Nov. 13, 2015 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| I have to start this week's Direct Message with a trigger warning, that's right. | ||
| So take a moment, get into something comfy, and move carefully to your safe space because we've got to talk. | ||
| I'll actually wait for just a bit. | ||
|
unidentified
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(upbeat music) | |
| All right, I think that did it. | ||
| Now that you've been trigger-warned, yeah, let's talk about free speech. | ||
| It feels like it's on the ropes these days, right? | ||
| Well, we've been talking a lot about it here in the context of how the regressives stifle debate by calling everyone racist, sexist, homophobic, or the rest. | ||
| This very concept, tolerance for intolerance, has been taking root at college campuses across the country for quite some time now. | ||
| There are two completely separate situations unfolding right this very moment. | ||
| One is on the campus of Yale, where some students were upset that a professor | ||
| wrote a letter defending the right to wear offensive Halloween costumes. | ||
| The letter in part explained that you can either ignore the costume altogether, | ||
| or you can engage in the person wearing the costume, telling them why you find it offensive. | ||
| Apparently this wasn't enough for some of the students, culminating in video that has now gone viral in which a student screams at the Dean, quote, it's not about creating an intellectual space, it's about creating a home here. | ||
| The other situation is at the University of Missouri, where students were fed up with a series of racially motivated instances they felt weren't being properly dealt with by the administration. | ||
| The students demanded the resignation of the school president, which he submitted after the mostly black football team got involved. | ||
| A video on campus has also gone viral showing a young journalist trying to cover the protest, but being screamed at and bullied by a group of students. | ||
| Ironically, these students are trying to silence someone who was only there to cover the very protest they wanted attention for. | ||
| For one of the oldest and largest journalism schools in America, it seems that MU has gotten something very wrong about free speech. | ||
| Of course, these two instances are not isolated in America, nor in other parts of the Western world. | ||
| Colleges and universities are the very places you're supposed to go to engage in the battle of ideas, to learn new ways of thinking. | ||
| and to challenge your preconceived notions, yet somehow colleges are the very place | ||
| that have become hostile to all of these concepts. | ||
| Now shouting down speakers you don't agree with, demanding professors be fired for contrarian views, | ||
| and denying the media free and unfettered access have found their home in these safe spaces. | ||
| Of course, this all ties in perfectly with everything we've been talking about on this show. | ||
| The regressive left, by calling everyone racists and bigots and homophobes and the rest, have ushered in a generation of people who are so sure in their beliefs, and so dismissive of their opponents' ideals, that they have no reason to stand up for free speech anymore. | ||
| If your opponent is a racist or a bigot, then why even engage with them? | ||
| You've got the moral high ground, so just shout them down or call them names until they give up. | ||
| These are the tactics the regressives have used successfully in so many areas, and now we're seeing the fruits of their labor. | ||
| I want to be very clear here. | ||
| Nothing I'm saying is dismissive of the actual issues these college students are dealing with. | ||
| There is no doubt we have racial problems in this country, we have equality problems, we have wealth disparity problems, and the list goes on and on. | ||
| But these problems won't go away if we don't talk about them. | ||
| They won't magically resolve themselves if we only talk to people we agree with. | ||
| They'll only get much worse. | ||
| This is the inherent flaw of identity politics that the regressives love so much. | ||
| When you whittle us all down just to race, religion, nationality, sexuality, or whatever else there is, there's very little left to unite us. | ||
| I'd much rather look at people based on their ideas and their beliefs. | ||
| Those are the principles that unite us across the divide that the regressive left Has been digging. | ||
| I've been saying for a while now that two things can be true at once. | ||
| In this case, it can be true that these students have legitimate grievances, and at the same time, it can be true that free speech shouldn't be sacrificed on the altar of political correctness. | ||
| We should be more worried about the government taking away our free speech rather than us taking it away from ourselves. | ||
| Some say the road to hell is paved with good intentions. | ||
| Some say the ends justify the means. | ||
| Some just want to shut you up. | ||
| And that's when you have to speak the loudest. | ||
| Joining me this week is a human rights activist who grew up in a place not too kind to free thinkers. | ||
| Currently, he's the Middle East Community Manager of Movements.org, an organization dedicated to opening closed societies. | ||
| He also happens to be in Los Angeles for the first time right this very second. | ||
| Faisal Saeed Al Matar, welcome to the show. | ||
| Well, thank you for having me. | ||
| I mean, thank you for bringing sanity to all the world. | ||
| I've been a big fan of your show since it started. | ||
| Wow, are you bringing sanity to all of the world? | ||
| I would say so, because I've seen your video being shared with some of my friends who live in the Middle East, and they were all talking about you. | ||
| So, yeah, it's really great to be here. | ||
| All right, that's very rewarding. | ||
| We could probably end the show right there. | ||
| We'll talk a little bit about you as well. | ||
| So I want to talk about your personal story and coming from Iraq and all that, which is really, it's really a wonderful story and it's so perfectly lined up with a lot of things we've been talking about here. | ||
| But first I want to talk about how I came to know you. | ||
| Because the second episode that we did of this show on Aura, I had Cara Santa Maria on. | ||
| And a few days before that, she had been tweeting that she was in contact with someone that | ||
| knew somebody in Saudi Arabia that was outed as a secularist or an atheist and was in trouble. | ||
| Their life was threatened, I think, by their father. | ||
| And your name then got looped into this. | ||
| And then this is a direct through to what you do at movements.org. | ||
| So can you just tell me a little bit about that instance? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, that was a pretty interesting case, to say the least. | ||
| So, the man comes from Saudi Arabia, and he also happens to be a lucky one, because he does have an American passport, so he lives in the United States. | ||
| And he went into a discussion with his father on the dinner table, and he told him—he didn't even say he's an atheist, he just said that he has some doubts about God, and things of that sort. | ||
| The end result of that conversation is that his dad threatened him that he's going to report him to the authorities. | ||
| And that actually means, in a country like Saudi Arabia, which is literally death or you're going to get lashed like our friend Raif Badawi. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| He started contacting a lot of secular organizations, like, this is my story, I need help, and things of that sort. | ||
| And he came across Cara, and Cara made that, like, she said, like, oh, I have a friend in Saudi, like, I have someone in Saudi Arabia, and I kind of became the direct person. | ||
| Somebody tagged me on the post. | ||
| Because that's my work, is that I try to help activists in closed societies. | ||
