Transcript for #1107 - Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz

That's what he can put on the back of a book, isn't it? Yeah. It shouldn't put that one.

Yeah. That is an issue. You're too cognizant. Thank you.

In fact, I have an update for everybody because we crowdfunded a lot of the early costs for the case against the southern post.

Let me back up, please. Once upon a time, yours truly a British Muslim of Pakistani origin. was listed in the United Kingdom on the Thompson Reuters World Check database under a category red terrorism designation. While at the same time being listed across the Atlantic in the United States by the Southern Poverty Law Center as an anti-Muslim extremist. So I was both a Muslim terrorist and an anti-Muslim extremist. according to two separate lists. And of course, that speaks to some of the polarisation in our times in how irrational this conversation around extremism, Islam, integration, Muslims in the West has become. I sued Thomson Reuters, well, check the database. This database is no joke. It's like HSBC and many, many other banks use this database for background checks and where the clients can have a bank account with them. So as a result, for example, Thomson Reuters and their database, Aquilium, which is a counter extremism organization I've found in 10 years ago, had its bank account shut down in the United States because of the Thomson Reuters World Check database system that HSBC subscribes to. Anyway, we sued them, they paid damages, they issued an apology and they took my name off this terrorism designation list, they have on their World Check database.

I'll do that. But at the same time, the southern poverty law center had listed me as I said as an anti-Muslim extremist, so we are also taking legal action against them. And I will get to your point, but I think just want to say that the, I've just held a law firm on retainer, Clare Lock, and they were the ones that sued the Rolling Stone magazine for that college rape. Yeah, that's right. Successfully got one that case. Clare Lock, which is an announcement made here exclusively with you. No one else knows this yet. We have retained Clare Lock. They are writing to the Southern Poverty Law Centre as we speak. I think they've got wind of it, the Southern Poverty Law Centre, as of I think I've yesterday on the day before, they've removed the entire list that's been up there for two years. They've removed the entire list which also had a unhealthy alley on it and it's no longer available on their website.

So that's pretty much what they've said. If you criticize Islam, Ayan, myself, who have come from within the community, who have had that experience, that somehow that makes us anti-Muslim. There are a number of logical errors involved in that logical leap.

One of them, honestly, the reasons they listed, one of them was that I had a bachelor party in a strip club a year before I got married.

It was one of the three main reasons they were originally listed and another one was again false. They claimed that I had called for the criminalization of the face veil for Muslim women in the West, which wasn't true. I had called for a policy to be adopted, where in banks and airports, where you are not allowed to wear a motorcycle helmet, you also shouldn't be allowed to cover your face in the name of religion. which is very different to calling for the criminalization per se of the Facebook. That's like saying, you're not allowed to wear a motorcycle helmet in a bank, so I believe in the criminalization of motorcycle helmets. That's the absurd. Yeah, that's ridiculous. So it was a mischaracterization of my opinion, the Article II. Yep, and the other one, the reason they kept changing their reasons. The actual website has been, we've got the archive and it's been, they've been changing it. Each time people have been pointing out the stupidity of their allegations.

So I was born and raised in Essex in the United Kingdom and I came of age in what I now refer to as the bad old days of racism in the United Kingdom much has changed since then for the good. But in those days, there were serious cases of violent racism that I faced, hammer attacks, machete attacks by actual neonauties. I mean, I've grown up, this is the irony of this southern poverty law centre listing. I've grown up fighting neonauties on the streets and they've been attacking me with hammers and machetes because of the color of my skin. And you've got a bunch of white guys in Alabama, designating me in the same breath as they would designate these neo-Nazis. But that, when I grew up in having that experience being falsely arrested by Essex Police on a number of occasions profiled while the genocide in Bosnia was unfolding against Muslims in Bosnia. I often say to an American audience, what I'm speaking about this, we are now here with you on the West Coast and this beautiful new studio you have, congratulations. And imagine a genocide was unfolding on the East Coast against a group of people with whom you identified and even if it's just on a human level, human beings. But even within that community identification would impact you in a way, for example, if you defined yourself as Jewish and there was a genocide against Jews on the other side of this very continent of this very country, how it would impact you on the West Coast. Well, Sarriova from London. It takes us less time to fly from London to Bosnia than it does from New York to LA. And so it really had a profound impact on Muslims across Europe when that genocide was unfolding. And things were never the same again. It radicalized an entire generation. Of course, ideology had a lot to do with that, but the anger originally came from. the genocide. So at the age of 16, what with the domestic racism and the situation in Bosnia unfolding, as it did, I joined his battalion, which is a non-terrorist, still legal in America and in Britain and across Europe, Islamist organization. It was the first of the global Islamist organizations that aspired to resurrect the notion of a caliphate, which we've subsequently seen to great damaging effect in the form of ISIS caliphate. And their method of coming to power was by infiltrating militaries in Muslim majority countries, recruiting army officers and then instigating military coups, whether that be in Turkey and Pakistan in Egypt, these are the countries they targeted. And their aim would be to then through the military coup, set up this caliphate which would then be an expansionist caliphate and would conquer the world. It sounds crazy, that's what they believe and that's what they're very, very serious and intent on bringing about. And now people want to say that believe me because they've seen the ISIS experiment unfold. But I joined a group that sought to do that through non-terroristic means at the age of 16. I ended up on the leadership of that organization in the UK. I ended up co-founding that group in Pakistan in 1999, where I left the UK when to Pakistan, was among the first the Vanguard of British Pakistan members that went out there to set the group up. There have been about three or four coup-lots in Pakistan since and Army officers have been arrested for being members of this group and many of them still in jail. I spent a year in Pakistan, went back While studying for my degree in the University of London would fly on Saturdays and Sundays to Copenhagen and Denmark, I co-founded the Danish Pakistani chapter of this group. And then the third year of my degree, because I was doing law and Arabic, resulted in me having to go to an Arab country for the language year. And so I chose Egypt. And a day before the 911 attacks in 2001, I ended up in Egypt. I went to Alexandria enrolled in the University of Alexandria to study for the year of Arabic language, which was the third year of my degree. Of course, 911 happened. And the climate changed, the security climate changed all over the world, something we didn't know about more predicted. And on the first of April 2002, my house in Alexandria was raided by the Egyptian state security. I was blindfolded. My hands were tied behind my back. I was then driven through the desert into Cairo to the dungeon of the state security headquarters in a building known as Al-Jihad, which was the main headquarters of Amin Abdullah, the internal state security. We were held in the dungeons there for four days, and they electrocuted most of the prisoners that they had there. Tortured them, interrogated them. On the fourth day, I was taken to a prison known as Masala Atora in Cairo, put into solitary confinement for about three and a half months, then charged eventually sentenced to five years as a political prisoner under the Egyptian emergency law. And served my full sentence there in Egypt. eventually left prison in 2006 in return to the UK.

