Dec. 17, 2018 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:06:09
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| Joining me today is an Iranian-born Shia Muslim scholar and the president of the Islamic Association of South Australia, Imam Mohamed Tawidi. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Hello, Dave. | ||
| Thank you for having me. | ||
| Which one of us is going to be in more trouble for doing this? | ||
| Well, I'm already in enough trouble, so hopefully we can share that part. | ||
| All right, so two interesting things have happened even before we start this conversation. | ||
| First, you said to me in the green room, nothing is off limits. | ||
| You said, ask me the hardest questions you can possibly do. | ||
| Please. | ||
| I appreciate that as an interviewer, and it's a refreshing thing to hear. | ||
| I just thought it was interesting that you even said that to me, because it's like, you know, a lot of times people just want to come in and say what they want, but you want to be challenged. | ||
| You want to go to those places. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| I've had many interviews, over 400 interviews in the last two years, whether they be on radio or television or YouTube, and I just feel that many people give us special treatment just because I'm Muslim, and even though they know that I do have some conservative views, such as a border on border protection, national security, | ||
| but even then, they still want to give me that special treatment, | ||
| so I made that request publicly as well. | ||
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| Please don't be nice. | ||
| There's a lot of information I can share. | ||
| All right, well, I'm probably gonna be nice to you, but I will try to get to some of the hard stuff. | ||
| Don't worry, it's right here. | ||
| That's number one, and then number two, right before we started, | ||
| you requested that normally right behind you there, we have a little thing of wine bottles | ||
| that are right behind you, and you asked that we removed it | ||
| just out of your direct shot behind you because you just don't want to get any bonus hate, | ||
| let's say, which I think is, I sympathize with that position, | ||
| but it's also sort of interesting 'cause you take all of these very controversial positions, | ||
| and it's like, oh, well, they got 'em with some wine bottles. | ||
| It's like Yes. | ||
| Well, these issues serve the extremist agenda. | ||
| If the extremists can obtain an image of me beside a wine bottle or in a bar, for example, then they can easily discredit me as a Muslim Imam because Muslims don't drink. | ||
| And I don't drink either. | ||
| But they can easily stick that accusation when they have a picture of me being close to a wine bottle. | ||
| And they want that and I'm not going to allow them to do that. | ||
| How thrilled are they going to be that you're in the home studio of a gay Jew? | ||
| That's got to be worse than wine bottles. | ||
| What's the list? | ||
| Well, I'd say 80% upset. | ||
| Yeah, they won't be happy. | ||
| They won't be happy at the fact that you have a large audience as well. | ||
| So they try to silence me, and you've got people that try to silence you as well. | ||
| But I'm happy to be here. | ||
| Gay or not, Jew or not, I'm happy to be here. | ||
| Yeah, and I'm happy you're here. | ||
| Alright, so let's let it fly. | ||
| So first, just tell me a little bit about your history. | ||
| You grew up in Iran until you were about 12 years old, right? | ||
| Correct. | ||
| I was in Iran for the first 12 years of my life, and then we travelled to Australia. | ||
| We landed in 1995. | ||
| My father is a prominent Muslim, a faith leader as well, an imam. | ||
| And he traveled from Melbourne, which we first landed, to Western Australia and established the first Shia Muslim mosque. | ||
| And it was originally a church. | ||
| It was called St. | ||
| Mary Church, so he left the name St. | ||
| Mary Mosque. | ||
| Wow! | ||
| Out of respect for the greater Christian majority. | ||
| And you see, my father, I learned tolerance from him. | ||
| He didn't have that belief in him that, oh, it's a church, it's filthy, we can't turn it into a mosque. | ||
| It was for sale. | ||
| The people welcomed the mosque. | ||
| None of these terrorist attacks had happened. | ||
| People were fine with mosques. | ||
| And so the first mosque was erected in Perth, Western Australia. | ||
| And basically I grew up there until 2007. | ||
| I was raised amongst scholars and Islamic teachings in a very conservative Muslim family. | ||
| So what does a conservative Muslim family mean? | ||
| A conservative Muslim family goes the extra mile to be extra religious. | ||
| So we wouldn't even go to banks or shopping centers that played music, let alone listening to music ourselves. | ||
| Whereby other Muslims would not listen to music because it's banned in mainstream Islamic jurisprudence. | ||
| They would still go to shopping centers and, you know, attend music lessons in school, but we were very, very conservative. | ||
| I couldn't wear anything shiny or anything like that, such as watches or necklaces or anything like that. | ||
| What was that like for you just as a young person that, you know, I'm sure you knew that music was out there. | ||
| I'm sure you knew movies were out there and video games and the rest of it. | ||
| I'd never been to a cinema until I was 20 years old. | ||
| I've never actually completed a movie. | ||
| Now, I'm not here to play the oppressed person and it was harsh. | ||
| I know you are not. | ||
| But I try to be as honest as I can. | ||
| I didn't know what that life was like, so the life I was living was very normal. | ||
| It was, this is how life is to me. | ||
| I didn't know there was another life and in fact, when I first moved to a public Australian school, I I was shocked that we actually had people that were not | ||
| Muslim because the school I grew up in was a, I was raised in initially, completed my | ||
| initial studies in Western Australia, there was a private Muslim school, also a conservative | ||
| atmosphere. | ||
| So the house was a conservative atmosphere, school was a conservative atmosphere, up until | ||
| 2007, I go back to Iran, and then you've got Sharia law everywhere. | ||
| So I've never actually had time to be open to the rest of the world and just accept everyone, | ||
| and that happened after my family was oppressed by ISIS in 2014, when I was still there studying, | ||
| and it just hit me, that this can't be the way we were supposed to live. | ||
| Do you remember the moment that it hit you? | ||
| Was it was it finally going to another school? | ||
| No. | ||
| I was an Islamist, a fundamentalist, and an extremist as well. | ||
| Yeah, okay, so I'm gonna later in the interview let's define some of those terms because I think people get lost a little bit in the difference between Islamist, Jihadist, fundamentalist, etc. | ||
| Okay, so put it to you this way. | ||
| I wouldn't have sat with you. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Before 2014. | ||
| I wouldn't even shake your hand. | ||
| Because that was the mentality that I had. | ||
| Complete rejection of the West. | ||
| And I was walking in the holy city of Karbala. | ||
| It's a Shia Muslim stronghold. | ||
| And the speakers of the sacred shrine of Imam Hussain announced that Mosul, which is Mosul, The Iraqi city close to Baghdad had fallen under the authority of ISIS. | ||
| And that's what an hour away from where I was. | ||
| So that's when it really hit me. | ||
| And then as I tried to leave the country, I found a lot of struggle because airports were now blocked. | ||
| These guys were shooting down airplanes. | ||
| And the Australian passport that I had saved me. | ||
| I was given priority and I returned back to Australia. | ||
| But before all of this happened, my uncle was kidnapped, burnt alive, who served in the Iraqi army. | ||
| And we had to go receive his body from Baghdad. | ||
| So this whole scenario woke me up. | ||
| And when I came to Australia, I saw that, hang on, Muslims are killing Muslims. | ||
| I've been interrogated in Iran for several times for my views and opinions. | ||
| And the Muslims in Australia are playing the victim card, crying Islamophobia. | ||
| So then I started to form diplomatic relations and public relations to combat extremists. | ||
| So what was it like right when you got onto the scene, right when you started being more public about this? | ||
