May 10, 2017 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| We're gonna be doing something a little different this week. | ||
| We're taking the show on the road and doing this week's interview in a remote studio. | ||
| Joining me is a personal hero of mine, a former guest on the Rubin Report, and now someone that I'm incredibly proud to call a friend, Ayaan Hirsi Ali. | ||
| Ayaan's life story is a true testament to the human spirit which shows that any of us, including a little girl born in Somalia who underwent female genital mutilation, If you want to test people on whether they truly, truly stand for liberalism, tolerance and western values, just ask them what they think of Ayaan Hirsi Ali. | ||
| The people who really believe in the individual and in human rights will be firmly in her corner, while those who stand for moral relativism and collectivist thinking will be against her. | ||
| In an unfortunate sign of the times, speaking your mind as Ayaan does comes with a certain cost, so unfortunately we can't share the location of where we did the interview, but I do want to take a moment and thank everyone who helped facilitate it. | ||
| And without any further ado, here's my chat with Ayaan Hirsi Ali. | ||
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(upbeat music) | |
| All right, we are on location this week and I am with activist and author | ||
| and one of my favorite people on the planet. | ||
| And now I can call you friend. | ||
| Ayaan Hirsi Ali, welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| David, thank you very much. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| I can't believe that somehow this is our first time sitting down in person. | ||
| That's right. | ||
| We did it over Skype a few times, I guess. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Here we are. | ||
| And a lot of email. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| So I said to you last night that what I don't want to do today for this hour is just tell your story again, because it's been told so many times. | ||
| It's an incredible story. | ||
| For you, it must be sort of exhausting to tell it over and over. | ||
| And we'll link to it below so that people can get it if they don't know it. | ||
| But is there one piece of your story that you think Has either been misconstrued, or is it an important piece that people haven't quite got, or anything like that? | ||
| Well, it's the reason why I tell it at all, which is, I use it to illustrate that it's possible, you know, to be born in Africa, grow up in a Muslim household, and go through all sorts of adversities and come out whole and wholesome and healthy. | ||
| And what I see sometimes, what some of my opponents use, is they say, oh, she went through all of these terrible things, and she's angry, she's resentful, she's miserable, and so she's using Islam to get back at an unhappy childhood. | ||
| And I think that's false. | ||
| Yeah, and especially now that I've gotten to know you a little bit, I don't sense any of that. | ||
| I mean, there's such light in you and goodness and all of those things, and I don't sense any of that. | ||
| But we're sort of just stuck in a situation where even by talking about this, it's somehow, they want to project something on you, right? | ||
| That's right. | ||
| But, I mean, if you look at the arguments of my opponents, what you see is they run out of logical consistency. | ||
| They want to defend a system of life, or a theory for life, that is intolerant, that is anti-women, anti-gay, that conflates religion with politics. | ||
| And some of them, really honest ones, defend it and go all the way to say, you know, this philosophy is better than all other man-made philosophies. | ||
| And they talk good all the terrible stuff, that's the outcome. | ||
| But the ones who believe in it and promote it and yet, you know, find themselves in this What I think of as cognitive dissonance, they're the ones who would use anything. | ||
| So firstly, they say she has no experience. | ||
| Then I put my experience at the table and they say, OK, that's bad. | ||
| That's because you're traumatized. | ||
| Things are not in the Koran. | ||
| I show them what's in the Koran. | ||
| They say, yeah, you misinterpreted. | ||
| Or, you know, you're doing something other than what it says. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And on and on and on it goes. | ||
| So I think it's just, it's people who have no argument or a weak argument who take refuge in these inconsistencies. | ||
| And just last night we spent some time with some people that really had interesting arguments and we didn't all agree on things, which I thought was wonderful. | ||
| And people were quoting the Quran and all of this stuff. | ||
| And that's what discussion is about, which is why this whole thing is so related to free speech and everything. | ||
| So, instead of talking about some of the critics, let's talk about your new book. | ||
| Should we call it a book or a booklet? | ||
| What should we officially call it? | ||
| It started out as a white paper. | ||
| It's now a booklet, and I hope to expand it to a book. | ||
| start treating other subjects such as assimilation that are not in the booklet. | ||
| But it's an argument. I'm basically saying in there that there is this term, dawah, | ||
| that non-Muslims and Muslims should know about. I know that most people here, if you ask them about jihad, | ||
| they have something to say about it. | ||
| They may not agree on what it means, but most people are familiar with the term Jihad. | ||
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Right. | |
| If you understand Jihad to be a holy struggle or a holy war against infidels, against unbelievers, then you have to understand that there is this whole process that's prior to Jihad, and that is Dawah. | ||
| Yeah, so when you talk about Da'wah, you're really talking about it's political Islam, which is separate, it's not independent of, but it's separate than what we think of as religious Islam, right? | ||
| Yeah, I think I like talking about individuals because it's individuals who take actions, and then there is the doctrine of Islam. | ||
| So I think from the get-go you have to separate Islam as a doctrine from Muslims as adherents. | ||
| Do you ever feel that no matter how much you do that, that a certain set of people just won't let you do that? | ||
| Because I do it every week here whenever we talk about this stuff, and a certain amount of people just, no matter how many times you do that, they're just not going to have it. | ||
| They're not going to have it, but I'll keep doing it. | ||
| Fair enough. | ||
| I think it's very important to separate the doctrine from the people. | ||
| And if you look at the adherents, what they do is they look at the doctrine and they select out of the doctrine what they want. | ||
| So if you look at Islamic doctrine, Islamic history, Islamic scripture, you will see that politics and religion are intertwined. | ||
| But there are many Muslims who just stick to what is religious. | ||
| They'll say, look, I pray, I fast, I would like to go to Mecca, or they go to Mecca, if they can afford to. | ||
| But other than that, their attitude toward other people, whether they're Muslims or non-Muslims, and their religiosity is to say, unto you your religion and unto me mine. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And all of this is in Islam. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| So, for those people, I like to describe them as Mecca Muslims, because what they're doing is they're selecting out of that whole doctrine the bits and pieces that were revealed in Mecca to Muhammad. | ||
