TRIGGERnometry - Ayaan Hirsi Ali: The Growing Threat of Radical Islam

Episode Date: May 26, 2024

Watch the Munk Debate - Douglas Murray vs Mehdi Hassan: Is Anti-Zionism Antisemitism? Live June 17th. Join today to live stream. Click here: https://bit.ly/munk_debate Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born human rights activist, writer and former politician. To escape an arranged marriage, she sought political asylum in the Netherlands at the age of 23. In her early 30s, she renounced the Islamic faith of her childhood and began identifying as an atheist, becoming an outspoken critic of Islam in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. In late 2023, Ayaan shocked many by announcing her conversion to Christianity. She has recently launched a new platform, Restoration, which aims to unite and equip those who want to restore the confidence and institutions of the West. Find out more on the Restoration Substack: https://www.restorationbulletin.com/ SPONSOR: Express VPN. Go to https://www.expressvpn.com/trigger/ and get an extra 3 months free on a one-year package! Join our Premium Membership for early access, extended and ad-free content: https://triggernometry.supercast.com OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube: @xentricapc  Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/#mailinglist Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https:/ /www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

I think we're in a worse place today than we were in 2001. And so it is for me a bit of a nightmare that Europe is resembling the sorts of streets and places that I left. When you have a scenario where violent, radical white supremacists face off with radical Islamist jihadis, then it's not Europe anymore. How do you deal with it without becoming the thing you don't want to become? IAN Horseli, welcome back to the show. It's so good to have you back. I don't want to waste any time at all.

You are someone who's been talking about one issue for a very long time, which was Islamism and Islam. And the other issue about which you're increasingly talking about is Christianity and the role of faith and society as well. I want to start with the first of those two, because since the days after 9-11, which feels like it was a different world, when it was a different world,

you've been trying to raise the alarm. You've risked your life. Friends of yours have been murdered because they were talking about the same thing. Where are we in relation to that issue in Western Europe, the United States, the West more generally? Well, thank you very much for having me first.

It's a lovely to be here. Again, I think for the same. second time. Where are we on the threats of radical political Islam? I think we're in a worse place today than we were in 2001. We've spent trillions of dollars in a lot of blood. And I think we have come, I'm coming to the conclusion. What is wrong with our Western leaders? do we have some kind of curse on us that prevents us from seeing the determination of the radical political Islamists who want to spread their message, which ultimately is the establishment of an Islamic state based on Sharia law? So initially, with 2001, the news broke with those Islamists who wanted to accomplish the objective of,

establishing an Islamic state through violence. We took passenger planes, they knocked down the twin towers, they were on their way to knocking down the White House, and they managed to knock a win of the Pentagon, and they didn't want to stop this. They wanted to use jihad as a means of shock and awe, and we, I think, got trapped by, if you remember, it's probably too young to remember that, but it was quite spectacular and it was history changing. And the reaction from the United States and the rest of the West was to meet them with force. Because of the military supremacy of the United States of America, the rest of the West, it was relatively easy to subdue and eliminate the structures of Al-Qaeda to bring down Osama bin Laden as their leader.

And when out of that group, a new group, through Al-Zargawi, the Islamic State emerged and hijacked territory, captured territory in Iraq and Syria, we did the same thing again. We were confronted with this determination of these groups to use brutal force, and they were met with military deterrence. They were removed. There is no structure called the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria anymore. But what over the years we have failed to see is the other side, the Dawa side. So not the jihadists, but within the Islamist political groups, there is, in my view, much stronger, more insidious, more sinister group, which tries to expand and reach that objective of establishing an Islamic state through Dawa. And Dawa is basically the plan.

It is to bring Muslims, those people who identify as Muslim, to transform them from just religious people, people who identify with the faith, but who are not political, into political tools for the objective. And then take it one step further and convert non-Muslims. And on top of that, to Islamize institutions, It's a long-time plan. It's gradual.

There is a hybrid form. There are some people within the Islamist circles who say, we should use the gradualist means, and then when the opportunity is right, we should use force. So all of these three flavors, if you will, of Islamizing society, working towards this objective, of a Sharia-based society, be it local, regional, or global. They exist.

