at drop off. And it turned out that those
• 1:38:32
  children that were continually and chronically separated from
• 1:38:37
  their mother had the same stress hormone as those children who
• 1:38:42
  were severely abused. Neglect is what you're saying is
• 1:38:46
  neglect has the same level of stress on a child as abuse.
• 1:38:51
  Yes, but I think what most people and and I don't know any
• 1:38:55
  mother who is willfully neglecting her child.
• 1:38:58
  Every mother wants the best for her child, but then I don't
• 1:39:01
  understand the choices to make. You know, in the area where I
• 1:39:06
  live, schools, a lot of parents would drop off their kids at
• 1:39:11
  7:30 and at 3:15, they're still there.
• 1:39:17
  If they're lucky, they're picked up at 3:15.
• 1:39:19
  The other other ones have aftercare.
• 1:39:22
  And so I'm going, you drop off the child in the morning when
• 1:39:30
  the day begins and you pick it up, then the day ends.
• 1:39:34
  That child has grown up in an institution.
• 1:39:39
  And you can't expect resilient children that don't have
• 1:39:43
  attachment. And I see, you know, they're
• 1:39:45
  like these, these, these plants who have very shallow roots.
• 1:39:51
  And when a tiny wind comes, their roots are gone and they're
• 1:39:56
  just destroyed. Whereas in Pakistan, life is
• 1:39:59
  extremely hard, OK, very, very hard.
• 1:40:03
  And there are lots of storms. Persecution is a big one, for
• 1:40:06
  example. But the roots go so deep.
• 1:40:10
  Storm 1 the tree still stands. Storm 2 The tree still stands.
• 1:40:15
  You don't see so many depressed girls or weak men.
• 1:40:19
  You know, you have this one man that I saw, for example, who is
• 1:40:23
  a slave, the chop off his arm. And my colleague asked him, So
• 1:40:27
  what are you going to do now? He said, well, I still have the
• 1:40:30
  other arm to evangelize. It sounds like you're saying it
• 1:40:33
  the the average Western American child, including in the average
• 1:40:36
  Christian family, has an identity wound because they are
• 1:40:41
  not given the experience of presence and connection to their
• 1:40:45
  larger family. They don't get love, they get
• 1:40:46
  toys. That's what they get.
• 1:40:49
  So it's not about love, it's about your academic success.
• 1:40:53
  And everything is geared towards the economy.
• 1:40:56
  So the family is a cog in an economic wheel.
• 1:40:59
  And that's why even the educational system in this
• 1:41:01
  country is designed like that. Everything is designed towards
• 1:41:07
  to fitting the the working schedule of the working mother,
• 1:41:12
  you know, and that's I think one of the the things that that I've
• 1:41:19
  seen that I find some most devastating going.
• 1:41:21
  These are little children. They're like ships on the sea
• 1:41:28
  and they're lost and they're trying to anchor themselves on
• 1:41:31
  equally lost ships, which are their friends.
• 1:41:35
  And that's when say they have community, but they have no
• 1:41:39
  love. And love is what bills
• 1:41:41
  fortitude. When you were growing up and
• 1:41:43
  what you observed of Christian families growing up again from a
• 1:41:46
  distance in Pakistan is that, you know, the mother and the
• 1:41:50
  father, they worked. In fact, the women worked
• 1:41:52
  constantly, constant work. But you're saying the difference
• 1:41:55
  was the children were there, they were in proximity, they
• 1:41:58
  were part of the work, they worked as well.
• 1:42:02
  But this idea of mother works here drops off child over here.
• 1:42:06
  The children are out of the home, separate, somewhere in an
• 1:42:08
  institution for hours and hours a day in a week.
• 1:42:12
  That is something that, first of all, has never been seen before
• 1:42:16
  in in Christian human history. Never in the history of
• 1:42:18
  humankind did we do to children what we are doing to them now,
• 1:42:23
  and we are expecting to still have the same outcome.
• 1:42:26
  You're very candid in your concerns about the
• 1:42:29
  Islamification of the world. And what Islam is going to do
• 1:42:35
  when it becomes a majority in a nation.
