Transcript for #608 - Ali Rizvi

Oh, no. Yeah.

Seven drink lots of water now. That's how I was telling you that, you know, this long podcast was just one day.

that's like jumbo shrimp or military intelligence Zeta one of those I'll see you around it was a partly tongue and cheek right thing and then there's a serious element to it to the tongue and cheek thing is I was I have a friend who's she calls herself a feminist Muslim so not a neighbor right now So I always have fun conversations with her, you know, she's like sort of nonly religious.

And, you know, I was like, how can you be a feminist? Muslim is not like being a mediting vegetarian or, you know, it's contradiction. And she's like, well, you know, there's parts of it that I like, parts of it I don't like. So I just, I mean, she's essentially saying that she cherry picks.

So I figured, and then, you know, there's other things like there's LGBT Muslims in Toronto. There's a big community.

Great people. Yeah. Yeah.

Transgender Muslims. Gay and lesbian Muslims.

Yeah. It's, it's, it's, it's actually quite sizable. It's really?

Oh, I don't, I don't know a number.

Yeah, they practice. They're religious. They do Friday prayers and things like they have a lot of events that go on.

I think what's happening is the Muslim community that's in North America. in Canada, the United States. They're a little bit more progressive. They're sort of going through what all of the other religious groups went through when they came here. They kind of have like another religion part is really more of an identity issue. They have broad beliefs like they'll believe in God, they'll believe stick to some traditions. But, you know, the large part of it, like they're integrating pretty well. It's a very different Europe. It seems.

It's a jab at the cherry picking thing. You can cherry pick, you can be a feminist Muslim and LGBT Muslim. I can cherry pick all the way to non-belief. I'll keep the things I like. I love the Ramadan feast. I grew up with that. It's just very communal. Families get together. It's great. The eat holidays are great. Um, tax exempt status, you know, why not keep that?

You do, yeah. I mean, I'm kidding about that.

Yeah. I probably won't be doing that anytime soon.

You can't. No, you wouldn't believe it. Even those older religions, if you brought them back, if they started recently. Right. Some of the, it's just, you know, when religious people make fun of Scientology and more.

It's hilarious. You know, you're talking about, well, the angels are real and virgins really happen, but like this fucking Mormon shit. So it's kind of funny when you look at it. I saw this comic where there were these two religious groups fighting, they were running against each other, swords, and one of them was screaming two plus vehicles, five. The other one was saying two plus two equals three. And they were about to fight about it. And that's really what it's like sometimes when you look at it.

It is a similar thing. It's probably a good thing. I mean, that's how people sort of progress towards, right? I mean, we're talking about Jews and the Old Testament is You know, we're talking about killing gay people, like Leviticus 2013 says it. You know, if there's two men and you find them together in the way that a man should be with a woman, then they'll be put to death. That's exactly what it says. But most Jews don't really take that seriously. They've moved beyond it. Even, you know, Christians, you know, one of the things I look at is Catholics. You know, Pope says you should not use birth control or You know, abortion is a bad thing. The majority of Catholics are their pro-choice, you know, the half-pre-marital sex. They are, you know, they're perfectly fine with all these things.

Over here in the US they are. Is it, is there a like a statistic that proves that? Yeah, there is. I don't know the exact number, but the majority of Catholics in the United States are actually pro-choice.

No, it's definitely, I mean, they are pro-choice. Joe Biden's a Catholic, he's a practicing Catholic, and he's also pro-choice big.

Yeah, that kind of I think that was one of the major things that killed his campaign not the only thing.

Yeah, he's I think he's done there's a lot of stuff he's done that I think that kind of redeemed him.

It did. It didn't come up during the debate, but during the campaign there were people trying to bring it up, but I think that just it been so long and he had done so much more since then, like with foreign policy with the violence against women, legislation and so on that people were willing to let him get passed. And he has a really strong personal story too that he, you know, emphasized. And so I think He was able to move past that.

He never did, like even in the other campaigns, whenever he's run, he never really did too well. I mean, he was, he was running against Obama too. Back in the mid and then Obama chosen his vice president, but he, I think he's always in like the single digits.

I just think I like it. It just seems really dodgy to me. Like I always feel like there's something under the surface. That's just really explosive and evil. Like he comes across that way.

Yeah, that's that's a dark shit. Yeah, that's a hell of a way to articulate it. Yeah, if it's accurate.

Yeah, that was just, yeah, that was kind of shaking their hours with us.

Yeah, I like I told you see the logic of that. I don't obviously, I don't think that's a case.

Yeah, it's a prototype. It's like that's exactly what you'd want.

Yeah. And you know what's like this whole idea that they're a fringe and you know that they don't have a lot of support. You know, it is one thing that yes, they don't represent all the Muslims. Like they don't even represent, you know, the majority of Muslims and everything. But unfortunately, like I think they have a lot more support than we'd like to believe. You know, everybody who comes out and says that, you know, just like a friend, just a, you know, group of guys who are doing this stuff and nobody really follows them. That's not true. like there's a lot of support and you see it online, you know, I've talked to people online in Pakistan or totally in support of ISIS. It's bizarre, you know, they are like they won't go out and commit those acts themselves, but they'll definitely chair it on.

Yeah, that's a tough thing to argue against. You know, that's what, whenever this kind of thing happens, you always have the sort of the no one Trump's key kind of mindset or what he thinks is that you've got us on this side and we're doing all these terrible things and you've got them and they're doing these terrible things. What's the difference? I don't think it's as simple as that. I mean, I'm not saying that everything that the U.S. is doing is great and defending all aspects of American foreign policy. But if you're going to have that balance, you got to sort of level the competition. So the U.S. has this biggest strongest military in the world got loads of nuclear weapons, so on. If ISIS had all of that, how bad would they be and what would they do? That's when you really sort of get an idea of the intentions and intentions matter. Right. Right. So, you know, they do what they can and they go all out and they I think that You know, like the Yazidis that they killed, right, or the Christians that they're killing in Mosul, or the poor people that the women and the gay people that are throwing off buildings and, you know, crucifying and stoning to death. And these are not people who are oil hungry, they're not people who have been sort of invading their lands or anything like that. These are, these people have nothing to do with it. They just have some of their crimes that they're just shea, they have a different belief in a different strain of Islam, or their post dates, you know, they left Islam, they changed their mind, or their, you know, their Christian, their non-Muslims, or infidels who are not gonna subscribe to the, you know, the ISIS philosophy, they're not gonna pay that tax, the jizzyad that they want them to pay. So, like, you know, I think that the foreign policy thing is an excuse, specifically for people like ISIS. It is like it helps them recruit people, for sure. It doesn't hurt, but I don't think that that's a primary motive. What do you think the primary motive is? I think there's a lot of primary motors. I think, you know, like the US foreign policies and one thing too. But this is actually part of the religious belief. We've had Sam Harris here, you know, he's talked about this as well, the beliefs and behavior. And most of the time, you know, when you have an entire world and you're seeing these guys and they're, you know, accurately quoting the Quran. I mean, there's a couple of verses in the Quran say, be had disbelievers. You know, eight, 12, you know, you can Google that like surah, eight, verse 12 and 13, 47, four is another one says, you know, be had disbelievers. So they actually quote this stuff and they say a law walkper when they do it and they call themselves the Islamic State. So and they don't just target, you know, sort of people who are involved in U.S. foreign policy or anything like that, they actually target poor people, you know, Yazidis minority groups, she is, you know, gay people who are in Iraq and Syria. And that's what they do. And this doesn't really, so it's a lot more complicated. I think that it is part of the religious belief. And one thing you're going to see when you go to their Twitter accounts is that they genuinely believe what they're doing is right.

Well, that's the text is the religion in this case. The one thing that's universal, you know, people say Muslims are not a monolith and they're not. I mean, there's 1.6 billion Muslims in the world. So they're obviously not all the same, the ones in Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, they're all very different from each other. But the one thing they all have in common is a Quran and belief in the Prophet Muhammad. So the Quran, again, has different interpretations, but it's supposed to be an immutable text. And unlike a lot of Christians and Jews who don't believe that their, with Christianity, if you say that the Bible is a literal word of God, You're part of, I think, just 30% of the US population. I think it is 30% that is considered fundamentalists, where they believe that it's a literal word of God. In Islam among Muslims, like the vast majority of Muslims, that is a fundamental requirement to believe that it is the literal word of God. Like the idea of scriptural in currency, that anything in the Quran that can't be wrong. So you'll have The more progressive people who try to justify it, they'll never say, well, you know, that verse in the Quran, I don't believe in it. I don't think it's right. They'll try to justify it by saying, at that time was okay, or it's being mis-translated, or the word kill actually means embrace, you know, whatever it is. They look at the Arabic roots, so there's find other justifications for it. But unfortunately, to the rest of us who can read it and now you can Google it in all kinds of different translations and interpretations and you know commentaries and you just find it online and when you see the words or words are what they are.

