Today, Explained - Know your enemy (Part II)

Episode Date: July 5, 2019

When people see Deeyah Khan's documentary about white supremacists they tell her, "The real problem is jihad. You should spend time with jihadists." She says, "I did." Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

On the last episode of Today Explained, I spoke with Dia Han. She's the documentary filmmaker behind White Right Meeting the Enemy. If you haven't heard it yet, go listen to it and come back when you're finished. If you're finished, in White Right, Dia bravely confronts a bunch of white supremacists. And believe it or not, some people watch it and feel like singling them out is unfair. You know, people who've seen white rights come back to me and they go, oh yeah, well, we don't see you, you know, it's easy. That's not really a big problem. The real big problem is Muslim extremists. And, you know, I don't see you doing that. So, you know,

and then you pull out this other documentary you made. Well, that I did first. Yeah. There you go. Well, here you go. Here yeah here's my id okay so let's talk about jihad a story of the others in this one you sat down with jihadists to find out what was fueling them yeah what were you looking for there just a simple answer to that question i was looking for any answer that would make me get closer to why it is that people who were born and raised in the West like me would go off into foreign battlefields and be willing to sacrifice themselves for a cause that isn't even really truly theirs. Being a woman, being a Muslim woman, I have been on the receiving end of death threats from Muslim extremists as well for many, many, many, many

years. I left Norway because of death threats from Muslim extremists in the for many, many, many, many years. I left Norway because of death threats from Muslim extremists in the past. And after many, many, many years, I finally sort of just, you know, got myself together and thought, okay, I'm tired of being afraid. And I have to make a decision in my life. Am I going to spend the rest of my life being scared? Or do I take back some control of my life? And at that point is when I thought, okay, this is kind of my biggest boogeyman. This is the thing that I've been afraid of my whole life, these guys who have wished me dead and who have come very close to attacking me in the past. I need to figure out if there is any ounce of humanity there.

In White Right, you talked to white supremacists in the United States. What approach did you take with jihad? I spoke to active and former jihadis in England. So my interest wasn't why somebody in Pakistan joins a jihadi group. My interest was why are we seeing this phenomenon rising and expanding in the way that it is amongst Western Muslims? Who grew up in Western culture. Exactly. Where some of the socioeconomic arguments sort of don't fit, you know, because it's just not the same dynamics as in Palestine or Pakistan or anywhere else. And the reason I chose England is that the UK has been at the center of kind of the expansion

of the Western Jihad. But I wanted to find out, you know, what is it? Why does this make any sense to a Western-born Muslim? And surprisingly, now having done both films, I found a lot of the same things. I found a lot of brokenness. I mean, I was looking for monsters, I guess. I mean, you know, both movements have this thing of, you know, they think that they're going to change the world. They think that they are warriors of God. And there's something very intoxicating about this when our culture, our Western culture doesn't really provide a right that we talked about last episode which was like i was shunned and spurned as a kid yeah humiliation yeah which to hear that after hearing shit skin it's just like these are the exact same thing same thing it's exactly the same two sides coin. Exactly. And it's a lot of the same hurt in a way.

People who are made to feel like they're not good enough, and especially on the jihadi side of it, all of the men that I spoke to consistently fell between all the sides. They would say that I was never Pakistani enough or Muslim enough. When I'm in England, I'm Paki. And when I go to Pakistan, they're like, oh, you're British. They're calling me British. So I really feel like I belong on an airplane, just somewhere in between, just hovering. That's where I belong. Like that's the middle ground. And so what am I, you know, and who wants to live with the feeling of never being good enough, no matter what you do. And one of the men even says, he's like, look, I had the white girlfriend. I spoke English perfectly. I was doing well in

school and I was doing this, this, this, this, this. I grew up in a white working class community. I had no interest in Islam whatsoever. I hated being brown. I had my white girlfriends and then middle class parents saying, oh, but you'll have mongrel children. Still, I'm just a Paki. I mean, Paki is like a derogatory term for Pakistani people. I know it well. You know it well. From my childhood.

Unfortunately, me too, yeah. The kids in Toronto didn't understand the nuance between being Pakistani and being Sri Lankan, so I was just a Paki. My dad was a taxi driver. My house smelled like curry. Same thing, yeah. Even though my parents always opened the windows

and we cooked and lit candles because they didn't want the house to smell like curry. To smell like curry. They just assumed the house smelled like curry. Same thing, yeah. Even though my parents always opened the windows and we cooked and lit candles because they didn't want the house to smell like curry. They just assumed the house smelled like curry. Yeah. You couldn't win. And that's the thing, feeling like you will never win. And then you have this charismatic,

brilliant recruiter that comes along. Al-Qur'anu dasturuna. The Qur'an is our constitution. Wal-jihadu tariquuna. The jihad is our way. And to die, to seek death and martyrdom in the path of Allah is our highest ambition or our goal. Abu Monteser. Yeah.

