Sam Harris speaks with Yasmine Mohammed about her book Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam. They discuss her family background and indoctrination into conservative Islam, the double standard that Western liberals use when thinking about women in the Muslim community, the state of feminism in general, honor violence, the validity of criticizing other cultures, and many other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe. Learning how to train your mind is the single greatest investment you can make in life. That’s why Sam Harris created the Waking Up app. From rational mindfulness practice to lessons on some of life’s most important topics, join Sam as he demystifies the practice of meditation and explores the theory behind it.
Well, there's a lot going on in Iran at the moment in response to the murder of Massamini.
Obviously, I completely support the women and men who are protesting there for their secular freedom.
It's quite extraordinary to see what's happening there.
So, perhaps I'll do a podcast on that, but as it turns out, some years ago I had a conversation that was highly relevant to this moment with the writer and free speech activist Yasmin Mohamed.
We just released this on the Best Of Making Sense feed, but I wanted to put it here because it really gets at the underlying issue of women's rights in an unusually complete and personal way.
Yasmin's story is being lived and now protested by millions and millions of women in the Muslim world.
And it's in light of a story like this that the killing of Mas Amini should be understood.
Today I'm speaking with Yasmin Mohamed.
Yasmin is a human rights activist and a writer.
She's a very eloquent advocate for women living in Islamic-majority countries and in the Muslim community generally, worldwide, and a very effective critic of religious fundamentalism.
And her new book is Unveiled, How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam.
And I've been in Yasmin's corner for a little while when she was getting ready to write her book and it was at the proposal stage.
I blurbed her, this is the blurb that appears on the book, but this is a blurb really for her as a person before her book was even written.
I'll just read that here to give you some context.
Women and free thinkers in traditional Muslim communities inherit a double burden.
If they want to live in the modern world, they must confront not only the theocrats in their homes and schools, but many secular liberals, whose apathy, sanctimony, and hallucinations of quote, racism, throw yet another veil over their suffering.
Yasmin Mohammed accepts this challenge as courageously as anyone I've ever met, putting the lie to the dangerous notion that criticizing the doctrine of Islam is a form of bigotry.
Let her wisdom and bravery inspire you.
And so you should.
And here Yasmin and I talk about her background and indoctrination into conservative Islam and the double standard that Western liberals use to We talk about feminism generally, the validity of criticizing other cultures, and other related topics.
So, now I bring you a very brave woman and one of my heroes, Yasmin Muhammad.
I am here with Yasmin Muhammad.
Yasmin, thanks for coming on the podcast.
Thank you so much for having me, Sam.
So this has been a long time coming.
I forget where I discovered you.
Was it Twitter?
How did we get introduced?
I sent you an email.
Just a cold email?
Well, we were, I was supposed to do a talk in Australia with Magid about the Assume and the Future of Tolerance documentary.
And then I had to cancel it because I was going through a lot of, you know, basically I was having consistent panic attacks and, um, I had to take some time off work and then I just had to cancel all of my, my speaking engagements.
So I sent you a letter to sort of apologize that I wasn't going to be able to make it.
And then you wrote back to me and started asking me about the panic attacks and everything that was going on with there.
And so then that's how I got into meditation, actually.
Oh, interesting.
Yeah.
So yeah, I remember that, but I don't remember that being the first contact.
Did you not have a Twitter presence yet?
I did have a Twitter presence, but you weren't following me yet.
Oh, OK.
Well, someone could have been forwarding your stuff.
I feel like I saw you there first, but maybe not.
Anyway, you go hard on Twitter.
That's something we're going to talk about.
Yeah, it's the Arab in me.
So let's just take it from the top.
We're talking about your book, Unveiled, in the end, but let's just start with your story from the beginning.
Where did you come from, and what were your parents like, and what was your upbringing like?
This is the beginning of your story that has, for better or worse, made you one of the most courageous voices I can name at the moment.
So to the beginning, I guess would be my parents meeting each other in university in Egypt.
So my dad's from Palestine and my mom is Egyptian.
Um, but Palestinians could go to university in Egypt.
It was all covered.
Like they were treated as Egyptians, but they weren't given citizenship.
So they met in university in Egypt and my mother's family were very angry at her.
For marrying a Palestinian because they thought he was so beneath her.
But they got married and then they moved to San Francisco together.
And they were there during the peace, love, hippie era.
And they had my sister and it was a bit too much peace and love.
And so my mom wanted like a quieter place to raise the kids.
And so then they moved to Vancouver, Canada, and that's where I was born.
But then their marriage fell apart in the end anyway.
So when I was about two years old, my dad, you know, left us, went to the other side of the country.
So here my mom is now in a new country, no support system, no community, three children, and she's feeling, you know, depressed, vulnerable, sad, lonely, all that stuff.
And how religious were they at this point?
No religiosity whatsoever.
Neither of them.
They're both grew up very secular.
My dad had like zero connection to religion.
It was just like a cultural thing.
He's very anti-Israel, just being Palestinian, but there's no religious, like him personally, he wasn't very, um, he wasn't practicing.
And then my mom's all alone.
And so she goes looking for a support system and she goes looking at the mosque for community.
And at the mosque, she finds a man who is already married, already has three children, but he offers to take my mom on as his second concurrent wife.
Right.
So, you know, she is happy to have somebody take care of her and take care of her kids.
And so she's willing to put up with whatever he's dishing out.
My dad was abusive towards her.
He used to hit her.
And this man never hit her.
He'd hit us, of course, but he never hit her.
So she felt like this was a better relationship for her.
So she stayed with him as a second concurrent wife.
We lived in his basement.
And he is very, like my life changed completely when he entered our lives.
So before him, I used to be able to, you know, play with my neighbor's friends.
Like we'd play Barbies together.
I'd go swimming.
I'd ride my bike.
I'd go to birthday parties, listen to music, just like a normal childhood.
And then once he entered our lives, it was just immediate.
Everything is haram.
Everything is forbidden.
And all of a sudden, my mom started covering her hair, and we had to start reading from this book of these words that I didn't understand, and I had to start praying five times a day, and I resisted it from the beginning.
Of course, I missed my old life.
I was especially upset that I couldn't play with Chelsea and Lindsay anymore.
They'd always come knocking on the door wanting to play Barbies, and I was never allowed to go, and they were never allowed in.
You're going to the same school at this point?
Yep, but not for long.
Then I got, as soon as the Islamic school was, I mean it wasn't built, it was in the mosque, but as soon as it was established that we would have an Islamic school and my mom was teaching in it, then I started going there.
Was this associated with any religious awakening on your mom's part, or she just needed a man to take care of her and it was just practical and romantic?
Well, I don't know if romantic is part of it.
I think practical for sure, and it was a combination of both of those things.
So she needed, I think, She was happy to have somebody to take care of her, but then also she just became a full on born again Muslim.
So she just entered it, like she just jumped all in.
