Nov. 20, 2015 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
52:03
| 
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| All right, naturally I have to start this week by talking about the horrific attacks in Paris a few days ago. | ||
| Sadly, it seems to me that these attacks are becoming all too common these days, and each event continues in the path of carnage and absolute savagery these Islamic extremists want to impose on the Western world. | ||
| Yeah, I did say Islamic extremists there. | ||
| I know that upsets some and makes the politically correct crowd uncomfortable, but unfortunately the more we ignore the very set of ideas these people tell us that they're using to attack us, the more we actually strengthen them. | ||
| This is what my former guest Majid Nawaz told me he refers to as the Voldemort effect. | ||
| J.K. | ||
| Rowling described this idea in the Harry Potter books as, quote, fear of a name only increases fear of a thing itself. | ||
| Are there any other ideas we should be afraid of talking about? | ||
| I can't think of any, and I refuse to treat this one idea differently. | ||
| We can't be afraid of scary things, especially in idea form, because that's how they will grow and morph right in front of our eyes. | ||
| And of course, by saying these people who committed these specific horrific acts were Islamist extremists, it obviously doesn't condemn all Muslims. | ||
| If at this point you can't understand that distinction, perhaps there's a cat video out there better suited for you than what we're doing here. | ||
| I mentioned a couple weeks ago how I'd like to move a bit away from talking about the regressive left. | ||
| While I still want to do that, I feel like the regressives are a lot like the mafia. | ||
| The more I try to get out, the more they pull me back in. | ||
| Case in point, the response by many of the regressives immediately after the attacks was to blame US foreign policy, rationalizing we ourselves are to blame For the people who chose to murder over 100 innocent civilians. | ||
| After talking to my last two guests, Douglas Murray and Faisal Saeed Al Matar, I've come to believe this is an incredibly dangerous and egotistically driven view of the world. | ||
| To the regressives, everything revolves around us. | ||
| People only do things as a reaction to us. | ||
| So even though these terrorists say they're doing this in the name of religion and point to the actual texts that prove it, well, according to the regressives, they just don't know what they're talking about. | ||
| That said, as Majid mentioned, and as I've been saying repeatedly, two things can be true at once. | ||
| It can be true that there is an ideology out there, a book written by men a long time ago that gives plenty of reasons to kill all infidels. | ||
| And at the same time, it can be true our Western foreign policy created massive instability in their part of the world, and perhaps if we left Saddam in power, ISIS never would have arose. | ||
| Every action leads to consequences, often unintended ones. | ||
| Sometimes America does good things, sometimes America does bad things, but thinking it's all about us, all of the time, seems more like how a child would think of the world than how an adult would approach the problem. | ||
| Of course, none of this will stop the regressives from laying blame solely on America and its allies, thus emboldening both the extremists themselves and those on the far right. | ||
| I've been trying to have discussions on this show so people can see that there are others out there who understand the nuance and complexity of these very difficult issues. | ||
| We don't have all the answers, but we aren't afraid to have the conversations that most people won't touch. | ||
| Let's pretend for a second that all of the world's issues were 100% because of America and we did exactly whatever it is ISIS would want us to do. | ||
| Would that make us any safer? | ||
| Actually, I'm pretty sure it would do the exact opposite by holding the Western world in a perpetual hostage crisis with the same people who have an old text to justify just that. | ||
| Final thought on this. | ||
| I'm really not trying to score cheap political points here by constantly calling out the regressives. | ||
| I'm trying to lay out a case to show you guys that the left is in real danger because of the regressives' misguided, head-in-the-sand, politically correct brand of demagoguery. | ||
| At the end of the day, I blame these attacks on nobody other than the sick, twisted people who committed these horrific acts of violence. | ||
| At the same time, I won't stop speaking up against the misguided ideas that will only bring about more of these acts because we are afraid to look at the whole picture and not just our narrow, myopic view of the world. | ||
| My guest this week is Sarah Hader. | ||
| Sarah is the co-founder of Ex-Muslims of North America, an organization which advocates for the acceptance of religious dissent, promotes secular values, and aims to reduce discrimination of those who leave Islam. | ||
| Also, according to her Twitter bio, she is Pakistani by birth and American by choice. | ||
| Sarah, welcome to the show. | ||
| Thank you for having me here, Dave. | ||
| It's really good to be here. | ||
| So I'm so glad we finally connected, because we've been going back and forth for a couple months, and we seem to be sort of swimming in the same circles, so to speak, lately. | ||
| And I love that line. | ||
| Let's just start with that line on your Twitter bio. | ||
| Pakistani by birth, and American by choice. | ||
| Why'd you put that in there? | ||
| Well, what a lot of people don't know about me is that I am an immigrant. | ||
| And I think that's a big part of my story. | ||
| And in addition, I think that the American by choice means a lot because there are so many things about America that I love. | ||
| There are so many values that are truly American that I think are wonderful. | ||
| And in so many left-wing circles, it's unfashionable to say anything positive about America at all. | ||
| And I hope to be able to swim against that tide a little bit. | ||
| Yeah, I'm pretty sure that as an immigrant that's doing good things in this country, you're allowed to maybe, kinda, say something nice about America. | ||
| Are you a neocon now? | ||
| Apparently, if you ask certain people, I am. | ||
| But I think that, you know, it took me so long to be able to get this citizenship. | ||
| I only got it this year. | ||
| And now I am fully an American citizen and I feel so happy about it because this is a country I know so much about and I've spent my entire, you know, most of my life here. | ||
| And I feel so strongly that I am part of the American fabric and I want to contribute to it however I can. | ||
| Yeah, well obviously I love all that, and where I really became familiar with you was back in May when you gave this speech at the American Humanist Association, which was really brilliant stuff. | ||
| But I want to start first with a little bit of your history. | ||
| When did you and your family come here from Pakistan? | ||
| When did you sort of have your secular awakening, that kind of thing? | ||
| Well, I think I was about eight years old when I came to America, and I remember this being a very strange new country for me. | ||
| I remember learning the language, and I remember thinking it was very strange. | ||
| I struggled a little bit in the first few years, but then there was so much about America that I thought was just wonderful. | ||
