Dec. 22, 2019 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| It doesn't make any sense to have a woman in Mormon underwear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. | ||
| No one's saying Mormon women can't be athletes. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And it also doesn't make any sense to have a woman in a burkini on the cover of Sports Illustrated. | ||
| Nobody's saying women can't wear Mormon underwear. | ||
| Nobody's saying women can't wear burkinis. | ||
| But for us to pretend that this is some empowering feminist thing that should be celebrated, that's the lie. | ||
| Hey, I'm Dave Rubin and this is The Rubin Report. | ||
| Just a quick reminder to click subscribe on our YouTube channel and hit that little freakin' bell over there so that you actually see the videos when we put them up and share them and all that good stuff. | ||
| Okay, joining me today is a true fighter for liberalism in the best sense of the word and the author of the new book, Unveiled, How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam, Yasmin Mohammed. | ||
| Welcome back to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thank you so much for having me, Dave. | ||
| It's great to be here. | ||
| I am glad to have you here, my friend. | ||
| This is your third Rubin Report appearance. | ||
| That's right. | ||
|
unidentified
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Pretty, pretty, pretty good. | |
| Just quickly, before we really get into it, last time you were here, I interviewed you solo. | ||
| And we're going to recap some of your story, which is just absolutely incredible. | ||
| And then I had you and Faisal on together. | ||
| And there was an author here from Der Spiegel, which is a big German magazine. | ||
| And I had you on talking about your fight for liberalism and leaving radical Islam and the rest of it. | ||
| And Faisal as an Iraqi refugee coming to America, fighting for freedom. | ||
| And then Der Spiegel put me on the cover of the magazine saying something like, I'm the leader of the alt-right. | ||
| So I don't know what you're gonna do to me today. | ||
| That was terrible. | ||
| That was absolutely shocking. | ||
| The word Nazi was in that article too. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I thought bringing in someone like you would offer me a little cover, and yet here we are. | ||
| I'm a Nazi too, Dave. | ||
| All right, so let's get right to it. | ||
| So I really think you are one of, truly, I'm just going to pat you on the back to start. | ||
| I think you're one of the most brave, fearless, fun, joyous, decent people that I know. | ||
| And your story is incredible. | ||
| It's incredible and it's... | ||
| It's exactly so much of what is happening right now. | ||
| So for anyone that didn't see the original interview, can we just do like a five minute sort of recap of your life? | ||
| Give me your whole life in five minutes so that we can then shift into this. | ||
| Okay, I'll try as hard as I can to get into five minutes. | ||
| But essentially I grew up in a fundamentalist muslim household in canada so here i am living in the free west but essentially under sharia in my own home so i feel like i have one foot in each camp and uh... so growing up in a fundamentalist muslim household meant that i went to islamic schools the hijab was put on me at nine years old i was forced into a marriage with a man who turned out to be | ||
| a member of Al Qaeda, actually. | ||
| He was one of the people that trained the terrorists that bombed the American embassies | ||
| in Tanzania. | ||
| So a horrible human being. | ||
| And I was able to get away. | ||
| I had a daughter with him and then was able to get away from him and start a new life with my daughter and I because we're living in a free secular democracy that supported me in that decision. | ||
| And I stayed quiet living my life with my daughter for many years until the infamous episode with Sam Harris and Ben Affleck on Bill Maher and That day, I was really shocked to see that everybody on my Facebook page and all my friends were totally supporting Ben Affleck and against this guy that Ben was yelling at. | ||
| Can you just quickly, I know most of my audience knows the story, but can you quickly recap what that was all about? | ||
| Because as you know, my wake up, I came from a liberal New York family. | ||
| And literally, my political wake-up was at the exact same moment. | ||
| I was watching it live, as you were watching it live. | ||
| We weren't going to meet for five years, and so many people, not just us, woke up at that very moment. | ||
| Yeah, it's a pretty shocking little microcosm of everything, you know? | ||
| So, essentially, Sam and Bill were talking about liberals and how... Bill Maher. | ||
| Sorry, what did I say? | ||
| No, no, you just said Bill. | ||
| I just want everyone to be sure we're talking about Bill Maher here. | ||
| Yep, Sam Harris and Bill Maher were talking about how liberals will get so excited and happy and applaud loudly if we talk about You know, supporting liberal values like women's equality, LGBT equality, free speech, all those kinds of things. | ||
| But then if you talk about how those values are nowhere to be seen in the Muslim majority | ||
| world or if we talk about the fact that in countries like Egypt, like close to 90 percent | ||
| of people believe that if you leave the religion of Islam that you should be executed, these | ||
| are concerning numbers. | ||
| These are concerning things that if we care about liberal values, we should care about | ||
| them universally, not just within our close proximity geographically. | ||
| And as they were talking, Ben Affleck got really irate and he started yelling at them | ||
| and calling them gross and racist because he felt like exactly he was, he just, it's | ||
| like he decided that he wanted to be exhibit A. | ||
| Are you? | ||
| To embody exactly what they were talking about, you know? | ||
| Mr. Virtue Signal, let's roll. | ||
| And he went ahead and just did exactly what they were talking about, which was to get all upset that they were talking about Islam. | ||
| Meanwhile, this is the same person, of course, that did a movie criticizing Christianity, dogma, criticizing dogma in general. | ||
| That's literally what the entire movie is about. | ||
| It's actually a pretty funny movie. | ||
| But then why can't we also criticize other religions that also deserve criticism? | ||
| How much of it for you was that Sam clearly laid out something that now I talk about all the time here, that you're allowed, not allowed, you must criticize ideas and must not be bigoted towards people. | ||
| It's such an obvious thing when you think about it, but people can't Not people. | ||
| A certain set of people seem to be unable to detangle those things. | ||
| You could criticize the Old Testament all you want, the New Testament. | ||
| That doesn't mean you hate Jews, or you hate Christians, or you would criticize a political party. | ||
| That doesn't mean you hate everyone who's, say, a Republican or a Democrat. | ||
| But for some reason with this issue, it seems almost inextricably intertwined. | ||
| I don't know if it's that intertwined. | ||
| I think that they just pretend that it is, to be perfectly honest. | ||
| Because it's sort of like if Ilhan Omar says something and people criticize her for what she said, the response is, oh, you hate her because she's black and because she's Muslim. | ||
| It's like nobody has mentioned her skin color or her religion. | ||
| We're talking about The words that she has tweeted, or the words that she has said. | ||
| But it's just a way, I think, of deflecting. | ||
| And in fact, that episode with Sam Harris, the reason why I started to speak up was because everybody that was attacking him was attacking him not because of anything that he said, because everything that he said made absolute sense. | ||
| They were attacking him because of his skin color, because he's American, white, and male. | ||
| And so that's what they were against. | ||
| So I said, all right, well, I am Arab, female, and... | ||
|
unidentified
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That's good enough. | |
| Well, also, you grew up Muslim. | ||
| That might have some value in this equation, right? | ||
| Right, and then I'll just go ahead and I'll say the exact same thing that Sam is saying, and then you'll have to respond to the actual message. | ||
