48: Islamophobia and the Intellectual Dark Web (with Eiynah Mohammed-Smith)
Daniel is joined by special guest Eiynah Mohammed-Smith of the Polite Conversations podcast for a fun, casual (and, of course, incredibly polite) chat about Islamophobia, Sam Harris, New Atheism, the IDW, fascism, and assorted phenomena. Content Warning Links / Notes: Eiynah's Twitter: https://twitter.com/NiceMangos Polite Conversations podcast: https://soundcloud.com/politeconversations Polite Conversations Patreon: https://t.co/PaeNNFMEfP?amp=1
Alright, welcome to episode 48 of I Don't Speak German, the podcast about terrible people and the things that they say and believe.
Once again, my co-host Jack Graham is not going to be joining us because, meh, coronavirus, people dealing with shit.
That's kind of the reality of the world.
I'm Daniel, and if you don't know me by now, then you probably haven't been listening to this podcast very long.
Today, I'm doing another kind of casual chat with someone that I've admired from afar for a while.
And this is Ina, aka Nice Mangoes, who does the Polite Conversations podcast.
She's an ex-Muslim.
Thanks so much for having me on.
Saudi Arabia and currently lives in Canada which I believe is a better place for her and we're gonna be talking kind of generally about sort of new atheism and fascism and what it's like to be in this world today and I know thank you for coming on the podcast thanks so much for having me on it's a pleasure of course You've been around, at least in terms of your public persona, you've been around much longer than I have.
In fact, you interviewed Sam Harris in 2016, which I was re-listening to some of that today.
Oh God.
I guess the place to begin maybe would be for you to introduce yourself to my audience who may or may not be familiar with your work and tell us where you are politically, maybe?
Okay, so I'm Aina.
I'm an ex-Muslim of Pakistani background, an illustrator, and I've written and illustrated some children's books.
Politically, I am, I guess, An ex-New Atheist, if that says anything.
So, yeah, like, you know, leaving religion and all of that.
It was nice at first to discover that there were other, like, atheists online.
other ex-Muslims and it was kind of empowering to have a place to speak up about it and then things quickly kind of went to places that I did not sign up for so I've spent the past few years kind of trying to distance myself from that and re-examine it and kind of wonder how I got sucked into that and yeah so I used to be a Sam Harris fan actually
and you even interviewed Robert Spencer who is differentiated from Richard Spencer some people get that confused but But you never interviewed Richard Spencer, but you did interview Robert Spencer, and I do find your podcast I'm not gonna say I'm that I've listened to every episode, but I listen to it quite often.
I quite enjoy it and I do find the The sort of initial thing where it's your father kind of saying like well you should just have polite conversations with people and It seems very, and you're like, no, I'm completely non-controversial, despite the fact that you seem to engage in controversy at the slightest provocation, and that's a compliment in my book, by the way.
Oh, thank you.
My dad does not think so, but... Well, you know, it's a thing.
You know, my father's no longer with us, but my mother has no idea... Oh, I'm sorry to hear that.
Yeah, my mother has no idea what I do in my online life, and that's how we like to keep it.
Anyway, um, so I did want to kind of start off I mean you kind of come out of like the new atheist community and um, you know We've done an episode about Sam Harris in this podcast and hopefully again you and I will do an episode Completely about Sam Harris and just like rip him a new one at some point.
I am quickly becoming a Harris ologist, you know, I've done some Rubin ology as well and Yep.
You know, I did.
I've been kind of listening to Harris quite a bit for the last couple years, particularly after the Ezra Klein interview.
I kind of did a deep dive on that.
And I think you and I could have a very long conversation about the Ezra Klein conversation and all the bullshit that was involved in that.
And you even did an episode about Sammy Harris's recent bit about why white nationalism is not as big of a threat as the threat of Islam, etc.
And I'm going to put a link to that in the show notes because I think that's really worth listening to.
Thank you.
But kind of the reason I wanted to bring you on is I wanted to kind of get your perspective on, you know, sort of the new atheism crowd and the way that Islamophobia has kind of played into this kind of rise of this kind of like far right fascist ideology post new atheism. sort of the new atheism crowd and the way that
And I kind of wanted to kind of pick your brain on that just a little bit because I you and I and Jack as well to us to some degree kind of come out of that kind of new atheism milieu and kind of come out of that kind of reality.
So what I kind of thought at the time was, well, this is, you know, early 2000s is the George W. Bush administration.
And, you know, like kind of opposing fundamentalist Christianity was sort of like the real of the kind of the core of new atheism.
And then there was this kind of like pro-war contingent, kind of pro-Iraq, pro-Afghanistan war contingent within that.
But that was kind of a sideline.
And what I find kind of coming back to it now with a little bit more of a sort of like material understanding of the world is that the Islamophobia was kind of baked in from the beginning.
And I'm just wondering what your perspective on that is.
Um, so firstly, I want to make clear that, uh, you know, I have no issues with atheism.
I am an atheist and I think that vocal, there's, there's a space for vocal criticism of religion and it doesn't have to be the way that these ITW guys do it.
You know, it doesn't have to be dehumanizing large groups of people.
It doesn't have to be like, um, playing footsie with Ben Shapiro and all of that, who is Oddly, that kind of religious fundamentalism seems acceptable to some of these guys.
Yeah, it really is about the Islam, Islam, Islam.
So, for me, I think the way I got sucked into it is that I do think that there is plenty of valid criticism for Islam.
Obviously, it's a religion I left behind.
I'm not a fan of religion in general.
Um, and where I'm coming from, that was the status quo, right?
So it was like punching up.
It was like, uh, you know, someone in North America criticizing evangelical Christianity.
So at first glance, when I heard terms like Islamophobia, it made me wince a little bit.
Like, you know, Imagine, I guess, someone leaving very toxic Christianity and then hearing, oh, you know, you shouldn't criticize Christianity as Christianityophobia or whatever.
But that's a very, like, it's a very basic understanding of the situation, right?