No, they only can interest in the UK. So they can't pay for my release. Nobody got me out because I had to finish my full prison sentence. But what changed me and led to me to be the man that sits before you today is your right Sam. Amnesty's adoption of me and a few others in the case as prisoners of conscience. And they took the very brave and bold step now looking back at it. Because keeping mine the context here, this is Bush was president Tony Blair was prime minister and we were in the thick of the war on terror. We were in the middle of it. And I'm to see him come along and says, we disagree with everything this guy stands for, but they don't believe in using violence to bring their caliphate about. And so we will defend their rights to say stupid things. And they shouldn't be in prison. They certainly shouldn't have been tortured for it. So Amnesty adopted us as prisoners of conscience, and I was 24 years old at the time, by the way. So everything I've just described, you happened to me up until the age of 24 when I was in prison. And it was the first time in my relatively young life from 40 now, right? And I had never been defended by any mainstream pillar of mainstream society in that way before. Nobody had spoken out for me. And that had a real huge kind of emotional impact on my psyche. I've said in my autobiography that where the heart leads the mind can follow, and so I was now willing to consider alternatives because of the amncies work campaigning for me. And so I spent the next four years in prison reading reading all well. Every one of his books reading Tolkien, reading classic English literature, studying Islamic theology, really trying to understand the world around me. And I had four years to do so. And I spent four years debating and discussing with Pretty much the founders of Egypt's major hardest organizations were in jail with me in the same prison including the assassins or the former president Unwalsadat who had been killed in 1981 because of his peace deal with Israel and his assassins were in jail with me and they'd been in prison longer than I'd been alive and so they had some collective years of wisdom between them and most of those jihadist prisoners are in jail with had over the course of those years, two decades and more, changed their views and reformed. They were still conservative religious Muslims, something which I'm not, and I don't claim to be in my work at the moment. But they were still religious Muslims, but they were no longer extremists, and they were no longer what I call Islamists, people that sought to implement their version of Islam over society. And so they, in four years of constant debate and discussion with them, people that I knew had more wisdom than me. They've been in jail for longer than I've been alive. My views began slowly changing. I read a lot of the books they wrote about changing their own views and why they changed. And upon my release, I eventually, a good few months after my release, I had to leave the organization because I no longer believed in an ideology that I was once prepared to die for.

Yeah, among many others, yeah.

Yeah. I don't know why mine is an exceptional case, because most people, you're right, when you look at St. Kutup, who's known as the founding father of modern-day jihadism, He started off like me, a non-terrorist Islamist, but in Egypt's jails, in fact, the very jail I was held in, he was tortured and he ended up becoming the godfather of modern lay terrorism through his book, Mahal Stone's or Mahalim in Arabic. And yet, in my case, for whatever reason, I kind of went that bit further to question everything I believed in. But that's not normal. In most cases, we need torture people in jail. It ends up hardening and ossifying that ideology. And people become as angry as, you know, they become the monster that they were seeking to defeat.