| Oh, but did you find out that that was not the case? | ||
| Yeah, no, I didn't calculate correctly, because apparently I can still be a white supremacist. | ||
| Yeah, it's actually pretty, so had you ever, was the reason that you wake up in that moment, watching that, Television show, was the reason that you had never heard it so obviously explained and seen a reaction that was so over the top. | ||
| Like, were you thinking sort of this stuff? | ||
| Because for me, as a big lefty and working at the Young Turks and all that, I had been seeing it, but suddenly it was like, whoa, that's it, all of it right there. | ||
| Yeah, so I hadn't been seeing it at all. | ||
| And in fact, when Sam started to speak and he started to talk about the concentric circles | ||
| and everything, I started to get really excited because mainstream media, I mean, this guy | ||
| is on Bill Maher's show. | ||
| I've been watching Bill Maher since I was a teenager. | ||
| And I was so excited that this is, you know, it's part of mainstream conversation now. | ||
| People are going to start talking about this. | ||
| People are going to talk about people being hacked to death in the streets of Bangladesh, or people being whipped in the streets of Saudi Arabia, or women going to prison in Iran, etc. | ||
| All of these problems in the Muslim world that we should be addressing. | ||
| being, you know, gay people being executed in 15 Muslim-majority countries. | ||
| Why isn't this a conversation? | ||
| Why hasn't anybody mentioned this? | ||
| We have a whole month where we have pride flags everywhere, but that never comes up. | ||
| Again, it's only people within this close geographical proximity. | ||
| So I was really excited to hear Sam and Bill having this conversation, and then it was such An incredible punch to the gut to have Ben Affleck shut them down because I was like oh my god like really like can you just please you know you don't understand anything about this world you don't understand the value of these men finally speaking up and for him to shut them down was you know it was really hurtful it was really upsetting | ||
| So let's back up for a second, because you're talking about the geography related to all this, and you've mentioned a couple other countries that are not that close to Canada and the U.S., but you grew up with a lot of those rules in Canada. | ||
| I think that's hard for a lot of people to understand. | ||
| Can you just talk, I know we've done this before, and we'll actually link to your original video in this, but can you talk a little bit more about, I don't think people can really understand that you grew up Canadian in a Western country and lived under some of these laws. | ||
| Absolutely, and in fact, you know, Faisal grew up in Iraq, and him and I talk all the time about how his upbringing was more liberal than mine was, and that has a lot to do with the fact that when you're not in a Muslim-majority country, sometimes the family members become a lot more zealous because they're super concerned about you picking up ideas from the non-believers, so they want to have a very tight You know, they want to make sure that your bubble that you live in is very separated from the non-believers outside. | ||
| Were your parents first-generation immigrants to Canada? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And were they fundamentalists on the way in? | ||
| No, they weren't. | ||
| So, neither of them were practicing, really. | ||
| They were just born Muslim and pretty secular upbringings. | ||
| And it wasn't until, well, they separated, my mom and dad separated, and then my mom was alone with three kids. | ||
| And she started looking for support, started looking for community, and so she went looking at the mosque. | ||
| She went to the mosque, and that's where she found a man who offered to take her on as his second concurrent wife. | ||
| So he was already married, already had three kids. | ||
| This is in Canada. | ||
| This is in Canada, and I have to express, like, these are very common things. | ||
| Like, this isn't just my story. | ||
| This is very common that there are people that I speak to all over the States, all over the Netherlands, all over Europe, all over UK, Scotland, everywhere, that tell me about how they also grew up in Households with more than one mother, more than one wife to the husband, and going to Islamic schools and living in their own little bubble of Sharia, this is, you know, it's not like my story is unique. | ||
| Are they technically married? | ||
| Like, are the mosques actually performing that marriage? | ||
| It's obviously not done in a civil way in a place like Canada. | ||
| Yeah, so that's exactly it. | ||
| So the first wife would be his legal wife, and then the second wife, third, fourth, would be Islamically married. | ||
| So yes, the mosques are performing these marriages, and quite often what ends up happening is he will go on social assistance and that each one of the other wives will apply as single moms and quite often the government is sort of aware of what's going on but they don't do anything about it this is an issue in Canada where there's like millions of dollars spent in this direction but they don't want to say anything about it because of course cultural relativism and feel even though it's against the law | ||
| This is the subtitle of my book. | ||
| It's because things are against the law, but when a Muslim does it, people are afraid to touch it with a ten-foot pole because they don't want to come off as being racist or Islamophobic or bigoted or whatever. | ||
| And then, of course, that is a real slippery slope that can lead to things like the rape gangs in Rotherham where journalists, politicians, you know, everybody was too scared to say anything because Most of these rape gangs were being led by Pakistani Muslim men and so they stayed quiet about it and that of course allowed these girls, some as young as 11, to continue to be raped. | ||
| So that's what happens when we turn a blind eye, there are victims under there. | ||
| So, all right, so the subtitle of the book, How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam. | ||
| You wake up, you've lived through this. | ||
| It sounds like basically immediately you realized, oops, this isn't gonna be as great as I thought. | ||
| Like you sort of thought the dam was gonna break and it was like, holy cow, people are gonna start understanding, the left's gonna wake up, liberals are gonna wake up. | ||
| You quickly found out that wasn't what was happening. | ||
| What else happened at that time? | ||
| Did you start seeing support from places maybe you didn't think you were gonna get support? | ||
| Yeah, so initially I came out as anonymous and I started getting messages like crazy from people all over the Muslim world who were you know excited that i was telling my story happy that i | ||
| saw my story and asking me to be their voice so telling me their stories as | ||
| well and then i got to a certain unit was a very long as for a | ||
| bit of a year into it when i started to just feel ashamed i was like here i am | ||
| using a fake you know confessions of an ex-muslim because i'm afraid to use my | ||
| real name but that was That was my original thing, and I don't have my face out there. | ||
| And these are people that are living in countries like Pakistan where they can go to prison for, you know, just questioning anything to do with the religion that would be considered blasphemy and thrown in prison. | ||
| And so I started to feel like here I am living in a free secular country. | ||
| I have to be, you know, I got to man up. | ||
| I got to put my face out there, put my name out there. | ||
| And so that's actually what initially was the catalyst for me to start speaking. | ||
| So that was their support. | ||
| And it still is their support that keeps me going, especially women in countries like Iran, when they take off their hijab and they're posting videos. | ||
| Um, Women in Saudi Arabia taking off their niqabs and burning them. | ||
| Like all the women all over the Muslim majority world that are fighting back against the literal patriarchy. | ||
| Those are the women that I really want to be here to support and they're the fuel. | ||
| Are you shocked at how fearful people are in the West, right? | ||
| Like you're just describing these incredibly brave people who literally could lose their life and everything else. | ||