• 1:42:37
  It's not just a majority. Just give them a strong
• 1:42:40
  minority. Just look at Minnesota and just
• 1:42:43
  translate this to. What's happening in Minnesota?
• 1:42:46
  Just just look at this. And then it's, it's going to
• 1:42:48
  happen everywhere. And I think now this Mamdani,
• 1:42:50
  we're going to have parallel societies that will have their
• 1:42:54
  own rules and it, you know, radical Islam will go unchecked.
• 1:42:59
  He's got those jihadis cheering him, You know, it's And the
• 1:43:06
  problem is that Americans generally are just very naive
• 1:43:10
  about other cultures. You know, you and it's, they
• 1:43:15
  don't mean badly. This is such a big country, you
• 1:43:17
  know, So you hear the news about the different counties that's
• 1:43:21
  already so much, and they haven't had the exposures.
• 1:43:26
  But it sounds like in addition to the naivete of Western
• 1:43:29
  people, especially Western Christians, you have a warning
• 1:43:34
  for them too about how they are raising their families and
• 1:43:38
  building their communities. Yes, and these are, these are
• 1:43:41
  not the children who are going to take on Islam.
• 1:43:43
  Come on. They're they're on meds for
• 1:43:46
  every little thing because they can't cope with normal life.
• 1:43:49
  How are they going to take on a jihadi for goodness sakes, No,
• 1:43:53
  these are like the many children that I see that are converting
• 1:43:57
  towards Islam. I genuinely think that there are
• 1:43:59
  more conversions towards Islam than there are towards
• 1:44:02
  Christianity. Definitely.
• 1:44:05
  And you know, it's very hard for Muslims to to come into a
• 1:44:09
  church. When you convert, there's no one
• 1:44:12
  to support you. No one understands what you have
• 1:44:15
  gone through or what you have given up.
• 1:44:18
  And a lot of people will say, well, God is my only good as
• 1:44:22
  well. But when he strips you of your
• 1:44:27
  money, of sometimes your health, your reputation, your family,
• 1:44:33
  your country, your freedom, your home, and then you can say to
• 1:44:37
  him, blessed be your holy will, then truly he is your only good.
• 1:44:45
  Otherwise, it's just like a theological phrase that anyone
• 1:44:48
  can utter, but you have to be stripped of it all in order to
• 1:44:55
  understand what it means to suffer for Jesus.
• 1:44:59
  And, and I think most people don't have that appreciation and
• 1:45:03
  also they don't have the attachment to family as strong
• 1:45:07
  as we do. For us, nothing is worse than
• 1:45:10
  losing a family and. That's also why there are even
• 1:45:14
  honor killings. Yes, in it in its own perverse
• 1:45:17
  way, but it's your the the honor and the unity of the family is
• 1:45:23
  of the highest order in Islam, to the point where if the woman
• 1:45:26
  has brought dishonor or she's somehow seemed to be separating
• 1:45:30
  from the family, then it's better for her to die than for
• 1:45:33
  her to be able to be dishonored or to leave the family.
• 1:45:36
  There was one young man who killed his sister in Berlin,
• 1:45:40
  Germany, and he was his young man.
• 1:45:45
  And he's asked why he killed her.
• 1:45:47
  And he said I wanted her to go to paradise.
• 1:45:50
  So he needs his view. He's doing a righteous thing.
• 1:45:53
  That's that's when you don't have the truth, but you're, you
• 1:45:58
  know, a lot of zeal and no truth.
• 1:46:00
  What do you think that Christian families should do to not so
• 1:46:06
  much to prepare for the, you know, incoming, I should say, of
• 1:46:12
  Muslim ideology into their country, but to be more true in
• 1:46:15
  their identity as Christian families?
• 1:46:18
  So one of the things is. Which will effectively prepare
• 1:46:20
  them, but the the purpose is not preparation as much as it is
• 1:46:23
  true identity in the Christian faith that we are living and
• 1:46:27
  called to as a family. See, Muslims view the Christian
• 1:46:32
  world as very decadent. We are.
• 1:46:36
  And it's, it's, it's I used to hear this growing up.
