Percentage of them but they do exist who feel at though their identity is under a certain sense of crisis and who are looking to these groups who are expressing their grievances sometimes in horrifically violent way. Were nowhere near to problem europe has. Lets be clear. We have had 3,000 or so europeans who have left to join isis, and almost zero very close to zero of them in america, and i will also say that this overwhelming focus that we have on islamic terrorism and islamic extremism in the United States is absurdly exaggerated and more dangerously, think, hides the truth. The department of homeland security, the fbi, and 74 of every single Law Enforcement agency in the United States all say that the greatest threat to americans is rightwing extremism, rightwing terrorists. They have killed far, far more than americans since the attacks of 9 11 than islamic terrorists have. Youre more likely in this donee to be shot by a todd than to be killed by an islamic terrorist at awful as the San Bernardino shootings were, as horrific as that experience was, that was 355th mass shooting in america in 2015, and that year, last year, ended with 372 mass shootings. So, yes, we are under threat of terrorism is in done toronto, this is not islamic terror simple. Host your new series, believer, and when does it premiere . Guest on cnn in 2017. Host bob is calling in from overland park, kansas. Bob go ahead with your question or comment. Greetings, people. Youre a national treasure. My question is, and it centers around my perception of the dawn of the millennium we were very worried about the y2k virus in our computers. Would assert that the true y2k virus was religion and the form of virus that infects the human operating system. So, one of the things ive always been interested in is the political assertions that were made at the council when they made the determination that christ had been physically reborn and had come back from the dead. We have, upon discoveries of the libraries in 1935, conflicting accounts of that, when their recollections of the resurrect was more in the form of persons dreams, recollections of christs teachings as opposed to a physical, it was more of a memory. Host lets hear from our guest. Guest great question. Youre a national treasure. I wouldnt necessarily call religion a virus since its been around since the dawn of human evolution. We can go back, with material evidence, at least 100,000 years ago, but now a new group of scientists who call themselves cognitive anthropologists say we could go back as late as 400,000 years ago and see signs, very clear expressions of religious impulse in human beings. So, if its a virus, its one that has been there from the dawn of our evolution. Secondly, i think youre absolutely right about the creed and the way that it calcified a particular kind of theology when it or christology when it comes to christian beliefs, but even the gospels themselves indicate a wide variety of beliefs about what the resurrection meant, how it was to be understood. Remember next gospel of mark, the very first gospel there, is no resolution, the tomb is simply empty, and the gospel which ends chapter 15, verse 8, says a young man in white told the women to tell the disciples that jesus would meet them in jerusalem and thats the end. Bit the time you gut to math hutu and luke you have the community trying to say what does the resurrection mean . Was jesus a ghost . We have a story in which jesus eats fish and bread. So he cant be a ghost. But was he physically did he have a physical body . We have a story in which the disciples are sitting around in a room and jesus suddenly pops in as though he is a ghost. So even in those gospels of the earliest moment of the formation of christianity, seems to be an enormous diversity of belief about what the resurrection actually meant. But youre right it wasnt until around the nicine period that became calcified. Host jacob, youre next. Go ahead. Caller hi. Good afternoon. My question for you is what were the beliefs and traditions that affected jesus and his preaching and actions. Thank you . Guest wow, i love that question. I never get to talk about that. It is a religion that was born in ancient persia, before it was even persia. Probably i would say around 1100bc. Thats give or take. So before abraham, i would say. The prophet is wildly rather as the first mon ethe is particularly created prophet. Created the concept of heaven and hell and the concept of angels and demons. These things did not really exist before he began to speak about them and he talk about how human morality is what decides where you go in your afterlife. If you have good thoughts good, words deeds, thats the formula, then you will go to a good place in your afterlife, heaven. If you have bad thoughts, bad words, bad deeds, then you go to a bad place. This was revolutionary. Now, the reason it is so important is because it backs the religion of the empire. Cyrus the great was the persian king who defeated the babylonian empire and set the jews free from their babylonian captivity. Sent them back to the holy land, gave them the money to rebuild their temple. And so the jews post the babylonian compile, post 6th 6th century bc were heavily influenced by this. That how they accommodate these notions. For instance, the best example of this is the concept of the devil or satan. You read the hebrew verses saidan