It was never, you know, if you see her wedding photos, she looked like a Bond girl, like short wedding dress, big, huge beehive.
You know, there was a belly dancer at her wedding.
And to go from that to the woman that raised me that I remember is just a pretty shocking difference.
And I used to always, you know, resent that.
I'd be like, how come you got freedom?
How come you got to live like this?
Look at your pictures when you were a kid.
You know, how come I don't get that life?
And she'd say, because my parents didn't know any better, and I'm raising you better, and you're going to be a better person, and you're going to go to heaven.
And my parents did the best they could, but they were wrong.
And so how old are you when you're expressing these doubts or Well, I was about, you know, about six years old when he entered our life.
And I just, I resisted all the way up at probably about nine years old is when I stopped.
Cause that's when the hijab was put on me and I started going to Islamic school and it was just too much.
So you can't really fight anymore when everything in your life is, you know, pushing you in one direction.
You just, you know, succumb, especially when you're a kid.
But according to my mom, I was never, you know, good enough.
The devil was always whispering in my ear and making me question.
I always asked questions, right?
Like, if Allah created everything, who created Allah?
And stuff like that.
Like, how could I even?
These are such blasphemous, you know.
If Adam and Eve are, you know, the parents of all people, are we all children of incest?
So these basic questions of, you know, that a kid would ask, I'd get in trouble for them.
So was there any point where you just went hook, line, and sinker and fully adopted the worldview without doubt?
Or did you always have some doubt humming in the background?
The doubt humming in the background finally went quiet once I was forced into the marriage with Faisal.
So once I married him and I wore niqab, so that's like full face covering, gloves, everything.
I was so diminished that I didn't have anything left.
And I also kind of made the conscious decision that, I mean, I was desperate for my mom's love and approval.
My sister was always the good girl that always listened and never questioned.
And I wanted that.
I wanted to have, you know, that relationship with my mom.
So she kept on pressuring me to marry this man and I eventually gave in because I thought, you know what, maybe she'll actually love me if I follow what she wants me to do.
I'll marry the man she tells me to marry.
I'll do everything the way she says to do it.
I've been fighting against this my whole life.
What happens if I just let go and see if she's actually right?
And how old are you at this point?
So I'm 20.
And I did let go and I did follow exactly what she said and until I had my daughter And held her in my arms and saw that she was about to grow up in the same environment that I grew up in.
My mom was talking to her the same way she had talked to me.
Her father was talking about FGM and her dying a martyr for a law and things like that.
And I'm like, okay.
Enough.
I could maybe accept this world for myself, but I'm not going to accept it for my daughter.
There's no way she's going to live this same life.
And was he Egyptian?
Yeah.
And I think people aren't generally aware that FGM is practiced in Egypt.
Like 98% of Egyptian women.
So it's basically like Somalia in terms of the prevalence of that practice.
And this was just a fully arranged marriage, or it had been encouraged once you had met him?
So it wasn't fully arranged in that.
I didn't know I was going to marry him my whole life.
Sometimes people arrange marriages for their kids, like from the get go, but it was definitely a forced marriage, which is a very common thing in the Arab world.
So it's like, this is the man we want you to marry.
And then you basically just get introduced to him.
And the woman doesn't need to consent.
Like in Islam, it says, silence is consent.
So if you just sit there and cry, it's like, okay, we're good.
Yeah.
You're now, you know, that's like saying I do.
And so it was, you know, you get pressured into it in the same way you get pressured into everything else.
So it's just like wearing the hijab and you You get given two choices.
Do you want to go to heaven or do you want to go to hell?
Do you want to be a good, pure, clean girl or do you want to be a filthy whore?
These are your choices.
Make the right choice.
So forcing you into a marriage is similar kind of coercion.
So it would be things like, there's a hadith that says, heaven is at the feet of your mothers.
So your mother gets to decide whether you're going to go to heaven or not.
So this was the one that was used all the time.
And it's a very dangerous weapon for an abusive mother to have.
So she would use that one.
She'd say, you're never going to go to heaven unless I approve you to enter heaven.
And if you don't marry this man, you will never go to heaven.
You will burn in hell for eternity.
And you will suffer here on earth because you are no longer my daughter.
I want nothing to do with you.
I won't even allow you to come to my funeral because I don't like, as far as anyone is concerned, you're no longer my family.
And then when you die, you'll burn in hell for eternity.
So go ahead and make the choice.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Reading your book, it's a fairly harrowing account of what your childhood and adolescence and young adulthood was like, and I think it's useful to differentiate what is just the sheer bad luck of having an abusive and perhaps mentally ill mom.
And having married somebody who, we'll get into his story in a moment, but that's bad luck that could happen to anyone in any culture, with or without religion.
Then there are the cultural practices, which aren't necessarily mandated by Islam, and maybe don't necessarily represent every Muslim, or even most Muslims' experience.
And then there's just what is fairly common under Islam because you can just play connect the dots and see that it is mandated or at least encouraged in the text.
So how do you kind of carve out those different strands for me?
What is just the sheer bad luck based on the personalities involved and where is the contribution of Islam?
Yeah.
So the problem is these, a lot of these elements are sanctioned in Islam.
So Islam says, for example, tells a man if you fear that your wife is, you know, arrogant or disobedient, then, you know, go through these steps and then beat her.
So it's like Allah is telling men, if you fear that your wife, you know, is going to give you any trouble, beat her.
Right.
So not every single man is going to beat his wife.
And not every single man is going to, you know, viciously beat his wife.
There's going to be, you know, different men are going to react in different ways.
But the problem is the fact that it is sanctioned.
So if you complain about it, like in my example, when I went to my mom and said, He just punched me in the face when he saw that I wasn't wearing hijab in the house on the 17th floor because he was afraid people, like, I don't know, seagulls, people in helicopters, might see me through the window.
And her response was, he has every right to be you.
You are his.
It says so right there.
Chapter 4, verse 34.
So that's the problem.
The problem is that it's codified.
It's in the religion.
And so It can be used in different ways, you know?
Like I said, not every Muslim man is going to beat his wife, but those who do have scriptural support.
Yeah, yeah.
And the debate really is not whether or not that support exists, but what is meant by beating?
It's like, how hard you can beat your wife.
That's very subjective, you know?
And there's scholars that come forward and they say things like, oh no, you know, it's like with a toothbrush or whatever.
But those are just scholars offering their interpretations.
As far as the Qur'an is concerned, it doesn't say that.
It just says that's it.
It offers no, you know, there's no asterisks there, but that's subjective anyway.
Like you don't, it depends on the country that you're in, depends on the environment that you're used to.
Yeah, beating can be pretty bad, and obviously hitting another human being is a bad thing anyway, and the creator of the universe really should not be sanctioning husbands to be beating their wives.