| And I mean, these concepts that we have that we take for granted, Like, you know, individual liberty and right to free speech and all these things. | ||
| I mean, these don't exist in any form in so many parts of the world. | ||
| So the fact that we have it, you know, and I saw this with new eyes that, hey, here you can say anything. | ||
| I mean, not anything truly, but in a way that isn't just comparable to anywhere else. | ||
| And so anyway, I became really immersed into American government and I thought it was really | ||
| wonderful the way that, you know, the separation of powers, the Bill of Rights, I thought that | ||
| was just fantastic stuff. | ||
| And when I was about 16, 15 years old, I began to have doubts about my faith. | ||
| And a lot of it had to do with actually, I mean, just debating and seeing new viewpoints. | ||
| I was on the debate team. | ||
| That helped. | ||
| What did push me a little bit, I think, was meeting what you would call militant atheists. | ||
| You know, the obnoxious type. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| They're the worst, those militant atheists. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| Right, and the people that would, you know, get in your face. | ||
| And there was one guy in particular, I knew a few, but there was one guy in particular who would print out verses from the Quran that were just horrible, right? | ||
| These horrible verses, and he would just hand them to me and not say a word and just be like, this is, look at this. | ||
| And, you know, this was my first time really, really looking into it. | ||
| And I think this is the case for so many Christians and Jews and Muslims who leave religion, that they were like, well, you know, when I really looked into it, It didn't make a lot of sense, or there was some horrible stuff in there. | ||
| And for me, it was kind of a quest to prove these atheists wrong, you know? | ||
| And I started doing research online because I was sure that Islam was the way, and Islam was so good for women and women's rights, and all of this stuff could be explained when looked into context. | ||
| And then I looked at the context. | ||
| Sometimes I made things worse. | ||
| So then I thought, okay, well, time to admit defeat. | ||
| And it didn't really take me a long time before I thought, this just doesn't make any sense. | ||
| And it's not honest for me to say that I am a Muslim, given that I know all this now. | ||
| Yeah, I love that you described the militant atheists. | ||
| What did they have? | ||
| They had photocopied paper. | ||
| That was their weapon. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| The other extremists, they have some more serious stuff. | ||
| Like you're going to get a paper cut, that's pretty much going to be the worst thing that's going to happen to you. | ||
| Right, and it's just, it's amazing to me, that's all that it took, really. | ||
| It's just, here, this is what you believe. | ||
| This is the book, this is your holy book. | ||
| That's all it took. | ||
| Yeah, so when they showed you that, and you looked at this, was your family, like, how religious was your family? | ||
| How did your process of coming out, you know, I've described this process, that atheists have to come out of the closet, much like LGBT people do, that there is this hidden shame, this feeling of the otherness and all that, How long did that take before you had the realization versus when you told your family, your friends, that kind of thing? | ||
| Well, so, as far as that terminology, the coming out thing, that's so common in ex-Muslim circles. | ||
| That's what we use. | ||
| We say, have you come out to your family? | ||
| Are you out of the closet? | ||
| That is the language that we use because that's the reality of it, isn't it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, what I did was I just had debates with my family here and there about specific issues, and that's how they sort of got the message. | ||
| I don't know if I explicitly said it for the first couple of years, but I was lucky. | ||
| I'm very lucky in that I have a truly liberal Wait, where's the liberal part coming? | ||
| I still wasn't allowed to wear certain kinds of clothing, right? | ||
| I still couldn't wear shorts in the house. | ||
| I still couldn't have, you know, boyfriends or anything like that, or date. | ||
| I was expected to get an arranged marriage and everything. | ||
| Wait, where's the liberal part coming? | ||
| It's coming? | ||
| It's liberal in the sense that he allowed me to, my father allowed me to read what I wanted to read and he didn't question it too much because he thought I would end up in the right place at the end. | ||
| So that was a sense of freedom and I only had to fight for maybe a year or two to be able to go away for college. | ||
| So that was my liberal father. | ||
| God, it's so funny how terms and words really mean a lot. | ||
| You know, before you referred as, you say something nice about America, the left will, you know, say you're a neocon. | ||
| And in this context, you describe your liberal father, but, you know, you couldn't wear shorts and that kind of stuff. | ||
| And yet, clearly within that space, he was liberal. | ||
| It's amazing. | ||
| He was very liberal. | ||
| He was very liberal in the sense that he gave me a sort of dignity as a woman that I think that wasn't given, it isn't given by many Muslim men to their daughters and to their wives and even mothers. | ||
| And so I consider myself lucky. | ||
| I know that sounds interesting, but I do consider myself very lucky that my childhood was, it was similar to maybe what very conservative, almost fundamentalist Christians would have, and that I consider myself lucky that I wasn't forced to wear the hijab. | ||
| I did wear it for a short amount of time by choice, but it wasn't forced upon me. | ||
| So it is interesting what we consider liberal and what's considered liberal anywhere else in the world. | ||
| Yeah, and that's one of the interesting things, and one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to you, because, you know, there are so many stories you hear about, you know, ex-Christians leaving, you hear about ex-Jews leaving, you know, Orthodox Judaism, something like that, where they're then considered heroes on the left. | ||
| Ah, they left this dogmatic, conservative ideology. | ||
| But you don't hear about many people like you, and I've recently connected with a bunch, and it's like, you're so obviously standing up for The basic liberal values that we all talk about all the time. | ||
| Right. | ||
| It's so bizarre to be in this space. | ||
| I mean, I feel strange that I'm here because I feel like we have enemies, like people who just don't like what I'm saying for one reason or another. | ||
| And my narrative is, like you said, a classically liberal one. | ||
| It's something that, on the face of it, should be something every liberal should support. | ||
| But there is such a tendency on the left to protect Muslims, to protect them from bigotry. | ||
| And these fears of bigotry, I would say, they're real. | ||
| They're not making this up. | ||
| It is a fear, and it's a real fear. | ||
| But the response has been what I would call reactionary. | ||
| It's interesting because they say the reactionary right. | ||
| But your response to Islam is also very reactionary. | ||
| You're also not looking at it from an objective point of view. | ||
| Yeah, well it seems to me we've got the reactionary right and the regressive left. | ||
| But I want to hold that for a second because I want to talk about the speech that you gave because it was really wonderful and I saw it blowing up on Twitter. | ||