| So, Muhammad, the founder of Islam, when he was in Mecca, he was saying certain things, he was behaving in a certain way, and there's that legacy, and they like to stick to that. | ||
| Mecca Muslims. | ||
| How many they are, I can't tell you. | ||
| I think they probably could be the largest number of Muslims. | ||
| Maybe they're decreasing in number now because the other group, the Medina Muslims, the ones who look at Muhammad's life and legacy and take whatever it is that he established in Medina, which is heavy on politics, heavy on military, those are the Muslims that engage in Dawah. | ||
| So when we talk about this Mecca and Medina stuff and the history of this and all that, do you sometimes fear that by focusing too much on that, that we end up getting lost in historical things that don't necessarily tie us fully to what's happening now? | ||
| Well, there's always a risk of getting lost in history, but I think in terms of trying to differentiate, because we live at a time when we really have to make it very clear that not all Muslims are dangerous, or that not all Muslims are a threat to us. | ||
| And in doing so, you have to really mind your language, and you have to find ways in separating those who are a potential threat or are a threat and are Muslim | ||
| because you and I, and I think many more people now agree with us that some of the phenomena of jihad | ||
| we're seeing has its roots in Islam. | ||
| If you believe that it doesn't, then you can go and get lost in history | ||
| and other discussions 'cause you always want to take the discussion off the table. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But if we all agree, okay. | ||
| So basically you can always find some historical event to pin on instead of what comes from doctrine. | ||
| So again, if we go back to, you know, let's look at individuals. | ||
| It's an individual who takes part in discussions, and there are people who are taking part in this discussion, in the confrontation between Islam and the West and Islam and the rest of the world, and who just happen to believe Islam as a religion, as a doctrine, has nothing to do With what we're seeing. | ||
| Islam has nothing to do with ISIS, or Al-Qaeda, or Boko Haram, or Al-Shabaab, with terrorism, with jihad, with misogyny, none of that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And I think it's very, I don't know about you, but it's very difficult for me to talk about this subject with those people. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Because I feel like their job is to deflect. | ||
| And mine is to illuminate as much as possible. | ||
| And I think it's helpful if we can pinpoint exactly what it is about Islam that we don't like. | ||
| And that's a threat. | ||
| And more importantly, who are the Muslims who are seeking to use Islam as a tool for political power, for domination, for misogyny, and to justify the unjustifiable, throwing people from tall places to their death, Killing and enslaving women, regurgitating anti-Semitism. | ||
| You know, we thought after 1945, with the end of the Second World War, that there was this enormous insight in the West, no more anti-Semitism, never again. | ||
| And now it's become, I don't know how often you visit or go to Europe, but in Europe anti-Semitism is back and it's back because of Islam. | ||
| Yeah, so, okay, so there's a bunch there. | ||
| So when people talk about these books, one of the things that I'll hear people say is, well, wait a minute, the Old Testament has a ton of bad stuff in it. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I suspect you wouldn't disagree with that. | ||
| No. | ||
| The New Testament actually has less bad. | ||
| Out of the three, if you were looking at them in terms of violence, I think the New Testament is certainly the least violent of the three. | ||
| But what is the difference, then, that that makes the individuals act on one of them more than the others? | ||
| Is it just that this is the newest one and it hasn't gone through that reformation or that maturation or whatever else? | ||
| Or is it specifically the point of the text? | ||
| Well, I think historically, if you look at the history of Christianity, you'll see that there's been a lot of Internal fighting about what Christianity should mean, the place of the Old Testament, the place of the New Testament. | ||
| There was this whole process of Reformation, the Enlightenment, and beyond. | ||
| Even post-modernism is part of, you know, the place of Christianity. | ||
| And one of the things that I think made it easier for Christians to move forward was that from the get-go, politics and religion were separate. | ||
| So you couldn't be declared not to be Christian if you proposed or you were a proponent of man-made laws and rules. | ||
| With Islam, we're not yet there. | ||
| And there have been individuals in the history of Islam who fought for a separation of religion from politics. | ||
| They've all been marginalized. | ||
| They've been forgotten by most Muslims. | ||
| They are celebrated only by non-Muslims in the Christian world. | ||
| But to this day, there are Muslims. | ||
| I call them reformers. | ||
| I call them modifiers. | ||
| It's that group. | ||
| There's the Mecca, the Medina, and the modifiers. | ||
| To this day, you have these Muslims who want to modernize, who want to liberalize, who want to move forward, and who want to, you know, say, let's just separate politics from religion, so that no one, no religious person uses Islam as a tool for political domination. | ||
| But again, they're marginalized, they're sidelined, they're threatened. | ||
| So is this the ultimate failing of what the frustrations that we and many others have with the left that they have actually held Islam hostage in a weird way because every time someone comes out and says I want to reform the faith or you know what Majid Nawaz is trying to do with Quilliam Foundation and many other people now and fortunately as we were talking about you know there is a growing movement there but every time they they step out of that lane yeah they get slammed so it really it's the it's the Liberals, unfortunately, the left, that is holding the more extreme elements of Islam in power. | ||
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A part of it, of course, it's not all of it. | |
| So there's the internal dynamics of Islam and Muslims and how they fight out what to retain of Islam and what not to. | ||
| And then there are the external pressures. | ||
| And I think what, when we talk about, because this is really relevant for Muslims living inside Western countries with a left and a right. | ||
| Where the left find themselves, I just want to say inadvertently, I can't believe that they really mean it, that they're doing this consciously and willingly, but they find themselves inadvertently aligned with the Islamists. | ||
| I've heard some people say that's because the left hates America, the left hates capitalism, | ||
| the left can't deal with political freedom, and to find another group with a similar outlook, | ||
| even though they want a different outcome, that it's easy and very natural for the far | ||
| left to align itself not only with Islam and Islamism, but also with other radical anti-Western | ||
| movements. | ||
| And this is basically what intersectionality is, right? | ||
| These "oppressed groups" that are coming together to form something bigger, even if what they | ||
