Oct. 2, 2015 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
58:59
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Hey everyone, we're going to be doing something a little different this week. | ||
| I've got Majid Nawaz jumping on a Skype call shortly. | ||
| He and Sam Harris are co-authors of a new book about Islam, and Majid is a former Islamic extremist himself. | ||
| A ton of you guys have been asking us to sit down, but he lives in London, so we thought we'd give the Skype thing a shot. | ||
| Actually, he's in New York at the moment. | ||
| I saw a picture of him and Morgan Freeman in a mosque yesterday, so I'm going to ask him about that and much more in a little bit. | ||
| But first, let's do a little housekeeping. | ||
| I want to talk about some of the principles we laid out in the first episode and some of the reaction to last week's show. | ||
| It seems that a bunch of you weren't thrilled with my guest Jimmy Dore. | ||
| Jimmy is a hardcore lefty progressive and uses some of the tactics I mentioned that I wouldn't be using on the show. | ||
| First, let me just say that I can only hold myself to the rules that I laid out. | ||
| If I stopped and mentioned saying every time a guest said something that goes against my personal rules, the show would be incredibly slow and horrifically painful. | ||
| More importantly, as we build a community based on tolerance and other ideas, it's important that we remain tolerant of ideas we don't like. | ||
| Jimmy is a great friend of mine. | ||
| We've worked together on-air for years, we've done stand-up gigs together, and I've had him and his wife over for dinner numerous times. | ||
| Yeah, we don't agree on everything, including some pretty big issues, but I think life is about more than just scoring who is right on everything all the time. | ||
| The most interesting part of last week's response was that some people said the episode was an echo chamber and I didn't push back enough. | ||
| Other people questioned why I even had people I disagree with on it all. | ||
| And that's the beauty of the internet, right? | ||
| We can all be part of the same exact conversation and still see it through our individual prisms. | ||
| Good journalism is the search for truth. | ||
| This show will be a battle of ideas, not just having our own ideas reinforced. | ||
| You know, there's so much intolerance of the other on both sides, and I think we can create something that's so much better than that. | ||
| Actually, I don't just think it, I know it, because I see it already happening. | ||
| Last week I had a hardcore progressive lefty. | ||
| This week I have a former Islamist extremist turned moderate trying to reform his religion. | ||
| Next week I have a gay conservative from Breitbart, Milo Yiannopoulos. | ||
| I won't agree with all of them all the time, but I most likely won't shout them down either. | ||
| I have enough faith in you guys that if we have an honest conversation here, the truth will present itself. | ||
| This of course reminds me of the Galactic Republic in the early days of the Death Star. | ||
| Grand Muff Tarkin wanted to stifle debate because they had the most powerful super laser in the universe. | ||
| Of course, let's not forget that Darth Vader said that the Death Star was nothing compared to the power of the Force. | ||
| The Force is on our side. | ||
| Let's use it wisely. | ||
| All right, so Majid, thanks for doing this. | ||
| We've been going back and forth for months now. | ||
| I've only had the show up for three weeks, but we've been going back and forth for a while. | ||
| And you're in New York right now. | ||
| You live in London, correct? | ||
| That's right, yeah. | ||
| I live in London. | ||
| So you live in London. | ||
| So you're halfway between Los Angeles and London. | ||
| So I figured we'd do the Skype, because I don't know when you're going to be out here. | ||
| Any LA plans coming? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, I'd love to come to LA and I have good friends on the West Coast, but nothing fixed yet. | ||
| So it's good to have this opportunity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So we'll do the Skype thing with you in New York, me in LA. | ||
| So first off, I saw a picture of you that you tweeted yesterday. | ||
| You were hanging out with Morgan Freeman in a mosque. | ||
| So what was that about? | ||
| Yes, this is what's brought me here to New York. | ||
| I can't explain too much of it at the moment. | ||
| All I can say is that I had a great conversation with him. | ||
| In the Islamic Center of New York. | ||
| We spent a good hour or so having a chat about the distinctions between Islam and Islamism, and about my story and the work I do. | ||
| But beyond that, we're just gonna have to wait and see what I was up to. | ||
| All right, well now, he's played God, so I guess he's the right guy to talk to on that. | ||
| In the house of God, I was speaking to a man that played God. | ||
| About God. | ||
| All right, there you go. | ||
| Okay, so I want to talk to you about some of the things that you probably did speak with him about. | ||
| So first, let's just start with your story, because your biography, what you've lived through to get to here is really, really incredible. | ||
| So can you just sort of sum that up in a couple minutes? | ||
| You know, those who want the, as you know, the full story, it's in my memoir called Radical. | ||
| But in a summarized form, basically I joined a revolutionary Islamist group at the age of 16 years old. | ||
| I ended up on the leadership of this organization and spent 13 years with them. | ||
| And I played my role in exporting this organization from Britain to Pakistan and then to Denmark and eventually to Egypt. | ||
| The group's name was Hizb ut-Tahrir. | ||
| It was the first among the Islamist groups to popularize the idea of resurrecting a caliphate that would seek to conquer other countries and enforce their version of Islam as law. | ||
| And their method By which they aimed to come to power was via military coups. | ||
| So we were very much focused in recruiting army officers to join our organization and then inciting them towards military coups. | ||
| And that's what took me to Pakistan. | ||
| It's what eventually took me to Egypt. | ||
| I arrived one day before the 9-11 attacks and then 10 months later, I found myself arrested and detained and taken to the torture dungeons of Egypt's state security headquarters in Cairo. | ||
| And then sentenced, after four months in solitary confinement, sentenced to five years in prison as a political prisoner. | ||
| At that point is when Amnesty International adopted me as a prisoner of conscience, began campaigning for my release, because of course, though we had views that I now find repugnant and would describe as extreme, we were, and the group still is, non-terrorist, which is why it's still legal in America and across Europe. | ||
| So it's the distinction I draw between an Islamist group and a jihadist group, is that if Islamism is the desire to impose any interpretation of Islam over society, jihadism is the use of force to spread Islamism, and jihadist terrorism is the use of force to spread Islamism by targeting civilians. | ||
| The group that I joined was an Islamist group, it wasn't a Jihadist group. | ||
| Right, so I'm glad you made that distinction because I do find that when we're having this conversation and it's being had by so many different people in so many different forms that just the definitions alone are lost and I know you've done a lot of work trying to just explain that kind of stuff to people so they're able to understand what we're talking about here. | ||
| Yeah, part of the problem is because this is a phenomenon that we've never really dealt with before in terms of human beings have never really dealt with this phenomenon of ideological Islam, seeking a very Bolshevik form of control, totalitarian control over society. | ||
| We simply, as people, didn't have the lexicon to have these conversations. | ||
| So though I use these definitions, you won't find these definitions taught in universities or in academic tomes, because people dealt with the problem before. | ||
| So part of the challenge that we faced was in coming up with very crystal clear, logical definitions and then popularizing them. | ||
| And so often you'll find that I repeat myself a lot. | ||