• 1:46:40
  Look at the Christians. Brothels are full, churches are
• 1:46:43
  empty. And when their parents are old,
• 1:46:45
  they just put them into nursing homes or as an American woman
• 1:46:50
  recently put it, a Pakistani. She said, oh, so in America,
• 1:46:56
  when the little children are little, they put them in
• 1:46:58
  institutions. And then these kids grow up and
• 1:47:01
  then they put their parents in institutions.
• 1:47:03
  Is this the gospel of Jesus Christ?
• 1:47:07
  No one wants to be part of this, trust me.
• 1:47:10
  And it's why so many Muslims who convert towards Christianity
• 1:47:15
  leave the faith within five years.
• 1:47:18
  They leave the Christian faith. Yeah.
• 1:47:19
  And do you, have you seen this personally?
• 1:47:20
  Yes, I have. Because they think Christians
• 1:47:23
  treat each other so badly. Not just first, there's no
• 1:47:27
  appreciation for their losses. They don't.
• 1:47:29
  No one invites them to become a family member because family is
• 1:47:32
  so important. No one invites them for
• 1:47:34
  Christmas to come over. Or you lost everything.
• 1:47:36
  You can be part of our family. So that sense is not even there.
• 1:47:40
  So there's this great loneliness.
• 1:47:41
  Not only have you suffered everything and then you read the
• 1:47:44
  Gospel and you read that the apostles had the same sort of
• 1:47:49
  community that they experienced in the Muslim faith, right?
• 1:47:52
  That they were one heart and one soul, shared everything.
• 1:47:54
  And they come into this community and it's a cold
• 1:47:57
  shower. No one cares.
• 1:48:00
  And then they see the way they treat their children.
• 1:48:03
  I think this is one of the big things, especially for women to
• 1:48:08
  find this heartbreaking. And I was talking to my friend
• 1:48:10
  in back in Germany recently. He's also a Pakistani.
• 1:48:13
  And he said, yeah, that's one of the biggest issues for Muslims
• 1:48:18
  who convert. If you want to really impress
• 1:48:20
  them, maybe have an evangelizer who has homeschooling.
• 1:48:27
  And invite them for dinner. Invite them for Christmas.
• 1:48:29
  Yes, don't be afraid of them. You know, I despite all these
• 1:48:32
  these things that are that I'm sharing, don't be afraid of
• 1:48:35
  Muslims, you know, invite them. We were invited.
• 1:48:39
  We were loved and that's what changed us because the
• 1:48:41
  Christians were the kindest people I had met in my life.
• 1:48:44
  But that was a different generation.
• 1:48:46
  My neighbors were old and Austria school system.
• 1:48:49
  By the way, a Germany school system is children don't spend
• 1:48:54
  their entire day in schools. How many hours do they spend?
• 1:48:58
  And in Germany, for example, it's four hours.
• 1:49:01
  That sounds so much more reasonable than 6.
• 1:49:03
  Days lower grades and then they accommodate the working mother
• 1:49:07
  and say, OK, if she needs to leave her child there, then she
• 1:49:12
  the child can stay there. But then you don't sit in a
• 1:49:14
  classroom. You run around, you do cross
• 1:49:16
  country, you're food in nature. It's very, very different.
• 1:49:20
  I'm very shocked by what I have seen here that they imprison
• 1:49:24
  children for a 40 hour week and then they wonder why they have
• 1:49:27
  mental health issues. Of course they will have mental
• 1:49:29
  health issues. For goodness sakes.
• 1:49:31
  You don't need to study psychology.
• 1:49:33
  You just need to look at their faces.
• 1:49:36
  I think what you're saying is so valuable and I'm so grateful for
• 1:49:38
  you saying it because it is easy to criticize as a faithful
• 1:49:44
  Catholic or Christian, the obvious defects, errors, and
• 1:49:50
  evils that can come from false religions, right?