| Because I'll be very honest with you, when I first saw you on Twitter and you were tweeting about some of these things, I thought, I can't, well, so immediately, everybody was like, Ruben, you've got to have Imam Tawidi on. | ||
| Everybody was saying it, and I was like, this guy just came out of nowhere. | ||
| I can't just magically sit down with him. | ||
| I am not perfectly versed in all of these things, obviously, and I don't want to be used as a pawn, basically. | ||
| So, what was it like as you started talking about these things from the inside community and the outside community? | ||
| Okay, the inside community knew who I was because of my lineage. | ||
| Because I descend from the... | ||
| The companions of Prophet Muhammad, one of the early converts from Christianity into Islam, and, you know, shared their wealth and their military and their tribes and everything, military power with Prophet Muhammad, and they went throughout Arabia in all the wars, and I've written in my book that they're terrorists. | ||
| So my prominent lineage, my father, my grandfather, and also the fact that I was close to the Grand Ayatollahs and I was ordained publicly as an Imam, So the inside world of Islam knew who I was, and I still had Facebook, I still had Twitter, you know, a very humble following, a basic following, but I was still known. | ||
| Not the big Twitter star you are now. | ||
| Well, life changes. | ||
| So what happened was the Muslims knew me. | ||
| And there are many forums now dating back to 2008 that discuss what I'm doing. | ||
| So they knew who I was. | ||
| Right. | ||
| But as you started speaking up against these things... I didn't have plans to speak out. | ||
| I didn't have plans. | ||
| I'm going to be honest with you. | ||
| Many people think that I have an agenda. | ||
| I didn't have any plans. | ||
| I was discovered by... look how I'm putting it as though... American Idol! | ||
| Australian Idol! | ||
| Let's go! | ||
| I got a call from Channel 7 One of the best Australian channels, top channels. | ||
| And they had a program called Today Tonight and apparently they googled Imam Adelaide Muslim just to get a comment. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So they came in wanting a three-minute comment on a certain issue and I gave them a 30-minute talk about the Muslim community and everything. | ||
| And so they take that and then the director gets in touch with me and they're like, you know, we can do a lot with what you're saying and you have this we didn't know. | ||
| So then I became known in the area nationally and then internationally and I had a few heated exchanges on Australian television, Sunrise. | ||
| Yeah, were those usually with, I suspect they were probably with white people on the left. | ||
| Is that fair to say? | ||
| Or maybe with people more extreme on the right. | ||
| Something to that effect. | ||
| We did have several interviews where the host was a leftist and the other guest was an extremist Muslim and they would gang up. | ||
| That's how you know you're doing something right. | ||
| write a reply, or for example-- | ||
| That's how you know you're doing something right, right? | ||
| Yeah, or write articles about me without even asking my opinion, | ||
| or just pops up, article one, article two, article three. | ||
| So were you shocked once you started talking about these issues and the problems that you see | ||
| within Islam and the solutions that you see, were you shocked where you were getting comfort from | ||
| and where you were getting hatred from? | ||
| I was absolutely confused. | ||
| Confused is the right word to put it. | ||
| Because on one hand, I've got politicians calling me, telling me that you are an asset, you speak English, you're young, you present yourself well, you know how to talk, you're against extremists, you love Australia, clean record, we need you, but not publicly. | ||
| So that really hurt because what do you mean not publicly? | ||
| You want to work with me behind the scene, but you still want to visit the extremists for votes. | ||
| Why wouldn't they want? | ||
| Oh, so that's purely votes. | ||
| So that really does tell you about some demographic stuff, I suppose, that we'll talk about. | ||
| So they'll sit with me privately. | ||
| And these meetings aren't official meetings. | ||
| No, no, no. | ||
| I would actually have my My turban on the side and we just, I'll open some buttons and we just, it was a very relaxed gathering with these politicians. | ||
| For the record, you walked in here turbanless and without the robes. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| So just, you know, FYI. | ||
| And it was a very friendly gathering with the gifts. | ||
| We would exchange gifts, but as soon as the issue turned public, it's like they don't know me. | ||
| So that almost gets to the heart of exactly why the discussion around Islam is so difficult, because every time someone tries to come in and talk some sense about the difference between an ideology and people, and all of the sort of moderate things that I see you talking about all the time, you guys are the ones that get thrown under the bus. | ||
| There's so many examples of this, of almost every minority that tries to fight from within. | ||
| They're the ones that get thrown under the bus, and then all that does is strengthen the extremists. | ||
| I think what helped me a lot was the fact that I had a political advisor, a man who worked in the Australian Parliament for 40 years, retired now, Australian, so born in Australia, non-Muslim. | ||
| Can I ask you his name? | ||
| No, I'm really sorry because I fear for his safety. | ||
| And basically this man was giving me advice as to how to handle the media because, look Dave, you asked me a question about how I felt. | ||
| Let me just give you one scenario so you know exactly what was going through my mind. | ||
| I'm criticizing extremists on Twitter. | ||
| I get a phone call from the ABC in Australia. | ||
| This is the main Australian broadcasting corporation. | ||
| And they asked me, what is my opinion about claims that I am aligning myself with the right? | ||
| And I said, what is the right? | ||
| I did not know. | ||
| So I came from a completely conservative Muslim background. | ||
| Now I'm trying to serve humanity. | ||
| This is my only agenda, going against the extremists. | ||
| And someone's telling me that there's left and there's right. | ||
| Now I have to sit back and try to understand what's happening. | ||
| All right, so which politician that I met with was on the right? | ||
| Which one was on the left? | ||
| We're trying to put everything together and get some perspective. | ||
| And that was one of the things that really confused me. | ||
| So it was really good to have a political advisor two and a half years ago, because he told me exactly what was going on. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So what about the reaction from within the community, though? | ||
| I would imagine once you start talking about these things, often the reaction from within the community is going to be even worse, because now you're a traitor and a sellout and the rest of it. | ||
| The community reaction was very fast and evaporated quickly. | ||
| Because the Imam stayed silent. | ||
| If the leaders carried on, then it would be a different scenario. | ||
| So what do you make of that? | ||
| I make that the leaders agree with me because they still come to my house and we have dinners and no problem, but they don't want any photos. | ||
| But I do have photos, but I share that with the people in government to know what the progress is with what I'm doing. | ||
| I'm not a one-man band walking around with nobody. | ||
| No, Muslim leaders come to my house and we have amazing dinners and we talk about Muslim issues, but the community will reject them if they know that they have relations with me. | ||
| In a way, does that type of person, although I can sympathize with their position, right? | ||
| They don't want their congregation to turn on them or something like that, but that type of person that gives you the quiet support, But won't do it publicly. | ||
| Isn't it, in a way, the most frustrating type of support? | ||
| I find that. | ||
| I have so many people that will come up to me, public people, people more famous with plenty more money and all sorts of things, that come up to me and say, Dave, you know, I really love your show and I'm sorry I can't tweet about it. | ||
| I just don't want to get in hot water. | ||
| And I think this is a theme amongst a lot of the people that we're sort of connected to. | ||
| It's frustrating, but I also appreciate it. | ||