| But that people in the West are afraid to say what they think, be who they are, and the rest of it. | ||
| Yeah, absolutely. | ||
| It makes me... it's infuriating, actually. | ||
| Like I mentioned, these people can go to prison and they can be killed for speaking out. | ||
| And over here, you've got people where it's your First Amendment. | ||
| Free speech is like... there's a reason why it's in the First Amendment. | ||
| It's that important. | ||
| And they are instead You know, they've got these self-imposed blasphemy laws. | ||
| Like in Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and all those other countries, the government will get you for speaking out. | ||
| But here, they get each other. | ||
| Like, it's really shocking to me and sad. | ||
| Were you also shocked that, because there is a world of either ex-Muslims or Muslim reformers or whatever, and I've had some of them on the show actually, were you shocked how sort of at odds even that world sort of seemed to be so that it's, Many times, someone like you comes out, you defend liberalism, and then they'll even, those guys who were supposedly the reformers, will even attack someone like you. | ||
| Yeah, I think that there's always, you know, the thing is about people that leave their communities, you know, it's like herding cats. | ||
| We're not the wallflowers, right? | ||
| The wallflowers are still in the religion. | ||
| So I think that when you get a bunch of people that are willing to be vocal in this sphere or willing to walk away from their communities, those people are usually, they've got some fight in them. | ||
| and so you see all sorts of you know, schisms | ||
| and sometimes negative interactions. But I don't | ||
| necessarily see that as a bad thing I come from a world where everybody | ||
| followed the exact same book and everybody had to | ||
| you know, in Islam it's called a "Surat al-Mustaqim" | ||
| so it's this long, thin almost like a tightrope | ||
| and underneath the tightrope is hell. And you have | ||
| to walk this long, straight path | ||
| narrow path and you have to be very, very careful never to stray | ||
| or you're going to burn in hell for eternity. | ||
| So there was no variation in anything, like everybody thought the same, everybody spoke the same, everybody acted the same, and so now out here in the real world where people have different ideas and people disagree and whatever, I don't see that as a bad thing. | ||
| I'm happy to see it. | ||
| Yeah, it's interesting because When I started doing some shows with people like you, the amount of hate I got from that crew, the supposed reformer crew, I was just like, you know what? | ||
| I tried, it was an interesting thing. | ||
| I thought this was a nice way of defending liberalism. | ||
| And basically, I haven't touched this topic in probably since literally the last time you were here, which is almost three years ago. | ||
| So even though I had Faisal on a few weeks ago, we really just talked about foreign policy and geopolitics. | ||
| Because there's a certain opportunity cost That comes with defending liberalism in liberal Western societies, which is quite bizarre. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, but you know what? | ||
| You're doing it. | ||
| I guess. | ||
| We're doing the best we can. | ||
| We're doing the best we can. | ||
| Do you think, so this is sort of where I'm at with all of this, and we don't have to make this specifically about religion. | ||
| Do you think there is something inherently flawed or that liberalism has some sort of weakness that these people have been able to either exploit or Or unearth that maybe we couldn't see before? | ||
| Yeah, unfortunately I think that that's true and they've been very transparent about that. | ||
| So the Muslim Brotherhood clearly said that we're going to spread Islam without raising a single sword and the way that we're going to do that is through three means. | ||
| Number one, through the wounds of Muslim mothers. | ||
| Number two, through immigration. | ||
| And number three, through using secular laws against themselves. | ||
| And in fact, Hassan al-Banna, who is Tariq Ramadan's grandfather, so the person who started the Muslim Brotherhood, Said we need to have our children in the West so that they can understand the Western minds so that we know how to Infiltrate basically because us because he was Egyptian, you know, it doesn't matter even if we live in the West We're never really gonna understand their mindset. | ||
| We're not gonna know how to work against it So yeah, that was part of the plan. | ||
| So what do you think the weakness is of liberalism? | ||
| I mean, you know, I talk about classical liberalism a lot. | ||
| I do believe that it is the best set of ideas to create the most human flourishing and allow people to be themselves and govern themselves and live the lives they want to live. | ||
| But I have come to a certain unfortunate conclusion that it might have a soft spot and they've gone for it. | ||
| What do you think it is about, not what they're trying to do, but what do you, do you think there is something within liberalism itself that? | ||
| I think that the problem with liberalism is that people aren't like standing up for liberalism as much as they should. | ||
| So what ends up happening- Do you think that's an inherent problem of liberal, of the openness of liberalism allows that to happen? | ||
| Like that's, I'm starting to get to that spot. | ||
| I'll tell you what I mean. | ||
| So I gave the example of the rape gangs in the UK. | ||
| Also in the UK, once every hour a girl goes to the emergency room, like there's a case reported of FGM, female genital mutilation. | ||
| For the past 30 years, it's been against the law there, but nobody's ever been prosecuted. | ||
| There's my personal story in there of me going to the judge, basically. | ||
| It went through social services and through police and everything, and I ended up going to family court, where I told them about how my family were beating me, and I showed them the bruises, and they all understood what was going on. | ||
| And in the end, the judge said, Listen, you come from a culture where that's acceptable, that's the way your family chooses to discipline you, so that's their right. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| So this is what I mean. | ||
| If we stood by our principles, if we stood by our values, and we said, look, this is what liberalism means, And this is the stop sign, right? | ||
| But this failure that I think you're seeing, and that I'm seeing too, is that there's no stop sign. | ||
| Where's the boundary? | ||
| You have to have a point where you say, yes, we're inclusive, yes, we accept you, up until then. | ||
| Up until you cross this line right here. | ||
| So would you say that it's moral relativism that you referenced earlier that has somehow seeped into liberalism? | ||
| I mean, to me, that's what created the progressives. | ||
| You had decent liberals who just wanted, you know, like even now when they're virtue signaling about gays and blacks and Muslims, I'm like, most of you aren't bad people. | ||
| You're just confused about what the issues are and you're confused about what freedom is. | ||
| But then this moral relativism seeps in and for some reason, I mean, it's probably for a whole other show, but I do have a lot of thoughts on why liberalism has this soft underbelly that accepts that, where something like conservatism, maybe because of a religious connection, which is a pretty bizarre position for someone like you to have to think about, has protections against it. | ||
| Yeah, I think that actually the biggest problem I can see with the progressives right now is that they remind me too much of religious people. | ||
| It reminds me too much of the world that I walked away from. | ||
| So these progressives, these, you know, the far left ones, you know, they've got this cancel culture, for example. | ||
| Well, you see that with Scientologists, you know, you're a Suppressive person. | ||
| Muslims will kill you if you leave the religion. | ||
| You can be excommunicated, ostracized, or cancelled. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Our friend Pete Boghossian calls it a secular religion. | ||
|
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That's what he calls radical leftism. | |
| So when we're talking about liberalism, I'm here for it. | ||
