The Joe Rogan Experience - #608 - Ali Rizvi

Episode Date: February 4, 2015

Ali Rizvi is a writer, musician, physician, currently working on his first book, The Atheist Muslim. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ali-a-rizvi/ http://podcasts.joerogan.net

The Joe Rogan Experience. Showing by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day. All righty, Ali, you're looking at something. What's going on? Something wrong with the sound? Too loud? Too loud? Yeah, I can't turn it down.

Yeah, we're very obnoxious here. We like to be loud. Is this it right here? Check, check, check, check, check. Is that better? There we go. Is that fine? Yeah. If you want to fuck with it, it's that button right there. Awesome, yeah. The one right below the clock. There we go. Welcome to my country, my friend. I know in your country it's frozen solid and you escaped, came down here, did a little drinking last night. yeah um maybe oh no yeah yes I've been drinking lots of water and I was that's why I was telling you that you know this long podcast was just wondering if I you could absolutely take a pee break do not be intimidated by the long form we're just trying to have a conversation here um No, no, I'm fine. You're working on your new book, and your new book is entitled The Atheist Muslim.

That's a working title. Is that like Jumbo Shrimp or Military Intelligence? Is that one of those oxymorons? It was partly a tongue-in-cheek thing, and then there's a serious element to it, too. The tongue-in-cheek thing is I have a friend who's, she calls herself a feminist Muslim. So I'm not gonna name her right now okay so I always have fun conversations with her you know she's like sort of nominally religious right and you know that was

like how can you be a feminist Muslim isn't that like being a meat-eating vegetarian right you know it's a contradiction and she's like well no there's parts of it that I like parts of it I don't like so I just. And she's like, well, no, 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. Right. So I figured, and then, you know, there's other things like there's LGBT Muslims in Toronto. There's a big community. Really?

They're great people. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Transgender Muslims. Transgender Muslims, gay and lesbian Muslims. That's a small crowd. It's hard to find your peers. Yeah, it's actually quite sizable.

Really? Yeah. Like, wait a minute, 10 people? How many transgender Muslims are there? Oh, I don't know a number. But they practice? Yeah, they practice. They're religious.

They do Friday prayers and things like that. They have a lot of events that go on. But clearly in the Muslim religion, like homosexuality, there's a lot of areas of that that are looked down upon. Right. So how does one justify that or rationalize that in their head? I think what's happening is like 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 is they kind of

have like you know the religion part is really more of an identity issue right they have broad beliefs like they'll believe in god they'll believe they'll stick to some traditions but um you know the large part of it like they're integrating pretty well it's very different in europe it seems sort of like um american jews perhaps like a lot of american jews are not really religious at all like i have a lot of friends that will call themselves jew like my friend ari shafir clearly an atheist but yet if you talk to him he'll tell you he's a Jew. Yeah. And that was kind of the idea, the title of the book.

It's a jab at the cherry-picking thing. I was thinking, you know, you can cherry-pick. You can be a feminist Muslim, an LGBT Muslim. I can cherry-pick all the way to non-belief. Yeah. I'll keep the things i like like uh like i love the ramadan feasts i grew up with that um you know that it's just very communal uh families get together it's great the eid holidays are great um tax exempt status you know why not keep that but what cut you only have taxempt status if you operate a religion, though, right?

You do, yeah. I'm kidding about that. You're going to have to operate your own church. Yeah. I probably won't be doing that anytime soon. You can do it if you want to. My friend Alex Gray does that. Our friend Alex, the painter.

He's this amazing psychedelic artist, and he has this organization called the chapel of the sacred mirrors and uh he what he's essentially does is as done rather is create his own religion and he has tax exempt status although his this i think that not like the state recognizes it but his town doesn't want to recognize that they want like local taxes and it's it's very interesting it's because people are cool with religions as long as they're really old as long as they're like as soon as you know who made the religion whether it's even mormonism gets looked down upon because joseph smith although

he lived in the 1800s everybody there's a historical record of joseph smith that's pretty easy to to track yeah whereas you know Scientology is the most made fun of and that is by a science fiction writer in the 1950s it's the easiest to track it's like it's right there yeah anything newer than that you're like come on get the fuck out of here like you can't know 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 mmm-hmm it's always uh you know when religious people make fun of scientology and it's always entertaining because you know you know you're talking about like well yeah angels

are real and virgin births really happen but like this fucking mormon shit you know so it's uh i know it's it's kind of funny when you look at it i think i saw this comic where there were these two religious groups fighting. They were running against each other with swords. And one of them was screaming, 2 plus 2 equals 5. The other one was saying, 2 plus 2 equals 3. And they were about to fight about it. And that's really what it's like sometimes when you look at it. Well, did you see the anger from the people that were upset at Neil Tyson, Neil deGrasse Tyson, for tweeting about Isaac Newton?

Yeah. Isaac Newton, who tweeting about Isaac Newton. Yeah. You know, Isaac Newton, who was born on December 25th. And, you know, was it Darwin or Newton that was born on December 25th? It was Newton. Was it Newton? Yeah. And he was tweeting about, you know, this great man being born on this great day. And so many fucking religious people got really angry at him,

although he said nothing negative whatsoever about religion yeah but they're like you know you're shitting on our holiday and it to me sort of highlights what religion is for a lot of people it's it's a group that you belong to it's a team like i'm a patriots fan yeah you, don't fuck with our team. I mean, it really does become something like that. And when you're talking about American Jews or Muslims, maybe perhaps,

that don't really follow all of what's in the Quran, they just decide to cherry pick. It's kind of a similar thing you're dealing with. It is a similar thing. It's probably a good thing.

I mean, that's how people sort of progress forwards, right? I mean, you're talking about Jews and the Old, 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. It says, you know, if there's two men and you find them, you know, together in the way that a man should be with a woman, then they will 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, the Pope says you should not use birth control or, you know, abortion is a bad thing. The majority of Catholics are, they're pro-choice, you know, they have premarital sex. They are, you know, they're perfectly fine with all these things. Do you think the majority are pro-choice over here in the u.s they are is it is there 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 that's interesting because i would have not thought that was true yeah i would have thought that it would probably be at the very least 50 50 but at the very more likely

skewing towards pro-life no it's it's definitely i mean they're they they are pro-choice and joe biden's catholic he's practicing catholic and he's also pro-choice big he's also an idiot though yeah you know when we were uh comics back in the he's a funny yeah he is yeah well people forget about this about joe biden but you know not to everybody makes mistakes. And I'm sure it probably wasn't his fault. But in the 1980s, he was running for president and he plagiarized a huge chunk of John F. Kennedy speeches. Yeah, he did. And we used to do Joe Biden night at Stitches. And Joe Biden night would be like we would all go up and try to remember each other's acts.

Like I would try to do my friend's act and he would try to do my act. We would try to steal each other's jokes. It was like an inside thing that we would do on open mic night. Yeah. That this guy, I forget who came up with the idea. But we would call it, he was such a known plagiarist that we would call it Joe Biden night. Yeah, that kind of, I think that was one of the major things that killed his campaign, if not the only thing.

Yeah, but now he's the vice president, and it's sort of never brought up. 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, you know. Right, but how did that not come up when he was, like, debating Sarah Palin? It did. Well, and it didn't come up during the debate, but during the campaign, there were people who tried to bring it up. Yeah.

But I think that just it'd 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 past. 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 it's interesting because a lot of times things like that are real career killers and it was as far as like him being the actual president president like when people talk about hillary running for president no one's talking about joe biden running for president have you noticed that like no one no one is he running for president? No, he's not. He's not, right? But he's the vice president for eight fucking years, and no one hates him. You know, it's not like he's Dan Quayle, where everybody's like, get that fucking moron out of office.

He never did, like, even in the other campaigns, whenever he's run, he never really did too well. I mean, he was running against Obama, too, back in the day, and then Obama chose him as vice president. I think he was always in, like, the single digits. Right, but, I mean, he was running against Obama, too, back in the day, and then Obama chose him as vice president. I think he was always in, like, the single digits. Right, but, I mean, he is the vice president. He is the vice president. You would think that that would be, like, a prime candidate to keep the Democrats in a position of power. Yeah. But, no, they're looking towards a woman instead.

Yeah. Like, dude, you're a liability. It was like Dick Cheney, right? He was also vice president. Right. Nobody. There was no fucking way he was going to. Well, he's probably the most hated vice president ever.

Dick Cheney, like the most despised. Like there's some people that supported him for sure, but the people that hated him really fucking hated him. Yeah, they did. It was just such a money trail, you know, pointing him directly to Halliburton and all the, you know, the weapons of mass destruction fiasco and all that shit. I just think, like, 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, he definitely doesn't come across warm and compassionate and interesting. Yeah, it's hard to understand a guy like that. Passionate. Interesting. Yeah, it's hard to understand a guy like that. Especially a guy that's gone through some serious health issues, and it doesn't seem to have softened him at all. Like four heart attacks?

He's got a new heart. He had a heart transplant, which is insane. And before the heart transplant, he had some sort of a device that eliminated his pulse. He didn't have a pulse. There was some artificial method of pumping blood through his body. And if you checked his pulse, it didn't exist, which is probably in the Bible somewhere.

You know, a guy who causes the death of millions. I mean, he's directly connected to the death of at least a million people, and he doesn't have a pulse. Yeah, that's some dark shit. shit yeah that's a hell of a way to articulate it but yeah yeah if it's accurate it's accurate i don't know how we got on this but what we're talking about is people that are in groups i mean there's there's there's good things involved in being a group because it gives you some support and it gives you some feeling of camaraderie and they belong to a social structure right but it's the the the real issue though is groups against other groups you know

diametrically opposed groups like like right now being a Muslim is a very unpopular thing in a lot of parts of the world yeah this Charlie Hebdo thing this most recent isis video where they burn the jordanian pilot alive yeah that was just yeah that was kind of shaken for hours without i didn't watch it i didn't watch it either i've seen it all at this point i know what it looks like i've seen the beheadings and the assassinations and it's just like okay i get it there's evil people i get it but it's just like this is it's almost like it's if you were a conspiratorially minded person if you're the

type of person like that believes black helicopters are circling your house every day taking scans of your phone and yeah you i am yeah you would say okay it's almost like we're creating this monster that's so unbelievably horrific and so impossible to feel any sympathy towards. It's like you want them all wiped off the face of the planet. this so they're they're so evil and their acts are so horrendous that like it's the perfect instigating weapon like the perfect perfect method of instigation if you wanted to if you were like an evil dictator or the the evil head of some sort of government and you had this desire to go to war with another country like what you would create would be ISIS. You would say, all right, we need some bullshit CIA propped up organization. It's not real, and we need them to be just so heinous,

so beyond belief that everyone agrees we should go over there and fuck them up. Yeah. Like I totally see the logic of that. Obviously, I don't think that's the case obviously I don't think that's the case. I don't think that's the case either, but if it was going to be the case, like ISIS is like the perfect candidate. Yeah.