| Because at least I know who's on my side and who will not attack me with a fatwa without me knowing. | ||
| So it's good. | ||
| I don't appreciate the silent ones. | ||
| Is there a co-fatwa? | ||
| Could we get a fatwa on both of us right here? | ||
| That would be amazing. | ||
| It's like an episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm. | ||
| That would be amazing. | ||
| But it would certainly pave the way for other people to get fatwas, so I don't know how we would feel about that. | ||
| Right, right. | ||
| We could deal with it. | ||
| We can, we can. | ||
| Okay, so let's just do a little bit of sort of Islam 101 and sort of how to talk about these issues. | ||
| So when I first sort of became interested in all of this, most of my audience knows my sort of political evolution, But it was the night, and I suspect you've probably seen this, that Sam Harris, the neuroscientist, was on Real Time with Bill Maher, and they were talking about the difference between Islam, a set of ideas, and Muslims as people, and that you shouldn't be prejudiced, but you should be allowed to criticize ideas. | ||
| And the line that sort of caught the internet on fire was Ben Affleck calling Bill Maher and Sam Harris gross and racist. | ||
| He said, that's gross and racist. | ||
| And for me, and I was a progressive at the time and the whole thing, I thought, whoa, this just captures everything that I've seen wrong with my side. | ||
| The inability to deal with a complex issue honestly, and that the immediate charge is you must be racist, you must be a bigot, and the rest of it. | ||
| So first off, can you just talk a little bit about that, just how you can talk about a doctrine, any doctrine, but in this case through an Islamic lens, and then how you can do that but then not be racist or prejudiced towards people. | ||
| Okay, that's a very dangerous area to fall into, because I'm not a political commentator. | ||
| I am trying to change the mentality of a community, at least on a local level, socially. | ||
| I might not be able to change Mecca and change the whole religion, but at least where we live We want to have a peaceful community so I'm trying to present a better example for the moderates or the vulnerable ones than the extremist imam in their own mosque. | ||
| So it is a very dangerous field because the moment you lose their trust You lose a Muslim man's trust, or any Muslim individual's trust. | ||
| If you then recite the Quran, they'll say you're lying, because they lost your trust. | ||
| It's finished. | ||
| They don't trust you anymore. | ||
| And I find it very difficult to get that point across. | ||
| However, what I do is, I use a lot of quotations. | ||
| So it's not my words. | ||
| I quote certain issues and I refer to certain social events and I comment on them. | ||
| So I try my best not to make any statements for myself, because the level of mentality within the Muslim world is that, okay, as long as it has a divine coating, then we'll accept it. | ||
| If it's from Tawhid himself, then it's man-made. | ||
| So if it's divine, they also can't reject it. | ||
| So I try to use a lot of quotations. | ||
| Okay, so can you give me an example of, say, a quotation, and then how you would approach it? | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| For example, when I speak against stoning, I can refer to the most sacred book outside the Qur'an, the Bukhari, and show that the stoning began when two monkeys were throwing rocks at each other in Bukhari, throwing rocks at each other, and the companion of Muhammad saw them and said, okay, so that monkey must be a female and must have cheated on that male, so he's stoning her, so we must apply that. | ||
| And this is the most sacred book after the Qur'an. | ||
| And the Qur'an itself does not have a verse on stoning, because a goat ate that verse. | ||
| So what I do is I bring these sacred scriptures that speak about stoning, how it began with monkeys, and the verse that was supposedly there was eaten by a goat, and I quickly say, well, this is a monkey teaching. | ||
| It sounds funny, and so I'm having a go at them, but the evidence is there. | ||
| Okay, so we can talk about these issues. | ||
| A certain amount of people all over the map are gonna not be happy with either one of us. | ||
| Do you have proof of some of the inroads that you've been able to make in terms of de-radicalizing people? | ||
| The extremists are so frustrated with me. | ||
| They're trying to ban me. | ||
| I've got diplomats in the Pakistani government that try to shut me down. | ||
| Are you banned on Facebook as we tape this right now? | ||
|
unidentified
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Yes, yes. | |
| You were banned a couple days ago. | ||
| Can you just explain to people what you posted? | ||
| Because I retweeted it. | ||
| It's incredible. | ||
| I wasn't sure if the ban was still up. | ||
| Hopefully it's still up by the time we post this in a couple days, but hopefully not. | ||
| The amazing song, Jihad Bells, Jihad Bells, Jihad all the way. | ||
| I got that song and I posted it on Facebook and I said, I share this song every Christmas because the extremists don't like it. | ||
| Therefore, please share it. | ||
| And it's a funny song. | ||
| It ridicules them for what they're doing. | ||
| And Facebook shut me down for 30 days and said that was hate speech. | ||
| That was it. | ||
| So I find it very ridiculous. | ||
| This is the ninth time Facebook has blocked me or banned me or unpublished my page completely in 2018. | ||
| So it's, you know, Twitter has never suspended me not once. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| What do you make of what's going on with our ability to talk about these issues online? | ||
| So you haven't been Suspended by Twitter, but this has happened a bunch of times on Facebook. | ||
| Do you know my friend Faisal Amutar? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| So Faisal, who is one of my best friends on earth, I love the guy, I adore him. | ||
| He has been banned several times for tweeting out similar, or for posting on Facebook several things like that. | ||
| It's like, do they realize, do you think they realize they're actually emboldening the extremists the more they try to take people like you out? | ||
| Well, they definitely do because the extremists only operate as much as they do because they know that they can operate with no criticism. | ||
| Or if there is criticism, it's only one or two accounts that are speaking against them. | ||
| So by shutting me down, I mean, that's a big win for the jihadists because let's not forget, jihadists use Facebook friend recommendations to build cyber societies The Cyber Caliphate and it's a real study that Facebook's been falling into this trap where it's website recommends jihadists to each other based on the pages they like. | ||
| So now they have this community and Twitter is the same. | ||
| Twitter recommends friends to each other. | ||
| So these guys have that advantage With the help of Facebook and Twitter. | ||
| But we don't. | ||
| When someone likes my page, the next person that comes on is a right-wing figure. | ||
| So the people say, okay, we're not gonna like this page and we're gonna unfollow this guy too. | ||
| Yeah, it's incredible. | ||
| You're fighting an ideological war at some level and an algorithmic war. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| At another level. | ||
| So let's just do some of the definitional stuff. | ||
| So first off, you've mentioned moderate Muslims sometimes. | ||
| What would you say are the categories, so to speak, of Muslim people? | ||
| Okay, well, there's a Muslim who believes in God, believes in the Prophet Muhammad, believes in the Quran. | ||
| And just an average person who, and this is me speaking in the West, believes that they should pray five times a day, fast in Ramadan, celebrate the Muslim celebrations, that's about it. | ||
| That's the definition of a Muslim. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| But could you be less than that and still be Muslim, so to speak? | ||
|
unidentified
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No. | |
| So you couldn't be just sort of nominally secular Muslim where you don't pray five times a day? | ||
| Then you're just Muslim by name. | ||
| So you would say that, would you say that's ex-Muslim? | ||
| So there is a, I wanted to ask you about the ex-Muslim community also, but, so you would say that's just, you would say that's actually not Muslim, that's just sort of? | ||
| Look, a Muslim, the term Muslim, It's taken from Islam, which means submission. | ||