• 1:49:54
  Like Islam, objective, right? We can say this is objectively
• 1:49:57
  wrong. Christianity is objectively
• 1:49:59
  true. But it's another thing to look
• 1:50:02
  inward at the beam in our own eye and say, these are the
• 1:50:07
  things in how we are living in our culture that is actually not
• 1:50:11
  living the Christian faith, even though culturally it is how
• 1:50:15
  we've all grown up. It's it's how we just think is
• 1:50:17
  normal. Is this really inculcating a
• 1:50:20
  Christian identity, not just in a child, but in myself, in my
• 1:50:24
  extended family, in my neighborhood?
• 1:50:26
  And I do think I've seen pieces of it done beautifully.
• 1:50:30
  You know, some evangelical communities, some smaller
• 1:50:33
  Catholic communities where there's a strong sense of
• 1:50:35
  identity. We care for each other.
• 1:50:37
  We love each other. Our children are the first
• 1:50:39
  priority. You know, we care for our
• 1:50:40
  children. We don't abandon them or drop
• 1:50:42
  them off for hours on end or whatever it is.
• 1:50:44
  And, and you know, it, it, it, what you have is a strong
• 1:50:47
  identity then, but then you have so many other Christians in our
• 1:50:50
  country and Catholics in our country.
• 1:50:52
  Catholics, of course, are Christians.
• 1:50:53
  But you know, I'm using the word Christian to more talk about
• 1:50:56
  evangelicals and and Protestants and then Catholic Christians who
• 1:51:01
  the children struggle with identity so much and they're
• 1:51:05
  breaking away from the faith of their parents at record numbers.
• 1:51:09
  And that's the thing, when you lose love by losing your mother,
• 1:51:15
  you lose hope and then you lose hope, you lose faith.
• 1:51:22
  And so the decline is like this. And unless we fix the family,
• 1:51:27
  absolutely nothing is going to be fixed.
• 1:51:30
  You can have as many round tables as you want, but you
• 1:51:33
  won't have resilient children that are going to be able to
• 1:51:35
  take on the very strong current of the culture.
• 1:51:40
  Wow, what is your message to Christian mothers?
• 1:51:43
  If you're seeking to do God's will, just look at your duties.
• 1:51:46
  It's the most simple message. And to be resigned to that.
• 1:51:50
  And if he has anything else that he wants you to do, he will open
• 1:51:53
  the doors. But what I see very often is
• 1:51:56
  that every woman wants to be Joan of Arc without being burned
• 1:52:00
  at the stake, you know? And this is just not the way.
• 1:52:03
  Without getting a message from God that you're supposed to be.
• 1:52:06
  I mean, Joan of Arc was given a special grace and message from
• 1:52:10
  God. Exactly to do what?
• 1:52:12
  She did. But, and there are all the
• 1:52:13
  seasons in our lives, right? So if God is asking you to do
• 1:52:18
  one thing which may be super boring, like changing diapers
• 1:52:22
  all the time, but you want to do another and you end up doing
• 1:52:26
  another, which is heroic. He will not just reject that
• 1:52:31
  sacrifice of yours, but he will be appalled by it because you
• 1:52:36
  haven't fulfilled what he is asking you to do.
• 1:52:38
  It's like in the Old Testament, your prophet Naman, who was
• 1:52:42
  asked to do a simple thing to get healed and he was doubting
• 1:52:45
  you all. He's so simple, right?
• 1:52:47
  But that was God's will for him and he did it and he got healed.
• 1:52:52
  And so this is, this is also true for, for us that it's being
• 1:52:58
  resigned to the duties that God has called us to, to do, you
• 1:53:02
  know, but I, I think it's very difficult for mothers,
• 1:53:04
  especially with the education system.
• 1:53:06
  I mean, I have friends who've got 8 kids.
• 1:53:09
  One of my friends is having her 7th.
• 1:53:11
  And you know, they have these kids in these schools.
• 1:53:15
  And you know, some moms are just not built for this home
• 1:53:18
  schooling thing and, and there is no option for them in these
• 1:53:23
  Catholic schools to put their children where they don't spend
• 1:53:27
  their entire day with strangers. Are you recommending like a
• 1:53:31
  overhaul of the Catholic school culture and system where school
• 1:53:34
  is maybe only three to four hours a day?