So I left the group in 2007 and by 2008 in January. So I finished my degree. I'd one year left of my undergraduate degree. I graduated. I did my Masters at the London School of Economics in Political Theory. And while doing the Masters, set up Quillium. And Quillium, we built as the world's first counter extremism organization. It was meant to be, we believe it is, bringing us back to the SPLC's allocation, a Muslim response to extremism from people that have lived up, been through it, My co-founders were Islamists themselves who had changed like me, Muslims, born and raised, come from the community to have a community-based response, a Muslim response to this growing problem of extremism. And this was 10 years ago, and of course ISIS emerged since then, only demonstrating why this kind of response was needed. And so for the southern poverty law centre to designate, somebody with my background, with that trajectory, with somebody who was prepared to die for this cause. And if somebody who wanted to address these problems as a Muslim to call for a form for the good of my communities as opposed to against them. At the end of the day, it can only benefit Muslim communities if extremism is put back in its box. For them to then list someone like me, as an anti-Muslim extremist, it just really does, I think, shine a light on the true absurdity of the situation we find ourselves in.

The CEO, something coming, I think.

You can swing it toward it. It's very difficult because I can't fully explain to anybody what it feels like to have lived an entire life. From roughly the age of 14 being consumed by this issue of Muslims in the West and this question and originally getting it answering it in one way and then still being consumed by the topic answering it in a different way as I now do. I can't describe to anybody how much emotionally the toll that it takes to have your whole life have defined your whole life by trying to answer this question and because you care for it because this is a question that concerns you when I joined the Islamist group I did I was wrong and adopted some really nefarious ideas, but did so because I gave a damn and cared for a genocide that I saw wrong folding and desperately wanted a solution. So even when I became an Islamist, I did so out of care and love and concern for what I believed was my community under attack. To have a bunch of people come along. and say that I am anti the very community that I have but even if I have fought for all my life you know and have and my life has been consumed and defined by this it really is taking the one thing away from somebody that they have I mean I went to jail for this thing I have people have died in front of my eyes from their torture wounds imprisoned because of this thing to have someone completely ignorant in that way to to to to bribe me of having, of being able to claim that I have stood for my community, but by instead saying that I'm anti that community, it really does kind of make you feel like crap, Joe.

Identity.

So there was a lot of this stuff, this paranoia, this sort of irrational approach to this conversation that Sam suffered from. When when when when when I first met him I met him in New York at the intelligence squared debate that he that so A and her C Allian Douglas Murray while believe he've had yes on this podcast were on one side of a debate I was on the other side of this debate and the motion that we were debating was Islam is a religion of peace. I was back then arguing half of my true belief is because I actually don't believe it's a religion of peace or war it's just a religion that is interpreted in different ways but I had to pick aside and so I picked that side in defending the motion and Ayan and Douglas will on the other side and there was a dinner afterwards. for the speakers in Sam was there. Imagine you were there as Ayan's guest. I didn't know who he was and Ayan and I were locked in conversation, post debate conversation and Ayan invited Sam to have his say and she said, I want to hear what Sam Harris has to say.

And the actual line here was, and can you just be honest with us in the case of this movie?

And so, so I responded immediately and said, are you calling me a liar?

and it didn't go too well at all. The entire, everyone on the table kind of went quiet. And I didn't know who this guy was. I never met him. And I should have known who he was. And then I think somebody very tactfully changed the conversation and just completely veered off this. And I never spoke to him again for another what was it? A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A couple of euros. A are based upon the defensiveness when it came to this topic. And I think that actually it's important to say that to people that, because you asked him a question about the Charles Murray situation, a lot of people rather than actually wanting to engage with someone on the substance of their ideas, that I think in the climate we're in today they're engaging with people based upon their on their feelings and their feelings are valid of course everyone has the right to their feelings but we've got to try as hard as we can to detach those feelings from because that's clearly not what that you know if the principal charity means you lend the person that you're speaking to the best possible interpretation of what they're saying and and allow them to clarify what they mean as opposed to you putting into their mouths what what they mean and telling them what they mean I learnt that, you know, because then two years later he reaches out to me and he says, I think we can try again, you know, are you willing to have a conversation with me? And I hadn't originally remembered it the same guy.

And then we had this conversation, which it's a lesson for me, because we had this conversation, it's called Islam and the Future of Tolerance. It's become a book, right, published by Harvard University Press. We had this conversation that became a book that's been made into a film, which I think any couple of weeks now, we're here some news on that.

And that is that I am somebody that didn't engage with him on the substance of his question but actually fired a misfire, an emotional misfire on what was really questioning and his motives for asking the question rather than actually addressing the point he was making and I think that when I because I didn't remember who he was I then started the conversation a new

So you haven't deleted your account.

Oh, no.

And is he sober that what he was all stressed was asking about the Charles Murray thing? Yes.

Statistically, it was of disparities.

I'll tomorrow it would be vilified for

Oh, by the way, he's also listed by the Southern Bullseye Law Center. Oh. And so that's what contributed to the de-platforming and the violent protest against him at Middlebury.

Yeah, that's the upside. Yeah. They will talk about why it's a premise. Asian, Asian, so I don't know. Far and above.

It's a name of ideology.

So you were on your holiday and you get, so it was just a little more context.