| And the reason I repeat myself is because, you know, we have to popularize these terms and to popularize these | ||
| concepts can only come through repetition until everyone finally | ||
| begins to understand it. | ||
| And it got to a point where the Prime Minister of the UK understood. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we got somewhere. | ||
| Okay, so you spent about five years in an Egyptian prison. | ||
| Now, that was under Mubarak at the time, who technically, I suppose, he was known as the president, but he basically was a dictator that was backed by the U.S. | ||
| for about 30 years. | ||
| What was that like being in an Egyptian prison? | ||
| I can't imagine. | ||
| Well, it wasn't a pleasant experience at all. | ||
| We had the torture, first of all, for the first four days, and then we were put into solitary confinement for four months. | ||
| And I was held in a cell, as were all of us in that period of solitary confinement, in cells in which we had no sanitation, no lights, no beds. | ||
| We had nothing but a bare concrete cell in which to try and get through without going insane. | ||
| And so I have with me, actually, I wanted to show you this because When I was arrested, I had a pocket-sized version of the Qur'an, which is this in my hand here. | ||
| This particular Qur'an has been with me from the day of my arrest all the way through the torture dungeons, through the solitary confinement, and then through the four years in prison. | ||
| And one of the things I did is, in the solitary confinement, we didn't have any light to read with or anything. | ||
| And obviously the mind can wander in that sort of situation and you fear for your own sanity. | ||
| So one of the things I would do is stand by the door of the jail cell and wait for the light to seep in through the bars. | ||
| And then I would stand there and read, if you can see it's a very small, the text is actually tiny. | ||
| Oh wow. | ||
| And I would read that. | ||
| I ended up memorizing half of it sort of in my jail cell. | ||
| But it was, you know, it was these sorts of things and it's why I've kept this. | ||
| It was these sorts of things that kept me From going mad during the solitary confinement period. | ||
| And another thing I want to show you is this. | ||
| This is a radio which I had with me. | ||
| It was given to me by the British Embassy. | ||
| And it was actually on this thing that I heard first time that we'd been charged. | ||
| We hadn't been informed officially. | ||
| But the BBC World Service had reported it and so I was listening to it on this. | ||
| And we found out that we'd been charged, and then we would go to trial. | ||
| And finally, I think this picture is up on the internet, but I have the original with me. | ||
| And this is something I stole from prison, and I've kept it with me ever since, because it means a lot to me. | ||
| This is the mugshot that was taken of me. | ||
| So that's the day, that's the very day we were dragged from the torture dungeons to be thrown into solitary. | ||
| That's before I was actually put into solitary confinement. | ||
| That's me at 24 years old. | ||
| And there you see, what you see is my name in Arabic, Majid Othman Nawaz. | ||
| And there is a prison number. | ||
| And what I've done, of course, since then is I've taken that number, which is in Arabic, 2453, and I have tattooed it on my back as a reminder for me, actually, of those days and of where I've come from. | ||
| Which was your original question, and the journey that I've made to get to where I am now. | ||
| Yeah, it's such an incredible journey. | ||
| One other thing on the jail thing, I find that fascinating that they let you keep a copy of the Koran with you, because wasn't Mubarak basically, not that he was secular per se, but they were, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood was illegal under him, you would think that he would want no sign of religion to get the prisoners to uprise or something like that, and yet he let you have it. | ||
| On the contrary. | ||
| Now, I'm not about to defend Mubarak. | ||
| I cheered when he was overthrown. | ||
| In fact, he was held in the same cell that he held me in afterwards. | ||
| So, I'm not here in any way to defend Hosni Mubarak. | ||
| What I would say is that the Egyptian dictator and his regime already understood the distinction that I now make between Islam and Islamism. | ||
| Their problem wasn't us holding copies of the Qur'an. | ||
| Their problem was the interpretation that we spun. | ||
| And with the ideology of Islamism that I refer to. | ||
| In fact, they would encourage us to study traditional medieval Islam because they knew that medieval Islam wasn't Islamism. | ||
| And they would encourage us to be exposed to theologians from Azhar University, which we were in prison, and their books, so that we could read about Islam from its medieval era and understand it wasn't this modern ideological form that we'd come to adopt. | ||
| I say this, and I say it with a caveat, that of course traditional ultra-conservative medieval Islam also needs to be reformed. | ||
| It's not the pinnacle, it's not the epitome of civil liberties. | ||
| However, what we have to accept, anyone who knows the basic thing, the most basic thing about Islamic History and the development of Islamic theology will know for all of its faults, and there are plenty of faults, by the way, and, you know, fundamentalism largely owes a debt to sort of the fact that we Muslims generally still revere that medieval period of our theology and haven't developed it since, but it's still very different to what the Islamist project is. | ||
| And the Egyptian authorities knew that, so they would encourage us, you know, they would rather we were Yeah, that's so fascinating, and even if you think about what's going on with Egypt now, where we sort of have another version of Mubarak and Sisi, and sort of controlling things, and yet, you know, the Muslim Brotherhood was in charge for a year and we backed them too, but that's a whole other topic. | ||
| So before we move on to some of the other stuff, I saw a clip where you were on Realtime with Bill Maher from about a year ago, and on the Overtime segment, you recounted a story about a bomb maker that you met in jail. | ||
| And I was hoping you could just sum that up real quick, because I thought it was fascinating, and it goes to very much what you're talking about right now. | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| So in prison, there was a... I mean, we were imprisoned with the who's who of the jihadi scene at the time. | ||
| We had the assassins of all of Egypt. | ||
| Adwan Sadat, who was killed in 1981. | ||
| The group was known as Tanweem al-Jihad. | ||
| Those who weren't executed in that case were with us in prison. | ||
| We had the leader of the Muslim Brotherhood, Dr. Mohammed al-Badir, who's since been reincarcerated, as you mentioned. | ||
| He wasn't the leader of the Brotherhood at the time. | ||
| He since became the leader of the Brotherhood. | ||
| But he and his entire leadership were with me in prison. | ||
| We have the leadership of his battalion. | ||
| And we also had people that came from abroad. | ||
| And the bomb maker that you refer to, he in particular was from Dagestan, next door to Chechnya. | ||
| And he came via Afghanistan to Egypt in an attempt to cross the Rafah crossing into Gaza to teach Hamas how to make bombs. | ||
| But he was caught at Rafah by the Egyptian authorities, and they imprisoned him. | ||
| They sentenced him to 17 years. | ||
| And I became friendly with this man and had a long conversation with him due to the London bombings. | ||
| Because, you know, the invasion of Iraq happened when I was imprisoned. | ||
| And the London, the 7-7 attacks in London, the bombings and sort of the buses and the tubes in London also happened when I was in prison. | ||
| So I got locked into a long conversation with this man about the, in his view, the legitimacy of attacking London. | ||
| And I was attempting to convince him that it wasn't legitimate. | ||
| Now, again, because I used to belong to a non-terrorist yet revolutionary extremist Islamist group We didn't believe in jihadism to come to power. | ||
| So we were arguing with the jihadists that actually what they should be focusing on is a military coup. | ||