You don't understand the power dynamics of the populations and the groups involved.
um so in the west the way muslims are being dehumanized uh is deeply tied to some of the criticisms that people have of islam and those are like blanketly spread out onto all muslims and that is dangerous
so yeah i think that now the term islamophobia is something that i used to cringe actually has become rather justifiable because it's not just a hatred of muslims it's It's a fear-mongering that is completely out of proportion of Islam itself and I say that as someone who has No love for the religion I left behind.
I just don't want to dehumanize a group of people.
Right, and it becomes sort of a, you know, not to, not to, you know, put words in your mouth and please correct me, but it becomes kind of a justification for Mideast war.
It becomes, it becomes a justification for, you know, kind of Western imperialism to like carpet bomb.
Right, exactly.
You know, goat herders in the mountains or whatever, you know, whatever kind of thing that becomes.
Right.
Like, I mean, I did an episode on Orientalism in Disney's Aladdin.
That was a good episode.
I really liked that one.
Oh, thank you.
And I talked to a professor of classics about that.
And yeah, it was a very interesting conversation.
But we also talked about how, like, the way that people are portrayed in, you know, generally coming from the Islamic part of the world leads to people justifying things like war.
Like, when it comes to Aladdin, I think Democrats and Republicans were asked, you know, if the bombing of the city of Agrabah, which is a fictional city, city or country, I don't remember, from Aladdin.
If that was justified.
And both Republicans and Democrats, I forget the exact percentages, but respond, like, you know.
Well, yeah, of course.
Like, bombed the brown people.
It's justified.
That's fine, you know.
Right, right.
And so much of these sort of Islamophobic, you know, so Islam gets coded onto, like, brown people who speak a language that sounds a certain way, that come from a certain, you know, places.
It absolutely comes a code for Middle East North North Africa And that's what's frustrating to me when people say like, you know, Islam is not a race and criticism of Islam is not racism.
It's a very like 2013 kind of point.
Like, you know, if there was no racism attached to people's understanding of Islam and Muslim, then we wouldn't have Hindus and Sikhs suffering.
From the consequences of anti-Muslim bigotry, right?
Criticism of Islam is completely racialized and completely projected onto, you know, quote-unquote, brown people.
So... Right.
I mean, it becomes like it's not a criticism of the religion.
And in fact, I would argue, and again, I welcome your correction at any point, because one of the reasons I don't do more criticism of that on this podcast and more kind of criticism of these kinds of structures is just because I feel like I, as a white guy who grew up in Alabama, because one of the reasons I don't do more criticism of that on this podcast and more kind of criticism of these kinds of structures is just because I feel like I, as a white guy who grew up in Alabama, who now lives in Michigan, who has no knowledge of Arabic, doesn't have the
Although I feel like I can kind of recognize those things.
It's kind of difficult for me.
And, you know, I'd like to take this opportunity to learn, honestly.
But I find that like what happens is that in particular with some of the people like Sam Harris or Douglas Murray or, you know, what they do is they take this sort of idea of like the furthest out version of of what this kind of religion represents.
They take this violent "jihadism." They take this idea that everyone is a potential terrorist.
And there are good Muslims and bad Muslims.
And there are people who can be allowed in our society because, oh, they are secular and they have these kinds of ideas, or maybe they're not And then there are the, like, threatening kind.
And, like, only if you sort of pass our ideological test, only if you pass our cultural test and you're gonna come in and be, like, kind of good, quote-unquote, white people, because whiteness is something that's kind of culturally assigned, do you get to sort of be able to enter our society.
And, you know, that is, you know, as much as we can criticize some of the kind of misogyny and some of the kind of cultural values of these Abrahamic religions, you know, that also kind of neglects the fact that, like, Catholicism is in many ways just as misogynistic as, you know, any kind of version of Islam we can imagine.
Right.
You know, the Southern Baptists have, like, deep fundamental misogyny, you know, kind of built into their religion.
Well, you said a bunch of stuff there, so I'm trying to think of what to respond to.
westerners americans you know whatever um and it does kind of strike me as like it's it's sort of selectively imposed and um i don't know uh respond i guess i guess respond to that i apologize for for not really having a question there well you said a bunch of stuff there so i'm trying to think of what to respond to yeah i guess um yeah they don't want to focus on they get very mad if someone tries to bring that in
i mean i've heard sam harris and douglas murray talk about just that that don't do the whole but all religion all abrahamic religions are like this and they want to specifically specifically talk about islam and it's it's It's interesting because they dwell on that so much, and it's like, what religion has more power over here in the West?
You know, Islamists don't have power over here.
So, I mean, how much of a, how much of a threat can it be?
Of course, terrorist attacks and all of that, like everyone, everyone is horrified by those, including, you know, non-extremist Muslims.
There are millions of them, but When it comes to progressive Muslims like Ilhan Omar, someone like Sam Harris can't tolerate her even, right?
I have a deep love for Ilhan Omar.
She is deep in my heart.
I love her dearly.
They always talk about this, you know, this idea of the progressive Muslim that's LGBT friendly and feminist and when that shows up in their face they find reasons to discredit that person.
Unless they're an IDW-er that's just calling themselves feminist and are only LGB-friendly in the sense that they'll use that to shit on the T. Right.
You know what I'm saying?
Yeah.
You know, particularly in kind of the Quillette crowd, there is that, like, kind of finding these kind of particular, like, almost like the pet, you know, the, you know, we've got our, like, pet ex-Muslim or we've got our The token.
We've got the token who's going to come in and tell us all the things that we want to hear.
And I guess, you know, Aeon Hersey-Eylee kind of fits into that a little bit.
And I know there's some, you know, everything that I've kind of understood about her is that she had a legitimately terrible life.
And I would never criticize her or apologize for that or pretend that that wasn't a thing.
But also she, you know, the reason that she gets the platform that she does to kind of be the person she is is because there are sort of powerful interests that, you know, sort of back her in that way.
And I feel like it's fair to sort of both acknowledge the reality of her and acknowledge the reality of her opinions may very well be completely justified.
And that's what people conflate.
Yeah, exactly.
They conflate those things all the time.
