Making Sense with Sam Harris - #59 — Friend & Foe

Episode Date: January 5, 2017

Sam Harris speaks with Maajid Nawaz about the Southern Poverty Law Center, Robert Spencer, Keith Ellison, moderate Muslims, Shadi Hamid’s notion of “Islamic exceptionalism," the migrant crisis in Europe, foreign interventions, Trump, Putin, Obama’s legacy, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming one. Today's guest is Majid Nawaz. Majid is well known to many of you. We wrote Islam and the Future of Tolerance together. He is a friend and now regular collaborator. There's a film coming out by the same title based on that book, and it's based on a lecture tour we did together in Australia at the beginning of 2016. In any case, Majid is someone who I am proud to call a friend, whose work I deeply support. And once he gets talking, you will

understand why. So without further ado, I bring you Majid Nawaz. So without further ado, I bring you Majid Nawaz. I am here with Majid Nawaz. Majid, thanks for coming on the podcast. A pleasure. Thanks for having me again. Bringing listeners up to speed. Most will know this, but you and I have collaborated in now a variety of ways. We wrote a book together, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, Now, a variety of ways. We wrote a book together, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, and there will be a movie based on that book coming out next year. I believe it's also called Islam and the Future of Tolerance. So I hear. We'll see how that goes. But it's really been an immense source of gratification for me to collaborate with you, given how fraught our

initial meeting was. And this is something we describe in the book and have described on a previous podcast. But relevant to our conversation today, we'll be talking about some of the people who despise us. We both have people who despise us, but a subset of each of those groups are the people who despise each of us for collaborating with the other. That's a weird thing to keep running into. But in any case, there's a lot to talk about here. And in no particular order, I'll read you the topics I have gathered since I knew we were going to meet in this way, and then we can take it as we see fit. There was a Southern Poverty Law Center debacle where they grouped you and Ayaan along with others as anti-Muslim extremists. We

will want to hit that. There is Syria and the rather obvious failures of Obama's foreign policy. There's the related migrant crisis and the knock-on effects, Brexit being one, Trump being arguably another. There's Putin. There's the phenomenon of fake news and the hacking of the election. There is ISIS. There's the assassination of the Turkish ambassador. There's the atrocity in Germany at the Christmas market last week. My exchange is with Robert Spencer and Shadi Hamid that I know you'll want to comment on. A bunch of other things on this list, actually. So let's get into it. I guess the first place to start for me, let's deal with the Southern Poverty Law Center

issue, because that really was just a crime against reason and common decency that we need to get into. Actually, this is a similar problem here. There's this general problem of people not being able to figure out who anyone is, right? Just basic moral confusion about who the good guys are and who the bad guys are, and if they're bad guys, how bad are they? How bad are they compared to the next bad guy? And there's a lot of confusion here that we should try to clear up. So... Yeah, the Prophet Muhammad would tell you that's a sign of the Day of Judgment. Let's hope not, for a variety of reasons.

A messy preamble, but once again, welcome, Majid, and say whatever you want, but let's zero in on what the Southern Poverty Law Center did to you first. Yes. Well, you know, that was a debacle is the word you used, I think, but it was certainly deeply, deeply disappointing to receive that news. And look, you know, at the end of the day, it doesn't affect my reputation insofar as my name and work is relatively well known. And so if it did affect my reputation, it's a bit like, you know, it's going to deflect. You have the Wall Street Journal writing an editorial decrying this decision to list myself and Ayaan by name in particular as anti-Muslim extremists.

But then you had a whole bunch of other UK-based outlets, internet and online-based outlets, and people at the UN. Karima Badoun, who's the head of the UN's cultural rights, Harima Badoun, who's the head of the UN's cultural rights special representative for cultural and religious rights at the UN, basically tweeting against the Southern Poverty Law Center and declaring their decision as against my cultural rights to be self-critical of my own culture. And so I don't think in the long run it's going to affect my reputation. Here's what I really worry about with this decision. Two things. First of all, it is a clear and present target on our heads. That's number one. So even if my reputation isn't affected among the middle of the line Muslims who are still, you know, trying to work out where they stand on the question of Islamism versus conservative Islam versus liberal reforming Muslims, even if it doesn't affect my reputation among them,

those hardened extremists don't need any excuses but relish opportunities to target those who are critical of them. And here is another opportunity. What I wrote in my immediate response on The Daily Beast to this decision is that lists are for fascists. The only people that use lists in this climate are, for example, you and I, I think, have spoken before about this, the lists that were produced to target atheists in Bangladesh, where they were then picked off one by one. That was a list. And so many of them have been killed by extremists since that list was published against atheists. The list that was put into the body of Thierry Van Gogh, naming Ayan as the next person that they were going to target. That's what lists do in this day and age. And the left criticizes McCarthyism. And I just find it astonishing