Can I say that what he just summarized that when I've heard sounds to me as being more humane than the implications of the argument that the left who are opposing what Sam has just said. Because if you think about it, the implications of their argument would be, they want to deny the facts because they're scared that those facts would from which they would be derived a policy that would reflect those facts. In other words, in their minds, they are marrying those two. They are marrying the notion that if in statistical observance, there are variances in IQs between groups, in their minds, that means the policy should follow from that. So it's why they're resisting what he's saying, whereas what he's saying is there is no connection between what the policy should be and what the facts may be because the kind of world we want to live in should aspire to equality, regardless of what the science is saying, because one is policy and one is science.

It's not, it's not, but it's almost as if it's prepared by, by conceiting on the data. It's almost as if they fear that the implication must necessarily follow that the policy will also be supremacist in that way.

So at this stage, allow me to remind everybody that was Sam summarizing what he thinks Charles Murray was saying, suppose to Sam. No, no, but I don't know.

Not a hundred percent of what I've seen happen to you, though, is that people have taken your summaries of other people's films.

That's theological.

So there was a Commonwealth Games. It was just over the last couple of weeks and there was a male to female transgendered athlete in the weight lifting. category. Yeah, that's a whole another bowl. We participated in the women's competition. Yes. And the Commonwealth Games at the time of her joining hadn't yet put down a rule as to testosterone levels in the females competing. And so this male to female transgendered person qualified in the female games and was as you'd expect winning in all of the games and was the front runner and destined to win the competition as a male to female transgender person. And the only reason and it would have led to a huge crisis in the Commonwealth Games because there were some resistance to this notion and of course the questions that arise is this fair men are born naturally with higher levels of testosterone for example the only reason it didn't lead to the crunch time and that was the huge scandal of of of her winning is that she injured herself in the competition and by sheer accident

That's literally what happened.

All right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right, all right,

So I think, as you said earlier, she is a woman, but for the purposes of competition against other women, you know, legally, she's a woman at that stage. Right. If she goes through that identity transition, but I think we have to recognize, and I think even many traditional feminists are making this point much to the anger of the trans community they're saying hold on what you're doing in this way is actually we fought so hard and so long for these female spaces where we have a space of our own and people that used to be men are coming into those spaces is actually quite literally beating the crap out of us in spaces yes you know whether it's but in boxing whether it's in weightlifting and martial arts they are to buy definition that dominates them. Well, this is a cool say awful.

What was the way you mentioned something about the reaction that you got to that? What was the trouble you got into that? People were so mad at me.

Question for you. That way around, if it's female to male transition, somebody that used to be a woman, that transitions to a man who wants to compete with the men, they don't have an advantage too. If they allow to compete with this advantage. So if they win in that context, they've actually done really good. Yes. Right.

So would you be, so in that Texas case, they clearly have it wrong. They should allow, they should allow him to compete with them. Yes. and would you be, whereas I think all three of us probably instinctively would resist the notion that a female, that a male to female athlete, competes with other females because they'd have an average of that. But would you be for a female to male athlete competing with men?

Yeah. But the thing is, it's actually not that feeling as horrible. I don't really want to be here. I would have looked at my head so horrible.

And of course, the rest of the world didn't know you actually meant to be on vacation right now.

What did you even find that guy on Twitter on Twitter?

He's podcasting until this day. I don't even know who this bloke is. This guy is some crazy guy. I don't know who he's called me. It was because at one point he was going on about me being some form of enabler of your bigger tree

Yeah. Nate's an informant and whatever it is. But listen, I could draw. I could see this is that this is why it's so frustrating because I have pretty much memorized inside out, back to front, the Islamist ideological narrative. And I could sit here right now and play that game with you, that game of ping pong without conceding anything. And this is where, you know, I feel our conversation went really well because it was stripped away from all of that bullshit and we had a genuine conversation. It's still to this day very easy for me to play the tune of the Islamist and score those points especially because of some of what I've been through. and score those points and just get locked in a essentially it's ego, but it's not an intellectual conversation, it's a game of who is basically checking the right boxes in their own little confirmation bias to their own audience. That was an interest me, but it's frustrating.

It's a hit on YouTube. It's a hit on YouTube. It's a hit on YouTube. It's a hit on YouTube. It's a hit on YouTube. It's a hit on YouTube.