It's a prototype. It's like, that's exactly what you'd want. Yeah. It's like right out of Hollywood casting. Right. Yeah. 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 Muslims. Like they don 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 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 fringe, just a group of guys who are doing this stuff and nobody really follows them.

That's not true. Like there's a lot of support. I doing this stuff and nobody really follows them. That's not true. Like, there's a lot of support. I mean, you see it online. You know, I've talked to people online in Pakistan who are totally in support of ISIS. It's bizarre. You know, they won't go out and commit those acts themselves, but they'll definitely cheer it on.

Well, I follow some people online that are in ISIS. I follow their twitter accounts yeah you know i don't follow them so like they know i'm following them i follow them so i bookmark their twitter page and i go back to it yeah i'm sneaky like that but what i mean i hate to say this but they do occasionally have good points and one of the good points was they after they beheaded one of these guys i forget which guy was i think was a journalist that got beheaded over there it was one of the american guys they beheaded they this guy wrote one guy loses a body part and everyone

goes crazy but thousands of people lose their entire lives and no one blinks an eye. Like thousands, I think the way he said it is thousands of people's bodies are blown to bits and no one blinks an eye. Yeah, that's a tough thing to argue against. Yeah. That's what, whenever this kind of thing happens, you always have, you know, the sort of the Noam Chomsky kind of sort of mindset or, you know, what he thinks is that, you know,

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? Right. I just I don't think it's as simple as that. I mean, I'm not saying that, you know, everything that the U.S. is doing is great. And, you know, I'm defending all aspects of American foreign policy. But if you're going to have that balance, you've got to sort of level the competition.

So, you know, the U.S. has this, you know, the biggest, strongest military in the world, got loads of nuclear weapons and 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 right so you know they they do what they can and they go um all out and they i 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 they're 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 they're just shia they have a different belief uh in a different strain of islam or they're apostates you know they left islam they changed their mind or they're apostates, you know, they left Islam, they changed their mind. Or they're, you know, they're Christian, they're non-Muslims, they're infidels who are not going to subscribe to the, you know, the ISIS philosophy. They're not going to pay that tax, the jizya 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 uh... i don't think that that's a primary motive what do you think the primary motives i think there's a lot of primary motives i think you know it'd like the u s foreign policy is one thing too

but that this is actually part of the religious belief you've got some errors here you know he's talked about this as well the beliefs and behavior. And most of the time when they're when you have an entire world and you're seeing these guys and they're accurately quoting the Quran. I mean, there's a couple of verses

in the Quran that say, behead disbelievers. 8.12, you can Google that, like Surah 8, verse 12 and 13. 47.4 is another one that says, you know, behead disbelievers. So they actually quote this stuff, and they say Allahu Akbar when they do it, and they call themselves the Islamic State. And they don't just target, you know, sort of people who are involved in U.S. foreign policy

or anything like that. 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, Shias, 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 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. And they think it's okay.

When you're supported by the religion that you've sworn allegiance to and sworn your life to, when you're supported by the text, it really, I mean, that's sometimes all you need to justify horrendous, horrible acts. You just need to know that you're doing it in the name of God well that's the text is the religion in this case like 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 the Quran and belief in the Prophet Muhammad. So the Quran, again, you know, 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 they're like, you know, like with Christianity, if you say that the Bible is a literal word of God, you're part of, I think, just 30% of the U.S. population. I think it is 30% that is considered fundamentalist, where they believe that it's a literal word of God. In Islam, among Muslims, among 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 inerrancy,

that anything in the Quran, it 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 it was okay,

or it's being mistranslated, or the word kill actually means embrace, you know, whatever it is. They look at the Arabic roots, you know, just find other justifications for it. But unfortunately, to the rest of us who can read it now, you can Google it in all kinds of different translations and interpretations and, you know, commentaries. You just find it online. And when you see the words, the words are what they are. I want to be real clear here that I'm not justifying what they're doing or not trying to exonerate them from the horrific nature of what their crimes are.

But what I was going to get to was that is that dissimilar, this belief that you can kill people because of the Quran, because they're not following the word of the Quran, is that dissimilar than this belief that you can launch drones into these nonspecific areas where this idea of surgical targets is pretty preposterous at this point. When you look at the number of people, the overwhelming number of people that are innocent, that are killed by drones, versus the number of people that are guilty, if you look at that and you look at this being sanctioned by the United States government, the Constitution, our ideas about law and justice and war, those are also just things that are written down on paper. I mean, they might be less ideologically based and more state-based or more based on the idea of protecting our nation as opposed to doing the will of God. But it is one nation under God, ultimately. This is what we say when we pledge allegiance now, since the 1950s, since they were worried

about the big communist scare. It used to be one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all, right? Now it's one nation under God. That was all because of communism. Most folks don't even realize that wasn't even in there until the 1950s. Yeah, it was a reaction to like the atheistic. The Red Scare. Yeah, communists.

But this is a justification. The horrific acts that are committed in war, nonspecific targets. I mean, and when I say nonspecific, obviously they're trying to get someone that's in a place. But, you know, when you're shooting a fucking missile where you know a guy's cell phone is, that's fairly nonspecific. I mean. Yeah.

Well, yeah, relatively speaking. Relatively speaking. I think what are the numbers? I think the numbers of versus like the amount of casualties that are civilians versus the actual people they're trying to kill with drones, it's some insane number. It's like more than 80% civilians. So the drone thing is a little, it's also a complicated issue. Right.

There's this writer, her name is Farhat 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 years ago. I think it was in the Daily Times, an Asian paper. And what she talked about was sort of the

different groups that are in that area in, like, northwestern Pakistan, the PAK-Afghan border. And she said that the locals over there, a lot of times, you know, they feel like they're caught between the Taliban that's sort of taken over the whole area. And they, you know, they go out and they put, they're shooting young girls in the head for going to school. And they're, you know, doing all this other bullshit.

And then on the other hand, there's the Pakistani military. And they're coming in with their planes and they're trying to bomb. And that's even more nonspecific. 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 and 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 like 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 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. I mean, they weren't saying that everybody's in favor of it. They're saying that it's not as clear cut as people think it is. So like with drones, you know, for instance, if you like the idea is that when you like, you know, these are decisions that are that are you know you got to choose between bad and worse like complicated decisions are never you know clear-cut good or bad right 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

who's going around killing you know hundreds of people and you want to stop him 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, you know, he'll kill hundreds more people then. And you, you're making that call. That's a really tough call to make. I don't know if I could do it. Right. You know, and, but I, when you're running countries and,'s a really tough call to make I don't know if I could do it right you know and but I when you're running countries and you know 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 it seems so intensely archaic doesn't it yeah I mean

what then one of the articles that I pulled up was talking about an attempt to kill 41 men resulted in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people. So the drones in their attempt to kill 41 different people have killed more than 1,147 people. Well, Farhat Taj, she talked about this too. So she talked about the... So in that area, nobody's allowed there. So you're not... Like journalists don't go there because it's too dangerous. What area is this?

This is in northern south. Pakistan? Yeah, in Pakistan. Now the army's in there because they're fighting against them recently after the Taliban has been really focusing all their attacks in Pakistan. Now the army's 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, you know of watchdogs or agencies that are looking at it. No journalists 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 there 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 they're very low. Other people report

they're very high. And 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, they 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 found it the most surgical and the most accurate compared to all of the other options that they had that's pretty scary when you think about well it makes sense bad choosing bad and worse right but it makes sense when you look at the numbers of innocents that have been killed in the Iraq War. Yeah. Like, I mean, it's arguable that it's close to a million humans, rather. I mean, that's an insane amount of innocent people that have been killed by feet on the ground, missiles, bombing campaigns, all of the above.

And when you compare that to drone strikes, that's the only way kind of like what they're saying. Like it's more surgical than that way. Then, you know, sending a bunch of tanks and a bunch of troops into an area is less surgical. It's like, what the fuck is war, man? Yeah, that's, you know, eventually come down to this that, you know, war sucks. And, you know, if we're going to 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, you know, it's very sort of inhuman. There's no contact. You're very detached because, you know, you're just, it's like a remote remote control they're firing off a missile like that part of it sucks uh but and there's a lot of things about it that suck but i just don't

know you know how else so you know 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 seem to be more upset about the drone strikes than anybody else you know that means that it is kind them. Like, it's not like the Taliban seem 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 the fact that, you know, they know that they can use these civilian casualties to their benefit, that automatically shows you that there is an ethical difference between both sides.

So it's not... Well, you're saying that meaning that they do it on purpose, that they have areas set up in high civilian population areas, knowing that they'll get hit in those areas and it will cause civilian deaths so that those civilian deaths will be used to sort of promote their cause yeah yeah they i mean they absolutely do that i mean think about it again you were talking about getting in the mind of you know conspiracy theorists and think about if you were one of those people and you knew that uh you know that a lot of people don't agree with you everybody thinks that you know 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 innocents killed and then you know everyone all these powerful political figures and journalists

everything around the world suddenly start um you know sort of coming to your side against your enemy right 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 You'd exploit it. Everybody would. Well, I can certainly see that, but I can also certainly see the argument that one of the best recruiting methods for the Taliban or al-Qaeda is having your family blown up by a drone. And that has happened too. Yeah, it works.

That's what I'm saying. This is really, really complicated. It's so complicated. It's – Are we in a state of perpetual war? I don't know. That's a – I'm not qualified to answer that question. Well, this is a weird war in that sense because all the wars throughout history seem to have been about someone trying to take over something whereas this one

seems to be at least a big part of the root of it seems to be religious ideology mm-hmm it is yet takes you back to that the Samuel Huntington paper the clash of civilizations what is that paper it's um he predicted he was this political scientist and in the 90s he wrote this paper and later expanded it 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 he said it won't be ideological, it'll be cultural,

and it'll be between like 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 you know that time i thought it was kind of you know wasn't completely completely in line with it but now more you know as time goes on every once in a while i was kind of, you know, it wasn't completely, completely in line with it. But now, more, you know, as time goes on, every once in a while, I'll 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. Have you ever tried to look objectively, like if you were the engineer of modern society or modern civilization, and you tried to look objectively, sit on a in a high chair

with a desk above the earth and go all right how do i fix this mess how do i stop all these silly monkeys from blowing each other up and shooting rockets from robots that fly above their cities and blowing up bombs in their buildings like how do you stop that have you ever have you ever tried to see like is there a way like a long-term short-term any term way to sort of engineer this away I think the long term that 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. A lot of the problem, like, for example, the Islamic State,

they're yelling Allahu Akbar, quoting the Quran and everything. This is weak, but cartoons, people making cartoons and then getting shot up for it. These are all things that 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. But just, you know, like I grew up in Libya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan. I didn't come to North America until I was 24. I grew up in pretty much Muslim majority countries and some very conservative ones, you know, all the time. And, you know, I just whenever I hear people say that this has nothing to do with religion, it just doesn't make any sense to me.