| And a zillion people were sending it to me, and I watched it again yesterday in preparation for this. | ||
| And, you know, we talk about this coming out process, but you sort of reference that in this. | ||
| It seemed to me like, obviously without knowing you, and this is the first time we spoke, but it seemed like your entire life had led up to that very moment. | ||
| Am I being very dramatic there? | ||
| Um, well, I, it was something that I was extremely nervous doing. | ||
| I mean, and I don't know, I think it showed in the video that I, it showed that I was nervous, and I was. | ||
| Because I felt, um, ever since I've been doing this activism now, it's been three years that I've been doing ex-Muslim activism. | ||
| I am blindsided by the reaction of the left. | ||
| I really thought, you know, and this is something that I hear from activists everywhere I hear that they thought they would come here and they would talk to people on the left and they would find allies. | ||
| They would find people who are willing to support them and were willing to give at least moral support, if not anything else, but they would find their brothers. | ||
| And I found that in so many ways, people I considered my brothers and my sisters in this | ||
| struggle have overlooked me for what seems like a very political reason. | ||
| And what I was feeling, especially around the time I was giving that speech, it was | ||
| after the Charlie Hebdo shootings, and I was feeling extremely disheartened by even the | ||
| secular community overall. | ||
| That there were so many people that were saying, well, that in some ways it could be justified, | ||
| and Islamophobia, Islamophobia, and all this stuff, that didn't really make a lot of sense, | ||
| and I was feeling abandoned. | ||
| And so I thought, you know, they gave me this opportunity to have this speech, so I'm going to just speak my mind. | ||
| I think maybe they expected me to talk a little bit, mostly about my organization, but I ended up sort of hijacking that conversation and talking about that. | ||
| Yeah, well, first off, I mean, I recommend that everyone that's watching this should absolutely watch that because we can only touch on some of what you did there. | ||
| But the reaction from the left, you know, it's a lot of what we've spent this show talking about. | ||
| And the more that I try to get away from it, You know, I've tried to address it so that I could move away from it. | ||
| I want these people to understand that someone like you, that someone like me, that we are standing up for liberal values. | ||
| But it's not just that they've ignored you. | ||
| In a lot of ways, these people have sort of actively tried to undermine you, don't you think? | ||
| Right, and there is, it's not just undermining, it's sliming, right? | ||
| And there's people that have questioned my agenda, and what am I doing this for? | ||
| I mean, I don't, you know, I'm not gaining anything from this. | ||
| I mean, in a lot of ways, this comes at a high personal cost, and I think many ex-Muslims that speak out. | ||
| But there are so many people that are very intent on painting me as a right-wing show. | ||
| And I get this all the time, and I even get this from people who I thought would be my allies, from atheists, from leftists. | ||
| So it's... What do you make of that tactic, just that general tactic, that it's not about what you say? | ||
| Because if anyone was to listen to that speech, or hopefully anything that we're going to talk about here, I'm gonna guess that you're gonna line up with liberal values 99% of the time, so it's rarely about what you say, it's about who you are and that you don't fit into their neat little box of what a Muslim should believe, which is crazy to me. | ||
| Well, I actually disagree with you. | ||
| I think it is what you say, in the sense that if you're talking negatively about Islam at all, at all, from any perspective, it doesn't matter if you're fueled by human rights or fueled by bigotry or whatever, it doesn't matter. | ||
| If you are touching negatively on Islam on any level, you are a bigot. | ||
| And it doesn't matter how you say it, because a lot of people say this to me, they say, well, what would you tell, you know, Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris, you know, if you think there's a way they can say their critique? | ||
| That would be beneficial. | ||
| And what I tell them is, or what I ask them instead is, well, can you think of somebody who has directly critiqued Islam, in a direct way, that has gotten away with it, that hasn't been called a bigot by someone? | ||
| You know, how do you, what is the right way of saying this? | ||
| Point me to an example of somebody who's critiquing Islam, and has been able to, you know, get away and still retain their liberal credentials. | ||
| Yeah, and that's the part of this that drives me nuts, because, you know, when I started this show only a couple months ago, my intention was not to talk about this stuff this much. | ||
| But as I said, I can't get out of it, because as a liberal, I see people like you, and I say, this is the very people, regardless of your religion, if you were an ex-Christian, as I said, or if you were an ex-Jew, I would feel the same way about the principles that you're standing up for. | ||
| So, you know, I laid out some principles when we started the show that I wasn't going to talk about people that much, specific people, except in this space there have been a couple people that have acted really, really dishonestly. | ||
| And I read just a couple days ago a piece that you wrote about some of the stuff that Reza Aslan Has said, and I find him to be a profoundly dishonest player in this space, and I see what he's done to Sam Harris. | ||
| Most of my audience knows about all of that already. | ||
| Can you explain a little bit about what your stuff is with him? | ||
| Well, so this was in response to, I co-wrote a piece with Mohamed Zeya who also works with Ex-Muslims of North America. | ||
| There's a CNN clip that's been going around and it's making rounds again. | ||
| The CNN clip where Reza Aslan is on and he He talks about FGM, and he talks about Bill Maher, and talks about how FGM isn't a Muslim problem. | ||
| It's an African problem. | ||
| Female genital mutilation. | ||
| We should just say it for the few people that may not be aware. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And then he puts a few other things out there as evidence that Muslim-majority countries are actually not that bad for women, including, you know, there are some women that are heads of state and etc. | ||
| So I wrote a piece about it, co-wrote a piece about it, and published it on the Friendly Atheist. | ||
| And it got this big response because I feel like there were some people that, a good amount of people, that were wanting somebody to pick up on these things that they felt like weren't true. | ||
| They couldn't say this and we said it and we laid it out there and we laid it out very clearly about why the points that he was making were dishonest at the least and I think in a lot of ways he's aware of what he's doing. | ||
| So he said many times that Something to the extent of how Mohammed freed the slaves. | ||
| He said things in that vein quite a few times. | ||
| And that is extremely dishonest. | ||
| That is not true. | ||
| It's just not true. | ||
| All Mohammed did was say that you can't enslave another Muslim. | ||
| And there are many people, many scholars who think that this actually encouraged the spread of the slave trade because suddenly you're in Arabia and you can't enslave another Muslim so you have to go out. | ||
