Oct. 30, 2015 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Joining me via Skype this week is Ayaan Hirsi Ali. | ||
| I hope that most of you already know Ayaan, but in case you don't, her story is truly an incredible one that takes her from a childhood in Somalia to an elected member of parliament in Holland to a fearless free speech advocate hated by both the extreme right and the regressive left. | ||
| We'll dive deeper into her life's incredible journey shortly, but before we do that, I wanted to take a moment to talk about why people like Ayaan actually matter. | ||
| As our show has gained momentum here, I realize that what we're doing is really becoming an influential force for the things that I believe that matter, namely the battle of ideas, free speech, and liberal values. | ||
| At the end of the day, though, I want this to be about more than talk, because the repercussions of these ideas that we're talking about aren't just abstract notions, they're stark realities for so many people. | ||
| Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a survivor in every sense of the word. | ||
| She survived genital mutilation as a child, she survived a forced marriage to a cousin, she survived the cold-blooded murder of a friend in broad daylight in Amsterdam, and subsequent death threats. | ||
| Many people would have given up after any of these horrific events. | ||
| Many people would have just accepted that this is what life has given them and remained quiet. | ||
| Many people right this very second are doing just that. | ||
| By the way, I find no fault with these people who remain silent under such subjugation. | ||
| They see no way out, and sadly, even those in the secular world who want to help them fear the repercussions if they speak out. | ||
| Not Ayaan, though. | ||
| She has bravely and boldly fought for women's rights, brought the issue of female genital mutilation out in the open, and relentlessly made her life story a cause bigger than herself. | ||
| It's easy to sit back and privately talk about these things or tweet about them from the comfort of your own home, but she's actually out there putting her life on the line after they already tried to take it from her. | ||
| I want to be very clear here that when I talk about these issues, I'm talking about ideas and not people. | ||
| This seems to be a major sticking point in this conversation, and I really hope that we can eventually get past that, not just for the health of the debate, But for all the young people currently being indoctrinated with this ideology. | ||
| Imagine if a political party had a platform that included female genital mutilation, forced marriage, and death for apostates. | ||
| Absolutely insane and ridiculous, right? | ||
| Well, guess what? | ||
| Religious ideas, cultural ideas, any ideas, deserve the exact same scrutiny, no matter how uncomfortable it makes us. | ||
| I, for one, would rather live in a society that deals with uncomfortable truths out in the open than one that leaves huge portions of people alone in the dark. | ||
| I'm here with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, human rights activist and author of the new book, Heretic, Why Islam Needs a Reformation Now. | ||
| Ayaan, welcome to the show. | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Thank you, Dave. | ||
| Thank you for having me on. | ||
| So I'm gonna show all my cards right up front here. | ||
| I'm such a huge admirer of yours, and I think you've done such good work, and your story's amazing, and your bravery is amazing, so I'm gonna hold nothing back and just set us off on that good, welcoming note. | ||
| Is that okay with you? | ||
| Thank you, thank you for having me on again, and thank you for everything you said. | ||
| So, there's a ton that I want to talk to you about, and so many of the things that your life is an example of are the things that we've been talking about on the show here for months now, and I know many of my guests have been people that you're friends with, and co-workers with, and have done speeches with, but your story is the most unique and most interesting, and I want to talk about the book, but I thought we could just spend about 10 minutes Just sort of on your biography, and I know you've discussed it a lot, and that's what one of the books is about, but it's so illuminating to sort of how you got here. | ||
| So if you could just tell me a little bit first about growing up in Somalia, and let's just start with that. | ||
| Well, I was born into a Somali Muslim household, and if I look at my journey from, I was born in 1969, November, my family went to Saudi Arabia, we lived in Ethiopia, we lived in Kenya, And then I went to the Netherlands, and now I live in the United States of America. | ||
| I think if you look at my geographical journey, there's really nothing unique about it today. | ||
| People from all over the world move to different places, learn different languages, and adapt to different situations. | ||
| I think that what Westerners find interesting, intriguing, and maybe in some ways disconcerting, is the intellectual journey. | ||
| I was raised as a Muslim. | ||
| I was raised in a clan or tribal society, and the moral framework that prevails there is that of honor and shame. | ||
| And it's a different kind of honor and shame from what we believe here in the West, which is, you know, as a little girl, At the age of five, my genitals were cut. | ||
| And when I was old enough to ask, why did that happen? | ||
| My grandmother was very, you know, she readily explained it as, well, we purified you. | ||
| And if you are not purified, you will never find a husband. | ||
| So that kind of practice is, and it isn't something that happened only to me. | ||
| It happened to, and it happens according to United Nations numbers. | ||
| to 98% of Somalis, Egyptians, Sudanese. | ||
| So that's one thing that people find fascinating. | ||
| How could you have endured something like that and come out of a cultural context like that? | ||
| And then fast forward when I'm 22 years old, my father returns from a long journey. | ||
| He had left us for 10 years in Kenya, a country that if you're a Somali, you feel, you know, you're in a foreign country. | ||
| And he comes back and he feels he has the right, as my father, to marry me off to the first guy who comes along and says, you know, I'm of the same clan as you. | ||
| I'm looking for a wife. | ||
| Which girl would you like to offer? | ||
| And then I'm the one who's offered. | ||
| So to Westerners, that seems pretty strange. | ||
| Yeah, and this person, just to be clear, this person was a distant cousin of yours, right? | ||
| Which probably wasn't that abnormal for that area. | ||
| Absolutely not. | ||