| So that's why I was opposing him, not because I hadn't yet left. | ||
| I hadn't yet left Islamism. | ||
| It's because my form of Islamism in its method was very different to his in sort of how it seeks to come to power. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| But one thing I'm really proud of is that here's a man who was trained, was fully capable of making bombs and causing mayhem and havoc. | ||
| And yet, when I put it to him that the justification he uses to say that it's legitimate to target British citizens in that they voted for their government, would be the same justification one could use for Turks who voted for their government and Turkey is a member of NATO. | ||
| And NATO as an alliance was involved in Afghanistan. | ||
| And so why wouldn't he be bombing Turkey? | ||
| And the answer he gave me was a pragmatic one, not a religious one, at which point I caught him out. | ||
| And I said, you see, what you're doing is you're playing politics. | ||
| You're giving me a pragmatic answer, which is the very thing when Bush does it, you criticize Bush for. | ||
| The upshot of that conversation was by the end of it, it took him a couple of days or whatever, he knocked on my jail cell and he came back looking really sheepish. | ||
| And he said, you know, I've been thinking about what you said. | ||
| And I think you're right. | ||
| I just don't think, I agree with you, it's not justified to attack British civilians. | ||
| And one of the things that really swung him was the fact that so many in the UK protested against the Iraq War. | ||
| So my argument to him was, how can you be attacking these people? | ||
| But I'm happy, you know, he changed his mind. | ||
| I don't know where he is and what he's doing now, but that's, you know, that's, it's a small incremental step towards peace and reconciliation. | ||
| And it was one of the first examples that I felt Set me on the path that I'm now on. | ||
| Yeah, and that's why I wanted to ask you about that, because I love the story. | ||
| It's a beautiful story, and it's about what I think your whole life now is about, which is trying to explain all this to people and actually get people to change. | ||
| And I think one of the problems we're really having here is that I see both sides on this, or however many sides you want to say there are. | ||
| I see everybody sort of getting entrenched and the dialogue sort of disappearing. | ||
| So I think that's a perfect segue. | ||
| You just co-authored a book with Sam Harris. | ||
| I had Sam on the show a couple weeks ago. | ||
| It's called Islam and the Future of Tolerance. | ||
| So first off, I think people would love to know a little bit more about the nature of your relationship with Sam, how you guys came together. | ||
| Sam, of course, is a devout atheist. | ||
| You're a practicing Muslim, correct? | ||
| I don't call myself religious or devout. | ||
| I'm a Muslim, but I wouldn't want to hold myself up as any form of standard for anyone to judge the religion by or anything else. | ||
| Well, there you go. | ||
| So that said, tell me a little bit about how you got connected with Sam and what sort of brought you two together to really go ahead and start doing things like this. | ||
| So Sam and I first met a few years ago when I came to New York, where I am right now, to debate Ayaan Hirsi Ali. | ||
| And the motion of the debate was, Islam is a religion of peace. | ||
| And there's something I need to clarify with that debate, is that I've never believed, say never, sorry, in my current incarnation after leaving Hizb ut-Tahrir, I've not believed that Islam is a religion of war or peace. | ||
| And this is something I explained at the beginning of my dialogue with Sam. | ||
| I chose the side of that motion, that Islam is a religion of peace, because there was a motion, and I had to choose whether it was a religion of war or peace, and pick a side. | ||
| I think the motion was worded incorrectly, frankly. | ||
| I think it's neither a religion of war nor peace, it's just a religion, and religions are interpreted. | ||
| But nevertheless, I sat on the side that it was a religion of peace because I logically reasoned in my mind that if the majority of Muslims today aren't jihadist, albeit many, many, many Muslims are not liberal in the way I would like, they're certainly not jihadist terrorists. | ||
| And so if religion is what people make it, if Islam is what Muslims interpret it to be, then by definition it's a religion of peace simply because Muslims, by the overwhelming majority, are not terrorists. | ||
| So I sat on that side of the debate and I debated it. | ||
| Afterwards, we ended up in a dinner afterwards, and Sam happened to be there, and I hadn't met him before. | ||
| And he was called upon by Ayaan to ask me a question. | ||
| And he asked me, you know, he said, look, it's all good and well you being out there and needing to present this view to the public about Islam being this or that, but, you know, here between us in the privacy of this dinner, can't you just be honest with us and tell us that, you know, what you really think about Islam is a barbaric religion? | ||
| So I, my immediate reaction I was to say to him, are you accusing me of lying? | ||
| What do you mean, can I not be honest with you? | ||
| Are you implying that I wasn't honest outside there on the platform? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And it became a very hostile exchange, which ended there. | ||
| It didn't go any further. | ||
| And everyone was a bit embarrassed around the table. | ||
| It didn't really develop beyond that point. | ||
| And then we didn't speak for a couple of years. | ||
| And so then Sam reached out to me when I think he'd watched me at the Richmond Forum when I was reunited again with Ayaan. | ||
| This time, the good thing was it wasn't a debate. | ||
| It was a conversation. | ||
| And that's actually the Richmond Forum. | ||
| I want to thank, if the people from the Richmond Forum are watching this, I want to thank them because the format that they got the same moderator, John Donvan, who had moderated the debate at the Intelligence Squared earlier on occasion. | ||
| But instead, they got Ayaan, myself, and Imam Rauf, who had been the imam of the main Manhattan mosque. | ||
| And instead of having a motion to debate, they just said, all of you just want to have a conversation. | ||
| So, that really allowed for me to be in the middle, because Imam Rauf was arguing Islam is a religion of peace, Ayaan was arguing it's not, that it's a religion of war instead, and it allowed me in the centre to say, guys, you know, actually, Ayaan's got something right, and you've got something right, and there's actually something in the middle here. | ||
| And I think that conversation really set the precedent for what happened with Sam and me afterwards, because I think he saw that, I think Ayaan was really impressed with the tone that I took with her in that conversation, And I was really happy with the way in which she reciprocated my overtures to her. | ||
| And I think that really laid the foundations for what happened next. | ||
| And then Sam reached out to me and said, hey, can we kind of have that type of conversation for my blog? | ||
| Because, you know, he interviews people on his podcast, he publishes it on his blog. | ||
| So I said, well, yeah, sure. | ||
| And we sort of had this exchange over the phone, and he transcribed it. | ||
| And I said, Sam, this is actually really good. | ||
| I don't think you should put it on your blog. | ||
| I actually sense this is a book that could really influence a lot of people. | ||
| And so then he approached Harvard, and thank God the editor-in-chief at Harvard Agreed, and that's the story of the book, which hits the shelves in a week. | ||
| Yeah, so we'll talk more about Sam in a second, but I think something interesting that you said about Ayaan is that, so I think a lot of your critics, or a lot of the people that are critical of everyone on your side of this, is that you guys all think exactly the same thing. | ||
| So I'm fascinated that, so you and Ayaan actually don't agree on certain elements of this. | ||
| Well, you see, that's the laziness and the knee-jerk reaction, the emotional reaction, which is born of fear, the fear of dialogue and the fear of actually having conversations with people that we may disagree with, is that actually the best way to ignore the consequences that dialogue can work It's to tarnish everyone with the same brush. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's to, in fact, you know, effectively slander everyone. | ||