| So, basically, Cara tweeted something saying, I would like to help this person, but I don't know what to do. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And that's where you jumped in. | ||
| Yeah, that's where I jumped in. | ||
| And I also jumped in, in like trying to verify if his story is true. | ||
| And I went back and forth in conversation with him to see Like, if—because, I mean, we have tons and tons of cases, and it's very important to know which ones are true, because every case takes a long time. | ||
| Like, nothing gets solved. | ||
| So I try to make—to have a vetting system in which we make sure that these stories are legit. | ||
| And then— So what do you do? | ||
| Like, what does the vetting system actually entail, to find out if this guy is actually telling the truth, and not just somebody that wants to get out of the country for other reasons? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, as somebody who is a refugee myself, there are certain questions that somebody can know whether this—like, you can ask them specific questions about what did they really say to their parents and whether—like, how is their relationship with their parents, you know, if that is actually—like, his dad is really crazy enough to report him to the—like, to literally get his son killed. | ||
| Like, it's—and Try to see, like, what he's trying to achieve—like, why he wants to leave, like, what he's trying to achieve when he wants to leave, and things of that sort. | ||
| And try to connect, if he does know other circles and other friends, go, like, through his Facebook friends and try to see if—he says, like, I told this person, and try to see if, like, the story matches up. | ||
| For this story, I mean, I admit, like, I only spent a few hours, because it was a very emergent situation. | ||
| What we did is that, because he got an American passport, so there was no visa—like, there was no visa needed, so we crowd-sourced—we crowd-funded money to get him to the United States. | ||
| So, like, within—like, I tell him, like, "By 5—I think, like, by 5 a.m., you have | ||
| to be at the airport. | ||
| We only have, like, 12 hours. | ||
| And just make sure that you're able to go to the airport. | ||
| Within these 12 hours, I'm going to be able to, like, crowdfund and get you the ticket." | ||
| So a ticket was waiting for him at the airport. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| And how are you communicating? | ||
| Is this done via email? | ||
| Well, in some of these closed societies, they use apps like WhatsApp and Viber and all of this stuff, because they cannot be controlled by the government. | ||
| And he does seem to be like a bit of tech savvy, that he's able to use what's called VPN, that the government cannot track where his exact location is. | ||
| And also, I mean, Here's what—the crazy part about this is that there was another case happened before by a guy called Hamza Kashkari. | ||
| And he also, like, came out as an atheist, and he escaped to Malaysia, which is a so-called moderate Muslim country. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And the Saudi government contacted the Interpol. | ||
| And got him out of the airport there. | ||
| So Interpol, which is a... Which is supposedly an international organization to defend human rights and all of that, they stopped him and get him back to Saudi Arabia. | ||
| So this guy, because he got an American citizenship, kind of helped in getting him—so he went to Dubai, and from Dubai he went to the United States. | ||
| So yeah, that's... | ||
| And now he's actually in the United States. | ||
| And he's in the United States. | ||
| So that's a good success story. | ||
| Yeah, it's a good success story, and that's why I wanted to jump off there with you, because that's what you guys do at movements.org. | ||
| It's a perfect example of technology meeting something that's important, because you guys are literally raising money to save secular people and atheists. | ||
| Yeah, not only money. | ||
| I mean, so the whole system of movements.org. | ||
| We crowdsource human rights. | ||
| So, what we do is we connect activists from closed societies to people in open societies who have the skills to help them. | ||
| So, it can be somebody who's looking for a web designer. | ||
| And women rights activists in Afghanistan want to be published in the media. | ||
| We have a partnership with the New York Times, Women in the World. | ||
| We have a partnership with the Daily Beast, The Huffington Post. | ||
| So, we try to match what the activists in these closed societies want with people who are in the open societies who have the skills to help these specific requests. | ||
| So, it's kind of like a multi-sided platform. | ||
| There's requests and there are offers. | ||
| And then, our job is just create a match.com for skills. | ||
| And also, we have, like, partnership with people who give—organizations that give grants to civil rights organizations and things of that sort. | ||
| So, that's, like, the main concept of movements. | ||
| Yeah, so how do you guys make sure that the network of people that you're setting up isn't being infiltrated either by governments or other people that want to hurt these people? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, it's very impossible to have 100% secure systems. | ||
| I'm going to be very honest about this. | ||
| I mean, even Facebook and Google and all of these. | ||
| So we do have a vetting system in which these people who sign up, we ask them to put as much information as possible for us to be able to verify this information. | ||
| And also, we ask people from closed societies—and I'm going to go to the definition of closed societies afterwards—is that to use anonymous names and, like, try to use a username that does not reflect their actual location or their real name. | ||
| For people who are in open societies, it's not really a big problem. | ||
| But for people who, like, live in Saudi Arabia, in Pakistan, in Iraq and all these places, they would need to use a username, and they don't give an exact Like, they don't say, well, this is my zip code and this is my address, and folks, please come and save me. | ||
| But they can just make kind of a general request, and then, within the messaging service that we have, they can reveal some of the information. | ||
| And we also have a very strong, like, security in terms of people trying to hack and things of that sort. | ||
| And, I mean, the organization started as a result of funding from Google. | ||
| We get that kind of saved in terms of security. | ||
| We don't have a problem of, like, big hacking. | ||
| But yeah, I mean, it is—it's obviously a possibility that many of these governments, whether it's Iran or Saudi Arabia, would try to use—but we can't track whether they're trying to message people and tell them, like, oh, what you guys do and things of that sort. | ||
| Also, we have the star rating system. | ||
| So, for every user, No matter, like, how much we verify that information, we put them on a star rating system from, like, zero stars to five stars. | ||
| So, we ask people, if you get messaged by somebody who got zero stars, this person— Watch out. | ||
| Watch out. | ||
| And if it's five stars, like, people like The New York Times or The Huffington Post. | ||
| So, that's—so, we—I mean, it is dependent on the user. | ||
| And we also try to make them cautious that they—but as I said, like, you cannot prevent All types of attacks from these authoritarian governments. | ||
| Sure, sure. | ||
| So I want to talk more about the authoritarian governments, but a little bit more about your work first. | ||
| How much is actually just trying to get these people out versus connecting them with people in the closed societies so that they can actually change their societies from within? | ||
| Yeah, I mean... | ||
| The fact of the matter is that many of the activists we have want to do change in their own countries. | ||
| There is a significant amount that actually want to get out. | ||
| And getting out of business is one of the most difficult ones. | ||