That was the reaction to the red scare.

Well, here's, so the drone thing is a little, it's also a complicated issue. Right. There's this writer named Farhad Taj, I mean, she lives in Norway now, but she's from that area. She's from North Waziristan, where a lot of the drones were, and she wrote this article a couple of years ago. I think it was in the Daily Times, the Asian paper. And then what she talked about was sort of the different groups that are in that area, in like Northwestern Pakistan, the Pac-Afghan border. And she said that the locals over there, a lot of times, they feel like they're caught between the Taliban that's sort of taken over the whole area. You know, they go out and they put their shooting young girls in the head for going to school and they're, you know, try all this other bullshit. And then on the other hand, there is a Pakistani military and they're coming in with their planes and they're trying to bomb and that's even more non-specific. So they feel a lot of them are actually in favor of it. Like there's many of them, that's what she said. So, I don't know how true that is, right? But I mean, it's definitely a plausible claim and so you know it's kind of anecdotal though you know one person saying a lot of them are in favor of it yeah well I mean what happened was after she said this there were a lot of other accounts that came out that said the same kind of thing they mean they weren't saying that everybody's in favor of it they're saying that it's not as clear a cut as people think it is so like with drones you know for instance if you like the idea is that when you You know, these are decisions that are, you know, you gotta choose between bad and worse. Like complicated decisions are never, you know, clear-cut, good or bad. So I don't like the drone strikes. I think it sucks that sometimes they're necessary. But unfortunately, I think sometimes they are necessary. Like these are people who are, if you have a sniper, it's going around killing, you know, hundreds of people. And you wanna stop them and, you know, he's around a place and you have a choice between, you know, targeting this guy and taking him out. And that may kill a few civilians, whereas if you don't do that, it'll go out and he'll kill hundreds more people. Then you're making that call. That's a really tough call to make. I don't know if I could do it. But when you're running countries and when you have a foreign policy, when you have to do something about something that's happening, then it's a call that you have to make. And it's a choice between bad and worse.

That's true. So well Farhattah, she talked about this too. So she talked about the like so in that area Nobody's allowed there. Okay, so you're not like journalists don't go there because it's too dangerous. Even. What is this? This is in Northern South, which you understand? Yeah, in Pakistan. Now the armies in there because they're fighting against them recently after the Taliban has been like really focusing all their attacks in within Pakistan. They've attacked the army school and killed all those kids and so on. So Now they're in there, but before when a lot of these figures were coming out, she said that there's no UN people, there's no independent sort of watchdogs or agencies that are looking at it. No journalist can go in there, no politicians can go in there, even the police, the Pakistani police is scared to go in there because it's just completely ruled by the Taliban, all these sort of militant elements. So a lot of these numbers, like if you look at the, I think it was a report, detailed report from Stanford, and They talked about how these numbers were arrived at. And there's a wide range. There's some people report their very low. Other people report their very high. That's not to say there haven't been civilian casualties, there have been, and that's terrible. But I think during Bush's time when he just carried out a few drone strikes, there were relatively non-surgical. I think Obama, one of the reason that he decided to go ahead and continue the drone strikes is that he founded the most surgical and the most accurate compared to all of the other options that they had.

That's like yeah that's you know eventually come down to this that you know war sucks and you know if we're gonna have that debate I will agree with you. It's terrible when you can avoid it you can but if you're of the view that sometimes it is necessary to prevent even larger atrocities and you know sometimes you need to do it to stop it I think which is the view that I have I think that if you the more surgical your methodology is and it seems like drone strikes tend to be better a better option than the other ones I mean there's elements of it that I know about the debate, like the fact that you're sitting far away, it's very sort of inhuman, it's no contact, you're very detached, because it's like a remote control. They're firing off a missile, like that part of it sucks. But there's a lot of things about it that suck. But I just don't know how else, I don't know what other options there are to handle the situation. And it is affecting them. Like, it's not like the Taliban seemed to be more upset about the drone strikes than anybody else. You know, that means that it is kind of hitting them. And they do know that the world has a lot of sympathy for civilian casualties. They know that, and that itself, just a fact that, you know, they know that they can use these civilian casualties to their benefit. That automatically shows you that there is a, there's an ethical difference between both sides. And so it's not

Yeah, I mean, they absolutely do that. I mean, think about it again, you were talking about getting in the mind of conspiracy theorism. Think about, if you were one of those people, and you knew that a lot of people don't agree with you, everybody thinks that you're back in the stone ages and so on. But the one time you get a lot of sympathy is when there are a lot of innocence killed and then, you know, everyone, all these powerful political figures and journalists, everything around the world suddenly start, you know, sort of coming to your side against your enemy. Right. And then why wouldn't you exploit that? When you have nothing, you have like shitty weapons, you know, you're living in the middle of nowhere. And if that's the only power you have, that's one of your strongest weapons, you know, you'd exploited everybody would.

That's something. This is really, really complicated.

Um, I don't know. That's a, I'm not qualified.

And as he had, takes you back to the Samuel Huntington paper, the Clash of Civilizations. What is that paper? He predicted, he was this political scientist. I think in the 90s, he wrote this paper and later expanded into a book, and it was called the Clash of Civilizations. It was like a sort of a prophecy about the future. And what kind of conflicts people are going to get into. And he said that it wouldn't be ideological. This is about the post-Cold War. And instead it won't be ideological, it'll be cultural, and it'll be between religious groups. And he actually talked about the Islamic world, and about seven or eight other civilizations, and how they're going to get into cultural conflict. And he was conservative, and a lot of people criticized it. And that time I thought it was kind of, it wasn't completely completely in line with it. But now, more, you know, as time goes on, every once in a while, go back to you know, to revisit the paper. And it seems to make more sense almost like, you know, he kind of knew what he was talking about.

I think the long-term, I think we discount the role of ideology and belief when it comes to this. And I don't know how to solve it, but I know one way to move closer to solving it, and that's just being honest about what the problem is. You know, a lot of the problem, like, for example, the Islamic State, you know, they're yelling a lot, walked by, you know, the quoting the Quran, everything. I mean, this is weak, but, you know, cartoons people making cartoons and then getting shot up for it. You know, these are all things that, you know, there is an identifiable issue. There's a root cause here that everybody seems to deny, like including all the prime ministers, and like this has nothing to do with religion. I grew up in Libya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan. I didn't come to North American until I was 24. I grew up in pretty much Muslim majority countries and some very conservative ones all the time. Whenever I hear people say that this has nothing to do with religion, just doesn't make any sense to me.

Well, yeah, it does. And then there's a, I don't know what goes into it. I know that there's a lot of fear. People don't want to criticize us. We saw what happened with someone rusty all the way up to the Paris attacks. So there is a fear of that. There's also a fear of being seen as a bigot. I call it Islamophobia, phobia. People like you. That's a great word.

It's something that a lot of people relate to immediately.

Yeah, you got to stay consistent. If you're a true liberal and everybody's saying this well, unfortunately, not everybody's saying it. I wish more people were saying it. But if you are, for instance, opposed to killing gay people, you should be opposed to killing gay people, whether it's in the KKK manifesto or in the Bible or in the Quran or in the Republican Party or in Uganda. It doesn't matter what it is. If you're opposed to something, you should be opposed to it across the board. It doesn't suddenly become respectful. that okay now well it's in the Bible so we ought to respect that right well and it's a respect for ideas is just such an overrated you know it's considered a virtue in respecting people's ideas and beliefs and ideas are not people you know that's that's the problem with the word is homophobia is that it implies criticism of an idea And there is genuine anti-Muslim bigotry. People do commit hate crimes against Muslims. But Muslims are people. They're not, I mean, they're entitled to respect. They have rights. Islam itself is not a person. It's a book. It's an ideology. It's an ideology. A bunch of ideas in a book. So it doesn't have rights. And it's not entitled to respect.

But let's see the Boston bombers, right? They're from Dagestan. Yeah, they're from where they're from Caucasus. Is that how you pronounce it?

Don't. That's great. Actually, the Boston Bombers are actually from a place where the word Caucasian comes from the Caucasian and the Caucasian. So they're from there. So they were white. The underwear bomber was black. The Jose Padea was Hispanic. So it's not a race. All these people were Muslim. And the thing is, if you're saying that criticizing Islam is somehow racist, you're assuming that all of Islam is a race. What does that make you? That itself. That's exactly where racism is when you assume that everything that entire religion is one race.