The fact that she has had some legitimately horrific experiences with Islamic extremism and has escaped that and all of that, you know, no one should try to take that away from her and You know, delegitimize that in any way.
However, there's also the reality of her politics being absolute garbage.
You have to separate those things.
And that's a very common thing I've seen among some ex-Muslims that are, like, ex-extremist Muslims, you know?
Like, fortunately, I... Do we need to talk about Majid Nawaz?
Is that where we're going?
Not just him, like I was thinking about some other ones as well, right?
There's Yasmeen Mohammed who has tweeted things about Muslims and Nazis being comparable and how the KKK, you know, not all of them were violent.
Only a handful of them actually went and did the lynchings.
And this is all in service of her idea that the Libs try to, I guess, defend Muslims by saying not all of them are violent.
So she compares them to the KKK and Nazis, which is just horrific.
There's a matter of sort of like there's a political system behind it, and I feel like some of this kind of comes down to the fact that, like, like in so many of these MENA countries that have this sort of like de facto theocracy or this kind of the act, you know, this kind of idea that like to be a part of the religion is also to be a part of the kind of the state structure.
And so, like, opinion polls about, like, sort of like, you know, 90% of people in this country kind of, you know, support the death penalty for idolatry, for instance.
And then you kind of look at that and go, like, well, yeah, but they don't actually do that.
And I feel like kind of finding that... Yeah, they're not gonna answer, honestly.
Well, and even just kind of, like, if you talk to people in the American South, which, again, I'm from the American South, And if you go into like Facebook groups, like Patriot Facebook groups, and like you look at people who are like, they won't say we should murder people who live Christianity, but they will absolutely say like anybody who's like a traitor to the country, quote unquote, anybody who's, you know, and, you know, my understanding, and, you know, again, please correct me if I'm wrong.
Yeah, neither of which is justifiable.
I mean, it's horrific either way.
I'm not arguing kind of the justification.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I know.
kind of what plays into that like the way how you get those kinds of opinion polls and to ignore that neither of which is justifiable i mean it's horrific either way i'm not arguing kind of the justification yeah yeah i know just wanted to point it out right but there's this sense of like well these people and this is kind of where i land on this and i'm not i'm sorry to kind of ask you about like you know ex-muslim questions because there's so many more interesting things we could talk about and hopefully we'll kind of move into that after this
but i feel like there's such this kind of like idea of um you know there are these kind of alien people who believe in this other religion uh islam and And they are very different from the people that live in my country because my, even though they are religious, they're kind of like secular and not kind of recognizing the fact that like so many, like, like you can find like memes and like cartoons of Trump and sort of like guided by Jesus and that sort of thing.
And this was even more overt during the George W. Bush era, which I am an old man and I remember, um, because I am, uh, uh, not 25 years old.
And I don't know like I don't I don't know kind of how far back you go But I just love to get your kind of again thoughts on that kind of rambling massive words.
i just gave you just like the sort of othering of muslims right well and just that sort of like the fact that it's like the othering then kind of means that like any kind of alien perspective or any kind of like weird poll result just kind of gets becomes a defense of both a sort of like aggressive anti-immigration policy but also becomes an excuse to go and like bomb people like it becomes a justification for literal war and um yeah sorry go ahead yeah
and that all starts with the othering right it's It's always interesting to me how the people that speak like that, they clearly don't know Muslims.
Because, I mean, there are so many jokes about cherry-picking Muslims, right?
Like, Ramadan is the time for all the, you know, mostly secular, but sometimes religious, cherry-picking Muslims to come out.
And in Muslim communities, like, the more Non-religious will always joke about the hypocrisies of Ramadan, and I did an episode once talking about my experiences of Ramadan in Pakistan and how, like, you know, people would stock up on booze because if you want to get, like, I guess, imported booze, you have to get a bootlegger
And you have to meet him in an alley and it's like a long complicated process over there so The bootleggers stop selling during Ramadan Because it's the holy month so people like stockpile booze they like buy it in bulk like before Ramadan starts and There are people who will not they will not drink during the day because you have to fast from sunrise to sunset but then as soon as
Um, you know, the sun sets, they break their fast with a beer, then there's the ones that are slightly more religious who will, like, give up booze for all of Ramadan.
Then, um, you know, there's people who make those kinds of excuses with halal food, right?
Um, so I've been to a pizza store with a drunk, um, Muslim acquaintance, and They've been asking for halal pepperoni and been very mad when it wasn't available.
And I'm like, are you seeing yourself?
You're drunk out of your skull here and you are upset about them not having halal pepperoni.
There's all kinds of cherry-picking hypocrites.
So when I did that episode, you know, some of the comments I got were like, wow, you know, this really helps me see that Muslims are just like my cherry-picking Christian family.
And, you know, it really makes me see, you know, how human they are, how much they are just like us.
And that really made me realize, like, wow, they, Muslims really were, are viewed as some kind of, like, blind faith religious robots, you know, that are not human, but like, blindly, perfectly following the faith to a T, which perfectly following the faith to a T, which is not humanly possible, you know, in any faith.
Well, right, it becomes like if you believe in the 72 virgins or whatever, and then suddenly you're, you know, this goes sort of like a robot that is like programmed to commit, you know, self suicide bombing.
Right, and even if you ask, like, many modern-day, younger, more secular Muslims, they won't literally believe in those things either.
Right.
Well, and, you know, again, it's kind of my perspective that, like, and this is something that I kind of ran into when I did the episode about Sam Harris.
I'm not sure how much that you listen to.
But when I listen to it, yeah, one of the things I kind of process is like Sam Harris kind of talking about like reading this issue of to beak and yes finding, you know kind of using this propaganda and like taking it literally and you know again as someone who Spends some time trying to I kind of understand like how propaganda works, you know on this kind of baseline level I find it I find is his analysis of I would say juvenile, but the word I really want is infantile.
It's completely ridiculous.
It just serves as biases.