| want at the end of the day is actually very different. | ||
| When I look at people talk about intersectionality and this whole identity politics thing, what | ||
| I see is taking the human being, moving it to the left, and then taking it to the right, | ||
| Magnifying a biological attribute and then putting them aside, putting them in a corner as victims of oppression. | ||
| And in a way I feel sorry for them. | ||
| I happen to be black and I happen to be a woman and I happen to be a minority in the United States. | ||
| I even happen to be an apostate. | ||
| You're really going for the whole thing. | ||
| So talk about intersectionality. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But none of that defines me as who I am. | ||
| I'm more than all of that. | ||
| And I most certainly don't see myself as a victim. | ||
| And knowing people Who grew up in Africa, who grew up in Muslim countries. | ||
| You probably know also some gay people who had to struggle and go through adversity. | ||
| I think when you come out of it, you come out as a proud survivor. | ||
| You don't come out as a victim and you don't want to be victimized. | ||
| You don't want safe spaces. | ||
| You don't want to be in this constant mental state of anger and full of resentment and wanting to lash out at others. | ||
| And demanding that society or whoever it is that you feel oppresses you, gives you money and jobs. | ||
| And no, you come out of this thinking, you know, I've earned, I love to work. | ||
| You know, what I'm proud of in my journey is that I was able to say every time when I tried to run away from that husband, Yeah. | ||
| Some of the Somalis around me would say, you're going to rot in hell. | ||
| And there's absolutely no way you're going to survive outside of the extended family, the clan. | ||
| You will end up being a whore. | ||
| And now at the age of 47, I want to look back and tell them that didn't happen. | ||
| I didn't end up being a whore. | ||
| I don't think I'm going to burn in hell because I don't believe there's a hell. | ||
| And I have a wonderful, comfortable life that I couldn't have if I had gone with that man. | ||
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And so that doesn't make me into a victim. | |
| Intersectionality or no intersectionality. | ||
| So to me the whole thing, the whole hogwash of... | ||
| The language, I tried to go through some of these articles and books, and they're so boring. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| It's just one long excuse to wallow in self-pity. | ||
| And that's not, those people don't speak for all blacks, for all women, for all minorities. | ||
| They just speak for, in my view, a very small subsection of overprivileged individuals who Yeah, who are seeking to take advantage of the trend now of white guilt. | ||
| Yeah, so is the irony that it may not even be exactly what you say that is getting, for your critics, it's not exactly what you're saying, which if you probably whittled it down, they might agree with you on some of it. | ||
| Privately, at least. | ||
| But it's that you don't act like a victim and that is so counter to the entire movement that even if you could get them to privately say, you know, yeah, you're making some good points, but that your very existence as a free, functioning, happy, successful person is counter to their movement and that's more of a threat than whatever you can say about Islam or anything else. | ||
| That's a threat, and the leadership within this movement, I have no idea what to call them. | ||
| You brought up the term intersectional. | ||
| Are they called intersectionals? | ||
| God knows what they're called. | ||
| They love the oppression Olympics, which I heard first from our friend Faisal. | ||
| Yeah, the oppression Olympics. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Some of it, I mean, look at college campuses. | ||
| There are freshmen, young, vulnerable students, impressionable minds, and their heads are filled with this nonsense that, you know, they have to fear for their lives, and that they're not safe on American campuses. | ||
| And it's that kind of leadership that I find so toxic, because here you have young people In my view, I mean, I come from Africa. | ||
| People would kill to be in any one of these ivy league universities and get an education. | ||
| And here they are being told that if they read Plato or Shakespeare or Mark Twain, they are threatened somehow. | ||
| Or that there's rape culture there. | ||
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There's rape culture, yeah. | |
| What are you doing to these young people? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So where, with that, where do you think the fault lies? | ||
| Because I agree with you. | ||
| I think a lot of the people that have bought into these ideas, I don't blame the 18-year-old kid who has been hit with this stuff and indoctrinated. | ||
| I don't blame that kid. | ||
| I would hopefully, will fight to save some of their intellect at some point. | ||
| Hopefully they'll hear some of our good ideas. | ||
| But who do you blame? | ||
| Do you blame the administrators first? | ||
| And the faculty. | ||
| So the people who are putting these stupid programs together, and I think those programs should not be funded. | ||
| And of course the administrators, the faculty, you blame the people who are supposed to be the grown-ups in the room. | ||
| And for them to You know, sign off on these programs where young people are being scared to death on campuses. | ||
| And it's not—here's the paradox. | ||
| The people that they're supposed to protect, and one is feeling protective of, are the ones who get disadvantaged ultimately. | ||
| Because you make people see nothing else but their skin color, or nothing else but their gender, or their transgenderness, or whatever it is, other biological attribute. | ||
| And for four years or five years, you're in a setting where your demands are met, or supposedly met. | ||
| I think usually people just ignore you. | ||
| Right, which would be the best thing to do, actually, I think. | ||
| You would think that, but then you graduate, and then you start taking part in real life. | ||
| And then I wonder, what has this institution of learning done for these young people? | ||
| What has it done to them? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if you were advising a school that was going through this, where every week we see another school going through this and they want a professor fired, they want an administrator fired, what would you say to them? | ||
| I mean, okay, so we can defund some of this stuff, but is it really that we have to teach courses on this? | ||
| I mean, teach the reverse course. | ||
| They're learning identity politics. | ||
| Do we need a counter course? | ||
| Yes, we need individuality courses. | ||
| We need more courses on the American Constitution. | ||
| The individuals who founded this country and the adversities that they went through, I would propose more programs on Western civilization, what makes it distinct from other civilizations, from other cultures. | ||
| And I would most definitely emphasize, when it comes to freedom, the position of the individual, not groups, not individuals. | ||
| You can pretend you're in some kind of group with all black people, but that's not the case. | ||
| You are an individual, and your circumstances are different from other people's. | ||
| And I think when you want, you know, People say, well, if you're going through the same sort of suffering or through the same kind of adversity, it does help to organize, and it does most certainly, and to put on the table exactly what it is that these problems are. | ||