| So it's a verb. | ||
| A Muslim is a man who's submitting. | ||
| So every day you're praying, so you are upholding that name of being a Muslim. | ||
| If you don't pray, then you're just Muslim by name. | ||
| You're not an actual Muslim. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You're not an ex-Muslim because you haven't denounced the religion. | ||
| You're just missing prayers or drinking alcohol. | ||
| Right. | ||
| So do you have any idea of the numbers of that amount? | ||
| I would imagine in the West that that's Probably a very large percentage of Muslims. | ||
| The majority of Muslims believe in God and pray, and there are also Muslims that believe in God, Allah, believe in Muhammad, but don't pray. | ||
| So, I wouldn't say that's an issue for us. | ||
| They can pray or not pray, whenever they like. | ||
| For me, it's the more extremist ones, and then trying to differentiate between the moderate and the extremist. | ||
| Right, okay, so we've got sort of just the ones by name only, I gather, the ones who, let's say, aren't practicing, but still are, they were born Muslim, they're Muslim, then... The ones who are not practicing, Yeah. | ||
| Right, so that's where I was trying to get with this, to understand what your definition of moderate is. | ||
| It's the ones who don't practice, and by not practicing, I mean the other laws of Islam. | ||
| So, for example, the stoning, the killing, the reporting on people who break the blasphemy law, issues like that. | ||
| People who just don't care, just want to go to work 9-5, come back, raise a family, live life, go on holidays. | ||
| Yeah, parents were Muslim, were born Muslim, but that's about it. | ||
| These guys are the ones who are referred to as moderates. | ||
| But they're not really moderates. | ||
| The moderate is the Muslim that is conservative but wishes to ban certain teachings, certain verdicts. | ||
| They are the moderates. | ||
| So the moderate is the one who's sort of staying within the religion and fighting the extreme parts of the religion, that's what you would say? | ||
| Whether it be personally, on a family level, not raising their children in extremist mosques, those are the moderates. | ||
| Okay, and then you obviously include yourself in that. | ||
| Well, I can see why this would be a tough question for you. | ||
| I don't believe in something called moderate Islam. | ||
| Now, just for the viewers to not get confused, I'm answering your question based on what society and what Islam says. | ||
| My personal opinion could be another thing. | ||
| So you might want to ask me what my opinion is on this issue. | ||
|
unidentified
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I don't believe there's a moderate... Let's pretend I asked you your opinion on this issue. | |
| There is no moderate Islam. | ||
| Islam is Islam and you're either a reformist, a reformer, a reformed person, or you're still a Muslim. | ||
| The Muslims who don't chop the hand of the thief and don't stone and don't apply the violence of Sharia law, they've diverted away from the core beliefs of Islam. | ||
| So in a weird way, you're an imam who also, you obviously have a great, affinity's not the right word, you have a great respect, I suppose, for the ex-Muslims, in a way. | ||
| The ex-Muslims have every right to be where they are, because now is the worst time to be a Muslim. | ||
| And when a Muslim has a problem or is facing a problem, whether it be inheritance, financial issues, abuse at home, divorce after being married off, you know, at a very young age, they don't find the person who listens to them. | ||
| The majority of imams in mosques have zero qualifications when it comes to counseling, when it comes to solving real life problems. | ||
| They only know how to talk when it's against Israel, against the Jews, and to play the victim card and basically spread news about what they're doing in society. | ||
| So the ex-Muslims, the majority of them leave the religion because, number one, they really feel it's not for them anymore. | ||
| And the people who paved the way for them, right, I do know that some people read Richard Dawkins or read certain books and then change their religion or leave religion completely. | ||
| But ISIS makes more ex-Muslims than any intellectual in the West. | ||
| So if we want to blame ex-Muslim for being ex-Muslim, it's the fundamentalist Muslims that made them ex-Muslim. | ||
| They are the ones who are making them leave the religion. | ||
| Right, and that's completely contrary to what the media would portray about this. | ||
| They would say that if you talk about any of this, you're driving people to become extremists, which, as many people call it, this is the soft bigotry of low expectations. | ||
| If I was to say anything that might offend you, you would automatically become an extremist, which is such a horrific way of viewing another human being. | ||
| Is there something that I could say to you that somehow you might end up blowing me up? | ||
| Nothing. | ||
| If you were to kill me, and I'd come back to life, I'd still hug you. | ||
| Seriously, I'd still shake your hand. | ||
| You got nothing to worry about, brother. | ||
| Okay, so let's just do a little bit more of the definition. | ||
| Okay, so wait, so we have sort of the ex-Muslims and the nominal Muslim, then the moderate that you say is not really a thing, actually. | ||
| Then can you sort of explain Islamist and Jihadist? | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And if there's anything else that I missed within that? | ||
| An Islamist is an individual that believes in preaching and spreading and expanding Islam and the message of Islam through militant means. | ||
| So they would spread Islam by the sword and now the tactics are a bit different. | ||
| Now it's getting through Congress. | ||
| So before it was by the sword, now it's getting themselves into Parliament and then making laws that act as the sword, the Islamophobia law in Canada, M103. | ||
| So an Islamist would silence you just to spread his agenda. | ||
| That's different from a Muslim. | ||
| A Muslim would say, okay, this is the Quran. | ||
| I believe Allah is the right God. | ||
| I believe Islam is true. | ||
| Accept it. | ||
| You don't accept it. | ||
| You're not gonna be saved. | ||
| Good night. | ||
| Good night. | ||
| That's basically a Muslim. | ||
| An Islamist will actually go the extra mile of kidnapping someone because they drank alcohol and whipping them because they believe that is the right thing to do. | ||
| We've seen across Europe. | ||
| Statues are being destroyed because it's not allowed in Islam. | ||
| So that's an Islamist. | ||
| An Islamist organization would be Hamas. | ||
| Hamas is an Islamist organization that did terrorist doings. | ||
| It's responsible for terrorist activities, so then it became a terrorist organization. | ||
| But its ideology is an Islamist ideology. | ||
| So, a two-state solution is not an option. | ||
| They need to be eliminated because our message is the right one. | ||
| That's an Islamist mentality. | ||
| Now, the other person or the other group of people would be the fundamentalists. | ||
| A fundamentalist Muslim wants to preserve the message of Prophet Muhammad and live like Muhammad the same way he lived. | ||
| So if the reports say Muhammad had short pants because his pants would stop to his ankle, they'd go to university, Harvard University, with their ankles sticking out. | ||
| So if there was no deodorant in Mecca, we're not going to use deodorant. | ||
| If Mohammed never trimmed his beard with a blade, then we're not going to use a blade on ours. | ||
| That's a fundamentalist. | ||
| And these guys will always take the side of the Islamist rather than the moderate. | ||
| And also moderate is just a politically created term. | ||
| It's a political term to differentiate. | ||
| But at the end of the day, I don't believe there's moderate. | ||
| You're either Muslim or you're not, and then there are levels in faith. | ||
| As to how deep you are and how much into the religion you are. | ||
| So where does the jihadist fit into that? | ||
| Because I thought that was a little bit of your definition of a Islamist because of the use of violence. | ||
| The Islamist isn't always a jihadist. | ||
| An Islamist can be someone who believes in the ideology of spreading Islam by violence, | ||
| who believes that's the right way, that's how religion should develop. | ||
| But they don't actually go and fight. | ||
| You know who these people are? | ||
| The majority of the Imams. | ||
| So they're sitting in their mosques, recruiting, sending people to ISIS. | ||