Is that like an American liberal convenient thing to say because it makes you look super sensitive and very Noam Chomsky-esque? Well, yeah, it does. And then, you know, there's a, I don't know what goes into it. I know that there's a lot of fear. You know, people don't want to criticize this. You know, we saw what happened with Salman Rushdie, you know, all the way up to the Paris attacks. So there is a fear of that. And there's also a fear of being seen as a bigot. That was, I call it Islamophobia phobia. People areobia. That's a great word. Islamophobia-phobia.

I love it. It's something that a lot of people relate to immediately when they hear it. It is true. Well, I hate that term, Islamophobia. Look, what about Christianophobia? quote-unquote progressive, very left-wing people, will openly mock Christianity while defending Islam or by labeling people Islamophobic or conservative. Yeah, I mean, you've 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 Koran 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 got to respect that. respectful that okay now well it's in the bible so we got to respect that right well you know and it's a respect for ideas is just such an overrated you know it's considered a virtue

you know respecting people's ideas and beliefs and ideas are not people you know like that's and i was trying to that's the problem with the word islamophobia 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 entitled to respect. They have rights. Islam itself is not a person. It's just a book. It's an ideology. It's an ideology. It's a bunch of ideas in a book. So it doesn't have rights and it's not entitled to respect. So the idea of Islamophobia is a phobia of doesn't have rights and it's not entitled to respect so um so the idea of islamophobia is a phobia of ideas that are irrational and ancient yeah that seems to be

pretty smart but it's connected somehow or another to racism and this is where it gets weird because progressive people don't want to criticize anybody with extra melanin yeah anybody that's remotely browner than them gets immediate free pass but see like the the Boston Bombers right they were from Dagestan yeah they're from where they're from Caucasus is that how you pronounce it talking he doesn't know he's wrong yeah he knows what Beyonce's weight is he knows her ring sizes and shoe size he knows when she was born he knows who she used to date. Oh, we need to talk later. Don't that's great the It's actually you the Boston bombers are actually from a place where like the word Caucasian comes from the caucus Yeah, yeah, so they're from there. So, you know, they were white

the underwear bomber was black the Jose Padilla was Hispanic, you know this so it's not a race. All these people were Muslim. And the thing is, if you're, 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? Right. That itself, I mean, that, that's, that's exactly what racism is when you assume that everything, that entire religion is one race. Yes, we're completely ignorant. Yeah. There's some white, blue-eyed Muslims, you know?

Oh, yeah, there's lots of them. If you look at Mecca, you see, like, the people that are in Mecca, you'll see red-headed people, red-haired people that are walking around with the traditional garb on circling Mecca. Yeah, man. I mean, there's, in Turkey,

so, you know, Turkey's a big Muslim, so Turkey's a big Muslim country. Egypt's a big Muslim country. There's Indonesia. There's Iran where everybody's Persian. Then there's the Arab world and there's South Asians. I mean,

it's just racially incredibly diverse. Yeah. So, you know, it's not really a race and I was, I think I saw something

where there's this woman wearing a niqab and someone wrote a funny comment about it in the niqab, the face veil and the, you know, cover the burqa and uh someone's like you know that's what you're doing is racist I'm making fun of this and I'm like wow can you tell me what fucking race she is yeah can you see how is that racist that's mind-blowing you don't even know if it's a man or a woman you can't see these are knee-jerk liberal ideas that are promoted in universities, the hypersensitive,

hyper-progressive atmosphere that literally eliminates objective thinking and reasoning. Because you are already automatically expected to behave in a certain way or think in a certain way because that is the progressive manifesto. Like your ideas, like you're not supposed to criticize Islamic people. It is Islamophobia the idea that we're supposed to be in their land that that is this is Islamophobia and that word is just so fucking thrown about over the last decade or so it's toxic like it's and I was trying to give the example of myself is that if I went back to Saudi Arabia or any of the 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. Well, you're an apostate. I'm an apostate, yeah. You should be beheaded, right? Isn't that the idea? Yeah, technically, I should be beheaded.

What the fuck, man? You should be phobic of those ideas. I know, so it's legitimate yeah and it's it's not irrational by any means well phobia means a fear right does it does it mean irrational does phobia mean irrational I think the medical definition is an irrational fear like an irrational fear I think any fear of being beheaded you mean it's not super rational exactly so that's why, that makes it even more

of a misnomer. Yeah, if somebody writes down, I want to cut your fucking head off, and you're like, you don't, you're a phobic of that person. Like, what? Of course he has.

I want to cut my head off because of a belief. 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 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 Charlie Hebdo attacks, and people said, you know, you guys are scum. You should get out of here. Where have you heard this?

This is, like, on Twitter, Facebook messages. Like, I'll get emails. Real people or eggs? They sounded pretty real. You know what I'm saying? Like, was it like a person where you knew you could track their account? You could read their stories? Oh, no, no.

Yeah, I knew them. Like, I know who these people are. Oh, you know them in person? Yeah, there's many of them. In 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. I always get selected for the random check and things like that. Of course. Look at you. There you go. So it happens. And then, you know, my passport has, you know, my record of living in all these different Middle Eastern countries and things like that. And the name and the skin color. So that does put me in the same category. so I share that experience a lot of people who do look like me and have the same name that I do right but the problem with the word Islam phobia is that I think it's an injustice and it's actually an insult to the struggles of Muslims who have

genuinely been victims of anti-muslim bigotry, to use their pain and their experience and exploit it to stifle criticism of Islam. Yeah, I would say that that makes sense. You know, sort of the same way anyone who disagrees with feminist ideology is automatically some sort of a woman hater, misogynist, someone who's just a bigot in some way against the female gender. That's just how it is, man. People love to silence ideas with a real simple categorization of you. You are a racist. You are a warm you know, I saw someone who wrote that about Christopher Hitchens, that he was a sexist and a warmonger. I'm like, okay, did you read any of what he wrote? Did you listen to any of what he said? Like, that's kind of hilarious.

Like, to categorize someone and dismiss them so openly like that. Yeah, with the labels. And I think a lot of times, you know, you don't even have definitions for these terms. When you say Islamophobia, if you ask, you know, someone in a Muslim, a liberal Muslim in Boston, you know, what Islam is, they'll give you a very different definition than someone who's in ISIS or the Taliban. Oh, sure. So they have different definitions of it. I think feminism is the same way and talk to ten different feminists and different definitions well there's a real problem with groups in that sense ideological groups in that sense whether it's men's rights advocates or I mean men's rights advocates are some of the most fucking

hilarious people online to read yeah they're their websites and their discussion groups and just a bunch of angry fucking weird that's a recent discovery I actually didn't know about these guys until just a bunch of angry fucking weirdos. That's a recent discovery. I actually didn't know about these guys until like a couple of years ago. I didn't know about them until I was accused of being one. Somebody called me an MRA, and I was like, what the fuck is that? Some angry woman was barking at me on Twitter, calling me an MRA. I forget what it was about.

So I went and looked at it, and I was like, oh, fucking Christ. Yeah. I found the community. I tapped into this vein of man who needed to fucking get over it. Yeah, I know. And what really sucks sometimes is that when you have a certain agenda associated with just a really radical, insane group, then even if they have

legitimate viewpoints about something if they have like if supposing they have like one or two points that are legitimate yeah you know i guess if you're talking about the men's right custody child custody and alimony those are the two that make sense to me there you go so that's where it ends yeah that's that's like a rational conversation you can have the problem is anytime you start talking about those issues, you'll automatically get labeled as part of that group. Sure, yeah. So there's this sort of smearing, you know,

painting you with the same brush as everybody else. Well, one of the most hilarious things that I read was that men's rights advocates are unnecessary because feminism addresses equality. And once women are treated as completely equal, then and only then should we address men's rights. And I'm like, that's hilarious. Like that is just some weird, angry girl

who no one wants to touch. And she just has a lot of bitterness. And this is what they're spouting out. I've always actually, I was talking to a friend about this yesterday that i think when when you have movements when you have like organized movements it's something that you want to achieve being in opposition to something just makes a lot more sense and it's more unifying than standing for something and we explained that yeah like you know if you have um if you have uh

say the feminist movement right when when you had when feminism meant equality you know, if you have, say, the feminist movement, right? When feminism meant equality, you know, economic, social, political equality for men and women, then, you know, we're all feminists. You know, we all had that. We oppose gender inequality. We're humanists. I mean, to say it's feminist, it just identifies you very specifically with one gender. And that's the issue. But I'm saying supposing, just supposing feminism was defined as that, as something that's in,

it's a movement that's in, or an ideology that's in opposition to gender inequality or patriarchy, whatever it is. Then it unifies everybody. But the moment it starts standing for something, like, okay, you're not a feminist if you're not pro-choice, you're not a feminist if you believe that males and females are not exactly the same, or psychologically, or if you don not pro-choice, you're not a feminist, if you believe that males and females are not exactly the same, you know, psychologically, or if you don't subscribe to this, like, sort of gender sociology theory or, you know, 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 religion and a lot of atheists. I like the anti-theist position that when you're opposed to, you know, the idea of religion and faith and believing things without evidence, you know, or doing things for no other reason apart from the fact that it was written in a book, you know, 2,000 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 where it means that you have to like what you have to agree with what Glenn Greenwald says you have to be in a social justice then yeah then you start excluding people so well then you get into atheism plus. You know what atheism plus is? I do. Someone explained this to me briefly, but I never really followed up on it. It's a hilarious group of social retards that have decided to make a religion out of atheism. And so they've connected atheism with a system or a group of social values and ethics.

or a group of social values and ethics, and attached this idea, it was just a lack of belief in a deity, to, on top of that, all these things that anyone with any ethics ordinarily, automatically believes in. Like sexual discrimination, gender discrimination, racial discrimination, all those things that, like, moral, ethical people already disagree with.