And again, the whole thing is like, any analysis of like, why people commit these acts of terrorism, that doesn't include like, you know, US sanctions, it doesn't include Western imperialism, Western sanctions, and, you know, continued bombing.
is completely kind of missing the point in my opinion and that doesn't look look look justify like that isn't saying like this is fine necessarily but also like let's let's you know let's view this in in its proper context so uh you know when it comes to sam harris look
if you are mean to um right-wingers even just a little bit you're obviously going to turn them into nazis and you're going to turn them into trump voters and it's going to be your fault But when you bomb Muslim countries repeatedly, then you can't do anything to them and they should definitely not react to that.
And jihadist propaganda you have to take at its word every single literal word.
But white supremacist propaganda, I mean, who's to even know what it means?
Like, it's so... Yeah, we don't even know.
What is white supremacy, even?
It's clueless to troll.
Nobody could possibly know what's going on in this.
Nobody could possibly know.
Nobody could possibly have just analyzed the information in this and kind of understood what's a troll and what's not.
Because, like, how can you possibly understand this?
And if they stream something online, then obviously it's not white supremacy.
It's just trolling.
LOL.
Hashtag.
Even if, you know, Brenton Tarrant decides to, you know, kill 50 people in Tumas in New Zealand, you know, on a livestream.
That's clearly not a deliberate intention.
That's just trolling, right?
Yeah, we will never know.
We will never know.
It's not like he wrote a manifesto or anything.
Right.
And it's not like, you know, again, you could understand that manifesto in context of like the subculture that produced it.
Right, right.
Which is, I don't know, that's the sort of thing that makes me so angry with Sam Harris is like his...
Complete unwillingness to examine anything beyond its like most literal interpretation, its most literal like base text interpretation, unless it fills his...
Unless he can kind of defend a right-wing ideology in terms of yes If it's you know, if it's Trump, then he's gonna examine it every which way to say it's not racist, right?
I feel like I do just kind of want to get into because you did interview Sam Harris back in 2016 and I do just kind of want to ask you about like how did that come about?
and what was how do you feel about that kind of later on because I My experience kind of we listened to a little bit of that, you know a little bit ago was you have moved significantly kind of like to the left since then and I think in part because of like kind of what you've seen and kind of what you kind of ran into in that conversation with Sam and Again, not to put words in your mouth.
Please feel free to disagree with me.
But like what was the kind of how did how did that come about and What was your experience and kind of what was your experience afterwards?
I guess I Yeah, so I'm actually going to do a post-mortem of that conversation in detail.
I'll probably have to split it up into multiple episodes because it is a three-hour conversation with Sam that I'm going to have to, you know, analyze.
And I cringe, like, thinking of it even today, so it's going to be hard.
But I'm going to do that soon.
So, yeah, I had already started kind of being very disappointed with Sam Harris and, you know, noting some of the hypocrisies and some of the anti-immigrant tendencies.
But I kept sort of, like, making excuses for it in my head.
Like, no, no, no, no, no.
I'm just, you know, there's got to be a better explanation.
He's just not, he's just naive.
He's just not understanding.
Surely, if he actually saw what Douglas Murray was about, he would not defend him.
And, you know, before that, before that conversation with Sam, I think it was a year before that, I had already written to him, like, I had written, like, an open letter to Sam,
Very extremely politely kind of not pushing him too hard Purposely because I wanted him to listen to what I was saying about Douglas Murray and that kind of made the rounds and lots of people read it And you know, of course if I was to write it today, I would not be as patient Right, but and just for people who don't know Douglas Murray is kind of like viciously anti-islam anti-immigration
British person who sort of feeds into this sort of xenophobia towards Muslims, but who kind of speaks with an English accent and is polite enough about it that he doesn't get criticized nearly as much as he probably should have.
Yeah, like he's basically, you know, complaining about white genocide a lot of the time.
One of my favorite quote-unquote favorite bits of Sam Harris's podcast is the bit where Douglas Murray and I put that in heavy quotes.
I just did it for the camera, but no one will get to see that except for Aina.
One of my favorite bits is when Douglas Murray starts ripping on transgender people Oh, yes, and Sam just giggles and there is a no of course like these like serious societies who are the Islamic societies who understand that we're at a war with each other would never take seriously the need for transgender bathrooms and Sam is just giggling to himself the entire time which is very telling and about the
Of all the terrible things that Sam Harris has ever said, that's one of the worst moments of Sam Harris.
Like, that's the thing I point to people and go, yeah, this is how you know how terrible Sam Harris really is, because this is just kind of casual bigotry.
Yeah.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
That's not even one of the worst things I've heard from him.
Oh, no, it's not one of them.
But it but it is like a very easy thing to be like, this is the casual just thing that like, he doesn't even think that this is like worth like he this is mask off for me.
Yeah, see so he thought he was covering it well there because he didn't actually add to the conversation.
He just laughed along with whatever horrific stuff Douglas Murray was saying and I guess he thought there was some safety in the fact that there was some protection in the fact that Douglas Murray is gay so he can get away with saying these things about trans people and Just like you know if someone says you're being You know, horribly anti-Muslim.
He'll point out some of his ex-Muslim friends and no, I'm not.
Look, these are my friends and they agree with me.
And as if, as if people don't recognize that you can have tokens from within communities that will just justify what you want to hear.
I mean, I think Milo proved that to everyone a few years ago.
I mean, I was doing like see Kyle's with Richard Spencer and he was like, yeah I'm not a Nazi because I'm in you know, how many miles of black cock do I have to take to not be?
You know considered a right.
That's definitely not racist.
You can't fetishize Someone sexually and be racist, of course So no, I apologize.
I just wanted to tell people who Douglas Murray was so please continue.
I Yeah, so I had already sort of started being disappointed with Sam at that point.
I had been writing, you know, I had a public open letter to him, but I still had some hope, you know?
Though he was sort of getting into this whole Reuben, Gadsad, and that was just, like, that was just the end of the line, you know?
I was almost, almost done.
Especially after I saw Sam tweet positively about, you know, Tommy Robinson and Anne-Marie Waters, who are some of England's most vicious, vicious, uh, you know, far-riders and basically, uh, open racists, uh, like white identity politics and everything.