| In fact, the closer the kinship, the better, because the only way to make sure that family members are loyal to one another, share wealth, don't mistreat one another, is to try and marry within the same family as much as possible. | ||
| Obviously with all the genetical problems, but that's not what we were looking at. | ||
| But that's the context, you know, your roles as a male, as a female that's given, as a female you can bring shame not only on your father and mother, your brother and sister, but the extended family as well, and even the extended religion. | ||
| And so I think what is fascinating for most Westerners is how could that intellectual journey, how come once I believed in all that, I lived it, and now I am saying, you know, as an individual, you have a right to be free to choose who you want to marry. | ||
| You don't have to cut off the genitals of girls for them to be married. | ||
| You don't even have to be married if you don't want to, because as an economic security, as a woman in the Western context, where there is the rule of law, where there is freedom, where there is this wonderful education system, as a girl you can actually Choose what you want to do in life. | ||
| You can map out your own destiny. | ||
| Yeah, and that's why I love your story so much and why I find you so inspirational, because you're truly living, breathing proof that things can change and that people and girls, especially from this part of the world, can have a different life. | ||
| And that's why I find it so wonderful. | ||
| But let's just back up for just a second on the female genital mutilation. | ||
| When this happened to you, Did you immediately, and you spoke to your grandmother and all this, but did you immediately question everything? | ||
| To be that age and go through something like that, how long did it take before you really were questioning everything about your life? | ||
| At the age of 5, I didn't question it. | ||
| At the age of 10, I didn't question anything. | ||
| At the age of 20, even, I didn't question anything. | ||
| But there's always, as you grow up, and I remember for me, in terms of evolving, As you know, evolving from childhood to maturity, it was the ages of 14, 15, 16, when I want to know, you know, what's the point of this life? | ||
| And why are we put on earth? | ||
| And is it only to reproduce? | ||
| We are, you know, at that point, my family, we're going through a lot of adversity. | ||
| And it is, what is the point? | ||
| What is the point? | ||
| So instead of being suicidal, I joined the Muslim Brotherhood because they make the point so very clear. | ||
| You've been put on this earth by God to be tested for your absolute submission. | ||
| You're going to be tested as a female in various ways and as a male in various ways. | ||
| And you just have to say yes to that, submit, and earn your points. | ||
| And for your audience, I'm just going to give you one interesting way in which... How does one even manipulate that? | ||
| As a believing Muslim, how does one know that, you know, you're doing what God wants you to do? | ||
| You have two angels on either side of your shoulders. | ||
| On your right side, you have an angel that Notes down, minute by minute, second by second, your good intentions versus your bad intentions. | ||
| So, we're not here, we're not even talking about what you say. | ||
| It's already before you say it. | ||
| But on top of that, that same angel also notes down what you say and then your behavior. | ||
| And on your left, same thing. | ||
| Everything that you do that is wrong. | ||
| That angel is doing the bookkeeping. | ||
| And you live And at some point, you die. | ||
| And then there is the hereafter. | ||
| There is the Day of Judgment. | ||
| And we are told as Muslims, no one can escape that. | ||
| You are before God and His Tribunal. | ||
| You are before God and His Tribunal, the prophets, the angels, and all these other human beings. | ||
| And those two books are going to be put on a scale. | ||
| And if your right-hand book weighs heavier than your left-hand book, you go to heaven. | ||
| And if your left hand book weighs heavier, you go to hell. | ||
| And as you grow up, especially with the radical Islamization of things, these things are made so explicit to you, and you become so aware of them. | ||
| It's like, in the West, it's like keeping track of your calories. | ||
| Yeah, well it's interesting, because even the way you're describing it, there's sort of a whimsicalness to the way you're describing it, because now, as a secular person, it sounds so ridiculous to you, and yet there's literally millions of people that believe in this in a literal sense. | ||
| Absolutely, absolutely. | ||
| And you know, you're young, you trust your parents, your teachers, and Islam is your religion. | ||
| And religion, I mean, I know that all human beings who are religious are taught that the criteria, you know, the framework, how do we know the difference between what's right and what's wrong? | ||
| Religion tells us that. | ||
| And so as a Muslim, and Islam is a way of life, you are taught that this is the difference between right and wrong. | ||
| And these things are spelled out. | ||
| Which is forbidden. | ||
| Haram. | ||
| That which is permitted. | ||
| Halal. | ||
| And so then it's up to you. | ||
| There's a level of... There's a level of choice in there, you know. | ||
| Right, but it sounds like it sounds like the guy on your shoulder already knows your intentions anyway, right? | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So even if you abstain, the angel still knows you want to indulge. | ||
| Wow, alright, so I want to talk a lot about, I want to talk, it's funny that it seems funny to you now, I'm glad to see that and you have a beautiful smile so it's nice because you've come out of this so it really is nice. | ||
| So I just want to do one more thing on your bio and then we can get into some of the specifics about the doctrine and things sort of in your life. | ||
| After that. | ||
| So you made political asylum in the Netherlands. | ||
| You then became Member of Parliament. | ||
| This is an incredible story of success. | ||
| And you know with all the refugee things going on in Europe right now, there's a lot of parallels to that. | ||
| You found safety and became successful and influential and went on to talk about female genital mutilation | ||
| and women's rights and all this incredible stuff. | ||
| But here, of course, I have to mention that then Theo Van Gogh was doing a movie | ||
| based on a script that you wrote, and he was killed by a Muslim extremist | ||
| in broad daylight in Amsterdam at 9 a.m. in the morning. | ||
| And as if that wasn't horrific enough, the person that killed him pinned a death threat | ||
| to you on this person's body. | ||
| Now I know you've talked about this a lot and I know people hear things like this and I don't think it quite gets to them. | ||