| And I've been—as somebody who is a refugee myself, I had—it took me around three years. | ||
| And, I mean, I left Iraq. | ||
| I went to Lebanon. | ||
| From Lebanon, I went to Malaysia. | ||
| And I had to wait. | ||
| From—I left Iraq in 2009. | ||
| I arrived to the United States in 2013. | ||
| So, it's like—it's a four-year process to actually eventually move from close societies. | ||
| So, most of the refugees or the people who are trying to save their life, they go through, like, middle countries. | ||
| Like, so—because you are—in your own country, you're mostly in the immediate danger. | ||
| So, many people move to, like, close countries. | ||
| And then, from close countries, move to the West. | ||
| So, that is extremely difficult process, is that it's— But sometimes things change. | ||
| So, for example, one of the cases I've worked on is the case of the Bengali bloggers. | ||
| And as a result of we help publishing them at Daily Beast, they were able to give that article to the Swedish embassy and receive the visa as a result, because they told them, like, look, we are literally, like, publishing the mainstream media, and they are now in Sweden. | ||
| So is there a risk in a case like that where these bloggers are writing in Bangladesh where we know people are being killed for this? | ||
| Just in the last two weeks, several people have been killed. | ||
| Is there a risk that when you guys go ahead and publish that either on Daily Beast or Huffington Post or wherever it is, that that brings more attention to it so that suddenly there's this new crop of people that didn't even know about it that now wants to kill them? | ||
| I wouldn't think so. | ||
| I mean, as they say, there is no such thing as half-pregnant. | ||
| Like, you're either pregnant or not. | ||
| They're right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| It's that when you're—I mean, there are like a recent tweet by a group called Ansar al-Islam, which is the al-Qaeda affiliate in Southeast Asia, and they actually like published all the names of the pluggers. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, they actually stole our idea. | ||
| They're crowdsourcing terrorism here. | ||
|
unidentified
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So, they're like— I think that's the reverse of it. | |
| They got something there. | ||
| They got something there. | ||
| And they are crowdsourcing terrorism, is that these are the names of the bloggers, and this—and it's open source to everybody who wants to go and kill them. | ||
| So, many of—I mean, it's—they're already under threat. | ||
| So, people, when—and actually, it's kind of helpful, like—at least, I mean, back to my case, is that it helped me that I was published in the mainstream media in terms of It's getting known, and it will be easy for me to get a visa. | ||
| So, if you are only published with the local news media, most of the people who, like, know about the—like, the lawyers and stuff will not—will discount that. | ||
| They will say, like, oh, we need something that we can show to American authorities. | ||
| Like, they don't understand Bengali or Urdu or that sort. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, it is helpful to get published at mainstream or American media. | ||
| I know all these writers in L.A. | ||
| that just want to get published so they get picked up by an agent, and you're dealing with the same thing there, just by language. | ||
| Yes, yes. | ||
| And back to the concept of crowdsourcing. | ||
| So, in the case of Bengali—so, they send this article in Bengali, and there is another person who translated the article from Bengali to English, and there is another person Edited the article. | ||
| And all these people don't know each other. | ||
| Everybody, like, has a certain skill. | ||
| And then there's the publisher. | ||
| So, these three people work together, and they don't know each other, help publishing the article, and that helped at getting somebody out to Sweden. | ||
| So, that's the concept of crowdsourcing. | ||
| Like, everybody has a skill that they can contribute collectively to create a great result. | ||
| Right, so that's the beauty of it, because people think of crowdfunding, and when I first went to the site and I was looking around, I thought it was really just going to be about money, like we're trying to raise X amount of dollars to get this person out of this country, but really it's about the skill set and linking people that otherwise couldn't find each other. | ||
| And for—I mean, for a case like we talked about in Saudi Arabia, we—like, so, we depend on partnerships. | ||
| We're not actually the ones doing the job, but we create the platform in which all these people work together. | ||
| So, the organization that did the crowdfunding was called Recovery from Religion, which is like, I think, in Kansas or somewhere in the Midwest. | ||
| And they raised the funds there. | ||
| And so, all of us, like, connected together, so the funds go to there, and the users from movements, and—yeah, so it's like a circle of people working together to get somebody out. | ||
| Yeah, it's incredible. | ||
| So, in a case like this, like this one that we're talking about with Saudi Arabia, where he had a—so he had an American passport? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So he had an actual American passport. | ||
| Is this a case—like, why can't they just go to the embassy, then? | ||
| Was he afraid to actually just go to the American embassy? | ||
| I mean, Saudi Arabia is supposed to be our big ally, right? | ||
| Yeah, that's— These guys, sure, women can't vote and can't drive, but— Yeah, I'm not sure about the ally word here, yeah. | ||
| But really, I mean, so why—what would be the fear, though, of going to the U.S. | ||
| embassy and claiming asylum or something like that? | ||
| Yeah, I mean—I mean, I don't think that the embassies give protections, because he's like a Saudi citizen and an American citizen at the same time. | ||
| I mean, sometimes—I mean, even these cases of like other folks, the U.S. | ||
| embassy doesn't seem to give that much protection from people persecuted by, as you said, allies, because— By allies, right. | ||
| So, we're not— Yeah, so that would create a tension. | ||
| So, it was better for him, I mean, just to leave the country and go to— Do you have, like, a list of the countries—I mean, I'm sure there's a master list of countries that are closed societies, as you guys call them—but what are the countries that are really the most impossible for the secularists or the freethinkers or the atheists or all that? | ||
| Yeah, well, I mean, what we depend on, like, definition of free society, open society, comes from an organization called Freedom House. | ||
| So, Freedom House tracks all the countries in terms of freedom of expression, freedom of press, freedom of association. | ||
| So, they have, like, all the countries, and they try to put—try to do reports on them on a yearly basis to see which ones get advanced, which ones get worse. | ||
| So, I mean, when it comes to the worst, I mean, I would put Saudi Arabia as the worst. | ||
| Again, our ally. | ||
| Yeah, our favorite ally, Saudi Arabia. | ||
| And, yeah, Pakistan and Iran. | ||
| I mean, that's... I call them the axis of evil, but... So that's... I mean, obviously North Korea, but that's... I mean, it's... I mean, being anything in North Korea... | ||
| It's a problem, other than being a believer in the dear supreme leader of the—or dear | ||
| leader of North Korea. | ||
| So, I mean, North Korea is probably like the closest society we know of at the moment. | ||
| And I think there is Tajikistan—Turkmenistan in Central Asia. | ||
| And this is kind of like the most difficult. | ||
| It also depends on the strength of—there's something called the strength of the passport. | ||
| So, like, for example, me, as somebody who is in Iraqi, like, Iraqi passport doesn't get me anywhere. | ||
| Like, there are only a few countries that get me in without a visa. | ||
| And that's the countries I went to, like Lebanon and Malaysia. | ||