| And together to work out as a group. | ||
| But the members in that group are voluntary. | ||
| They actually say, you know, I'm working with some Muslim women who understand that Sharia as a system of law is really something that's applied to their daily lives, that compromises their freedom, compromises their dignity. | ||
| And as a group, they don't see themselves as victims of anything else other than this particular culture that's practiced by their own parents, their own extended family, their own community, and they want to change, and they want to change these communities. | ||
| But outside of that, outside of those few hours when they're highlighting these issues, they're free individuals going about their daily lives. | ||
| So I'm glad you brought up Sharia and I want to get to that in a second but I said at the beginning I wasn't going to ask you about the past again but I think something that I get people ask me about like you know when they'll ask me when did you wake up to this stuff and start talking about some of this stuff so for you was there actually a moment like was it when you left Somalia and then from then on this idea about individualism and all of this really stuck with you or was it as your your travels continued and some of the some of the Some of the bad things that happened and now some of the good things. | ||
| Was there really a moment where your ideology got crystallized? | ||
| It was gradual. | ||
| I didn't have an ideology. | ||
| I just felt the pain of being told, you can't do this, you have to do that. | ||
| Being resentful and feeling powerless and thinking, well, I can't, I would like to do something. | ||
| I don't want to marry this man because I don't want to end up like my mother and like all these other women I've grown up around who feel powerless and who feel trapped in this and who really wonder what is life all about? | ||
| Why all this suffering? | ||
| And is there something I can do as an individual to be different and to make my own circumstances different? | ||
| So, when I went to Holland and I found people and a society and a culture that actually made it possible and enhanced all of that, I started to think about not so much, you know, developing a counter-ideology, but just trying to understand what's this all about. | ||
| And in my years in Leiden, I went to the University of Leiden, no safe spaces, none of that nonsense existed. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I got introduction to All the various philosophies that preceded the one that we enjoyed at that point in time in the Netherlands. | ||
| And then 9-11 happened, and that brought the issue of Islam for me as a Muslim, as a former Muslim. | ||
| At the time, I identified as a Muslim. | ||
| And so I found myself in 2001, 2002, thinking about, okay, how does all this relate to me, and where do I stand in this? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay, so from there then, let's go back now to Sharia and to Dawah and to political Islam. | ||
| How do we talk about this in a way that's not gonna make people crazy? | ||
| We've already got the idea of ideas and people that these are different things, and you've already talked about that there are a certain amount, of course, of Muslims that are good people. | ||
| As you said, we don't even know what that number is. | ||
| It could be a much bigger number than people might think. | ||
| We simply don't know. | ||
| But how do we explain the dangers of what political Islam is without getting lost in the mess? | ||
| We use the tools that we use to explain other threats and other dangers, as long as you're consistent. | ||
| If you're studying HIV, you have to know something about viruses, and you have to know something about infections, and you have to know something about blood-to-blood transmissions, and all the ways that that virus behaves. | ||
| If you're studying cancers and other threats, malaria, all of that, you've got to know everything about the causes, the vectors, and all the other environmental issues that exacerbate the problem. | ||
| With Islam, I find that very often we talk about We talk about symptoms. | ||
| We talk about the environment. | ||
| We talk about disenfranchised young men. | ||
| We talk about countries that feel that because they have autocratic and, you know, they have dictatorships that maybe the populations are acting out in a certain way. | ||
| But we hardly ever talk about the core of the issue. | ||
| And as far as I'm concerned, if We want to defeat what it is that makes ISIS, Islamic State of Iraq and Syria, so attractive, and al-Qaeda and all these other groups so attractive. | ||
| We will not be able to do that without learning something. | ||
| About the life and legacy of Muhammad, the founder of Islam. | ||
| Part of that legacy is the Koran. | ||
| What is it that he says was revealed to me, and how does that operate in the day-to-day lives of people? | ||
| The leadership, the Saudi Arabian government, spent billions of dollars spreading part of that legacy across the entire world. | ||
| That's da'wah. | ||
| That's an activity to Islamize non-Islamic societies and to strengthen Islam or radical Islam or political Islam within majority Muslim societies. | ||
| So if we don't understand, if we don't scrutinize these activities and don't analyze them properly, we will always be chasing the symptoms. | ||
| Yeah, and this, so this is what we see when we see that Germany, that the amount of mosques in Germany that are funded by Saudi Arabia is up by some, I don't know what the percentage is, but it's some crazy percentage, and that they're teaching these ideas. | ||
| So what, what is the goal then? | ||
| When they say we're, you know, what is the goal of DALA? | ||
| Is it truly to turn these Western countries into Islamic nations, to have a bunch of Westernized people actually suddenly living under Sharia law? | ||
| It's to Islamize. | ||
| And, you know, the president of Turkey, Erdogan, is very explicit about it when he's speaking in Turkish. | ||
| He wants to Islamize Europe. | ||
| He advises immigrants, Muslim immigrants, to have more children because he thinks that's the fastest way. | ||
| And governments like that of Saudi Arabia and Qatar and Kuwait, pump a lot of money into Western societies and target | ||
| immigrant groups and ask them not to assimilate because to assimilate means | ||
| less Islamization and to create these parallel societies where they live by | ||
| what I call Sharia light and Sharia light always starts with trying to cover | ||
| up women and having establishing Sharia councils where marriage and divorce | ||
| laws and laws of custody women are persuaded not to take advantage of or to | ||
| recognize the the normal secular laws that protect them | ||
| So this is literally a set of laws that exists sort of parallel to our regular secular laws, but it replaces them, and this is what certain people are living under. | ||
| Yeah, it's now become a reality, and ever larger numbers of Muslims Adopting this Sharia light and this idea that at some point Europe is going to be Islamized and the West can't be turned against itself to become Islamic. | ||
| Now what we see is there are those groups who use force and violence, they use terrorism, and then there are the governments and the legitimates, they're called legitimate because they are not using violence, at least that's how they regard themselves, that are working within the system. | ||