But there's a famous critic of Islam named Hamad Abdus-Samad, who is an Egyptian-German
who had a really great way of describing this and he says it's like Allah's at the bar and he had a bit much to drink and he's like you guys should just like beat your wives man and his friends right the scholars are behind him going no no no he doesn't really mean that he doesn't he doesn't he doesn't actually mean that he means like like with a feather or something so those are just the scholars trying to soften it up but at the end of the day people read the Quran and they you know they quote that verse Right.
So, and you're wearing the niqab at this point?
At what point did that happen?
Hijab was at nine years old, you know, as far as I could remember.
And then once I was engaged to him, started wearing the niqab, he got it all delivered from Saudi Arabia.
And that really helps in Dehumanizing you, that really helps in turning me into a nothing that he can control very easily.
It just suppresses your humanity entirely.
It's like a portable sensory deprivation chamber.
And you are no longer connected.
To humanity.
You can't see properly.
You can't hear properly.
You can't speak properly.
People can't see you.
You can only see them.
I mean, just little things like passing people in the street and just making eye contact and smiling, like that's gone.
You're no longer part of this world.
And so you very, very quickly just shrivel up into nothing under there.
Yeah, well, we're going to get to this, but it is amazing how sanguine Western feminists are around this practice.
Like, this is just another culture's ideal of how to honor feminine beauty and empower women.
Who are we to criticize it?
We should differentiate the hijab from the niqab.
The hijab is just a straight-up symbol of female empowerment now in the West.
For some reason, people, one, can't see that most of the women on earth right now who are wearing a hijab are not doing it based on some empowerment they felt at an Ivy League institution, where they're just going to take the male gaze off them at their own discretion.
So they're forced to do it.
The consequences of not doing it, in many cases, are, if not absolutely coercive social pressure, it's actually physical violence.
But it is also just a step toward the nakab and the burqa, which are the actual crystallization of the ideal here that's being enshrined.
Right.
Which is, it's all, the female modesty is the only thing that safeguards male sexuality from completely running amok.
It's like all men would be gropers and rapists, but for the fact that women hide themselves.
Maybe we should jump into that now.
I want to talk about who your husband revealed himself to be, but what have your encounters with Western feminists been like?
Well, that makes me really sad that they consider Muslim women to be of some other species and that are so completely different from them.
So for themselves, they will recognize all of those things that you talked about are basically victim blaming, you know, slut shaming.
They recognize those elements of rape culture when we're in the Western context, which are, you know, they're much harder to see in the Western context.
But under Sharia, it's very, very easy to clearly see a perfect example of rape culture.
But they somehow, when it's those women over there, it's empowering.
Like, would it be empowering for you if you were told you have to wear this clothing in order to protect yourself from men who might rape you?
Or you have to wear this clothing in order to be good and pure and go to heaven?
Because if you don't wear it, then you're a filthy whore.
No woman would want to hear that.
No seven-year-old child would like to be told, you have to wear this in order to go to school.
And your brother doesn't have to, he can wear whatever he wants, but you must wear this or you're not allowed to get educated.
It is An atrocity.
That's something that every human being should be upset about.
And the fact that they think that it's okay for those humans over there, but not for us, is the part that really upsets me.
Yeah.
And what do you do with the fact that you could go into any one of these cultures and And find women who will say, I want to wear the niqab.
I want to wear the burqa.
Just take your colonial bullshit elsewhere.
Yeah.
Oh, of course there will be.
And you can also go to fundamentalist Christian, you know, cults and they will tell you, I want to be a servant for my husband.
You see people like that on Twitter all the time, right?
They're like, you know, I quit my job and I cook and clean for my husband and I'm proud of it.
Whatever it is, like women make all sorts of choices and decisions and that's, Completely up to them, and they're free to do that.
But I'm also free to make a judgment on the decisions that they're making.
So when I'm talking about the hijab as a symbol of patriarchy and a symbol of misogyny, I'm saying that because, as you mentioned, not only are girls coerced into it because of, you know, family or government or religion, but girls can be killed because of this.
And not just in the Muslim world, but in Canada, in America, in France, in Sweden.
There's honor violence and honor killing going on.
A girl, a 16 year old girl in Canada was strangled to death by her father and her brother with the hijab that she refused to wear.
And then her parents refused to bury her because they didn't want anything to do with her.
There are so many stories around this.
The one that sounds stranger than fiction is the case in Saudi Arabia where the school was on fire and the religious police wouldn't let the fire department put it out because the girls weren't appropriately veiled.
And there are literally parents standing at the gates of the school watching their daughters burn alive.
And there are women in Iran today that are being imprisoned for 15 years and more for refusing to wear this cloth on their head.
So it's not just, you know, it's not just a benign choice.
When the Prime Minister of New Zealand or when Meghan Markle put a hijab on their head, it's not just a benign support of some benign cultural thing.
It is not just a symbol, but an actual tool of oppression.
There are women being imprisoned and women being killed.
There is a fight over this hijab going on right now.
Women in Sudan, Egypt, Iran, Saudi Arabia, they're burning their hijabs in the streets.
They're fighting against this thing.
And then to see free Western women, free Western women leaders, Take this thing that they are fighting against and voluntarily donning it and supporting it.
What those women are doing is they are supporting the oppressors.
They are supporting the oppressors that these women are fighting against.
Yeah, the double standard is so clear, and it really is sanity straining that it's so hard for people to see.
The clearest case for me in the media was when, I don't know if you remember this, but Warren Jeffs, the leader of the FLDS, the Fundamentalist Mormon cult, his compound was raided.
And all these little girls and young women were let out in these little house on the prairie dresses, right?
They were made to wear these awful 18th century dresses.
And they had been married to men who were, you know, their grandfather's ages.
And these forced marriages were described as rapes.
And the men were totally unrepentant.
And, you know, Jeff's got, I think it's at least 15 years in prison.
I forget.
He got a real prison sentence.
And this was all talked about on the news as just an unambiguous example of patriarchal exploitation of girls.
The fact that it was associated with religious belief was not even slightly exculpatory.
And everyone celebrated the fact that there was a SWAT team raid on the compound.
We kicked in the door of this place to free those girls, and it didn't matter at all that the girls didn't want to be free.
We knew they had been brainwashed, so when they're talking about how they loved their husband four to a man or whatever it was, no one had any qualm discounting that for their obvious ignorance and brainwashing, right?
And when you compare that to what is happening routinely in the Muslim world, The mainstream media has the opposite response, and this is the most benign case of real extremism in the Muslim world.
I mean, in truth, it's not even extreme, but the extremism in the Muslim world, you have to add to that the clitorectomies that would have been performed on these girls.
The fact that they were raising their sons to be suicide bombers, right?
And there was an explicit indoctrination of, you know, martyrdom.
And they were exporting terrorism to the capitals of Europe and America.
That's how the fundamentalist Mormon cult would have to behave to make it an analogous situation.
And no one can see it on the left.