They're expanding. And we are standing by and watching this happen in traditionally non-Muslim territories, in traditionally Christian or Judeo-Christian societies. We've seen them make attempts like this in India. Again, watch the pushback there. In China, the way the Chinese government is dealing with Islamist sedition, is absolutely abhorrent, and that is something we in the West can only condemn. We do not want to take our Muslim communities and put them in camps and enslave them,

torture them, rape them, sterilize them. These are against every principle we believe in. And looking at that extreme of what the Chinese, Communist parties doing to the Uyghurs. And then looking at the other side of, you know, when the Islamists use violence, we're going to go after those individuals who use violence and their organizations and put that down but do nothing else about the spread of the ideology. I think we have opened ourselves up for the establishment of a huge infrastructure of that

And so it's like a cancer. The Islamist message and the agents of Da'a, the Islamists who are pushing it, are in our education system. They have their own schools and Islamic centers and mosques and madrasas. They've now infiltrated universities. They are in political parties.

And so through perfectly peaceful and legal means, they have established themselves and here we are sitting back and watching this. And I think one of the most shocking things you see today in 2024 on our streets is this chanting of genocidal slogans at Jewish communities in Europe, in the United States, in Britain, in France, in Germany. For the Jewish community today, it feels like it's the 1930s. And this is Islamist-driven anti-Jewish propaganda. And so I find our, when I first came in here, I said, oh goodness, I'm being mic'd up again

to talk about the same things I was talking about what in 2001. Don't we ever learn. You know, my first experience on camera was in the Netherlands. It was a program called a Rondon Teen where there was two long benches full of, you know, members of the audience who speak. and there were young jihadi men snarling at me. And back then my friend Naima Tahr, who I think is still in the Netherlands.

And she and I were educated in the Netherlands. We were our backgrounds were Muslim, and we had come to accept and admire the principles and the values of the country we lived in. And we were there sitting and defending them and these guys were really snarling at us. And I look back to that moment what she and I were talking about

and over time, many other ex-Muslims and peaceful Muslims have joined us. And it's the same thing. And the problem is just getting bigger and bigger. I'm sorry, go ahead. First of all, can I just fact-check you? We're not too old to remember 9-11, sadly. But thank you for the compliment.

But thank you for the compliment. I remember very well, and I think it was clear that the world changed fundamentally at that moment. I suppose, you know, we've seen in the UK only in recent days the election of clearly, I mean, people who stand for the Green Party, a local councillor, who on being elected give his first speech, which he ends with the words Allah Akbar, Free Palestine, etc. Nothing to do about the local council that he's elected to represent. This is a win for the people of Gaza who will be in Iraq.

We will not be silent. We will raise the voice of Gaza. We will raise the voice of Palestine. I just think there are all sorts of other markers that people can see what you're talking about with their own eyes. And from the people, people are very afraid of talking about this issue, but behind closed doors, everybody knows what's going on. To what extent have our policies on mass immigration contributed to where we are?

Or is it more that when people do come, we failed to integrate them, assimilated, like, how were we here? So in my experience, again, to go back to those, for me, early days when I started to participate in this debate and say, look, here's what the threat is and what it looks like. The first obstacle, I think, to a broader insight was the members of the elite, politicians, academics, journalists who said, you know, or you poor thing, you were traumatized

a little girl from Somalia, you don't understand you know, we're this open societies, we're going to approach this the way we've been doing things for a good long time. We, sophisticated a lot. And that was through consensus. And the prevailing philosophy at the time was multiculturalism.

And so, The idea was if we give a little, they will give a little. And together we will go through this where they adapt and we adapt and we establish this beautiful multicultural societies. Immigration was a part of that debate where, as we were having those conversations all over Europe, it was, well, assuming that this multiculturalist consensus building, bridge building, sophisticated, wonderful way would work would be, just from a rational perspective, just from a number's perspective, wouldn't it be practical to stop immigration, integrate or assimilate?

The word assimilation wasn't used, it was integrated. Assimulation was considered to be an insult to the Muslims and to the immigrants. It had to come from both ways. in any case, why don't we take the lot who are already here, get to that utopia of multiculturalism, and then slowly you could talk about having more immigrants coming. But that's not what in the end happened. What in the end happened was those who had come and their children who had been radicalized in this Da'aer infrastructure, mosques and the madrasas and in Europe, they will continue, they continued to broaden their

parallel society. I don't know how else to describe it. They have sort of Sharia light ghettos, and those were allowed to thrive. But at the same time, the borders were also flung open through the asylum and refugee system. So now you have the opposite of what was the desired outcome, which is a group of mainly imams and other radical Islamist elites who have captured the hearts and minds of Muslim immigrants and their children who are saying do not integrate, do not assimilate, reject the values of the host country. And then everyone who comes in, they're the ones in town, they're the ones who bring them in, bring them into the mosques and radicalize them.