Talking of ideology, blingering statistical data on the subject of homosexuality. So in the United Kingdom, a poll was done last year asking, so there have been two polls gaging public Muslim attitudes towards gaze. The first asked, how many Muslims in the UK find homosexuality morally acceptable? and zero percent. This is by the way by a professional polling company. It's not just some student that's devised a poll on Twitter. A professional polling company found that zero percent of British Muslims responded to a poll saying that they found homosexuality morally acceptable. And then a year later, which now last year, another poll was conducted. And that was an ICM poll, asking whether British, how many British Muslims believe that homosexuality should be criminalized or remain legal? And I think it was roughly 52%, 52% if my memory serves incorrectly said, of British Muslims said that they would wish for homosexuality to be criminalized. And of course, what is criminalization of homosexuality mean under Sharia? And traditional Islamic jurisprudence, we know that it's punished by death. So, these are, these, this is scientific data from gaging, you know, attitudes, British Muslim attitudes towards homosexuality. But the ideological blinkers will, will kick in and refuse to see that truth. And these aren't Islamists. Unfortunately, my dialogue with Sam, we talk about this. There are the Islamists who want to who actively want to take over a country and enforce the version of Islam. Then there's underneath that. There's a softer landing of very very conservative stroke fundamentalist attitudes that unfortunately have become widespread. And here is an example of it that is that is being gaged by a scientific polling methodology that tells us there's a problem. And unfortunately, if one were to speak in this way, especially in Europe. One is received by my own political tribe and that's liberals, centre-left and further. One is met with denial and called a bigot, simply for relaying these facts. A quarter of British Muslims went asked about the massacre at the Charlie Hebdo offices in Paris, a quarter said that those attacks are justifiable. They sympathize with the attackers as opposed to the victims who were the staff at the Charlie Hebdo offices.

Speaking in these terms and unfortunately it's reporting polling data and what it does for me is to say this is why it's so important to address these issues, to have these conversations, to try and empower those Muslim voices that are seeking to challenge these sorts of attitudes and carve out a space. If one can do that with Catholicism in Europe and go through a Reformation and end up with an Enlightenment and end up with secularism in the West, what I often say is American liberals are very happy challenging their own Bible Belt and yet we have a Quran Belt within our communities and if I'm attempting to replicate the equivalent of challenging the Bible Belt within Muslim communities. It means addressing these issues. And yet, they grant to themselves the right to challenge the Bible Belt within America. And yet, if we were to challenge what I call the Quran Belt in Europe, we're suddenly called bigots and Islamophobes.

So, you know, the emergence of ISIS really did bring it to the fore and it really did quieten some of the voices. It also did increase the hysteria from the far left because they began panicking thinking actually we're going to lose this debate and that's where I noticed their labeling became even stronger. But the images of ISIS did wake up a lot of people to the challenges we're facing here because so many European born and raised Muslims went over to join ISIS and of course think about it in this sense the most infamous and notorious execution cell that I think were erroneously called the the Jihadi Beatles in the press because actually it really does It's an insult to the Beatles, but it also diminishes the true horror of these guys. You know, they called him Jahadi John, but the ISIS execution is basically that entire cell of the media face of ISIS execution cell were all British Muslims. And that should tell you something that we've got the worst terrorist group. Educated. I mean, the thing is, the university graduate.

Well, thank you. Think of it this way. We've got the the worst terrorist group in our lifetime. One can reasonably say his ISIS, right? The worst terrorist group at least in living memory is ISIS. And the worst sell in ISIS, the execution cell came from a fully developed for once of a better term first world country, and that was Britain. And Muhammad Amwazi, the leader of that execution, so graduated from the University of Westminster, was given as a young child, was given political asylum by Britain, because his family were Kuwaiti, and they fled. The invasion of Kuwait by Saddam Hussein, the country that the West liberated. and he turned against that country. So he had every reason to like Britain, Britain gave him a home, gave him a, actually physically bricks and mortar house, gave his family on social costs, they gave him social housing, they educated and he graduated from university and they liberated his father's country from an aggressor and this man turned against. this country that helped him and his family and his nation. Was he captured or did he or he's dead? One of them has been captured, but he's currently being held in Turkey.

You don't get a lot out of him. He was interviewed by a female Arab journalist. Did you watch that? Yeah, no, that was very happen there. It's a very solid and dismissive character. Yeah, yeah. He refused to talk about much. He said, you know, these are accusations and allegations you're making and I will wait to trial. in the end, he kind of caught the interview short.

So as I'm looking at you now, imagine she's the interviewer and she's asking me questions and I'm looking in this direction in your direction. He literally never laid eyes on her.

So I've got a phrase for this and I've been rallying for it on social media for a couple of months now and I call it a digital blind spot. There's a cultural bias on social media. where because of, and it's intellectually lazy, because social media is essentially a California invention, right? And we're in the home state of where most of this came from. It's got a very California-based world view, which cares a lot about white supremacy, and doesn't care about many other forms of bigotry that exist out there in the rest of the world, which by the way is the majority of the world. So on Twitter right now, of course there's Miley Annapolis has been banned. Tommy Robinson has been banned as in taken off. Now Twitter's a private company, Robert. He's the former leader of the British English Defence League, which was at one time Europe's largest anti-Muslim street protest group. I helped him leave that organization. He's still got many views I completely disagree with. But nevertheless, he doesn't support or nor advocate for terrorism. Why was he removed? Well, so Twitter is a private company. It can choose to remove whoever it wants for whatever reason and we will judge it for its inconsistencies. But he was ostensibly removed for hate speech as was minor inapolis. Now, the point being that still till this day and before people misquote me and completely say that I'm now defending their hate speech and its and their right to speak with hateful views on Twitter, this is my actual point that till this day, Did you know that his ballad, which is a known and recognized terrorist organization? So, if I get hate speech for a moment, a terrorist organization that believes in actually killing civilians, and Hamas, a known and recognized terrorist organization that believes in bombing babies on buses as a form of resistance, they still have accounts on Twitter. And my point is, this is the blind spot. And I've flagged Twitter about this on many an occasion. This is the cultural blind spot. This is the digital blind spot that the dude sitting in California in wherever who is monitoring this stuff and it's probably more than one person. They don't give a shit that there's some brown person in the Gaza Strip that believes it's okay to kill Jewish babies. They don't give a shit because it's a brown person saying it in the name of Islam. What they care about is a non-violent yet says stupid things guy because he's white called Tommy Robinson in England or Milo Yanapolis. saying stuff that they obviously, that touches their sensitivities. And it's so intellectually lazy to flag that immediately and to bar it from social media because you're comfortable with it. You recognize white supremacy. It doesn't take any effort to recognize it. You don't have to invest in studying this stuff to know what white supremacy is. It takes a bit of effort to study brown people's ideas that you're unfamiliar with and recognize here's a terrorist organization that's freely operating on social media. I know specifically on Twitter. I've actually pulled up their handles.