is nothings an evil character, no. The adversary of man himself part of gods court and is know at the satan with a lower case s. But he is one of gods messengers. God send him out to do his bidding. By the time you get to the new testament this is a completely different satan. A satan with a capital s. This is not mans adversary, he is an evil being. That shows you the influence of if were to be glib i would say christianity is what happens when you combine soastrium and judaism. George is next. Were listening. Caller i have a couple of questions regarding how christianity reconciles jesus as god. One point in the gospels jesus says, the father knows the time of the final judgment, the final coming, but i dont. And then, again, i went to church today in the gospel today, several times after the resurrection, jesus appears to the disciples and others but they dont recognize him. Ive never heard, well, what did he look like . What form did he take . Guest well, thats actually very much connected to the first conversation we had, that, yes, post resurrection, are certain resurrection narratives in which jesus appears kind of ghostly. The disciples dont recognize i him. He changes the way he locks. Suddenly breaks the bread and they do recognize him. Just as there were an enormous amount of ideas and controversy among the early clips about what the resurrection actually meant there, was an equal amount about whether jesus himself was god or what his relationship was with the father. You see this again in the gospels. On again, the gospel of mark. At no point in the gospel of mark does jesus eve identify himself is a god in matthew and luke there are verses that can be interpret as though jesus perhaps is equating himself with god, because of the powers that he possesses. He acts by the finger of god, he says, and if he has the finger of god, maybe he is saying he himself is god in some form, and then you get to the gospel of john, the last of the gospels, and jesus is barely human. He is pure god. He says, i am the i and the father are one. This slow evolution is a perfect example of this conversation that was taking place in the Early Christian Community over what the relationship between jesus and god was. Again, as with the resurrection, that conversation came to an end at nycia when the doctrine of the trinity, father, son, and holy spirit, one substance, three forms, became the creed of christianity, and all those other creeds, including the aryan movement, which believed that jesus was just a man. The gnosty cs who say jesus has no human attributes and what you saw was an illusion to a human being but he was pure god. Those views were violently suppressed and what we now forward as the trinity became the founding dock christian of christianity. Host ten minutes left. Jim in mercer island, washington, youre on the air go ahead. Caller thank you, peter good to talk to you again, reza. I called in a couple years ago on your program. It was wonderful. One question i have is i know when you came to the u. S. A. You became a christian, in fact i think you became a fundamentalist christian if i recall. Guest thats right. Host then went back to islam. Im wondering why . What was the motivation to go back to islam and do you prefer i guess you do prefer islam over christianity and why . And ill hang up and listen to your question. Guest thank you for the question. Yes, its true. So, i was born and raised a muslim but really a cultural muslim Mitchell Family was not very religious at all. My father was a hard core marxist athiest who hated everything about religion. When we came to the United States, this was a time of severe antimuslim settlement, the early 80s, the height of the iran hostage crisis, and we kind of scrubbed our lives of any kind of outward signs of religiosity but ive always been deeply fascinated by religion and a deeply spiritual kid. Has to too with my child images of revolutionary iran. I was seven years old and i experienced what it meant to have an entire country transformed in the name of religion, and that never left me. And so i had an abiding interest in religion and spirituality but no way to kind of live that out, at least not in my family. When i was 15 i went with some friends to an evangelical youth camp in northern california. Heard the gospel story for in the first time. Never heard anything like this before. It was a transformative experience for me medley converted to a particularly conservative brand of chinnity. Then when i went to the university i decided to study the new test. For a living, and it was there under the tattoolage of my jesuit professors i discovered the historical jesus, the jesus that becomes the central figure in sell zealot and that transform the with a i thought about christianout but was still desirous for some kind of spiritual edification, and i started learning more and more about what religion truly is. I think this is the core of your question, and im thats why im so glad you asked it. I think we have to understand that religion is not faith. These are two different things. Faith is subjective, is individualistic, its mysterious, its impossible to express. Religion, how too you expect it . Thats it. Religion is a language. A language made up of symbols and metaphors but a language that lets people express to themselves and the other people the experience of faith, of transscene dense, transcendence