| Like, when I applied to the United Kingdom, they rejected me, saying that they require, like, thousands of pounds in my savings account and that's for six months. | ||
| So, yeah. | ||
| Really? | ||
| It's very difficult for countries that have—that they require a lot of—like, they require a visa for every country they go to, to leave that country. | ||
| But for countries like—which are in the Gulf region, sometimes it's easier for them to get a visa elsewhere. | ||
| So, there's—the passport also plays a role in how to get people out. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| Well, that's a perfect segue to your story, which is pretty great. | ||
| So, you grew up—you were born in Iraq and grew up in Iraq. | ||
| I guess what could now be referred to as the good old days under Saddam Hussein? | ||
| Do you think of them as the good old days? | ||
| No. | ||
| Not that great now. | ||
| I mean, it's really, I mean, sorry to use the word, it's like it's a clusterfuck. | ||
| It's the internet, it's OK. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, living under Saddam Hussein was not really great. | ||
| I mean, Plus, I was living under the sanctions when Saddam Hussein was the president. | ||
| So it was two things. | ||
| Those are two separate things. | ||
| You had the regime itself. | ||
| You had the regime and you had the sanctions. | ||
| Sanctions applied by the U.S. | ||
| and U.K. | ||
| and everybody. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, I mean, it's literally a prison, living under Saddam Hussein. | ||
| So what was it like on any given day? | ||
| You're 13 years old. | ||
| What was it like? | ||
| Well, I mean, you see his pictures everywhere, and you have to, like—when you go to classroom, elementary school, you have to stand up and say, long live Saddam Hussein. | ||
| When 9-11 happened, he declared a holiday in the schools, in which my school was, like, praising the mujahideen who did 9-11, because he started, like, the faith campaign after the Gulf War. | ||
| That's why there's a lot of confusion, which they consider Saddam Hussein to be a secularist. | ||
| I mean, he's secularist compared to ISIS, but that doesn't say much. | ||
| probably al-Qaeda's secular comparativism. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So— But was he really—was he just using religion, or did you | ||
| think he actually believed? | ||
| I mean, it's—I don't—I mean, I'm not really good in psychoanalysis. | ||
| But I think that, regardless of whether he was using it for his own benefit, it's like | ||
| Iraq is a—sorry, a religious society. | ||
| So, using religion is definitely a beneficial tool. | ||
| If the people—he cannot use religion in Sweden, for example, but he was definitely able to use it. | ||
| Plus, he built a lot of mosques, and he was— Also, I mean, since the Gulf War, I mean, he started waging jihad against the West. | ||
| And he started bringing people like Abu Mus'ab al-Zarqawi, who became the leader of al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia. | ||
| He came to Iraq, like, before the war. | ||
| And so, yeah, I mean— So, for your life, though, so you're 13 years old. | ||
| Yeah, and the war happened. | ||
| Yeah, when were you having your sort of—your secular awakening in yourself? | ||
| Well, I mean, the lucky part of me is that I was raised in a sort of liberal family. | ||
| I call them cafeteria Muslims. | ||
| So, my dad was like, He said, like, oh, you can think for yourself. | ||
| And I was like, I was reading the Bible, the Old Testament, the Torah, the Talmud, and all of this stuff. | ||
| How do you get a copy of the Talmud? | ||
| Well, the Internet. | ||
| Even though it was like the intranet, but there were some parts that you can actually get online. | ||
| And I've seen that all of these religions make objective claims of them being true. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, I said, OK, well, either one of them is true or all of them are false. | ||
| And I moved, like, started reading more about science, and I just realized that's probably, like, all of them are false. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But my—I would say, like, my spark to activism came in after the war, I mean, when the first elections happened in Iraq in 2005. | ||
| And I was afraid of So you actually saw that coming? | ||
| going to take over the power, the Islamists, Shias, they're going to take over the power, | ||
| they're going to start this crime against the Sunnis, and that would lead to a civil | ||
| war, and that's exactly what happened. | ||
| I mean, it's very sad to be right on this subject. | ||
| So you actually saw that coming? | ||
| You felt that— Yeah. | ||
| I mean, the moment that Saddam Hussein fell down, the moment is when the Shia start getting more—like, they start getting more mobilized. | ||
| And you can see pictures of Ayatollah Sistani and Muqtada al-Sadr and all of these religious figures. | ||
| And it's very obvious that these guys are sectarian. | ||
| So, I would start—I said, like, well, secularism is literally the solution. | ||
| It's that try to make Sunnis and Shias equal under the law. | ||
| And we've seen that success happening when the first prime minister, Ayatollah Alawi, who was a secularist, when he was the prime minister, there were much less sectarian warfare happening. | ||
| But the moment where the Iraqi election happened is when Islamist Party, Shia Party won, and Which is my biggest agreement with the United States when it comes to U.S. | ||
| management of the war, because I always thought that Iraq was not qualified yet for a democracy, and there needs to be some sort of transitional period between building a secular civil society, and that will take some time, and then you create an election. | ||
| Not like after 40 years of dictatorship, you would just make people who—many of them are illiterate—would just go vote for the best interests of Iraq. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And we've seen many instances of this, as in Hamas was democratically elected, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Iraq isn't the only example of a democratic election. | ||
| Egypt is another example of the majority of people—because voted for a Muslim Brotherhood. | ||
| I mean, one of the things of living under a dictatorship, what I've noticed, is that dictatorships kill everybody who disagrees with them. | ||
| So, people who are left out are the ones who don't care about life. | ||
| So, who don't care about life? | ||
| The jihadists. | ||
| So, dictatorships, for a large extent, create radical Muslims, because they kill all the moderates, and they then give the people a false binary system, is that either you want us or you want the terrorists. | ||
| And the same thing happening now in Syria. | ||
| So, like, with Assad, his—now with the Russian intervention, most of what they're killing are the moderate rebels who are in the middle. | ||
| So, when they destroy the moderate rebels, they're going to give the world two choices. | ||
| You want us or ISIS. | ||
| And I can assure you, most people, including myself, would choose Assad over ISIS. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that is—so, dictatorships create extremism. | ||
| So, what happens is that when these dictatorships go away, they literally create, like, a hostage crisis. | ||
| They create, like, a prison. | ||
| And you get out of the prison, and eventually you would have continuous sectarian warfare and continuous Like, bad politics. | ||
| And America was obviously not very well-versed in post-dictatorship. | ||
| There was a lot of focus on, like, let's get rid of Saddam Hussein, but there was very little thinking of what after, which is post-dictatorship is much more important than just getting rid of the dictator. | ||
| Right, so where do you place, or how much do you place the blame on the United States? | ||
| And I guess at that time it was a coalition that at least originally went in. | ||
| Of course it was mostly us. | ||