But imagine what that does in Arabic with the terrorist groups. Yes. But everything you've just said, by the way, I agree with, and multiply that for groups that have infrastructure in multiple countries with actual organizational hierarchies, and planned means of distributing their ideas across entire populations, physically fighting in wars right now, such as Hezbollah and Syria, killing Sunni Muslim rebels. And so imagine that and the way you're able to rally a mob in Pakistan and blasphemy as an example. All it takes for some personal and social media to accuse another person or blasphemy and they're probably going to get killed the very next day. And it happens all the time. But because these California-based social media companies are unaware of the cultural implications of those sorts of organizations in groups and listed terrorist groups mind you, they are completely no barring on any of their activity.

He's clearly flat on there. He's still a hundred percent.

Yeah. I mean, these are private companies. They've got the right to choose whatever policy. The only thing I would expect from a private company is show a consistent policy towards these things. If you don't like hate speech, then brown, banned brown people who are also advocating more than just the hate speech, but actually preaching violent terrorism. Right.

Yeah, no, it was set up to pull women.

Like the just doing that just was a very close story. Thank you for that.

Well, you've taken off your phone now.

My wife Rachel will be very happy with that. I think she'd probably wish that I did this.

Well, I don't. react sometimes I like to think I don't react in this way but I mean I can't I can't say that because actually probably I have sometimes but you know I get all that same kind of I get it's interesting because I took a stance on the serious strikes and well I just think that especially now in hindsight where there are no casualties involved at all there are only three injuries I think we had to take a stance that succeeded where Obama failed in making sure that red line was maintained that the use of chemical weapons cannot be tolerated even if it was symbolic even if it was highly symbolic I think sometimes symbolism is important so I took that stance and it got a lot of love on Twitter Well yeah, of course because it's actually that's against the grain. Public opinion at the moment is it was against the strikes and I fully acknowledged that when I took the stance. But I argued a case and I set the case out and both on my Sky News show I have a show, a co-host on the pledge and also on my radio show and obviously I repeatedly argued for why I think is important that we don't allow for chemical weapons and they used to become normalized in our world. And so it was interesting because I posted the Sky News clip of me sort of talking to camera about my reasons for this. And I had this screen grab of the reaction. It's actually hilarious.

So it is the two extremes. They actually started fighting with each other about who's right about the So I've said, look, here's a clip, why we must intervene in Syria after that chemical attack, blah, blah. The first one is a guy with an actual swastika Nazi symbol on his profiles. Oh, wonderful. And it says, you know, at Nordic Scott. There's his handle, Thomas James. He says, magic wants Britain to intervene in Syria because Putin and Assad are kicking his ISIS buddies' asses end of story. Right? So there's a guy who's basically saying, my real reason for calling for that is because I'm supporting ISIS against the Assad regime. The guy immediately after responds to him. He's called Atlas Doug, right? And he says, what are you on about you Nazi dumbass? Magic is funded by your law. He's a far-right uncle Tom. So they're fighting with each other. They're actually, you know, this is a, is that on your cover that captures that? But they're arguing with each other. Over whether I'm in their cat, his camp or his camp. Oh, wow.

So I think I should take myself out of that equation and let them fight each other would be better.

Well, again, it's reducing one's opinion to the lowest base, you know, dodgy motive as opposed to applying the principle of charity. So if Joe says something, now I can either sit here and actually think, no, I don't trust this guy. I don't respect him and therefore I'm going to reduce his opinion to the worst possible interpretation that he could possibly mean and then use that against him. Or I could continue to ask what you mean by that because I'm assuming you're a good decent human being in origin and perhaps you mean something that I haven't yet quite grasped and then ask you to clarify your own opinion in your own words and I think it's unfortunate that many of our conversations today in the far left is as guilty of it as the far right and they like to think they're not which is part of that righteousness that blinds them from actually committing this very same injustice they accuse the far right of committing and that is a it's the same bigotry in in a mirror image I call it the bigotry of low expectations the low expectations they have that Muslims are somehow unable to adhere to common decent liberal secular democratic values. And so it's actually plaguing our conversations today. If only we were able to strip away our ideological baggage and entering conversations and allow for that honest conversation. But of course, we say that and then you try to replicate our success on a number of occasions and found yourself incredibly frustrated. Well, you were one of our kind.