that as critical as the left rightly is of McCarthyism, that it finds it somehow justifiable for it to adopt the same tactics against what it deems as its enemies. So that's reason number one. I think lists lead to killing people off of the lists once they are compiled. The second reason is a long-term reason, and it's not my reputation. It's the reputation of those who are the next Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the next Ali Rizvi, the next people who are coming up who want to be critical of their own culture, their own heritage, and be a bit more introspective about these challenges that we face. And the danger is this puts them off. The danger is that they come to the conclusion that the opportunity cost associated with this work is

too high. And so those next voices don't come to the fore. One of the reasons it's so important for me to stay alive, apart from the fact that I want to stay alive, is that by staying alive and by remaining a highly visible figure speaking out in this way, I'm able to show by my mere existence practically to the up and coming generation that you can do this and that in doing so you can be successful, you can attract supporters around you, and you can defy these people who would rather torture and behead those who disagree with them merely by existing. But if that next generation comes to the conclusion that the opportunity costs associated with that is too high, then it can be off-putting. And let's keep in mind, this is not hyperbole. I'm talking about a climate in which Malala Yousafzai was shot in the head for speaking in this way. I'm talking about a

climate in which those atheist bloggers in Bangladesh have been picked off a list. 84 atheist bloggers in 2013 were named on a list. By the end of 2016, 10 of them had been assassinated by jihadist terrorists. You know, this is the climate we're talking about. So when Hope Not Hate in the United Kingdom, which preceded the Southern Poverty Law Center, it's their equivalent in the UK. When they compiled a similar list that included a Danish author, journalist and Islam critic Lars Hedegaard, he was later subjected to assassination attempt. And so Southern Poverty Law Center and Hope Not Hate, they should be ashamed of themselves. And I hope and I believe that history will judge them as shamefully as

it judges Senator McCarthy. Yeah, well, let's remind people what the Southern Poverty Law Center is because its name really is kind of opaque. It's a civil rights legal firm, essentially, that has specialized since the early 70s in suing white, racist, Aryan nationalist groups in the United States. So they're the ones who sued the KKK and other groups nearly out of existence. And it's quite a painful irony, given the recent rise of white racism and identity politics and nationalism during the most recent presidential election in the States, that the Law Center has just torched its moral compass and reputation here with this judgment

on you and Ayaan and perhaps others on that list as anti-Muslim extremists. It's completely insane, obviously, with respect to you and Ayaan, especially with respect to you, because Ayaan, for all her obvious virtues in the world, you could at least argue that she is anti-Islam in some basic sense because she's an apostate and she's spoken out very clearly against Islam in totality in the way that I have. But you are still a Muslim talking to the Muslim community as a Muslim. And to paint you as an anti-Muslim extremist, someone is guilty of being, at best, utterly confused over there. But what's amazing is that when their attention has been called to this problem, they've just doubled down. That's the spirit of the time now. When someone points

out an error that you've made, however grievous, you tell them to go fuck themselves and double down. And that's what this person, Mark Potok, at the Southern Poverty Law Center, the author of this list has done, apparently, according to an Atlantic article. It's shameful because we need an organization like this to keep watch on the real racists and militia nutcases in the U.S. And they, for decades now, have been a resource for journalists to go to and say, is this person crazy and dangerous? And they say, yes, that person's crazy and dangerous. And the story gets published. And it's really astonishing that they did this in the first place and that they have not issued an appropriate mea culpa. Well, Sam, I'll tell

your listeners, I'm very, very tempted to set up a crowdsource funding to sue them, to do exactly to them what they did to the KKK. It is inexcusable to put people on a hit list in this way. We've just recounted the number of people that have been killed through such hit lists because they've been deemed anti-Muslim, and they've included atheists. Ayaan is no different to those 10 or so, roughly could be more than 10 by now, atheists who were killed in Bangladesh for exactly the same reason, after being designated in exactly the same way. And so I'm really tempted to sue them and do to them exactly what they did to the KKK. I don't see this tactic as any different to McCarthyism.