Yeah, and then there's Turkey. So, you know, Turkey's a big Muslim country, Egypt's a big Muslim country, as Indonesia is Iran where everybody's Persian There's the Arab world in the South Asians. It's just racially incredibly diverse. It's not really a race. I saw something that was this woman wearing in the Cobb. And someone wrote a funny comment about it and got the face veil and the full cover, the brooker. And someone's like, you know, that's what you're doing is racist. I'm making fun of this. And I'm like, can you tell me what fucking race she is?

You don't even know if it's a man or woman.

It's toxic like it and I was trying to give the example of myself is that if I went back to Saudi Arabia and either countries where I grew up and if they knew the stuff that I write then I have reason to be Islamophobic because by their Islamic laws, you know, like it's just not something I like thinking about what could happen to me.

I'm an apostate.

I think the medical definition is an irrational fear. Like a rational fear.

Super rational. Exactly. So that's why that makes it even more of a misnomer.

So, you know, there's that aspect, and then there's also the anti-Muslim bigotry, which is a separate thing, which is real. Yeah, and it's based on people, it's targeting people, and, you know, I have been on the receiving end of that as well. I mean, that has happened. I mean, people have told me after the, you know, Charlie Hebdo attacks and people said, you know, you guys scum, you should get out of here. Where have you heard this? This is like on Twitter, Facebook messages, like I'll get emails.

It sounded pretty real.

Yeah, I knew them. Yeah, I know I know who these people are.

So yeah, many of them I real life. No, not in person No, not in person over here fortunately like I haven't really had that the only sort of personal thing I've had is you know the TSA the airport, you know the random checks Mm-hmm. I always get selected for the random check cause like that look at you There you go. So happens. And then my passport has my record of living in all these different Middle Eastern countries. And the name and the skin color. So that does put me in the same category. So I share that experience with a lot of people who do look like me and have the same name that I do. The problem with the word Islamophobia is that I think it's an injustice and it's actually an insult to the struggles of Muslims who have genuinely been victim of anti-Muslim bigotry to use their pain and their experience and exploit it to stifle criticism of Islam.

Yeah, with the labels, and I think a lot of times, you don't even have definitions for these terms. You say Islamophobia, if you ask someone a Muslim, a liberal Muslim, and Boston, you know, what Islam is, they'll give you a very different definition. than someone who's in ISIS or the Taliban. Oh, show clearly. We want some, so they have different definitions of it. I think feminism is the same way. We talk to ten different feminists in the same different definitions.

That's a recent discovery. I actually didn't know about these guys until like a couple of years ago.

And it's what really sucks sometimes is that when you have a certain agenda associated with, just a really radical insane. Yeah. Even if they have legitimate viewpoints about something, if they have like, if it's supposed to have like one or two points that are legitimate. Yeah, you know, but I guess if you're talking about the men's rights, custody, custody, and the testimony, those are the two that make sense to them. So that's where it ends. Yeah, that's that's like a rational composition you can have. The problem is any time you start talking about those issues, you know, automatically get labeled as part of that.

So there's this sort of smearing You know, painting you with the same brushes everybody else.

I've always actually, I was talking to a friend about this yesterday that I think when when you have movements and you have like organized movements is something that you want to achieve being an opposition to something just makes a lot more sense and it's more unifying than standing for something and explain that. If you have, say, the feminist movement, when you had, when feminism meant equality, you know, economics, social political equality for men and women. Then, you know, we're all feminists. You know, we all had that. We oppose gender and equality.

I'm saying, supposing feminism was defined as that as something that's in, it's a movement that's in ideology that's in opposition to gender and equality or patriarchy or whatever. Right. then it unifies everybody but the moment it starts standing for something like okay you're not a feminist if you're not a pro-choice you're not a feminist if you believe that males and females are not exactly the same or you know psychologically or If you don't subscribe to this sort of gender sociology theory or whatever it is, the moment you start excluding people based on that and you start talking about what feminism stands for rather than what it stands against, then you start getting fragmentation. And I kind of feel the same way with the religion and a lot of atheists. I like the anti-theist position that when you're opposed to the idea of religion and faith and believing things without evidence, You know, we're doing things for no other reason apart from the fact that it was written in a book, you know, 2000 years ago. If you're opposed to that, you have a lot of people, you know, who will be part of your movement. But the moment you start saying, well, atheism stands for being having this political stance, right, for it means that you have to like what we have to agree with what Glenn Greenwald says in the social justice, and yeah, then you start excluding people.

I do like I at someone explained this to me briefly, but I never really follow up on it.

I think that's exactly, that was a point I was making, that the moment atheism starts standing for something beyond just not believing in the God. The moment that happens, there's this fragmentation to start to take place. But I just think that it's better, like the anti-theist position, just the idea that, okay, it's been many, many years and now this whole religion thing, like the respect for religion and all the stuff that's being done in the name of it. This is kind of enough. So all of us rational people are going to take a position against this. And find another, find something else to guide your actions apart from these sort of archaic social and legal codes. And if we had that position, you could have, you know, people from all kinds of, you know, subscribed to all kinds of leaf systems. You can come and enjoy your cause. But the moment you start saying, well, if you're an atheist, then You have to stand for this, or you have to be pro-choice. There's a lot of pro-life atheists that are still atheists.

And that I have seen a lot. And it's a grown-up. We suddenly think that all these labels, like, you know, when you see what some of the atheist activists that are out there, especially now that's such a big move. There's a lot of really, really angry people.

Yeah. And no, I'm completely, I'm not saying that they shouldn't be. I'm totally with that. I mean, if I had the life that I on Hershey Elite did, you know, where I grew up, and I went underwent genital medallation, and all of these things. as a woman, and I would be angry too, if I was a press by the fit. I have a rife by the way, you know about the blogger in Saudi Arabia. Which one is that? There's a blogger that they have jailed in Saudi even they've been like lashing him. They last him 50 times. Okay, so I'll tell you. Tell me. So he rife is actually someone that I know my girlfriends are really good friends with his wife and his kids and everything, so we know them. personally. And he started a website called Free Saudi Liberals. He wanted to start talking about liberalism and sort of just different innovative non-status quo ideas in Saudi Arabia. And he essentially got a jail sentence for 10 years with a thousand lashes. So they would take him out And to the public outside of Moscow for Friday prayers in Al Jafali mosque in Jeddah. And they just take a cane and they lash him 50 times every Friday until the 1000 lashes are complete. So they did the first set think about four or five weeks ago. And so, you know, we all started writing about it. All of us really, you know, became a huge story. There's a lot of pressure. And then the Charlie Hebdo attacks happen. And the Saudi ambassador was in the free speech rally in Paris. And I think that was on a Sunday. And they'd actually last rife on Friday. And he was in free speech rally. So a lot of people wrote, I wrote a piece for CNN about it. You know, just talking about the double standard.

Fifty. And there was supposed to continue every week. But he had a medical review. And the doctors said that He's not fit to be last the next week. We're just fucking bizarre because basically they said that his wounds haven't healed enough Yeah, to create new wounds to create new wounds Yeah, so it's fucking so that is wounds close up before we rip them open again and last with whether they're using to beat them with they use a cane they use a really sharp bamboo cane with like edges to it like it's using Singapore what I know about it is Yeah, it's a cane like that, but it's got apparently it's got a very sharp edge so it does cut off the slice you open 50 times yeah 50 times it's correct so it's I mean they don't even have to hit you they can just hit you like lightly and it will still cause cuts on your body but they're beating the shit out of this yeah and there's a there's a distribution you have to distribute it between like the knees all the way up to the upper back oh my god so he's scarred for life hey he's scarred I mean he's uh it was his his wife was just really really upset our names in soft and after the first lashing, you know, she, he was in really bad medical condition. He wasn't getting any medical help. And she just said, she's like, you know, I don't think he's going to survive it. And he's, you know, like, when you talk, and he's just like a very gentle, very nice, you know, thinking kind of guy, just very sort of, you know, introspective. And he's like really more of an intellectual kind of person. I mean, he's not very physically robust or anything like that. So it's, what did he write? He wrote, man, he just wrote sort of like liberal things. He started talking about how religion and politics should be separate, just a basis of secularism. There was one post that I liked that he wrote. That was about astronomers, like there were some Saudi cleric religious leader with a lot of influence. you know, who was essentially saying that, you know, I think he said something like traveling to planets as Haram or, you know, as you saying something about astronomy. Haram? Yeah. Haram means sinful. So, and if I remember this correctly, and he essentially wrote this really sarcastic thing about Sharia's astronomers. He was like, oh, I didn't know these Sharia astronomers existed, and we should just forget about what all the scientists are saying, you know, what all the telescopes do, and we should just listen to these guys because they have knowledge that nobody else has. centuries ago. So he would write sort of sarcastic things like that. He never opened the challenge religion, you know, being wrong or anything. But he was just an advocate for secularism. So, and that's really all he did. I mean, I know, you know, people tend to think that, like, well, what did he really do, you know, but I can't, you know, I can't say any other way. The guy all he did was he just blogged on a single free Saudi liberals. And so Saudi Arabia is another, like I grew up there, right? I was there for about 12 years, so I could talk about that forever. But King Abdullah just died, right? And I always tell people this that the month that James Foley was beheaded in August 2014, that same month Saudi Arabia beheaded 19 people. And it wasn't just for murder. They were murdered, they were beheaded for sorcery, for cannabis smuggling. You know, we'll probably resonate with you a little bit. You know, all kinds of like just crimes that are not really crimes.