They've attached that to atheism and called it atheism plus yeah so you know so but standing against all those other things but now now it becomes a group like an ideology it's essentially in a way like a religion because to ascribe to atheism plus you have to be someone who you know these people that like go to these conferences and like you listen to their speeches, these fucking droning, boring, it's, they should call atheism plus duh, because anyone who's intelligent already thinks, yeah, of course, if you're a balanced person, you shouldn't believe in racial discrimination. Of course you wouldn't

support sexual discrimination. Of course you wouldn't support, discrimination of course you wouldn't support you know fill in the blank you know of course you would be pro-women's rights of course you'd be pro you know there's a whole group of desires that they have or ideological desires that they've attached to this idea of atheism yes it's a hilarious but I think that's exactly that that was a point I was making that the moment atheism yeah it's a hilarious but i i think that's exactly that that was the point i was making that the moment atheism starts standing for something beyond just not believing in a god right um the moment that happens you start you know there's this fragmentation that starts to take place um and but i 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 right you know find another uh find something else to guide your actions apart from these you know sort of archaic social and legal codes. And if we had that position, you could have people from all kinds of, you know, subscribe to all kinds of belief systems. You can come and they can join 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. Right. So you can't um well that's why they call it atheism plus yeah and their ideas but if you listen to them talk it's a lot of these really really weak guys who just are looking for social brownie points and trying to get women to love them by like standing so powerfully and strong in favor of equality it's like there's there's a certain aspect of feminism that's sort of in in in favor of equality. It's like there's a certain aspect of feminism that's sort of engaged themselves with atheism,

and they've kind of embedded into it. And these radical feminist ideas have also become a part of Atheism Plus. And it's very strange to listen to what they say and completely intolerant of other people's ideas and aggressive in attacking and doxing and going after people who disagree or who they think have, you know, in some way or another, just, you know, stood out against what their ideas are. And that I have seen a lot.

Yeah. And it's aggressive. I was recently thinking that, you know, 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 for good reason in some ways. No, I understand where it comes from.

I mean, look, religious ideology, especially radical religious fundamentalism, has done horrible damage to people. And there's a lot of people that grew up in that, and they have an extreme backlash against it. And so they're angry because of that. 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 Ayaan Hirsi Ali did, you know, where I grew up and, you know, I underwent genital mutilation and, you know, all these things as a woman, and, you know, I would be angry too if I was oppressed by the...

I mean, I have... Raif Badawi, you know about the blogger in Saudi Arabia. Which one is this? There's a blogger that they have jailed in Saudi Arabia and they've been lashing him. They lashed him 50 times. Okay, so I'll tell you. Tell me, sir.

So he... Raif is actually someone that I know. My girlfriend's a really good friend with his wife and his kids and everything. So, you know, we know them personally. And he started a website called Free Saudi Liberals. So he wanted to start talking about liberalism and sort of just, you know, different innovative, you know, 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 into the public outside a mosque after Friday prayers in Al Jafali Mosque in Jeddah.

And they just take a cane and they lash him 50 times every Friday until the 1,000 lashes are complete so they did the first set I think about four or five weeks ago and so you know we all started writing about it all of us really you know it became a huge story there's a lot of pressure and then the Charlie Hebdo attacks happened. And the Saudi ambassador was in the free speech rally in Paris. And I think that was on a Sunday. And they'd actually lashed Reif on Friday. And he was in a free speech rally.

So a lot of people wrote. I wrote a piece for CNN about it, just talking about the double standard. So how many lashes has this guy received so far? 50. And it was supposed to continue every week. But he had a medical review and the doctors said that he's not fit to be lashed the next week, which is fucking bizarre. Because basically they said that his wounds haven't healed enough yet.

To create new wounds. To create new wounds. Jesus fucking Christ. So let his wounds close up before we rip them open again and last with what are they using to beat him with they use a cane they use a really sharp bamboo cane with like edges to it like it's used in Singapore what I know about it is yeah it's a cane like that but it's got apparently it's a it's got a very sharp edge so it does cut slice you open 50 times yeah 50 times so Yeah, 50 times. Jesus Christ.

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 guy with this. Yeah, and there is a,

there is 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. Yeah, he's scarred.

I mean, he's, it was, his wife was just really, really upset. Her name's Insaf. And after the first lashing, you know, 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 to him, 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. And he just wrote sort of like liberal things. He started talking about how religion and politics should be separate, just the 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 who was essentially saying that, you know, I think he said something like traveling to planets is haram. He was saying something about astronomy. Haram? Yeah, haram means sinful. And if I remember this correctly, and he essentially wrote this really sarcastic thing

about Sharia 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 nobody else has from centuries ago so he would write sort of sarcastic things like that he never openly challenged religion you know being wrong or anything but he was just an advocate for secularism so and that's really all he'd I mean I I know you know people tend to think that like well

what did he really do right you know but i i can't uh you know i can't say it any other way the guy all he did was he just blogged on this thing called free saudi liberals man 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 beheaded for sorcery, for cannabis smuggling.

It would probably resonate with you a little bit. All kinds of just crimes that are not really crimes. Both of those resonate. I'm a sorcerer as well. I don't like to talk about it, but I do a lot of witchcraft. My spare time. I time a few cats fucking sorcery what no what does that mean how do you get beheaded for sorcery what is sorcery uh black magic uh doing spells on people um oh my god yeah promising people that you can sort of, they can't get pregnant. It's like, okay, I can get you pregnant.

Oh, God. Sorcery, huh? You can get your head cut off for sorcery in Saudi Arabia. And that's our allies, right? It's happening as we speak. Still doing it. And they beheaded, I think, 10 people in January. Oh, my God.

And these are public beheadings with a sword. So you could watch? Yeah. So if I flew over there, I could are public beheadings with a sword. So you could watch? Yeah. So if I flew over there, I could watch a beheading? 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 kids running towards the scene when execution is about to happen or lashing is about to happen. The video of Rife is online when he was lashed. It's online? Yeah, it's online. Someone actually secretly filmed it. Oh, no. What you can really see is you can see people running towards where the lashing was about to take place.

How clearly do you see him getting lashed? You don't see it very clearly. Is he naked? No, no, he's not. He's clothed, and then he's got his hands in shackles. He's got his head raised up. So they're beating him through the clothes. They're beating him through the clothes.

And from a distance, you can't really appreciate what it's like because the cane 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. There's like hundreds of normal, regular Saudis that have gathered around.

They're cheering afterwards. And they all yell Allahu Akbar when the lashes are complete. Oh, my God. And there's little kids, like 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 in Riyadh, the place where they do the public executions, at least when I was there, it was called Chop Chop Square. That's what we used to

call it. What? Chop Chop Square? That was the sort of affectionate term for it. Yeah, there was a market in the middle of which there was Chop Chop Square. But if you criticize that, you're Islamophobic. Did you know that? Yeah, because then they'll say, well, this has nothing to do with Islam. And then you'll show them the verses in the Quran that actually say that you can behead people for all kinds of things. And they'll say, well, that's mistranslated, misinterpreted, and it was at a different time. Sorcery.

It's out of context. 19 people? In August, the month that James Foley was beheaded by ISIS, the Saudi government, our ally, the one that Obama just recently went to pay respects to the king. And Fareed Zakaria actually asked him, he asked Obama about, he's like, are you going to mention the blogger that they have jailed? And he didn't.

He's like, well, right now I'm just going to pay respects to the king, but with human rights abuses, with our allies, it's very tough to have that dialogue. What kind of fucking allies are they? It's like having a friend who has a slave. It's like, I i really love the dude i don't want to talk to him about his slaves but he's got this guy shackled up in his basement and yeah guy's digging holes for him yeah he's a good dude though i don't want to talk to him about he's my friend we're gonna barbecue you know what they did was king abdullah is he's a little bit like the pope um he's uh he just says something that's

really common sense to the rest of us. Like, 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, the Pope says, okay, maybe condoms are okay. Right. He gets this sort of disproportionate praise.

Right. For saying it, even though. It's a rational thing that everybody already that everybody should so they're they're getting uh 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 so it's such a low standard it's like a really low bar for them and 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 he had this one, I think it was 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 uh 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 some things they can't even do with the permit

like they can't they're not allowed to drive yeah i've heard that so um they can't do that even with permission of a male guardian but pretty much anything else whether it's uh working or traveling or any of that stuff they can't do it without express permission of a male guardian. So they spoke out about it because their guardian was their dad, who was a king who they barely even knew. And, uh, their mother, right. She was, she's also female. So it really restricted a lot of things that they could do. So they started talking about, you know, gender discrimination, you know, issues, uh, the situation of women in Saudi Arabia and they did an interview in 2013 and it's it's online it's a bite with Russia Today with RT I think that's what it stands for Russia Today so and they they were able to get a Skype connection and do this interview and

they spoke out and after that nobody really heard from them again they didn't do any other interviews so actually I've got in touch with I so here's where my connection happened is I went to a school called Monartha 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.

And 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 Abdullah's daughter. So I'm actually working on a piece about that. I just did a whole interview with them for an hour. It's about a week ago. And it's just the whole story is 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 have been imprisoned. and all the things that he's done for women in Saudi Arabia. And his own four daughters have been imprisoned. And they've been starved. They've had a lot of their dog died of starvation because they weren't getting enough food. Fuck.

All these things that have been happening. And the hypocrisy and the double standards are just amazing. I mean, Westminster Abbey in the UK flew their flags at half-mast when Abdullah died. This is a guy who sanctioned all those beheadings. I mean, 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 it will allow women to vote in 2015. Fuck. And everybody's like, good job. We'll allow women to vote on things that we agree with only. And you don't really get an option to vote on a lot of things. Like, do you want a king? No.

I don't want a king. Do you think that people should have their head cut off for sorcery? I would say that's that's not progressive yeah that's his that's his his own that's his call so it's uh it's a different world out there i think it's and uh that's why it's hard like you know when you when you're there and you come here and um you know and when you hear like the sort of the Noam Chomsky thing or the Glenn Greenwald thing that, you know, we need to stop all this Islamophobia. And yeah, when you see the apologism and it immediately cuts you off and it affects people like Rife Budwee, the blogger. Yeah. And it affects people like that. It actually harms them.

It affects people like that actually harms them I mean the the people that we should be getting behind right and Supporting in those parts of the world are the dissidents and the reformers and they're there and there are a lot of them It's just you can't you don't hear from them because they can't speak well because they're terrified like the same way People are so terrified of Islam that when this Charlie Hebdo thing came out no one no one on the left actively criticized it or published those images or put it on the front pages of their magazines. It wasn't something that was done.