| But then when we start to talk about this far left progressive secular religion people, those guys remind me so much of the guys that I just ran away from, like risked my life and risked my daughter's life to get away from. | ||
| So I want nothing to do with them just as much as I want nothing to do with them. | ||
| But the problem is, here in the middle, where there's, you know, rational-minded people, we're just... These guys on both sides are just nasty. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, if you think of, like, the Westboro Baptist Church people standing there with, like, God hates fags, or the jihadis with their, you know, behead anybody who criticizes Islam. | ||
| Both bad. | ||
| I'm happy to criticize both. | ||
| Yeah, and then on this side you've got those guys that were blocking that old lady and her walker that was trying to get to your talk. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Whose husband fought the Nazis in World War II and they're calling her a Nazi. | ||
| Unbelievable. | ||
| So I mean, they're just like angry people that are unwilling to engage in, you know, | ||
| just decent interaction with other human beings, but they want people to walk | ||
| on that long, straight, narrow path. | ||
| They decide what that long, straight, narrow path is, right? | ||
| And they want everybody to walk on it. | ||
| And that's what I'm totally against. | ||
| In a weird way, though, is it scary for you as someone that left a fundamentalist line of thinking | ||
| to see that as the secularists become fundamentalists, like it almost seems to me like | ||
| that everything happening right now is just the end of secularism, which really blows. | ||
| I hope not. | ||
| Well, that it almost seems like what the progressives are offering us, and the moral relativism and postmodernism and identity politics and all of those things, which is so the reverse of liberalism and Western belief, that that is secularism on steroids. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, I truly hate to say that. | ||
| I think that, well, as you know, I'm a college professor and my students are like the 18 to 25 demographic. | ||
| And I really do believe, maybe I'm being a hopeless optimist right now, but I really do believe... You sort of have to be in your business, wouldn't you? | ||
|
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Yeah. | |
| I feel like there is like a post-woke They're called Zoomers now. | ||
| I really feel that they roll their eyes at all of these things. | ||
| I honestly feel like those people that we're talking against, I feel like they're going to fizzle themselves out before they're able to bring down secularism or liberalism. | ||
| Do you see signs of that? | ||
| So your signs you're saying are that young people now that you're teaching, and believe me, I see plenty of that when I go to colleges. | ||
| There's plenty of people standing up against this, but I would say for as many as that stand up against it, we just don't know how many are afraid to for the same reason. | ||
| That's exactly it, and that's exactly what the religious thing reminds me of too, because when I was a Muslim and I was doubting and I was questioning and I didn't like the things that I was hearing, I wasn't gonna say anything because I'm gonna be attacked for it. | ||
| And I'm going to be not just attacked, I'm going to be demonized for it, right? | ||
| If I just say these things, it's like, oh, how could you question the faith? | ||
| You're a non-believer. | ||
| You're us and them. | ||
| You're now like the enemy. | ||
| And it's exactly the same thing that's happening over here. | ||
| I mean, my daughter's studying to be a social worker, and in that field, it's super left. | ||
| I mean, she had a question in one of her final exams. | ||
| It said, um, gender is a social construct, true or false? | ||
| And she was like, Mom, I had to answer it incorrectly to get the grades, you know what I mean? | ||
| And so many stories like that. | ||
| And so, yeah, she bites her tongue in class because she wants to pass. | ||
| And sometimes in discussions, she'll notice that there are other people that are sort of saying things too. | ||
| But like she was telling me the other day, as soon as the discussion started, her teacher | ||
| just shut it down and was like, "Different people have different opinions. | ||
| Different people..." | ||
| And she's like, "Literally, that's the point of school, is that different people have different | ||
| opinions. | ||
| Why are you guys scared to even have these conversations?" | ||
| Is that a doubly intense thing for you? | ||
| Because not only your backstory and everything that you've told us here, you're also on college campuses. | ||
| So you're really hit with this monster all the time, basically. | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| As much as I can, just focus on all of the positive things that are going on. | ||
| But it does bring me down. | ||
| Quite often I just feel like I just want to quit everything and just move to a deserted island. | ||
| But there are enough things that I see that keep me going. | ||
| I'm looking into some land somewhere. | ||
| I don't want to say it while we're on YouTube. | ||
| Don't say it on air. | ||
| Did I ever tell you about the time I think I was speaking at University of Arizona and I was a couple hundred kids and there was a kid towards the back who was brown-skinned. | ||
| I happened to see him and it wasn't that brown skin that alerted me in any way. | ||
| It was that he looked very glassed over in his face like really sort of lost and sort of and you can pick that you speak in front of public. | ||
| Sometimes your eye just gets caught to a particular person. | ||
| It might be the body language or whatever it is. | ||
| And I could see he was also really sweaty, and he kind of looked glossed over, and I just was, I was a little nervous, like you just don't know, these days you just, whatever. | ||
| Anyway, I'm doing the meet and greet after, and I see him in the line, and he comes up to me, and he gets really close to me, and he says, can I hug you? | ||
| And he hugs me, and then he says, I'm like you. | ||
| And I didn't know what he meant at first, and then it took me a second and then he said, I'm gay. | ||
| And oh, and his name was Mohammed. | ||
| And I thought, this is just so twisted that someone like him, you know, has to live in fear while he lives in Arizona. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And it's like, you see this over and over and over. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And that's why it's so meaningful when you go and do these talks. | ||
| That's why it's so meaningful when Sam was on Bill Maher's show. | ||
| Or it's so meaningful when Sam was doing his TED Talk and he was talking about women in Afghanistan having to cover themselves up in bags and why we don't care about that and why we're not talking about that. | ||
| It's so meaningful to people like me and this guy who were brought up in, I mean, him probably, you know, it's Arizona, and for me it's Canada. | ||
| Like, you think that these kinds of things only happen over there in these countries under these strict Sharia regimes, but anywhere we're within, you know, these ideas cross borders, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| So if we're within that community, you really have to keep your, you know, Your personal thoughts, your doubts, your homosexuality, your feminism, your any ideas that go that are sort of dissident in any way. | ||
| You have to be so quiet about it. | ||
| So to see somebody else talking about it is just incredibly healing. | ||
| So to be crystal clear, for those of us, including the two of us, who would never want anyone to be bigoted towards Muslim people and who want Muslim people to live free and practice their religion however they want. | ||
| I want all people to live free. | ||
| Of course. | ||
| What do you think the reformers, are the reformers making any headway? | ||
| It's sort of hard to say. | ||
| And what can What can the liberals do, even? | ||
| Because every time the liberals get involved, it doesn't work out well for the liberals. | ||
| And then it actually, in many ways, it seems like it hurts the reformers, because then they doubly seem like sellouts or something. | ||
| But do you think the reformation, you know, other religions have gone through reformations. | ||