Black magic, doing spells on people. Oh my god. Yeah, promising people that you can, sorry, they can't get pregnant.

Happening as we speak. It's still doing it. And it be headed, I think, 10 people in January.

And these are public, these are public beheadings with a sword, you know, the, so you could watch.

You know what they would do if you flew over there and you were a foreigner. It would be in the middle of a marketplace or outside a mosque and they would push you up to the front because you're a foreigner. They want to show you how they rock it. Yeah, you'll see you'll see kids running towards a scene when executions about the happen or lashings about the happen that the video of rife is online when he's lashing and it's online. Yeah, it's online. That's someone actually secretly filmed it. But what you can really see is you can see people running towards where the lashing was about take place.

You don't see it very clearly. And you know, so what's he making? No, no, he's not. He's he's clothed and then he's got his hands in shackles. He's got his head raised up.

They're beating them through the clothes. And from a distance, you can't really appreciate what it's like because, you know, the gain is really really sharp and so you don't know exactly what happens. You can't see it very clearly, but the thing that is most striking about that video is the people around it is like hundreds of normal regular Saudis that have gathered around their cheering afterwards, and they all yell a law walk burn when the lashes are complete. And there's little kids, like a little five, six, seven year old kids, and they're all excitedly running towards a scene and so on. So these are things that they see in public. I mean, not a lot of people here know this. There's a, in Riyadh, the place where they do the public executions. You know, at least when I was there, it was called Chop Chop Square. That's what we used to, what? Chop chop square. That was the sort of affectionate term before it. Yeah, there's a there's a market on which there was chop chop square and but if you criticize that you're Islamophobic Did you know that yeah because then then they'll say they'll say well this has nothing to do with Islam and then you'll show them the verses and the Quran that actually say that you can be had people For all kinds of things, and they'll say, well, that's mistranslated, misinterpretated, and it was, you know, at a different time, a source of data context.

In August, the month that James fully was beheaded by ISIS, the Saudi government, our ally, the one that Obama just recently went, you know, to pay respects to the king. And for Eid Zakaria, I actually asked him, he asked Obama about, he's like, are you going to mention the blogger that they have jailed, you know? He's like, well, you know, right now I'm just going to pay respects to the king. You know, but with the human rights abuses and with our allies, it's very tough to have that dialogue.

You know what they did was King Abdullah is he's a little bit like the Pope. He just says something that's really common sense to the rest of us. Yes, I think women should be allowed to vote. We'll start doing that in 2015. And everybody praises him like he said something amazing. It's like, you know what the Pope says? Okay, maybe condoms are okay. He gets this sort of disproportionate praise for seeing it even though

So they're getting praised and lauded for pretty much bringing their people, you know, forward into the 19th century. So there was like, well, I'm glad you're not in the 17th century anymore. I'm glad you're in the 19th century. Yeah, it's such a low standard. It's like a really low bar for them. And so Abdullah, I'm working on the story right now. I just talked to these two women who Well, I saw the story where King Abdullah's own daughters, so he's got like a shitload of wives and a whole bunch of kids, and you know, this one I think is a Jordanian wife, and he had four daughters with her. Didn't have a son, so he wasn't happy about that. And he's had them under house arrest, imprisoned for 15 years. So why? Because they spoke up about male guardianship. There's a law in Saudi Arabia that says that like women are not allowed to do anything without the permission of a male guardian. Like travel work. Really? Yeah, they can't. Some things they can't even do with the permit. Like they can't, they're not allowed to drive.

So they can't do that even with permission of a male guardian. Pretty much anything else, whether it's working or traveling or any of that stuff. They can't do it without express permission of male guarding. So they spoke out about it. Because their guardian was their dad. It was a king who they barely even knew. And their mother, she's also female. So it really restricted a lot of things that they could do. So they started talking about gender discrimination and issues. the situation of women in Saudi Arabia, and they didn't interview in 2013, and it's on line, it's by with Russia today with RT. I think that's what it stands for Russia today. So, and they were able to get a Skype connection and do this interview on this book out. And after that, nobody really heard from them again. They didn't do any other interviews. So, actually, I've gotten touched with So here's where my connection happened is I went to a school called Monarchal Riyadh, which was like an English medium school for foreigners and Saudis as well in Riyadh. And she was in the girls branch. And I knew these two girls who were in the girls branch, who went to school with her, who were good friends with one of the daughters, the youngest one, her name is Jawahar. When they found out about this imprisonment, they were just shocked. I mean, they went to high school with this girl. And she was king up to the list, daughter. So I'm actually working on a piece about that. I just didn't whole interview with them for an hour. It's about a week ago. And it's just the whole story. He's crazy because Abdullah is being, you know, Cameron, Obama, everybody's been praising him as a reformer. And all the things that he's done for women in Saudi Arabia and he had his own four daughters. Our pros have been imprisoned and they're being they've been starved you know they've had a lot of their dog diet of starvation because they weren't getting enough food all these things that have been happening in the you know the hypocrisy and the double standards just amazing and we Westminster Abbey and in the UK flew their flags at half mass when up to a diet. This is this is a guy who sanctioned all those beheadings. I mean they he can stop that shit if he wants to The sorcery beheadings and the lashing of bloggers and the imprisonment of his own daughters. He could stop that he could have stopped it and he didn't he just said that will will allow women to vote in 2015

Yeah, that's his own, that's his call. So it's a different world out there. Yeah. That's why it's hard when you're there and you come here. And when you hear the sort of the nomchomsky thing or the Glenn Greenwald thing, that we need to stop all this homophobia. Yeah, when you see the apologism and immediately cuts you off. And it affects people like Rife but the blogger. And it affects people like that. It actually harms them. I mean, the people that we should be getting behind And supporting in those parts of the world are the dissidents and the reformers. And there are a lot of them. You don't hear from them because they can't speak.

Did you see that thing on Sky News? There was this, this is woman. It was interviewing, like when they did the reprint and they put the cover of, you know, the put Mohammed on the cover again, you know, crying and so on. So she was interviewing somebody about that. And then the woman that she was interviewing started pulling up the paper and showing the cartoon and she immediately cut away. So come, sorry, we can't show that, and I'm so sorry to anybody who was offended and so on.

You know, the stuff, there's a lot of, I was, my mom gets upset at me sometimes. She's like, you know, can you do the criticism, but don't do the mockery? And, uh, I mean. Well, it just means that when you make fun of it, when you draw cartoons and it's insulting, it's different. And I understand where she's coming from. But I think mockery is super important. If you think about the interview, the Seth Rogan movie, you have all of these journalists and everybody writing all these inquisitive, biting critiques of the North Korean regime, And all it does is, you know, because Kim Jong-un wants to be taken seriously. And he gives him, you know, he's like, okay, I'm legitimate, everybody's criticizing me, you know, they don't like what I do. But when you make a movie with like Dick jokes and, you know, the kind of thing that the interview was, and you make fun of it, he goes,

They did actually. Yeah. Yeah, Kim Jong-il was not happy about it.

It wasn't like what happened here. And I'm not sure exactly why they didn't. That was a longer time ago.

probably. It's impossible.

He's a little insecure. I think probably. But he's got a fat face.

You know, when you when you have this kind of mockery cartoon like the jokes and the cartoons piss these people off a lot more because they want to be taken seriously right like they have these like they can't do it through ideas because their ideas are all bullshit right there you know women can't drive or you know you should be beheaded if you leave the religion or change your mind about what you believe and so on Those aren't the kind of things that you're gonna get people flocking to you with, you know, through rational discourse. So, you know, you have to use other means.