• 1:53:36
  I mean, what, What do you have a I'm curious, like based on,
• 1:53:39
  again, your very unique experience.
• 1:53:41
  I think children, if they should learn, they should rather
• 1:53:46
  recently in an advertisement, the most important choice that
• 1:53:50
  you will make for your children is where he goes to school.
• 1:53:53
  And I'm going, no, it's when he goes to school, what age he goes
• 1:53:58
  to school and how, how many hours he spends there.
• 1:54:01
  School should be there for learning.
• 1:54:03
  But in America, they are daycares.
• 1:54:04
  I mean, I am intimately familiar with family that is
• 1:54:10
  homeschooling their kids. They're one year, they're a
• 1:54:13
  first grader spends one hour learning and she is reading
• 1:54:17
  grade four level. So what are they doing at
• 1:54:23
  school? These poor children and except
• 1:54:26
  for suffering the separation, I mean, the separation of mothers
• 1:54:34
  against the will of their children is deeply harmful for
• 1:54:40
  the mental health of, of of children.
• 1:54:42
  This is just it just a proven thing.
• 1:54:45
  As I I mentioned with the study, it's.
• 1:54:47
  So it sounds like you're recommending that we totally
• 1:54:50
  reform school and if we have institutional school, it's
• 1:54:54
  limited in it's time and it's for older children or if even
• 1:54:57
  though maybe there are six years old, it may be two to three
• 1:54:59
  hours a day, but 6. Years is normal in Germany for
• 1:55:02
  example and but they don't go there and spend the entire day
• 1:55:07
  there, it's just just 4 hours. Or I think it's Finland and they
• 1:55:12
  read better, write better than Americans.
• 1:55:16
  It's it's. It's and.
• 1:55:18
  Then they go home with their mothers afterwards or what do?
• 1:55:21
  They do after or if if the mother is working, there is
• 1:55:24
  there are still options for those kids.
• 1:55:27
  But you know, since America kind of rules the world now, they
• 1:55:30
  want to bring that full day school to Europe.
• 1:55:34
  And it's happening. It's happening in France.
• 1:55:36
  It's the same in UK. And it's devastating.
• 1:55:40
  In the last chapter of my book, I am making the comparison
• 1:55:44
  between how children grow up in Muslim families, how much time
• 1:55:49
  they spend around their parents and in nature, versus in America
• 1:55:56
  where they're imprisoned in institutions and have hardly any
• 1:55:59
  contact with their parents. I hope that everybody listening
• 1:56:05
  to this podcast right now, including myself, because my
• 1:56:08
  family is actively making decisions about how we're going
• 1:56:10
  to educate our kids and how we're building our family
• 1:56:13
  culture. I mean, our oldest is only 6,
• 1:56:15
  right? That we can really take time to
• 1:56:18
  listen to what you're saying because it is very easy for
• 1:56:23
  people who are Christians to not listen to God.
• 1:56:27
  We talk to God, we go through the motions.
• 1:56:30
  We may go to math and and even with a open heart receive Holy
• 1:56:33
  Communion, but to stop to think and then to listen because God
• 1:56:40
  will speak to us about how we are to raise our families.
• 1:56:44
  We should use our reason, listening to stories like yours
• 1:56:46
  and and recommendations and even warnings like yours, because
• 1:56:51
  culture is formed like you're saying this is a fact through
• 1:56:55
  the family and not just the nuclear family.
• 1:56:57
  Because like you said, this is a post industrial revolution
• 1:57:00
  overemphasis on mom, dad and kids when the family is supposed
• 1:57:04
  to be extended as well and multi generational inherently it is.
• 1:57:09
  And so we do have a problem with this in the West.
• 1:57:12
  We do. We talk about this on the show
• 1:57:13
  sometimes we should discuss it even more and explore it even
• 1:57:16
  more and then come up with solutions, solutions that are
• 1:57:19
  possible. You know, sometimes people are
• 1:57:21
  overwhelmed. Like, I have a job I have, you
• 1:57:23
  know, the school I'm so attached to, it's, it's part of the
• 1:57:25
  community or, you know, this is how everybody has always done
• 1:57:28
  it. And it's hard to even imagine it
• 1:57:30
  otherwise. This is the thing that I'm very
• 1:57:32
  often say, well, everyone else is doing it.