It is as fascist, it is as disgusting. And I genuinely believe history will look back at these people and see that they became the very monster, the very beast that they sought to defeat in the way that I became an Islamist when I faced neo-Nazi racism growing up. And I don't think they're going to back down. They've had ample time to do it. And the only thing that's stopping me is that unlike in the UK, where libel laws are a lot stricter, here it's very expensive, very costly and very difficult. But I'm really seriously tempted to do it just to teach them a lesson. They can't get away with this. But anyway, let's see what happens with that. Yeah. Needless to say, you'll have the support of many people if you decide to do that. But again, that is, you talk about opportunity costs, that's a cost,

forget the money aside, it's a cost in time and attention on your side, and it's all the more galling in that respect. perhaps the most famous white supremacist in the United States. Robert is quite a valuable critic of Islam. He runs a website called Jihad Watch. And he and I have never met or spoken publicly, but we've managed to figure out how to skirmish a little bit nonetheless. And this speaks to the larger problem of not being able to figure out who anyone is or how sullied anyone should be by association. And this is a problem that you and I both have ourselves. You wound up on that list, as did Robert, and Robert, I'm sure, feels it's no more justified in his case than it is in yours or Ayan's. He's associated with people like Pamela Geller, and I don't know how much daylight there is between Robert and Pamela. And I've spoken about this on

the podcast before. I don't know how much anyone deserves their reputation for Islamophobia or bigotry or anything else that's unsavory in this area. At one point on my podcast, I spoke about this problem quite transparently and I spoke about it with respect to Robert. I said, listen, you know, I see that Robert has been stigmatized in this way. I have been stigmatized in this way. I know I don't deserve it. I don't presume to know whether Robert deserves it

in his case, but I see the cost in this. I see the reputational cost for someone like Robert, because I have to think long and hard whether I want to have anything to do with him. And I know people are doing that to me based on what's happened to my reputation at the hands of people like Glenn Greenwald and all the usual suspects. It is like toxic waste. It just spreads around and it's very difficult to clean up and no one has enough time or attention to figure out what the hell's going on. And you just have to pick your battles. And so I said this, this really pissed Robert off. And he's attacked me for, you know, for not having him on the

podcast, for not engaging him. He's attacked me for my collaboration with you. He doesn't trust you. No surprise there. So it's a mess. And I'm reasonably convinced that there's a fair amount of confusion operating even here locally with Robert and yourself. So for instance, before you answer, I would guess that you think there's probably significant daylight between me and Robert, and you think Robert probably is a bigot, or at least deserves some of his reputation for being a bigot. I'm guessing that. And he thinks you're, if not a stealth Islamist, someone who I really shouldn't trust as much as I do. And that's where we are. I am prepared to believe that both of you are significantly confused about the other.

I know Robert is confused about you. I suspect you're returning the favor in this case. And I say that just based on what I've heard Robert say publicly and never having engaged him personally. So in any case, I tee that up for you. What's your view of the Robert Spencer situation? Let me make this absolutely clear from the outset. I don't think Robert, Pam Geller, or anyone belongs on that list because in principle, I oppose lists. So to begin

with, it's not that I think that Ayaan and myself shouldn't be on the list and the others deserve it. I oppose lists in principle. And in fact, a good few months before the Southern Poverty Law Center's list, I wrote an article in my regular Daily Beast column decrying the hope not hate list. And I did so even though I wasn't named on that list. Whereas Zuhdi Jassar, who's an American Republican Muslim reformer, was named on the list, as were a few other Muslims and many non-Muslims. So the UK version of the SPLC, the Southern Poverty Law Center, did put out a list. I wasn't on it, and I wrote an entire column against it because I oppose lists in principle.

And so for that reason, I don't think Robert nor Pam Geller deserve to be on the list. I also don't think Robert Spencer is a racist. I want to make that very clear. There is a huge confusion in this conversation around Islam isn't a race, and Muslims are not a race. It's easy when your listeners think of Christianity to understand that. Just as Christianity is not a race and Christians aren't a race, to be critical of Christianity isn't racism. Even to be critical of Christians isn't racism. It may verge sometimes onto bigotry if somebody were to, for example, want to create exceptional models of treatment just for Christians. But that certainly isn't racism. It may be anti-Christian bigotry, but it isn't racism. And so let's park racism out of this conversation, because it really

doesn't belong here, and it's incredibly unhelpful when racism gets confused with a conversation around Islam and or Muslims. Except the obvious problem, though, is that there are actual racists who say negative things about Islam, and one can at least imagine that they're in part motivated by their racism. If Richard Spencer said something about Muslims, yeah, I would rightly suspect his motivation behind saying it is racism, even if what he's not saying is racist. And that's the difference between Robert Spencer and Richard Spencer. Richard Spencer being the founder of the Alt-Right blog, who is a white supremacist. Robert Spencer sharing very little with him apart from his name, his family name.