It wasn't something where everyone stood in unity and said, everyone's terrified. They're terrified that they're going to be next. They're going to get their heads cut off. They're going to get shot. Someone's going to storm their office and gun them down because they also published the cartoon. And Sam Harris made a really good point. It was the one chance that journalists had uniformly to stand up against this type of shit and just everyone publish it.

Every fucking magazine, every newspaper, everyone across the world published those images. But everybody's like, fuck that. Self-preservation took over. Did you see that thing on Sky News? There was this woman who was interviewing, like when they did the reprint and they put the cover of, they put Mohammed on the cover again, 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 she's like i'm sorry we can't show that and i'm so sorry to anybody who was offended and so on anybody who's offended at a cartoon that's amazing you know the stuff um 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. What does that mean? Well, it just means that, you know, when you make fun of it, when you draw cartoons and it's insulting.

And it's different. And I understand where she's coming from. But I think mockery is super important. she's coming from but i think mockery is super important like if you think about like the interview the seth rogan movie you know you have all of these uh sort of uh you know journalists and everybody writing all these inquisitive you know biting critiques of the north korean regime um and all it does is that you know because kim jong-un wants to be taken seriously and it gives him you know he's like Jong-un wants to be taken seriously. And it gives him, you know, he's like, okay, I'm legitimate. Everybody's criticizing me and, 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 apeshit. Well, how come they didn't go apeshit over the Team America movie? They did, actually. Yeah? Yeah, Kim jong-il was not happy about it and of course he wasn't happy but nothing happened it wasn't like yeah it wasn't like what happened here and i'm not sure exactly why they didn't that was a long

longer time ago maybe his dad's a little more chill probably it's impossible he might be more sensitive he's like the young one yeah maybe, maybe he's... Yeah, maybe he feels less legitimate because he just kind of got it from his dad. He's a little insecure, I think, probably. Well, he's got a fat face. Yeah, that's going to do it. Lazy fuck. Go work out.

Yeah, no, he's... That's the thing. Like, you know, when you have this kind of mockery cartoon, like the dick 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.

Like they're, 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 going to get people flocking to you with, you know, through rational discourse. So, you know, you have to use other means. Why is that part of the world so archaic in their beliefs? Is it because that's the cradle of civilization? That's the oldest form of symbol? What we know today, like the oldest civilizations that we're aware of that we can track is like 6 000 plus years ago which is mesopotamia right the middle east sumer iraq babylon that those those areas that's like where we believe civilization sort of began and those same areas have the most archaic form of religion and social justice.

Their ideas are so barbaric in a way or so old. I mean, the idea that women have to cover themselves in veils and they have to – these oppressive ideas, it's the exact opposite of where the world is heading, especially because of the internet. There's more and more openness. The exchange of information is quicker than it's ever been before. And it's really hard to like hold on to like a really stupid idea today. Yeah. Stupid, oppressive idea. But in that part of the world, not so much. And it's like this momentum, the momentum of the past is so strong. 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 U.S., is, you know, the reason that the Saudis are lashing Rai for the reason that they're beheading people for sorcery has nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy or Western imperialism or really anything like that. But the reason they've been able to maintain it, the reason they can actually, you know,

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 propped them up.

We have supported them. And, you know, I mean, you saw, like, do you remember when King Abdullah visited Texas? I think it was in 2005. And then George Bush was holding hands with him. Yeah, they were walking around holding hands. Yeah, and they kissed each other on the cheek. A couple of queers. Yeah, they were walking around holding hands. Yeah, and they kissed each other on the cheek. Like a couple of queers.

Yeah, that's that. And they, so you had that. And then a few years later when Obama, his first year of his presidency, he was at the G20 summit in London. And there was a controversy where everybody thought he bowed to the Saudi king, which he sort of did, right? When he met him, he shook his everybody thought he bowed to the Saudi king, which he sort of did. Right. When he shook his hand and he bowed. 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 of 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 bowing to the Saudi king. We're all doing exactly the same thing. With fracking now, it's kind of changed quite a bit. You know, the United States produces more gas than anyone now. Yeah. And that should change.

And I think that it is 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. Well, there's these areas like Abu Dhabi and Dubai

and the areas that were just 50, 60 years ago, barren. I mean, there was nothing there. And now there's thriving, huge cities, and the economy has just blossomed out of oil. 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 any kind of goods.

They've got any, even cultural elements that are going around all over the world that is well how does that change how does that change that well that's the reason for their success you said it yourself it's the oil yeah change that and you change things drastically there like they're the thing that would put an end to all of them is uh if they ran out of oil or if we didn't need their oil would that though i mean would that really is there it seems like there's so much momentum on their side i mean the the culture has been so firmly established their mindset has been so firmly established this adherence to radical islamic philosophy and and ideology is so firmly established.

How does one ever change that? You change it when you have to, right? Like when you have to move on with life, when you can't maintain that. 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 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 obscenely rich. Like, you know.

Like trillionaires. Yeah. Oh, they're fucking crazy rich when i was there like the just going into riyadh you can't as a tourist you can't go into riyadh and this is i'm talking about the 90s i mean you know when you see those those movies with all the futuristic cities and stuff it was uh it really looked like that the architecture the buildings the highways and just, it's beautiful to see. It's just the people that are walking around are all wearing burqas. Ancient clothes with the most sophisticated modern city. It's like such a weird technology. Contradiction. It is really strange.

There's one royal family that's running it. There's a whole bunch of brothers. It's kind of like uh and and the the the people who live there and come stay there for a little while and go away all the expatriates it's uh it's it's like they're running a hotel it's like a family running a hotel and it's got all its money and sort of american accounts swiss accounts you know wherever and And people just check in and check out all the time. You get paid according to your passport. I met a dude, I don't want to say his name, who's a prince in one of those places

who listens to my podcast. We had a long conversation about MMA. Well, I hope he's listening now. He may be. He's a young guy, you know. It was weird talking to this young guy who's probably, you know, we didn't discuss his finances, but I'm assuming he's insanely wealthy. But he just wanted to sit down with me and talk about the UFC.

He's a big fan. So we had this weird conversation about strategies and tactics and fighters and the trends and where things are moving and changing. But I'm talking to a guy who could one day be the head of one of these gigantic governments i mean i guess you call it a government it's not really monarchy would you call it a monarchy yeah it's a kind of i mean it's a it's kind of government yeah yeah but it was very strange very strange to have this conversation you know it is yeah it's a it's a really different world it's it's like another planet and to be fair his was a less

suppressive we're not talking about like saudi arabia beheading people over sorcery it's not that but you know that part of the world is it's is it it's almost impossible I think for a lot of people who are apologists for that part of the world to rationalize it or to understand it the way you do 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 just so removed and so alien that people either shut it out of their mind or they don't believe it.

So I've seen that a lot. And, like, you know, I'll tell you stories. What I'm doing in my book is, you know, when I talk about these things, I always try to bring personal anecdotes into it before I go into the topic in detail because you know it helps it helps people to relate to it sure yeah so this is something that happened when I was in fifth grade so I went to the American school there which is kind of why I talk like this and 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.

And we 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. I can't remember exactly. And, you know, 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 was 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 couldn't speak about Christmas, you couldn't have red during Valentine's, and so on. So they, he saw the snowflakes,

and he 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 yeah and uh so i remember thinking i was like wow i worked really hard on that and you know he just like amputated one of the tips off the snowflakes and then we asked the teacher what happened we wanted to know and um that's when i found out about the star of david so star david has six points so anything that has like six points is uh 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 didn't really know anything about the jews before but i just thought i was like wow these you know these must be scary people whoever they are you know like the guy's cutting like tips off his snowflakes

fucking snowflakes christ so i went back and uh you know i asked my dad about it my dad was you know dad was a professor so he's a fairly rational guy and then he told me about the whole israel palestinian history explained it to me as well as i could understand it and then he told me about the whole israel palestinian history explained it to me as well as i could understand it and then he pulled out a map it was one of those you know inflatable globes um and he tried to show me israel on the map and it wasn't there like this is this map was we bought it in the in a bookstore in riyadh and uh there's no israel there was no israel it was like a it wasn't even like they labeled it something else or they made it all Palestine like I remember this distinctly there was a border they'd drawn the border and the rest of it was

the same color as a Mediterranean and same colors as it was as a sea so it was just like a little notch so you know this was I remember we bought the world book encyclopedia you know around that time uh that was a big thing encyclopedias are obsolete now but and they'd taken out the uh the entries on israel and evolution everything you know you pay a lot of money for it and they took it out so they they'll do those things now what i'm saying is uh you know the this was my introduction this is what i saw and my fortunately my father was rational and you know he told me right story. But there were a lot of other kids that also went home. They asked their parents the same questions. You know, what is the Star of David? Who are the Jews? And I don't know what kind of responses they got. I don't know what they were told. So it's you 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 know, you have these ideas around you.

And the kids who are in the Saudi schools, which are separate in the way like foreigners are not allowed to go to Saudi schools. Their textbooks are just insane. The kind of stuff they have about Jews, about infidels, and everything. They actually teach this stuff to kids. In the U.K. recently, there was a Saudi school that was in the U.K. They were using some of these textbooks, and there was a big brouhaha about it. A brouhaha? Oh, yeah.

I love that term. Sorry. I was one to say that i rehearsed it i'm gonna fucking say brouhaha that's incredible that they had to cut your snowflake your snowflake was symbolic of these evil wizard jews doing their sorcery nobody would have made that connection but that's what i. It's stuff that's so unimaginable and things that you wouldn't even think of. I watched a documentary once on these suicide bombers, and there was this school that they were running

where they had these images in this children's school of these kids that had blown themselves up and images of them you know these holy images of them covered with their their explosive vests and they were they had a saying on the wall above them that said the children of today are tomorrow's holy martyrs. And there's just like trying to, trying to wrap your mind around the idea that you are, you're, you're, you're promoting that you are going to raise these children to be holy martyrs, meaning they are going to blow themselves up and kill a bunch of bad people

with them. And this is going to be a great thing. And then their images are going to be displayed at this school, and everyone's going to praise them. And it's impossible. It didn't make any sense. It didn't fit. I tried to find a place for it in my head. I tried to shove it in there somewhere. I'm like, this has got to be fake.