And one of the men even says it in the film. He said, you know, suddenly somebody puts their arm around you and says, you're okay. They were offering something which, you know, I never had before, a family understanding, belonging. This is where the journey starts. And not only are you okay, but you can be a part of this thing, this brotherhood. I care about you. All these other people care about you and you can do something that is great. You can do something that actually really matters. This man was famous, famous to the point he was infamous. I had to meet this Abu Muntasir and I made it my mission to track him down.

It's incredibly powerful for somebody who feels powerless to suddenly be seen and to suddenly feel like they're accepted, not just tolerated on the bus by somebody who clutches their purse closer to them because a brown guy walked on the bus, but truly, truly accepted. And the only thing that is required of you is that you be a Muslim. And that's it. It doesn't matter if you're brown, black, red, white, man, woman. It doesn't matter. Just as long as you're a Muslim, that's enough.

Because a lot of people think that this movement is about hate and it's about violence. But the draw and the appeal of it is not that. I mean, when the recruiters are spending time with these young people, they're not saying, hey, would you like to come and cut the heads off people? That's not what they're doing. What they're doing is they build loyalty. They build real relationships with these people. I mean, some of these guys spend hundreds of hours recruiting just one person. Imagine somebody who feels insignificant and small suddenly has somebody who's giving them that much attention, that much caring, that much empathy. Also, you know, some of the men that I talked to had really problematic relationships with their fathers. And then you have, again, this charismatic, brilliant recruiter that comes along who shows you love, who's not judgmental,

who's willing to talk to you about relationships and about girls and about the difficulties in your life and about feelings of discrimination and racism. And you think about it, at the height of ISIS, for these types of guys to suddenly be in a group that the most powerful men in the world, like Obama and Putin, having to pay attention to you and having to figure out how they're going to take you, I mean, how intoxicating that must feel. I mean, a lot of these people, because they look at the world in such a black and white way, you know, they look at either this, a kind of a righteous path of trying to change the world,

versus being a consumer. A lot of people don't want to just be a consumer. That thing is never satisfied. It's never enough. Dia, one of the most surprising things about your other documentary, White Right, that we talked about last episode is discovering how broken and sad and lonely some of these white supremacists are. I mean, you assume that of any human, of course, but to see them be that vulnerable with you is very shocking and very surprising.

In Jihad, I'm watching someone like Alias, and he's just laughing, he's so full of life, he's this exuberant jihadist. You're in a circle, and you get out some brown envelopes, and you would give it to certain people, and you're wishing, oh, I wish I could get a brown envelope. And if you didn't get an envelope, you felt like shit. Honestly, you felt absolute shit. Oh, fucking hell, I've got one of these envelopes.

And all these other guys have got these envelopes, yeah. Oh, tell me what's in the envelope. What's in the envelope? You chose the ones where you have the envelopes. You have the envelopes. We are in the inner circle. You're in the outer circle. It's just playing silly games with people.

And I'm just like, this guy seems so likable. Like, you want to, like, go get a beer with him, but he probably would kill you if you said, do you want to go get a beer? Like, were you surprised? It's maybe the wrong thing. By how bubbly this jihadist was? Yeah, in both films and i feel kind of strange saying it because it sort of says something about my own kind of prejudices too but the biggest shock was how fun how interesting how likable how strange how just how human everything

that it means to be human these guys possess all all of that. And that isn't cherry picking. You didn't just go with the people who were the most human. No. These were just the people you spoke to. These are just the people that I spoke to. Now, you also have to remember that it is self-selecting to the extent that these are the people who are willing to speak to me as well. But, you know, to me, the only view I've had of these men on both sides of these movements is they're just monsters. And that's not to say that their actions aren't monstrous. Of course, their actions are monstrous.

But the human being didn't used to be that. What extremist movements so brilliantly and actively and cynically do on both sides, whether it's white supremacists or the jihadi side of it, is that they exploit these vulnerabilities that young people have. They take it and then they redirect it into their own political causes and their own hate. They give them a channel. Because I remember sitting with the jihadis and they were talking about, you know, I went through this, I experienced racism, I went through this and this and this. And I remember sitting there finding myself agreeing, going, yeah, me too, me too. And they're describing their lives and more than half of it I've lived

and I've experienced as well. And then I remember also sitting there just thinking sort of obsessively going, okay, so what is it that makes me pick up a camera and he picks up a gun with the same experiences, the same slaps from society and from within our own communities. So what is that? And the only thing that I can find, truly, it is who shows up. When you are at your most vulnerable, at your most broken, at your most desperate, at your most transitional point of your life. If it is somebody loving and caring and supportive, a good friend, a family person, somebody who's willing to see you at that point in time, or if it is somebody who comes and exploits it. And I mean, this is another film that I'm about to do now, and I shouldn't even really be talking about it, but I'm going to mention it because

I'm finding the same thing. It's not just extremist groups, you know, gangs do the same thing. Street gangs do exactly the same thing. They offer you protection, they offer you safety, they offer you belonging, they offer you all the things that we all so desperately crave at different points in our lives. That says something about us as a society, more so than it says about any of these guys. I get that answer throughout both films that these people didn't have the right role models. They didn't have someone there to say, don't worry about this bullshit you're experiencing now. It's going to be okay.