| You have to go to various places to get your slaves. | ||
| He didn't condemn slavery. | ||
| He had slaves. | ||
| He had sex slaves. | ||
| And supposedly Reza Aslan is a scholar. | ||
| I don't even know about that whole thing. | ||
| I can't waste any more brain cells on that guy, basically. | ||
| Right, it's just so, it's very frustrating, and talking about it, and I'm getting tired of it myself, just to see that, oh, he just makes stuff up sometimes. | ||
| But do you think that's part of, the reason I wanted to mention it, because I knew you were going to be exhausted by talking about it, because it's like you write your piece and then you want to move on, and that's how I felt with a lot of my interviews. | ||
| I interviewed Sam and I wanted to move on to some other stuff, but then these guys just further the attack. | ||
| But do you think that that's part of it, that they throw out What I would call just basic bullshit, or they throw out these lies and these smears, and then you have to spend a tremendous amount of your time and your energy and your life force basically either defending yourself or the honest critiques that you're making. | ||
| Absolutely, and I think this is the experience of almost everyone who has critiqued Islam in any way, which is why we're seeing that there's just a lack of it. | ||
| There's just a lack of it everywhere. | ||
| I mean, there's a lack of scholarship. | ||
| If you try to really study this, and I have, there isn't that much out there that is truly secular, that is looking at it from a very outsider's perspective. | ||
| There were some efforts to do so, but they've now been painted as Orientalist, and therefore bad, and therefore right-wing. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Of course. | |
| And so that study sort of stopped around the time that those smears began and those associations with, this is bigotry if you're going to conflate this with any kind of negative, any kind of negative anything. | ||
| So I think it's really unfortunate because the scholarly pursuit of looking into what Islam is, how did it begin, what Muhammad did, all of that, I mean that has just It's suffered. | ||
| It's suffered tremendously because of people's fears of being seen as a bigot, a racist, whatever. | ||
| So I think a lot of people haven't really reached out, haven't really said the things that they want to say, revealed the knowledge that they had, or even looked into it further if they wanted to because they're thinking, well, this is going to destroy my career. | ||
| What's the point? | ||
| Yeah, and doesn't some of that, that fear of speaking out about this stuff, doesn't that actually show what real bigotry is? | ||
| If you're afraid to speak out about something because you think it's going to lead to dishonest smearing of you, or really what it's about is violence to you, that's what people clearly are really afraid. | ||
| I mean, I get emails now every day, literally, from all over the world that people are afraid to speak out. | ||
| So the real bigotry is saying, we're not gonna talk about these people because guess what, they can't control They're violent tendencies, or something like that, right? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, it's interesting, because a lot of people said this about the Charlie Hebdo, the cartoonists. | ||
| They said, well, they should have seen it coming. | ||
| John Kerry, John Kerry, our Secretary of State, just in the last day or so, said basically, you know, there was some sort of rationalization. | ||
| It's unbelievable. | ||
| It's absolutely unbelievable. | ||
| And to say that you have it coming when you are exercising a right, exercising a right that is given to you in the country that you live in. | ||
| What's the point of having a right if I can't test it to its extremes? | ||
| That's the point. | ||
| And in a lot of ways, what Charlie Hebdo did, for example, was not that extreme. | ||
| It was exactly the same treatment that they were giving Christianity. | ||
| And they were giving that exact same treatment to Islam. | ||
| So, to me, it seemed like they were making it fair. | ||
| They were saying that, hey, we're not biased, and we're going to apply the same scrutiny to all religious forms. | ||
| And they did that, and I thought they were very fair about it. | ||
| And then they got smeared in so many ways. | ||
| Yeah, and not only did they do it out of equality where they made fun of Orthodox Jews and made fun of Christianity. | ||
| I think, I'm going to slightly butcher this, but I think it was something like 80% were about Christianity when they did covers related to religion and only something like 10% were about Islam. | ||
| But I don't quote me fully on that. | ||
| But also what people fail to realize with Charlie Hebdo is that it was satire about the things that are wrong with religion. | ||
| They weren't mocking Muslims as people, just as they weren't mocking Christians as people, but they were mocking archaic age-old ideas, right? | ||
| Right, absolutely, and in many ways I think it can be seen as an anti-racist publication. | ||
| And a lot of people made a lot of good cases for this, and it's difficult because we're English-speaking people and we don't really understand the context of how these publishers do what they do in France. | ||
| But I think when you look at it from a very unbiased perspective, you'll find that there are anti-racists in a lot of ways. | ||
| It was horrible to hear people say, well, they had it coming, because it made it seem not only that they were stupid for doing what they were doing instead of brave, which is what they were, but also that Muslims are beasts and animals, and we cannot expect them to behave in the same way we would expect everyone else to behave. | ||
| Right, and that's what I mean about this sort of soft—I think this is what Bill Maher refers to as the soft bigotry of low expectations. | ||
| If you say anything about these people that's going to upset them, well, then you have to just expect that they're going to kill you, and that's crazy. | ||
| And also, you would live in a constant hostage crisis with a certain set of the population. | ||
| Absolutely, and that's exactly the feeling of, I think, a lot of those people who tell you that, you know, I'm afraid to speak out. | ||
| It is absolutely taking away from the humanity of Muslims, too, because it's turning them into beasts that we cannot say, hey, this is a standard that we expect from everybody. | ||
| We expect you to be able to handle this. | ||
| and that they listen to it. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah. | |
| And I think that we actually haven't pushed it. | ||
| We actually haven't said that, hey, this is totally acceptable. | ||
| And this is totally how we run things in the Western world. | ||
| And this is what we expect out of everyone who is here in the Western world. | ||
| We expect you to respect us, especially not respond in a violent way. | ||
| And I haven't had that conversation. | ||
| So is part of it simply that for the people that are the real Islamic extremists, | ||
| they simply, at the end of the day, no matter how much my friends on the left | ||
| wanna blame everything on American foreign policy and all of this stuff, no matter, | ||
| Boko Haram killed about 160 people last week. | ||
| It had nothing to do with American foreign policy, right? | ||
| Yet this is, they always blame everything on America. | ||