| To expand the number of people who accept willingly that these Sharia-like laws apply to them. | ||
| So they create parallel communities or parallel societies. | ||
| Now, are they going to really succeed in their goal of Islamizing Europe? | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I hope not. | ||
| I don't think so. | ||
| But they're trying. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And I think there's nothing wrong in recognizing the fact that they're actually trying. | ||
| Yeah, so do we get lost in too much of the violence? | ||
| I mean, if you were to ask the average person who doesn't know that much about this, they would say, well, I'm mostly concerned because I see trucks driving into people in Sweden and shootings in Paris and the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| But that really may be a distraction from really what's going on? | ||
| Like, do these things work together? | ||
| Are the jihadists and the Islamists, even though you're saying they have totally different, the ideologies are different, are they somehow in cahoots? | ||
| Well, our liberal governments do what I think primarily governments must do, which is protect people from terrorist activity. | ||
| So we have intelligence communities that are monitoring individuals and groups who are planning the next terrorist attack. | ||
| And I think that should continue. | ||
| But the rest of us who are not monitoring terrorists, we should understand the process before the jihad. | ||
| So before a guy jumps in a car or in a truck with a knife in his hand or a gun in his hand, you've got to understand how is it that this man came to this conclusion. | ||
| He's going to kill strangers, people he doesn't know. | ||
| What is it? | ||
| And when you look at the history of all the people who've been captured and were able to talk about it, they just say, I'm doing it because I believe that it's my religion. | ||
| They believe that they're going to heaven for doing it. | ||
| And the more you listen to them, the more you compare the notes to what they hear in mosques. | ||
| And what starts at Islamic schools, what is preached sometimes on the streets, so there's all this non-violent activity that is taking full advantage, exploiting the freedom of association, the freedom of religion, the freedom of speech. | ||
| To spread this idea among people, that is, I think, when we as a society should wake up to this and say, wait a second, what is this message? | ||
| What are these people teaching? | ||
| Which groups and individuals are they targeting? | ||
| What is their objective? | ||
| And can we develop a counter-narrative? | ||
| And we have that counter-narrative. | ||
| We don't even have to develop it. | ||
| We just need to market it to those individuals and groups that they target. | ||
| I'm perfectly happy to talk to, and these are the people that I would like to talk to, the prisoners, the immigrants, everywhere, and tell them, listen, you come from a country where Sharia is actually the law. | ||
| And you fled that country. | ||
| It's not a great life. | ||
| You're now in a free country. | ||
| Do you know what the two different philosophies and the two different principles are that each of these countries is founded on? | ||
| This is what Sharia, countries that are founded on the Sharia principle, this is what they look like in real life. | ||
| Life is miserable. | ||
| It's miserable for women. | ||
| It's miserable for religious minorities. | ||
| It's miserable for gays. | ||
| It's miserable for men. | ||
| It's miserable for everyone. | ||
| It's miserable for most of the Muslim people that live there that just want to be free. | ||
| I think in this case a good example is just forget the minorities. | ||
| Just think of the majority. | ||
| Majorities. | ||
| It's miserable for everyone. | ||
| You look at these other nation-states that are founded on the principle of freedom, of equality, of tolerance. | ||
| Hey, life may not be what heaven is painted out to be, where you can have 72 virgins at a time, sorry, and drink wine. | ||
| Seems like a bit much. | ||
| So it's not, you know, that fantastical a new topic and, in my view, kind of, you know, really stupid. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But I wouldn't even use the word stupid. | ||
| I would just say, hey, it might not be as Disneyfied as that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But, you know, you're free to do what you want. | ||
| Life is stable. | ||
| It's predictable. | ||
| You can have your friends in your community, you can build, you can have a passion and develop it. | ||
| You can indulge your senses, art, music, love for cooking, love for others. | ||
| It's so much more attractive. | ||
| In fact, when I came to Holland and here in America, often I think that this is paradise. | ||
| I want to live as long as possible. | ||
| I don't want to go to this promised paradise. | ||
| And so we have to start talking to the same audiences about, is there really an afterlife? | ||
| Was Muhammad really moral? | ||
| Should you really follow everything that Muhammad said to this day? | ||
| Or are there some things that are unacceptable? | ||
| I mean, it's a few centuries later. | ||
| We should at least be able to talk about it, at the very least. | ||
| And we should talk about this in elementary schools, in high schools, in universities. | ||
|
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That's where young people are. | |
| We should use cultural tools, the cinema, music, everything, to try and influence them to make these choices. | ||
| But we've got to make them aware of this other choice, the principles of freedom, because that's not where they come from. | ||
| They want to know it. | ||
| So is that really where the West has failed? | ||
| Your phrase about the tolerance of intolerance, and you're making a very clear case that they want to use our tolerance against us, and yet our tolerance is so built into the West. | ||
| Of course we have problems. | ||
| People, we have monetary, you know, people have all sorts of different amount of money and all kinds of problems. | ||
| And there, of course, are still people that are racist and all of those things. | ||
| But that our basic tolerance is now being turned on us, and we haven't done a good job selling it, right? | ||
| Because we do find out that a lot of these jihadists, they don't come from poor families. | ||
| Many of them come from well-to-do families, and many of them are well-educated and all of those things. | ||
| Which, if we would push that idea out more, perhaps it would give us a little more credit in what we're... | ||
| And what we're trying to do, yeah, I think it is the recognition that it is not like we talked about the symptoms. | ||
| It's not because people are poor. | ||
| In fact, I think people are poor because if the principle of Sharia is the prevailing principle, People will be poor. | ||
| Sharia is not about making money. | ||
| Sharia is about trying to adhere to a set of rules very blindly that are economically unfriendly and that increase inequality. | ||
| I mean, look at the position of women. | ||
| If you lock up women that way and you keep them ignorant, you're going to have a society that's extremely poor and with great inequality. | ||
| With Sharia, it may be well-intended. | ||
| Whatever the intentions are, I can't see the well in there. | ||
| But you are also creating circumstances for the abuse of power. | ||
| Power is concentrated in the hands of very few people. | ||