| There's a reason that most Jews are mainly liberal. | ||
| Which upsets a lot of conservative people, but they're mainly liberal, usually, I think, in the better sense of liberalism. | ||
| Or Christianity, obviously, went through a reformation. | ||
| The church went through a reformation. | ||
| Do you sense that Islam can go through a reformation? | ||
| I think that there are people all over the Muslim world and the Western world that are Muslim that are pushing back against fundamentalism. | ||
| ISIS did a lot to help people to see this is what your religion teaches. | ||
| This is the end game right here. | ||
| What would you say to the people who say that's not what the religion teaches? | ||
| Read about the religion, read the Quran, read the Hadith, read the way the Prophet lived. | ||
| Not everything ISIS did was following the Prophet's example, but like the sex slavery, throwing gay people off of the highest rooftop, you know, a lot of things that they did were just following in the Prophet's footsteps. | ||
| Let's not forget that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi had a PhD in Islamic Studies. | ||
| You mean the austere religious scholar according to the Washington Post. | ||
| So this is your question about what the left can do or what liberals can do to support the reformers or to support the people in these countries that are fighting back is how about you not support the fundamentalists? | ||
| How about if you not call a terrorist, I mean the most vicious, disgusting terrorist, leader of the most horrible terrorist organization we've ever had to date, how about you not call him an austere scholar? | ||
| How about that? | ||
| How about you not take... But what do you think is happening in the newsroom? | ||
| So let's remove this from college kids. | ||
| A lot of drugs. | ||
| Let's remove this from Twitter. | ||
| Is it just like... | ||
| Or you think it's just a massive mind virus that has just run through the institutions, media, political, whatever? | ||
| Well we saw this in Canada too when we were talking about bringing, Justin Trudeau was talking about bringing ISIS fighters back into Canada and the Conservatives were of course against that idea and so he retorted with calling the Conservative leader Islamophobic because he didn't want to bring back ISIS fighters. | ||
| Wait, there's a lot there. | ||
| So first off, what was Trudeau, anyone with half a brain, I don't want to give Trudeau more than he deserves, but if you have half a brain, if you leave your country to fight for ISIS or any terrorist group, you shouldn't be allowed to come back. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I don't think that's a racist thing. | ||
| That's not Islamophobic. | ||
| It has nothing to do with race. | ||
| It has nothing to do with Islam. | ||
| It has to do with the fact that this is a criminal. | ||
| This is a terrorist. | ||
| This is a horrible human being. | ||
| So what do you think is happening in Trudeau's brain? | ||
| They just cannot recognize that people with brown skin can be bad. | ||
| That's what it comes down to. | ||
| If this person had gone to Germany to join the Nazis, you know what I mean? | ||
| And then decided, oh, and had burned his passport because he was like so in support of the Nazis and now he's decided to come back to Canada again, there's not going to be any open arms for that person. | ||
| But for some reason there's just like this misfire when the person has brown skin or when they're Muslim. | ||
| It's really the bigotry of low expectations is what it is. | ||
| They're not treating the religion of Islam or Muslim people, they're not treating them the same as they would treat everyone else. | ||
| So you see like when I talk about FGM in the UK, okay once every hour a girl is getting her clitoris chopped off with a razor. | ||
| If it was a white family that did this to their blonde girl, those people would be in prison in a heartbeat, right? | ||
| And everybody, yeah, front page news, everybody would be just absolutely disgusted and horrified that anybody could do this to their own child. | ||
| But because they're from Somalia, then we're just not gonna, we're just not gonna talk about it. | ||
| Do you think all of this ultimately strengthens the far right? | ||
| Because that seems to be sort of, we're seeing a lot of that in Europe, and I think we're now starting to see some signs of it here in the United States. | ||
| And I'm not talking about the Westboro Baptist Church, or just like, you know, some remnant of the KKK, but something more perverse that feels like maybe it's like starting to bubble up, and it's in a weird way, it makes sense. | ||
| I'm not excusing it, but it's like, oh, this sort of makes sense, just if you understand human psychology. | ||
| I think that those people always existed that hate Jews just because they're Jews, or they hate Somalis just because they have dark skin, or whatever. | ||
| But in this climate, I think it was Majid Nawaz that said it. | ||
| Maybe it was Sam Harris, I can't remember. | ||
| That if we, the rational minded people, are not speaking about these issues rationally, then we are just leaving it to the irrational to start having these conversations. | ||
| And unfortunately what ends up happening is that the people that are in this rational sphere are like craving for anybody to say these things | ||
| and then it's unfortunate that sometimes it comes from the mouth of you know somebody that | ||
| you know you wish that it would come from over here you know what I mean | ||
| and so then they end up getting support maybe because of that one issue and I | ||
| think that's probably a good example of that is the way us or no money | ||
| voted for Donald Trump was you know exactly that And then what happened to her after? | ||
| I mean, just the pile-on is just unbelievable. | ||
| Actually, I never hear of her anymore. | ||
| Is she even still in the game? | ||
| I follow her on Twitter. | ||
| I have not seen a tweet of hers in God knows how long. | ||
| I don't know if it's shadow banning. | ||
| She's writing a book right now, so she's busy, but she's still in the game. | ||
| I can't remember who said this analogy, I'm stealing it from somebody right now, where they said if the house is on fire, and you can see the fire everywhere, but all the people are saying things like, it's a fire of peace. | ||
| Or like there's no problem here then if somebody's got the door open even if it's Boris Johnson or Donald Trump or doesn't matter who it is somebody's got the door open over there and they're saying yeah there's a fire guys I can see it you're gonna head for that person and be like yes thank you sanity you know what I mean yeah so I think that in a way it probably does You know, gets more supporters. | ||
| But that's on us, you know? | ||
| That's because we're over here pretending that everything is fine and that there's nothing to talk about. | ||
| It's interesting, I'll give you another fire analogy that is from Bill Maher. | ||
| He talks about how liberals, for some reason, or lefties, the house is burning down and instead of figuring out how to get out, which is what you're describing, they're going, there's a dust bunny in the corner! | ||
| And we better fight about how to clean up the dust money and the whole house is gonna burn down and then you just got a bunch of people with a lot of rubble on top of them. | ||
| That's so good. | ||
| I love that. | ||
| It's just like another version of what you just said there. | ||
| That's exactly it. | ||
| The infighting. | ||
| The infighting instead of going, guys, we got a bigger problem here. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Let's go this way. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| 100% behind that analogy, too. | ||
| and that's something I, like if we talk about feminism, for example, | ||
| we're fixated on like our air conditioner sexist is, can we build chairs so that men can't manspread? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like we're concerned about all of these little things and it's like, okay, but like how about these women | ||
| over here that are being thrown in prison because they want to wear what they wanna wear? | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Or these women over here that just wanna drive a car or these women, you know-- | ||