You know what I think we've done and it's again the advent of social media is that we I was speaking uh we my friend Mark about this and we've democratized truth and when you democratize truth in that way um the earlier thing you mentioned about sports combat sports and your expertise in their field. If I had come back at you and spoke at you with as much authority as you claim in your expertise with having absolutely no history in that expertise whatsoever and assumed that I have as equal writer an unresearched claim to truth in my opinion as you do and who has a lifetime of experience in that field. They're in lies of problem. They're I am aggregating to myself this notion, this this this kind of belief that my opinion though I've of course have an equally legal right to express it, but it doesn't mean it carries the same weight as your opinion when it comes to combat sports and it shouldn't.

Otherwise you're racist and it's might, that's the key word that it's my truth. And so the problem with that is when you relativize truth in that way, is that then I can speak to you on an equal footing about combat sports, which only a mad person who hasn't had that history in combat sport would think would irrigate to themselves the right to do so, but social media I think is allowed for that to happen. I gave a TED talk in about, I think it was roughly 2011, about the dangers of this happening and social media dividing us all. But I'd say now, if I were to pitch that TED talk today, I did it at TED Global. If I were to pitch that TED talk today, it wouldn't be accepted because it's not something new now. It's now people know the household from the years has divided us, but back then, It was new and innovative enough as an idea for Ted Global to say, we want you to speak about this on, and it's still up online. But if people watched it today, I think, how enough did that become a TED talk? Because there was this heavy day back in five, six, seven years ago, this kind of hope-filled moment where everyone thought Google, Facebook, and Twitter, and generally social media, and also tech companies were like, the good guys that these companies weren't actually companies that they were on our side against the corporate world. And it turns out I think we've just hit this moment. You mentioned Zuckerberg. I think we've culturally come to this moment now where I think symbolized by his testimony of Congress that that honeymoon period is over. People now view him. I think quite firmly and squarely as a CEO of a very rich company as opposed to a guy in my club that I'm friends with, who's on my side against the world, you know, and that's how Google used to have that slogan. Don't do evil. Don't do evil, yeah. Well, they don't. They still have it.

Yes. Two things, yeah.

There are a bunch of cowards. There's a guy who went to my old universe. I graduated from Celeste before I did my master's at the LSE. Celeste has been embroiled in a strike at the moment. The students union has been supporting professors who are on strike and it's over pension rights and it refuses government refusing to raise their pension rights and whatever. and some of the students came out in far left students defending the professors and they put forward a ring preventing students from attending their classes and a female black lecturer wanted to cross the strike lines to go into teach her students a white male a public school educated, very, very middle class protester far left, physically attacked her. He physically attacked a female black professor. So gone is suddenly gone is the white privilege. Gone is the male attacking a female. You know, gone is all of that. Gone is nonviolence, all the above. In the name of ideology, he legitimized and allowed himself to attack a black female. By the way, oh, and she was also Muslim. She went to the prep. She went to the prep. She went to the prep. She went to the prep. She went to the prep. She went to the prep. She went to the prep. She went to the prep. She went to the prep. She went to the prep. She went to the prep. She went to the prep. She went to the prep. She went to the prep. She went to the prep. She went to the prep. She went to the prep. She went to the prep. I say that because it's going to take a lifetime's work and I don't think that in our lifetime much is going to change. I think maybe for the next generation.

So let me tell you a story. I can answer this question with a story. So radical, which is my autobiography, has a US publication, right? In the UK it's Random House Penguin. It's published by the biggest publishing house. When I came to publishing the US, I approached publishing houses, but it was after Bin Laden was killed. And so, when we approached 10, 20, whatever, publishing houses. The problem solved. They all said, no, they said the problem solved. They said, we think, you know, we wish it comes to us five years earlier, but problem solved now, and there's not a problem anymore. And a bit like what you mentioned as sort of your expertise, and I have been consumed by this subject all my life, and there are a few people on this planet that I would take seriously on this subject. Outside, especially of Quiliam, and there are other organisations, they have some really good people, but I know them all. and we regularly speak. So I would say it's all these publishing houses. I can assure you 100% this problem, not only has not been solved, is going to come back around in a far worse way than you can ever have imagined. This is before ISIS came along. None of them believe me. Of course, what then happened? My book eventually got published by some very small publishing house in the US and has done quite well for them. But the point of the story was this ISIS came around and people were suddenly like, oh my god, where did this come from? Of course, those of us who had been monitoring the situation knew this was going to come back around very, very heavy. Now that ISIS has been pushed back and this is where the story is sort of the point of the story is We've got to resist the temptation to believe the problem has been solved, because the organization known as ISIS, which is a bureaucracy, has been fought back. But the ideology upon which that organization was built, is still very much alive, and it's still strong. What Al-Qaeda did while the whole world was focused on ISIS was exploit that opportunity to rebuild and regroup, and they've been rebuilding in Syria. Now, they are stronger than they have ever been, even under Bin Laden. Because for the first time in the history of that organization, they are firmly embedded within the Syrian population as a genuinely viewed by the people that they were fighting on behalf of. as a grassroots resistance organization, whereas before that, they were seen as a terrorist group that was like a, you know, just like a van god. They've embedded themselves in the Syrian population, in the Yemeni civil war, they've embedded themselves in North Africa, East Africa, and in Pakistan. And they are resurgent, and they are grooming, hums are being ladden, who has been laddened son, and they're grooming him for leadership. And a time will come, maybe in a couple of months, maybe in a couple of years, where they announce hums are being laddened as a new leader, of al-Qaeda, currently it's same ones who are free. When they do that, once their grooming has been complete and assuming arms are isn't killed up until then, all of the fragments of what remains of ISIS will probably rejoin al-Qaeda under Hamza bin Laden, and you'll have a stronger than ever before al-Qaeda organization, and we've got to remember that we never expected ISIS to emerge al-Qaeda will come back with a vengeance.