| And that way we are justifying to ourselves and those who are listening to us why dialogue isn't a good thing. | ||
| The truth is that even after this dialogue with Sam, there are probably many things that he and I don't see eye to eye on and with Ayaan as well. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But the important thing is in recognizing that dialogue is a process. | ||
| It's not a, you know, you don't just snap your fingers and somebody agrees with you. | ||
| And democracy itself, by the way, liberal democracies, weren't born in a day. | ||
| The reason why we use the word mature democracies when we refer to countries like the United | ||
| States and the United Kingdom is because they've had centuries over which time they've matured. | ||
| And that's what the, to use that analogy, that's exactly what a dialogue with people | ||
| It matures over time. | ||
| Right, so there's been a bunch of people, you can name them if you like, we've talked about them a lot here, and I'm almost tired of talking about them at this point, who are writing some pretty horrific things about you. | ||
| You know, the worst kind of slanderous stuff. | ||
| Calling you names that if anyone on the right called you, they'd be condemned, and rightfully so. | ||
| And I'm seeing so much of this coming from the left. | ||
| And these are the people who I thought would be the ones standing up for all the things that you're talking about here, the words that you're talking about, conversation, liberalism, all of these things. | ||
| And you're getting it from the left. | ||
| What do you make about that? | ||
| So, you know, let's move away from the individuals and look at the movement. | ||
| And, you know, the individuals, at the end of the day, you know, whatever they say about me and wherever they are in their views, they certainly weren't as bad as I was when I was a revolutionary Islamist. | ||
| So I hope they can change. | ||
| Wow, you're a good guy. | ||
| You're a good guy. | ||
| Well, I believe in change, and I hope that, you know, people adapt. | ||
| And if they do change their views, I'd be perfectly happy to continue being friends with them. | ||
| Reza Aslan used to sit on my organization's board in London as a member of our advisory council. | ||
| And we disbanded it two years into founding our organization, so it hasn't existed for about five years. | ||
| But we used to know the guy. | ||
| We invited him to London. | ||
| He's spoken at my offices in London at Quilliam. | ||
| So people change, and I'm hoping that we can resume a cordial form of relationship with all of these guys. | ||
| I just think that If I can go from where I was to where I am. | ||
| I have faith in humanity. | ||
| But it is important to talk about the concepts, because that's the only way people do change, by the way, is when, as happened with me, is when those ideas are challenged. | ||
| In a way that tries, and it's difficult, we're all human beings, we all have emotions, we all have egos, but in a way to challenge those ideas without making about the ego, but actually just really making about the concepts themselves. | ||
| And so what you've referred to is what I've come to refer to as the regressive left. | ||
| And what I mean by the regressive left is because not all people on the left wing are regressive leftists, just like not all Muslims are Islamists. | ||
| And so what I mean by the regressive left is this phenomenon of people on the left wing of the debate who see between their duty, their ideological duty to challenge You know, foreign policy mistakes, American and British foreign policy mistakes, what they interpret as colonialism and neoconservatism. | ||
| They see it as their duty to challenge this. | ||
| And then they see another challenge, which is theocracies and the Islamist ideology. | ||
| And they have come to the view that you can't challenge both of these together. | ||
| Because if you were to challenge Islamist theocracy, you're supporting neoconservative foreign policy. | ||
| So they've, in their minds, they've prioritized. | ||
| They've said, you know, neoconservative foreign policy is a bigger evil. | ||
| Organized violence and chaos in the form of military invasions is worse than randomized non-state act of violence and chaos. | ||
| So we're going to go after, they believe they're engaged in a war. | ||
| We're going to go after the, this is their mindset, we're going to go after the organized violence and The reason why sometimes you see duplicity in their statements is because they genuinely believe it's an ideological war. | ||
| And so it's necessary to even engage in propaganda to defeat this bigger evil that they believe in, which is the organized violence and war. | ||
| And so why I call them aggressive is because in doing so they make alliances with some of the most aggressive, theocratic, fascist, totalitarian, barbaric, murdering and justifiers of murderous regimes across the world. | ||
| Right? | ||
| So, you know, whether it's Hezbollah, a terrorist organization that's currently fighting alongside the dictator Assad to fight against the Syrian people. | ||
| And the reason I use the example of Hezbollah, because the man who's just been elected to the Labour Party leadership in the United Kingdom, who's actually born of this regressive left phenomenon, has been historically, has been very close to groups such as, supporters of groups such as Hezbollah. | ||
| And that's why I'm citing this example. | ||
| So whether it's Hezbollah, or whether it's Hamas, you know, on the one hand, I can see the frustration of people who want a two state solution, which includes a secure, free and independent Israel, and a secure and free and independent Palestine. | ||
| But that frustration shouldn't legitimize the supporting an organization that has at the heart of its policy, the legitimization of targeting civilians. | ||
| And so what's happened is, why I call them aggressive, is that they've allied in their anti-colonial prioritization with some of the most aggressive, theocratic organizations that are out there in the world. | ||
| And then they feel that anyone who criticizes those organizations is by definition with the neoconservatives, so they must attack them. | ||
| And that's what's going on. | ||
| And I take the view, actually, you can criticize, I oppose the Iraq War and the invasion of Iraq from my jail cell in Egypt. | ||
| I have never supported the invasion of Iraq. | ||
| I've never supported neoconservativism. | ||
| I'm a member of the Liberal Democrats in the UK. | ||
| I've never been a member of any conservative party. | ||
| I've never been a conservative or supporter of wars in that sense in my life. | ||
| So you can oppose those things. | ||
| At the same time, you can oppose Theocratic fascism. | ||
| We can hold two thoughts at the same time, and it's not impossible to do, and I encourage everyone to try it. | ||
| Yeah, I love how you wrap that together, because you're right, it's two thoughts at the same time. | ||
| And when I talked about this with Sam, he was saying that they want to find this nugget in you, and once they find this thing that they say you have, not that you say you have it, but that they say you have, then it somehow discounts every other liberal principle That you have, which is why suddenly I'm hearing from them that they'll call Bill Maher is suddenly a neocon. | ||
| Bill Maher, who has, I think, stood for every liberal principle, been against every war that I can possibly think of. | ||
| And I have a suspicion that unfortunately what these guys are doing, I think for the reasons that you laid out very well, I think they're actually strengthening The extremists on both sides, right? | ||
| Because they're strengthening the Islamist extremists because they're not challenging them, and then they're strengthening the secular extremists because they're saying, they're making it seem like there's this one set of ideas that can't be talked about, and secular people want to talk about all ideas, right? | ||
| Well, if we, and I've come to refer to this as the Voldemort effect, you know, it's the Harry Potter books in which J.K. | ||
| She devises a really clever mechanism. | ||