• 1:57:34
  Well, if everyone else is committing sin, then you don't
• 1:57:37
  commit sin just because everyone else is doing it right.
• 1:57:40
  So that's, that's no excuse. We, we.
• 1:57:44
  Yeah. Well, and I think God will give
• 1:57:47
  individual mothers and fathers in their marriages wisdom for
• 1:57:51
  what to do because like you said, you know, not everyone is
• 1:57:54
  Joan of Arc. There was actually only one Joan
• 1:57:56
  of Arc. Yes, exactly.
• 1:57:57
  There's only one. And that's the beauty of it.
• 1:58:00
  You don't want the same flowers everywhere.
• 1:58:02
  Not one St. is like another. OK.
• 1:58:05
  And so that and that's completely fine.
• 1:58:08
  And The thing is, most of life is ordinary.
• 1:58:13
  I think I have done a few extraordinary things in my life,
• 1:58:16
  but those things don't happen every day.
• 1:58:20
  They sometimes come as a calling.
• 1:58:21
  But you do need to fulfill the ordinary things in life before
• 1:58:26
  God calls you for the extraordinary.
• 1:58:28
  Why should he give you an extraordinary mission if you're
• 1:58:34
  not faithful to the ordinary mission he's given you?
• 1:58:37
  And this is, I think, what we need to remember, I guess.
• 1:58:44
  Yeah. Sabatina, you've mentioned a few
• 1:58:47
  times about your Catholic faith. You shared the story of the
• 1:58:52
  priest that you first went to who basically rejected you.
• 1:58:55
  He didn't help you in Austria as you were fleeing the violence of
• 1:58:59
  your family. How did you end up becoming
• 1:59:01
  Catholic? The Catholic Church in Austria
• 1:59:04
  was completely non missionary, no zeal.
• 1:59:08
  And I always asked myself, where is the man on the cross in the
• 1:59:16
  Evangelical church? I couldn't find him anywhere.
• 1:59:21
  And you know, they were always talking about the blessings they
• 1:59:26
  received and, and the presence of God.
• 1:59:29
  Can you feel the presence of God?
• 1:59:31
  They sometimes they would have this conference.
• 1:59:33
  Can you feel the presence of God?
• 1:59:34
  And I felt pain of losses and they were like scars and it was
• 1:59:38
  heavy. And I just went, I don't feel
• 1:59:41
  that. So is my faith real or not?
• 1:59:45
  And then one day I prayed and there was a revelation that came
• 1:59:49
  through to me that that suffering is the presence of
• 1:59:56
  God. It's the presence of the cross
• 1:59:59
  and therefore the presence of Jesus Christ.
• 2:00:03
  And during this time I started to question the.
• 2:00:10
  What the pastor said about we are the early church because I
• 2:00:13
  was at the early church St. Paul suffered and when he speaks
• 2:00:18
  he doesn't say I pastor so and so who has such and such
• 2:00:22
  following on YouTube. He said I Paul prisoner of Jesus
• 2:00:26
  Christ. He was one of us and he you know
• 2:00:31
  when he exalts anything he exalts the cross and his
• 2:00:34
  sufferings. That's what he boasts and and
• 2:00:37
  during this time he said, how is it possible that God abandoned
• 2:00:42
  his church for 1500 years, the Catholic Church, right.
• 2:00:45
  I was baptized Catholic and where did he go like 1500 years?
• 2:00:51
  Where's God and why would a God of love do such a thing?
• 2:00:57
  And it's during this time then two voices across the centuries
• 2:01:02
  reached to me, which were one St.
• 2:01:04
  Augustine and Saint Ignatius of Antioch.
• 2:01:07
  And I described in my story how their voices reached me.
• 2:01:13
  But empowered by their writings, I went to a Catholic Mass.
• 2:01:21
  And what I saw in that Mass was so beyond words and explanations
• 2:01:33
  that I feel very uncomfortable to share.