Well, you know, one of the reasons for that, that's where I think our role comes in a little bit or the role of the West, the US is You know, the reason that the Saudis are lashing right for the reason that they're beheading people for sorcery has nothing to do with US foreign policy or Western imperialism or for the anything like that. But the reason they've been able to maintain it, the reason they can actually keep those archaic legal codes in place and not really have to do anything about it is because, you know, they're very rich. They have a lot of oil. They don't really need to progress. You know, they're making that money. And the reason that they have that is because, you know, we've all brought them up. We have supported them. And, you know, I mean, you saw, do you remember when King Abdullah visited Texas? I think it was in 2005 and then George Bush was holding hands with him.

Yeah, so you had that, and then in a few years later when Obama is first year of his presidency, he was a G20 summit in London, and he did this controversy where everybody thought he bowled to the Saudi king, which he sort of did when he became shook his hand and he knew. So that's kind of that symbolizes where the U.S. Saudi relationship is, but they have to do that. It's not just, you know, we can blame the leaders for being allies in Saudi Arabia, but, you know, it's sort of the same thing that you see when, you know, people driving around their SUVs, filling them up with gas, and I will say that, you know, every time we fill our cars up with gas, we're all bound to the Saudi king.

Yeah. And that should change. I think that that's a positive thing. I mean, whatever the controversy is about fracking right now, and you have to make everything safer, obviously. But eventually, anything that helps us get off foreign oil. Because that's what funds it. I mean, yeah.

Yeah, it's oil. And then tourism and things like that. But it's not really innovation. It's not like they're providing some sort of service or manufacturing and kind of goods or to have got any even cultural elements that are going around all of the world that is.

How does that change? Well, that's the reason for their success. You set it yourself. See oil. Yeah. Change that and you change things drastically there. the thing that would put an end to all of them is if they ran out of oil or if we didn't need their oil.

You change it when you have to move on with life when you can't maintain that and you like if the rest of the world is moving on and you are not able to stay in that bubble when you need to have international trade relationships when you when you are dependent on diplomatic relations with other countries and you can't just get away with the shit that you do all the time then that's how countries evolve that's how they progress they haven't needed to do that yet because they're fine they're in their bubble they've got a lot of oil money everyone's happy everyone's well fed. I mean, they're, they're, they're fucking crazy rich. You know, I was there like the, just going into reality, you can't, as a tourist, you can't go into reality. And this is, I'm talking about them in 90s. I mean, you know, when you see those, those movies with all the futuristic cities and stuff. It really looked like that. The architecture, the buildings, the highways, and it's just, it's beautiful to see since the people that are walking around are all wearing burccas and.

It's it's contradiction. It is really strange. It's like and there's one royal family that's running it. There's a whole bunch of brothers and it's kind of like a And the people who live there and come stay there for a little while and go away all the expatriates. It's like they're running a hotel. It's like a family running a hotel and it's got all its money in American accounts, so it's accounts, you know, whatever. And people just check in and check out all the time. You get paid according to your passport.

Yeah, it's kind of, it's kind of government.

You know, it is yet to, it's a really different world. It's like another planet.

It's you know what it's really unbelievable and I understand that now right when when I was there Just explaining the way that things happen there to people over here. It's it's just so removed and so alien that People either shut it out their mind or they don't believe it I've seen that a lot, and I'll tell you stories. What I'm doing in my book is when I talk about these things, I was trying to bring personal anecdotes into it. Before I go into the topic in detail, because it helps people to relate to it. So this is something that happened when I was at fifth grade. So I went to the American School there, which is kind of why I talk like this. When I was in fifth grade, we made snowflakes during the winter. I got a paper, fold up a piece of paper, and you cut it and you make snowflakes. Decorated them with glue and glitter, and our names, and so on, and the teacher put them up on the door. Or the bulletin board, and I can't remember exactly. You take a lot of pride in that kind of stuff when you're a kid. I was like 10 or 11 years old. And there's a ministry of education guy who used to come in and he used to check the school to make sure everything is operating correctly. You know, like you had to say, winter holidays, you can speak about Christmas, you could never read during Valentine's and so on. So they, he, Saw the snowflakes and started yelling at the teacher in Arabic, teacher didn't even know Arabic. And in front of all the kids, and he just took a pair of scissors and he cut one of the tips off of each of the snowflakes. So I remember thinking, I was like, wow, worked really hard on that. He just like, amputated one of the tips of the snowflakes. And then we asked the teacher what happened. We wanted to know. And that's when I found out about the star David. So Star David has six points. So anything that has six points is apparently banned there. So she told us about the Star of David. She said it's a sign of the Jews. So this was my introduction to the Jews. I don't really know anything about the Jews before. But I just thought I was like, wow, these must be scary people, whoever they are. The guy's cutting like tips off his stuff. I think spark guns and no flicks. So I went back and, you know, asked my dad about it. My dad was a professor, so he was a fairly rational guy. And then he told me about the whole Dizio Pauston history, explained it to me as well as I could understand it. And then he pulled out of map. It was one of those inflatable globes. And he tried to show me Israel on the map. And it wasn't there. This map was we bought it in a bookstore in Riyadh. And there's no Israel. There was no Israel. It was like a It wasn't even like they labeled it something also. They made it all Palestine. I remember there's this thing. There was a border. They'd drawn the border and the rest of it was the same color as Mediterranean.

So it was just like a little notch. So you know, this was, I remember we bought the world book in Cyclopidea around that time. That was a big thing. Cyclopideos are obsolete now. But, and they'd taken out the the entries on Israel and evolution, everything. You pay a lot of money for it and they took it out. So they'll do those things. Now, what I'm saying is, this was my introduction. This is what I saw. Unfortunately, my father was rational, and he told me the right story. But there were a lot of other kids that also went home. They asked their parents the same questions. What is the star David or the Jews? And I don't know what kind of responses they got. I don't know what they were told. So you live with that in school. You live with that as a kid who's even if you're a foreigner, even if you're going to an American school, you have these ideas around you. And the kids who are in the Saudi schools, which are separate. The foreigners are not allowed to go to Saudi schools. Their textbooks are just insane. They're kind of stuff they have about Jews, about infidels, and everything. They actually teach this stuff to kids. You know, in the UK recently there was a Saudi school that was in the UK and they were using some of these textbooks and there was a big bruh-ah-ah about it.

Yeah, yeah. There was love that term. Sorry. That was one to say that I rarely say. I don't know if I can say bruh-ah.

Nobody would have made that connection. But that's what I mean. It's stuff that's so unimaginable and things that you wouldn't even think of.

No, it's a tough thing because I'm realizing more and more as I live here. with every passing year that people who have been raised here, it's very difficult for them to comprehend that mindset. We grew up, like I grew up in a Shia Muslim family.

They're basically two different schools of thought, so after the prophet Muhammad died, you had his best friend, his name is Abu Bakr, right, and just what the current ISIS call of his name after And you had his son-in-law and his cousin and his name is Ali. So I'm named after. I don't know how that ended up like what we're named after. But anyway, so what happens is you had these two different lines. And there was a conflict about people were, they couldn't decide if the successor was going to be. Some people kind of flock to the Caliphate, which was Abu Bakr and the other Caliphs and others flock to the Amams, which was So it was a successor. It was just basically a conflict about who the successor was going to be in different people. It took different sides. That's the long story short.

That's that they've been fighting and it's not just the Sunnis and she has as a whole bunch of other factions. What are the other ones? Oh, there's too many names. I can know if we're talking about all the different rounds.

So yeah, there's the Sunnis and the Shias, they're primary. Within the Shias, you've got two different groups. There's the Ifnoshries, which is the 12th verse, and they believe in 12 Amoms. And then there's another group that's split off after the sixth Imam into a separate sort of like decency. And those are the, they're called the Ismailis. And the Sunnis, you've got Salafi Sunnis, which is a lot of the, the ones in Saudi Arabia were very conservative. You have four major schools of thought within the cynysers. You want the names? I mean, it's like a humble, a chaffy, mollicky, and how to fee. So these are four different schools that thought they'd practice different things. For instance, the chaffy sect does, for them, female general relation is mandatory. in Indonesia and in a lot of Southeast Asian countries. You know Indonesia, where Resa Aslan says the women are 100% equal to men. I would say when it comes to circumcision rates, they are. Is there more than 80% of men and women there are circumcised?