| Kind of a bigot. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, like, but what's the bigotry though, right? | |
| Isn't that the bigotry? | ||
| Well, that's the bigotry. | ||
| That's the bigotry, is you're saying, I don't care about those women over there. | ||
| In fact, it's empowering for them to cover themselves up head to toe in black in the searing heat of the desert. | ||
| That's great for them. | ||
| Not for me. | ||
| For me, I want to go free the nipple. | ||
| But for them, It's empowering for them to cover themselves, and in fact, let's celebrate that, and let's put a hijab on Barbie, and let's put a swoosh on a hijab, and let's put on the cover of Sports Illustrated. | ||
| Is that the part that makes you crazier than anything else? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| Because when you see this, literally, you know, they'll have everything you just described. | ||
| Nike has the hijab and the whole thing, but like, they would never do that for Mormon women, or where's the, you know, Orthodox Jewish women wear like a wig, where's the wig with the logo, and like, all of these ridiculous Like in any other religious sense, people would be like, this is bananas. | ||
| No one's saying that women shouldn't be allowed to do these things. | ||
| No one's saying they shouldn't be allowed to wear what they want. | ||
| But sort of like the corporate I was gonna say something that was gonna be a gross sexual reference. | ||
| Just the corporate need to suck this thing off. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| You know? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, yeah. | ||
| No, absolutely. | ||
| I mean, it doesn't make any sense to have a woman in Mormon underwear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. | ||
| No one's saying Mormon women can't be athletes. | ||
| Exactly. | ||
| And it also doesn't make any sense to have a woman in a burkini on the cover of Sports Illustrated. | ||
| Nobody's saying women can't wear Mormon underwear. | ||
| Nobody's saying women can't wear bikinis. | ||
| But for us to pretend that this is some empowering feminist thing that should be celebrated, that's the lie. | ||
| That's the problem right there. | ||
| Do you think part of it is just for the average person? | ||
| Like let's try to give these people like as much credit as possible. | ||
| The average advertising executive out there. | ||
| Like every commercial now that you see, there's always a woman in a hijab in it. | ||
| You know, like literally Reese's Pieces. | ||
| We all like Reese's Pieces, and I'm a Muslim with Reese's Pieces. | ||
| Okay, it's great. | ||
| But they do this in all these commercials now, and I don't, for me, it's like, of course, that's wonderful that everyone can eat Reese's Pieces and everyone can play sports. | ||
| We love it. | ||
| But they do it because it's their way of, because they think inclusivity is the number one thing, and how else could you show inclusivity as opposed to just showing people? | ||
| So like they think they're doing something good, but they're bizarrely then protecting things that would never protect them. | ||
| Yeah, you're right. | ||
| And that's why, you know, technically the title of my book should have been How Western Liberals Empower or Inadvertently Empower Radicalism. | ||
| So yeah, they're not doing it on purpose, but they are doing it essentially. | ||
| If we did Look at how everybody just attacked Mitt Romney for the fact that he was Mormon. | ||
| Do you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, if we did take, let's say, a whole bunch of Mormon symbols and had them, like if Nike put their swoosh on it, and if we had them on Reese's Pieces commercials, and in Banana Republic, and in Marks and Spencer, and in, you know, literally any flat surface, we just splashed all of these Mormon symbols all over the place, People would be responding appropriately, right? | ||
| People would be like, why are you celebrating Mormonism? | ||
| Why are we valuing this far, you know, fundamentalist ideology? | ||
| We shouldn't be doing this. | ||
| I don't even think they would go that far. | ||
| I think most people would say Mormons can be whoever they are and do whatever they want, but we just don't need it to be promoted through all of our mainstream media. | ||
| That's exactly it. | ||
| We don't need to slap our logo on it. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Mattel didn't create Mormon underwear for Barbie. | ||
| Why would they create a hijab for Barbie? | ||
| That's all I'm saying. | ||
| I'm not saying these people aren't allowed to make whatever choices they want. | ||
| Make or wear whatever they want to wear. | ||
| I'm saying that we here as You know free liberal enlightened country, you know of secularists. | ||
| We really should not be celebrating fundamentalist Aspects of religion and in fact, I just want to add most Muslim women in America do not wear hijab But we're only celebrating the ones that wear hijab. | ||
| Hillary Clinton ignored the woman who won a gold medal. | ||
| She ignored her and instead focused on this woman over here because she has a hijab on. | ||
| So it's very clear that we're not celebrating American Muslim women in general or just being inclusive of different types of Americans. | ||
| We're specifically supporting the American women that look like fundamentalist Muslims because they are wearing the hijab. | ||
| Those are the ones that get celebrated. | ||
| Those are the ones that get on the cover of magazines. | ||
| Those are the ones that get splashed on every flat surface. | ||
| So as all of this happens to you, and you write a book about this, and you enter the online world and the whole thing, we've talked a lot about this privately, what do you make of what's happening, broadly speaking, on the right? | ||
| That you're a woman, you're brown, you're liberal. | ||
| You're supposed to be hated by these people if we listen to the non-thinking meme that's out there. | ||
| But that's not really the case. | ||
| No, I mean, I see a big difference in just Openness to diversity of ideas. | ||
| So this long straight path that I was talking about, I see that very clearly on the left. | ||
| But on the right, you know, I can talk about the fact that I don't believe in Christianity and I don't believe in any religion and in fact I think that it's toxic. | ||
| I can talk about being pro-choice and I always will be pro-choice and there's nothing you can ever say to me that's going to ever get me to consider not being pro-choice. | ||
| I can And that's a deal breaker for a lot of conservatives, but they're still happy to talk to you. | ||
| They're still happy to talk to me because we agree on certain things like we agree obviously the way we feel about the left uh... they agree with how i feel about fundamentalist islam but we don't necessarily agree if we're going to be talking about fundamentalist christianity there are a lot of secular people on the right that do agree with me uh... but what i mean to say is that the variation in thought is more accepted on the right than it is on the left | ||
| not the liberal classical liberal not the typical left but that little far left crazies over here | ||
| there's no variation in thought like you need to speak perfectly | ||
| you can't even get a pronoun wrong or you are just like evil right | ||
| yeah but on the right | ||
| they're more willing to just sit back and disagree with what i have to say but not | ||
| try to shut me down or not demonize me | ||
| or not uh... | ||
| you know they wouldn't call me gross and racist if i had something to say that | ||
| completely disagreed with their value system or with their belief system | ||
| Having said that though, there are quite a few people on the right, on the far right, who I've interacted with who Very, you know, they'll get mad at me because I have a white husband and we've made a brown baby, so I've now, like, ruined that lineage. | ||
| I get that kind of attacks. | ||
| I get attacks for, oh, once a Muslim, always a Muslim. | ||
| We just don't want your type in our country anyway. | ||
| Go back to where you came from. | ||
| So just like there are some crazies on this side, there are some crazies on this side. | ||
| But I think that this middle ground here is full of both left and right people. | ||