• 2:01:40
  I know as a lot of people talk about these experiences, I think
• 2:01:43
  it's completely unnecessary. What I can tell you, though, and
• 2:01:48
  I want every Catholics to know, is the beginning of every Mass
• 2:01:54
  is the beginning of a great suffering.
• 2:01:58
  And if all of us can just focus on that, we would have so much
• 2:02:03
  reverence. And I wish that our priests
• 2:02:07
  would know who they are when they are offering the sacrifice
• 2:02:13
  of the Mass. For me, the Sacrifice of the
• 2:02:19
  Mass was a turning point to the Catholic faith, and it's the
• 2:02:25
  center of the Christian life. Without that, there's nothing.
• 2:02:32
  I describe, of course, how I then came into the the Catholic
• 2:02:39
  Church through a priest who reached out to me during this
• 2:02:43
  time. Interestingly, God's Providence,
• 2:02:45
  you know, I have such full trust in God's Providence that I
• 2:02:48
  believe that everything that happens to us, whether it's
• 2:02:52
  adverse or prosperous, is guided by Providence.
• 2:02:58
  And so I'm completely trying to be resigned to to his will in
• 2:03:03
  that. And because I've seen it so many
• 2:03:05
  times in my life. And this priest reached out to
• 2:03:08
  me. He wanted me to do a lecture,
• 2:03:11
  come to speak and I went there, but to seek if I wanted to
• 2:03:15
  become Catholic. And he was the one who brought
• 2:03:22
  me to the Bishop. I was confirmed in the into the
• 2:03:24
  Catholic faith and yeah, that's the entire story I described in
• 2:03:33
  my book. It would take too long because
• 2:03:35
  we don't have that much time. Yes, but the turning point where
• 2:03:42
  the Saints and the sacrifice of the Mass.
• 2:03:48
  Sabatina, you've poured out your heart in your books.
• 2:03:51
  We have The Price of Love here in the studio, which I highly
• 2:03:54
  recommend everybody order. We'll link it for folks.
• 2:03:59
  The last part of the title is a warning to the West, and I want
• 2:04:05
  to end with that this question. What is your warning to the
• 2:04:08
  West? Islam is the fastest growing
• 2:04:12
  religion in the world. It is also the fastest growing
• 2:04:17
  religion in America and Christians need to know what
• 2:04:25
  Islam teaches about them to be prepared and also in order to
• 2:04:31
  evangelize the incoming Muslims. You can't evangelize people
• 2:04:35
  whose culture you don't understand.
• 2:04:38
  And I invite the Catholics in America to give up their
• 2:04:44
  therapeutic Christianity. That is very often self seeking.
• 2:04:53
  Love is never self seeking and to embrace sacrifice, it can
• 2:04:59
  start with the little. I think for US women, those who
• 2:05:04
  have children can start with that.
• 2:05:06
  It's already something. And I think the other thing that
• 2:05:17
  is important is to not be afraid of the Muslims that are coming
• 2:05:26
  in. I don't advise people to to, you
• 2:05:34
  know, have massive Islamic immigration, but I actually
• 2:05:40
  advise to not have more Islamic immigration.
• 2:05:43
  I advise to take in the persecuted Christians if you
• 2:05:47
  have to because they have nowhere else to go.
• 2:05:49
  This would be my important message to our leaders that if
• 2:05:53
  they want to take in people, take in those who have nowhere
• 2:05:57
  else to go than to Christian countries.
• 2:05:59
  But I think my most important message in this book is to
• 2:06:05
  embrace the cross and let Christ suffer his passion within your
• 2:06:09
  soul. It's how we are going to
• 2:06:11
  transform the world. The the world is not transformed
• 2:06:15
  by the powerful. I think the world will be
• 2:06:18
  transformed by those who are willing to suffer with Christ.
• 2:06:22
  Beautiful and convicting. Thank you so much, Sabatina.
• 2:06:27
  It's been an honor to have you on the show.
• 2:06:29
  And thank you so much for your love and courage that you're
• 2:06:33
  sharing with us and everyone listening today.
• 2:06:35
  Of course, a big thank you to our channel partner.
• 2:06:38
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• 2:06:43
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• 2:06:46
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