| And I don't deny, as I said at the top of the show, I don't deny Absolutely, and I'm sick of hearing that colonialism is to blame for all of this. | ||
| the left just completely fail, right? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And I'm very, I'm sick of hearing that colonialism is to blame for all of this. | ||
| I'm sick of that one particular thing I hear all the time, that this is, it's because of | ||
| colonialism. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right. | |
| And it doesn't really make any sense when you look into it. | ||
| And again, not to say that colonialism wasn't a horrible practice. | ||
| I'm from the South Asian subcontinent, so we were colonized by England, and it was horrible | ||
| what England did to South Asia and the effects, the long-ranging effects it had on South Asia. | ||
| But it's just so easy to throw away the colonialism excuse when it comes to radical Islam. | ||
| I mean, I mentioned two of these in my speech, which is that Muslims have been doing this | ||
| sort of thing, violence, justifying violence in the name of religion, since way before | ||
| colonialism ever came into the picture, right? | ||
| That it's existed for a long, long time. | ||
| And when you say colonialism is the only thing to blame, you are denying that that whole | ||
| history existed, that there were so many people that were oppressed in the name of Islam. | ||
| It's happened before, and it's happening again. | ||
| It's the same sort of thing. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Did you by any chance see a piece that Faisal Saeed Al-Mutar put up a couple days ago on | ||
| Facebook where he writes sort of a satirical piece saying that he's playing this Muslim | ||
| extremist saying, "This is why I'm doing it. | ||
| I'm doing it for religion. | ||
| And it's basically this argument with him and one of these regressive lefties saying, no, no, no, no, it's not because of religion. | ||
| And he keeps saying, no, no, no, I'm doing it because of religion. | ||
| And they go back and forth and go back and forth. | ||
| And at the end, the guy's like, you know, what do I have to do to prove to you that this is in the name of religion? | ||
| I mean, even after Paris, which I want to talk to you about in a second, the statement that these guys issued, there was a lot of religious overtones to it. | ||
| A ton of religious overtones. | ||
| It wasn't purely, you know, this bombing in Syria or whatever. | ||
| Well, it's astounding to me that at this point anyone can deny that religion has nothing to do with it. | ||
| I believe that there is no one really, any serious intellectual, who believes that this has nothing to do with religion. | ||
| It has something. | ||
| You can even make the case that it's a perverted Islam. | ||
| But it is some aspect of Islamic theology that they have taken and then perverted, at the very least. | ||
| At the very least that they have done that. | ||
| And I think that a lot of people play just lip service. | ||
| They say that this has nothing to do with the religion. | ||
| I don't think they believe it. | ||
| I think this is, in a lot of ways, a very political move. | ||
| Yeah, so I mentioned this also at the top of the show, but if, let's say magically, the United States and the West and France and England and everybody, we all did whatever it is ISIS wants us to do, you know what I mean? | ||
| Pull out of that part of the world, whatever else they might want us to do. | ||
| Do you have any reason to believe that suddenly terror would stop or that things would get better? | ||
| I actually would see it completely the reverse. | ||
| They would almost be more emboldened to continue. | ||
| And I say that as someone that doesn't even want to be there in the first place. | ||
| Greg, I agree with you. | ||
| ISIS is a different animal. | ||
| And they are very strict about their interpretation. | ||
| And they look into things in a very literal way. | ||
| And if they are going to look into it in the way that Islamic thought has progressed about what you would call the land of the believers and the land of the non-believers, They are religiously, it's their duty, it's their religious duty to do what they can to spread Islam throughout the whole globe, so they're not going to stop. | ||
| They've told us they're not going to stop. | ||
| Why can't we just listen to them and understand that they mean what they say? | ||
| Yeah, and that was the point of Faisal's piece, and I got into a fight on Twitter, I try not to fight on Twitter, but I got into a fight with one of my friends on the left who kept saying foreign policy, and I kept saying, listen to what they're saying, don't listen to me, listen to what they tell you. | ||
| So one more, I just want to jump back a little bit before we get into Paris. | ||
| So I want people to understand there's a distinction between someone like yourself, that you consider yourself an ex-Muslim, you're a non-believer, versus some of the reformers that are still either believers or that consider themselves Muslims, someone like Ahmadinejad, although he said to me that he doesn't want to put up his version of Islam for anyone else. | ||
| But there is a distinction there. | ||
| So there's two brands of people that we're talking about. | ||
| That are trying to help here, right? | ||
| Do you mean like progressive Muslims and... Well, meaning that there's your branch that's sort of ex-Muslims, right? | ||
| You fully, you are an atheist, you don't consider yourself part of the religion. | ||
| Versus there are some that are trying to reform the religion from the inside. | ||
| Is there any sort of interplay with you guys? | ||
| Are people working together? | ||
| It's hard to tell. | ||
| Well, I think that, I think it would be intellectually dishonest for us to work together in the sense that truly our aims are different. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, they're similar in some ways, right? | ||
| We want to make sure to, we want to decrease harm in the world. | ||
| We want to push secularism, push human rights, promote it the best that we can. | ||
| But our ways of going about it are so radically different that I think that it would be, I mean, I'm in contact with some of these people and I respect them tremendously. | ||
| They're doing wonderful things. | ||
| I disagree with them. | ||
| There is very little about Islam and the fundamentals of Islam, as Sam Harris says, that I agree with on any level. | ||
| And it's hard for me to find any beauty or compassion or all these wonderful things that we would ascribe to something so holy. | ||
| I don't find that in this text. | ||
| So, there isn't really... I disagree with people when they do say that I'm a little bit extremist. | ||
| You know, people say that, well, you cannot expect everyone to just apostize all at once. | ||
| But this is not what I'm pushing. | ||
| I don't want the Muslim world to apostize all at once. | ||
| But for me, it would be intellectually dishonest to go about it on any other way. | ||
| And I actually think that there is, I mean... | ||
| It's atheism and secularism and free thought. | ||
| I think we have a very strong critique of religion. | ||
| Something that is very internally coherent and ethically coherent. | ||
| And this case is one worth making. | ||
| And if we're talking about the marketplace of ideas, it's important that we show our side and we put our best case out there. | ||
| And that people land where they'll land. | ||
| So that's really interesting to me. | ||
| So in a weird way, your brand here is a little cleaner, let's say, than the people that are trying to reform it from the inside. | ||