Everything's going to be okay. You'll have opportunities. But I wonder, as I was thinking that watching these documentaries, if that was too simple an answer to a very complicated and difficult question. It is complicated. I mean, I don't want to oversimplify it. Yeah. For me, the reason I revolve around the kind of human and emotional and psychological aspects of this so much is because that's what I'm the most interested in. But of course, there are other layers and other dynamics involved in both movements. You know, there is the socioeconomic

and political layers of all of this. And on the jihadi side, there is obviously, you know, Western foreign policy and what it has done and the way Muslim countries are being obliterated with bombs made in the USA. It all obviously plays a part in all of this. And what these movements so brilliantly do

is that they take the personal grievances and the personal pain and the personal suffering of an individual and help connect it to a larger suffering population. And that's how you get someone like Zacharias saying, My dream is to see the American empire fall. And I mean that, I genuinely mean that, for all the harm that they've done to civilizations, to people, to communities, to countries. And he means it with every single part of himself.

We all are angry. We're all angry about the fact that we are being victimized, that we're being stopped and searched at airports and being forced to give in our DNAs simply because we walk in with a thaw ball with a beard. Or that we're being stopped and searched in the street for being black and wearing a hoodie. In order for us to be more effective as a society in providing alternatives and also in preventing people being drawn into these movements, we absolutely have to understand the emotional

and psychological and human needs of these men. So we have to understand that layer and we have to address that. Struct structural racism has to be addressed. And just inequality. But bombing this out of people is not going to help. It isn't going to fix it. And this kind of exclusionary mindset also isn't going to do it. I mean, if there's anything I've learned from these films, I know what it feels like to be dehumanized. What that has taught me is that I'm not willing to do that to somebody else. Even if they don't deserve my respect, I still refuse to view them or treat them any less than human.

Because otherwise there's not much difference between me and people like that. We're going to have to find a way to live together. We're going to have to, even with people that we dislike. If we don't, the alternative is violence. But obviously, it's very hard to talk about this and to even engage in any of this when we've got our politicians who are indulging in nothing but, you know, finding the flames of resentment and fear and deepening divides between people. That's every other episode of the show, actually.

That's what we talk about. But that's why we have to resist that, because that is what the climate is becoming everywhere now. Do you remember when ISIS, they used to have a magazine, maybe they still have it, called Dabiq, and they dedicated a huge piece on something that they called the gray zone. And what they called the gray zone was all of us. It's all the people in the middle. They wanted the gray zone to be done away with. Their enemy is not white supremacists. And same, white supremacist enemy is not necessarily the jihadis. It's us in the middle who actually want this to work. And that's why they always target us as well. Pluralism and diversity is the enemy of both of them. Is there a way to target these individuals on a bigger scale? I mean, you doing one-on-one interviews with white supremacists or jihadists and reaching some consensus or having some sort of transcendent moment is one thing. But how do countries make sure that cells of jihadists don't crop up or white supremacists for that matter?

How do you scale this sort of understanding upwards? I think that the top level of this, you know, obviously there has to be political solutions to it. So when it comes to people being left behind economically, we as citizens need to ensure that we vote in the types of people who will actually actively do something about that. On a societal level, when you look at what the extremist movements do, it is one-on-one. It is one person spending a lot of time with another person. Because a lot of people have said to me, well, it's not scalable what you're doing. And if the extremists are able to do that, then I think we can also do it. I think us taking the steps to engage and encounter each other is important. And obviously, also the systemic racism that is

absolutely entrenched within a lot of our structures. So it's like an uphill battle on an uphill battle on an uphill battle, because they're over there going, listen, the problem is the Jews. And on this side, you got to say, listen, the problem is the Jews. And on this side, you got to say, listen, the problem is much more complicated. We have this equality fight. We have this justice fight. We have to elect different leaders. We need social programs. Yes, we need all of those things, but it is also simple. And the simplicity part of it is, it is just about human connection. One-on-one should not be underestimated. All of the ex-Nazis or ex-jihadis that I've spoken to, the only reason any of them left was because of a one-on-one connection.

And then one layer that we're forgetting, because we're saying politics and then our individual interactions with each other, but I think the other middle really, really important layer is also media. I think how we tell stories about each other is vital. If the only stories you ever hear about people who look like me and you is that we're either terrorists or we're criminals or we're rapists, no wonder that some person who lives in Texas somewhere who's never met, never had any kind of interaction with anyone like us, thinks that that's all we are. And I have to be completely honest, at the beginning of both films, I was very, very, very pessimistic about where we're headed. But I have to say that leaving both films, I actually feel that something different, something better is possible. In order to allow for that to happen, I think we cannot give up on people. It doesn't matter if they deserve that or not. We have to choose who we are in all of this. And we have to hold on to our own humanity. Otherwise, we've lost everything. Diahan's documentary Jihad, A Story of the Others, is out now. And in case you missed our last episode, we broke down Diaz's other film, White Rites Meeting the Enemy,

which you can also check out now. I'm Sean Ramos for him. This is Today Explained. Thank you.