So you have this paradox where there are refugees from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Somalia, were not at all Islamists. They're fleeing war-torn countries, war-torn because of Sharia, by the way. And they come into the UK, France, Sweden, Germany, etc. And that is where they are taught to become, through Dawa, to become radical Islamists. And do you think part of the problem here is that Islamism is so different from the way Western people see the world that we really can't understand it. We really, and as a result of not being able to understand it, we can't comprehend and intellectualize the dangers that it poses. The answer is yes and no.

I think we have an experience in Western Europe and in America with the intolerance or the rise of intolerant ideas, talking about national socialism, for instance, and the ideas in America that were used to defend the institution of slavery and segregation. We've come to see that those were absolutely horrible, abhorrent ideas, and we've rejected them. And part of showing that we are atoning for the past is to, the way we deal with radical political Islam, we recognize it for what it is. There is plenty of scholarship now in every country to show that radical political Islam is totalitarian. It is anti-human. It's anti-freedom. It's anti-woman. It's anti-Jewish.

it's homophobic and they show us over and over again when the Islamic state of Iraq and Syria was established they proceeded actually to carry out what it would be like

to live in an Islamic state so we know that we know it not only through scholarship but also what they readily show us when Hamas on October 7 went into Israel to attack the people that they hated the way they treated them

part of that was defended with Islamic script or with the Islamist ideology. So it is no secret at all to any of our Western leaders, regardless of where that leader, moral leadership, political leadership, scholarship, any kind, it's absolutely clear to us what radical Islam entails. But somehow we can't get ourselves disconnected from this idea of atoning for our past sins, the sins of slavery, of colonialism, of causing the Holocaust,

And now here we are. I remember a conversation I used to have openly with the mayor of Amsterdam, where he plainly said we should not treat Muslim minorities in Holland the way the Jews were treated in the 1930s. There is this constant reference, and in my view absolutely wrong, reference of the totalitarian terrible ideologies of Europe and America, to say the only way atone for it is to give a free pass to this new totalitarian ideology. By the way, Islamism is not, it's not like, you know, the Jews who were persecuted in the 30s, there was never a Jewish empire. Jews never held slaves.

There were Islamic empires who held slaves and who segregated people and who continued to do that. And yet somehow we find ourselves inhibited, frigid when it comes to seeing this problem and dealing with it appropriately while we still have time. And while there are still, you know, we have options that are open to us. Why do you think it is that we're so reticent about talking about this problem and then actually dealing with of it and tackling it head on. So what I can report to you is I was a politician actually operating within a proper liberal democracy and in parliament within in that context. And if I give you an aggregation of all the arguments, every person on either side,

we don't have two, one aisle, two sides in Holland. We had several parties. It's the proportional representation system. So it's a bit more crowded. But all of them were saying, look, we have a constitution. And this constitution guarantees the following things. It guarantees the freedom of religion, the freedom of association, the freedom of speech. We have schools, religious schools in the Netherlands paid for by the government.

And so if an Islamist wants to open a school to indoctuary, we know he's going to program children with the totalitarian. ideology of Islamism, he gets not only a license to open this school, but he also gets money. So we knew all of these things, and we can't stop it, because our laws forbid us from doing anything other than if they cross over to the line of violence, then we will go and pick those individuals up, we'll surveil them, if possible, we'll bring them to court. There's really not much else we can do, in which case these constituencies, these constituencies, they sort of turn into, you know, what one American scholar right after 9-11 called, the constitution is seen as a suicide pact.

And we're talking about indoctrination here. And one of the most worrying things is it's not just refugees who come in from war-torn countries. It's there indoctrinating our youth as well. A perfect example of this is Shemima Begham, a girl who left the UK. at 15 to go and join ISIS. So the case of Shamin Began is very, very interesting. And I think I followed it a little bit in the UK. And what I see again is a very legalistic conversation

that is very much beside the point. Should this young woman come back to the UK? Should her citizenship be revoked? It was revoked. Should she get her citizenship back? No, she should not. that's where the conversation is stuck when actually the conversation should be

what on earth was going on in Bethel Green who are the grownups who programmed her and the other young women and the other young people and why are we not holding those grownups who programmed her accountable for the fact that they did this I remember it was a few years ago watching her father give interviews