So I think if Richard Spencer said something like Islam is the motherlode of bad ideas, to quote a famous neuroscientist, I would suspect the motivation for why Richard Spencer is saying it is racism. And he's using an argument that doesn't sound racist because he wants to present himself in a sterilized form when really his motivation is racism. Whereas if the famous neuroscientist said that, I have no doubt in my mind or heart his motivation is racism. Whereas if the famous neuroscientist said that, I have no doubt in my mind or heart, his motivation is not racism, right? And so that's the difference. And in fact, Muslims will understand this. Any Muslim listening knows

this. It's entrenched within our history that you can say the right thing for the wrong reasons. When the Khawarij, which was the first terrorist sect that emerged in Islam, and they killed some of the companions of the Prophet Muhammad, when they went up to one of the companions, whose name was Ibn Abbas, and they said to him exactly what ISIS says today. They said,

There is no law but God's law. It's the ISIS slogan, right? And they were killing the disciples of the Prophet Muhammad using the very same slogan that ISIS uses today. And the companion of the Prophet said to them in response, he said, the word of truth, obviously he'd say that because he's a companion of the Prophet. So I'm not saying here that it is true that God's law must reign, right? I'm just giving you a historical example here. He said, kalimat al-haqq urida bihal batil, the word of truth used for unjust ends, right?

And so it's very important to be able to isolate people's racist motivations from something they may be saying which isn't racist. But that isolation isn't done by speculation. What I'm not saying is let's open up the doors and let's all speculate on Sam Harris's, you know, in quotation marks, racist motivations for saying Islam is a mother of bad ideas, because actually it's done by evidence.

So Richard Spencer, we know it because he's on camera giving a Nazi salute. You know, we've got his writings where he tells us he wants a white ethnostate. So we know the guy is a white supremacist. So we have every reason, based on evidence, not to trust that his reasons for disliking Muslims are divorced from his reasons for not liking anyone who's not white. And that's clear. With Robert Spencer, not related apart from the last name, likewise, therefore, we mustn't confuse when he says things that sound like what somebody else that is racist may be saying.

That doesn't mean Robert Spencer's racist. And as I said at the outset, nor does it mean anyone deserves to be named on hit lists. If we don't like people, either we should name the organization or we should write columns about their opinions, not compile lists. So those are the two points I wanted to just put out there to start with. As for the man himself, you know, the way I look at these things is, I mean, he and I will, like with many people, probably disagree on lots of things. I mean, I disagree with him when he says that oaths of allegiance in the Congress should be allowed on any book, including any holy book, except for the Quran. You know, I think that's a discriminatory practice and

it's actually unconstitutional. And therefore, I wouldn't agree with him on that. I certainly wouldn't agree with him on his view that Bosnia should not be classified as a genocide. Despite the killings there, the classification, in his view, it shouldn't be designated as a genocide. I disagree with that. I don't think those disagreements, though they are vehement, I don't think those disagreements mean that I classify him as somehow a racist and certainly wouldn't put him on a list. As for how that would mean I go forward and treat somebody like this, I'm always somebody who leaves open the door for change. I engaged with Tommy Robinson. And though it didn't lead to Tommy necessarily

changing his individual views, and I never claimed it did, it did lead to Tommy leaving the EDL, which was Europe's largest populist anti-Muslim or anti-Islam street protest movement. And so it was a limited success. The EDL is not the same as it used to be, as it once was with Tommy at its head. And so engagement is always there as an option, but timing and time and how much someone's force fields are diminished by a previous collaboration are all relevant factors to how and when and who you engage with. At this moment in time, if you were to ask me my opinions to whether I'd be happy to engage and take on even more than what I've taken on by having this conversation with you, and you know the backlash on both sides that that created,

I just don't have the energy or the space at the moment. I don't have the bandwidth. I don't have the, let's say my force fields need some time to replenish before I engage on any other form. I did Tommy Robinson. It led to him leaving the EDL. Then I spoke with you. I'm not averse to speaking to people. And I think perhaps you've assumed that I'm more critical of somebody like Robert than I may well be. I'm perfectly, let's just say my understanding of the importance of dialogue outweighs my vehement disagreement on exactly those two areas, for example, that I mentioned. With anyone, I would speak to Islamists who hold views far worse than Robert does, with a view to hoping that dialogue in that sense leads them to

a more centrist liberal ground. I think the purpose of dialogue for me would always be to try and bring people to the classical liberal center. There's one last thing I'd like to say here, and that's to my fellow liberals and my fellow Muslims listening to this. And that is that we have to be proportionate in our condemnation. said, would disagree with Robert on this notion that any book can be used for an oath of allegiance when swearing somebody in on any official capacity in Congress or the Senate or anywhere, except the Quran. I vehemently disagree with that view. But it's not the same as saying that gay people should be executed in an ideal Islamic state.