| You know, it sounds like a movie sort of, right? | ||
| And so I just want you to talk about a little bit About it specifically, but also just the feeling that it left you with, the sort of terror. | ||
| Because it's one thing to say these things happen, but you're a person that these things actually happen to. | ||
| Well, in a way, I have to say the difference between Theo Fungo and myself was that I believed in those threats. | ||
| I didn't know exactly what the individuals who were threatening me would do. | ||
| So two years prior to After Theo's death, I started to take all kinds of security precautions. | ||
| And when he and I were working together, I kept saying, Theo, you know, I know it sounds surreal in a Dutch context. | ||
| I think he would tell me over and over again, do you know the last time in the Netherlands someone was killed because of what they believed in? | ||
| and he would give me years from the 17th century. | ||
| Like we are Dutch, this is the Netherlands. | ||
| We don't do that sort of thing. | ||
| So relax, let's do this. | ||
| And that was actually true because Holland was an incredible place of mixed cultures and religions | ||
| and ethnicities and all that, right? | ||
| Absolutely. - And still is. | ||
| And it wasn't only that, it was also in the wider Europe when in hundreds of years ago, 17th century, 18th century, | ||
| when on religious grounds, people would face intolerance so much as to threaten their lives. | ||
| Thinkers, creative people, they would go to the Netherlands and they would get. | ||
| A sanctuary. | ||
| And so for him, it was for Theo, making this film, it wasn't about that. | ||
| It was about preserving what he knew was his culture, his civilization, and really not just Dutch civilization. | ||
| I think civilization with a capital C, when human beings can discuss and can disagree without having to threaten with force. | ||
| Right, so in a bizarre way, by them killing him instead of you in a weird, I know this sounds perverse or something, but that was more of a direct attack on Holland, right? | ||
| Because they were going after one of their own, so to speak. | ||
| So to speak. | ||
| And I had accepted the perimeters that the government put me within, you know, a security framework, which was really something that Theo van Gogh said, I would never ever accept anything like that, because these security measures curtail your freedom to a degree that you're not free anymore. | ||
| I'm never going to accept that. | ||
| And he wanted to prove to them it is not having to, you know, put a shell around the people who are practicing free speech. | ||
| That is not the answer. | ||
| The answer is to openly discuss these things and make them open. | ||
| If these people are provoked by what is that was that particular film was, this is what the Koran says about women. | ||
| This is how it's put into practice. | ||
| That's what we need to be talking about. | ||
| We shouldn't be talking about security. | ||
| And he gets killed. | ||
| And I think by doing the murderer killed Theo van Gogh and that incident confronted Dutch society and Dutch leadership and I think the wider European and Western leadership with, you know, we can all go around saying, talking about the First Amendment, freedom of speech, freedom of expression, all this, that and the other, but what are we willing | ||
| To do to preserve it. | ||
| He has left us with that question and I'm disappointed to say that so far we haven't done that much because as you know this year, the beginning of this year, the cartoonists in Paris were killed and the threats to free speech continues and if government policies are anything to go by it seems as if they're telling us it's best not to provoke them. | ||
| Yeah, all right, so I really want to focus on that, because that's been one of, you know, this free speech and political correctness. | ||
| It's become this perfect storm that's actually strengthening everything that it should be against. | ||
| But just to put a final cap on your bio and all that, what was it like for you? | ||
| I mean, really, at the personal level, when he was killed, did you want to just disappear? | ||
| Did you want to leave the country? | ||
| Did you want to give up? | ||
| Because now you've lived for these last, how many years ago was this? | ||
| This was? | ||
| This is 2004. | ||
| Right, so you've lived for these last 11 years honoring everything he stood for, but I'm sure there must have been a time when you thought, let me just get out of this, right? | ||
| Well, I think it every day. | ||
| I think it all the time. | ||
| It's so tempting to just think, you know, I've done enough. | ||
| This is my age. | ||
| I'm 46 years old next month. | ||
| There's nothing for me in it, personally. | ||
| But it's... | ||
| I think it's what Hayek said made the difference between being comfortable, which if I just disappeared and changed my name, I would be very comfortable, versus actual living, which is when you're challenged and when civilization is challenged, when our freedoms are challenged, we always rely on those who stand up for it. | ||
| And those who want to push their agenda Through intimidation, through force, they know that their argument is very weak. | ||
| Otherwise, why would they avoid discussion? | ||
| Why is it difficult for them to showcase what the Quran and Allah and the Hadith, | ||
| the sayings of the Prophet Muhammad and the jurisprudence and the practice of Islam says about women | ||
| and says to women, why are they afraid? | ||
| If women, all women had 100% the freedom to choose and if your message is superior, | ||
| why not allow people to just choose for it? | ||
| One of the things we've really focused on here is what I'm now calling and what Majid Nawaz has coined as the regressive left. | ||
| That there are people, I come from the progressive world, that's where I've been for these last couple of years, and it's only really in the last six months that I've had my own awakening that I realized it was my guys, it's my guys on the left That are trying to silence people like you and silence people like Sam Harris and Majid and all of this. | ||
| And I've had Sam and I've had Majid on and I include you in that. | ||
| And I think partially, I think that Majid said that part of his awakening was after a debate that he had with you. | ||
| What do you make of this coming from the left? | ||
| Because the left is supposed to debate ideas, right? | ||
| We're supposed to be about ideas, free thought, and yet it's those very people who are trying to silence you. | ||
| I'm amazed by this. | ||
| I think what I've seen, and I could be wrong, is that what the left does is they put all the emphasis on justice, the concept of justice. | ||