| But they're not jihadists. | ||
| The Imam is responsible for the jihadist going and joining ISIS. | ||
| So he's an Islamist, and he would send the Islamist congregation to then become jihadists. | ||
| So this is when people talk about the radicalization that's happening in mosques in the West, you believe that to be a real thing. | ||
| Of course, it is a real thing, and it's something we battle every single day. | ||
| What, so what, if I was to go into one of these mosques, what would I be hearing? | ||
| Well, firstly, because of your beard, you'd be welcomed. | ||
| I'd be welcomed, I have to lengthen this a little bit, okay. | ||
| Yes, you'd be welcomed. | ||
| And a fundamentalist mosque would, they would definitely frown upon you if you had shaved your beard completely. | ||
| So, beard, you'd be welcome. | ||
| So if you don't have a beard, you actually can't even go in? | ||
| No, you can. | ||
| They'll just tell you what's wrong. | ||
| Are you a woman? | ||
| Are you a Jew? | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because the reports say that the Jews that came to fight Muhammad had no beards on. | ||
| It was a sign of going to war. | ||
| In Arabia, the sign of going to war would be to shave your head. | ||
| The Jews in Arabia would shave their beards so that you can tell who is who in the battle. | ||
|
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So, the Muslims kept their beards. | |
| Yeah, okay. | ||
| So, it's not a crime. | ||
| I mean, there are many reformers who don't have beards. | ||
| It's no big deal. | ||
| Okay, I grow this out. | ||
| It's a week from now. | ||
| I say to you, hey mom, get me to one of these mosques. | ||
| I want to know what's going on. | ||
| I walk in with you, let's say. | ||
| On a Friday prayer? | ||
| Yeah, just tell me what is actually being spoke of that is the place from where it goes from an Islamist ideology to a fundamentalist ideology. | ||
| What are people hearing? | ||
| Okay, well firstly it depends on the speaker. | ||
| It depends on the imam. | ||
|
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Of course. | |
| There are Islamist imams who say in close circles what they will not say on the pulpits. | ||
| Because of the laws in the West. | ||
| And then there are Imams who would go on there and say things nobody could ever imagine would ever be said. | ||
| In the history of Islam, on the pulpit, they would just say it. | ||
| In the West? | ||
| Some of them are doing this in the West. | ||
| I mean, we see this out of Canada a lot. | ||
| Just these incredibly awful things that they're saying. | ||
| Memory has a wonderful archive of all of these issues. | ||
| YouTube is another great source. | ||
| And the issue is, the mosque records the imam and uploads it on YouTube. | ||
| So it's nothing being discovered. | ||
| They know that the world is going to react this way and they still continue to produce this content. | ||
| And now they're speaking in English, which makes my job a lot easier because I have to translate sometimes, but now they're just saying it in English. | ||
| Yes, we want to behead and we want to conquer. | ||
| So when I see these videos, and Memory does a great job of the translations, when I see these videos, but let's say the ones that aren't translated from Canada, for example, they want that message to get out of the mosque. | ||
| Like you would think that's contrary to what they would want. | ||
| You'd think it's like you'd want to keep it sort of radicalized within so you can put a good face on things. | ||
| But you're saying when they're talking about this and that with the Jews and the gays and this and that and the other thing, you think they actually want that to get out there because they're the ones putting it out. | ||
| Yes, and also there's a concept of the one Muslim nation, and it's called the Muslim Ummah, Ummat al-Islam, the Islamic nation. | ||
| Now, what it is, is basically a Muslim is a citizen of two or more nations. | ||
| One, the nation they live in, America, Australia, the UK, and the second one is the nation of Islam, not Farrakhan, but the actual Islamic nation. | ||
| So if the Mufti in Mecca issues a fatwa, An Islamist sitting in L.A. | ||
| would commit a terrorist attack. | ||
| You see that connection? | ||
|
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So if Salman Rushdie is at Starbucks and someone in Iran issues a fatwa, they'll get him here. | |
| There's a link. | ||
| And no other religion has this power. | ||
| Unless it's an organized organization that targets people and sends hitmen. | ||
| But no other religion has this power. | ||
| An Imam in Mecca would say that the Jews are the enemy or that the Christians are the enemy, knowing 100% that there will be a Muslim Who would go and commit a terrorist attack. | ||
| He doesn't even have to look for him. | ||
| He doesn't need to do anything. | ||
| He just knows there's a Muslim who will get this and will do the job. | ||
| No other religion has this. | ||
| And we see it several times where, in Russia, they killed a, I think it was, sorry in Turkey, I think it was. | ||
| A Russian ambassador was shot dead. | ||
| Oh, yeah. | ||
| There's video of it. | ||
|
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Yeah, yeah. | |
| Just right in the museum or something. | ||
| He was supposed to protect him and he said, for Syria. | ||
| And we see this every single month. | ||
| An act doesn't go by without someone in the West committing a terrorist attack and saying, this is for Syria. | ||
| This is for Iraq. | ||
| What's that link? | ||
| And this confuses our intelligence department. | ||
| They've never seen anything like it. | ||
| So when we're speaking about Imams, uploading videos online, they're actually contributing to that platform of the Islamic nation. | ||
| Whoever's out there, this is our message. | ||
| So I know you're a free speech guy, because I see you tweeting about it all the time, and you're exercising your free speech here. | ||
| It's a beautiful thing. | ||
| What should be done? | ||
| I don't mean just from the inside conversation, say you meeting with a more fundamentalist imam and trying to get him back, let's say, towards the center or something. | ||
| But what should be done by these states? | ||
| What should Canada, what should the United States, what should Australia be doing? | ||
| because they're using the freedoms of the West against themselves. | ||
| I mean, this is as difficult a free speech topic as there is for the true free speech people. | ||
| They're fighting for democratic rights to be applied for the extremist, for the Islamist, | ||
| when the Islamist doesn't believe in democracy. | ||
| They will use democracy to destroy democracy and then establish their own belief system. | ||
| Now, what can we do? | ||
| I think, and I say this all the time when I'm having dinner with a politician or a premier or anyone, and I say, your political party is finished. | ||
| You guys are infiltrated. | ||
| And if you email me, I'll send you reports about one or two of your candidates and what their backgrounds are like. | ||
| They remain speechless, and I'm not speaking liberal, I'm speaking Conservative Party. | ||
| I'm speaking parties who, you know, we have hope in. | ||
| Okay, these guys will seriously serve the cause of national security, will, you know, tighten the situation at the borders, won't let these jihadists come in. | ||
| Refugees who end up being jihadists, we've had them in Australia. | ||
| So, these guys are being infiltrated. | ||
| So, number one, what we can do... So, what does that mean, that they're being infiltrated? | ||
| Meaning that there are actual operatives within the political parties? | ||
| I mean, I just had Brigitte Gabriel on, who talks a lot about the Muslim Brotherhood's long plan, that this is an actual plan. | ||
| Yes, it's one of the main plans to infiltrate political parties and then make their way into positions where they can change or make the law. | ||
| And we've seen this numerous times. | ||
| I mean, my book, I speak about a lady, Khatib, I mean, she became, well, she's deceased now, she passed away, but she actually said that her long-term goal is to make all of America Muslim. | ||
| And she was getting grants from the American government. | ||
| She was overseeing educational curriculums. | ||
| And you see this, I mean, even in the United States. | ||
| I'm not totally sure this is her name. | ||
| Ilan Omar, is that her name? | ||
| The representative in Minnesota who just got elected. | ||