There's four different kinds of FGM, according to the WHO. So, that ranges from just nicking the clitoris to all the way, to removing the clitoris and the labia. So, nicking it is just sort of a scarring ritual, yeah, it's still pretty fucked up. And they're all banned over here. So, there's different grades to it. But in, so, that's one example, right, of the Shafi sect and then the Malaki they have a different belief, the Hanapis have different beliefs. So, and they'd range and, you know, there's really liberal ones within each sect. There's really conservative ones. So, it's very wide. Like, you know, you have jihadists who will actually go out and they'll carry out these martyrdom operations. And you have Islamists who agree with political Islam, but not all of them are necessarily going to carry out these operations. And then you have moderate Muslims, and a lot of moderate Muslims are extremely conservative. And they do believe in all those conservative things like being gay is not a good thing, woman should cover herself. So a lot of moderates will believe this, but they reject the political ideology of Islam. And then you have liberal and progressive moderates, and they're a different as well. So it's a very, you know, it's a 1.6 billion people. It says a very wide, it's extremely, extremely diverse.

This conservative elements in both, like just a given example that may be more recognizable to you, is the Iranian theocracy. If you can keep that closer to, like, it's okay.

Yeah, that's nice. So the Iranian theocracy is a sheath theocracy. So that's extremely conservative sheath Islam. The Saudis are Sydney. It's extremely conservative. Sydney is something.

The Bronx successor. That's a historian. That's a difference between Shia's and Sydney's. So it's like Baptist going after Catholics. Yeah. Sort of in the United States. And yeah, pretty much similar. There's just a different idea of what the belief should be. And there is an element of labeling people who don't agree with you, non-Muslims, so a lot of Saudis will say that the Shias are cough or they're apostates because they rejected belief in the callives. And then that makes them punishable by death, and you have to go out and you have to kill them. And there's also an ethnic thing there to there's the Arab and Persian ethnic rivalry, so it's extremely complicated, and that's why Bush ended up in such a mess when he went into Iraq. I don't think he, I mean, this is a hard thing to understand for a lot of people. And really, I don't know what I read. I don't think he had any idea. I don't think he knew the difference between she and Cindy's beyond just the superficial level.

His name is Faisal Mothar. He grew up in Iraq and he started the global secular humanist movement while he was in Iraq. So he became a target for a lot of people. And the global secular humanist movement now has like I think 300,000 followers on Facebook and so on. So it became huge. And he was also from a Shia family and he was targeted by Al Qaeda. And they managed to kill his brother. And after that, he went into running around all kinds of different countries until he finally got refugee status in the U.S., and he came here recently. And he's full of stories about Iraq and how complicated it is. And some of the other people, you know, I've talked to you, they say that the reason the Saddam Hussein was so effective, because he ruled with an iron fist, and he kept all of these sort of religious rivalries under control. And he prevented anybody. Fairly like pro secular a lot of these dictatorships are so they're secular and They just didn't in the moment you took that fist away everything just went nuts Yeah, that's what it seems like from our point of view from our

Yeah.

I agree with Sam Harris and I think he's very dishonest.

He's, like, I've only read the stuff he's had. I've had some exchanges with him on Twitter and so on. And he's sort of like a very classic apologist. And he's Muslim. He's Muslim. I don't know about his belief. I'm not sure whether he really is a practicing or believing Muslim or not. But he's definitely an apologist. And he's one of these guys who, whenever anything terrible happens, he's like, well, we got to look for the root cause. Islam is not the root cause. And at one point, he said that Like he's one of those guys who responds with everything by with accusations of bigotry in Islamophobia. Like he'll just call you a bigot. And you know, especially that, you know, people here especially liberal white Westerners. That's a lasting they want to be called. It's just a great way to shut down the conversation. And people know this people in the Muslim world generally they know this. they know they can completely shut you up if you just accused they just accused you of racism and so there's so much guilt involved with that especially white people yeah we're so guilty yeah and the white and the sort of western like in a they they mean well right yeah but they they have the sense that they're like okay we don't want to be called racist want to be called bigots so and and i think he kind of uh... he uses that a lot and one of the things that he said for instance is that He actually wrote, he's like, these books, the Koran, the scriptures, they don't mean anything in and of themselves. These words have no meaning. It is a people, like a misogynist, violent person will bring their meaning out and they'll see in it what they want. Like, as if the book is full of rorschach tests. It's like a ink blots. You can interpret in these words, don't mean anything. And I was just thinking about the implication. And I wrote this for the Richard Dawkins website, You know, if he's saying that like these people, they didn't get their ideas in the book. The book has nothing to do with it. And he's saying that all the people in the Muslim world are disproportionately inherently violent and misogynistic.

It's got to be something in their DNA.

And that's bigoted. You're essentially that that's actually even more bigoted because you're saying that These people are inherently like that. It's in their DNA. That's the way the people are.

And you can't fix it. It's like because they're just like that. So to me that actually sounds, that's a much worse position to have. It's a much more bigoted position to have. And to neglect obvious causes. You know, when we talk about root causes, anytime someone says, A law walkbird if they do something or they say Jesus made me do it. We also kind of ignore that like oh yeah, let's ignore that. Let's look beyond every time but when you're looking beyond something you're never going to see what's in front of you Right, so if if I tell you I did something horrific act because of my political beliefs or because I played a certain video game where I liked a certain band or I was pissed off about US foreign policy You'll take that a face value Everyone, well, like moments, anybody says you're as foreign policy, you know, arrest us on Glenn Greenwald. I'll be like, okay, they said what the cause was we should believe them. But way more than you as foreign policy, they're telling you why they're doing things. They're doing it for God, they're doing it for the afterlife. But when we listen to that, we don't take that a face value. Like, no, that's impossible. It has to be something beyond it. It's the only thing that we don't believe. you know, religion and religious belief can actually do these things. They can actually, they do people to act on them.

It's a tough thing to fix and I, there's this one after that, you know about the attack on the school in Pakistan where they killed hundreds of people in 132 kids and they just went and they were like, seven suicide bombers, it just went in and they just took out all those kids in the age 12 to 14. So that shook up the world. And after that, I was talking online to this Taliban sympathizer. I don't know if he was a member of the Taliban, but he's definitely a sympathizer. And he told me something that completely, like it was actually really chilling. And he said, he's like, you know, I don't It's not that I believe in an afterlife. I know there's an afterlife. It's like we don't think of death as an end. You know, death is like this is just a human concept. Something people who believe in materialism believe. We know that death is not an end. And then he pointed out the Urdu word, which is the language from Pakistan, for death, which is enthicle. And then the call actually means transition. It doesn't mean end. It doesn't mean death as we know it. So he said, even the word for death and the call means transition, means you're moving onto another world. And then he went into more detail. These kids, if kids have had the chance to sin, there's a higher chance of them going to hell. But if they're young and innocent, then they're immediately going to go to heaven. So we don't think of, we don't think that we're killing these kids and we're ending their lives. We think that we're actually sending them to a place where they're going to be protected from their evil, infantile parents.

And they're not a ghost. And then he said that If, you know, I'm trying to remember all of it because there was some really important elements of, you know, what he said that gives us insight into how they think. Yeah, and then he said the reason that we blow ourselves up is like, you know, we're killing ourselves. If death was such a bad thing, we wouldn't do it ourselves. But we know where we're going and we know where we're taking the kids as well. So we just don't think of it in the way that you do. And most Muslims, you know, and he was talking about all the Muslims condemning it. And he's like, most Muslims, their faith is in this pure. really believed that there was a heaven, they were doing the right thing, they were going to get there. They wouldn't be mourning this, they would be celebrating it. But they are of poor faith, you know, where of the right faith. And I was, you know, when you, so that's the mindset that you're going up against, and how do you fight it?

It's different from what you were saying about the drones.

No, it was absolutely amazing. But it's important to, I think you know, I was watching this movie and I, you know, was it a TV show and someone said something? Well, they said that moment you demonize your enemy or the moment you call your enemy the devil. you're not going to be able to understand them, you know, the moment you've decided that they're the other, and that's just pure evil. You'll never understand their motivation for why they do what they do. And I think it's important, like that was a very eye-opening conversation for me. I'm sure.

No, no, that was the thing. I've heard that before. People have told me that, for instance, I was a kid. I was raised religiously. You know, that, you know, it's not permanent, you know, life is just temporary and see after life. But I don't think anybody really, like truly, truly believes that that's it and that's why this life is useless. People still get upset when their loved ones die and, you know, they still fear death. They don't want to die already. If they really, really thought that they were going to some place great afterwards, it wouldn't be that much of a fear of any of us. Imagine, like if you, if you thought, okay, my death is a fucking ticket, to eternal bliss. Then it's not something that would scare you if you really, really knew that. These people really know that. And they're all too willing to kill themselves and kill others.