| And I don't sense that you're judging them for that, as much as it really is easier to make a case from your position, because you're just saying, I don't believe in thousand-year-old books, so I'm gonna make a case based on the world as it is, sort of, and they're still trying to negotiate, and that's where I see someone like Reza, and where I say this is someone who's profoundly dishonest all the time, but I think he's trying to negotiate the world with this religion, and then he uses a lot of words so nobody knows what he's talking about, but your case is a lot cleaner. | ||
| Even if I disagreed with you, I would understand the logic more sensibly. | ||
| I do think that in the case of somebody like Raza, I think it is condescending towards other Muslims because I think some people believe that, you know, Muslims will never get there. | ||
| They'll never get to where you are. | ||
| You're expecting too much. | ||
| I don't think I'm expecting too much. | ||
| I think this is actually, if I was allowed to make this case, most Muslims do not hear anything similar to what I have to say. | ||
| They will never hear anything like this. | ||
| I think if they did, I think it would change things. | ||
| But we don't know yet, right? | ||
| And we don't know that that's the case. | ||
| Right, well now you did this show with me, they're gonna say you're working with a Zionist Nazi, and I don't know if this is gonna help now either. | ||
| Tell me a little bit about being a woman in this space, because you have a double-edged sword, so to speak here, because leaving a religion, any religion's tough, but particularly tough to leave Islam, and then when you couple that with All the stuff related to being a woman and being a secular woman in America in 2015 isn't that easy sometimes. | ||
| How does that play into how you live? | ||
| Well, let me start by saying there's so many people that I'm connected to through the organization and through meeting a bunch of ex-Muslims. | ||
| I don't think it would be a stretch to say that I probably know more ex-Muslims than | ||
| most people in the world will ever know. | ||
| And what I hear consistently from a lot of women, that the reason that they left the | ||
| religion was because of the treatment of women. | ||
| And a lot of it just didn't make any sense. | ||
| And they didn't appreciate, they felt that they weren't being given the same kind of | ||
| dignity as men. | ||
| And when they looked at it from that perspective, things changed. | ||
| Feminism had a lot to do with it. | ||
| Which is very interesting when we talk about today's feminism here, because I haven't really | ||
| found the feminist allies in the West that I thought I would find. | ||
| I expected for them to be the first people to run to my defense, and a few have, but a small few. | ||
| I expected there to be a big rally with feminists from all over to come and talk about these issues, but I haven't found that to be the case at all. | ||
| It's very disheartening. | ||
| Yeah, so what is that strange alliance? | ||
| Because you see this all the time, you know, a group like Code Pink that stands for women's rights and anti-war. | ||
| You would think they would be standing for women's rights all over the globe, but instead they'll rant and rave and, you know, talk about Gaza. | ||
| Meanwhile, if they ever went to Gaza, I'm pretty sure that these women would not be treated particularly well. | ||
| So this double standard just endlessly exists, huh? | ||
| Absolutely, and I think it's very, like I said, it's disheartening for one, and because I was somebody that feminism was a huge part of me leaving religion, it was a huge part of me, of fueling me, and the women's rights causes of fueling me into my activism, it's been especially painful to see that feminists are not always on the same level as me. | ||
| What I have found is that there's a lot of posts about Muslim women that say that they're empowered by the hijab. | ||
| They'll be on feminist websites. | ||
| They'll say, you know, I'm very empowered by this hijab and it's my political whatever. | ||
| To me, it's wonderful for that particular woman if she feels that this is her choice and this is what she wants to do and this is how she wants to live her life. | ||
| That's great. | ||
| But Muslim women that's wearing the hijab, making a piece like that is like a woman in, you know, 1930s | ||
| America saying that I'm proud to be a housewife. | ||
| I love staying home with my children. This is exactly where I want to be. | ||
| Well, good for you. Maybe you do. And that's wonderful. | ||
| It's good for you that everything in society aligned with your desire perfectly. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And now you get to live this wonderful life. | ||
| But you have to acknowledge that in 1930s America, women who maybe wanted to have a career weren't as free to do so. | ||
| That there were so many different factors that were making it very, very difficult for them to live their life the way they wanted to. | ||
| You have to be able to acknowledge that. | ||
| In that same way, I want these hijabi women to be able to acknowledge that, hey, there's so many women who don't ascribe to these modesty codes, and they aren't free to live lives the way they want to. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And this, again, this is why the left has put themselves, or this regressive left, has put themselves in such a crazy box. | ||
| They should be defending women's options. | ||
| They don't have to say you have to live a certain way, but they should at least give you the options. | ||
| And that's also why they've been relentless on new atheists. | ||
| So you get it now as a woman, you get it as an ex-Muslim. | ||
| I don't know if you identify specifically with a new atheist, with new atheism. | ||
| Do you consider yourself a new atheist? | ||
| What does that even mean? | ||
| I'm not sure exactly. | ||
| Nobody really seems to know. | ||
| The best way I can describe it now, at least as I've come to understand it, is that it's an atheist who is finally speaking up. | ||
| So for that version, that's what I would consider myself. | ||
| But the community, the left, really has been attacking atheists too. | ||
| So you're on a, like a, you're like spinning. | ||
| And you got shots from all sides, huh? | ||
| I definitely feel that way. | ||
| I don't want to talk about how big of a victim I am because I don't like those kinds of politics. | ||
| But in general, I have felt that the people that On paper, should be supporting me. | ||
| And I looked into this actually as a response to seeing the way that leftists have reacted. | ||
| I've started to do more research on what liberal principles were and really trying to get a grounding on what it meant to be a liberal. | ||
| And I feel, and Bill Maher has said this so many times, he said, I'm the real liberal. | ||
| And I think he's right. | ||
| He's right when he says he's a real liberal. | ||
| And I feel like I'm the real liberal. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So you're not gross and racist. | ||
| That's what you're telling me? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Oh God, that was so bad. | |
| That was so bad. | ||
| And honestly, when I was watching that, I kind of felt, I'm going to get haters for this, but I kind of, for Ben Affleck a little bit, I kind of thought, oh it's cute that he's standing up, he thinks he's standing up for the poor oppressed minority. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right? | |