| And maybe what the right, rather classical liberals, because those are the people I identify with, and in the U.S. | ||
| they're called conservatives, sometimes libertarians. | ||
| But what classical liberals do is they put the emphasis on freedom. | ||
| And I was exposed to these concepts between say 1995 when I go to the University of Leiden until 2000 and then 2001, something happens that makes me intent on testing these ideas. | ||
| And what I have discovered, like many people before me, and I think you will as you grow, Is that, you know, there is no justice without freedom. | ||
| And so if you accept, and that is freedom from coercion, freedom from being forced into doing something you don't want to do, or using the tools of state to make individuals do something they don't want to do, or the government failing at, you know, having one individual take the freedom of the other individuals. | ||
| But if you have no freedom, then you will have no justice. | ||
| Yeah, so I'm with you on that. | ||
| So justice is secondary. | ||
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Right. | |
| So what do you make of the tactics that they use? | ||
| Because there's been so much, we've talked about it so much, but so much lying and smearing about people's views, including your own. | ||
| Even when I've just tweeted that I'm having you on the show, fortunately, because we've built something good here, I think, you know, 80% of it was positive. | ||
| But a lot of people, she's racist. | ||
| I mean, they're telling me that you are racist. | ||
| So what do you make of the tactics that they're using? | ||
| Because I do think they think they're doing something lofty. | ||
| They think they're helping the downtrodden or something like that, when in actuality they're strengthening the very people that they should, by definition, be against. | ||
| And I think that is because if you put the emphasis on justice, you are by definition going to start talking about groups and collectives. | ||
| Groups and collectives are abstract. | ||
| You belong to a group for, you know, a short period of time. | ||
| You're a member of whatever you are, a collective you are a member of, for a certain amount of time. | ||
| But really, all the time, you are an individual. | ||
| So, the basic arguments I used to have with the left, and I started out in the Netherlands, was, okay, so you want to protects the culture and the religion of this collective. | ||
| And this collective is saying, if we don't practice our religion the way we used to back at home, | ||
| we are just not happy. | ||
| We feel deprived. | ||
| We feel persecuted. | ||
| We don't feel at home. | ||
| And that has all kinds of a psychological effect on the entire group. | ||
| But what about the individual? | ||
| What about the individual girl who's removed from school? | ||
| What about the individual girl who's forced into a marriage where she's consistently raped? | ||
| She can't reach out to her parents because they put her in that situation. | ||
| Her husband thinks he has a right. | ||
| What about that individual right? | ||
| What about the individual right to say, I don't want to do this. | ||
| I want to do something else. | ||
| And you're forcing this individual into doing that. | ||
| And these constitutions in liberal countries is all about recognizing that individual | ||
| freedom and aspiring to protect it as much as possible. And so what I tell my left-wing friends, | ||
| and I have a lot of them because a lot of them have good intentions and they're progressive and | ||
| they want to stand up for the poor, the downtrodden. I feel the same way, yeah. It's just | ||
| take them back to that unit that they can empathize with. | ||
| If you're gay and you're on the left, and on the one hand you belong to a movement, you're fighting for the right in America to marry. | ||
| But on the other hand, you're also fighting for the right of some minority collective to do whatever they want to the individual members. | ||
| Shouldn't you be thinking about the plight of the individual members, those who can't voice their wishes? | ||
| And those who, if they do, have to deal with consequences, so die. | ||
| And I'm not talking about death and threats. | ||
| I'm talking about your father looking you in the eye and telling you, you're no longer my daughter, I disown you. | ||
| You can't show yourself up in the mosque. | ||
| You are not invited to, so you are shunned. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| And think of the psychological impact of that on the individual who chooses to have a lifestyle that is not in sync with a 7th century lifestyle. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that lifestyle, whether they're gay or just a woman, is what the progressives should always be fighting for. | ||
| And that's the ultimate irony in this. | ||
| That's the ultimate irony. | ||
| These women that I... I mean, this is my background. | ||
| I wanted to be free to determine my own destiny. | ||
| I didn't want to marry the man I was forced to marry. | ||
| I wanted to find my own mate in life. | ||
| I wanted to work and I wanted to finish my education. | ||
| And I was told that's going to bring shame on us. | ||
| Now, with the emphasis on us, that is the group, the collective. | ||
| So it's always you, the individual, the unit, and you're constantly being told, you're so selfish, you're bringing down the whole family, the whole clan, the whole group. | ||
| And here's the irony, I think. | ||
| It used to be the left that would take up the defense of the weak. | ||
| And now, unfortunately, we live in a time when it is the left that has decided to define weak units as groups, not individuals. | ||
| So what can we do? | ||
| Yeah, so what can we do? | ||
| People in the public sphere with a voice that care about people on the left. | ||
| Not even people on the left, that care about liberal values. | ||
| What can we do? | ||
| Because when I see the tactics and the way they treat you guys, I even, I've asked this to Sam and Majid. | ||
| I said, you know, there must be this piece of you that wants to get out. | ||
| And that's why I asked you too. | ||
| And I partly think that the reason that they do it is they want to do enough damage to you guys and people like you so that everyone else, it's not about you. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like they'll get rid of you. | ||
| You'll just say, okay, I can't do this anymore. | ||
| And that, but it's the chilling effect for everyone beneath you. | ||
| So how, how do we fight this? | ||
| It's about their utopia. | ||
| I think what we have to do is we have to expose the fact that they are after a utopia. | ||
| This whole justice thing. | ||
| You know, life would be wonderful if we had Sharia law. | ||
| All of us. | ||
| Just uncover their message. | ||
| Really? | ||