so to me it doesnt matter what language you choose, whether youre speaking french or german your saying the same thing. English or mandarin youre saying the same thing, so i choose whether you choose the symbols of christianity or buddhism or islam, youre still expressing the same sentiment, just in a different language. And so i think its important to choose a language. Thats all. I am a muslim because i think there are symbols and metaphorses of islam make more sense to me. Im not a muslim because i think its more right that kinect or more correct thaninnity. Dont think that way. I just think that the language that it uses to describe the experience of the divine, the relationship between creator and creation, that language works for me. The buddha once said if you want to draw water, you dont dig six onefoot wells you. Dig one sixfoot well. Islam is my sixfoot well but i also recognize, as the buddha did, the water im drawing from is the water that everybody is drawing from. Host a couple of viewers our discussion with rezas a lan online. Just two quick quotes from zealot. The common depiction of jesus has a peacemaker who loved his enemies and turned the other cheek has been built mostly on his portrayal as an apolitical preacher with interest in or for that matter knowledge of the politically turbulent world in which he lived. That picture of jesus has already been shown to be a complete fabrication that jesus of history had a far more complex attitude toward violence. Kim in pennsylvania, please go ahead with your question or comment. Caller hi. Well, you sort of answered i wanted to know a brief summary of what your book was about, but if he could goo into more detail why your book is different from other scholarly books on jesus. Guest sure. Sure. Host can you, tim. Guest my book is the world in which jesus lived. This incredibly turbulent, apocalyptic era in the First Century, an era in which the jus were living under the boost of an imperial roman occupation that controlled every aspect of their lives, including their religion, and the way in which he jews over that First Century repeatedly rebelled against the roman rule, and how jesus fits into it. The quote peter read is a perfect example. Jesus lived in an era in which it would have been impossible not to be aware of what was going on. The political and religious and economic turmoil that had affected the life of every jew in judea and and to stand up and say a. The messiah, the ancestors or king david people and here to reestablish the kingdom of david on earth, thats a political statement. This book is not about who jesus was, whether he was god or the son of god or the messiah. Just makes a very simple argument that whatever else jesus was, whatever else he was, he was also man, and as a man he lived in a specific time and place. His teachings were addressed to very specific social ills. His actions were in response to very specific religious and political leaders that whatever else he was, he was a product of his world. And so if you really want to know who jesus was, and how to understand his message, youve got to begin by understanding his world. Host joe in phoenix, arizona, one minute left go ahead. Caller quickly. I applaud your comments on the popeespecially amortis lucretia, being a divorce evidence catholic. Its astounding mitchell question is regarding president obama. Should he be labeled correctly that he is not calling the terrorists islamic terrorists . Guest i like what seth myer said about this. This isnt hogwarts and president obama is not harry potter. Simply calling it islamic terrorism doesnt magically make it go away. The president s argument is that isis sees itself as the representation of all muslims which is absurd, and by calling them islamic terrorists, we are just feeding that isis narrative. Thats a pretty good argument. However, as i said earlier in this conversation, isis is muslim for the simple fact they call themselves muslims. Just because isis is muslim doesnt mean that islam is isis. Thats where we get tripped up. To say that these actions, which are so beyond the pale of anything that could conceivably be called normative islam, they have anything to do with representing the ideas, view us, actions and thoughts of the worlds 1. 6 billion muslims, that i think is just ridiculous. Host reza aslan youre speaking at the Los Angeles Times festival of books but your wife is also speaking. Guest jess car cofound over kiva, the worlds first peer to per platform. Check it out. And lets you loan 25 to a person in africa. 9. 5 payback rate. Fastest growing nonprofit in the world. She is my hero. Host she has written a book. Guest her book is called cleric water, brick. And its clay, water, brick. No just about the experience of creating kiva. Its about how to think about poverty, how to think about the poor, not as the poor burt as entrepreneurs who dont have the cspan, brought to you by your local cable or satellite provider. Now a discussion about race and crime in 19th century with two true crime authors. You will hear from Skip Hollandsworth, author of the midnight assassson, and Kali Nicole Gross author of hannah mary tabs and the disembodied torso. From the san antonio book festival this is an hour. Good afternoon. We are all set. Those in the back might think about moving up here a little closer to these wonderful authors with us. Our panel is