| And they found old tweets of hers where she's saying, the Jews or Israel has pulled the wool over something and Allah has to take care of this. | ||
| And then the entire time that she was being elected, she kept saying she's against boycotting Israel. | ||
| The day she gets elected, now she's for it. | ||
| So this is not just pie in the sky stuff that you're talking about. | ||
| Everything you see in the Muslim world when it comes to politics is all studied, is strategic, it's all planned, well-funded, well-organized, and they know exactly what to do and when to do it. | ||
| All the media that's going on now against the organizations such as C.A.R.E., they do no harm to C.A.R.E. | ||
| whatsoever. | ||
| C.A.R.E. | ||
| has a clear vision and they are reaching their goals because there are loopholes and there are cracks within the system and they're equivalent in Canada, they're equivalent in Australia. | ||
| And these, you know, these loopholes within the government keep getting bigger and bigger as these guys get elected. | ||
| And I don't want to scare your viewers, but all I have to say is these people are very smart people. | ||
| They're not what the media says, that when they actually attack then they're mentally ill or these people are minorities. | ||
| They're very strategic and they're very, very smart. | ||
| Which is why intelligence services around the world need hundreds of millions of dollars just to keep up with what these guys are doing. | ||
| We need these resources to understand how they operate. | ||
| And they keep learning and they're getting better and better. | ||
| What do you make of the progressive alliance seemingly with Islamists? | ||
| To me, this is like the biggest piece of this, that you've got certain pieces of the left that are just useless idiots, basically. | ||
| They're useful idiots, not useless. | ||
| They're useful because they're allowing these people to attain power in the name of tolerance. | ||
| And it's like, well, you guys will just be the last ones to be beheaded. | ||
| I mean, that's really the way I see this thing playing out. | ||
| First, when I was a fundamentalist, Islamist, someone who rejected the West, rejected dialogue with the West, my best friends from the outside world, you know, and I wouldn't say they were friends who I knew personally, but the people who I considered our friends, our allies, were the leftists. | ||
| So when I was a fundamentalist imam sitting in Iraq or in Iran, and I'm on social media, there were certain people I liked. | ||
| Politicians I liked. | ||
| Jeremy Corbyn. | ||
| A hero. | ||
| People like that. | ||
| Hillary Clinton. | ||
| Every Muslim, every extremist Muslim in the United States votes for Hillary Clinton. | ||
| This is a fact. | ||
| I'm not saying all of them vote, but those who do vote Hillary, they would never vote Republican. | ||
|
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Right. | |
| So can you explain that connection there? | ||
| There's a common agenda. | ||
| It's very common. | ||
| I mean, you take a look at what these guys are doing. | ||
| It's very common. | ||
| Extremist Muslims just want to operate. | ||
| Who's going to give them that free room to breathe? | ||
| They'll vote for that person. | ||
| And Hillary and Obama, these guys, they funded ISIS. | ||
| They funded ISIS. | ||
| They funded the Mujahideen, the Jihadists, these rebels who killed my family. | ||
| These guys fund them. | ||
| So the extremist, at the end of the day, is not seen as a threat by the Democratic Party. | ||
| They visit them every Ramadan and they sit with them every Ramadan and they, you know, they welcome each other. | ||
| So what do you think, okay, so I'll go with you on that, but what do you think then is in the mind of Hillary or Obama or any of these other lower-level politicians that then, I would say again, are useful idiots, basically. | ||
| They don't understand the threat that you're laying out here. | ||
| Or do they? | ||
| Are they in on it? | ||
| Like what do you think is actually going on in the mind of Hillary when she's doing these things? | ||
| And we don't even have to make it about her so specifically, but any of these people. | ||
| No, she understands the threat. | ||
| And so do many people like her. | ||
| They know the threat of what they're doing. | ||
| I think they're just greedy because they know they can't be touched. | ||
| So she's protected. | ||
| She doesn't care about anybody else. | ||
| It's greed. | ||
| But that protection doesn't always last, right? | ||
| I mean, this is a fool's game, right? | ||
| It doesn't last, but I mean, I think she's guaranteed for the rest of her life she's going to have that protection at least. | ||
| Because, you know, in Iraq we had the same situation. | ||
| How did ISIS get in? | ||
| ISIS got into Iraq because certain politicians played the diversity game. | ||
| You know, why have borders with Saudi Arabia? | ||
| Why have a wall? | ||
| Just let the deserts be open. | ||
| And then these cars came in from around the world and they took over 40 minutes away from Baghdad. | ||
| I mean, then politicians, when their family members were being killed, they woke up. | ||
| So maybe that's what it takes. | ||
| That you experience the threat of Jihad personally, then you'll understand where Imam Tauhidi is coming from. | ||
| And people like Dave Rubin who understand what Imam Tauhidi is saying, maybe some people will wake up. | ||
| But then again, that's another world of politics. | ||
| So let's talk about immigration a little bit, because it's been sort of a thread through this. | ||
| You're for strong border protection. | ||
| I mentioned to you right before we started, I was in London a couple months ago, and I hadn't been there for quite some time before that. | ||
| I've been there twice this year. | ||
| And the first time I was there, one of the things that was shocking to me, it's just viscerally shocking, and it has nothing to do with bigotry or hatred or anything else. | ||
| Is that I was in you know the Harrods area right in the sort of center of London and the amount of women that I saw in burqas I mean only eyes that's it now I have no problem with those people individually of course but seeing this amount I mean I'm talking it seemed like at points 20 or 30 percent of the women Now, if I had seen 30% of the women dressed in traditional Mormon clothing or dressed as Orthodox Jews, I would have also thought there's something strange going on here. | ||
| Let's put it that way. | ||
| That's what I thought. | ||
| I was just like, there's something odd going on here. | ||
| Can you just talk about that related to Western countries and then how that's related to immigration? | ||
| Very simple. | ||
| You see how I had to even ask the question in a way that's like I'm apologizing just for seeing something? | ||
| It's pathetic. | ||
| It's very simple. | ||
| The West has become weaker. | ||
| They've become stronger. | ||
| They're telling you this is the norm. | ||
| In fact, this is the encouraged norm. | ||
| This is how we're going to dress. | ||
| You're going to look at us and you're going to turn away if you don't like it. | ||
| That's basically it. | ||
| That's what's happening. | ||
| Now, are these people extremists? | ||
| Of course. | ||
| I'm not saying every lady that wears a burka is an extremist. | ||
| What I'm saying is, because, you know, this is between us on camera. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| Don't worry, it's just going to YouTube. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| You know, some of the filthiest women to ever exist are ones that wear burkas. | ||
| Seriously, hookers, they wear burqas because they don't want their faces to be known. | ||
| And now in Baghdad, from the reports that come, because I speak to officials, they tell us that they have a problem with prostitution and the women are wearing burqas. | ||
| And they want to stand out from the other women that are wearing burqas, so what they do is they flip their attire inside out. | ||
| But it's all black, but all you have to do is focus on that thread. | ||
| Is that inside out? | ||
| Right? | ||
| So an inside out burqa, prostitute. | ||
| Exactly, in Baghdad. | ||
| And some Muslim areas, if a lady went in there with a burqa, they'd know she's up to something. | ||
| So this isn't Islamophobia, this is Muslim areas. | ||
| What's she up to? | ||
| So it's none of that, oh, I wear it to preserve my modesty, no one's going to hit on me on the street, no catcalling, no. | ||
| In fact, some guys go out there just to look for these women because they know she's out for business. | ||