| Because I think most people in America now, there's a real sense that it was the wrong war to go to and they lied us into the war and all that stuff, which I agree with. | ||
| But the sense I'm getting from you is that There was a ton of really bad stuff going on there anyway, and a lot of it maybe would have bubbled up, regardless? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, there are so many things that were, like—I mean, Islamic extremism is not new. | ||
| It didn't start with the United States. | ||
| It didn't start with the CIA or Israel or the Mossad. | ||
| So, these things have been—I mean, have been going on for hundreds of years. | ||
| The Sunni-Shia conflict, I mean, it started in Iraq. | ||
| And, I mean, back in the time—I don't think it was called Iraq—but, I mean, Najaf and Karbala is where Imam Hussein and Imam Ali were killed, and that's where the split between the Sunni-Shia thing happened. | ||
| And then, fast-forward to modern history, you've got the Ottoman Empire, who was at war with the Persian Safavid, who are the Persian Empire, who are the Shias, and Ottomans were the Sunnis. | ||
| So the conflict has been going on for hundreds of years. | ||
| And all these dictatorships are unsustainable. | ||
| Like, Saddam was unsustainable. | ||
| And America did not intervene in Syria. | ||
| Until now, recently, after the Messiah came back, is that—still, they still had the civil war between Sunnis and Shias, and they still had ISIS and al-Qaeda and all of this stuff. | ||
| So, it's—I mean, I never thought that—I never think that the United States is the root of our problems, obviously, but I think sometimes that the United States Some policies need to be applied based upon the understanding of the region that can prevent or reduce the amount of sectarian violence. | ||
| And that, in my opinion, was to keep some sort of transitional secular regime that can build a civil society that can reduce—I mean, obviously, it's not going to eliminate secularism. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So, basically, if you had had a time machine, you would have gone back to right around the elections, when they finally had the free elections, Yeah. | ||
| And then you would have just sort of either, so you would have wanted either American troops or something there to stay, just to stabilize it a little bit longer. | ||
| And yet at the same time, as an American, even though I know it's all gotten worse in these last three years since we pulled out, we didn't want to stay there either. | ||
| And that's the double-edged sword. | ||
| The thing of—like, I always go, like, conversation with, like, neoconservatives and things of that—of people who believe, like, continuous aggressive foreign policy, is that it doesn't fit in with the American political system. | ||
| It's like, in American political system, you have elections every four years. | ||
| And, like, nation-building, you're talking about the Middle East, which is—which would— It doesn't get done in four years. | ||
| It doesn't—obviously, it doesn't get—probably 40 years. | ||
| So, it is unsustainable to have, like, a political system in which, like, the president has to change every four years and nation-building, especially in a region that is very different, let's say, like Germany during World War II or after World War II and Japan, as that—I mean, Iraq is literally in—has the worst neighborhood ever. | ||
| You have Saudi Arabia, which is the—which is the rule of the Wahhabi regime that's not that different from ISIS. | ||
| And you have Iran on the east. | ||
| That is the motherlode of Shia Islam. | ||
| And Iraq is in the middle between Shia—and America was expecting, like, so come to Iraq | ||
| and create a liberal democracy in the middle of all regimes that are theocratic, that don't | ||
| believe in liberal democracy. | ||
| And one of them is an ally, which is kind of ironic. | ||
| It's like—so, they try—like, now, with Syria, they try to work with non-democratic countries to create democracy. | ||
| Right. | ||
|
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It makes no sense. | |
| I mean, it makes no sense. | ||
| It's like, the idea that Saudi Arabia or Qatar or even Iran would allow a liberal democracy to flourish in Syria and Iraq is pure delusion. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| They're not that thrilled with the one liberal democracy that's in the neighborhood, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, well, let's hope it stays. | ||
| I mean, it seems like Israel is going—I mean, as I can see, there is A lot of elements of theocratic leadership is now rising up in Israel, which I don't think—I don't see Israel—I mean, I hope it's going to continue to be a liberal democracy, but I see there are a lot of elements that may not be in the future. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, you're against theocratic dictatorships and theocratic regimes, regardless of religion? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| Yeah, I mean— Because a lot of people, I think, when I've seen—I've watched things with you on YouTube where people attack you for—they'll attack you for being Islamophobic or that you're attacking Islam more, but clearly that's not the case. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, the fact of the matter is, like, You cannot criticize Islam in most Muslim countries. | ||
| So, even here in the West, they created some sort of, like, Catch-22. | ||
| So, if somebody is a white person, like Sam Harris, they immediately attack him as cisgender, white male. | ||
| It's kind of interesting to hear from, like, Muslims who don't believe in trans rights and everything. | ||
| So they—but if you—if somebody like me, who is from the Middle East, you immediately can attack him as some sort of Uncle Tom, mass murderer. | ||
| So they created Catch-22, is that in the Middle—in the Muslim world, you cannot criticize Islam. | ||
| And if you do it in the West, you will be labeled immediately as some sort of— As a traitor. | ||
| As a traitor. | ||
| Right, so this is an incredible thing to me. | ||
| So I've had Maajid Nawaz on, obviously. | ||
| I think you know Maajid, right? | ||
| I'm in the acknowledgement of his latest book. | ||
| There you go. | ||
| So you know him a little bit. | ||
| And he gets this all the time. | ||
| He gets it more than I do. | ||
| Right, so he gets that he's a traitor, or he's an Uncle Tom, or he's a porch monkey. | ||
| And again, we've talked about this a lot, but this is coming from people on the left. | ||
| So what I don't understand is, if you believe in liberal values, and you want women to be free, and you want gay people to be free, and all of those things, and you want equality for everybody, how do they expect to get it if not through people like you and Majid? | ||
| Forget Sam. | ||
| Okay, they want to throw him under the bus. | ||
| Well, I'm not going to forget Sam. | ||
| He's a great guy. | ||
| No, of course I'm not for that. | ||
| But what I'm saying is, if they want to use their own version of bigotry to remove him because he's a white guy, fine. | ||
| But then wouldn't they look at someone like you, that stands up for all those values on the left, and say, this is a guy, he survived Living under Saddam, he now fights to make his country and those other countries stand up for the very values that we, as progressives, say we're for. | ||
| And yet, you don't get support out of these guys, do you? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, I do get some, but I know what you're referring to, is that the regressive left, as Majid Nawaz—yeah, I mean, it's very interesting. | ||
| I call it the unholy alliance that happened between the liberal left and the Muslim right. | ||
| Against the Muslim or secular left in the Arab world. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And— So, ironically, the secular left, just to put that all together, the secular left is actually lined up in a weird way with the conservative— With the conservative right. | ||
| Of America. | ||