What is there's a sensitivity to hurting people and hurting their feelings? Overmoter? Overmoter. Yeah. I think that they think they'll always say that I'm not defending the murders that was horrific, I condemn it, but and there's always a button and then there's this whole sort of justification for it. This is a sensitive thing for me because I am, like, I'm a free speech absolutist. Like, I just, when I grew up, there's a lot of things I couldn't say. You know, I have a friend who is being, who's in jail for 10 years and he's being, you know, he's been sentenced to lashing. And for doing exactly what I do here. You know, so when I look at it, like, him and I both grew up in Saudi Arabia, we're both writers. We're both pro-sacularism. But when I, when I say something, I can say it. And there's no theater, it's fine. And when he does it, he gets lashed and tortured. So the free speech is a big thing for me. So coming here, I just don't think when it comes to the cartoons or the movie, the interview, people were saying, well, it's a shitty movie. And I didn't think I thought it was hilarious. But when they start talking about the content of what is being criticized or attacked, I just think it's completely irrelevant. And the context of what's happening Like it doesn't matter what was in the Charlie Hebdo.

Well, that's one of the Islamophobia, phobia comes in.

Yeah. It's, you know, it is what it is.

Yeah, people are more upset about it's not. There's this value, the value of freedom of speech, okay, which I think is extremely important.

Oh, yeah, very taken for granted. That's something that I, in a festival, a guy from Iraq, I told you about it. He, he, he says the same thing, you know, when he came here, he's like in a lot of people are sort of apologists about it because There's a freedom of speech and then there is this sort of political correctness and not to offend anybody. And people will say one thing I've been hearing a lot is Freedom of speech doesn't mean the freedom to offend. That's exactly what it means. There's no point of freedom of speech.

Yeah, everybody said that the fact that you can have this conversation about what freedom of speech means is that's what freedom of speech is. And if the whole reason it's protected so strongly is because of the, it means the right that all of us have to offend other people.

It's a very weird. Like you know, we have, we have the right, they have the right to be offended. They don't have the right not to be offended. You know, that's the idea. You know, nobody has a right not to be offended. If you don't like something, you don't have to listen to it.

Or counter speech with speech.

You know, we also talked about hate speech because I think one of the biggest problems with France and Europe is a lot of European countries is that they have laws against hate speech. And the U.S. you have laws against hate crimes, but hate speech is protected as part of free speech. And I think that's right. You know, like the Westboro Baptist Church really, where the Supreme Court voted eight to want to allow them to pick a few news. And as much as you, that idea is a warrant, or anything of the Westboro Baptist Church does is a warrant. That is a right, and they should be able to do it as long as it's not a crime, and it's his speech. But, you know, they have, in France, they've got Holocaust denial laws, they have rules against, you know, attacking, you know, like the, we put it this way, the very same things, same rules that their hate speech laws were actually used by the government at times, the Warren Charlie Hebdo. Like, you know, what you're doing is you're eating hate speech. So the same hate speech laws that actually protected the killers. right protected their right to express themselves and to say okay do everything from subjugate women to you know impingion gay rights for instance like all of those same things the same hate speech laws were used to warn the charlie up to people I mean they had that that fashion designer who was arrested for anti-semitic remarks that he made in a bar right yeah so if you have hate speech laws if you have things like that then that causes a lot of issues. It doesn't work very well for people who are making the cartoons like Charlie Hebdo and actually ends up protecting their attackers and their ideology.

Yeah Yeah, I agree with that.

Yes, the merit of the content has nothing to do with it. It shouldn't even be an issue. Yeah, so I don't even know why it was an issue. And I've, you know, there's this idea that it's posing, you know, we said that the cartoons were hate speech. And they were criticizing an ideology that a lot of people found out of the belief that a lot of people were very sensitive about or like a historical public figure who's been dead for a long time. People are sensitive about it. So supposing you have that, again, you know, sort of even the competition there. You know, pull out the, they used to lampoon religions, all the religions. So it wasn't just Islam. So you know, pull out the Bible, pull out the crown, open it up to certain things. And you know, there's more hate speech in those books than there could ever be in the Charity of Duck Artunes. Like, if you're talking about incitement to violence, killing infidelity's apostate, you know, go to Deuteronomy. And if you go to Deuteronomy 20, and you read it, reads like an ISIS rule book. It says, it says, you know, go into the land, you know, take the, put the sword to all of the men, you can take the women and the children as slaves. I mean, that's exactly what it says. and then in the Quran, 47-3, it's the exact same thing.

Yeah, they did do it for a long time.

Yeah, so it was during that time that they did do it. And there is a response a lot of times when you talk about Islam when you criticize Islam, as I will Christianity had its dark ages too, several centuries ago, I'm like, yeah, and how would you react when that was happening then? That's the same way you have to approach what's happening now with Islam, because they're going through the same thing. The books are really not that different. Like the New Testament's a little nicer, like the New Testament that all the torture begins after you die. It's like the Old Testament's only during your life, or the Quran, it's a bit of both.

It's secularism, separating religion and state. So the good thing about secularism is that it allows freedom of religion. It's the only system that allows every religion to really openly but the complete religious freedom to everybody. But at the same time, it separates that from politics. So it allows the system of coexistence. And I kind of, I always think that there's several steps to enlightenment. I mean, for me enlightenment would be, if nobody had any religious beliefs at all, everybody was just kind of operating rationally, that would be very nice, hasn't happened anywhere yet. But I would say that you'd have a reformation, and after the reformation, that would get you to secularism, where you separate religion and state. And then you move to a point where, you know, people can actually have that conversation and they can, you know, reject irrational beliefs entirely. But the step before reformation, in order to have a reformation, you have to, especially in the Muslim world, you have to reject the idea of scriptural and currency. You know, you have to stop taking the Quran literally, not just justifying the stuff that's in there, just saying, okay, you know, there's this in here. We don't believe that anymore. Um, and stop thinking that it's the literal word of God, which is a very tough thing to do. But, um, well, it's very tough.

Let's see that's when you when you say all of that stuff and you don't and And when we're talking about Mormonism and Scientology earlier, I mean, this stuff sounds so much more insane than Mormonism and Scientology.

This is really, I mean, this is, but this stuff is just as, it's all bloody.

undeniable fact they work and that it's also the process I mean that the what's at the heart of religion is infallibility like the idea that you know this you know this can't change that's immutable so you have infallibility on the other hand with science the heart of scientific you know inquiry is falsifiability which means, you know, it's just a whole idea that you start with the assumption that, okay, this could be wrong. How do I prove that it's right? Right. You know, and with faith, it's different. You start with the conclusion. You're like, it's my conclusion. I don't need evidence for it. And I'm going to work backwards and see what I can do to strengthen my belief. It's to completely different dynamics.

Yes, just in the basics, when you look at the basics, the way that they work.

back when they thought the world was flat and the sun was 17 miles away like that's what you need to abide by because otherwise you're you're gonna fuck up our party yeah this and it kind of brings you back to the whole community thing that I think a lot of people they want that identification and they want that sense of identity yeah and you know group identity that religion gives them they want they need it so much that that's why they take um... just attacks on their ideology personally

There were people that cheered all the time. Like, in where I grew up, people used to celebrate it all the time. I mean, you know, like, educated people. They wouldn't say it to, like, within our own living room, we were sitting there, you know, educated uncles and aunts who had, you know, been overseas and they'd studied overseas, they came back, you know, when something like 9-11, what happened? Or, you know, you kind of attack against America, what happened even with civilians, you know, be completely supportive of it. But, you know, when they'd go out and they'd talk to their, uh, white friends, we wouldn't be like, you know, yeah, this is terrible. We condemn it. Why? There are, there are root causes for it. We should understand what their legitimate grievances are and why they did it, but that doesn't justify the murder.

Well, they certainly not particularly in my house, but Extended family, family friends, I mean, just on a daily basis, we've surrounded by it. I mean, when the Selma understeer came down, you know, a lot of my extended family, a lot of my friends, you know, teachers at school and everything they all supported it. Wow.

Yeah, I was never, I've never been able to read it. Like I like some honesty and I've read some of his stuff, but satanic verses just couldn't. It's just really dense and I can't, no, can't. It's not interesting. I just, yeah, yeah. It takes a lot of focus I think to really get through it, you need to sit down and really.

So it is kind of, it is about Muhammad's life. Sort of a satanic verse is where, because the way the Quran was supposedly revealed was that Muhammad got these revelations from above. And at one point, he got these revelations that said that idolatry, certain elements of idolatry are okay. And there's like these three idol gods. And okay, fine, we can respect that, or people that follow them, but they're okay. And then later on, he's like, no, no, that was Satan talking to me. He wasn't God. So those were the satanic verses. So they didn't end up being part of the Quran. And that's where some owners got the idea. So it was based on an actual documented piece of Islamic history. And he did change the name of Muhammad and he had a lot of similar elements with symbolic of his life.