| That's what he thinks he's doing. | ||
| That's what he's really convinced that he's standing up for in a press group. | ||
| And it's nice that he has good intentions. | ||
| It's nice. | ||
| I appreciate that. | ||
| But he's so wrong. | ||
| And he's really hurting these same minorities. | ||
| And he's not understanding exactly what's going on here. | ||
| And it was very interesting in that particular scenario to see Sam and then very emotional Ben Affleck. | ||
| Very, very emotional Ben Affleck. | ||
| And very calm Sam Harris. | ||
| You know, I think you'll find this interesting. | ||
| I was discussing this with... Well, first off, I discussed it with Sam himself, but I also discussed it with Joe Rogan a couple weeks ago on his show, and I said what you just said. | ||
| I said, well, you know, I think he was trying to do the right thing and trying to... And maybe he got too emotional, but, you know, he was trying to stand up for the downtrodden, that kind of thing. | ||
| And Joe said something that I now fully believe. | ||
| I mean, he got me to change my opinion like that. | ||
| He said no. | ||
| He's like, man, I know actors. | ||
| I'm around actors. | ||
| They fake this so that everyone will just think they're so holy, they're so benevolent, they're so wonderful, and all that. | ||
| And he was really convinced that that's what Ben was doing there. | ||
| But I don't want to waste any more time on that specifically. | ||
| So the atheist stuff, yeah, you're getting it from them, you're getting it from the other guys. | ||
| What can we do then? | ||
| What can secular people and free thinkers do? | ||
| Because I know that people, just by listening to this, a certain subset of people are gonna say all the things that you laid out at the beginning. | ||
| They're gonna say that I hate Muslims, that you're a secret Zionist, all of this nonsense. | ||
| But what can we do? | ||
| I guess just talk, right? | ||
| I mean, is really that the best we can do? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And I think, just be intellectually honest. | ||
| And I think that a lot of people understand what I mean when I say that. | ||
| Because people stop themselves. | ||
| They want to say these things. | ||
| They have these opinions. | ||
| And the reaction that I got to my speech at the American Humanist Association, the biggest reaction was, you said what I wanted to say. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You put the words that I was thinking in my head, but I just felt like I couldn't, I really couldn't articulate, and I felt trapped. | ||
| And you said those things, so it felt like a release, you know, for me to hear you say it, to hear somebody say it. | ||
| And I think that if we can be brave, and if we can talk about it, and especially liberals, | ||
| it is very important that it is liberals who stand up for this, because we are the compassionate | ||
| ones, right? | ||
| We are the ones that really are keeping the harm of the people in place. | ||
| We are not forgetting about anti-Muslim bigotry. | ||
| That is something that is obviously at the forefront of our minds. | ||
| We know that because that's why we're not saying anything about Islam, right? | ||
| We're afraid of this harm. | ||
| So it is those, particularly those people, that need to be speaking up, that need to | ||
| be making this nuanced discussion. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And that's what it seems so obvious to me, that I don't have to twist my beliefs to say | ||
| the things that I'm saying to you. | ||
| Everything that I'm saying to you, and I sense everything that you're saying to me, is based in the same set of secular principles that you apply to everything else. | ||
| And for some reason, these guys want you to just be a little more careful when it comes to this set of ideas. | ||
| But what I see as the real danger there is that If we don't speak up right now, and we're at an extremely precarious moment right now with everything going on in Paris and with ISIS and all that, that if we don't speak up we hand the future to the people on the right, don't you think? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| They're getting empowered by this because people are not stupid. | ||
| We are seeing that there is this big elephant in the room that we cannot talk about, that the media isn't talking about. | ||
| What are we doing? | ||
| We're building distrust of your average American citizen when they're watching their TV screens and they're not seeing anybody but Fox News really talking about Islam in a way that feels remotely honest. | ||
| And it's horrible, it's horrible that we're giving this up to these people who really have some xenophobic motives maybe, you know, and we need to make sure that it is us that are talking about this, that are engaging with this | ||
| issue. | ||
| It's similar to, I think, what happened with the Tea Party. | ||
| I think there was some real hurt and some real pain right after the economic downturn. | ||
| And I think a lot of people were feeling abandoned by their government. | ||
| And I think we could have, I even say now, we could have seized on that moment | ||
| and we could have made it a populist, progressive movement to take down corporations or whatever it is. | ||
| We could have harnessed it, but instead we disdained those people because they were backwater, bigots, whatever, people who don't understand things in a nuanced, complicated way the way that everyone else does. | ||
| And so we find it very easy to... | ||
| to just push them aside and dismiss them and look at what happened there, right? | ||
| They became a political force that a lot of people would say | ||
| have done some harm in political spectrum. | ||
| So we don't want that happening again. | ||
| Yeah, I don't know if you saw my video about it a couple of weeks ago, | ||
| but I said that the regressive left is our Tea Party and I don't want what has happened to the right | ||
| that has been dragged off the deep end, I don't want that happening to my side. | ||
| That's why I do think we're at this moment. | ||
| So I know we only have a little bit left, but I do wanna focus on Paris a little bit. | ||
| I know you're not a terrorist expert or something of that nature, | ||
| but in terms of the human part of this, that it sounds like a lot of these people | ||
| did grow up in Paris or in France. | ||
| They grew up in the West. | ||
| Some of them grew up in Belgium, but they grew up in Western societies. | ||
| What do you make of that kind of radicalization? | ||
| Because, you know, I know a lot of the debate right now is about, can we let refugees in? | ||
| Are we going to let terrorists in with refugees and that? | ||
| But there's also a home grown problem right now that we're not dealing with. | ||
| Yeah, this is just my opinion, and again, I'm not a scholar on this, but I feel like there are many young people in different parts of Europe especially, and I think Europe particularly, that feel that they are, and a lot of people say they're between two cultures, that's the phrase that people use, that they're between this Western culture and their culture back home, but I don't think that that's the truth. | ||
| I think that the truth is that they don't really have any viable options. | ||
| They don't really believe in the same stuff that their parents might have done from Pakistan | ||
| or whatever, and they don't really fit in with the community in the West. | ||
| And they sort of feel lost by this multiculturalist narrative. | ||
| If we can push, and a lot of people do have this specific critique. | ||