| Yes, which is very— It's bonkers. | ||
| Yeah, it is extremely—I mean, they don't say it very publicly, but— The fact of the matter, I mean, they apply extreme different standards to—and I was speaking at UC Berkeley before I came here, and I've had also some debates in Northern California. | ||
| And I told him, like, what do you call a conservative Republican who is against gay marriage? | ||
| And he said, I call him a bigot. | ||
| Then I said, thank you for calling 90 percent of Muslims bigots. | ||
| Then he said, I never said that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| OK? | ||
| Then I told him, if you apply different standards to different people based upon their race, And because they think that Muslim is the brown, technically. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So it's not even a race, but— Yeah. | ||
| If you apply different people, different set of—based upon their race, then you are actually a racist. | ||
| And this form of racism is sometimes get— Because most of the racism we talk about is like the KKK. | ||
| And the fact of the matter is that they agree—so, like, when somebody like the Charleston shooting, the one that happened in South Carolina, is that the guy said, I'm motivated by racism. | ||
| And they immediately took him for his word. | ||
| And they're true. | ||
| They're right. | ||
| Like, his guy was motivated by racism. | ||
| But replace this guy by ISIS. | ||
| And ISIS says, I am literally motivated by this interpretation of Islam. | ||
| The same guys who said that this guy was motivated by racism will say, no, no, this thing has ulterior motives. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And it must be about economics and foreign policy. | ||
| Geopolitics. | ||
| And George W. Bush and Dick Cheney. | ||
| And they lump in all the—they create the salad of everybody they hate, and they put him in one category. | ||
| And so, you see, like, the double standard is extremely obvious. | ||
| And so, as a result of that, they kind of created a smokescreen for apologists and even extremists to flourish. | ||
| And, like, people like me have to fight against the religious right and the far right in the United States, who consider me, like, inferior human being. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And to me, it's like, get them! | ||
|
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Yeah, and have to fight the religious right in my own country, the Islamic right. | |
| And then I have to fight the apologist left. | ||
| So, like, they created extra fronts for—and they have made it very much difficult for people like Majid Nawaz and many people who are, I mean, reformers. | ||
| to actually even have the discussion to begin with, because they don't think there is | ||
| any discussion to be had, and it's all about U.S. foreign policy, and they always try to | ||
| divert the discussion into it's all about America. | ||
| It's all about America. | ||
| You know, I've also noticed now, now that I've followed more of these people on Twitter, | ||
| and there's probably a good maybe 40 people like yourself that are trying to reform and | ||
| coming from these countries and trying to make things better. | ||
| I see people like you tweeting about coexistence, tweeting about how do we make things better, all that, and I never see it from the regressives. | ||
| They always are screaming about foreign policy, or whatever it is, and not defending our foreign policy. | ||
| That's the irony here. | ||
| It's not a binary system. | ||
| It's not a binary system. | ||
| So, what is the angle? | ||
| What is it that they're throwing back at you, that they can't get behind what you're doing? | ||
| Yeah, I mean, they think that the biggest problem, like—so, they see the world kind of like a pyramid. | ||
| So, the biggest problem in this world is cisgender, white male, capitalists, rich. | ||
| And then— Do we have to define cisgender? | ||
| I didn't know what it was until about a month ago. | ||
| Me, too. | ||
| I get attacked because of it. | ||
| Because you're cisgender. | ||
| Because I'm cisgender. | ||
| Which just means that you were born the gender that your sexuality is supposed to be. | ||
| Yeah, and that's now a privilege. | ||
| And I was like, "I come from Iraq, and my brother was killed, and you're telling me | ||
| I'm privileged here." | ||
| But anyway, so they have this pyramid in which there is—they see the world based upon, | ||
| like, race, gender and financial privilege. | ||
| And they think that the biggest problem in this planet is Western capitalism. | ||
| And they link everything in this world into—it's a very American-centric point of view. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Is that they link everything, problem in this world, as a problem of—so, if a brown person | ||
| from Pakistan wants to blow himself up to, say, to defend Jerusalem, quote-unquote, they | ||
| will say that this is as a result of imperialism happening by the multi-industrial complex | ||
| connected to Western capitalism. | ||
| So they always lump everything. | ||
| to—and everything is an expression of grievances. | ||
| So like, you say somebody is like, "I hate Jews." | ||
| And they say like, "Well, I mean, he doesn't literally hate Jews, but that is his language | ||
| to express his frustration with American imperialism." | ||
| So, they always link everything back to—so that is their point. | ||
| And people like Noam Chomsky, who is like the head of the movement, I would say. | ||
| I would have him on, but I don't think he'd like to talk to someone smarter than him. | ||
| Well, I mean, I don't think it's—I mean, Sam tried to engage with him. | ||
| And I don't think it's—you can actually have a conversation, is that—I mean, they | ||
| seem to subscribe to a specific dogma. | ||
| Like, I always try to, like, make debate with my friends, and I can, like, predict what | ||
| Chomsky is going to write just by seeing the title of the article. | ||
| So, like, I make five points. | ||
| I say, "This is what Chomsky is going to say in this paragraph, in this paragraph." | ||
| And I always, like, get my $50, because I bet with them on, like, what exactly Chomsky | ||
| He's going to say that it's about American imperialism. | ||
| He's going to say it's about grievances. | ||
| He's going to say it's about capitalism. | ||
| And all his—like, you don't need to read all his books, even though I've read, like, | ||
| quite a lot. | ||
| But it seems like I've read two books, and all the rest were like just— | ||
| Were just. | ||
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—subscribed to the same— So, is that the danger of these guys? | |
| Because what they're doing, even if a certain percentage of what they're saying is right | ||
| about American foreign policy— I had Douglas Murray on last week— Yeah. | ||
| —who I thought really said something that I had never thought of before, which was that he said, you know, you Americans always think everything's about you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's what you're saying. | ||
| That's what these guys are doing. | ||
| But let's just say a certain percentage— I mean, it's half-truths. | ||
| I mean, many of them—I mean, look at, for example, what some apologists say, is that—they say, like, the majority of Muslims don't support ISIS. | ||
| This is true. | ||
| But al-Qaida also doesn't support ISIS. | ||
| So, the question of do you support ISIS or not, saying not doesn't move you to the moderate. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You can subscribe to a lot of beliefs that you agree with ISIS with. | ||
| And you don't need to support ISIS. | ||
| For example, Ayatollah Khomeini and all of the Ayatollahs in Iran, they disagree with ISIS. | ||
| But if you look at how they treat gays in Iran, it's not that much different than ISIS. | ||
| So, like, the disagreement—they tell you a truth, which is the majority of Muslims don't agree with ISIS, which is true. | ||
| But that's half a truth. | ||