| Would we? | ||
| And I think if you are a liberal, you have to revisit the basic principles of liberalism, and it was about individuals. | ||
| That is how the aristocracy was put in its place back then, when there was, you know, I have all of these rights because I happen to belong to this family, and you're all serfs. | ||
| And you serve us as aristocrats because you happen to belong to that collective. | ||
| It wasn't about that. | ||
| It is about the individual freedom. | ||
| When it was about fighting slavery, you had to recognize the other person who was the slave as a fellow human being and as an individual. | ||
| Fighting for women's rights. | ||
| You had to recognize women as fellow individual human beings. | ||
| And the whole concept of human rights is based on the individual and the freedom of the individual. | ||
| And we know that we are social animals. | ||
| And as social animals and as individuals within our families and within our communities, within our workplace, we have to negotiate that sweet spot, that space where you can say, I can be me. | ||
| And this is how I can serve my community and this is how my community can serve me. | ||
| But all of that is not going to work if individual liberty is compromised. | ||
| And unfortunately the people who have inherited these systems, America, Europeans, other free countries, they're compromising that because they think it's so, you know, there's this collective or that collective and this story, that narrative. | ||
| They think it's a lofty goal somehow, but do you sense that the tide is turning? | ||
| I feel like the social justice warrior thing and this whole movement, I feel like it's been gaining strength for the last five years, but I do think partly because of Charlie Hebdo, And sort of the general absurdity of so much of it online and, you know, Brandeis University saying that they're not going to give you an honorary doctorate. | ||
| I mean, the height of absurdity to not give you an honorary doctorate after they said they would do it, that I do sense that the tide is turning. | ||
| Am I just being optimistic there or do you feel that? | ||
| I think what we are seeing is more and more confrontations that really pronounce this struggle. | ||
| I think one of them is Israel versus the Arab Muslim world. | ||
| Here is a liberal country. | ||
| It's a democracy, for goodness sake. | ||
| And we find outsiders telling them what they can and can't do. | ||
| You know, in the United States of America, if we had people throwing rocks at us, knifing us, if you had the leadership of the opposition saying, you know, take a knife, take a car, take whatever weapon you can, go after them, we would find it completely unacceptable and deal with it appropriately. | ||
| But when Israel does it, we demonize and vilify Israel. | ||
| So, in a weird way... But that's one example. | ||
| And then we have more examples. | ||
| And you've mentioned Majid and myself and all the other... I don't know what is the right term to use. | ||
| Muslim performers, Muslim modifiers, Muslim heretics. | ||
| I think that is the right word. | ||
| Heretic is you're on the inside, you start to ask questions and then you're vilified and shunned by this group because they don't want to change. | ||
| Or because they have an agenda for Sharia and the Caliphate and Jihad, and you stand up to that and then they go after you. | ||
| So we're seeing so many of these confrontations on so many different levels, and I think the mistake is that, you know, if you're a socialist in the United States, you know, you're Bernie Sanders and you're running for president, and you're Donald Trump and you're running for president, you can say the most ridiculous things in the world. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Nobody's going to kill you. | ||
| And nobody expects you to be killed. | ||
| And if you are attacked, if any violence against these two, right now these two extremes, the American population is going to meet that with such rejection, and it's going to be reviled. | ||
| And we have to teach the rest of the world that it is possible to disagree and to disagree radically, but not use violence unless violence is used. | ||
| That's an interesting thought, because we always think, or I think, that our system is so broken here, our political system is so broken, and we can't get things done properly, and our discourse is so silly and cable news. | ||
| But actually the way you just said that, that look, you have these two people | ||
| who couldn't be further from each other, Trump and Sanders, the ultimate capitalists, | ||
| the ultimate socialists, and yet they're not, there is no threat, there's no credible threat | ||
| to their lives, right? | ||
| So that does show that we have something pretty good about our Western society. | ||
| I know it's not cool to say that, but that's the truth, right? | ||
| That's the truth, and it goes even more than that. | ||
| We also expect them to shake hands on stage. | ||
| We expect them to be civil to one another. | ||
| And they can disagree as much as they like. | ||
| But, you know, why is the general public, say the establishment Republicans, why are they angry with Donald Trump? | ||
| I don't think it's because of his ideas. | ||
| Sometimes it's because of the way he speaks. | ||
| That goes a little too far. | ||
| It gets too close to, you know, Uncivilized behavior, violent behavior. | ||
| Let's not do that. | ||
| There is a culture here where, yes, people are violent. | ||
| There are a lot of guns out there and people use these guns. | ||
| But mainstream Americans expect mainstream Americans to behave in a certain way. | ||
| And it's not a culture that says, let's not disagree. | ||
| We know we all disagree. | ||
| You say the system is broken. | ||
| No, it's the human being that's fragile. | ||
| We disagree. | ||
| What we have is a system where you can have these disagreements and these discussions and you can change your mind or you can go as radical as you please. | ||
| But you're not expected to use violence, and the government is there to protect you. | ||
| And with people putting question marks on the First Amendment, there are two different things. | ||
| One part of it is, you know, we can disagree with one another as much as we like, but there's a system here, there's an infrastructure that allows us to disagree with one another without the use of violence. | ||
| If you start putting question marks on the First Amendment, In other words, you know, defamation laws. | ||
| There are some religions or there are some icons that you may or may not criticize. | ||
| Then you are really eroding the system. | ||
| You're bringing down the system. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this system is superior to any other system I've ever seen, any other system in history. | ||