| The clergymen who believe that they can tell you the difference between right and wrong, who put themselves on God's seat. | ||
| So it's just... | ||
| It opens the doors for ultimate pure exploitation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And we in the West, we have failed to sell. | ||
| And I think part of it is because the people, present day Westerners, didn't do the fighting. | ||
| You know, they were not the young, hungry, scrappy men that made this country. | ||
| They're the ones who inherited After several generations, so people don't know. | ||
| I remember being in Holland and seeing this idea of freedom. | ||
| It was the identity of the Dutchman, almost a biological identity. | ||
| They took it so for granted, they couldn't understand why people didn't just adapt. | ||
| They didn't see that it was something that they had learned from their parents and their environment. | ||
| Their parents had learned from their parents. | ||
| I always compare it to children of wealthy families. | ||
| Family businesses. | ||
| The first generation is the one that makes the money. | ||
| The next generation kind of knows what the first generation went through. | ||
| They are conscious of the fact that they have to carry these responsibilities forward. | ||
| But ultimately, a generation comes that just spends and doesn't know where it all comes from. | ||
| And part of me thinks, you know, we're living at a time when lots of Westerners are really spending this legacy of freedom and they don't know what it is not to be free. | ||
| They don't know what inequality really means. | ||
| I'm not talking about inequality of outcomes. | ||
| I'm talking about this idea that is ingrained in people outside of the West that they have an inferior spot and that that's their spot. | ||
| So as women, you're inferior in a caste system. | ||
| You belong to your caste and you can never come out of it. | ||
| And there's no social mobility. | ||
| Or if there's social mobility, it's because of Western influence. | ||
| It's not an organic thing that comes out of these cultures. | ||
| So Westerners just think, you know, people will come to it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's just simply not true. | ||
| It's not true, and it's dangerous, because if we don't engage in a dower for freedom, we're going to be overtaken by the dower for Sharia. | ||
| So one of the things that I've been trying to figure out, and with a bunch of our allies, some of that I've had on my show, I've been saying, I'm finding it a lot easier right now to build bridges with people that are thought of as more traditionally on the right, because at least it's rooted in the individual, which is obviously a big part of everything you're talking about. | ||
| Do you see room to build anything left with what is the modern left, for the most part? | ||
| So, for example, they'll prop up someone like Linda Sarsour and basically not ever offer you a platform. | ||
| Or even for me, I only get invited to colleges from the young Republicans and the Libertarians and the Freedom This and That, and I think it's probably very similar to you. | ||
| I think that your observation that people who identify as Conservative in this country, and ironically liberal in Europe. | ||
| Right, right, which is another thing, which when you have a show on the internet, then all the words get people crazy. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| So people who identify as conservative in this country, in the United States of America, they find it so much easier to see, you know, what is unfree about so many of these non-Western cultures. | ||
| I find it so much easier to talk to Tucker Carlson of Fox News about female genital mutilation and I really appreciate his, you know, the horrified look on his face and the fact that he thinks this is a practice. | ||
| He doesn't care whether it's justified in the name of culture or religion or whatever. | ||
| It needs to stop. | ||
| And he is going to use his influence and his position to make that point. | ||
| And then I look at The New York Times, one of these New York Times editors, who says, you know what, maybe we should—in order for these cultures to come or to lessen, to To narrow the gap between this culture and that culture, maybe we need to stop calling it mutilation and call it a cut or whatever. | ||
| And that I don't understand. | ||
| I mean, this is literal. | ||
| You're not making this up. | ||
| This is literally a piece that was written just in the last week and a half or so. | ||
| Her name is escaping me. | ||
| But when I look at that kind of reasoning, that kind of logic, and I look, here is a free woman. | ||
| She calls herself a liberal. | ||
| She is with probably the most powerful newspaper in the United States of America. | ||
| Has all this influence. | ||
| Why on earth? | ||
| Is she making this terrible trade-off? | ||
| And the trade-off is this. | ||
| Is it the individual who's actually going through the mutilation, or potentially may go through the mutilation, and that individual is a child, four, five, six years old, seven years old, sometimes younger. | ||
| Some cultures, they start at infancy. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Versus some vague, abstract notion called culture. | ||
| Or some kind of group. | ||
| So people will come and present themselves, grown-ups, and say, well, if you call it mutilation, then I'm offended to my core. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So this is what Bill Maher describes as the soft bigotry of low expectations, right? | ||
| Like we have to change all the words and never say what things exactly are because this could inflame the situation. | ||
| But that goes to, you know, conservatives versus liberals. | ||
| And it becomes so much easier for people like me, for people who come from the countries where this Yeah. | ||
| these terrible things take place and it is justified in the name of culture and | ||
| religion and a combination of the two that we think, yeah, conservatives are our | ||
| friends. Because, you know, they may have a very passionate position on | ||
| closing borders and getting illegals out and all of these things. | ||
| But when it comes to honor killings, when it comes to female genital mutilation, when it comes to, you know, if you're a gay Muslim man, just imagine what you're going through. | ||
| When it comes to all these Muslim apostates, we find that conservatives in this country make it so much easier. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I spoke at University of Arizona a couple weeks ago and I was saying hi to some of the kids after and a kid came up to me. | ||
| And I can see he was really nervous, and he was shaking a little bit, and he said to me that watching my show has helped him, you know, think about some things, and then he told me, he said, I've never told anyone this, but I'm ex-Muslim, and then he said to me, and something else, I'm also like you, which meant he was gay, and he just, he couldn't really say it, and I didn't even know what to do, and he was starting to cry, and I just kind of hugged him, and I was kind of tearing up, and I thought, This is the ultimate irony here. | ||
| Here I am with the, I forget it was the Young Republicans or whatever group it was, and here is where he had to come for refuge, and yet they'll be slammed as the people who are racists and bigots and homophobes and all that. | ||
| But ironically, again, in 2017, it's the conservatives who take very clear positions on radical Islam, on anti-Semitism, on the killing of gays. | ||