And, yeah, I think Sam tweeted that, you know, Anne-Marie Waters' episode with Gad Saad made a lot of sense on immigration.
And I was like, what the fuck?
Like, anyone that thinks Anne-Marie Waters is making sense on the topic of immigration, those are some alarming views.
Anyway, so I reached out to him to interview him.
I wasn't expecting that he'd say yes, but he did.
And I thought, hey, you know, this is going to be my chance to kind of gently nudge him and see if he's actually as bad as I think he is.
Because I didn't want to believe.
I certainly still wanted to be his fan.
Because coming from Saudi Arabia, a woman, you know, living in Saudi Arabia, even though my parents have never been forceful about religion, just the state over there, right?
like you're forced to wear A black cloak in the heat and it just kind of leaves you with a bad taste in your mouth about modesty gear and religion and sharia and all of that.
So, you know, some of the stuff that Sam was saying about religion made a lot of sense to me and I was like, hey, you know, we do need to have some of this vocal criticism.
And so I really wanted him not to be racist.
Right.
So I was really clinging to that.
Yeah.
No, you can tell that in the audio of you, you know, like really trying to give him every benefit of the doubt.
Yeah, but I mean, did you notice that I was actually also pushing him harder than you see him push in interviews?
Absolutely.
I mean, I feel like he sort of like was, you know, and again, I'm glad to get your kind of comment on this if you feel comfortable with it, but I feel like he was both sort of like approaching you as like, oh, you're an ex-Muslim.
So you can maybe be one of my like pet friends that I can use to sort of like justify my bigotry.
Well at the same time when you're pushing him, he's kind of you know, I Don't know.
It's a complicated dance, right?
Because you were both trying to kind of give him the benefit of the doubt I kind of say well, I know you're not really racist racist, but you kind of say just say the right thing here all you have to do is like defend yourself and like any kind of Reasonably even like the limpest noodle of a defense I will latch on to and he kind of refuses to do any of that.
I Yeah, yeah, I tried and I tried.
And there was one moment that someone clipped and it went viral from that podcast.
It was like me complaining to him that you know, he tweets stuff like Anne-Marie Waters.
interviews and uh i'm like you know who she is right like she's someone who doesn't want muslims and government or anything like is that not alarming and she actually said to me um that just because we're not anti-immigration um we actually are pro the rape of white women like that was her takeaway and his response to this was like yeah yeah but you have to see like you know what's been going on
and i think this was when like there was some uh migrant rape Rape in Germany and He was talking about that and it was it was really bad, obviously Is it Germany or the Netherlands the Rotterdam?
Thing I know the Rotherham that I think it's Rotherham.
Yeah, that was in England That's another that's another story.
Okay.
Yeah.
Sorry.
I'm confused about exactly which Yeah, but this anyway, so yeah, please continue.
I So he goes on about this story and he's like, but there are people who are willing to let white women be raped by Muslim immigrants.
In fact, there are people who are willing to be raped themselves, basically saying that there are some people who just don't want to be called racist so badly that they'll just shut up and be raped or whatever or let people be raped and he kind of positions it as like muslim immigrant men versus white women which is like a very old school racist trope
you know i mean that's almost like the arab slaver like uh archetype you know from like the 20s and 30s like pulp fiction stuff um so i mean if you hear me in that clip i'm just kind of like what i'm Like, I had my breath taken away, you know?
Like, I am kind of silent, but you hear me say, what?
You know?
Like, okay, I did not.
Like, at that point, I was kind of being gaslit by the entire New Atheist community, right?
Who were completely on my side.
Always applauding me, supporting me, when I'm criticizing the Islamic right.
And then all of a sudden, when I start seeing these hypocrisies with Dave Rubin and Sam Harris and I start speaking up about them, they're all collectively against me, right?
I'm being piled on daily.
So you have to understand the position that I'm in.
Like my politics hasn't actually Significantly changed so much since I was a Sam Harris fan, but my excuse making for that kind of atheism not being bigoted has completely ended for sure.
But I still had very progressive beliefs and very like, you know, I was not anti-immigrant like how you see a lot of the ex-Muslims are.
And I was not like, you know, into Christina Hoff Summers or that kind of anti-feminism or anything like that.
Um, but yeah, so that, I think after that conversation I was like...
Holy shit, you know, what kind of community have I gotten myself involved in?
And I got a lot of shit after that from Sam Harris fans, too, you know?
Yeah, sure.
I mean, and even at that point, I mean, that was kind of early in Sam Harris's sort of like podcast career.
But like, I can only imagine, like, at that point, even though he didn't have the audience he does now, you know, he still had like a good.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
I mean, he He was, you know, two, three hundred thousand at least.
Yeah, no, absolutely.
He could throw, he could throw a lot of shade your way.
And, uh, that comes with like abuse and all that.
Um, especially, you know, a brown woman, uh, from outside of, uh, you know, uh, quote unquote, you know, developed countries or whatever.
Um, I can, I, you know, yeah, it's, it's unimaginable, you know, as a white guy, I apologize, but it is kind of unimaginable.
Like I would never have that experience.
And, um, it's vile and disgusting, obviously.
Yeah and yeah so I mean you have to also kind of imagine the intimidation factor of even pushing even that much against Sam right he's like this massive figure in the community nobody dares to speak out against him let alone challenge him like and you see if you listen to my conversation with him That I am pushing him, gently, but still pushing him.
You know, on the Dave Rubin thing, on the race and IQ thing, I think, on Gadsad, on Douglas Murray a lot, on Tommy Robinson, and stuff like that, you know?
I keep throwing specific examples at him, like, no, no, you know, I don't let him out of those conversations easily, and I've had people say, even people who've recently heard the conversation, that That is like some of the most, I guess, most grilling they've heard, you know, happen to Sam Harris.
He really doesn't put up with that.
Like, it's amazing.
No, no, he doesn't.
I would agree that that's about as, like, aggressive as a... For the length of that conversation, I think even the Ezra Klein interview, which sort of, like, would ride Alongside that in terms of like level of aggression, I think that like you're pushing him in ways that even Ezra Klein doesn't.