It's not the same as a belief that somehow Jews are like pigs and monkeys. It's not the same as a belief that adulteresses or adulterers should be stoned to death, or that limbs should be chopped off for various crimes, or that apostates should be killed. And by the way, these beliefs aren't just fairy stories. They are beliefs that are backed up by force in states, not just ISIS. Let's keep that in mind. But Iran and Saudi Arabia and Pakistan, where apostates and blasphemy and homosexuality are punished. So it's not the same as being a fellow traveler for regimes that actually kill people for these

things. And so it's really important for my fellow liberals and Muslims to put our disagreements with somebody like Robert Spencer in proportion to the real bad world out there and what's actually going on. The people that are attempting really to destroy our civil liberties are those people that support those sorts of regimes, like Iran and Saudi Arabia, and other Islamist organizations that are non-governmental and definitely jihadist terrorist organizations that make it their business to hunt people like me down and kill me. I've got no doubt Robert Spencer is engaged in anything similar to that. So I want to seize on this issue of the swearing in on the Bible or the Koran because it connects to Keith Ellison, I believe, who Robert has been quite exercised about.

But first, I want to clean up a mess that I may have made. I now have echoing in my ear my own use of the word Islamophobia from several minutes ago. And I don't know that the scare quotes of derision were conveyed by my tone there, because I don't want to be one of these people who uses this term as though it were a legitimate one. I think this term has been consciously engineered to prevent us from talking honestly about Islam, Islamism, jihadism, etc. I just want our listeners to know that I have not caught the virus, or if I did, I've only had it for about five seconds. And I also don't want to have caricatured Robert in my effort to untangle my previous mentionings of him on the podcast.

I have no reason to believe Robert is a bigot and someone I couldn't have a perfectly reasonable conversation with. I simply don't know. And given how much I talk about this issue and how loath I am to keep talking about it, I, like you, feel as a matter of priority, a public engagement with Robert is probably not on the calendar anytime soon, but I don't mean to stigmatize him in the way we're talking about him. But the issue is, again, it comes back to points of confusion about who anyone is. And Robert is impressively confused about you, it seems to me. And one reason why he's confused is your recent endorsement of Keith Ellison to

head the DNC. And you might just say who Keith Ellison is and why you endorsed him. The only things I've ever said about Ellison are from five years ago, where I saw an interview he did on Real Time with Bill Maher, where he was obscurantist about the link between Islam and jihadism in a way that I've come to expect of obscurantists. And he said he didn't seem to say anything reasonable in that context. So I criticized him for that. But beyond that, I haven't paid much attention to who Keith Ellison is. But the fact that you endorsed him recently is one reason why Robert and his minions think I am insane, frankly, for having collaborated with you, because you are now propping up a straight-up Islamist in Ellison. Perfect segue, actually, Sam, to move on to Keith, because I've just said that I don't think

Robert's a bigot, but there are things I vehemently disagree with him on, but also that in principle, there's no boycott. You know, if I had the emotional and intellectual bandwidth and space, and my force fields were strong enough, and as I said, they've taken a bit of a battering recently, what with the SPLC ruling, and then having before that spoken to you and being battered for that, and before that, having dialogue with Tommy Robinson. Spell that out a little bit more. What you mean by force field, I assume, is your reputation as a Muslim among Muslims who you are trying to reach as a reformer. Yeah, yeah, the resilience, right?

So the ability to do things that are out of our own echo chamber, that are out of the box, that take a conversation to areas where previously Muslims hadn't been comfortable taking them, and then take the flak for that, absorb it, allow the dialogue to move on, to allow the conversation to enter new territories, and then take it to the next stage. I don't think we're anywhere near where we need to be at the moment. But it does take, it takes, you know, one takes a hit to their reputation for doing things that are unprecedented. And, you know, when I spoke to Tommy Robinson, as I said,

was the founder and the leader of the English Defense League, which was an anti-Islam populist street protest movement. When I spoke to him to help him leave the EDL, my reputation took a bit of a damage. People like the British version of Reza Aslan, Mehdi Hassan, have never forgiven me since then. And though my objective was very clear, it wasn't to change Tommy Robinson, and we never claimed Tommy's views had changed. It was to have him leave the EDL. And the dismantling, the subsequent dismantling of that organization is a good thing that we must bank. Whether Tommy as an individual changes his views is a secondary thing, which would also have been a good thing, but that we didn't even get the chance to do

because the attack was so strong after the first thing was achieved. And then, of course, I spoke to you and you know, I was called your porch monkey. I was called a native informant and the attacks, your listeners will be very well aware of what happened after my collaboration with you. And then, of course, the Southern Poverty Law Center listed me as an anti-Muslim extremist. So my, when I say force fields, my resilience, my ability to continue having these dialogues is conditional upon my reputation surviving within Muslim communities and within the left in particular as an honest interlocutor. If you want to change a community or communities, as I want to do, then your reputation among them

needs to at least, you know, on a scale of one to 10, be around four or five. Otherwise, there's no point, right? I'm not interested in winning philosophical or intellectual arguments, as though I am, as much as I am interested in bringing change to where I believe a large part of, not all of, but a large part of the problem resides and where I think I can be most useful. And so in that sense, it's just not possible nor plausible at the moment for me to engage in any form of rapprochement with somebody like Robert. And also sometimes, sometimes personality gets involved as well. I don't think that Robert's in the state of mind at the moment that you and I were when we spoke.