Well, Hamza bin Laden's succession to the leadership solves that problem. But because the ISIS guys were originally Al Qaeda. ISIS was Al Qaeda in Syria. And they broke away after bin Laden died because they had pledged allegiance to bin Laden. And the new leader of Al Qaeda, Aiman Zawari, is by all accounts of rather uncharismatic. And, you know, he's a, he's a Peter Trishan. He's not really a kind of, been ladden had the co-spitiate Trishan. Yeah, he's a Peter, he's Egyptian. He's an Egyptian Peter Trishan from a very well-off Egyptian family, by the way. I think his grandfather was Egyptian ambassador to the UN. Bin Laden clearly had the charisma, the wealth, the presence, the looks. He had all of it, that Zawari doesn't. Zawari is, you know, compared to Bin Laden, he just doesn't, you know. So if the guys that broke away from Al Qaeda's former ISIS, said to Zawari, the current leader, we pledged allegiance to Bin Laden. We are uniting. You're not our amir, our leader. If hums have been lighting comes back in as the leader of Al-Qaeda, it solves that problem because those remnants of ISIS have a loyalty to the bin Laden name and the bin Laden family and they remember what they consider their glory days fighting under under bin Laden.

No, no, the problem has not gone away. I can tell you that. The problem is the ideology and it will not be dealt with until we deal with this ideology. And it's why it's so dangerous to, you know, there was this awful term that I railed against it. It was so frustrating to see under Obama's presidency, the US State Department officially adopted as their name for challenging this problem. They adopted the term al-Qaeda inspired extremism. Of course, it isn't al-Qaeda that it inspired extremism. It's extremism that inspired al-Qaeda. And it's for the purpose of political correctness. You adopt this term in the state department, officially, that we're fighting across the world. We are fighting al-Qaeda, inspired extremism. My formal organization His Buddha had a caliphate espousing organization that believes in their ideal caliphate that gay should be killed, adultery should be stoned to death. They were there before al-Qaeda. And this ideology has been there before al-Qaeda. Al-Qaeda was one of a long line of groups that came as a result of the Islamist ideology. And we've got to start focusing on the ideology itself, not the physical groups that spring up from it.

So you, of course, you remember, because President Obama refused to use the word he's limistic extremism, of course. Trump has the other problem. He thinks that, like, rumple still skinned by repeating it enough. You've solved the problem. But actually, one of the elements in which he was correctly critical of Obama, was and I was at the time vocally critical of Obama's reluctance to use the word Islamist extremism and we've got no problem when we talk about you know when we talk about white supremacist ideology we don't mean that all white people are supremacists You know what we're doing here is actually attributing precisely specifically what the ideology is and believes in white supremacy. Likewise, it's important so we can identify that ideology. Still while not calling it Islam. So we're still giving a bit of a leeway there for everybody else or the other Muslims. But to call it Islamist extremism is to recognize that it's an offshoot of Islam. It's a manifestation, extreme or otherwise of Islam. And thereby we are acknowledging that its justifications are in Islam scripture as well as of course a multiplicity of other causes grievances and what have you. But we cannot ignore that it also rests on justifications that are derived from these Islamic scripture. I mean, I can cite for the Arabic that tells you in the Quran itself to cut the hand of the thief or to lash the adulterer. These are called the Hadith of the saying of the Prophet that says, kill the person that changes their religion. This is scripture. Of course, there are other factors involved as well, but one of the factors that gives rise to this is the unreformed scripture that these extremists cite. We have to acknowledge that Islam has a role to play. I often say that again under the Obama presidency it was frustrating that the common refrain was to say that Islam, this is nothing to do with Islam. This is absurd as arguing that the Spanish inquisition had nothing to do with Catholicism.

I think you want to use that first name. I'm really grateful to meet both of them and you as well. Thank you guys.