And Ezra Klein has like a million times the, you know, the media clout.
Yeah, and Ezra Klein doesn't know the like inside baseball of that stuff either, right?
No, absolutely.
Yeah, and then it just, I guess, I just started realizing more and more and more that there was like absolutely no excuses that Sam had that were valid and then the Me Too stuff happened.
Right and he gets he gets really defensive of certain people I mean it is it is amazing to the degree to which like in particular in your interview was long before like the Charles Murray interview and Long before sort of he starts like really kind of like pushing for the right.
I mean at that point he was still sort of like kind of the rationalist liberal somebody kind of kind of doing the Oh, you know, I'm I'm kind of in favor of this kind of policy, but like I kind of acknowledged sort of the realities of like kind of racial discrimination But I think we should like approach it in a different way and then like increasingly he gets more and more reactionary to the point to where he's singing like Ben Shapiro and Figures and it is kind of amazing that like I
Man, no, I have so many.
And now he's defending, like, he's tweeting Bill Maher, like, talking about, why can't we call it the Chinese virus?
And it's like, what is the difference between these guys and PragerU or Ben Shapiro anymore?
Absolutely.
I mean, I tweeted, I tweeted Bill Maher is, you know, Ben Shapiro with a sense of humor, a sense of comic timing and stage presence.
I quoted that today.
I tweeted that out today and I was, I was pretty happy with that one.
You know once upon a time I was invited on to the Bill Maher show Wow and it never happened because I said I wanted to remain anonymous and They said they would try to work around that but it just never happened So and I'm really glad now that it didn't because I was also a Bill Maher fan Yeah, I mean I I remember Bill Maher as being someone that I kind of like I had issues with I mean even major yes, but
You know, certainly if you were sort of a liberal, lefty, progressive type in Alabama in like 2003, he was one of the only voices on TV that like spoke to your needs at all.
I mean, it was kind of him and Jon Stewart and that was basically it, you know?
So, you know, I remember being kind of a fan of his despite the fact going like, do you really have to be anti-vax?
Like, this is a really stupid thing for you to do.
And like, yeah, some of your libertarian priors, etc.
That's kind of like more being just kind of anti-war Was sort of the the thing that sort of attracted me to him.
I think at that point I don't know.
I was a shitty teenager in some ways, you know, I've developed since then We were all like You know, I I don't think I will ever be invited on the Bill Maher program I think he would oh, I don't think I will be anymore either I I do.
I don't know if you listened to this one.
He interviewed Kathleen Belew a few months ago.
Oh, yes, I certainly did.
Yeah, which... And he set her up as some SJW and then he shit all over her at the end as well.
And speaking of someone who knows quite a bit about Nazis, she is one of the world-class people.
She is one of the greatest people in the world.
I mean, Bring the War Home is an essential read.
If you want to kind of understand 20th century.
I'm actually surprised he was even willing to have her on, but that is, you have to understand the game that Sam plays, right?
I think he was getting too many accusations of being sympathetic and some of his terrible, terrible takes about the alt-right.
And so he had to kind of like, especially after getting into it with Christian Picciolini.
I think he had to redeem himself in some of his fans eyes now He couldn't even take her like being so you know, I think he said that she was overblowing What white supremacy is and she was counting too many things as white supremacy He really just wants to narrow it down systemic like white supremacy.
He doesn't understand like no what what?
The systemic critique is like he just doesn't get it at all.
I It's basically KKK people in that sense.
To say that, like, you know, Ezra Klein is as far to the left as, like, a KKK member is to the right in terms of, like, your view of race.
No, he said they were comparable to, like, the KKK in terms of moral integrity or something like that.
And then Ben Shapiro is a good guy.
Right, right.
Ben Shapiro, who says, like, Arabs like to, you know, live in sewage.
And a whole lot more than that.
And then his defense of that is like, no, I only meant Palestinians.
It's just the Palestinians.
Like, yes, yes.
I'm not being racist because I'm referring to the Palestinians and not like all Arabs, which is again, like a complicated word to use in that context.
It's yeah, like, you know, it's racist all the way down, right?
Like even your defenses of racism become racist at that point.
Yeah.
Yeah, what fascinates me about this whole crew, the IDW crew, is how they've managed to repackage a lot of racism as respectable, intellectual, and academic.
And I'm not as horrified by Richard Spencer because I feel like he's open enough that A lot of people would be like, yeah, that's ridiculous.
But I am very worried about people like Sam Harris, people like Eric Weinstein, people like Dave Rubin, kind of bringing this shit into the mainstream and kind of dressing it up and making it fashionable even, you know?
Oh, I agree.
I mean, something that I've kind of always said and maybe doesn't come across as clearly as I mean it to all the time is that like I focus on these like extreme figures like Richard Spencer and people further to the right of Richard Spencer because like their explicit goal is sort of pushing the narrative further.
And so Sam Harris can be more racist because.
He gets to point to someone like Richard Spencer and going like, well, yeah, but I'm not.
Yeah, yeah, that's right.
And you know, one of the things that somebody like Mike Enoch, Mike Painovich, who is the kind of the lead guy on the Right Stuff, The Daily Show, a podcast, I don't know if you've listened to the episodes we did about him or how familiar you are with him, but like, I've heard of him.
Yeah, that kind of concept.
I'm very, very familiar with this guy.
I've listened to, like, literally thousands of hours of this guy talking.
We'll use sort of the existence of, you know, these kinds of, like, anti-Islam groups and kind of go, well, yeah, but you've sort of missed the point because you're saying, like, Islam is bad and Islam is bad because, like, oh, it's not kind enough to, like, LGBTQ people.
When, really, we like the fact that they're mean to LGBTQ people, but we don't like the fact that it's a religion practiced by brown people.
And what we really need to do, and you need to acknowledge, that really what you want to do is keep all the brown people out of your country.
Which, ultimately, when you look at these guys on the IDW, when you look at Richard Dawkins talking about how the call to prayer interrupts his day, as opposed to He says the church bells are lovely and the call to prayer.