| and that's like I said to you when I was here a few years ago I really believe that this is the largest group but we just haven't found a way to we're just not as loud like these guys you know if it bleeds it leads yeah so these guys are loud and obnoxious and so then they're getting all the airtime But all the rational people in the middle, I think we're the majority. | ||
| In a weird way, it's almost like we're fighting human psychology to be rational. | ||
| A couple days ago, I spoke at Sacramento State, and we knew that there were gonna be some of these white nationalist people there, and a local news crew came, and I gave what I think was probably the best speech of my life, because I've been thinking about a lot of this because of writing my book, and I was really sharp, and I took all the questions I could, I didn't censor anybody or anything, and it actually went totally fine. | ||
| There was some minor screaming and minor, minor marginal stuff, but nothing happened. | ||
| Nobody was attacked, nobody was thrown out, no fire alarms were pulled. | ||
| And then, of course, they don't cover it on television because it was a peaceful exchange of ideas. | ||
| And yet, had anything crazy happened, just one person really screamed, or had I done anything untoward or whatever, it's like, now we're on the news, the local news, and then it gets picked up by CNN, and America's racist. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Yes. | |
| But whenever you diffuse things as sane, somewhat centrist people, nobody has a freaking clue. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| This is a problem. | ||
| This is a problem because then people start to feel like the world's gone crazy and they start to feel like things are way worse than they really are. | ||
| I don't think, and we give them too much, because we think that things are so bad, we give them too much credence. | ||
| There's too much credibility given to these people who say crazy stuff. | ||
| Like, why are we even paying attention to them? | ||
| This, you know, Jessica Yaniv from my hometown of Vancouver, BC, you know, went to estheticians and insisted that they wax Jessica's balls. | ||
| Right, so to be clear, she is a biological male. | ||
| Nobody has a problem with her identifying as a trans person. | ||
| But she has balls. | ||
| Yeah, she has balls, and there are many reasons why these women refused, one of which being | ||
| it's a completely different skill set as an esthetician. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
|
unidentified
|
Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
| It's probably a different tool. | ||
| These are very different things. | ||
| Very different wax, very different methods. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Like, these are physically very different body parts. | ||
| And so they just, these women just weren't, they didn't have the knowledge required to do this. | ||
| And she took that and ran with it to the Human Rights Tribunal and said that it was a, | ||
| you know, a violation of her rights, et cetera, et cetera. | ||
| Oh my God, how much airtime she got. | ||
| Right, and like Ricky Gervais is tweeting about her, and it's just like all over the place. | ||
| Blair did a really great video on her, Blair White. | ||
| Just like all over the news. | ||
| And that is somebody that, as a society, we should just be either ignoring, you know what I mean? | ||
| Like, it should have just been, luckily, the Human Rights Tribunal, | ||
| the judgment, it was against her. | ||
| So everything turned out fine in the end. | ||
| But she-- | ||
| She just got way too much air time. | ||
| We spent too much time and energy talking about somebody like that. | ||
| And so it makes everybody say things like, wow, the trans community are nuts! | ||
| It's like, no, Jessica Yeniva's nuts. | ||
| But we ignore all the ones that are just living their lives. | ||
| That's what I always say about the bathroom thing. | ||
| It's like trans people have been going to whatever bathroom they wanted to pretty much forever, and there's really been no issues with it. | ||
| And now we find one issue with it, we blow it up into a national emergency, where suddenly, literally, when it was happening in North Carolina, I think, Obama was like, we're cutting funding to the state. | ||
| And it's like, I think we might have blown this thing out of proportion, guys. | ||
| Totally. | ||
| Totally being blown out of proportion all the time. | ||
| And I think that that's really dangerous. | ||
| And I just wish that we could get to the point where we just ignore stupid things. | ||
| You know? | ||
| Like there was a Bed Bath & Beyond that they had to take down their pumpkins. | ||
| They had black pumpkins. | ||
| And they said, we've got to take these pumpkins off the shelves because they're pumpkins with black face. | ||
| Like jack-o'-lanterns. | ||
| Right? | ||
| I miss this one. | ||
| Somehow I miss this one. | ||
|
unidentified
|
So when people, when somebody writes you a letter... They still do have the 20% off coupons though, right? | |
| Because people freak about those things. | ||
| Yeah, okay, good. | ||
| But I mean, if you're Bed Bath & Beyond and you get a letter from a nut job saying, you need to take these off the shelves because these jack-o'-lanterns have blackface, you know what? | ||
| Send them a 20% coupon. | ||
| Yeah, here's five 20% coupons. | ||
| Yeah, just like, shh, go back home, everything's going to be okay. | ||
| You don't take them off the shelves. | ||
| You don't listen to these idiots. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| But that also, it still gets back to that thing about the weakness of liberalism, I think. | ||
| And I hate to say it, like I truly hate to say it, that it's like these institutions and companies to watch social justice infect everything and for some reason Liberals, and of course I don't mean everybody, but like they don't stand up for it. | ||
| They always take the path of least resistance. | ||
| And I think that's the problem. | ||
| I don't necessarily think that liberalism is the problem. | ||
| I think that the problem is that liberals are not standing up for liberal values. | ||
| And we talked about this, you know, when I was here last time before, just Western values, Enlightenment values. | ||
| Why do we feel like that's a bad thing to support? | ||
| Well, now the meme's out there that, well, it was all white men. | ||
| It was John Locke, and it was all white men. | ||
| Adam Smith, it was all white men. | ||
| Who cares? | ||
| John Stuart Mill, white guy. | ||
| Yeah, it's in all of these colleges now where they're taking down all the pictures of the poets and statues because these are all white men. | ||
| Most of them wrote poetry in the name of whiteness. | ||
| Oh my goodness, yeah. | ||
| That's really the problem right there. | ||
| That's the crux of the issue right there, is they're not looking at the value itself or the issue itself, but they're looking at the color of the skin of the people. | ||
| And that works both ways too, right? | ||
| So to go back to the Rotherham rape gangs, that was the problem there too. | ||
| Instead of just looking and saying, oh my god, thousands upon thousands of girls are being raped, We need to do something about that. | ||
| They went, wait a minute, but they're being raped by men with brown skin. | ||
| So hold up. | ||
| You know, we have to address this differently. | ||
| No, you don't! | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Those are still girls being raped. | ||
| It doesn't matter if they're being raped by white men or black men or brown men. | ||
| Irrelevant. | ||
| Is the other part of this, and we sort of referenced this earlier, that like, so when there were all those rapes in Germany a couple years ago on New Years, and they sort of covered it up, and basically the only people that were talking about it online were people on the right, and Breitbart was covering it, and Drudge maybe, and a few things like that. | ||
| And then so then what happens is the mainstream media is like, see the way they're blowing this thing out of proportion. | ||
| But then regular Germans who I've talked to said, no, this was real. | ||
| This was a real thing that happened. | ||
| And then what happens is the people who were like, and then it came out that it was really happening. | ||
| Like it was very clear that it was happening and then maybe some minor media touched it. | ||