| The people in the story are so fearful of the evil Voldemort that two things happen. | ||
| One, they don't believe Voldemort is actually alive. | ||
| They think he's dead and they refuse to accept anyone that's telling them that Voldemort still lives. | ||
| And the second is that they're so petrified of this Voldemort, who they believe is dead, that they can't even name him. | ||
| So they refer to him as he who must not be named. | ||
| So, that's what I mean is the Voldemort Effect. | ||
| And that leads to, you know, when you can't name something that actually is staring at you in the face, and you're so scared of it, that you deny it exists, and you don't want to name it. | ||
| That increases the hysteria. | ||
| So, you know, when President Trump says, we must defeat the evil ideology, well, which evil ideology? | ||
| Right. | ||
| You know, and so then the average dude that stands up in Donald Trump's rally and says, when are we going to deal with America's Muslim problem? | ||
| Or Carson who says, you know, he doesn't want a Muslim president. | ||
| When they say these things, because the evil ideology, when they hear that word, what they mean by that is Islam and by default every Muslim who identifies with Islam. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Which is why they don't want a Muslim president. | ||
| So what we're doing is by blurring those lines, we're increasing the hysteria and actually the bigotry that we're trying to avoid. | ||
| So what I argue is for those two reasons, and actually more importantly to empower reforming Muslim voices within Muslim communities because the first victims of theocratic fascism will be those Muslims themselves. | ||
| It will be the Muslim women. | ||
| It will be the minorities, the Yazidi women. | ||
| It will be the Coptic Christians in Egypt. | ||
| It will be the liberal Muslims. | ||
| It will be the apostates, the ex-Muslims. | ||
| It will be the gay Muslims and the lesbian Muslims. | ||
| These are the ones who first suffer under the yoke of theocratic fascism. | ||
| We need to also provide them with a lexicon. | ||
| That they can deploy in their own internal reform debates. | ||
| So if you don't recognize Islamism, what are they going to say is the problem when they're having these debates within their communities? | ||
| Islam the religion? | ||
| That's going to get them killed immediately in the first place. | ||
| Aside from the intellectual point that what do you mean by Islam the religion? | ||
| It's interpreted in a million different ways. | ||
| God, that's such a good handle on why this is so difficult, because we're talking about ideas, we're talking about people, we're talking about religion, we're talking about political movements. | ||
| It's just so much at once. | ||
| So, just to bring around this part of it, in terms of dealing with these people, the people that have been writing all these things and all that, How personally exhausting is it for you? | ||
| Because I see and I've read, you know, where Sam has said, you know, he's not going to do this anymore. | ||
| And he said to me even that then suddenly it's like he has to say something because it's not fun being lied about or slandered or smeared. | ||
| And as I said before, you, in a way, get it worse. | ||
| A tweet By one of these guys just this week to you was about how he's going to report you to the Department of Homeland Security when you come to the United States because he doesn't want an ex-terrorist here. | ||
| I mean, this is really horrible stuff. | ||
| How do you just deal with it on the personal level? | ||
| It's exhausting, right? | ||
| You see, the thing with this tweet is it really raises an interesting insight. | ||
| And again, I hope this guy really changes his approach to this. | ||
| The interesting thing this raises is a liberal guy who ostensibly opposes profiling at airports. | ||
| Which, by the way, I've always done. | ||
| You can find more that I've done against profiling than any of these voices. | ||
| If you Google my... On YouTube, there's a whole debate I've had on BBC Newsnight, which is the flagship news show in the UK, against a left-wing Labour Party Member of Parliament, who also happens to be Muslim, who was advocating profiling five years ago. | ||
| And I was debating him on that, saying, you know, this is a silly idea. | ||
| So, I've always been against profiling, but so was this guy who sent the tweet you just referred to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yet, what's interesting is, suddenly, when somebody is breaking out of the group thing, think, and disassociating themselves with the tribal identity that we use to have this us and them kind of game that we referred to earlier, that, you know, you're either with the neocons or you're with us. | ||
| And that kind of us and them relies on this tribal identity. | ||
| When someone breaks free from that tribal identity, refuses to belong here or there, suddenly you find it's open season. | ||
| That all the principles that we use to actually tarnish the neocons, oh it's the neocons who want to profile Muslims, it's the neocons who are racist, we're using that same racism against those dissenting voices. | ||
| I was called a porch monkey, right? | ||
| I was called a native informant. | ||
| I was called a house Muslim by white non-Muslims in this instance. | ||
| And supposedly reputable people. | ||
| This isn't just random eggs on Twitter saying this. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| These are journalists that work for established organizations and write for established blogs. | ||
| And then on top of that, you've just mentioned somebody saying, I hope DHS reads, the Department for Homeland Security reads your book before you come to the States because I don't want an ex-terrorist coming into the United States. | ||
| And I put aside the fact I was never a terrorist. | ||
| That's advocating profiling by somebody who literally a day earlier had been on CNN accusing Sam Harris of advocating profiling. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And so it's suddenly what happens is when you break away from that group, kind of tribal groupthink, it becomes open season. | ||
| And that's why I said earlier that I think what's going on here is they genuinely believe they're engaged in a war. | ||
| And so in a war, all of these tactics become legitimate because the objective is to win. | ||
| It's not to find the truth. | ||
| And I think that's part of the problem, it's why I think this dialogue and this conversation is so important. | ||
| Because what we do is we break down that hostility. | ||
| So I keep referring, that's why actually it's a lesson to myself as well, it's so important to remain polite with these guys. | ||
| Because whatever they say to me, if I reinforce their notion that they've somehow managed to convince themselves that this is a war, And if I respond in that manner, they will double down and | ||
| they will continue to act this is a war and that anything is permissible. | ||
| So that's why I try and deescalate it and I fail sometimes, but it's important for me | ||
| to keep trying. | ||
| Yeah, I feel the same way. | ||
| I try as well from the little piece of this that I'm part of and I've tried to engage | ||
| some of these people in a respectful way. | ||
| And unfortunately, as Sam has illustrated quite well, it's hard to debate when you have your facts and then the person you're debating is debating what they think you say or what they want you to say, not what you actually say. | ||
| I think a little bit of this also is what Bill Maher refers to as the soft bigotry of low expectations. | ||
| Do you feel that, that somehow these people, and again, I'm talking about the white liberals in this group, that they think because you think differently than they want you to think, that shows racism, right? | ||
| Doesn't that show racism? | ||
| You could cut right now, into your show, when you do your production, an image of me talking to Sam Harris, and being called a porch monkey for it, and me talking to Morgan Freeman. | ||
| Now, the question I ask is, why would none of these guys, and they haven't done so, why would any of these guys not call me a porch monkey for talking to Morgan Freeman? | ||
| Not call me his native informant. | ||
| Not call me his porch monkey. | ||