It's just and you look at them It is like and it's hard to I don't know what's in Richard Dawkins heart But it's hard to not read that as like an explicit like well these brown people have their brown people things that they're doing and that's disgusting and it was much better when it was more white people doing these things and so I think that what these kind of more explicit racists are doing is sort of like
Trying to normalize, I mean, this is my explicit opinion, you know, trying to normalize a sort of reactionary explicit racism and kind of calling out the people who are kind of coding their racism within this sort of like cultural milieu.
And this does kind of come with a, you know, there are sort of these pseudoscientific genetic, you know, presuppositions that kind of go into that.
And I don't know, like to a certain degree, you know, Sam Harris saying like, well, we can let 1% of the brown people in so long as we know that they have a certain kind of secular values.
And someone like a Richard Spencer is like, none of the brown people get in because they're brown.
It's kind of a distinction without a difference, right?
Yeah, I mean, I find it very fascinating that you, who studies Nazis, is very interested in the IDW and Sam Harris in particular.
I find that generally very interesting.
Just asking questions.
I'm not saying anything.
I'm not saying Sam Harris is racist or anything.
I'm just Asking questions.
Why do you think someone who studies Nazis and races so?
Carefully also manages to find their way to Sam Harris.
I don't know.
Yeah, not saying anything I'm just asking questions There's a chyron beneath us and like the Fox News font with a question mark at the end Like why is Daniel Harper shouldn't Sam Harris question mark, you know clearly Absolutely.
We have complete justification.
I did say in, I think, episode 22, which was the Sam Harris episode, like, I would like it if Sam Harris did not sue me, but actually it would be really good for my brand if he did.
Yeah, it probably really would.
Please make me famous, Sam Harris.
Sue me for calling you a racist.
I mean the Charles Murray thing really was the end of the rope for a lot of people like a lot of people just lost interest in Sam Harris after that like I had already been losing interest but that was the Last straw.
Absolute.
And then he became a total joke to me.
And now I spend my time, like, mocking him.
Because I feel kind of bad that I spent any time at all defending him.
So, I mean, it's gotten to him clearly so badly that he's gone on Eric Weinstein's podcast and said I was mentally ill, provided zero examples of it.
But, you know, said that to their massive, massive audiences.
Whereas I if I say anything about Sam Harris critically, I back it up with plenty of examples of what he said and done.
And I don't attack him personally.
I do not attack his, you know, appearance or his mental health or anything like that.
Just the things he says.
Well, he's very I mean, this is something I kind of said on Twitter.
And again, I don't know how much of the show you listen to, but like Christopher Cantwell is sort of a major running theme of this podcast.
And Chris Cantwell is incredibly brittle with people who sort of criticize him directly or people who sort of disagree with him or who kind of insults him.
Regardless of whether working with them would sort of make him achieve his political aims better, he tends to just sort of reject them out of kind and sort of ascribe them like the worst kinds of motives.
And Sam Harris kind of does that as well.
Like if you've noticed that like the thing that he really has an issue with with the SPLC is that like they said bad things about his buddy Majid Nawad.
Right.
You know, the thing.
And so like suddenly that becomes like the reason to reject them.
That it was Christopher Piccolini.
But then he also says like he would take a point that's I'm sorry for interrupting.
Oh, no, no.
Please go ahead.
Please interrupt.
That he would take a point.
This is your show.
Yeah.
Please go ahead.
That he would take a point from Hitler if need be if Hitler was right on something, you know?
These hypocrisies that really get to me because he is so even internally inconsistent in his logic.
Like, he is not making sense.
He has one standard for the right and another standard for the left entirely.
I mean, and this is something that, like, again, just kind of, like, kind of getting to maybe the end of the episode, unless you have kind of other things to add.
I know we have so much more we could just kind of sit and chat about, and hopefully we'll do that in the future, but I know our time is limited.
One of the things that these kind of really far-right figures will do is sort of use the willingness of... Look, left-leaning people see a racist and go, you're a fucking racist, go fuck yourself, right?
And right-leaning people use that as a sort of like, oh, did that mean leftist?
Did that antifa insult you?
You should just come on and be with us.
And like, look, you don't have to agree with everything I have to say, but let's just have a conversation, right?
Let's be a part of the same group.
And it is exactly that sort of brutalness and that sort of like unwillingness to sort of I don't know if Harris is being pulled for the right.
a kind of systemic critique that leads to, like, this is how these people, like, pull people further right, right?
And I think that's exactly what's happening with Harris and, like, his, you know, Ben Shapiro and a lot of these other kind of, you know, sort of, like, alt-right figures.
I don't know if Harris is being pulled further right.
I think that his right-wing beliefs are just showing in this political climate more.
Like, I think he is pretty right himself.
I mean, his criticism of, like, Trump is, like, Trump is, like, a liar and rude as opposed to, like, Trump is, like, lending support to fascists.
And unpredictable and just a buffoon.
Like there's no there's no sort of like analysis of like and actually Trump is doing like terrible things with his policies No, no, he's just rude.
He's just mean and that's you know, and and that's the kind of thing of like you are not worth taking seriously I mean Sam Harris has had like I think Jonathan Haidt has been on the show.
Um, he was quoted, um, you know, by Richard Spencer, uh, approvingly, uh, on many occasions.
Um, and, uh, you know, I think David Fromm and a lot of these are the kind of like neocons who are like architects of the Iraq war have been on, uh, Sam Harris's show, or at least have been sort of like friendly with him.
And that sort of thing is like, You mean David Frum, who was called, like, far-left SJW on Dave Rubin's podcast by his audience?
Really?
I wasn't... Oh, yeah.
They were so mad that the, you know, SJW cuck Frum was on the Rubin Report, like, because he was there criticizing Trump, you know, ever so slightly.
Right.
They just couldn't take it.
One of the architects of the Iraq War, you know, yeah, left-leaning, you know, the peacenik, the, you know, the SJW cuck, clearly.
Yeah, no, that's a thing.