I guess the other example I should mention—I believe I mentioned this on a previous podcast, but it really belongs here, because we were talking about this last night—I just saw Ayaan Hirsi Ali give a talk at a university for the first time in three years, since she was deplatformed at Brandeis.
And it's a fairly conservative college, Pepperdine, In an explicitly Christian college.
And she ran through her whole life story on stage, starting with female genital mutilation, abuse in school, physical abuse, sexual abuse.
She described it as routine among her friends at the school she was in.
She described all this and how she escaped a forced marriage, became a member of parliament.
She's just a true feminist success story, right?
And as she starts to get into a discussion of contemporary politics, I mean, honestly, the edgiest thing she said was, if I were teaching at a university and someone, and one of my students said that they didn't want to read a certain novel because it triggered them, I would insist that they read that novel, because that's what a university is for.
And then I think the other thing she said was, when Me Too came up, she expressed blanket support for it, but she said, we have to keep a sense of proportion.
There are the Harvey Weinsteins of the world, and then there are people who just put a hand where it's not wanted, and you slap it away.
She was trying to articulate this spectrum of misbehavior that we need to differentiate.
And as she's talking about this, again, she had just spent a half hour describing in a background so replete with abuse, patriarchal abuse, that you would think it would have earned her intersectionality points of a sort that, you know, few people have.
And I've got these white Women students behind me who are beginning to almost heckle her, right?
It was just, you know, hissing and laughter among themselves.
And then they walked out.
It was like, again, it was another kind of brainwashing.
There's a kind of moral panic happening around variables of gender and race on the left that is making it impossible to even parse the statements of a Somali woman, right, who just recapitulated the entire Enlightenment success story of reclaiming secularism and modernity and humanistic values in her own case in a few short years.
It's just amazing.
So anyway, I mean, if Ayaan had white skin and had overcome all of those things in the West, she would be celebrated.
She'd be hailed as a feminist hero.
So, I mean, when you were talking before about the difference between that Mormon cult and girls in the Muslim world, I started to tear up because it reminded me of your TED Talk.
Which, I'm going to tear up again, that TED Talk to me hit me so hard because it was the first time anybody in like media I'd ever heard somebody care About those girls, the same way you would care about any other girls.
Like, the argument you were making in that TED Talk, like, these girls in Afghanistan, why are they different than the girls from the Mormon cult?
Sorry, Sam.
No, it's great.
That TED Talk was like...
Yeah, yeah.
Thank you so much.
You don't have to apologize.
This is good radio.
Yeah, a few people notice it, but I actually teared up in that TED Talk.
I can't remember if we spoke about this or not, but there was a point where I talk about honor killing, and I said, imagine your daughter gets raped, and what you want to do is kill her out of shame.
Obviously, I had rehearsed that talk.
A ton.
I mean, it's unlike any other talk you ever give.
A TED Talk is like this memorization feat, right, where you have to remember every line because you've got a hard time limit and no notes.
And so it's a very odd talk to give because you're basically It's a performance as yourself.
I mean, you're not thinking out loud because you really have a script that you've memorized.
At least that's the way most people do it, and the way I've done both of my TED Talks.
And so, obviously, I knew exactly what I was going to say, and I had done this, you know, a dozen times at least.
But I had just been told a couple of hours before going out on stage that my first daughter had taken her first steps So when I got to that point in the talk, it totally punctured me, and I actually almost burst into tears.
People who are just watching it as a TED Talk don't tend to notice, but you can see that I'm almost totally derailed in the talk at that moment.
You could see that you actually care.
That was very evident.
And that's why it hit me so hard is because I'm so used to there being this two tier system of like all, you know, girls that matter.
And then the girls that don't matter.
And that was the first time I had seen in the Western world, somebody standing up like in a Ted talk.
Speaking up for us as if we were human beings like every other girl on the planet.
And that was very evident in your talk.
And then of course, you know, immediately after your talk, you get questioned about it.
And you know, all the predictable things happen.
And so, you know, that's a very quick The wokeness comes to swallow you after that.
Yeah, exactly.
Here I am feeling all excited and happy and there it is.
But, you know, I just wish that this is why the the subtitle of the book, How Western Liberals Empower Radicalism, like that's what it's all about.
I want my liberal friends and supporters and You know, this is where I see myself.
I am in this realm too.
So when I talk about liberals, I'm not saying those people over there.
I'm saying us over here.
We need to look at what we are doing and we need to stay consistent.
And if we believe that all humans are equal, then why are we having a different set of You know, why do we use a different yardstick for these people versus these people?
I feel like if they could see that, if they could understand that, then they would get it.
Like, I feel like if they could get the lunacy of, would you celebrate a Mormon underwear on the cover of Sports Illustrated?
No, you wouldn't.
You would automatically see that that's ridiculous for many different reasons.
But then, Having a burkini on the cover of Sports Illustrated, that's something to be celebrated.
Like, I just want them to stay with the thought for four more seconds and just continue on with that and think, okay, why is this celebrated and this is not?
Yeah, again, it's very hard to understand how the point doesn't run through and change people's outlook just in real time whenever you have the conversation.
So like an example I occasionally use when I'm getting criticized for judging another culture.
And again, I always go to the most extreme, and still that's not extreme enough.
So I talk about the Taliban, or I used to talk about the Taliban a lot before ISIS came around.
When I was in this conversation a lot, I would talk about the Taliban, and I would say, OK, well, then, you know, actually, I'm starting to agree with you.
So what I think I'm going to do is I'm going to send my daughters for a year internship to Afghanistan, right?
So they'll have to wear the burqa, and they'll just learn to recite the Quran, and, you know, they'll get beaten if they take the burqa off, and, you know, it'll broaden their horizons, and they'll just get the full cultural experience, so am I a good father?
Is that the right decision?
I've never seen the point land.
It's considered, on the one hand, a low blow.
It just doesn't compute.
You find yourself in this conversation a lot, both on social media and in the world, What is it that keeps the double standard ethically in place, even when you point it out?
I think it's because we have been taught that you cannot criticize other cultures.
We can only criticize Western cultures, the only culture that's safe to criticize.
So my counter-argument to that is when you criticize something, that is how progress happens.
So Western culture has been criticized a lot and that's why there's LGBT equality here and women's equality here and all of these progressive, you know, we got rid of slavery, you know, all of these things happen because of internal criticism.
That is how progress happens.
If you do not criticize things that deserve to be criticized, how will progress happen?
So these groups of people that are saying, no, no, no, we cannot criticize the Taliban, or we cannot criticize the fact that Iranian, you know, what the Iranian regime is doing, or Saudi Arabian, or etc, etc, etc.
What you're doing is you're saying, we don't want those cultures to progress.
They need to stay the way they are.
You know, 1400 years ago, the way they, the religion formed, the way Sharia was formed, this kind of thinking needs to just be fossilized.
Now, that is what, again, we've got that two tier system going on.