| Yet when I'm talking to a white man, they're his porch monkey. | ||
| They call me his native informant. | ||
| And that's the racism of low expectations. | ||
| It's the assumption that when a brown man is talking to a brown man, it's a meeting of equals. | ||
| But when a brown man is talking to a white man, the brown man suddenly loses all agency and can't think for himself and is following the white man's thoughts. | ||
| And yet the irony is that I don't even use that form of identity politics to describe people. | ||
| I don't see people as white people, brown people. | ||
| I see people effectively. | ||
| I like people to look at people as their values. | ||
| If someone's liberal, if someone's Islamist, if someone's conservative, that's how I look at people. | ||
| Because it tells me where I stand with them, much more than skin color does. | ||
| But these are the people who are ostensibly anti-racist, deploying that form of racism. | ||
| And you'll find that, you know, I tweeted an image of Morgan Freeman and me yesterday and put it on my Facebook page. | ||
| I have not once heard any reaction from any of this regressive left phenomenon, in the sense of being called his native informant or his House Muslim or his porch monkey. | ||
| It simply hasn't happened. | ||
| And that there is a best example of the reverse racism of low expectations you've just referred to. | ||
| Yeah, so I have been using the term regressive left also. | ||
| I just started using it in the last few weeks and a few of my friends that are in this space aren't thrilled with me because of it. | ||
| But I think what you're exposing there is a fatal flaw of progressivism because they view things in the prism of identity politics. | ||
| It's very hard to extricate someone with a separate idea Or someone that doesn't fit the cliché. | ||
| And you're literally a walking, breathing example of that, which explains why you get the shit that you do. | ||
| And it's important to mention at the same time, when I'm sitting there, I tweet out that I was with Morgan Freeman in the mosque, explaining, you know, having a conversation about the difference between Islam and Islamism. | ||
| It is important to mention that at the same time I got lots of reaction from people saying the difference between Islam and Islamism Is in your head. | ||
| And actually, you know, they're the same thing. | ||
| So there's also that side of the reaction. | ||
| You know, I get it from that side too. | ||
| People insisting that Islam is what they believe it to be, which is what Al-Qaeda believe it to be. | ||
| And that I'm just engaged myself in a form of apology for what Islam is. | ||
| And so it's difficult to try and strike this balance where, you know, we need honesty in this conversation. | ||
| We need people to accept that there's a problem with Islamist extremism. | ||
| And there's also, in fact, a challenge in dealing with taking Islam out of its medieval heyday, the paradigms, the theological paradigms that were developed in the medieval era that we simply haven't moved on from. | ||
| And actually, that means that a whole bunch of Muslims, so the Islamists obviously don't like me, a whole bunch of traditionalist, non-Islamist, conservative Muslims don't like me because I talk about reforming the interpretation, and then a whole bunch of anti-Muslim people on the other side who want me to apostatize don't like me because I say Islam can be interpreted. | ||
| And they want me to say that Islam is evil. | ||
| So, you know, you end up getting kind of stuck in this middle, and it requires a lot of patience. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I guess if you have a lot of people hating you, you might be telling the truth. | ||
| How about that? | ||
| Yeah, and you don't need to be a believer in Islam to concede the point, which is the point I was making with Sam, who I think has since shifted in his view, and he's accepted that his view has changed somewhat on this point. | ||
| You don't need to be a believer in the religion of Islam to concede that texts can be interpreted It's not as simple as saying, I'm going to go to a restaurant and order a lobster, and if you bring me a chicken, why did you bring me a chicken when I ordered a lobster? | ||
| Because the menu says lobster. | ||
| You're ordering one thing there. | ||
| What we're talking about is a manual, a bit like a car manual, when something's gone wrong in the engine. | ||
| And reading the whole thing and working out what the diagnosis is, you know, where the particular relevant parts are, how you put them together. | ||
| When you're talking about complex ideas like that, like interpreting scripture and adapting them to the time and space we find ourselves in, You know, by definition, it's an exercise in interpretation. | ||
| And that's why even with the U.S. | ||
| Constitution, you've got the same document being used as a source for pro-choice and pro-life people or pro-gun laws and gun restriction people using the very same document to make their arguments, because the dispute is over what the document means in this day and age in the first place. | ||
| And so you don't really need to believe in the scripture to concede that there is no one definitive reading of Shakespeare, there's no one definitive reading of the Bible, and there's no one definitive reading of the Quran. | ||
| Yeah, alright, so one more piece on this portion of all this. | ||
| What do you make of the term Islamophobe? | ||
| Because to me, the term itself has a lot of problems with it, because I don't think people fear Islam as in the religion. | ||
| They fear, if there is a fear for some people, it's the actions They fear the actions that people are taking in the name of the religion. | ||
| And again, I know that can be confusing for people, because that's the idea versus the people. | ||
| But I do see this meme of calling everyone an Islamophobia, and it goes, of course, to a lot of the things we've talked about so far. | ||
| But I fear that their use of that word also is creating a real backlash to what they want to accomplish. | ||
| Well, you see, often this word is deployed to silence. | ||
| You know, it's used to kind of muzzle the debate. | ||
| When people have every right to criticize and scrutinize and satirize any idea, whether it's Christianity, science, whether it's religion, whether it's Islam, any idea is open to scrutiny. | ||
| In fact, that's the essence of progress. | ||
| It's how our societies have ended up where they are today. | ||
| Every innovator for their day was a blasphemer. | ||
| You know, Galileo questioned things that he was called a heretic for. | ||
| was considered a heretic for the theory of evolution. | ||
| And so, you know, and even prophets were heretics against the old religion, you know, whether that's Muhammad, Jesus or Moses. | ||
| So at the end of the day, if it wasn't for blasphemy, if it wasn't for, in other words, questioning established norms and heresy, we wouldn't have progress. | ||
| So to use the word Islamophobia to silence any scrutiny of an idea would be to hinder this debate and the progress that is needed in this debate. | ||
| I don't like the term for that reason, and I think it's deployed too often against people who are simply questioning whether Islam needs to be reformed or not, or whether Islamism has a relationship to Islam, which of course it does. | ||
| Islamism is an offshoot of Islam. | ||
| It's wrong to say it's got nothing to do with Islam. | ||
| And so people that are asking these questions to deal with some very real problems in the world are being called Islamophobes, and that's actually unfair. | ||
| I prefer the word anti-Muslim bigot. | ||
| There is such a thing as anti-Muslim bigotry. | ||
| Of course, absolutely. | ||
| There are people like Carson who don't believe in, perhaps don't even believe in evolution, but they also don't want Muslim presidents of the United States. | ||
| What do you do with a neuroscientist who doesn't believe in evolution? | ||
| Those things don't seem like they should add up. | ||
| But it kind of indicates, you know, so there is something about people that have, they want to discriminate against people like me because of the religion I was born into, right? | ||
| That's anti-Muslim bigotry. | ||
| But that's very different. | ||