| So our job is And here's where people like you and me and Sam and Majid are saying, we've got to be careful that the government does not enact laws where some ideas cannot be criticized. | ||
| And religion is just an idea. | ||
| It may be to you. | ||
| everything, but to me it's just an idea and all ideas can be criticized. It makes | ||
| your idea only stronger. We must not challenge this. We mustn't | ||
| erode the system that makes that possible. So I'm a fast amendment | ||
| fundamentalist if you want to put it that way. | ||
| If you're going to be a fundamentalist of some kind I suppose that's the one to be. | ||
| So I know a lot of people will, as I said earlier, they'll call you an Islamophobe. | ||
| They'll call Majid, who's Muslim, an Islamophobe. | ||
| What do you make of the meme of Islamophobia? | ||
| Because at one time, I feared that the government was going to come for our free speech, so infringing on our | ||
| First Amendment. | ||
| But what I'm now fearing is that we're taking it away from ourselves by what the universities | ||
| are doing and by every debate ends in someone being called a racist. | ||
| We know what's happened to Sam. | ||
| It's not the government, but it's the use of words to stifle debate. | ||
| We are doing it ourselves. | ||
| You know, when the Charlie Hebdo incident happened, I expected all newspapers in the free world, all televisions, the whole media, to stand in solidarity with them and republish those cartoons to show them, this is what we do, this is what we are about, it's an idea. | ||
| And the Islamophobia meme, if you want to, first of all, you know, to criticize an idea is not to be phobic. | ||
| Islam is a religion, it's a faith, it's a set of beliefs, it's an idea, it's not the people. | ||
| Muslims are very diverse and many of them disagree on many things. | ||
| Including the position of Mohammed, including whether Mohammed should be drawn or not drawn, criticized or not criticized. | ||
| So given all of that, yes, you're right. | ||
| It's not only the government. | ||
| Of course the government is lobbied by 57 nations of the Organization of Islamic Conference that through the United Nations and other international bodies is trying to make them adopt laws that leave Islam out of Which is just what they want, right? | ||
| and criticizing ideas. | ||
| But it's not only that, we are doing it to ourselves. | ||
| Schools are doing it, the education system, the press. | ||
| Even individually, I think that some of it is because we are scared, because we think, | ||
| you know, we don't want to be shot, we don't want to be killed. | ||
| Which is just what they want, right? | ||
| They want, because the fear is as powerful, if not more powerful, perhaps, | ||
| than murdering somebody, right? | ||
| Absolutely, absolutely. | ||
| That's the whole point of terrorism. | ||
| They want to get what they want. | ||
| So I would like to promote the idea that men and women are equal and should be equal before the law. | ||
| I want to get into every Muslim community and promote that idea. | ||
| And I know it's an uphill battle. | ||
| But for me to do that, my life is not safe. | ||
| Now, for the Islamic extremists, they want to promote the idea among Muslim American citizens and others that women and men should behave in a certain way. | ||
| They can take advantage of all the freedoms that we have, freedom of religion, of association, of expression, and I give them that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But why can't I do the same? | ||
| Why is my government not protecting me to promote my message, which is 100% aligned with our constitution? | ||
| Yeah, it's so fascinating because it's so many levels of craziness, I suppose. | ||
| So I think part of the issue also is that people get a little lost in the definition of terms. | ||
| So could you explain the difference between the doctrine of Islam So sort of the religious side of it versus what political Islam is because I think that that split in itself I think has many people very confused and that's why I'm trying to use this show to get people just to understand the basic tenets of all this stuff because maybe that'll remove a bit of where everyone says this is about bigotry and racism and things like that. | ||
| In the 7th century, a man called Muhammad comes with a message. | ||
| So, man, Muhammad. | ||
| The message, submit to one God. | ||
| Forget about all your other gods. | ||
| Submit to my God, the one who spoke to me there in that cave called Hira. | ||
| And a bunch of people say, this man is crazy. | ||
| We're not going to abandon our gods. | ||
| And he carries on. | ||
| So for the first 10 years, what he is preaching is, my God requires you to pray, to fast, to look after the poor, to be charitable. | ||
| A lot of the things he was saying in those first 10 years would fall under what you and I and a lot of Americans and Europeans understand as religion. | ||
| You believe in these things and maybe something good will happen. | ||
| Maybe something good, you know, you can mobilize. | ||
| If you look after the orphans, I mean, what's wrong with that? | ||
| Right. | ||
| That's great, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| And then the next 10 years of his life, he moves from Mecca to a place called Medina, and he starts to put together a militia, and he starts to wage war. | ||
| Small wars that he wins that get bigger, and he starts to conquer and conquer, and of course all that goes to his head. | ||
| And from then on, the second 10 years of Muhammad's life, that's when political Islam comes about. | ||
| In the first 10 years, he was saying, please reconsider. | ||
| Think about having all these many, many gods. | ||
| Give them up. | ||
| Come to my one God, and it would be your choice to do it. | ||
| From Medina onwards, you had to do it. | ||
| It had to happen at the tip of a sword. | ||
| And every victory strengthened him and his followers in doing that. | ||
| And that happened for centuries afterwards. | ||
| So a lot of the people today who are using Islam as a political tool To get people to do what they want them to do, following Muhammad in this example. | ||
| That is why Muhammad is relevant. | ||
| That's why he needs to be discussed, to be drawn. | ||
| Who was he? | ||
| Did he really live? | ||
| Is this really what he said? | ||
| If he said so, was it really moral? | ||
| We should discuss Muhammad the way we discuss Hannibal. | ||
| We'll discuss Julius Caesar. | ||
| You know, these were warriors of the past. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| They, Alexander the Great, they established all these empires and then now they're historical figures. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's how, and can we, can we do that in 21st century America without having armed men around me all the time? | ||