Like, why don't these people deserve progress as well?
Why don't the gay people in those countries deserve to not be executed?
Why don't the women in those countries also deserve, not free the nipple, but like free the face?
You know, like why don't they also deserve freedom?
How are they a different kind of human than you are?
Because there are people in those countries that are risking their lives.
I mean, America's got, you know, like live free or die.
They embody that live free or die mentality.
And they are, I mean, Raif Badawi, just blogging about humanism, blogging about liberalism, gets him whipped in the streets, gets him 10 years in prison.
You know, I mentioned in Iran, removing a hijab off of your head gets you thrown in prison.
In Saudi Arabia, a woman was walking without hijab on, got thrown in prison.
I could go on and on and on about these cases.
And that doesn't even start to talk about the 12 countries, 12 to 15 countries.
I can't remember right now.
That will execute people for being gay, you know, or being an apostate.
Yes.
If you decide that you don't want to believe in this religion anymore, then you are to be killed.
You're given three days to repent.
And if you don't repent within those three days, then you're to be killed.
So if we're liberals and we believe in liberal values, why do we only care about the LGBT that are Living in close proximity geographically to us.
What about the ones over there?
Don't they matter too?
Can we talk about them as well?
But no, we excuse it over there or we ignore it over there.
So how will those countries progress?
How will those cultures progress?
It's unfair.
We deserve it too.
Feminism is universal.
It's not just Western or all of human rights.
Yeah, so I guess it's a concern about racism and the imbalance of power and wealth between the West and the rest of the developing world.
The legacy of colonialism.
It's, you know, it's white guilt and... Yes, it puts white people in the center of it all.
They always want to be in the center of it all.
It always has to be as a result of, you know, as if Arabs were just frolicking in the desert making sandcastles until the white man came along and taught them how to be baddies to each other, you know?
Like, please, these things happened and these things You know, regardless of Western intervention, of course, that adds, in some cases, fuel to the fire.
But that's not the be all and the end all.
You know, America is not the center of the reason for everything that's happening in the Muslim world.
There's a whole other world over there.
That had existed before the West even existed.
So, and then again, there's this idea that, you know, people need to remember that Islam is the second largest religion on the planet.
It's not some little minority, like in America you've got like 1% or so are Muslim, so they think that it's just a small group that are not really, not that many people are getting hurt by it.
And the concern is it's a beleaguered minority in the West generally, but especially in a place like America.
So that, I mean, I mean, that's probably true, but it is not a beleaguered minority on a global scale.
So if you just, you know, expand on that.
And the reason why this matters to us over here is because ideas cross borders.
They don't just stay over there.
So, you know, all of these, these misogynist ideas and these, you know, all of these things that we're talking about, the honor culture and the honor violence and the honor killing.
That doesn't just happen over there.
When, you know, those ideas all come here too.
I was born and raised in a Western country, in a secular democracy, but I essentially lived under Sharia in my own home and in my own school, because we're separated in a bubble from the rest of society.
So for me to get out of that world was, you know, infinitely easier than it is for a woman in Saudi Arabia or in Sudan or in Somalia or in Pakistan, who's having the same thoughts as I am and the same feelings as I am wanting to get free.
She can't because she's, you know, she's not supported by her government in the way I was, right?
She couldn't just go get student loans and Get on social assistance or whatever.
There's no support system for that.
She'll in fact get imprisoned or she could be killed for defying her family.
And even in your case, it was still fairly hard for you to get out.
You told me a story about what it was like, I think, when you were 12 to report your desire for freedom to one of your teachers.
Perhaps tell that story.
Yeah.
So that's Mr. Fabro who wrote the foreword to my book.
I just met him recently.
I was 12 years old.
I mean, I didn't meet him.
I met him again recently.
I was 12 years old and I, or 13 years old.
And I went to him and I told him about the abuse that was happening at home.
So this was during the time when I was still fighting, trying to get out of the home I was in.
My mom was married to this abusive man.
And I showed him the bruises and I told him the stories and he ended up calling the police and child services were involved and it ended up going to court.
And essentially the judge ruled that because my family are Arab and that is the way they choose to discipline me, then that's their right.
And so, first of all, I have to explain how difficult it is when you're part of an insular community to go to the outsiders, to go to the non-believers and ask them for help.
That's really a betrayal.
It's kind of like if you're in the mafia, if you're the rat, you know, I'm going to the cops and I'm saying, I need help.
For me to overcome that as a child and to go and ask for help, and then to have the judge basically tell me, sorry, your family happened to have been born in this country, so you're not going to be protected.
Had your parents been born in, you know, Sweden or Germany or Scotland, I would protect you.
But sorry, you know, that's just luck of the draw.
You're You know, I'm, I'm hearing him tell me, you don't matter as much as other kids.
And I know that it's coming from a place of trying to be culturally sensitive, but it ends up like this, this whole cultural relativism, moral relativism, you end up hurting the people in those groups.
And you end up supporting the people that are oppressing them within those groups.
Yeah, this is Maja's point about abandoning the minorities within the minorities.
If you care about minority communities, also pay attention to the people who are being routinely victimized in those communities.
So you're taking, in this case, you're taking the side of theocrats who are abusing women and girls over the interests of women and girls, and gays, and freethinkers, and apostates, and anyone else in that community who's being abused.
Absolutely.
And why does it matter if this little girl has blonde hair and blue eyes and her parents took a razor or her aunt took a razor and chopped out her clitoris, but then this girl over here has brown skin and her family is from Somalia and they did the same thing.
Now, why would one set of parents be treated differently by law enforcement than another set of parents?
Those two girls are both suffering equally.
There is no difference between these children and how it's going to affect them for the rest of their lives.
Why is one more important than the other?
That's what their well-meaning excusing of cultural norms, this is what ends up happening.
You end up leaving these kids to be victimized, but then you also end up becoming incredibly racist.
Yeah, this is yet another irony in the irony museum.
The people who are actually being racist here are the people who ostensibly are most concerned about racism.
That's what I heard from the judge.
That's how I felt.
And that's what I've been told my whole life.
You know, I'd been told these non-believers don't care about you.
These non-believers hate you.
These non-believers are your enemy.
And I never believed it, but that judge made me actually believe it.
I was like, wow, he really just said that to me.
He really just said, you don't matter as much Because you're from that culture.
If you were from culture X, you would matter, but you're from culture Y, so you don't matter.
So I felt that he was being racist towards me.
That was probably the only time in my life, because Canadians are, you know, generally not racist people, but that was the only time in my life.
And it was coming, like you said, like, you know, it's coming from a place of good intent, but it ends up being so counterproductive.
And all of these things are.
So when you say people of color and color, as a person of color, that is segregation.
It's no different than saying colored people, because you're saying, here's humanity, here's people, and then here's people of color, the other.
You're othering us.
How is that not racism?
Don't separate us.
We're all just people.
