I recently had the pleasure of speaking with the tireless ex-Muslim cartoonist and author Bosch Fawstin. If you’re unfamiliar with Bosch’s work, this is a great place to start, but be sure to check out my 2015 TOS interview with him; Joshua Lipana’s review of the first chapter of his graphic novel, The Infidel, featuring Pigman; and Nicholas Provenzo’s review of his latest book. If you’d like to support Bosch’s efforts to educate people about the true nature of Islam and to defend free speech, consider becoming a patron of his work through Patreon. —Craig Biddle
Craig Biddle: Great to chat with you again, Bosch. It’s been a while since we last spoke, and I look forward to catching up and hearing about your recent work and future projects.
To begin, because some of our readers may not know much about you, say a few words about yourself and your work. Who is Bosch Fawstin? What does he do? And why does he do it?
Bosch Fawstin: Thanks for reaching out again, Craig. I always enjoy speaking with you.
I’m a cartoonist. I write and draw single cartoons, comic books, and graphic novels. I also write essays to accompany my cartoons on topics such as free speech, Islam, jihad, and the left.
I’m the winner of the first Mohammad cartoon contest, and I was announced as the winner at a Mohammad art exhibition in Garland, Texas. Two jihadists who came to murder the attendees got their heads blown off by a cop, as a security guard there put it, and my life has not been the same since.
Although I have no regrets, and I will defend free speech to the death, the path I’ve chosen comes with loss, in a number of ways, and it has made my life more difficult. But I can’t imagine doing anything else. . . .
Biddle: I know I speak for many people when I say thank you for being such a stalwart defender of free speech. You are the only person who does what you do. Your work comes with death threats and murder attempts. It also helps to defend everyone else against such mayhem by addressing and discrediting the mysticism that underlies and gives rise to it.
Tell me about your view of Islam, your history in the religion, and why and how you got out of it.
Fawstin: I really appreciate you putting it that way. It’s a far cry from how I’m usually described, and not just by my enemies but even by those who should know better.
Islam is an evil ideology, a political religion that has retarded the humanity of everyone under its thrall. Just look at the countries who live by its “ethics,” and you’ll understand that it should be in the dustbin of history. Yet it persists. And it destroys human lives. It destroys the lives of those who try to live by it. And, by motivating some of them to commit atrocities, it results in the destruction of many more lives.
If you want to see Islam in practice on a day-to-day basis, I direct you to the website TheReligionOfPeace.com, which posts about the deaths and injuries caused by Islam’s true believers every single day. When I post a screenshot of the website’s weekly and monthly tallies, I get a good number of “shocked” emojis in response. And these reactions come from people who follow my work and are thus familiar with the horrors caused by Islam. Even they are shocked to see the relentless carnage. Most Western media ignore these events.
I just checked the site today, and from the week of November 2 through 8 9, 151 people were murdered and 167 injured in twenty-six attacks in thirteen countries. But the media don’t report this, nor do they ever identify the true nature of Islam, and so the vast majority of people remain ignorant of it all.
As for my history with Islam, I was born to Albanian Muslim parents in the Bronx, New York, and I was raised Muslim. I’ve said this before, but it’s worth repeating: Although many people today would describe my parents and my larger Muslim family as “moderate Muslims,” there was nothing moderate about the hatred for Jews or the abuse of women in my family. In Islam, Jews are regarded as descendants of apes and pigs and fit to be slaughtered, and women are considered a necessary evil, to be used for sex and to bring male Muslim heirs into the world.
The thing that made me question it all was the sharp contrast between my life at home and my life at school and with my friends. After learning about the Holocaust in school, I began to recoil every time a relative praised Hitler, whom I now refer to as Islam’s favorite infidel. And seeing my friends treat all people as people made me challenge the Islamic view that some are not. So in my mid-teens I quietly left Islam. There was no hard break, no one thing that did it, just the fact that it was ugly and that people involved in it lied about so much. That led me to see there was nothing there for me, nothing good.
In time, I came to love superhero comic books and to understand that fighting evil, including evil ideas, is important, and that only the good can fight evil. The only place I saw this happening was in superhero stories and, later, in novels. A few years later, I discovered Ayn Rand’s work, which I loved. I saw her fiction as the peak of the heroic fiction genre, her nonfiction as clearly correct, and both as powerfully uplifting. Nothing has come close since.