| They don't tell you that there's a significant amount of Egyptians and Pakistanis and so many countries around the Muslim world that think that penalty apostasy should be death. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Which is—so, I think, like, the pure research that has been done on, like, Sharia and what Muslims believe—and I ask everybody to read it—was very intelligent, because it asked specific questions. | ||
| It doesn't people—they didn't ask people, like, oh, do you support ISIS or not? | ||
| Or do you support 9-11 or not? | ||
| But they asked him, like, a question, do you think that suicide bombing is an appropriate way of dealing with the grievances? | ||
| And you see a significant amount of saying yes. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And do you think it should be allowed of killing these people who conspire with the Americans and the Israelis? | ||
| They will say yes. | ||
| And a significant amount will say yes. | ||
| So, when somebody says—so, all of these things, even though some of the parts are true—I mean, as I said, like, US foreign policy in Iraq has not been very great, to say the least. | ||
| And there are so many things that should have been done that have not been done. | ||
| And so, yes, United States foreign policy have played a role in in rise of the extremists in the Middle East. | ||
| But they are not the root of the problem. | ||
| There is a huge difference between—and the reason—like, what's kind of very ironic | ||
| is like the moment they agree—like, for example, on the abortion clinics that had | ||
| happened in the United States, they agree that this is a result of religious fundamentalism. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Many of the liberals agree that Mike Huckabee and Ted Cruz and all of these folks are Christian | ||
| fundamentalists, and they are worried about them because they are Christian fundamentalists. | ||
| But the moment that this discussion goes into Islam, the moment that, no, the root of the fundamentalist has nothing to do with the text, has nothing to do with interpretation, and it's all about us, it immediately goes back—and it's very self-centered, like, egotistical point of view, is that everything is about the United States. | ||
| It's not solving anything. | ||
| I mean, I think that's why— No, it's not. | ||
| It's actually very dangerous, as you mentioned, because they are giving a free pass to these people that me and others who are fighting on a daily basis. | ||
| We're fighting against the theocrats in our countries. | ||
| The regressive late has given these people a free pass to telling them, well, it's nothing to do with—it's all about us. | ||
| Do you think they're consciously aware of it? | ||
| Because I've sort of struggled with this question a bit, and when I've talked to people, I think a lot of people—I think Sam at this point thinks that they're fully malicious in what they're doing. | ||
| And I pretty much think so, too. | ||
| But I want to give some of these guys a little of the benefit of the doubt that they're not doing this maliciously. | ||
| I mean, it sort of depends on who are we talking about. | ||
| I mean, I think we need to mention names here, because, I mean, I did want to mention names, but the—I mean, I think that people like Noam Chomsky and Frankenstein and some folks—Noam Klein, I think—are motivated by an ideology that they actually care about, which is like left libertarianism, anarchism, against, like, United States capitalism and things of that sort. | ||
| There are people who are completely disingenuous. | ||
| And completely dishonest, and they would misrepresent all of other people's views. | ||
| Like, I was— I think all my viewers probably know the long history names that you're going through. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So, there are people who, like—for example, I had a debate, which was featured on NPR, WYNC, about Islamophobia in New York City. | ||
| And I said there are Progressive Muslims, moderate Muslims, conservative Muslims and extremists. | ||
| And then I was attacked as being generalizing on Muslims. | ||
| And I said, that is exactly what I didn't do, is that the statistics and the research that's being done is to avoid generalization. | ||
| It's when you say there's like 40% of Americans believe in creationism, you are literally saying that 60% of them don't. | ||
| I'm not generalizing on Americans. | ||
| But I kept repeating the same statement, and they kept saying that you are generalizing on all Muslims as being extremists. | ||
| And I kept repeating. | ||
| And they kept saying the same thing. | ||
| And then, they go in and take something out of context, and then they put that in a meme and share it on social media. | ||
| And somehow, I started getting attacked as me generalizing on Muslims, which is completely disingenuous. | ||
| So, I mean— What Sam has been dealing with is pretty much what many of us who are actually talking on the subject are dealing with, is that people are purely disingenuous on this subject. | ||
| They—and actually, it's kind of interesting. | ||
| I think that they want to create something, what I was telling you about Bashar al-Assad, which is to destroy all the nuanced approach of the liberal critics of Islam, and try to create the battle between them and people like Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer and all of the far-right Morons. | ||
| And so that way they will give people a binary system in which they tell, you know what, it's a war between far-right fascists and Muslim innocent people, so which side are you going to choose? | ||
| I love that framing, because I mean, I'm getting email literally from all over the world every day at this point, people talking about this middle ground. | ||
| That's why I wanted to connect with you, and that's why I've been talking about this stuff on the show, because I don't think most people are One side, or the far left, or the far right. | ||
| Most people are right here. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, sometimes, I mean, on college campuses, it seems to me that the debate is also, like, it's very polarized. | ||
| Like, and I was speaking at UC Berkeley and Palo Alto, and I'm speaking in Cornell, and I spoke in so many universities before, and I can see that In campuses, the debate seems to be much more polarized than it's on the media. | ||
| And, I mean— And I'm guessing it's a lot of white— Liberals. | ||
| —people on the left— Yes, it is. | ||
| —that are upset with you. | ||
| Yes, which is extremely—so they always want to turn it up on them. | ||
| I was like—I kept talking about, like, issues related to honor killing in Iraq and things of that sort, and then a guy jumps up. | ||
| There has to be, like, a white liberal. | ||
| There has to be this guy. | ||
| There has to be this dude who shows up at my venue, wherever I go around the states, and say, It's nothing to do with the culture. | ||
| It's nothing to do with the religion there. | ||
| It's all about us. | ||
| Don't you know about the—he has to give me, like, the lecture about the military-industry complex. | ||
| Don't you know about Wall Street? | ||
| Don't pay taxes. | ||
| So— None of the stuff—you're not defending any of this. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And there's no correlation. | ||
| I mean, like, I always mention this example. | ||
| It's like, for example, if somebody— Let's say a radical Muslim. | ||
| He walks in, let's say, a small town in Arkansas or Mississippi, and some redneck goes in and calls him, like, a sand nigger, and like—or he face any racism there. | ||
| And then this person, the same person, goes back to his house and kills his daughter because she added the guy on Facebook. | ||
| These two actions are not related with each other. | ||
| Is that what some people think is that this guy, because he's facing oppression or racism of some sort, that led him to kill his daughter, which is something that he believed in probably before he came to the United States. | ||
| And so, yeah. | ||