| Now, not all of them, but this does exist. | ||
| For the women who live in the West, who wear burqas, there are several types of women. | ||
| One, one that's forced by her husband. | ||
| The second one, the second type, is the type that would divorce her husband if he told her to take it off. | ||
| And the third one would be someone who is just trying to fit in with all of this, we are the rebels in society. | ||
| We are the real Muslims. | ||
| That's basically my analysis of the situation. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Do the average lefty that used to be your ally when you were more extreme, so to speak, do you think they realize that this set of ideas is so in direct conflict with the rest of their ideas? | ||
| The rest of their ideas about tolerance and we're for gays and minorities and women and all of these things that they've aligned themselves with an ideology. | ||
| If you were to look at it in their pyramid, they've put Islam really at the top of their pyramid because they believe it's a brown person's religion. | ||
| which of course is a racist notion in itself because a religion is not of a skin color. | ||
| But do you think they even realize, like now I'm not talking about say the Islamist, | ||
| what they realize their alliance is, the other way around. | ||
| Do you think these people have any sense of what's going on here? | ||
| I think what's happening now is that loyalty has shifted from being loyal to your country and to your people | ||
| to being loyal to your boss and to your company. | ||
| So, I've seen journalists who would write wonderful articles about me. | ||
| The moment they get a job in a left-leaning outlet, it's like I'm the worst person they've ever known. | ||
| And the contradiction remains online. | ||
| Like, what happened here? | ||
| I'm someone who's going to influence Australia, and I'm a peaceful guy, and they welcome me. | ||
| And here, I'm a fraud who should be silenced, don't give him the megaphone. | ||
| So you see, I think loyalty falls in companies, no more in country or faith or family. | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Can you talk a little bit about the sort of unique way that Islam is designed to spread? | ||
| So are you familiar with Dr. Bill Warner, who does PoliticalIslam.com? | ||
| So one of the things that he said when I had him on, I think this is Probably over three years ago that I thought was interesting. | ||
| He said that religions are designed to spread differently. | ||
| So Judaism, for example, it's very hard to convert. | ||
| You have to do a lot to convert. | ||
| But if you want to get out, you just basically say, I'm not a Jew. | ||
| Every Jew would be like, ah, you're still a Jew. | ||
| And then that's it. | ||
| Where Islam, it's very easy to get in, right? | ||
| You just have to recite something very quickly, and it's almost impossible to get out because then you're an apostate, so now we can kill you. | ||
| So he said it's actually, a virus is very easy to attain and very difficult to eliminate. | ||
| So that's what he was comparing it to. | ||
| I thought it was an interesting analogy. | ||
| For me personally, the way I see it is, if Islam is going to grow, it has to grow in the right direction. | ||
| Because I believe Muslims will always be converting people and there'll be people always converting to Islam. | ||
| So I don't believe religion can be stopped at all or eliminated. | ||
| I mean, look at Judaism. | ||
| They never had a government to protect them for thousands and thousands of years. | ||
| Everyone was trying to kill them and did in fact kill them. | ||
| They've been butchered in the millions, but they still They're still around. | ||
| It's hard. | ||
| It's almost impossible to eradicate a religion. | ||
| It doesn't work like that. | ||
| So that's my take, my position. | ||
| So I don't see it as a virus. | ||
| I just believe people will always have certain opinions and change religions. | ||
| What I do acknowledge is the fact that Islam is very strategic. | ||
| in recruiting adherents to its belief system. | ||
| And this isn't all Islamic schools of thought, but the majority of them. | ||
| So the majority, the mainstream, do actually have a strategy, and it's called through da'wah. | ||
| Da'wah. | ||
| What da'wah is, they go out to the streets, and they're basically selling religion. | ||
| They'll sell you religion, and in return they'll give you heaven, paradise, and the hereafter. | ||
| That's the basic transaction. | ||
| And, you know, there's an audience for everything. | ||
| This is a fact. | ||
| And many people do embrace Islam because of the promises that they get. | ||
| I mean, if you're a businessman, and you're stopped by one of these stalls, they'll tell you, there's so much wealth waiting for you. | ||
| One prayer will build you five castles. | ||
| If you're a farmer, they'll promise you massive farms in paradise. | ||
| If they know that you like women, They'll promise you plenty of women, like the Jihad, the 72 virgin issue. | ||
| 72 virgins seems like a bit much. | ||
| No, the actual teachings say each one of these 72 virgins comes with her aids. | ||
| So it's actually more than 72. | ||
| And the actual number 72 or 70 in the Arabic language just means a lot. | ||
| It means unlimited. | ||
| Oh, is that right? | ||
| I've told you a million times. | ||
| Oh, okay. | ||
| That's good to know. | ||
| So it's not actually 72. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| And it's not raisins either. | ||
| Many people say it's not because the Islamic books describe their hair, their eyes, and if one hair band was to fall on planet Earth, the perfume would be smelled by everyone. | ||
| So there are descriptions that these are actual women, not raisins. | ||
| So the strategy of Islam spreading is very unique in a sense that their unity In their theology, it's unbreakable. | ||
| It's impossible. | ||
| I mean, a Muslim would unite with a Muslim against a Christian, against an atheist, even if he knows his brother in faith is wrong. | ||
| So then how are you a Muslim? | ||
| And that's the thing, when you ask them, are Shia Muslims Muslim? | ||
| They'll say no. | ||
| You ask the Shia, are the Sunnis Muslim? | ||
| They'll say, not real Muslims. | ||
| Then the Ahmadiyya will say, both of these guys are not Muslim. | ||
| I'm the real Muslim. | ||
| And then both the Shia and the Sunni will unite against the Ahmadiyya and say, he's not the real Muslim. | ||
| So, it's a struggle within Islam itself. | ||
| It's a problem. | ||
| And they fall into many contradictions because of this, because Muslims kill Muslims every day. | ||
| Muslim governments bombing other Muslim governments. | ||
|
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So. | |
| Right, I mean, what's going on with Saudi Arabia and Yemen, right? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| Yeah, which nobody talks about, of course, because we don't know how to frame it properly. | ||
| So we just wait for something to happen with Israel, basically, and then it's like, oh, well, now we can, we got good guys and bad guys, it's easy. | ||
| So, all right, so two more questions for you. | ||
| So one, where do you, what do you think it is about you? | ||
| about the guy I'm sitting across from right now that gives you the sort of bravery to talk about this. | ||
| I mean, that's why when you first came on the scene and everyone was like, talk to this guy, I was hesitant, because I was like, I just don't know enough that A, I don't want the wool pulled over my eyes, but B, you know, as your critics will say, there's fame to gain out of this, there's all of this other bounty to be had by this. | ||
| So what is it about you that makes you do this? | ||
| I'm nobody special. | ||
| I swear, I am nobody special. | ||
| I'm just a regular guy who grew up in a Muslim family, was trained in Iran. | ||
| Life put me in this position, ordained as a scholar, came back to Australia, started meeting with politicians. | ||
| It worked out really well. | ||
| More politicians started inviting me. | ||
| We started working with parliaments, advising senates. | ||
| And I have a Twitter account that I'm active on. | ||
| I have a foundation, an organization. | ||
| Basic stuff. | ||
| And I speak out only because I've always been outspoken. | ||
| When I was an Islamist, I was an outspoken Islamist. | ||
| So let's put it that way. | ||
| What does an outspoken Islamist sound like? | ||
| You don't want to hear it. | ||
| It's horrible. | ||
| I was outspoken. | ||