I don't think that he's in the frame of mind where the principle of charity will be employed in a conversation. But I think he's more like where you and I were when we first met. And I don't mean to sound patronizing when I say that. I genuinely, from what I hear and read that he's saying about me, it's going to take him a while to realize that what I'm about to say next about Keith Ellison is meant with the best of intents and the most honest of intentions. And that's going to take him, I think, a while just to see me continue the work I'm doing before he applies such a principle of charity to me. But this allows me to move on to Keith Ellison. So as I said, I'm not averse to actually engaging with anyone. And as I engage with Tommy Robinson,

and as I, in principle, wouldn't be averse to engaging with somebody. And as I engage with Tommy Robinson, and as I in principle wouldn't be averse to engaging with somebody like Robert Spencer, I likewise am not averse to engaging with somebody like Keith Ellison. And for me, there's no difference. Whether somebody disagrees with me and I disagree with them vehemently on the anti-Islam spectrum of things or on the too much Islam kind of Islamist spectrum of things, I see them as one and the same, that it's a spectrum of engagement. And my aim will be to bring everybody to what I believe is a classically liberal, human rights grounded, critical and skeptical center that is also muscularly liberal, though. The only thing we mustn't be skeptical about is our commitment

to pluralism, human rights and liberal values. It's the only thing that we are certain of, and that is that nothing is certain, and that people making truth claims are not true. And so my reasons for actually extending an olive branch to somebody like Keith Ellison are multifaceted. And the first one, I think, is clear. It's everything I've just said, that actually, because I've engaged with the anti-Islam, well, let's say anti-Islam speakers and activists. Now, for a while, I think it's probably about time to balance it out and to engage on the Islamist side again and on the Muslim side again. And so that's a pragmatic reason, reason number one. And it's that balance that deters the future SBLC from listing me again. So that's a pragmatic reason, reason number one. And it's that balance that deters the future SPLC from listing me again.

So that's reason number one. I'd say reason number two is a bit more political. I'll give you an analogy with the mayor of London, Sadiq Khan. He, very much like Keith Ellison, was a politician. Now, let's be fair to politicians. And so I'm going to caveat what I'm about to say. It's not that they are bad human beings, but all politicians are opportunistic. It's the nature of the game. And as I say, it's not to say they're bad human beings. The nature of politics is it forces you. That's the job description. You have to seek out an opportunity that you can capitalize and exploit for political gain. And that's how you maneuver, like a chess game. Politicians' lives are like a chess game. And so by definition, whether they want to be or not,

they have to be opportunistic. Otherwise, by definition, they wouldn't be politicians. And so like Keith Ellison, the now mayor of London, Sadiq Khan, was an opportunistic politician. Before being mayor, he was a low-ranking local member of parliament in an area called Tooting in London. And most of his support base, because he has a British Pakistani Muslim background, opportunistically, much of his support base to get elected came from the Muslim community. But if you're going to get elected from the Muslim community in this day and age, your opportunism is going to reflect where Muslims are when they are surveyed. And you and I have spoken about this in our book, in our collaboration. Where Muslims are when they are surveyed isn't exactly liberal in everything, right? In 100% of things. They may be when it comes to things like, whatever, immigration and racism, but they may not be when it comes to things like gay rights.

And so that's just the nature of being a politician who's relied up until now on that vote bank to build up a bit of a support base. Now, Sadiq Khan did that, and Keith Ellison did that. And what we're lacking on the Muslim, liberal, and even left side these days around the conversation around Islamism and Islam is strong leadership. Like Keith Ellison, the mayor of London used to be pretty much involved in sectarian Muslim politics before he became mayor. But he transformed, incredibly so by all accounts, both his enemies and his supporters. And by the way, I was somebody who was critical of him, the mayor of London, when he was a Tunisian MP. And he was critical of me. He's called me on

television. He's called the Quilliam people, quote, Uncle Tom's, for which he had to later apologize while running for office as mayor of London. He had to make a public apology for using that racial slur. And so when I now speak of him in the terms I'm about to, it's as somebody who was on the wrong side of the fence of this man. But by all accounts, including London's Jewish community, the mayor of London now is doing a stellar job. He's performing better than everyone expected as mayor of London. And there are some reasons for that.