Yeah, I mean, he knew that it was a satire, like, you know, like, animal farm, just, you know, use animals to represent like real people. Right. So he did this. He had fictional characters, you know, sort of different time settings.

I don't know if he thought it would be OK. I knew, I mean, I think that he knew that there would be some backlash. I didn't think at that time. I'm not sure if he really thought that he would have to go on driving for probably wouldn't have been wrote it.

I don't know if he travels with arm security. I mean, I don't know him personally, but he does tend to do all the talk shows and everything. I mean, he was really underhiding those first like 10 years. And this is where the spread the risk comes in. I think there's so many people talking about this stuff now that We're not in the rusty days anymore. There's a lot of people who are talking about a writing about it. It's all online. So that process has started. So in that way, a little bit optimistic. In the fact that some honesty can really show up at talk shows, shows you see him everywhere. He does public speeches, he does debates.

Yeah, I don't know, not sure.

Well, you know, I yarn herceally. She does travel with Arnold.

Does she? Yeah, that's pretty well known. So she still does. And it's it's actually tougher for women who decide to change their mind about Islam because, you know, like with my girlfriend, she's also like a secular activist. Whenever anybody wants to send me hate mail or hate messages, they'll always argue with me. They'll be like in your bullshit, everything you're saying, it sucks. As you're going to go to hell or you should get your head chopped off, whatever it is. The same thing's like that. But with her, it's always a sexual thing. The threats that she gets are rape threats, rape threats, you know all kinds of things that they would do. Yeah, and she'll get hundreds of them. There's a lot of hundreds. Yeah, hundreds.

Yeah, we save them and we do. I mean, the hundreds actually happened in one incident. There's a politician in Pakistan who she knows personally and who has been sort of a very vocal in his opposition to the Taliban. And she just said that she supports him. right and just because of that and because he is under a lot of threat targets and then she had some argument with some of the people who opposed him and then the rape threats started coming in and so at that point you know we would report it So we will report things like that. I can't talk too much about what happened. But most of the time they come from like overseas, some kids sitting in villages and, you know, with a laptop or a cell phone and sending threats. So, but, you know, there's always a chance that one or two of them are real and this is obviously a real issue. but it is just generally it's a lot worse for women than this for men because there's this idea especially among conservative cultures and a lot of the Muslim culture is that if a man decides not to follow religion you know that's a separate thing but if a woman decides not to follow religion she's lost all morality So she'll do anything. She'll drink, she'll have sex, she'll crazy bitch.

That's how they measure morality. Like, there is a lot of, a lot of the people who kill people and they behead people and stuff. They're really upset. Like, when they talk about morality, like, lapsed Western morality. They talk about, chicks and mini skirts and drinks sex. Yeah, things like that.

Well, but they don't think of the murder and the martyrdom and all of those things are virtuous. They actually think that those things are good.

And a lot of times, they think that they have the updated software. We have the most recent religion, you know, like Islam came after Christianity, you came after, and that we had this great civilization. And which they did at one point. And why are we in such a bad shape?

We should look into it. There is precedent for this. We're talking about the holy books. The holy books are very similar. A lot of the stuff is. The Old Testament actually mentions stoning short old brides. The crown doesn't even mention it. It's in the Hadith, which is a separate sort of like a lesser source of guidance in Islam. And so there's many things that are in all of the scriptures that are pretty important. But how is it that Jews and Christians were able to move past it? I mean, they had their dark ages too. They did some really fucked up shit at one point. But they moved past it and they're here now. What did they answer to that? I think this is one of the things I'm exploring in my book. With Jews and with Christians, they were able to have a genuine reformation where they're able to bond and come together on a sense of community rather than ideology. If you're Jewish, you can be an atheist Jew, you can be an agnostic Jew, you can be a secular Jew, you can be an orthodox Jew, but nobody's ever going to say, okay, you're not a Jew anymore. Because you did this, you'd bake in or whatever. With Christians, again, we were talking about the Catholics, right? A lot of them pro-choice, they'll do that. They'll still end up going to church. But you can't be an atheist Christian. You technically can't be an atheist Christian.

No, it's a very bad word. I mean, they actually think of atheists as worse than rapists. I think I was reading that. that a survey on how many who you despise most. And if you actually think atheists are worse than rapists. So you have, but at the same time, you don't get murders. You don't get murdered. And you don't even get excommunicated from the community as you use condoms. Like no one's going to say, OK, you use birth control. So you're not a Catholic anymore. But with Islam, it's still, a lot of Muslims are still in that. You can sit 10 people down. One of them is going to say, music's a sin. Another one's going to say, you got to cover your head. And you'll have all these different viewpoints. And there's going to be fragmentation based on that. But if they are able to come around, if they're able to focus instead of the ideology, focus on the community. We were saying that the identity of going to church, having their own family and friends, and that sort of communal atmosphere that

Yeah. And it wasn't really, again, this is where we make that distinction between Islam, the religion and the Muslims followed it. And a lot of this was done by the metasolites, which is very sort of open-minded, very progressive sect of Muslims. And there's a lot of those things happened not because of Islam but despite it. Even back then. Yeah, even back then. It's always been like that. I mean, Newton was a religious Christian. because he had the time.

It wasn't really weird. Yeah, he was a virgin. He didn't. That's not there was no evolution. Nobody knew about evolution. It was pre-darwin. So there's a lot of things he didn't know. If he had known, he may not have been. We can't speculate on that. I mean, he was a religious Christian, but we don't identify his achievements. as Christian achievements. You know, we don't identify like Albert Einstein's achievements as something as Jewel, and he wasn't even Albert Einstein, it wasn't even religious. So with this, the fact that there were Muslims in a certain part of the world that were engaging in a lot of scientific inquiry and they were really moving forward and they were being progressive and they're making new discoveries. You know, this is something that is more of a, it's a more of a testament to science and to free thinking than it is to the religion itself. They just have to be Muslims.

Yeah, a lot of them, they were.

Yeah, I think what we do is we sometimes look at it the other way around. When you had all that scientific progress happening in the sort of the golden age of Muslims, then that was happening again, like it was happening despite the fact that it was Islam. Now when you have all the terrorism, all these things happening, there's a direct relationship between words and the scripture and what they're doing. So what we do is now we say, okay, just because they're Muslims, they just happen to be Muslims, that's why they're doing it. But at that time, we actually attributed to Islam when it's really the other way around. Right? That makes sense. Like, there's, there isn't anything in the Quran that, I mean, the Quran says strange things just like any other holy scripture in surah 86, right? Reverse is five to seven. It says that Man was created from a fluid ejected between the backbone and the ribs. So, such that it's saying that seam inner sperm was created in the chest. Yeah, this is like a backbone in the ribs. The backbone in the ribs. It's like the belly, right? It could be like this, this rib. Yeah, I mean, you can broaden it and you can try to judge it.

I think it's just a test easement.

It's like, yeah, it's like saying Chicago's in the Western Hemisphere. Yeah, but you miss the Western Hemisphere because this is really, you know, there's absolutely no scientific basis to that. What's our right flat out wrong. But, you know, they So it doesn't have it even said that the Quran doesn't necessarily, it's not conducive to, you know, robust scientific inquiry.

Right. But it is, unfortunately, linked, like, you know, the words of the Quran and the scripture, it is linked to a lot of the violence that you see, a lot of the subjugation of women that you see. And that connection There's something that should be acknowledged.

There you go.

But it's just that on that show, like the fact that that happened, it was such outrage everywhere. Like I just noticed that when someone says something like that or if there's a coronavirus or a cartoon strong, this is like a lot of outrage. It just not the kind of thing you see when people burn people to live. Yeah. Then you get hashtags and when Boko Haram, like, you know you're Boko Haram, killing 2,000 people, kidnapping all those school girls. You get hashtags and things. You don't get the kind of outcry that you get over cartoons.

You know, like, Darfur. Yeah. It's like 500,000 people killed by an Arab, the Johnjoyed militia.

Yeah, we could.

I'm still working on it right now. We're in the middle of sort of negotiating, like talking to publishers. So it's still happening. There's more interest in it than I thought there would be. So it's a good thing. So I'm actually, I'm looking forward to it. I think the timeline is probably I would say about a year. That's like my personal goal.

Twitter address is Ali Umjad Rizvi. It's ALI AMJADRIZVI.

Website, you can just Google it and I've got Huffington Post Archive. So it's just HuffingtonPulse.com slash Ali HuffingtonA, HuffingtonRizvi.

I've got to have a diagnosis before you get into management. The diagnosis is not the fun part.