| And they think that everything is really centered about oppression dynamics. | ||
| And what's happening is that now you cannot even talk about the subject without claiming to be victim and claiming to be oppressed. | ||
| So now, like, the whole competition is that who is the most victim. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's why, like, I don't really want to go to the identity politics myself, because it's like a very crazy world. | ||
| It's like, all the—like, now I look at websites like Tumblr or things like this, and it's like, somebody's identification is like—it's not like, oh, I'm from there and I studied there or whatever. | ||
| It's like, I am transgender, gender fluid, asexual, this, this, this, this. | ||
| It's all about, like, his oppression, like, how much he's oppressed. | ||
| And that is what is now concerning the biography, like, in some places. | ||
| So, at some level, if you could lighten your skin and change your biography away from Iraq, they'd like you a little bit more, in a weird way, because they would think that you're helping the oppressed, instead of somehow being from the place that you're now betraying. | ||
| Like, it's so warped. | ||
| Yeah, it's very—yeah, I mean, it's very—I mean, as I said, like, they look at the wall—the wall is pretty much, like, as a pyramid, and that's what, like, If you go to, like, the critical race theory and gender theory, and it's pretty much all about class, gender and race. | ||
| And there's hardly any mention of ideology. | ||
| And they—so that's the way they see the world. | ||
| So, it is—anything that a brown person is doing, even though that is his culture, that existed before the United States or even Israel, They say, well, this is as a result of an oppression—he's been oppressed by somebody who's on the upper class. | ||
| But there are signs of hope. | ||
| I mean, for example— Yeah, give me some hope. | ||
| We've got about eight minutes left. | ||
| Let's finish— Yeah, there are signs of hope— Let's finish drawing with hope. | ||
| —is that if people go to movements.org and they see, like, the continuous help, like, many of these activists are doing, they're trying to achieve things in their own countries. | ||
| Because, like, when I started becoming an activist—when I started, like, being an activist myself, And there were only very few people, I see, on the internet who were secular freethinkers. | ||
| And now I look at Facebook and social media, and I see tons of thousands from Iraq, from Syria, from Lebanon, from all over the Arab world. | ||
| Countries like Tunisia has voted for a secular country, despite of all the status quo of the region. | ||
| Many people think that the Middle East is like one country. | ||
| If it's like, things are bad somewhere, it's bad everywhere else. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, places like northern Iraq, which is the Kurdish region, they seem to be much more developed in terms of human rights than— They have women on the ground fighting ISIS— Yeah. | ||
| —than turkeys bombing them. | ||
| Yeah, that's—I mean, as you said, like, yeah, there are signs of pessimism there, because Turkey has a long secular history, and it is going backward with the—but at the same time, there is a—I mean, I would say a very strong opposition for the Erdogan in Turkey that needs to be supported. | ||
| And that's—I think, like, if there is any message I would give to the liberals, it's like, just don't betray us here. | ||
| Liberals in the West should stand with their fellow liberals in the East, and should not start to apply double standards, and should not stand with our enemies. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| That's—if there's a message I can say, just don't stand—if you don't want to help, just don't stand with our enemies. | ||
| Just make it kind of more easier. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I love that message, and I love the fact that you brought it also back to colleges, because that's where I started the show today, because, you know, we have all this stuff with free speech going on in our university. | ||
| Yeah, in Missouri and Yale, the recent cases. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So that's what we were talking about earlier. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| To me, it's a direct extension of what these guys on the left have done, because they've made everyone so intolerant, just as you're saying, that now it's sort of like they're now reaping what they've sowed. | ||
| Yeah, it's kind of very interesting. | ||
| It's really a slippery slope. | ||
| You're going to see, over a moment of time, they're going to start attacking each other. | ||
| So, it was female white feminists criticizing male white feminists as being male privileged. | ||
| Now the female is going to get attacked by a transgender, disabled person of color, attacking the white, transgender, non-disabled. | ||
| So, they're going to start attacking each other. | ||
| And eventually, nobody's going to be allowed to speak, because anybody's going to claim offense and that, oh, they are trivializing the experience of—I mean, just to end it with a funny story, I mean, with people like this, somebody, like, messaged me, and he said—she said, you should stop posting pictures of you smiling on Facebook. | ||
| And I said, like, yeah, what's going on over here? | ||
| And then she said, uh, when you post pictures of you smiling, you're intentionally trying to trivialize the experience of depressed people. | ||
| I was like, LOL, are you kidding me? | ||
| And then she, like, blocked me immediately. | ||
| So, yes. | ||
| So, so, and eventually the funny part is this person get attacked by other people who they also consider her trivializing their experience by, like, eating food with her hand because they're disabled. | ||
| It just never ends. | ||
| It just never ends. | ||
| But I'm very glad that there's now a counter-movement who are the real liberals standing against the regressives. | ||
| Because the thing is, I want everyone to be treated equally. | ||
| Me too. | ||
| Equally as shitty. | ||
| You don't have to treat everyone as equally great. | ||
| Treat everyone equally as shitty. | ||
| That would be fine with me. | ||
| I want women, wherever they are, to be treated equal. | ||
| Whether they're in the United States or whether they're in Saudi Arabia. | ||
| I want gay people to be treated equally wherever. | ||
| I want the white cis male to be treated shitty. | ||
| That guy can be treated shitty. | ||
| Well, let's hope not. | ||
| But, yeah, I mean, that is—I mean, that's what really motivated me when I started my activism, is literally—I mean, the movement that I started is called the Global Secular Humanist Movement, in which, after seeing so many conflicts about sectarianism and religious extremism rising up, is that The best way is to create a secular society, a secular liberal society, in which all people, regardless of race or gender or sexual orientation, would live equally, without saying that, oh, it's their culture and things of that sort. | ||
| Because, I mean, my motto is, humans have rights, cultures and beliefs don't have rights. | ||
| And ideas should be up to criticism and debates, and human rights have to be sustained all across the board. | ||
| Wow. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| Well, that's a beautiful ending. | ||
| You will always have my support. | ||
| Well, thank you. | ||
| And I think we're on to something, because even when I was tweeting that you were coming on, people wanted to hear this. | ||
| And I think you're right. | ||
| Even though there's a lot of bad stuff going on, there is some hope there. | ||
| There's a lot of signs of hope, and I think your show is one of them. | ||
|
unidentified
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All right. | |
| Well, I appreciate that. | ||
| You guys can follow Faisal. | ||
| It's Faisal Al Mutar on the Twitter. | ||
| All right. | ||
| Thanks for watching, everybody. |
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