It can't be real. No, it's a tough thing. I'm realizing more and more, you know, 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. Because we grew up, like I grew up in a Shia Muslim family. So... Can you explain the difference for folks who don't know? What is the difference between Sunni and Shia? They're basically two different schools of thought. So after the Prophet Muhammad died, you had his best friend. His name was Abu Bakr, which is what the current ISIS caliph is named after.

And you had his son-in-law and his cousin, and his name is Ali. That's who 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 have these two different lines and there was a conflict about, people were, they couldn't decide who the successor was going to be.

Some people kind of flocked to the caliphate, which was Abu Bakr and the other caliphs and others flocked to the imams, which was Ali. So it was a successor. It was just basically a conflict about who the successor was going to be and different people took different sides. That's the long story short. Well, that became incredibly confusing to Americans when the Iraq war went on and we realized that, oh, okay, there's a war going on now that we killed Saddam Hussein between the Sunnis and the Shias.

It's like, what? Wait a minute. The Muslims don't like each other? Like, what kind of crazy shit is this? They've been fighting. And it's not just the Sunnis and Shias. There's a whole bunch of other factions. What other factions?

What are the other ones? Oh, there's too many names. It's like, you know, if you're talking about all the different Christians. Rattle off a couple. Hit me with them. Episcopalians, Lutherans.

So, yeah, there's the Sunnis and the Shias. They're primary. Within the Shias, you've got two different groups. There's the Ethnosheries, which is the 12ers, and they believe in 12 imams. And then there's another group that split off after the sixth imam into a separate sort of like descendancy. And those are the, they're called the Ismailis. In the Sunnis, you've got Salafi Sunnis, which is a lot of the ones in Saudi Arabia were very conservative. You have four major schools of thought within the Sunnis.

There's the, do you want the names? I mean, it's like Humbly, Shafiafi maliki and hanafi so these are four different schools of thought they practice different things like for instance the shafi sect does for them female genital mutilation is mandatory mandatory mandatory so in indonesia and in a lot of southeast asian countries you know indonesia where raza Aslan says the women are 100% equal to men, I would say, yeah, when it comes to circumcision rates, they are. Because more than 80% of men and women there are circumcised. Well, circumcision for a man, though, is not nearly as brutal as circumcision for a female.

You're just cutting off skin. You're not cutting off the clitoris. There's four different kinds of uh 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 a ritual yeah nick a circle it's still pretty fucked up um and they're all banned over here so it So there's different grades to it. So that's one example of the Shafi sect. And then the Maliki, they have a different belief.

The Hanafis have different beliefs. And they range. And there's really liberal ones within each sect. There's really conservative ones. So it's very wide. 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 like conservative things like, you know, being gay is not a good thing woman should cover herself so a lot of moderates will believe this but there they reject the political ideology of Islam and then you have liberal and progressive moderates and they're different as well so it's it's a very you know it's a 1.6 billion people this is a very wide it's it's extremely extremely diverse. Which is the more conservative faction, the Sunni or the Shia?

There's conservative elements in both. Like just to give you an example that may be more recognizable to you is the Iranian theocracy. If you can keep that closer to you. You don't want to vary too much in the sound. You can just pull it towards you. It moves around a lot. Okay, cool. But it's weird.

These things are very directional. Sorry. There we go. Oh, there. Yeah, that's louder. So the Iranian theocracy is a Shia theocracy. So that's extremely conservative Shia Islam. The Saudis are Sunni. It's extremely conservative Sunni Islam.

What do they hate about each other, that they're willing to go to war? The wrong successor. It's a historical difference between Shias and Sunnis. So it's like Baptists going after Catholics. Yeah, sort of in that way. And, yeah, pretty much similar. They just have different ideas 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 kaffir they're apostates because they rejected belief in the caliphs um and then that makes them punishable by death and you know you have to go out and you have to kill them and there's also an ethnic thing there too 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 because uh i don't think he i mean this is a hard thing to understand for a lot of people and apparently other than what i read he i don't think he had any idea. I don't think he knew the difference between Shias and Sunnis beyond just the superficial level.

He probably had no idea that that was going to go down, that there was going to be some sort of a brutal civil war to try to reclaim power. I mean, no one in this country had any idea that that was going to happen, that there was going to be a civil war between the two competing factions of Islam Yeah, I have a friend his his name is a festival with our he is a he's in Iraq He was 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 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 he was running around all over 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 they say that the reason Saddam Hussein you know was so effective is because he ruled with an iron fist and he kept all of these sort of religious rivalries under control and he prevented anybody so he was fairly like pro-secular a lot of these dictatorships are so they're secular and uh you know 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

confused point of view when all that was going down there was a very strange moment where most Americans were standing back on wait wait wait what's going on like they're they're competing again they're fighting with each other like in their two rival sections away what no one knew that there were rival factions of Islam um this guy Reza Aslan, he is a very interesting sort of polarizing figure. Some people think that he is like an interesting historian, a voice of reason, and other people think he's completely disingenuous and not just like incorrect about certain things, but that he's full of shit. Yeah.

That's sort of Sam Harris's take on him is that he's just, he's just, he's just dishonest. I agree with Sam Harrison. I think he's very dishonest. What is his objective? Like, what is he trying to do? Cause my friend Duncan is enamored by him. My friend Duncan read his book on Jesus and he's just, he said, it's an absolutely fascinating book and just really thinks the guy's very interesting. But then I talked to Sam about him, and Sam said that he had some really dishonest dealings with him, some conversations with him where— Yeah. 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. Yeah, he's Muslim. So 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. 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 um like he's he's one of those guys who responds with everything by with accusations of bigotry and islamophobia like he'll just call you a bigot and he knows

especially that you know people here especially liberal white westerners um that's the last thing 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 accuse they just accuse you of racism there's so much guilt involved with that

especially white people we're so guilty they mean well but they have this sense that they're like, okay, we don't want to be called racist. We don't want to be called bigots. So, and I think he kind of, he uses that a lot. And one of the things that he said, for instance,

is that he actually wrote, he was like, these books, the Quran, 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 texts, it's like inkblots that you can interpret and these words don't mean anything.

And I was just thinking about the implication, and I wrote this for the Richard Dawkins website, And I was just thinking about the implication, and I wrote this for the Richard Dawkins website, is, you know, if he's saying that, like, these people, they didn't get their ideas from the book, the book has nothing to do with it, then he's saying that all the people in the Muslim world are disproportionately inherently violent and misogynistic. Right. Because if the words don't have any meaning, then they've just chosen to behave this way. It's got to be something in their DNA. And they're rationalizing it with those words that don't mean anything. And that's bigoted.

Essentially, 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. It's not that they've been misled by some ancient ideology. And you can't fix it, right? 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, like, you know, when we talk about root causes, anytime someone says, Allahu Akbar, if they do something, or they say, Jesus made me do it, we always kind of ignore that. Like, okay, let's ignore that. Let's look beyond it. But when you're looking beyond something, you're never going to see what's in front of you.

Right. So if I tell you I did something, a horrific act, because it was my political beliefs, or because I played a certain video game, or I liked a certain band, or I was pissed off about US foreign policy. You'll take that at face value. Everyone will. The moment anybody says US foreign policy, you know, Reza Aslan, Glenn Greenwald, they'll be like, oh, okay. They said what the cause was.

We should believe them. But way more than US 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 listen to that we don't take that at face value we're like no that's impossible it has to be something beyond it um it's the only thing that we don't believe that you know religion and religious belief can actually do these things they can actually trigger people to act on them. That's almost impossible to fix.

It's a tough thing to fix. There's this one after that. You know about the attack on the school in Pakistan where they killed 140 people and 132 kids. And they just went and there were like seven suicide bombers that just went in and they just took out all those kids in the age 12 to 14 so that shook up the world and um 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 you know he he told me something that just 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. He'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 intikal and then the call actually means transition it doesn't mean end you know 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

on to another world and then he went into more detail he's like uh these kids like you know 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 uh 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 infidel parents. Oh, fuck. And they're not able to sense. And then he said that if, you know, I'm trying to remember all of it because there were 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 he's 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.

He's like, most Muslims, their faith isn't as pure. If they 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. He's like, but they are of poor faith. And, you know, we're 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? You fight it like that scene from Aliens, where he says you got to pull out and nuke it from orbit. So, ever see that scene where aliens where he says you gotta pull out and nuke it from orbit so ever see that scene where it's built axton from what you were saying about the drones yeah it seems like we need to nuke the entire world start fresh with new monkeys no we just so fucked the fact that a human being in 2015 can literally operate and think that way. No, it was absolutely amazing. But it's important to, you know, I was watching this movie and I, no, was it a TV show?

And someone said something where they said the 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 this is 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.

Well, I... Oh, please go on. No, no, I was just saying, I've heard that before. People have told me that since I was a kid. I was raised religiously. You know, that it's not permanent you know this 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 early if they really really thought that they were going to someplace great afterwards it wouldn't be that much of a fear for any of us i mean 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 right these people really know that and they're all too willing to kill themselves and kill others. The Charlie Hebdo thing confused the shit out of me. Not that people were willing to kill people over the cartoons. I kind of already had that idea in my head. But the reaction by a lot of left-wing progressive people in the United States condemning the racism of those cartoons.

I was like, what the fuck are you even talking about? You're talking about a massacre, a horrific, murderous massacre. And you've chose to condemn the quote unquote racism of these cartoons, which, you know, it's like killing the people that write Mad Magazine. I mean, it's not much different you know mad magazine or you know name any sort of controversial south park going after the guys from south park killing south park yeah it's killing matt stone and trey parker i mean it's not much different yeah no i mean what is that that apologist thinking that weird sort of thinking um that's embodied by a lot of those really progressive left-wing, like really radical left-wing people. I think there's a sensitivity to hurting people and hurting their feelings.

Over murder? Over murder, 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 but, 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 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-secularism but when i when i say something i can say it and there's no like it's fine and when he does it he gets lashed and tortured so free speech is a big thing for me so coming here like i just don't think when it comes to the cartoons or the movie the interview people are saying well it's a shitty movie anyway i didn't think i thought it was hilarious

but the you know when they start talking about the content of what is being criticized or attack i just think it's completely irrelevant and the context of what's happening. It doesn't matter what was in the Charlie Hebdo paper. Do you think they're doing that because they're terrified of retribution and they're so terrified that they're willing to side with the murderous religious fundamentalists because they're almost worried

that they're going to get attacked themselves? They're themselves they're like well you know I mean those cartoons were kind of a really racist and they mean I'm not saying the that the murders were cool but I'm saying like hey why why are you promoting like horrible racist cartoons I mean let's look at that well that's where the Islamophobia phobia comes in yeah they have a very certain way of talking. Have you ever noticed? Yeah, they do. These people that are super progressive and super liberal and they have this weird accentuation of certain words. And I mean, I'm not saying that it's cool to murder all those people, but like, let's look at why were they so upset? Yeah. It's, you know, it is what it is is we live in an easy culture it's yeah people are

more upset about it's not yeah there's this uh value the value of freedom of speech okay which i think is extremely important taken for granted very much so by americans and oh yeah very taken for granted i that's something that i and then fessel the guy from iraq i told you about you know he he says the same thing, you know, when he came here, he's like, you know,

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. What does that mean?