This is a point for which I find very few takers when I'm in these conversations with someone who's more woke than I am.
If we acknowledge that the goal is to get to a society where we're all just human beings and the color of a person's skin is one of the least interesting facts about them, totally analogous to the color of their hair, right?
So you've got blondes, you've got redheads, you've got people with black hair and brown hair.
Who cares?
And anyone who said, well, you know what we really need?
We need to take an inventory of how many blondes are doing this sort of job.
There are not enough blonde cardiologists, I've noticed, and there's clearly something happening there.
How do we correct for this?
It's like an Onion article, right?
And I'm not discounting the fact that racism has been a terrible problem and is still a problem in certain cases.
If the goal is to get to a society that is actually post-racist and post-racial, when can we start acting as though that were the case?
Is it too soon to start acting as though you actually don't care about the color of a person's skin, and you don't want to hear every political argument parsed by that variable, or any political argument parsed by that variable?
And it's amazing when you're in conversation with a white, liberal, intellectual, you can almost guarantee that the door to that consideration is barred.
It's too soon, though there's no argument for that.
I've even met people who say, it's just a false ideal.
Race is always going to be the most important thing.
So Martin Luther King was wrong when he said that we should judge a person based on the content of their character versus the color of their skin.
Exactly.
It's an explicit disavowal of that with a clear conscience, and no one seems to notice.
Which is really inconvenient for those of us who are left of center on basically every issue, right?
And this is a great scandal that surrounds people like Ayaan, and perhaps you have a direct experience with this as well.
That the allies you find when you tell your story of abuse under Islamist theocracy are Christian conservatives, neocons, you know, people on the right who... Who are supporting me for reasons that I don't support.
Yeah.
But also, to take my experience with Christian conservatives, at least these are people who don't doubt the power of religious ideas and religious indoctrination.
So when they run their code with one toggle switch to Islam, they know, okay, I know that ISIS, when ISIS makes their videos and frames it all in religious language, The Christian fundamentalists have no problem understanding what's happening there.
They understand the power of ideas, and secular liberals reliably don't.
They just think that there's got to be another explanation.
Something else is going on here.
This can't be religion.
Because they don't understand the power of religion, the power of indoctrination.
Speaking of the power of indoctrination, who did your husband turn out to be?
So, my ex-husband was a member of Al-Qaeda.
He joined when he was 18 years old.
So, when he was 14 years old, his father In Egypt, there's a very clear distinction between classes.
So if you're from a lower class or a higher class, it's not, you know, it's not a democracy.
So there's, it's very, there's very clear, you dress differently, you speak differently, you act differently.
And so when he was growing up, His family, you know, his father, when he was about 14 years old, got a better job and they moved to a better part of town and he went to better schools.
So he didn't really fit in because he was coming from the other side of the tracks.
And it's not that he was being bullied, but he just didn't fit in with his peers.
And those are the ones that the jihadis go around trying to catch those boys.
So much like gangs or, you know, neo-Nazis, you know, they're catching those boys that are full of aggression.
And it's that age of 14 to 16, where they're just, they're not, you know, They're not cognitively mature, but they're physically able to, you know, they're strong and they're full of testosterone and they're full of aggression.
And, um, he was encouraged that if he joined this group of men, that he would reach levels of heaven that no other human would ever reach other than like the prophets.
So it was, you know, it's intoxicating.
So he joined this group and all of, you know, his friends at school didn't want to be friends with him, didn't matter because he was friends with these men.
that were amazing and powerful.
And, you know, and so when he was 18, he told his father that he wanted to go to America to study.
And his father let him go.
But instead he went to Afghanistan.
Afghanistan.
And he was with bin Laden in, you know, a member of Al Qaeda for ever since he was a kid, right?
So he was trained by him, raised by him, essentially.
And eventually he was sent to Canada to be the The center of the cell that were here in support of 9-11, to that end.
And I lived... What year was this?
This was 96.
So I lived close to the American border.
I lived in a city called White Rock.
And at the time, you could cross the border with just a driver's license.
I mean, you could just say, I'm just, I'm just going to Bellingham to get some gas or whatever.
Like they don't, nobody cared.
You could cross the border so easily back then.
And so it's easier, it was easier for them to come into Canada and then just cross the border versus going into America.
And all of the stuff that I'm telling you now, I learned, of course, after we were divorced, like me just going on his Wikipedia page and finding the New York Times articles and stuff like that.
So at the time, all I knew was that he had, because He entered Canada, so he's Egyptian, he's coming from Afghanistan, and he's entering Canada with a fake Saudi Arabian passport.
So that's a lot of red flags.
Yeah, yeah.
But then all of a sudden he gets this money sent to him that bails him out of prison and pays for a lawyer, and they've traced that money, and that came straight from Bin Laden.
He sent somebody from California up to bail him out of prison and got him one of the best lawyers.
And the lawyer argued that he doesn't have Egyptian citizenship because Egypt had taken his citizenship away because they knew he was a terrorist.
And so he needed to enter Canada as a refugee.
It's pretty crazy now to think post 9-11 that he actually was approved as a refugee with all these red flags.
But, you know, who knows what they were thinking.
But a part of me suspects that the FBI were already following him.
And I'll tell you why I suspect this is because, so as I'm married to him, covered head to toe in black, never leave the house unless I'm with him.
But then one day my mom starts to bleed simultaneously from her nose and her mouth and I call 911 and I go with her to the hospital.
This is the first time in our entire marriage that I'm out of the house with him not next to me and my mom not next to me either.
I'm alone for the very first time and that is when I'm approached by CSIS who are the Canadian CIA.
That's when they approached me, like immediately in the waiting room.
I thought that they were doctors.
And I, and so that's why I suspect that FBI were, they kind of like let him in, like along with CSIS, they said, okay, go ahead, let him into the country and let's just follow him and see what, what he does while he's here.
Because I don't know how they could have found me so quickly.
And they sat me down and they told me who I was married to.
And I had been lied to.
I knew he was in Afghanistan, but I've been told he used to drive an ambulance.
He was a.
A peacekeeper and a paramedic.
And that's what he was doing in Afghanistan.
He was supporting the Afghani boys that were fighting against the Russians, training the little kids.
And, you know, he was just a do good humanist.
And, uh, so I learn from CSIS who he really is and the terrorism that he was really involved in.
And so of course that gives me the kick in the butt I needed to get myself and my daughter away from him.
Did you believe them immediately?
I believe them immediately.
Yeah.
Because everything that, all of the things that were happening that were making me feel suspicious.
Where everything just started to make sense.
Everything just clicked.
It was just like, click, click, click.
Oh, okay.
That's why this and that's why that.
He was always really secretive.
I, I never like go for like days at a time.
I didn't know where he was and you know, he, he would get like, I just, I, I, It all made sense to me.
There was one time there was a Time magazine that had bin Laden in it and he flipped out and he's like, get this out of the house.