| Some of them may be against gay marriage, but here we have a religion that says gays should be killed. | ||
| You never come out of the closet because you risk getting killed by your own family. | ||
| So in that sense, I think, there is a big, shameful smear on the people who describe themselves as liberals and who make excuses for these cultures, these low expectations and racism, bigotry of low expectations. | ||
| Yeah, so I'll put you on the spot here. | ||
| If more left-wing outlets, and I said to you last night, I get the same thing, I only get invited when I get TV things, it's only from Fox. | ||
| People say, why don't you go on MSNBC and talk about this? | ||
| Well, I can't bust down their door. | ||
| But if you got more invites from the things that are thought of as liberal or left, or invited to schools or wherever else, you would do that, correct? | ||
| Well, I would do that. | ||
| I have a relationship with CNN. | ||
| I've been on their show many times when something happens. | ||
| I write for the Daily Beast once in a while. | ||
| It's not, they're not monolithic, and within every organization there are individuals, you know, who just, you know, pure common sense, say these things are inhuman, these are violations of our human rights, and these things should stop. | ||
| But very often I also hear I can't say this or I can't do this because the rest of the organization doesn't want it and they prioritize other subjects or they let the Muslim Brotherhood Front groups take the stage and sedate them basically into saying that Islam is a religion of peace and none of these things has to do with Islam and Muslims in America are victims of Islamophobia and this is then | ||
| Yeah, I mean I can see as you're saying it, it's so ridiculous to you that you're sort of laughing as you're saying it, but so like when you say that, you're talking about basically a group like CARE, and every time something happens, within 10 seconds, and I'm probably giving it an extra 9 seconds, they're immediately talking about Islamophobia as opposed to the victims, or certainly not the ideology or the rest of it. | ||
| And you're saying that this is part of Dawah? | ||
| It's part of Dawah, because what they have seen is this weakness in the West. | ||
| A colleague of mine at Hoover, Shelby Steele, whom I really respect and admire, he calls it white guilt. | ||
| And this white guilt was there before there were any Muslims in the United States of America. | ||
| But organizations like the Council of American Islamic Relations, they see this and they exploit it. | ||
| And sometimes they manufacture this. | ||
| You know, they talk about a backlash. | ||
| No backlash ever happens. | ||
| And then they start manufacturing stories. | ||
| So all, I mean, you look at, the FBI makes these reports on hate crimes. | ||
| And you see that, again, in the United States of America, unfortunately, The largest number of recorded hate crimes is against Jews. | ||
| There is a little bit against Muslims, and then even some of that ends up being, you know, manufactured. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And when CAIR uses cases like those, they don't tell the public, oh, but this case has been debunked. | ||
| They keep using it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And the whole point is they see that people feel guilty, and it's a way of shutting people up. | ||
| It's a way of stopping them from questioning. | ||
| And then what you get is that people start talking about—instead of talking about it | ||
| openly in open platforms, you see—you hear people talk about it, you know, behind closed | ||
| doors and on birthdays and in scenes where you can't really have a proper debate from | ||
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Right. | |
| And that's unhealthy. | ||
| Well, it's unhealthy, but then the irony is that then, you know, a terrorist attack happens, they immediately do that, and then the only time that these networks put some of the reformers or the ex-Muslims, so Majid or you or whoever else, they only put them on right after, when the feelings are still raw. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| We're doing this, hopefully nothing happened while we're doing this, and we'll put it out, and it'll be for people to learn. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| But the media now, at least cable news, is so reactive That you have these competing things that make no sense together. | ||
| You have the reaction of, it's Islamophobia, as I think you said in one of the things, the bodies were still warm. | ||
| Or you have the reaction of, they only put you on while it's happening and it's still raw. | ||
| So it's like these competing forces. | ||
| Or they frame a story in such a way that Major Nidal Malik Hassan's attack was Workplace violence. | ||
| Orlando was just another gay, hating man, and it has nothing to do with what he said it had to do, you know? | ||
| And had he been Christian, of course they would have said, if they could have found the most light connection to Christianity, the left would have went bananas with this, and they would have said, you see, the Westboro Baptist Church and the Christians are doing this, but they, and that's what's causing the backlash, because they're going so out of their, they're bending over backwards, and they're starting to look ridiculous. | ||
| But there is no backlash, you see. | ||
| We live in a country of about three hundred... three million... | ||
| 300 million, 325 million people. | ||
| And if you look at, again, these FBI records, it's really minimal. | ||
| You don't see a backlash. | ||
| You see the opposite. | ||
| You see people, Americans, saying, you know, I'm going to protect my Muslim. | ||
| Right? | ||
| You see rabbis and Christian priests and the leadership going out and organizing more interfaith. | ||
| Muslims being welcomed everywhere. | ||
| You don't see a backlash. | ||
| They've been saying this in Europe, they've been saying there is no backlash. | ||
| Right, we see these pictures where they'll write something mean and then half of them turn out to be fakes, as you said before. | ||
| Yeah, and by the way, that happens on all sides, that whole thing about the JCCs, the Jewish Community Centers being called, it turned out to be an Israeli that was doing it, a Jewish Israeli. | ||
| So again, you can see things bad wherever they are either way. | ||
| But when something like that happens within the Jewish community, Jewish communities, because there are several Jewish communities, they get incensed, and they stop it, and they come out and say, yes, this is one of us, this guy is one of us, and for whatever reason he's doing it, it needs to be stopped. | ||
| But when you look at the Muslim leadership, have you seen anyone come out Among, you know, the organized Muslim groups to say, let's stop this now. | ||
| This whole bogus Islamophobia charge, let's stop it. | ||
| Let's do away with it. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You don't see that. | ||
| What you see are people like Asra Normani and the other Muslim reformers who are saying, we don't feel the backlash as Muslims. | ||
| In fact, we are more scared of these organized Islamists than we are about some kind of extreme right-wing backlash that never happens. | ||
| Right, okay, so I want to, before we finish, I want to talk a little bit at the end about your foundation and what you're doing, because I think you're building some new things now that I think are important, and a network to stop a network, I think, is loosely what you said before, which is, that's what we need. | ||