That's exactly what it means. Yeah. There's no point of freedom of speech and it means you have the freedom to talk about being offended by that freedom of speech that other person expressed yeah everybody can say 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. Right. Which was why I have a huge issue when people say something that other people deem to be offensive. They automatically go after their employers and try to get them fired.

Like this isn't just a freedom of you're not just speaking about them. Now you're taking action to try to get them fired, which is very different. And this is a very different kind of activism. And it's, it's, it's mean, like what you're doing is like, it's like, there's like, there's a negativity attached to it. That's very strange. It's like, it's an aggressive negativity a rebound from something that you know they believe is incorrect yeah it's very weird that you know we have we have the right they have the right to be offended mm-hmm they

don't have the right not to be offended you know that 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 you should write or counter speech with speech yeah well exactly to it. You can shut it down. Or counter speech with speech. Yeah, well, exactly. Exactly. That's a very good way of putting it. Counter speech with speech. Counter freedom with freedom. If you don't like the way someone expresses themselves, talk about the way they express themselves and what specifically you find incorrect about it.

And that's how dialogues get started. And, you know, people become illuminated by those sort of dialogues. Even people that have opposing ideas. You can see where a person comes from. Even if you don't have opposing ideas. You can see where a person comes from. Even if you don't agree with it, you can see where a person comes from. You know, there's this, we also talked about hate speech, because I think one of the biggest problems with France and Europe is, and a lot of European countries, is that they have laws against hate speech. In 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. Yeah. You know, like remember the Westboro Baptist Church ruling where the Supreme Court voted 8-1 to allow them to picket funerals. And as much as that idea is abhorrent, or anything the Westboro Baptist Church does is abhorrent, that is their 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 in france they've got holocaust denial laws they have uh rules against

uh you know attacking uh you know like the let me put it this way. The very same things, same rules that their hate speech laws were actually used by the government at times to warn Charlie Hebdo. Like, you know, what you're doing is you're engaging in 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, impinge on gay rights, for instance. Like all of those same things, the same hate speech laws were used to warn the Charlie Hebdo people. I mean, they had that fashion designer who was arrested for anti-Semitic remarks that he made in a bar. Right. Amazing. for anti-Semitic remarks that he made in a bar.

Right. Yeah. Amazing. 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. When I look at the apologists, especially in America,

I often wonder whether or not it's it's a case of people it's like very similar to people like almost like winning the lottery becoming spoiled and not appreciating the earning of that money or someone who inherited millions of dollars and you usually find them all fucked up and drunk and they get become drug addicts it's like they have they're so spoiled they're so spoiled by this freedom that they don't appreciate it's almost like you we've had so much freedom and it's gone on for so long with no consequences that until you see you actually see personally the effects of those consequences of free speech you don't appreciate free speech for what it really truly is like you, you may disagree with someone,

but if you disagree with their ability to express themselves, you're a part of the problem. Yeah. Yeah, I agree with all of that. Yeah, I mean, you might think those, I think those cartoons are stupid as fuck. I wouldn't draw them.

I wouldn't waste my time drawing those cartoons. I think they suck. It's not my culture. I don't get it. Maybe if I spoke French and I understood where they were coming from, I would think it would be funnier. But to think that there's something wrong with them doing it to the point where you're bringing that up

instead of a mass murder on a magazine, shooting the cartoonists, and the thing you want to discuss is like, well, those cartoons are really racist. Yes, the merit of the content you want to discuss is like well those cartoons are really racist 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 i mean there's and i've you know there's this idea that supposing you know we said that the cartoons were hate speech and they were criticizing an ideology that a lot of people found that 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 and you

know the people are sensitive about so supposing you had that you know again you know sort of uh even the competition there you know pull out the they used to lampoon religions all the religions it wasn't just islam so you know pull out Bible, pull out the Quran, open it up to certain things. And, you know, there's more hate speech in those books than there could ever be in the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. Like there's, if you're talking about incitement to violence, you know, killing infidels, apostates, you know, go to Deuteronomy. And if you go to Deuteronomy 20, and you read it, it reads like an ISIS rule book. It says, you know, go into the land, you know, put the sword to all of the men, you take the women and the children as slaves. I mean, that's exactly what

it says. And then in the Quran 47.3, it says the exact same thing. Well, why is it then? What is it about radical Islam where they don't just have that written, but take that and use it in a form of practice, whereas radical Christian fundamentalists very rarely go out and kill gays. They very rarely, you know. Yeah, they did do it for a long time. At one point in time. At one position during. Yeah. So they did. So it was,

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 to, you know, several centuries ago. I'm like,

yeah. And how would you have reacted when that was happening then? That's the same way you have to approach what's happening now with Islam, because, you know, they're going through the same thing. The books are really not that different. Like the new Testament's a little nicer like in the

New Testament that all the torture begins after you die it's like Old Testament's only during your life Quran it's a bit of both but well how did Christianity rise above how did they get past that into this lesser retarded stage that they're at right now it's'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, complete religious freedom for everybody. But at the same time, it separates that from politics. So it allows a 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 know, 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 people can actually have that conversation, and they can 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 inerrancy. You have to stop taking the Quran literally. Not just justifying the stuff that's in there we're 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 because christians did it what what becomes the basis of your ideology then and it seems like people want an ideology they want to have some sort of a very rigid set of rules and patterns of behavior that they're expected to follow and if those aren't coming from God then

they're coming from man if they're coming from man they're open to dispute and that becomes the issue with a lot of people so much so that they're willing to accept these ideas that were written down that are preposterous if proposed today. Like the ancient writings and stories from the Bible, from the Old Testament especially. If you try to say today that you found a book and that this book was written last week by God and he wanted me to read it to you. And apparently, fuck all these scientists, there was actually just two people. It was Adam and Eve. And that's where people came from.

And Eve actually came from Adam's rib. So that bitch is super lucky. She fucked up the whole thing because she talked to the snake and she ate an apple. And the snake told her, eat the apple. But everybody, God said, don't eat the apple. She ate the snake. And so because that, we're fucked. And they realized they were naked.

And then people go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. Shut the fuck up. Get out of here. Just stop it right there. Just get out of here, dummy. Who taught you about life? But see, when you say all of that stuff, and when we were talking about Mormonism and Scientology earlier, I mean, this stuff sounds so much more insane than Mormonism and Scientology.

It's right up there. Well, the Scientology stuff is pretty fucking insane. No, that is pretty insane. The whole thing about the Thetans and, you know, you're fucking from a volcano or some shit. They drop your soul in a volcano. This is really, I mean, this is, but this stuff is just as. It's all nutty. It's all obviously fiction.

All obviously fiction. All obviously fiction. And the more we become illuminated about the actual true nature of matter, of biological life, the process of atoms and the subatomic particles. And when we get deeper and deeper into the very nature of reality itself, the more we can explain, the less religion becomes valid. itself, the more we can explain, the less religion becomes valid. And the more it becomes pretty obvious that someone in a very distant time where there was no science and there was no base of knowledge where it had been accumulated over thousands of years of people slowly but surely measuring things and figuring things out and coming up with newer and better ways to measure things that were based on the discoveries of people before them. And we're all, all of us, I mean, the reason why we celebrate guys like Isaac of people before them and we're all all of us i mean the reason why we celebrate guys like isaac newton or darwin is because we've all piggybacked on their

discoveries and and and learned more and every scientist and every biologist and every anthropologist has dug up bones we've added another little piece to this puzzle that's constantly evolving and growing and changing and then something like religion comes along that says stop all this fucking learning cut it out I mean the very idea of it is anti-progress because you're supposed to rely on some old ancient shit it's like going back to when Galileo was imprisoned or Copernicus was was chastised going back to when these people were thought of as enemies of God because they had these crazy ideas that we today accept as fact, measurable fact, undeniable fact. They work. And it's also the process.

I mean, what's at the heart of religion is infallibility, like the idea that this can this you know this can't change that's immutable so you have infallibility on the other hand with science the heart of scientific inquiry is falsifiability which means you know like 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 Right. You know, and with faith, it's different. You start with the conclusion. You're like, this is my conclusion. I don't need evidence for it. Now I'm going to work backwards and see what I can do to strengthen my belief.

You know, it's two completely different dynamics. Yeah. I mean, the idea that the two of them can coincide, it seems less and less viable as time goes on. Yeah, just the basics, when you look at the basics, the way that they work. And it also seems like as time goes on, because of these ideas being less and less compatible, the opposing factions, science and religion, are more vehemently opposed to each other. They're more aggressive about their denial or they're more aggressive about their

non-accepting of these fundamentalist ideas. Scientists today are more aggressive about their ideas that atheism is the way to go and that these religious fundamentalist ideas that are being pushed on people are a form of ideological poison. They fuck with the mind because they give the mind these very rigid patterns that you're expected to adhere to and conform to. And if you do not, I mean, the idea of like, if you don't believe or you fall out of faith, you're supposed to have your head removed. I mean, that should tell you right there. What do you think?

You think with your fucking head. Well, you've been thinking too much. So we're gonna cut your fucking head off You don't think you need to abide by this shit that was written down on parchment 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 gonna fuck up our party Yeah, there's a 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 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. Yeah. And they all,

they cheer when there's reprisal for these attacks these verbal attacks on there i mean there's people that cheered when those guys were murdered oh yeah there's people that cheered all the time like in uh where i grew up people used to celebrate it all the time i mean like educated people they wouldn't say it to like within our own living room we're sitting there are you know educated uncles and aunts who had you know been overseas and they'd studied overseas they came back you know when uh something like 9-11 would happen or you know you kind of attack against america would happen 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 and be like you know yeah this is terrible we condemn it 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 but alone in your house they were yeah a lot of times yeah really well they certainly not particularly in my house but extended family family friends I mean just on a daily basis, we're surrounded by it. I mean, when the Salman Rushdie fatwa 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.