Why is this in here?
Do you want me to get kicked out of the country?
And I was like, What, why are you having such a reaction?
Like, and then they're, they showed me a picture of Bin Laden too.
And they're like, did, were there any, like, has he talked about this man?
And I was like, oh my God, that's the same dude in the turban that he flipped out about when he saw him in a magazine and just things like that.
And plus it's not that hard of a leap because I knew that Afghanistan was full of Mujahideen and You know, for them to tell me that he was a terrorist or that he was a jihadi, it was like, OK, well, that that makes sense, right?
Like, why else would he have been in Afghanistan for all those years?
And he was incredibly brutal and violent with me.
So the story about him being, you know, a paramedic.
Philanthropist.
Yeah.
Like that was that was that was much harder to believe.
Yeah.
I mean, so.
I, yeah, and I'd already been wanting to get away from him anyway, because like, as I mentioned to you, I don't know if I mentioned to you on, but he had been talking about getting my daughter, taking her to Egypt to get FGM performed on her.
And I knew that I needed to get her out, but I just didn't have the courage yet to do it.
Like I said, I was a high school education, covered head to toe in black.
I was diminished as a human.
And so this was the catalyst for me, because he was always talking about taking us and going back to Afghanistan, living in Peshawar, where it was supposed to be this little paradise.
And so learning about who he was really pushed me to get us out of there.
And so how did you get out?
And what's happened to him?
So I initially, I detail this in my book because it's a very long, convoluted, detailed story, but I end up secretly Getting to a lawyer and asking.
Okay.
So I guess I have to explain a little bit about how I secretly did it.
So I'm living with him and I find out that I'm pregnant.
So I'm going for an ultrasound.
And then immediately after the ultrasound, I'm told you have to go to this clinic and meet your doctor.
And my doctor tells me that the baby doesn't have a heartbeat.
And so I have to go for in for DNC surgery.
And then they tell me, you're going to go under a general anesthetic.
You have, I had like a nine month old daughter at the time.
So you're going to need help with your daughter for like, you know, a day or so.
Cause you're going to be groggy.
So I told him, I saw this as my opportunity.
So it was a very, very emotional time because I'm dealing with, oh my God, my baby is dead, but also, oh my God, I have to save the baby that's alive.
And so I told him, I need to go to my mom's house to recover for a week.
And so that she can help me with the baby.
So he wasn't happy about it.
But at the same time, he doesn't want to help me with the baby.
So he let me go stay with my mom for a week, because I knew that it would be easier to get away from my mom than it was to get away from him.
So now I'm at my mom's house.
She gets up in the morning.
She teaches at the Islamic School.
She's the head of the Islamic Studies Department there.
She goes to school, and I immediately go through the Yellow Pages, find a lawyer, get on the bus, go to the lawyer.
Here I am, like, full black.
Everything, carrying my baby with me.
And I walk in there, and the lawyer was just like, she's just like an angel.
I went to her and I said, I need full custody, I need a restraining order, and I need a divorce.
And you can't call me.
You can't contact me.
She was just like, right away, like, yes, absolutely.
Done.
Give me all the information you have.
We're going to get this done.
And she did.
And so I, she couldn't contact me, but I contacted her to make sure that, you know, he was, everything was gonna be okay.
And he was going to be served with the divorce papers.
How come you didn't contact the police authorities who had first made contact with you?
With CSIS?
Yeah.
I had no way of contacting them.
They were contacting me.
And so I wanted to... I just... This was like a little window of opportunity that I didn't even foresee.
Yeah.
So I just wanted to grab it when it was there.
It's kind of Yeah.
It was survival is just like, boom, you got to just go, go, go.
And, um, and so then he ended up coming to my mom's building and just screaming in Arabic, you know, all of these threats and give me back my wife and blah, blah, blah.
So of course, like a six foot four Egyptian man with long, dark hair, like nobody's going to open the door for him.
And so I called 911 and I'm like, there's somebody screaming.
And they're like, yeah, yeah, we know we got like 20 calls.
We're on our way.
And so they came upstairs to talk to me and they explained to me their restraining order only keeps them away from the building.
But if I were ever to leave the house and to go somewhere, That does it doesn't protect me from that like because I don't go to work or school or anything else So all they can do is say he's like 150 meters or whatever it is Radius cannot come near your mom's building.
Is that how a restraining order works?
In Canada anyway, huh?
Yeah seems to defeat the purpose of a restraining order Yeah, so I basically went under like house arrest.
I arrested myself and I didn't leave that house until CSIS contacted me again and showed me a picture of him behind bars in Egypt.
And then I felt like, okay, he's not going to be lurking around a corner.
I can actually leave the house.
And that's when I started to, that's when I got out and started to apply to universities and started my life over again.
So yeah, he ended up getting imprisoned in Egypt.
He was sentenced to 15 years hard labor and that was like almost 20 years ago now.
So I don't know if he survived or if got out.
I sincerely doubt that.
I don't really... The problem is he was part of the second largest court case in Egyptian history, like terrorism court case, the first one being Anwar Sadat when he was assassinated for trying to have a peace treaty with Israel.
So he was killed for that.
That was the largest, of course, and Assam's court case was the second largest.
So it was very high profile.
And that's Why, whenever I ask a journalist to investigate for me, journalists in Egypt, they get themselves in trouble because they're like, as soon as we start asking questions about him, the secret police come to us and they're like, why are you asking about him?
And so I've never been able to get an answer about where he is or if he survived, but Maajid Nawaz spent one day in the prison that Assam was supposedly, that had, if he lived, spent 15 years in.
And that one day that Maajid describes in his book, Radical, makes me suspect that Assam probably didn't last 15 years.
Because it's a very harsh place.
Right, right.
Yeah, that's not where Maajid was for four years in Egypt.
No, because he had a British passport, so they moved him out into the other one.
Right.
So that, you know, they have two systems, right?
There's the regular one that the rest of the world sees, and then there's the secret police and the secret prisons and, you know, the government ones.
Well, so now you're out and you're free and you're getting educated.
Then what caused you to take the additional step of being a vocal proponent of Western values among Westerners who don't want to hear about Western values?
So I, you know, I took a History of Religions course about, you know, 15 years ago, and that was the first thread that helped me to unravel everything.
And for a long time, I was like, Oh, I'm a Muslim, but I'm not practicing.
And then it was, Oh, I'm spiritual, but I'm not religious.
And, you know, I went through all of these different iterations.
And I was just going through my own personal journey of growth and figuring out who I was and.
And it wasn't until the Bill Maher episode with you and Ben Affleck that just brought everything like it just it was like this little.
Perfect microcosm of of everything right there.
And I was sitting there watching it.
Feeling like Ellen in that episode of Seinfeld when everybody was like eating chocolate bars and donuts with a knife and fork and she stands up and she's like, have you all gone mad?
Like that's literally how I felt.