where he was sort of throwing his hands up in the air and saying, I don't know, she ran away. And I think the dads of the other young women were doing the same thing. And I remember thinking that his story didn't add up. He surely must have known what was going on with his daughter in his own household. Because really, if you are growing up as a female, as a girl, in a Muslim household, everybody knows what you're doing,

what your plans are. And so my suspicion was, all the grown-ups around these girls encouraged them and helped them and programmed them to go and join the Islamic State. And now here she is. She has gone through all of these horrors

and she's left sitting there holding the ball. And all the grown-ups I've gotten away with it and our society, the British society, the American society and so on. They're not going after the grown-ups. They're not going after

the people who are propagating the ideas and filling these young hearts and minds with these ideas. When I was in the Netherlands, I was in Parliament. I was threatened by, I think he was a 14 or 15-year-old student of a proper or some Islamic school.

Here and his mates, they sneaked away to Chechchchurch. to try and fight. And they came back saying it was too cold for them to fight, which at the time everyone thought was hilarious. But they continued on this trajectory of radicalism. And the teenager was demonized.

The teenager was held responsible. The teenager is the one who was surveilled. It's a teenager who was eventually, I think, sent to prison. But not the grown-ups, not the teachers, the parents, the adults who had groomed this, these young hearts and minds. And that, I think, in the end, is what is wrong with our societies. It is this hatred, deep, deep-seated hatred of who we are.

And part of this atonement is pathological, because it's really taking us to a place of collective suicide. Ayan, we're going to talk about Christianity later, but when you wrote your article, you identified three, key threats to the West, which is something I've been talking about as well. Great power authoritarianism, Islamism, political, radical Islam, and woke ideology. What you're talking about with the self-hatred is the woke ideology. We've talked about Islam and the great power stuff is obvious. You mentioned that we've got to do something while we still have time. Do we still have time? I think we have more time in

America than we do in Europe. And I say this because, number one, because of demographics. You just mentioned a counselor, someone who won an election peacefully through the normal means and became the counselor. And I think we are seeing this all over Europe because of the birth rate crisis, because of the immigration crisis, that if a Muslim party or Muslim parties were formed, official ones, not the Green Party and the Labour Party, but real official ones that call themselves the Muslim Party. I mean, there are these scenarios where they could easily win elections. There are already stories in Germany of young people, German, white, non-Muslim kids thinking, you know, feeling left out and converting to Islam. The effort, the Dawa

to convert non-Muslims into Islam and to Islamize institutions is relentless and it's strong and it's not met with a counter-story or a counter-force. So I think that we have more time in America. If we wake up now, because of the crisis we're witnessing on universities and schools, we're in New York now and today there is a day of rage. the whole Middle Eastern problems are transported here. And so if Americans were to say through the ballot box, we don't want this, we understand what it is, we don't want this,

we can turn this tide. I think America could turn this tide. I worry about Europe. I worry about Europe also because of the rise of radical, the very radical extreme right-wing parties. And when you have a scenario where violent, radical white supremacists face off with radical Islamist jihadis, then it's not Europe anymore. The scene you have, there's a scene of chaos and violence and a splash of Antifa and the radical organized communist.

and legitimate authority of people in the center who are elected to keep these sorts of things at bay fails to work and you get a balkanization. You get a state of chaos. And in a state of chaos, if you look at other societies where this has happened, somehow the radical Islamists come on top. It's hard to disagree with anything you said. I suppose the question is one of the things that it's just incredible is, for example, the UK recently banned his buteerea, a group that was banned like in every Muslim country in the world. The UAE had, you know, the foreign minister of the UAE, he had this viral clip talking about warning Europe about terrorism and extremism, whatever. And it very much goes to your point, which is, I suppose the question ultimately is you've identified this problem that we have. But without going full authoritarian and saying, well, some religions are better than others and therefore not allowed or things along that line.

How do you deal with a problem where, as you say, people may not be committing any crimes by indoctrinating people into a worldview? and then those young people end up committing crimes, but telling them, you know, believe in this or think this isn't a crime. How do we, if we were to try and deal with it, how do you deal with it without becoming the thing you don't want to become? And I think here is where time is so important. The thing you don't want to become is either you fall into these chaos of a cycle of violence where all these extreme groups take over.