| Without fearing for our lives? | ||
| Unfortunately, I know what the answer is to that. | ||
| And by the way, a lot of people on the left, liberals, well-intentioned, wonderful, wealthy liberals, think that the way that they can make Muslims as a minority feel at home in America is by respecting their icon. | ||
| And I think the best respect that they can pay to their icon is to put him along with all those other icons of the past. | ||
| Yeah, so isn't that what Bill Maher refers to that as the soft bigotry of low expectations? | ||
| That somehow we have to treat these people differently. | ||
| I want, you know, I want everyone to be treated as shitty as everyone else. | ||
| It's not even about treating them well. | ||
| Treat everyone equally crappy. | ||
| That would be good for me. | ||
| And B.L. | ||
| Maher is, you know, he's on point. | ||
| He's one of those few liberals who is saying, I'm not going to make an exception for my fellow Americans' sentiment. | ||
| Why would I? | ||
| I want them to be, I see them as equals. | ||
|
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|
Yeah. | |
| And you know what? | ||
| And he knows there are a lot of Muslim Americans who laugh at his jokes and who love him. | ||
| But they have to hide that from the Islamic extremists inside of their families and their communities. | ||
| Yeah, so that's... Yeah, and it's our job to emancipate them by saying, I'm not in Pakistan or Afghanistan or Somalia or Egypt. | ||
| I'm now in America, probably in L.A., and I want to laugh at them. | ||
| I like these jokes. | ||
| Yeah, that's the crazy part, right? | ||
| That Bill Maher, when it comes to this discussion, is really being treated like a pariah by the regressive left, and they're calling him and Sam, of course, racist because of that whole Ben Affleck thing, but we've spent so much time on that, I don't want to get into that specifically, but look what they've done to Bill! | ||
| I want to say, why doesn't Ben Affleck play the part of Mohammed the Great or something like that? | ||
| That would be something, right? | ||
| He had no problem playing a fallen angel in Dogma, which was all about Christianity. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I guess it's a little different in this case. | ||
| So one of the other things when I tweeted about you was that a couple people said, how could you have her on? | ||
| She's a neocon. | ||
| Yeah, what's that? | ||
| That you're a neocon. | ||
| Yeah, yes. | ||
| Are you a neocon, Ayaan? | ||
| If somebody explains to me what a neocon is, I might decide to be a neocon or not. | ||
| All right, so I think what people are saying is that the neocons, they really think of the neocons as the sort of George Bush, Donald Rumsfeld, Dick Cheney, nation builders, this idea that America can exert its influence to nation build, and I think they lump you in on that. | ||
| Take it away. | ||
| It's a position in foreign policy that if you're going to intervene in the, and you remember right after 9-11, you know, if we go out there as the United States of America, we know we've been attacked from Afghanistan. | ||
| We get into the affairs of that country. | ||
| How do we leave it? | ||
| Now, there were people who were saying, we don't just go in and destroy And get the bad guys and get out because we leave the situation far worse than we found it. | ||
| We have a responsibility to rebuild and it's going to cost us a lot of blood and treasure. | ||
| If those are the neocons, count me in on them. | ||
| The fact that such a thing is really quite murky and it takes a long time, but I find that position to be more noble. | ||
| Then the position we are in now, where we're going to go and get rid of, defeat, degrade and defeat ISIS by bringing in together people who really have never fought and have them be defeated and offer some air power and just muck it up and muddle through. | ||
| When the neocons were in charge, if that is President George W. Bush, He did make huge mistakes early on, but after the surge, Iraq was under control, and the Iraqis lived in relative peace. | ||
| We didn't have to pull out. | ||
| These are political positions, and this is policy, and you can say what you like about the merits of the policy, but I think it is wrong to put labels on the foreheads of people as neocons and this and that. | ||
| It's not. | ||
| There are a bunch of people who thought about what would happen after you leave the place. | ||
| And I still think it's more responsible, once you invade a place, to stay there until things are in order instead of pulling out two, three years into it. | ||
| Right, and I guess that's the irony, is that, you know, we know in retrospect that the Iraq War was based on faulty logic, but when we were there, it was better than it is now, and that's just a sad reality, and that doesn't mean we should be there forever, but, you know, look, the United States, we're in this weird thing, we do things, people hate us, we don't do things, and look what's happening now. | ||
| They hate us anyway. | ||
| I guess that gets your point about labels. | ||
| It's also about policy. | ||
| I can't blame people who haven't been in parliament or who weren't involved in policy. | ||
| Every single policy has consequences. | ||
| Intended consequences, unintended consequences, you name it. | ||
| So it's all about the positions you take around these policy issues. | ||
| And the position you take around a policy issue should not define who you are. | ||
| And I think people who then start coming up with these names of neocondits | ||
| and take it from the policy to the person, they are wrong, they're malicious, | ||
| and they're acting in bad faith. | ||
| Yeah, and the part of that that particularly bothers me is that they think if they can label you with that, | ||
| or whatever the label is, that then they can extrapolate every other idea | ||
| that you think. | ||
| And they think they understand every other decision that you make, which is so rarely the case. | ||
| Many of us believe in many conflicting things or have liberal values and libertarian values. | ||
| And so on. | ||
| That, plus they also distract the weaknesses of their policy position. | ||
| So it's all about not having to discuss the merits and demerits. | ||
| I don't care if my policy positions are discussed through the letter, and I know that they'll have weaknesses and they'll have strengths. | ||
| But in order to discuss the policy position, the policy proposal of the other person, I would never call him this or that. | ||
| It has to be about the policy. | ||
| Yeah, well, you're what I would refer to as a true liberal and willing to debate the ideas. | ||