| But I do want to spend a couple minutes talking about female genital mutilation, because we've mentioned it. | ||
| I read your piece about it, and you described the five types, and it's horrific. | ||
| And the only reason I want to talk about it is because reading it, and even the way you wrote it, I think after the third type, you said, this is getting hard to read. | ||
| It was hard to read from the beginning, but you said something to that effect. | ||
| And really, I really was having trouble reading it. | ||
| I mean, it's so viscerally awful. | ||
| So we can go through all of them if you want, but we don't have to. | ||
| But can you just... | ||
| For a couple minutes just lay out what's going on there, because people are now hearing it, and you're right, when the New York Times then says, well, it's cutting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And, you know, last night you described some of the other... Oh, yeah, and some academics say this has been going on for a long time and it must have some kind of value that we as Westerners don't understand, so we should just let it be. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So we'll link to the article down below so people can read it, but if you want to just lay out a little bit of it. | ||
| Well, the first thing I want to point out is this is being done to children. | ||
| It's being done to girls, little girls, vulnerable by people they trust, their parents. | ||
| Their extended family, grandmothers, aunts, a lot of women are involved in keeping this practice in place. | ||
| They have their reasons for doing it. | ||
| They say it's religious, it's to give the girl the opportunity for a husband in the future, whatever. | ||
| So this poor little girl is really not consulted at any moment about whether she wants it or not. | ||
| It's harmful. | ||
| In some cases, it's so harmful and debilitating, it leads to paralysis, it leads to death. | ||
| Children bleed to death. | ||
| I can't even begin to talk about the psychological effects of once you realize that a part of you has to go because it's filthy. | ||
| And so you have to realize that. | ||
| It's happening to children. | ||
| Yes, it does happen outside of the United States, and now we are seeing those cultures come here and carry on the practice. | ||
| We have laws here that purport to protect all children. | ||
| And what you're doing by accepting this practice, or turning a blind eye to it, is that you're saying the United States laws that protect all girls and women do not protect these few. | ||
| Girls from Egypt, from Sudan, whose parents are from Egypt and Sudan, and Saudi Arabia, and India or Pakistan, any of these countries where It's commonplace to cut the genitals of girls, to mutilate and to close them. | ||
| The law does not protect them. | ||
| So you're quite literally saying we have laws except for the people who need those laws the most. | ||
|
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Yes. | |
| I mean, it's the height of absurdity, actually. | ||
| It's the height of absurdity. | ||
| Again, you go back to the bigotry. | ||
| This is, it's turning everything. | ||
| If you are not a racist, and you really mean it, Then you should open up these laws to little girls from these cultures. | ||
| With forced marriages, with honor killings, it's the same thing. | ||
| If you believe that the law should protect all women to own their own bodies and to make their own choices, then the same laws should protect these girls. | ||
| The girls who come to the AHA Foundation at the age of 16, 17, I'm being forced to marry. | ||
| If I disagree, I'm going to be killed by my father. | ||
| We can't get law enforcement to help out. | ||
| We give, we teach, we've created training manuals, we talk to service providers and all that. | ||
| But one thing that I really think needs to become, and this is our aspiration, The aspiration of the AHA Foundation is to make every American aware of the fact that these practices, child marriage, forced marriage, female genital mutilation, honor violence, and honor killings are happening right here. | ||
| And these vulnerable women are excluded. | ||
| They're excluded from the laws that protect us all. | ||
| Yeah, so then I think as a perfect ending, so your foundation, you've changed around a few things, you guys are growing. | ||
| I know you're doing a partnership with Faisal. | ||
| For people that want to get involved, because I do think we're getting some wins here. | ||
| This type of stuff is starting to resonate. | ||
| How can they get involved? | ||
| I mean, of course, people can give money and help get voices out and help find some people | ||
| that are in closed societies and things like that. | ||
| But what else can people do? | ||
| Volunteer work. | ||
| Because if you understand what the problem is, and you have the time, you can help us take that awareness. | ||
| Volunteer your time. | ||
| If you're good with social media or other ways of reaching as many people as possible, please help us out. | ||
| If you are a teacher, if you are a policeman, if you are any other service provider somewhere in the country, and you are confronted with any of these practices, please let us know. | ||
| Yeah, we are an activist group and again we want to shine the light on these terrible practices against women, but we also want to work with all other groups that are targeted by Sharia. | ||
| We want to work with the gay community, we want to work with the Jewish communities, we want to work with the Christian communities. | ||
| Nobody really in the United States, very few people, very few groups talk about what is done to Christians. | ||
| in the Middle East, these blasphemies, et cetera. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| And how this whole thing is finding its way into traditionally Christian countries. | ||
| I mean, there's almost no Christians left in the Middle East. | ||
| Yeah, they've been eradicated. | ||
| And even the ones that are left. | ||
| And it's not just the Middle East. | ||
| Think about the blasphemy laws in Pakistan. | ||
| Think about what happens to Christians in Malaysia and Indonesia. | ||
| None of this is really discussed in the way it should be. | ||
| It should be headline news every single day, I believe, until it stops. | ||
| We should be pressuring our government to Thai economic, political, diplomatic, you know, to use all | ||
| of these tools as a pressure method to stop these persecutions. The mainstream | ||
| media is not reporting. Once in a while you see a report here or there, | ||
| but it's not a campaign. It doesn't look like it's being taken up. And I | ||
| think we should, you know, make all of this... I'm someone who's really benefited from | ||
| globalization. | ||
| I am an immigrant who is really grateful to have been allowed here in the Netherlands and to have come out of this. | ||
| And I think my duty, as with other successful immigrants, is to make sure that we shine a light on these atrocities. | ||
| Yeah, well, I know it truly is about being an individual because you've inspired hundreds, if not, I'm sure, thousands of people, including me, that got me to have a little bravery to do what I do, and that's all we need. | ||
| So it's been a pleasure. | ||
| I could talk to you all day, but I know you have many more things to do today, so I thank you for coming in. | ||
| And for you guys that do want to get involved, check out IONS Foundation. |
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