| I used to flagellate. | ||
| I don't know if you've seen my pictures. | ||
| No. | ||
| So you actually used to do it? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Wait, can you explain what that is? | ||
|
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I would cover myself in my own blood. | |
| Absolute flagellation. | ||
| So, you know, I'm not a convert into the religion. | ||
| I've come from that whole lineage and lifestyle. | ||
| You got cred. | ||
| But people usually ask me, what red pilled you? | ||
| Because this isn't politics, this is religion. | ||
| I just don't know how to answer that. | ||
| But I think the best way to put it is that I have always been outspoken and I'm not afraid. | ||
| In fact, I am afraid of the fact that I'm not afraid, because I can get myself into serious trouble. | ||
| I've said certain things in front of certain people that I've had to leave the country the same afternoon. | ||
| Yeah, well your Twitter bio used to be something to the... | ||
| Do you know it exactly before I put your... | ||
| Yes, one day you will hear that I have been killed and the news will speak about it. | ||
| That was my first Twitter bio and then I changed it simply because I had a meeting with state intelligence and they said, you know what? | ||
| You could be giving ideas to certain people. | ||
| So remove it. | ||
| So I put peace advocate, things like that. | ||
| But I do have a great security team and I'm very grateful for. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
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All right. | |
| So my last question is this. | ||
| Paint me two roads of the future. | ||
| Give me two pictures of the future. | ||
| I want the future that you want to build, and then I want the future, if that does not get built, what does that look like? | ||
| So you can do either one first. | ||
| The future I want to build focuses on the West and the West alone. | ||
| The Middle East isn't my area anymore. | ||
| Because me having this interview, something like this in the Middle East, would see me killed the same week. | ||
| So, the best way to reach the Middle East is through social media. | ||
| And I've got my accounts in Arabic, I've got accounts in different languages, where I have translators that do that for me. | ||
| But my main vision and my effort and energy goes into the West. | ||
| And I would like to see all Islamist, extremist centers shut down. | ||
| The people who are fundamentalist and have been sponsored by terrorist organizations such as CAIR to lose their positions in in government. | ||
| I would like to see a honorable leader of a country that cracks down on these extremists. | ||
| On the other hand, I would like to see the so-called moderates or just the regular Muslims speaking out more, and their imams, being more vocal against extremists, and have this unity as a society. | ||
| You could be Jewish, I could be Muslim, our friend could be Christian, and we could just sit down and have a meal together, shake hands, go to, you know, watch a match together, watch a movie. | ||
| No problem in that. | ||
| Which people are doing every day in the West, by the way. | ||
| We shouldn't forget that, right? | ||
| It's like, we are doing that. | ||
| So after this interview, I go back to Australia and I go back into the Muslim community. | ||
| I don't go back to meeting with Jews and Christians. | ||
| I do that in my interfaith work. | ||
| But I actually live amongst the Muslim community. | ||
| So I would like to see that Muslim community embracing the larger community in the West. | ||
| That's my vision, because then we can work on establishing peace and building better relations and basically uniting with the rest of the world against the extremists within our own religion. | ||
| That's my vision. | ||
| If that doesn't work out... I was going to say, we should have done this the other way, because now you're going to end up ending on the bad note. | ||
| So I'll try to figure out a way to get us to some nice ending here. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| If that doesn't work out, then I believe we have to unite as Because there will always be Muslims who have conservative views. | ||
| Do you know how many Muslims vote for Trump? | ||
| Many. | ||
| They fled from the rulers who Trump is now putting in line. | ||
| So they would vote for Trump just for that very reason. | ||
| That they know that their rulers back home can't start war with other countries who are allies with America. | ||
| So many Muslims vote for Trump. | ||
| Well, that also is the ultimate irony of the alliance with the left, because it's like you're taking a group of people who are inherently conservative, who hold conservative religious values, and then you're aligning them with people that hold none of those values, and they're going, please join us, for now. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I think if my vision of the West doesn't end up being successful, Then we need to unite as the revisionists, reformist Muslims, who are completely against what's happening, unite with the Jews. | ||
| With the Christians, let's put far left, far right aside and let's just speak as humans who are concerned about national security. | ||
| We need to unite on a professional level. | ||
| It's not enough to speak on YouTube and to tweet. | ||
| This isn't enough for me. | ||
| Which is why I go and I sit with politicians because I want to get something done. | ||
| So, we need to unite either now or unite in a much more global style in the future. | ||
| To end on a positive note, I'll tell you this. | ||
| The Islamists are worried now. | ||
| Maybe not showing it too much because they're getting people into Congress and people into parliaments, but they are worried. | ||
| They've lost a lot of territory. | ||
| The caliphate that they dreamed of. | ||
| They've lost ISIS. | ||
| They've lost a lot. | ||
| I mean, the United Arab Emirates is shutting them down. | ||
| Austria shut down 60, deported 60 Imams back to Turkey. | ||
| I mean, we are doing things that harm them and harm their agenda of death, basically. | ||
| And we're doing them in large portions, so in portions they can't accept. | ||
| Sixty Imams vanish from the country in one day. | ||
| That's a big loss for them. | ||
| So we are pushing back, I believe, as a society, or as a global society, against the extremists. | ||
| But I think it's a slow way to the finishing point, and we will win at the end of the day. | ||
| I do know that eventually people will just get fed up with the extremists, and unite with these reformists, and just get them out of the society. | ||
| I don't know how, maybe in a hundred years, I don't know. | ||
| But it's going to be really bad. | ||
| The way we win will be really bad. | ||
| It will not be peaceful. | ||
| And I really hope that we can pave the way for a much more peaceful ending. | ||
| But I'll just say this. | ||
| Every time I came on Australian television, I have a police officer that tells me, you know Imam, I've been sensing this, every time you go out there speaking, we get more applications for firearms, because they believe the invasion is coming. | ||
| So then I started to tone it down a little bit. | ||
| But I still wanna say the truth, and I wish for a peaceful ending. | ||
| That's basically it. | ||
| Isn't it weird how you just have to live your life and do what you think is right at all times? | ||
| I remember when I first started talking about this stuff, and I was just a little worried about security and things. | ||
| I said to, do you know Dennis Prager? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| I said to Dennis Prager, I asked him about just security, because just any of my friends in this world that talk about this stuff, I was just asking. | ||
| And I said to Dennis, you know, what do you do about security? | ||
| And he told me some things that I can't repeat, but then he goes, but at the end of the day, when it's your time to go, it's your time to go. | ||
| I thought, I'm a little younger than you, I'm not quite ready for that yet. | ||
| Well listen, you have an ally in me and I hope we helped spread a little bit of what I know you've made your life about. | ||
| You know, hopefully there's a way that it doesn't get that bad before it gets better. | ||
| I suppose we shall see. | ||
| Definitely. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me, Dave. | ||
| Yeah, and I'm sorry we can't hang out tonight, because I would have loved to, but I'm a little crazy at the moment. |
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