| They say that we have lost our bearings. | ||
| We have lost our values. | ||
| We don't really push our story and our values and our way of looking at the world. | ||
| We don't really advocate for that in the way that it deserves to be advocated for. | ||
| And I think these are the people that are the lost children of this, because these are people who don't have anything to latch on to. | ||
| What they do have to latch on to is that somebody comes and says this Islamist narrative, and everything makes so much sense, and everything is so clear now, and they can grapple on to it. | ||
| I think you've covered this so many times. | ||
| You've talked about this, about freedom of speech issues, about how we're not allowed | ||
| to talk about certain ideas. | ||
| I think it's so harmful that we're not allowed to talk about critique of religion, critique | ||
| of Islam, because then we're giving up this ground to the Islamists. | ||
| We're letting them give these people these great narratives that they'll latch onto. | ||
| And they don't have any opposing narrative at all. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, really, what do the secularists do? | ||
| I know that there are some organizations, like the one that Majid's involved in, that are trying to de-radicalize people, show them that there's other outs. | ||
| And I'm with you, I get it, that it's a compounding of economic issues, and religious narrative, and imperialism, it's all of these things. | ||
| But how do we move forward? | ||
| Because the talking, as we're doing, it's good for now, but at some point, we gotta get to these To the kids, I guess, the younger generation. | ||
| Well, this is something I guess related to the Syrian refugees that are coming in. | ||
| A lot of people are very worried about the effect that these refugees will have on the countries. | ||
| And I think the only long-term way of proceeding and making sure that we don't have these same kind of problems is to push immersion as much as we can, which means that we don't | ||
| allow them to build these isolated little communities. We spread them out within the country | ||
| and we pull them in into the American way of life or Western way of life, what have you. | ||
| In that sense, I think a lot of these multiculturalist narratives are very, very, very harmful. | ||
| I think we need to discard them immediately. | ||
| There's a lot of hesitancy. | ||
| We know how to pull immigrants in and how to immerse them into our society. | ||
| We know that. | ||
| There's so much work about this and scholarly stuff about this, written about this. | ||
| We can do it. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| We're a nation of immigrants. | ||
| We want to, right? | ||
| Every one of us, every one of us here in America, we either are from immigrants, or we were brought over as slaves, or we're Native Americans. | ||
| But the large majority of us are immigrants. | ||
| Right, and you know what? | ||
| Because what happened was America pulled us in and said, well, here's the stuff I don't like, but here's the stuff I do like. | ||
| And they pulled it together and we became this nation that is so powerful. | ||
| And then what you have instead in places like the UK is that these mini nations that are not a part of the overall, you know, British society. | ||
| There's a little Pakistani community. | ||
| And a little North African community and they sort of live as if they were back in Pakistan or Bangladesh or whatever it is and that I think is so harmful because these people never feel like everyone else. | ||
| I feel like an American and I don't think everyone else does and I want them to feel that way. | ||
| I want them to feel like an American. | ||
| Yeah, it's an interesting, it's almost like a self-fulfilling prophecy, because then when the British people go in and try and move into that community, then they feel like, those people in that community feel like they're under attack or something, or they have to defend their little area. | ||
| So you have this constant battle of, you know, of the self versus the bigger community. | ||
| Yeah, and what has happened is that we've given up the battle, right? | ||
| We've just said, okay, we'll just live however you want to live, you're just different people, and you just operate on different rules, and you have different concepts of human rights, and that's just, we're just going to turn a blind eye. | ||
| That's what's happened in the UK, I think. | ||
| Yeah, and we can't do it anymore, right? | ||
| No, we have to have these, I mean, we've always had with these immigrant communities in the United States, these negotiations, these back and forths, and these scuffles, and sometimes they've been very painful. | ||
| But in the end, we're stronger, and the immigrant community gets immersed and is stronger too. | ||
| Yeah, alright, so my final thought would be, I've been trying to end all my conversations on a note of positiveness, and I think you've actually given a lot of hope throughout here, but I definitely sense that the tide is turning. | ||
| I know it feels like a dangerous time right now, there's so much craziness going on, and with the internet everything feels smaller, So when something happens 5,000 miles away, it seems like it happened in your backyard. | ||
| But I do sense something good here. | ||
| The fact that we've connected. | ||
| The fact that all of these people now, that we're all in the same circles, and we're all talking, and our circles are getting bigger. | ||
| I do feel like maybe the tide will turn in our favor. | ||
| Do you feel that? | ||
| Give me something good to end on here. | ||
| I think you're absolutely right. | ||
| You've mentioned this before, I noticed, that things are changing, and I feel this, and I think Majid Nawaz had said it too before, where he said the left is changing, and he feels this, you can sort of sense it in the air, that there's discontent there, that there's people where suddenly there's a lot of dissonance going on. | ||
| minds and we want it to make sense. | ||
| And I think that we're giving, you know, this point of view that we're giving is one that | ||
| is so much more clear. | ||
| And it's so much better for people and better for humanity. | ||
| And I think people will slowly gravitate towards it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know, it's funny. | ||
| I did a video on free speech last week, and at the end I referenced, you know, all of | ||
| this stuff with safe spaces and trigger warnings and all of this nonsense. | ||
| And it's like, when I speak to someone like you and I speak to Majid and Ayaan and Sam and all these people, I said in the video, I was like, look guys, watch my videos with these people. | ||
| If you think these are the extremists... | ||
| Then there's something wrong with you. | ||
| It's not something wrong with them. | ||
| You know, Majid and Sam just wrote a book called Islam and the Future of Tolerance. | ||
| It wasn't called Islam and the Future of, you know, Weapons of Mass Destruction, you know? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Anyway, well, it's an absolute pleasure. | ||
| I'm so glad we connected and were able to do this. | ||
| And you're doing such great work. | ||
| Thank you so much. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me. | ||
| Yeah, so it's at SarahTheHater on Twitter, and everyone should check out your group, which is Ex-Muslims of North America, and we're gonna stay in the loop, and next time you're in LA, dinner's on me. | ||
| Alright. |
Export Selection