| To scrutinizing Islam, the idea, and that's why I developed this maxim, which again, in the dialogue with Sam, and that is that no idea should be or is ever above scrutiny. | ||
| No idea is above scrutiny and no people are beneath dignity. | ||
| And I think that really nicely summarizes where we should stand on this debate. | ||
| Yeah, that's actually a great segue for my next question, which is, what has the reaction from just sort of the mainstream Muslim community in England been to you? | ||
| Because even when I tweeted out that we were going to sit down and do this, The majority of it was positive. | ||
| Now, obviously, we have a certain amount of people that follow both of us and know what we think about things that enjoy what we do, so that's expected. | ||
| But I did get some people that said, oh, you know, it was this porch monkey mentality. | ||
| Oh, he's just doing this for money and affection of white people. | ||
| You know, a lot of that, what I think, is pure nonsense. | ||
| But what about the mainstream Muslim community that you're around every day? | ||
| Well, look, you know, mainstream Muslims aren't Islamists. | ||
| They are conservative, but they're not Islamists, and they're certainly not jihadists. | ||
| And so what they're not going to do, even if they disagree with me, is they're not going to, you know, they're not going to basically attack me for it or launch into a tirade of ad hominem, even if they disagree. | ||
| Now, I'm very realistic about where I stand among my own religious communities. | ||
| That's because if I had just restricted myself to challenging Islamism, I probably would have had the support I'm a liberal socially, as well as politically. | ||
| And I've mentioned I'm a member of the Liberal Democrats in the United Kingdom, which is the centrist party there. | ||
| I also happen to be, in social and religious matters, conservative with a small "c." | ||
| And I challenge that, too. | ||
| I call for reform in our approach and interpretation of the scripture. | ||
| I am a liberal socially, as well as politically, and I've mentioned I'm a member of the Liberal Democrats | ||
| in the United Kingdom, which is the centrist party there. | ||
| And so, you know, I have very openly supported a lot of social reform on these issues. | ||
| And I think that, you know, we have Dr. Osama Asenat-Quilliam, who advocated for the reconciliation of evolution | ||
| with the Islamic creed. | ||
| That was incredibly controversial when he did so, and he was kicked out of his mosque for that. | ||
| And that's not an Islamist mosque, it's a conservative mosque. | ||
| And so the reason that you will sense a lot of backlash is because we take on the twin challenges of Wanting to again another sort of maxim is that you know what we want to do is that Islamism must be intellectually terminated Whereas Islam needs to be reformed But that's the twin challenge that faces us and it means that obviously because no change is seamless all change is painful | ||
| A lot of people get upset when they kind of hear some of the things we say, but that's the nature of change. | ||
| I mean, you know, that's how societies change. | ||
| It's normal. | ||
| Yeah, I know you might be slightly hesitant to talk about this, but can I ask you, just in terms of your own personal safety, I'm sure you are threatened. | ||
| I know that a lot of the other people in this space, from Bill to Sam to many others, have A certain amount of threats that they deal with from all fronts, by the way. | ||
| You know, I think from someone like Sam, it comes from people from radical Christians, too. | ||
| So I don't even want to make this about Islam or Muslims particularly. | ||
| But people, I think, need to understand that you put yourself at great risk to talk about the things that you're talking about, right? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I don't want to dwell on this, but yeah, it's not exactly the safest occupation in the world. | ||
| So there's a lot going on in England politically right now. | ||
| And Jeremy Corbyn, who you mentioned earlier, is now head of the Labour Party. | ||
| What's the general sense of the political atmosphere in England right now? | ||
| Because in America, we get very, very little, even if I just flick on BBC for a second. | ||
| I mean, we have very, very little of what's going on with basically our biggest ally in the world. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting because we are facing the inverse of what's happening here with the phenomenon of the rise of Donald Trump. | ||
| We've got Jeremy Corbyn, who is populist in the way that Trump is, but on the left wing of politics. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's the same discourse. | ||
| And actually, that's why you have the horseshoe theory of politics, you know, that actually, ultimately, you know, left and right, they come and they end up when they go to the extremes meeting in the middle anyway. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Mussolini's fascism, I'm not calling Corbyn a fascist by any means, but Mussolini's fascism was a left-wing phenomenon that emerged into totalitarian fascism. | ||
| So they end up meeting. | ||
| And the reason that, so if you look at Corbyn and Trump, what they both have in common is their anti-establishment approach, is their total disdain for politics and the way that things have been going on. | ||
| They want to change the status quo. | ||
| They're playing on popular anger, which in many instances is there for legitimate reasons, but in other instances it's playing up the identity politics. | ||
| They identify the other, so in Trump's case the Mexicans, And the wall, the silly idea of building a wall that he wants. | ||
| Identifying the other and allying with some unsavory people to achieve that. | ||
| It's all part and parcel of the politics of our times and across Europe we're witnessing this phenomenon with the rise of far-right populist parties and in Greece we had Golden Dawn, now we've got Syriza which is a far-left populist party. | ||
| And in Scotland we had the Scottish Nationalists who wanted to break away from the United Kingdom and the other for them were the English. | ||
| So, because for whatever reason people are feeling particularly vulnerable and insecure, they're rallying around identity politics and defining themselves against somebody else. | ||
| And I think that's a particularly, it's a very unhelpful unhealthy way to engage in politics and it leads to more division, which is what we see playing out across the world. | ||
| Yeah, not only do we see it playing out across the world, but now, you know, we have this massive refugee crisis, which you guys in Europe are having to deal with much more than we are in the States. | ||
| Now, Europe already has a huge problem with integrating their immigrants as a general rule, especially in Muslim communities, right? | ||
| So what do you make of what England or what the rest of the EU should be doing or can be doing With the refugee situation? | ||
| I think the important thing is integration. | ||
| I would caution people, and there will be, you know, in the United Kingdom we are overdue an ISIS attack. | ||
| So not if, but when ISIS chooses and decides it's capable of striking in the UK, I would urge people not to blame the refugees. | ||
| These are people who are, in some cases, who have fought ISIS in Syria and Iraq and have fled since then. | ||
| Or in other cases, who are fleeing for their lives because they disagree with everything that ISIS is doing. | ||
| Of course, among them, there may be one or two fighters. | ||
| But that's neither here nor there, because 1,000 born and raised British citizens have gone to join ISIS anyway. | ||
| So they're finding it easy enough to recruit from UK-born citizens, let alone having to sneak them in with refugees. | ||
| So if there are attacks, I would urge people not to blame these poor, desperate refugees who need our help and our sympathy and our understanding. | ||
| What I would say is important to consider for governments, on the other hand, is not to repeat the same failures when, what you mentioned, integration wasn't seen as important. | ||
| And so what we ended up developing in Europe, in Britain I can speak to, were these self-segregated communities that didn't mix with one another. | ||