Like everybody on like all my Facebook friends and stuff are like celebrating Ben Affleck and they're like, Oh yeah, that racist guy, Sam Harris.
And I was just like, What planet am I living on?
What is wrong with you people?
And it made me feel like I needed to speak out.
You know, everybody's criticism of you was mainly that you're American and that you're white-skinned and that you were a man.
And so I'm like, okay, I am Arab with brown skin and a woman and I'm saying the exact same thing that he's saying.
So maybe you'll now have to respond to the actual message versus stopping, like not even listening to the message because you can't get past the identity of the person that is speaking the message.
You know, I'm from that world, so I knew that it was going to be a huge risk, and it was going to be, you know, I had changed my name, I had changed my daughter's name, we had moved, like, I was afraid for my life already.
But so when I first started out, I was anonymous and I wanted to just write my book just to sort of throw it out there and say, here is a perspective that you're missing.
You know, I've got one foot in this culture and one foot in that culture, and I'm able to let you guys know what the miscommunication here is.
Please listen to me.
Here's my book, read it, and then just kind of keep myself at arm's length.
But that didn't last very long.
As soon as I started to speak out, I was immediately contacted by so many people all over the world that were relating to my story.
And then I started to feel ashamed that here I am in a free Western democracy, afraid to put my face up and afraid to be vocal when there's people in Pakistan that are like being killed.
There's people that are being, you know, hacked to death in the streets of Bangladesh.
And then here I am in Canada saying, I don't want to put my name and face out there.
So, basically, they were asking me to be their voice, like, I can say it, they can't, please say it for us.
And so then I started to do that.
And of course, as soon as I started to do that, I started getting attacked by my own people, the liberals in the West, and that was surprising to me.
I mean, I saw it happen to you and I knew that that was a possibility, but I really wasn't expecting it to be as vicious as it was.
I'm expecting and I'm prepared for all of the viciousness coming from the Muslim community.
Of course they're going to hate me.
I'm speaking out against their religion that they hold dear.
And so that made sense to me and they're indoctrinated and I was that.
So I get that, but I didn't, you know, when it comes from the left, when it, then I have zero patience for it.
I have no, like no tolerance.
I, it just gets me like from zero to 60 right away because it makes zero sense to me.
And, and it's really hurtful.
I think that's the bottom line is it really hurts.
Because when I was a Muslim, when I was a fundamentalist Muslim, I believed in all of the, or I was taught all of these right-wing extremist talking points, right?
I was taught about anti-Semitism.
I was taught to hate Jews.
I was taught to hate gay people.
I was taught that women are less than men.
I was taught all of these things and for me to risk my life and risk my daughter's life and fight tooth and nail to get out of that world and come into the light and leave the darkness behind and then to start to have people in the light attack me was, it's just, it's just a betrayal.
It just felt, it's just really painful.
I don't know how to reconcile that.
Like that still makes me really sad whenever that happens.
Yeah, we were talking last night, we had dinner last night with Megan Phelps Roper, who was also just recently on the podcast, has a book out, Unfollow, about her experience in the Westboro Baptist Church and her experience leaving it.
It's fascinating and instructive to see how differently you're responded to.
You essentially have the same story.
I mean, your story is one of greater abuse and greater danger, but it's still the same story of two little girls get indoctrinated into cults.
and managed to get out based on their own courage and insight.
And you guys could not be more similar in all of the relevant variables.
And yet, in her case, she's repudiating the most extreme form of fundamentalist Christianity.
And because that is the orthodoxy she's pushing against, It checks all of the boxes on the left of, this is all good, right?
You just got an angry white man, grandfather, religious maniac, Christian, homophobe.
If you're burning all that down and coming over to the left, there's no problem.
And yet, because you're repudiating Islam, Again, all the scary details are amplified in your case.
You try to port that over to the left, and the ethical intuitions get all scrambled.
There's this scrambling device of leftist politics that manages to make up, down, and down, up here.
It's really interesting to see.
I think you and Megan could have a great conversation about just together.
That would be a very interesting event.
Yeah, I would love to have that like as a public event with with Megan and, and to, to compare, you know, how, like you just said, how the two of us had very similar experiences growing up.
But, you know, Megan feels badly about the fact that she is, you know, celebrated and revered, that she left essentially her family, right?
Like, it's just a group of less than 100 people.
Whereas I, as she, you know, I've been through similar stuff as her, but of course it was a much bigger hurdle getting away from a much larger, much more powerful group.
So this is not like, I, I feel like I am grateful and happy that people are celebrating Megan and she absolutely deserves to be celebrated for what she has done and what she is doing.
But I get that same feeling that I got from that judge.
When the world on the left is basically saying, we support and love and celebrate Meghan because of what she has done, but you are a horrible bigot and we're going to try and silence you on, you know, whether it's Amazon or Facebook or Twitter or wherever I try to speak, I'm being mass reported and demonized.
And, you know, somebody like Jake Tapper, tries to retweet me, and all of a sudden these people are telling him what a bigot I am and how I'm a Nazi-supporting KKK member or whatever bullshit they come up with.
Well, this is what's amazing and not appreciated by well-intentioned people, is that there's a systematic And part of it is just that you have a very large Muslim community who will kind of spam the world in repudiation of any rational sound of the sort that you're making.
So when you get on Twitter, when you're interviewed on somebody else's YouTube show, say, They will get demonetized for talking to you.
Yes, immediately.
And it's part of it, it may be algorithmic, it may just be the fact that if you get enough people reporting something, Google or Twitter or any platform will just flag it, you know, shut it down just to try to figure out what's happening.
But, you know, I've had to get you reinstated on Twitter twice, I think.
Yes.
Because someone, you know, some white, woke millennial over there can't figure out what's going on.
They see, you know, your tweets, and someone's reported them, and they just, again, they can't do the arithmetic.
Yeah, and that same hurt, that same sense of betrayal from when I was a kid, and the judge telling me, your experience doesn't matter, your pain doesn't matter, is the same feeling I'm getting now.
It's just being on a much, much larger scale.
And it is so You know, it's not just hurtful for me on a personal level, but it's hurtful because I am trying to speak up.
I'm free.
I'm happy.
I'm golden, right?
I'm married to a wonderful man.
We have another daughter together.
I have two great kids.
I have a, you know, tenure position as a college professor.
I'm good.
I could just go on with my life and just live it happily and not care about any of anything.
But I feel compelled to speak up because of, like I mentioned, all of these people that have been contacting me from all over the world telling me, you can be our voice.
You know, I tried to take a break from Twitter and I have women from Iran writing to me saying, no, don't do it.
You know, we need you.
Just, you know, go meditate or something and get back on.
I have a responsibility.
And so That's why it hurts so extra much is because I'm not just speaking up for me.
I'm speaking up for all of these people.
So when you silence me, you're silencing all these people as well.
And when you're ignoring me, you're ignoring all those people as well.