called shadow country race and crime in america. It will be part of the broadcast on cspan2 if you want to see the programs you missed or because we do such a good job you want to watch it a second time. We have two terrific authors from texas. To my left is my long time, young ago young report colleague at the dallas herald Skip Hollandsworth who today is the executive editor of texas monthly, a National Magazine award winner, written some of the greatest true crime and has more for us his book is the midnight assassin and we will be signing them after the presentation. The carve book just dame came in. Dr. Kali nicole gross studies at the university of texas in austin but writes about crime in philadelphia. This is her second book set in philadelphia. Skips book is about the first serial killer to be documented in the United States and those who wrote devil in the white city in chicago and thought that must be the first serial killer but this occurs in 1885 even earlier in austin. And two years later, in philadelphia, 1400 miles away is hannah tab and the dismembered torso. These books are about nasty bad things that happened. That is what crime is about. Terrible bad things we dont know. What were the respective populations of austin and philadelphia in 1890 . That is the closest year to 1885 when skip is writing austin and in 1885 kali in filled. Austin had 1400. Does that help with filled . That gives you a better und understanding. Filled was the city it is today in terms of being a big city. Philadelphia. Those were two different settings. Both books as you will guess start out with something very bad happening to people. With that skip, i will ask you to set the scene of the crime in austin. Give us four or five minutes of overview of what you were reporting on and kali we will have you do the same. In 1885, austin was transforming itself from this Frontier Town into a guild age city. The driscol hotel was getting built with flushed toilets on the third floor which was never seen before west of the mississippi. They decided to built a new capitol. The architects were told to make it big. The university of texas opened the year before and had a whopping never before imagined 230 students attending being taught by seven professors who were recruited from University Like the university of virginia for 4,000 a year. A staggering sum. Even the state lunatic asylum was being revamped. 550 people were there. There were women brought in for too much menstrual flow and women brought in for too little flow. Several men were brought in for violations of the solitary vice, masturbation, and that led to insani insanity. On new years day, 1885, there was a headline in the newspaper called bloody work. Every wealthy home in austin had servant quarters and was found by the back out house and axed to death, knifed and cut into pieces so when the undertaker picked her up her body fell apart and thus began the story. We are ahead of the schedule so we will come back. Kali, set the scene in philadelphia. I will do my best. My crime takes place in philadelphia in 1887 and starts when a headless, limbless torso was discovered in a pond outside the city. Fill philadelphia is already a fairly large city but underwent a number of substantial changes. The black population almost doubled going from 20,000 to 40,000. The population of italian immigrants went from 300 to 1800. You have new black folks entering the city at the same time you have white european immigrants coming from abroad but they are not certain if the folks are white. So the Eastern European jews and russian jews are not sure where they fit in. The torso is disturbing. Headless and limbless of a man but they cannot discern his race. Is it a white man who has been killed . Some people suggested of many origins. So it paralyzes the investigation. The investigators are not what world to search. The project to discern his race becomes of paramount importance for a bunch of reasons. Thinking about Law Enforcement with africanamerican people and black people and race and class still divide the country in term of our approach to crime and Law Enforcement. Lets go back to the late 19th century years. How does Law Enforcement in each instance react to use of a black murder . Sgr well, the austin cops immediately looked for a black suspect. Austin is still very much a confederate state like it was and there was a theory that young black men because not experienced quote slavery had a chance to deconstruct and return to their mortal state. They believed an exgirlfriend who was upset molly, the servant woman, moved on to another man decided to take vengeance and did it only in a way a black person would do. This is only a crime committed by a savage man. When the second murder happened, a young black servant woman was found with her head chopped in and wrapped in blankets and cut to pieces. They arrested a mentally slow black foot black man who tried to become a lover of the second woman and failed and tried to get money from her. He was the culprit and this went on time and time again. There were no finger prints evidence. You can tell the difference between blood and animals but no blood typing. No hair evidence. No fiber evidence. What the cops had were bloodhounds that tried to sniff for a scent and chase whatever scent they could find. They could find nothing. Without any eyewitness to say who the killer was