| So I know we only have about 10 minutes left, and I wanted to discuss one thing with you, because I saw you, it was probably about six months ago now, on The Daily Show when Jon Stewart was still there. | ||
| And I interned at The Daily Show in 1999. | ||
| Jon is, you know, we've met a couple times and he's given me some great advice about comedy and life. | ||
| And I love Jon, just like everyone else loves Jon. | ||
| That said, I thought his interview with you was really terrible. | ||
| I thought every time you brought up something about Islam, again, coming from the history that you come from, coming from your life, your first-hand experience, every time you said something, he immediately brought it back to Christianity. | ||
| He immediately said, well, Christianity did this stuff, and you're focusing on Islam. | ||
| And it really was that regressive thing that we started this conversation about. | ||
| So A, do you agree that it was a sort of messy interview? | ||
| And B, were you shocked? | ||
| Because I would think, everything being equal, that you would sit down with this guy and he would absolutely love you. | ||
| You stand for every liberal value and women's rights and equality and all that. | ||
| And I thought it was really terrible. | ||
| It wasn't funny. | ||
| It definitely wasn't funny, yeah, for sure. | ||
| It wasn't funny, it wasn't funny, and the reason why it wasn't funny was probably because it was about Islam. | ||
| And Islam is not funny at the moment. | ||
| And I don't know what, because I can't speculate on what John Stewart's motives were, but, you know, imagine if the next morning he gets Threats, he gets whatever, you know, people telling him that he hasn't treated them fairly. | ||
| You can't laugh at Islam. | ||
| There's nothing funny. | ||
| I mean, I can, I can make a lot of comedy about the absurdities of Islam and all the absurd things that are done in the name of Islam. | ||
| But nowadays that comes, you know, laced with threats, laced with resentment. | ||
| So it wasn't a funny show. | ||
| I don't, I mean, in hindsight, I asked myself why he even agreed to it. | ||
| But it's for him. | ||
| He's an adult and he'll probably have his own explanations and his own lessons. | ||
| Yeah, and listen, I know that saying anything negative or whatever about John is not going to win me any brownie points, but I thought that not, because not only was the tone of it unnecessarily combative as opposed to just listening to you, but then at the end he said something to the effect as he was saying goodbye to you, like basically like, ah, you just want to sell some books. | ||
| And I really thought it was just incredibly dismissive and of course you kept your calm and you're cool and all that. | ||
| Well, that's funny because people go to John who writes books to sell books. | ||
| Right. | ||
| To sell a bunch of books. | ||
| But that is, I mean, I think what he did to a certain degree was put himself in the shoes of my opponents. | ||
| And in doing so, I think the people he entertains thought that this is not entertaining. | ||
| This is not funny. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Interesting. | ||
| All right. | ||
| I think that's the worst review you can give to a comedian. | ||
| Yeah, exactly. | ||
| All right, so I have one more for you. | ||
| I want to try to tie this all together. | ||
| So, you alluded to security threats that you still have. | ||
| Your life story, as we've said, is just incredible and an inspiration, I think. | ||
| Give me something To end this, that we can all feel good about the direction that this is going. | ||
| You know, we've talked a little bit about how the voices are finally raising up in the liberal community against the regressives, and I think a lot of my audience takes solace in that. | ||
| But give me something that you, from everything that you've lived through, that you can really help us all take with us and feel good and feel like we can win for the right reasons and the right principles. | ||
| Well, I mean, the best news I have at the moment is just the sheer number of individuals who are born into Muslim households who are rejecting the absolutist submission narrative, who are saying, I really, I think I don't like it. | ||
| If it comes to choosing between my conscience and what Muhammad tells me to do, I go with my conscience. | ||
| And people are paying with their lives. | ||
| I've talked about as much as I can, Raif Badawi in Saudi Arabia, of all, can you imagine living in Saudi Arabia? | ||
| Now, he is an icon. | ||
| somehow finding, you know, intellectually, the capacity to say no to all this | ||
| and stand up for a message of freedom and rationality and reason and science, | ||
| and then having to deal with the consequences. | ||
| This man is sentenced to a thousand lashes, 50 of them have been carried out. | ||
| He's fighting for his life inside prison. | ||
| Now, he is an icon. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But he's only one of what I now see as thousands, and I see them everywhere. | ||
| The calls, the emails I get, I'm so heartened by that. | ||
| And 10 years ago, it was the opposite. | ||
| Every single Muslim who called me, just called me an infidel and told me, you deserve to die. | ||
| And now people are saying, you know, my God, you are, you're my hero. | ||
| We're in this together. | ||
| And some of them still identify as Muslim. | ||
| They're not necessarily out, but they are, They're thinking. | ||
| And you and me and all the other liberals, the one thing we can advance is the idea of critical thinking. | ||
| Let's just give people, whether they are Muslim or not, the ability, I mean, just enhance their ability to think critically about these things. | ||
| Yeah, I love that. | ||
| I mean, that's pretty much what I've tried to now make my life about, and it's clearly what you've done. | ||
| So really, this has been truly a thrill to spend a little time with you, and I hope—I know you're not going to be in L.A. | ||
| probably for a couple months, but I hope we can do it in person next time. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you for having me on, David, and good luck with this show, and keep up the good work. | ||
| Thank you, likewise. | ||
| All right, well, you guys can buy Ayaan's book. | ||
| It's called Heretic, pretty much wherever books are sold. | ||
| Where do you want them to buy it, though? | ||
| Do you have a place you want to send them? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I mean, it's Amazon. | ||
| It's everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, buy wherever you can find it. | ||
| Whatever's convenient for you, I guess. | ||
| A nice message at the end. | ||
| All right, great. | ||
| Well, thank you so much, Ayaan. | ||
| I really appreciate it. | ||
| Thank you very much. |
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