| But basically it makes those people who were the ones screaming about it first go, well, the media is against us and this is a horrible stuff. | ||
| And now like it feeds the narrative. | ||
| to do is it does unfortunately yeah and not only does it feed the narrative it | ||
| feeds the hate to feed it feeds those insidious people so like in Sweden for | ||
| example where they refuse to talk about anti-semitism and how it has risen so | ||
| much so now it's like it's I think it went from something like 12% to like 50% | ||
| or something like that like it just keeps on growing as long as you don't | ||
| talk about it as long as you don't identify it as long as you don't try to | ||
| fix it it's just gonna continue to fester and is that what you want like | ||
| Really, that can't be what they want. | ||
| They don't want to be empowering those people to just keep going because nobody's talking about it. | ||
| You know what's funny? | ||
| We're getting away with it. | ||
| You know, I was on tour with Jordan, and we went all over the world, and we went to all the Nordic countries. | ||
| In Sweden, we ended up doing two shows because the first show sold out in literally 30 seconds. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Wow. | |
| And we were there, and everyone, you know, if you listen to all the lefties, they would say, well, we should be more like Sweden. | ||
| We should be more like Sweden and the Nordic countries. | ||
| Everyone that came to our shows, and I get it's a self-selected group of people, They're completely afraid of saying what they think. | ||
| That was like the running theme. | ||
| The shows there, when we got on stage, it was like people were like... Starving for that. | ||
| Like that. | ||
| It was actually crazy. | ||
| I can't get the vision, though, of if nine-year-old Yasmin, in full garb, would have known that 20-some-odd years later, she'd be on YouTube talking about waxing people's balls. | ||
| I've had that in my head for the last five minutes, and I just have to get it out, otherwise... | ||
| Yeah. | ||
|
unidentified
|
But there's a beauty to that, isn't there? | |
| I wish I could have, you know, known that any of this was even an option back then. | ||
| Because back then, there was no internet. | ||
| There was no way for us to all communicate. | ||
| There was no way for these voices to be heard, right? | ||
| Mainstream media were just deciding what was going to go on our little TV with five channels, and that was it, you know? | ||
| And I really felt so alone and so stuck and really crazy because everybody around me, I describe it like a school of fish. | ||
| You know, everybody's going in this direction and you don't really think about it. | ||
| You're not given the opportunity to think about it. | ||
| You just move along with them. | ||
| And if you move on your own, it's just so terrifying. | ||
| But even as a kid, I was always questioning things and things didn't make sense to me. | ||
| Like, imagine being a nine-year-old girl being told that you need to revere a man, a 53-year-old man, that raped a nine-year-old girl. | ||
| Like, you have to love him more than you love yourself. | ||
| And I, you know, that's pretty gross. | ||
| Like, it's, that's... | ||
| That's traumatizing to have to stop the part of your brain that is disgusted at the Prophet of Allah. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| Because how could you? | ||
| He's the most perfect example of humanity for all time. | ||
| And so you get filled with this self-hate and this self-doubt. | ||
| But I think that what you're doing now with these YouTube videos and, you know, obviously Twitter, Facebook, social media in general, with people being allowed to express their views, there's no gatekeepers at all, I mean they are, but to a lesser extent. | ||
| So not only can we reach people like that young man you spoke about in Arizona, but we can reach people in Iran and Saudi Arabia and Sudan and Somalia and Pakistan and Bangladesh. | ||
| It's crazy! | ||
| But they, just like I was as a kid growing up in Canada feeling, you know, crazy because I don't want to express how I'm feeling because everybody around me disagrees with me, they have an outlet now. | ||
| And what they're living, of course, is way worse than what I was living, because at least I got to see both worlds. | ||
| I got to see it outside of the bubble. | ||
| I wasn't part of it, but I saw it over there, and I knew that there was a reality that was way better than this reality in here. | ||
| And so I had something to strive for, whereas in a lot of those countries, up until recently, they couldn't even see it. | ||
| They didn't know that it existed. | ||
| There's a great quote in the documentary, Misrepresentation, where they say, you cannot be what you cannot see. | ||
| And that was exactly it right there, right? | ||
| Like, I saw Sheryl Sandberg. | ||
| I saw, you know, at the time, it's kind of ironic now, but Sinead O'Connor and how she cut that picture, you know. | ||
| And I saw Madonna fighting against religion and all of those things. | ||
| You know, John Lennon's Imagine No Religion, there were ideas permeating through that bubble into my head, but I still felt very alone, very separate, very, you know, just scared. | ||
| And so I wish that I had been able, you know, I'm so happy now that people get that other side. | ||
| So, just one more thing for you, although that was a beautiful closing to an interview. | ||
| Can you just talk a little bit about how difficult it was to publish the book, because you ultimately self-published, and we've talked about it privately, but you've said to me, basically, if this was about leaving Christianity, or leaving Judaism, or leaving Mormonism, or certainly leaving Scientology, or whatever else, You're going to get a book deal real quick, you're going to have a Netflix special, and there'll be a documentary and a fiction version, and da-da-da-da-da. | ||
| Yeah, and that's going back to that whole thing of identity again, right? | ||
| So if I had gone through this exact same experience, somebody else went through it, leaving the Westboro Baptist Church, or leaving Hasidic Judaism, or leaving the Mormon Church, whatever it is, They will not touch my story with a ten-foot pole because of the color of my skin and because of the fact that I came from a non-white, what's viewed as a non-white religion. | ||
| So they're not comfortable criticizing or celebrating somebody who is criticizing the ideology of the brown people. | ||
| But the issues within Islam are much, much more exaggerated, like they're much worse than they are from Scientology or Westboro Baptist or any of those other fundamentalist Christian ideologies that people are happy to speak out against. | ||
| Please speak out against these. | ||
| That's fantastic. | ||
| There's definitely a problem there. | ||
| And we definitely should celebrate people like Leah Remini or Megan Phelps Roper or anybody that leaves these horrible ideologies. | ||
| Please celebrate those people. | ||
| But can we also celebrate, like, all people? | ||
| What about Ayaan Hirsi Ali? | ||
| What about what she has overcome? | ||
| I can't think of a single human being that has overcome more than what that woman has overcome. | ||
| But we demonize her. | ||
| She's the barometer. | ||
| To me, if you say to somebody, what do you think about Ayaan Hirsi Ali? | ||
| Now, I guess some people aren't going to know her, but if you know her and you have to think for a second, Before answering how wonderful she is and brave and all those things, it's like, you are confused. | ||
| And if she had white skin and blonde hair and overcame those things in a Western context, we'd have statues of her. | ||
| You know what I mean? | ||
| People would definitely recognize how amazing she is. | ||
| But because she's from a different part of the world and her skin is a different color, then they're not willing to celebrate her. | ||
| And to me, that is the epitome of racism. | ||
| That's a second grade ending by you. | ||
| You're getting good at this. | ||
| All right, you guys can get Unveiled at Yasmin's website, which is yasminmuhammad.com. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about spirituality instead of nonstop yelling, check out our spirituality playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out our full episode playlist. | ||
| They're all right over here. |
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