And what it is, is when you take an opportunistic, pragmatic politician who is not an Islamist, but happens to be a Muslim, who happens to be religious, and you and I have spoken in our collaboration about the difference between traditional Muslims, who are perhaps conservative in their social values, even if they are liberal politically, and who are not Islamists. When you take a politician like that, a religious Muslim, who is politically liberal, but by being religious, it means that they are probably socially a bit conservative, and you thrust them into the mainstream, their opportunism remains consistent. What changes is the vote bank they begin appealing to. And so Sadiq Khan had to suddenly appeal to a far broader range of potential electors

than just the Muslim sectarian backing he used to enjoy as a member of parliament for Tuting. And I predicted that the same would happen with Keith Ellison, that suddenly when he realizes he's got to appeal to a far larger vote bank that is opportunistic Muslim politicking would give way, the opportunism would remain. And again, caveat that this isn't, I'm not using the word opportunistic here as a pejorative. And that he would have to appeal to a far broader vote bank. And I think the same thing that happened to Sadiq Khan would happen to Keith Ellison. Why is that important that that happens?

I think that's important because, as I said, what we are severely lacking on the left and among Muslims and among genuine liberals is leadership. And I think that the sorts of people that can lead are the sorts of people that need to be able to carry people with them. So we need to be able to identify somebody who's an opportunist, not in the pejorative sense, who is able to say to people, I came from where you came from, and then drag them to the classically liberal center that I want them to drag them to. Now, like Sadiq Khan, there are a few signs that Keith Ellison is able to do that. One of them is that both Sadiq Khan, who's now the mayor of London, and Keith Ellison, when faced with a choice on gay marriage equality laws,

despite their conservative Muslim backgrounds telling them that they should vote against this, both voted for it. An Islamist can't bring themselves to do that. An Islamist believes that that's the cardinal sin. That's known as shirk. That's changing God's law for man's law. That's the very thing that makes an Islamist is their fight that they're prepared to die for, that God's law takes primacy. And the minute you switch God's law for man's law, that's the difference between an Islamist and effectively the rest of the world. That's the very thing they've defined has the rest of the world. That's the very thing they've defined has gone wrong with the world.

An Islamist would never vote for gay marriage equality because as we elaborated upon in our collaboration, to an Islamist's mind, legislation and religious law are one and the same thing. Whereas to other Muslims who are the vast majority, legislation can be separated from God's law. So you can at once believe as a normal conservative Muslim, which I'm not, you can at once believe that homosexuality would be a sin for you while still voting for others to choose whether they

believe it's a sin for them and therefore giving them the freedom to choose that. And that would be somebody who's religiously conservative, yet politically liberal. That is a consistent stance for non-Islamist Muslims to take. And so voting on gay marriage equality is a kind of litmus test, as would be things like normal consensual sexual relationships outside of marriage. Voting on the legalization of that, would be a litmus test for whether somebody is an Islamist or a Muslim who's engaged in politics. Wouldn't it be rational to worry that a stealth Islamist would be able to pass those litmus tests in the interest of remaining essentially hidden? There's this concern that there are Islamists

who are trying to get into power and are willing to sacrifice their apparent Islamism, or that they're willing to make their Islamism so non-apparent to do that, that they might be able to vote for gay marriage, for instance. Let's understand another thing here, that jihadists believe in going deep undercover because they're at war.

So what matters for a jihadist isn't the proselytization, isn't convincing somebody of their ideological position. What matters, except obviously where they are in Muslim majority countries, where they're trying to recruit people. In the West, what matters for a jihadist is pretending they are more liberal than me. It's pretending that in fact they're debauched so that nobody suspects them. And yet when the time comes, they engage in an attack and the people are attacked from where they never expected it, from the guy that owns the strip club, for example. And so that's what matters for the jihadist, so that they are completely undetected. For the Islamist, it's the opposite. An Islamist doesn't believe that they are actively engaged in a

physical war with the West. They believe are actively engaged in a physical war with the West. They believe they're engaged in an ideological war. Those two things are very different. When you believe you're engaged in an ideological war, there are some principles that are non-negotiable. Otherwise, you've given up in the ideological war. So just to drill down on this, so you believe there is no third alternative, which is an Islamist who, by stealth, will get into a position of power along with, obviously, a sufficient number of other Islamists, and then turn the tables politically, essentially non-violence. So they're not jihadists. They're

not just waiting for a moment to strike. They're waiting for a moment to strike politically. An organization like CARE, for instance, strikes me this way at least some of the time, where they're often tipping their hand, they're saying semi-Islamist things, and so that's why I see in them a less than liberal organization. But I also at least imagine that I detect a fair amount of dissembling there, where they're not actually being candid about what their actual views are. They're not trying to win a war of ideas purely on the merits of their Islamism. They're trying to, they're playing a double game. They have a certain verbiage designed for export on CNN, and then they have the way they presumably talk behind closed doors. That's what worries me,