all they had to go with was their already determined believe it had to be a black man. Yours was found with a sign on it saying handle with care and it was found in bucks county which is rural now but a true farm country back then and a farmer or carpenter found it. How do you bring it back into philadelphia . As i said, there is this quandary and they bring in the corners physician to try to do a series of test to figure out the race. He does chemistry tests and microscopic tests and he said he believes the corpse belongs to someone who is three fourths negro. This is a moment where science is not trusted by investigators. The police chief as you know, the state attorney tdoesnt buy it. When this doesnt yield a result they ask the women you are black. Is this a black man . And one of the woman said white folks and colored folks look so much alike nowadays it is hard to tell the difference. Making a long story short, it is probably too late for that, they are combing the papers and this is described as handle with care and wrapped in a piece of calico and there is a conductor who reads it and remembers a black woman on the train carrying two pack nl packages that match the description. So then there is the belief it is true and that is where you get philadelphia because she took the train from philadelphia to bucks county. What prompted beoth of you t take on 130yearold murder cases . There was nothing to google. You hire researchers to look for stuff with you and sit in front of a microfilm machine day after day going through the newspaper when the print is smaller than today. Yeah, it is. And just hope you come across the story. I am haunted by what i missed in the newspaper. You never know where the local news would be. The bottom column would be one sentence about someone getting arrested. The reason i am scared to do the session is because i am afraid one of you is supposed to stand up and say if you looked in this library the killer is right here. It is just needle in the hay stack stuff. I am a journalist and used to calling up people who rulive and not dead. Something else triggered your interest and it was reading about another serial killer. Jack. Right, jack. I heard about this after a School Teacher told me she was working on a novel that jack the ripper came from austin. And i said where would that have come from . And she showed me a report made in a pamphlet being printed during the white chapel arts killer that the suspected killer could have come from a small town in texas where the three similar murders occur earlier and i said what murders . And that drove me. That is how reporters get on stories. Kali, how did you get on yours . I know you went to school at penn and this isnt the first victim about crime in penn. The first was about africanamerican crimes in the 20th century. Is that where you heard about this . Yes, i was doing research on my first book. This is where the penitentiary system is born. I dont know if any folks have been to philadelphia you have . You have been to the prison . I was going through the archives and this is the pain stricken work of it. They maintained scrap books and cut out newspaper clippings of the famous or infamous inmates. When i was going through the scrap book and came across the case, i see headlines murder foul. And disembodied trunk and this was love at first sight. I dont know if i want to con fes that. And once i found out there was a black woman at the heart of the story i said this isnt the kind of history i am used to encountering. I could not put it down. I could look up rosters and prison records when i started rough researching the program, ancestry. Com was not as built up as it was today. So there was a moment when it shifted and i could use the information from there. But i pain steak painstakingly put it it together. Served during the civil war able to find some of his records. Ive had a lot of information. So just going everywhere. This is sort of exciting for me being historian, both looking at the microfilm in the archives. How did the police get on to it . You already know that she is a slippery slope character study so the conductor gives them the sort of description of tracing her steps from when she gets off the train and she stopped at a number of houses and it becomes clear at some point she worked as a servant in the area and her name starts to circulate in the newspaper she actually goes back to the town and gives an interview in the newspaper at the same time the authorities are looking for. But at the same time thats happening, the victims sister once she sees the name in the paper, she goes to the chief of detectives in philadelphia because shes terrified that it might actually belonged to her brother. A young man that seemed to be having an extramarital affair. We are now up to a couple murders i think they made in a resarrest but how are they treag their respective investigations and suspects trying to close cases the people they continued on or are they genuinely saying in africanamerican crime victim in 1985 deserves justice to get to the bottom of it. The thing thats hard to understand that never occurred is the police and private investigators that are later hired and one man would be responsible for all this. The concept of the serial killer did not exist in 1985. There were maniacs that would go on the psychotic killin these pg sprees and our out of walls in