Whoa. Yeah. Killing a guy who wrote a book. Yeah. And not even a good book. Yeah, 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 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 well you need to be interested in it but it's just bizarre because i mean it's not even specifically about muhammad right i mean the the the atomic verses is satan it is kind of it is about muhammad's life sort of the satanic verses where i guess 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. It was like these three idol gods. And, you know, okay, fine. We can respect that or people that, you know, follow them.

They're okay. And then later on, he's like, no, no, that was Satan talking to me. It wasn't God. So those were the satanic verses. Right. So they didn't end up being part of the Quran. And that's where Salman Rushdie got the idea. So it was based on an actual documented piece of sort of Islamic history.

And he did, he changed the name of Muhammad and he had a lot of similar elements. It was symbolic of his life. So because he changed the name, he thought he was going to be okay? 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 and, you know, sort of different time settings.

And he thought it would be okay because he had fictional characters, because he didn't mention Muhammad by name. I don't know if he thought it would be okay because he had fictional characters, because he didn't mention Muhammad by name. I don't know if he thought it would be okay. I knew, I mean, I think that he knew that there would be some backlash. I didn't think at the time, I'm not sure if he really thought that he would have to go under hiding for 10 years. He probably would have never wrote it. I mean, is he okay now? Is he allowed to just go anywhere now?

Did they ever release or relieve him? I don't know if he travels with armed 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 under hiding in 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 right you know like I there's a lot of people who are talking about or writing about it it's all online so that process has

started so in that way you know a little bit optimistic the fact that some honesty can really show up a talk Joe's shows you see him everywhere he does public speeches he does debates you know i wonder what it's like if he does like the bill marshall i wonder what kind of security they have yeah i don't know i'm not sure i wouldn't want to be there to see it in person yeah because you know you wouldn't want to be there the day it goes down well you know ayaan hershey ali she does travel with armed yeah does she i know Yeah, that's pretty well known. So she still does.

And 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. like a secular activist whenever anybody wants to send me hate mail hate messages they'll always you know sort of argue with me they'll be like you're bullshit everything you're saying it sucks you know are you gonna go to hell or you know you should get your head chopped off whatever it is you know they'll say things like that but with her it's always a sexual thing. The threats that she gets are... Rape threats. Rape threats, all kinds of things that they would do. Yeah.

And she'll get hundreds of them. Hundreds? Yeah, hundreds. Now, what do you do when you get those? Do you report those to the FBI? Do you save them? Do you document them? 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 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 she had some argument with some some of the people who opposed him and uh 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 like i can't talk too much about right what happened yeah um but and most of the time they come from like overseas and 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 it is for men because there's this idea especially among conservative cultures and a lot of the muslim culture is that if 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 anything. She'll drink. She'll have sex. Crazy bitch. Yeah, exactly. How dare she drink and have sex? She's trying to be like an American?

Exactly. That's how they measure morality. Like there is 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 in miniskirts. Drinks, sex, sex. Yeah things like that Unbelievable well, but they don't think of the murder and the martyrdom and all those things are virtuous They actually think that those things are good. It's so backwards. It's so

It's so I mean the word archaic I keep using it, but that really is the word It's it's such an ancient version of thinking and this it's almost like an operating system that's so outdated like you're trying to fuck with dos like you're trying to like you know what i mean you're trying to like get on twitter but you're only using dos it's like god damn yeah the operating system of fundamental religion is so fucking broken i know and they a lot of times they think that they have the updated software we have the most we have the most recent religion you know like islam came after christianity it came after um and then we had this great civilization so and which they did

at one point and why are we in such bad shape i all of the world? So that's frustrating. Sorry, I watched a speech once where this guy was talking about, he was asking questions or the audience was asking questions about certain aspects of Islam and how do they know whether, you know, if one religion says one thing but Islam says another. And his answer was, it's very simple because Islam is the truth. And everybody starts clapping i'm like wow that's uh that's uh that's hilarious yeah it's hilarious that's what we should look into is uh like you know there there is precedent for this like you know like we were

talking about the holy books earlier and the holy books are very similar a lot of the stuff is uh like in the the old testament actually mentions stoning non-original brides to death the quran 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 abhorrent but how is it that you you know, 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. And what is the answer to that?

I think that, like, and this is one of the things I'm exploring in my book. I think, like, with Jews and with Christians, they were able to like have a genuine reformation where they're able to bond and come together on a sense of community rather than ideology. Like, you know, if you're, 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. Right. You did this, you eat bacon or whatever., but nobody's ever going to say, okay, you're not a Jew anymore. Right.

Because you did this, you eat bacon or whatever. With Christians, again, we're talking about the Catholics, right? A lot of them are pro-choice, they'll do that. They'll still end up going to church. But you can't be an atheist Christian. Technically, you can't be an atheist Christian. Not even technically. If you tell Christians that you're an atheist, they'll look at you like you're just shit on a plate.

They are not interested in hearing that. There's a strong faction of Christianity, fundamentalist faction of Christianity, that they're incredibly upset at the word atheist or atheism. No, it's a very bad word. They actually think of atheists as worse than

rapists. I was reading that. They had a survey on who you despise most. People actually think atheists are worse than rapists. But at the same time, you don't get... You don't get murders. You don't get murdered. And you don't even get excommunicated from the community just because you use condoms. No one's going to say, okay, 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, they if they're able to focus instead on instead of the ideology focus on the community you know we were saying that the identity of you know going to church you know having your own family and friends and you know that sort of communal right atmosphere that religious belonging to a religious group gives you which Which is a benefit for a lot of people. That sense of community is so huge.

For a comfort to people, providing people with this group that they can rely upon and they feel connected to and joined with. There's a lot of benefit to that. The idea that it has to be attached to some archaic belief system to some ridiculous old shit that was written down when people had a very poor understanding of

reality very poor like and that's what's really bizarre about the islamic religion is that at one point in time you know in the early you know, in the early, you know, just like the 1200s and before, Islam was at the forefront of science and philosophy and writing. I mean, it was one of the Islamic world, the Muslim world was one of the more advanced cultures on earth. 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 Matazalites, which was a very sort of open-minded, very progressive sect of Muslims.

You know, and so a lot of those things happened not because of Islam, but despite it. Even back then? Yeah, even back then. Yeah. Even back then. It's always been like that. I mean, Newton was a religious Christian because, you know, at the time he was like a virgin though, too. Wasn't he really weird? Yeah. He was a, he was a virgin. He didn't, um, like at that time there was no evolution. Like nobody knew about evolution. It was pre Darwin and everything. So there's a lot of things he didn't know. If he had known, he may not have been, uh. We can't speculate on that.

But, I mean, he was a religious Christian, but we don't identify his achievements as Christian achievements. Right. I see what you're saying. We don't identify, like, Albert Einstein's achievements as something, as Jewish. And he wasn't even, Albert Einstein wasn't even religious. Einstein 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, this is something that is more of a testament to science and to free thinking than it is to the religion itself. They just happen to be Muslims. That's similar to the fact that Darwin, when he was proposing his theories, the predominant scientific community was Christian. Most of the people that he told his ideas to were in opposition of these ideas initially because it went opposite of their Christian beliefs like yeah we think of scientists today as being almost universally secular or at least the the ones that we pay attention to

and respect we think of them as having at the very least an agnostic religious base but back then there were predominantly Christian yeah a lot of them they were and in America and you a lot of them. They were. In America and, you know. Everywhere. And I think what we do is we sometimes look at it the other way around. When you had all that scientific progress happening in 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 of these uh 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 you know they just happen to be muslim that's why they're doing it but at that time we actually attribute it 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 verses five to seven it says that um man was created from a fluid ejected between the backbone and the ribs. So essentially it's saying that semen or sperm was created in the chest. The backbone and the ribs? The backbone and the ribs.

It's 86 by 7. It could be like the belly, right? It could be like this rib. Yeah, I mean, you can broaden it and you can try to justify it. It could be like where your liver, the lower ribs. Do you think so? Yeah, it could be. I think it's just the testes, man. It could be.

It could be all sorts. That seems like a pretty vague... There's a lot of ribs. It's like saying Chicago's in the Western Hemisphere. Yeah. But you miss the Western Hemisphere because this is really... There's absolutely no scientific basis to that whatsoever. It's just flat out wrong. But it doesn't have any, the Quran doesn't necessarily, it's not conducive to, you know, robust scientific inquiry.

Right. Right. But it is unfortunately linked, like, you know, the words of the Quran, the scripture, it is linked to a lot of the violence that you see see a lot of the subjugation of women that you see um and that connection is something that should be acknowledged that's islamophobic how dare you there you go i'm a racist you are you're racist against yourself you son of a b how gross and racist just like gross as well yeah ben. Ben Affleck. Oh yeah, that's right. He was a silly boy. Yeah. That Ben Affleck thing was pretty weird, huh?

I think he was just trying to get brownie points though. I really do. It's just that on that show, like the fact that that happened, it was, it was such outrage everywhere. Yeah. Like I just noticed that when someone says something like that,

or if there's a Quran burned or a cartoon's drawn, this is like a lot of outrage. But it's just not the kind of thing you see when people burn people alive or shoot them. Yeah. Then you get hashtags. When Boko Haram, like you know about Boko Haram? Mm-hmm. Killing 2,000 people, kidnapping all those schoolgirls.

Yeah. You get hashtags and things. You don't get the kind of outcry that you get over cartoons. Yeah. Well, that get hashtags and things. You don't get the kind of outcry that you get over cartoons. Yeah. Well, that was in Africa, too. And we have a way of just going, ah, it's over there. You know, like Darfur. Yeah.

It's like 500,000 people killed by an Arab, the Janjaweed militia. We could go on and on and on forever, right? Yeah, we could. Yeah. Before I get too depressed, let's end this. Yeah. When will your book be available? I'm still working on it right now.

We're in the middle of negotiating, 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 looking forward to it I think the timeline is probably I would say about a year that's like my personal goal

well let me know when it's done and it's out and let's do this again man this is great give people your twitter address what is your twitter address? twitter address is aliamjadrizvi

it's A-L-I-A-M-J-A-D-R-I-Z-V-I and a website they can go to as well? A website, you can just Google it. And I've got Huffington Post archives. So it's just huffingtonpost.com slash Ali hyphen A hyphen Rizvi. Great conversation, man. I really appreciate it. It was a lot of fun.

Yeah. Thank you. I don't want to say fun, stimulating, depressing at times, but educational. Well, at least it's enlightening. Yes, very enlightening. You've got to have a diagnosis before you get into management. A diagnosis is not the fun part. Yeah, exactly.

Well, thank you, brother. Appreciate it. Yeah, thank you.