Yeah, well, the mainstream acceptance of these like never Trump Republicans like Jonah Goldberg and David Fromm and Bill Kristol.
Because they don't like Trump's rudeness and suddenly they get accepted within like sort of what we call like the The left in some sense in US culture is one of the things that I find Incredibly maddening and probably make okay But you know what's funny is that even those guys are sometimes far more SJW than people like Sam yeah far more left-leaning in what they're saying and
Yeah, in particular when Sam Harris is like laughing at like the existence of trans people, you know.
Yeah, or even in the way that From will criticize Trump.
It'll be much more robust than the way Sam will criticize Trump.
How can you be like less fapid than Sam Harris in terms of talking about politics, right?
Like, you know, that's a very low bar, Aina, that's kind of where I'm going to land on this.
It's a very low bar, yes.
But yeah, when we're talking about being pulled right is sadly what I see that's happened to the ex-Muslim movement.
It was something that, you know, I felt so proud of at some point.
Like, I thought it was just a, you know, a noble movement with the goal of normalizing apostasy in Islamic communities.
And why not, right?
Like, everyone should have that freedom to believe or not believe and be able to speak about it freely.
However, they've now gone to retweeting Candace Owens and being friends with Ben Shapiro, being friends with Christina Hoff Summers, talking about how Muslims are like Nazis and how the alt-right isn't all so bad.
In terms of the coronavirus, one major atheist account that is run by one of the worst ex-Muslims who thinks Islam does not belong on planet Earth and goes on the Canadian Breitbart to say so, he tweeted this picture one major atheist account that is run by one of the worst ex-Muslims who thinks Islam does not belong Right.
And I guess they're pictures from Mecca like during the lockdown and there's no one there like it's pretty bizarre seeing that because I don't think we've ever seen that in the history of the place like a Mecca completely empty.
But so they tweeted like pictures of Mecca being full in the half screen and the other half being empty if I remember correctly with the logo of an antibacterial cleaner saying you know this Implying that this is how all the germs.
Yeah, it's basically like raid kills Muslims dead is sort of the yeah, it's basically I mean, they're gonna deny it and they did deny it when everyone was like, what the fuck are you saying?
You know?
And clearly it's like, oh, it's just a joke, bro.
And I get like, you know, I get people in my image.
This is like Nazi rhetoric.
Oh, absolutely.
It's full on.
I mean, this is and, you know, again, not to not to speak and not to give a voice in your mouth, but this is like straight up exterminationist rhetoric.
And that's something that I fight against with, like, every fiber of my being.
That's part of the goal of this podcast.
Like, we do talk about things like mass shooters and, you know, sort of this accelerationist, like, kind of terrorism, because that's also a part of this.
But, like, what gets to me is when this kind of, like, rhetoric, this kind of, like, literally exterminationist rhetoric ends up being mainstreamed.
And that's part of what makes the IDW
And these kinds of more kind of quote unquote moderate figures interesting to me and what makes it because it's about this sort of like treadmill of how these ideas get like kind of fed from this extreme far right this like literally like terrorist groups gets fed into like you know mainstream respectable kind of political movements and then that gets to like feed into the actual like places as the bombs get dropped and that's something that is deeply deeply concerning to me because
An individual terrorist can kill me and you know I have been threatened by terrorists as you anybody who has been listening to the show for a while is aware And can kill like a lot of people and that's terrible and any loss of life in that is but That's not the same thing as like children in cages and like bombing the Middle East And you know what they actually recognize this when it comes to Muslim extremism, you know Islamic extremism Sam Harris has all these theories of concentric circles where you know
It gets fed into the center that is extreme by people who are propping it up.
But he cannot apply that theory to white supremacy, to racism, any other form of extremism.
And then he's like exactly the kinds of apologists that he complains about.
He turns into those.
Exactly.
Exactly.
So yeah, no, yeah, and I mean I have issues with some of the some of that like concentric circle theory as applied to Islam because I feel like it's kind of again ignoring that sort of political angle But I kind of I get I can't get where you're coming from.
I know that you're not necessarily like sort of Supporting that 100% and maybe that's yeah for another another conversation.
But yeah, I Yeah, I mean, we've been going for about an hour, and I know you've got a little one in your house.
Yeah, you can probably hear him in the background.
I've heard a little bit.
Thank you so much for being on.
Hopefully you will come back if you enjoyed yourself, and I would love to come on to your show.
Yeah, I would love to have you on.
And do you have anything that you'd like to sort of add as sort of a friend of the show, a fan of the show, something you'd like my audience to know that maybe I haven't kind of gotten to because I am a douchebag?
Um, no, I think we covered, uh, a bunch of stuff, uh, that I can't think of anything else right now, except for bedtime, which is difficult.
But, um.
Please, please get some rest.
Uh, Ina, thank you again so much for being on the show.
Uh, where can we find you on the internet?
Ah, you can follow me on Twitter, at NiceMangos, no e in mangoes, and I just started an Instagram account.
So you can follow me there, at NiceMangosArt, and my podcast is on SoundCloud, just look up Polite Conversations, and yeah.
Yeah, and I would say nice mangoes is one of my favorite handles of all time It's so it's so funny.
Like it's so like sexy and cute but also like like PG rated I don't know.
It's such a you know, I don't know It just hits that like kind of dad joke button for me and in a weird See, that started because I used to write a blog on Muslim and Pakistani sexuality, and mangoes, like, are basically the national fruit of Pakistan, so it was a good euphemism, I thought.
Yeah, there was a nice entry that you had retweeted recently, which was about a man who loved fingering his wife and making spicy food.
Yes.
This is the kind of play that maybe you have to ask consent for, is where I land on that.
I don't think he meant to.
No, no, it seemed very earnest, but also just keep some nitrile gloves by your bed and you're fine.
We'll put a link to that and we'll put a bunch of links to your other stuff in the show notes.
Again, Ina, third time, thank you so much for coming on and come back again real soon, okay?
All right, thank you.
Thanks a lot, cheers.
That was I Don't Speak German.
Thanks for listening.
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