texas there was John Wesley Hardin that shots people but with honest about who he shot and they had a gambling problem and deserve to die but had never been the concept of a man sneaking out of his home for his own motives to want to slaughter one woman after another for a period of months and then come back and give it again and leave their bodies out a work of art and then just disappear. So the police were under the assumption that there had to be some black involvement and at one point as they continued, people came up a theory that a black gang was on the loose, a group trying to wreak havoc on the city or service when it for reasons of their own and thats an important snapshot of the culture. They clean out the city of any black man who had committed a crime. The whole story changed when two prominent white women were similarly slaughtered within the space of an hour in two different parts of austin and thats when the panic really hate because this was considered to be a negro matter until suddenly everybodys world changed. That is probably the time to introduce the subject of sex and the role that played in the investigatiothey played in theif Law Enforcement and the role that relationships might have had so first, they got there i on anna, the guilty party, but she points her finger at somebody else. She does. Once shes arrested and apprehended i can talk a little bit about kind of thought policing in philadelphia at this moment. So, in this historical moment violins is considered an acceptable part of policing. In many respects you have the manuals that instruct the Philadelphia Police officers to detain anyone who is poor or looking like theyve come from outside of the state. So you can imagin imagine therea variety of constituencies. So while in custody, shes kept basically in a cell off the chief of detectives al office by herself and interrogated for a period of time. First she sort of maintains the idea that she doesnt know anything about the case or the victims. Shes kept in custody overnight. Then the next day she was reported as having a pronounced black eye, her coat is torn and she makes a confession. Its at that time she basically says this young man, george wilson, and another young man got into an argument in my house and he committed this horrible crime and basically forced me to help him destroy this evidence. And so, the issue you about her testimony is problematic because im the one hand, she herself was a pretty dubious character, but theres a lot of accounts at this time of the womens treatment especially in custody and being vulnerable to certain things particularly sexual assault. There are accounts of others that said they were interrogated by folks Wearing Masks but even though their faces were covered under their eyes werent and they were looking her all over. Another instance, there is a white woman arrested on a prostitution charge who in her memoirs basically testified she submitted t it to the sexual advances of the guard in order to escape. So to be in prison at this time is dangerous for both these reasons. So once she makes this confession they go and get george wilson. George wilson is a light complexion and assertive the sum of all fears because hes one of these folks that can pass for white. In spite of having an affair with the victim and a number of other salacious details that emerge that sort of lock on to o him as being infinitely more suspicious. This didnt get onto the piece as i thought it would. I will come back around to that. [laughter] i will bring up sex. Okay. [laughter] what happens in austin is they start to look at people but no the two white murder victims. At this point they are murdered in the space of a year and reporters are finally beginning to write that it might be one person escaping from the asylum, maybe someone turns into a werewolf. Even one reporter says that he could be frankenstein returned. They were trying to grapple with the idea that one brilliant maniac, a midnight assassin was at work and a reporter came down in the new york world to write about the killings and he said this is a different kind of killer than weve ever seen before in the civilization. Someone who kills and has the need to gratify his desire. It was a really prissy and piece of reporting. Well, the city leaders did not want to rediscover the reporting. They didnt want to be known as the Stomping Ground for a midnight assassin who was uncatchable so they came up with this idea that the two white husband murdered their wives because one of whom was going to leave her husband, the second was slipping off and had been discovered she was a young socialite and there were very few divorces, so she was slipping off into what was called at the house on assignation. There was a port keeper that would rent out rooms are wealthy men that wanted to have little affairs with other women. She was meeting someone there and so the second husband killed her because, according to the authorities they found out she was sneaking around on it. Then it wasnt a husban the husd giving it up as the leading candidate. [laughter] and youll never know the name, his name is pulling him, he was a giant man with the most popular politician in texas at the time and he was the state comptroller running for govern governor. He was losing in a newspaper poll and he had a campaign manager
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