and I'm sure that's what worries Robert Spencer about a person like Keith Ellison, that he's actually more doctrinaire than you might be allowing for based on his, in this case, supporting gay marriage. Well, so there is that third option, and they do exist as well. We have, whether it's CARE or organizations in the UK, like the MAB, the Muslim Association of Britain, there are brotherhood-founded and backed organizations that seek what we call entryism. In fact, my critique of entryism in the British context is one of the reasons the SPLC, when they doubled down, listed me as an anti-Muslim extremist, because we've actually witnessed entire institutions, such as schools in Birmingham, being taken over by these entryists. And in the end, the national body that monitors education, known as Ofsted,

the Office for Standards in Education, had to intervene and sack the entire board of governors of a school and bar them from ever standing as school governors ever again. Because this whole entry, it was major front page news in the UK carried by the Times. And in that British context, I was talking about it, and the Southern Poverty Law Center decided that must mean I'm an anti-Muslim extremist, even though by the implication, the Office for Standards in Education in the UK is also anti-Muslim. Doesn't make sense. But there is that category. We have the borough of Tower Hamlets that was taken over, backed by the IFE, Islamic Forum Europe, and other Islamist groups based in Tower Hamlets. And the mayor of that borough had to be struck down by a judge in court and barred

from ever standing from office again, using a law that had been originally devised in an ancient law that was devised to resist Catholicism during the times of the Reformation. It was a law that had been originally devised in an ancient law that was devised to resist Catholicism during the times of the Reformation. It was a law called undue spiritual influence. And the judge had to resurrect this law to kick out an elected mayor in the borough of Tower Hamlets so that he didn't, because he would say, he said he was coming under the undue spiritual influence of Muslims and Muslim groups. So that's, you know, and I've written about these things in my columns. I do not think Keith Ellison is one of those. And I know the man and I know an Islamist.

I can smell an Islamist from a mile away. I used to be one myself and I went to prison for being one. I can assure you that Keith Ellison is not an Islamist. There may be in this, in fact, just as strongly, I can assure you there probably certainly is a blind spot that he has towards people like that. Everyone has cultural blind spots. I'd suggest that somebody like Robert Spencer has a cultural blind spot to people who are convincing him not to classify Bosnia as a genocide. You know, everyone has these blind spots because they're more worried about some things than the other. So they don't dedicate as much thought to those other things.

And what I'm hoping is Sadiq Khan had those blind spots. What I'm hoping is that somebody like Keith Ellison can become somebody like Sadiq Khan. When you get somebody like that in position, they become the best line of defense against those entryists, because they're able to then see them and spot them coming from a mile away. Keith Ellison knows. He knows that there are Islamists within our community. I've seen him speak about this in the past because they've sometimes called him, they've decried him for being too liberal because of some of the assaults he's taken in Congress.

And the fact that he pulled out of the Muslim American Society's annual conference where he was scheduled to deliver their keynote address, and the Muslim American Society has ties with some Islamist-backed organizations, has hosted some anti-Semitic speakers like Mohammad Ratib Abdel-Nabulsi, who has said, I'm going to quote to you, he said, homosexuality leads to the destruction of the homosexual. That's why, brothers, homosexuality carries the death penalty.

Now, this is a speaker that was scheduled to speak at a conference that Keith Ellison was scheduled to speak at, and he pulled out. So he knows the political cost of being associated with these people. And what I'm hoping is that an opportunistic politician that he is, when he sees that his vote base is significantly broadened, that he realizes that there are more votes in the liberal side of this debate than there are in appealing to extremists and their backers, like this sort of speaker that we've just quoted. And then he acts as the front line of defense against these people, as Sadiq Khan now is. Let me just say that Sadiq Khan, who prior to becoming the mayor of London, called Quilliam an Uncle Tom, has now been called an Uncle Tom by the

very types of people that were his audience when calling Quilliam Uncle Tom. The tables have turned on him. And when that happens, these people, not just for politically opportunistic reasons, their emotions get invested in realizing, hold on a minute, when you're put on the line like that and called an Uncle Tom or a native informant, you start realizing how ridiculous these sorts of slurs are. And it puts a distance between you and the ignoramuses who are using this type of language. And I think that's what's going to happen to Keith Edison. And listen, if I'm wrong, I'm somebody who follows his conscience and really doesn't care, right? If he starts pandering to homophobes, if Keith starts pandering to Islamists

and justifying their views, I'll call him out on it. And it will hurt him a lot more if I call him out on it, because I've just endorsed him. And so that's where I stand on this. I don't think he's an Islamist, but I'm hopeful. And if I'm not engaged in changing members of my own communities and other fellow liberals, and those on the left, if I'm not engaged in changing them and bringing them to the classically liberal center, I'm not sure what I should be doing. I mean, that's what I set out to do. This is my job. It's my job to engage people like Keith Ellison.

Yeah, yeah. And as I've said before, I believe on this podcast, one of the most depressing things — If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content,

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