| And they grew up, you know, it's possible in 2015 to be born and raised in London as a Muslim teenager and not have a single non-Muslim friend Nor a single friend from the opposite sex. | ||
| And I just think that's not a healthy psychological state to be in. | ||
| So I would encourage governments to have really, really robust and strong integration policies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do you think that's even possible because they're already dealing with the integration problem that exists? | ||
| It seems to me that the conversation has been dumbed down to the point where if you say anything, if you were to say, well, we shouldn't bring in more refugees right now, that people would immediately call you racist, which the truth probably is somewhere between, you know, there's obviously a certain amount of people are going to be xenophobic no matter what. | ||
| And then there are also some legitimate concerns about what this can do to societies. | ||
| But we so rarely have this conversation, right? | ||
| Yeah, and it's, you know, at the end of the day, the immigration conversation is a bit like the Islamism conversation, that it's immediately shut down, and accusations of bigotry are the first, you know, recourse, if you like, of those who want to shut that conversation down. | ||
| It is important that these conversations are in fact thrown open. | ||
| In the recent history, the political history of the United Kingdom, we've seen the consequences of not having these conversations, because when these debates were shut down by the mainstream parties, What happened as a result is the rise of two groups. | ||
| One, a street protest movement, and the other, a political party. | ||
| The UKIP, United Kingdom Independence Party, that wants to break away from the European Union and wants to end all immigration. | ||
| That party, which started taking chunks out of the Conservative support base, arose at lightning speed in the UK, headed by Nigel Farage, precisely because the main political parties didn't want to talk about racism. | ||
| And so an uglier version of that conversation happened on the outside, on the fringes of the mainstream, because we didn't want to talk about it. | ||
| And the other thing that happened was the rise of the English Defence League, the EDL. | ||
| So what had been Europe's largest street protest movement began organising rallies and demonstrations up and down the country because of a conversation about Islamism. | ||
| So what I advocate and the reason why I'm so sort of heavily for having these conversations | ||
| is we don't have them in the mainstream in a responsible way. | ||
| The fringes will have them in an irresponsible way. | ||
| And that's the danger of the Voldemort effect that I refer to. | ||
| Yeah, and that's very much what I'm trying to do with this show, which is why I'm gonna have people | ||
| from all over the political spectrum here because we need these conversations. | ||
| So just one more thing on the refugee thing. | ||
| What do you make of the Arab countries that basically aren't taking in their brothers? | ||
| I mean, I think Saudi Arabia has let in maybe 30 families or something. | ||
| All these countries, we're seeing Egypt's not letting anyone in. | ||
| Turkey has done a lot. | ||
| Turkey's not an Arab country. | ||
| But all these countries that are doing this, what do you make of that? | ||
| So, we've got a caveat here. | ||
| It's the Gulf Arab countries that have let in zero refugees, whereas Jordan, Lebanon, and these surrounding countries that aren't Gulf Arabs have millions, you know, of refugees. | ||
| And so, there is that distinction to be made. | ||
| Jordan is overflowing with refugee camps and tents, and so is Lebanon. | ||
| But the Gulf Arabs, you know, the Emirates, Saudi Arabia, these countries, Kuwait, they think that actually they I think that their responsibilities have been met simply by providing funds to the refugee camps. | ||
| And I think that's a particularly interesting point there to look at as to the, just as with the Syria conflict, there are certain responsibilities that the regional powers have to deal with conflict in their own back gardens and in their own region. | ||
| And unfortunately, that hasn't been happening. | ||
| On the one hand, we complain when the international community led by the United States of America intervenes, | ||
| and yet on the other hand, when no intervention is forthcoming, we complain because we're saying that no one cares | ||
| about all the women and children and innocent men, civilians, | ||
| who are dying. | ||
| And actually, the only way around this is to say, "Okay, if you don't want international intervention, | ||
| then take responsibility for your own region and intervene yourselves." | ||
| And that applies to refugees, and it applies to the war in Syria | ||
| and dealing with that through political and diplomatic and military means. | ||
| And I'm very critical, unfortunately. | ||
| I don't think these Gulf countries have been doing nearly enough | ||
| in this regard. | ||
| And by the way, I don't want to just blame the Gulf countries | ||
| or any of the Arab states, because we just saw at the UN In these last couple days, there seems to now be this new alliance between Iraq and Iran and Russia. | ||
| And again, as to what you just said, the more the U.S. | ||
| pulls out, it seems the worse it gets. | ||
| And every time we go in, we seem to make it worse. | ||
| So there are no easy answers here, I think is the ultimate conclusion. | ||
| So I have one more thing for you, because I've been trying to end all my interviews on some sort of feeling of hope, and actually, you've done a nice job of giving us some hope this whole way through. | ||
| But I really sense that there has been, over the last couple months, a real secular awakening. | ||
| I sense it in the response I'm getting to the videos, the Facebook messages people are sending me, emails, the tweets, the whole thing, that people, that secular people, that want to base their values on humanism, And not on, you know, magical sky gods and all of that stuff, that they're really waking up. | ||
| And I think you've had a part to do with it, I think, Sam, I think many other people. | ||
| Do you sense that too? | ||
| Please tell me you do or I'm in a lot of trouble. | ||
| I sense particularly that more, what voices that I call the minorities within the minority, you know, people on the left that we've spoken about earlier, they traditionally care about the minority communities. | ||
| But actually, I'd say to them that if they're really worth their salt, if they really want to test their mettle, What they should be caring about are the minorities within those minority communities. | ||
| The gay Muslims, the lesbian Muslims, the ex-Muslims, the liberal Muslim voices, the feminist Muslims, and the minorities such as the Christians in Egypt and the Yazidis in Iraq. | ||
| So those minorities within minority communities, I sense, have been rallying and waking up and galvanizing. | ||
| I think I sense more and more Muslim voices coming out to speak against not just Islamism, but also Islamic religious conservatism. | ||
| And we get messages every single day. | ||
| We get people asking to join our organization, to help us, to work with us. | ||
| And I think that's really fantastic, because if we're going to really defeat the scourge of theocratic fascism, and if we're going to help reform the way in which Islam is interpreted today, then those voices are really the crucial voices that we need to hear from. | ||
| Yeah, well you've been a huge part of that, so I thank you for taking some time while you're in New York. | ||
| Your book with Sam, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, is already sold out. | ||
| The pre-orders are already sold out on Amazon. | ||
| It's coming out in a couple days in the bookstores, right? | ||
| Yeah, it will hit the bookstores very soon, and then everyone will hopefully be able to get a copy. | ||
| And then actually, after that, the Kindle version will come out too. | ||
| There is a Kindle version coming out, but it will come out after the hardback version hits the bookshelves. | ||
| All right, well, I'm really glad that we got a chance to do this almost face-to-face. | ||
| We can see each other, but one day we'll be able to have a beer and do it for real. | ||
| And good luck with all your work. | ||
| Appreciate it. |
Export Selection