Main Street, that's what you don't want. You don't want them taking over. the levers of power, that's the kind of world where I come from. And why also I'm terrified of some of these developments, because if you go to some of these ghettos where informal Sharia is applied, that's what it looks like. You have to visit these places to see for yourselves some of the transformation that's going on on the streets and neighborhoods

and towns of Europe. So how do you stop? Sorry, Iam. Before you get into that, what do you mean by the transformation? transformation of the towns and cities of Europe? If you travel around Europe, when I was doing this work, this book, Pray, and this is back in 2020, I think matters are even more serious now. You see things that you really don't see.

You can't just get it from reading about them or watching them in documentaries. is you've got to go to these places, see the sites for yourself, hear the sounds, smell the smells. And what you see is, yeah, streets that look like they could be in Algeria or in Somalia or in Lahore in Pakistan. And not, for instance, one of the salient things was not a woman in sight in part of Paris. And when I obviously couldn't go and talk to some of these people, but the woman who was working with me would ask, where are all the women? They were chased out of the cafe. And this chasing out of women out of a cafe is very uneuropean.

It is, that's a transformation in my view, because when I came in 1992, the opposite was true. And so it is for me a bit of a nightmare that Europe is resembling the sorts of streets and places that I left, and I was telling them, I was 1992, I was covered up, and when my Dutch friends asked me, you know, why are you frightened, what's wrong with you? I would say, no, you don't go out without someone escorting you, you don't go out without covering up. And they would think I was an alien, I had come from some other planet. And in 1992, that was true. I had come from a different planet. But now, that planet that I had come to in Europe. Many neighborhoods resemble where I left. And that just happened within three decades.

And so you can see when I talk about transformation that it doesn't take that long. And so there were really some very serious scholars, one who comes to mind, Walter Lockyer, Bernard Lewis, Nick Eberstadt, the American demographer, they were all telling us, my husband, Neil Ferguson, back back in the day, that if this democracy, graphic developments continue and we don't do anything about a simulation or there is going to be this flip in 2040 2050 that's not too far away so in europe really has a lot of catching up to the situation in europe is very alarming and it is totally possible to have sharia law established it's now established soft sharia in neighborhoods but established through the ballot box so come back with me

to help to preserve a liberal society given this threat without resorting to illiberalism in response? I think one of things we can do, what's great about open societies, open societies always are at risk of subversion, all sorts of subversions. But I think one of the strongest characteristics of an open society is its ability to learn from its mistakes and to learn from others. And so part of what we need to do is really to go back to the philosophical table, if you will, and define or figure out a way of defining seditious ideologies. Radical political Islam is an ideology that says as loudly as it possibly

can. We want to completely abolish the existing order and we want to replace it with our own order. That is a political theory. That's a political philosophy. It's not a religion as defined in the American constitution or any of the other European constitutions. And how you deal with that definition, that is, I think, where we ought to go now. And this is not something we civilians can do, it is the people we've elected to govern us to get together and do this and say, is political Islam really a religion the way we define Christianity or Judaism or Hinduism or Buddhism? Because these other religions are not organized and they're not loudly telling us that they're coming to replace us. That's number one. Number two, and I know this debate is ongoing in the UK.

The asylum, it's international treaties in general, international treaties, especially asylum and refugee conventions, the convention in 1951 and then European Council of Human Rights. These international laws have to be reviewed and we have to adapt to the reality of today, not the reality of 1951 or even in the 1960s, it's today. And the conclusion, and if you ask me, what is it that we should be doing, that we're not doing, is to review and remove, repeal these international conventions or withdraw from them, or come up with something else. People were talking about a national human rights code or law that goes back to the basics of human rights,

and that is individual-based human rights. So I think from the perspective of thinking about these things and the scholarship, just the data gathering, we have all of this. We need just to get out of this passive state that we've adopted. Well, I agree with you on that. And you say it's the job of elected politicians, sadly, and this really is sad. A lot of them watch this show and listen to people like you, and they're actually looking for answers in places like this, believe it or not, which is not. a good thing if you think about it, but nonetheless. And I still don't feel that we've got the answer

because you say it's not a religion that we have worried about, it's a political ideology, but in a liberal society, we allow people to express political views. I mean, Americans until recently were very proud that they had Jews who tolerated Nazis marching through particular towns, and this was considered an expression of freedom of assembly

and freedom of speech. So do we want to be a society that bans political views that we don't like? That's the question, right? And I don't disagree with your analysis. I'm just trying to think, how do we deal with the threat without allowing it to change who we are in the way that means that we're no longer defending a liberal society because we're not liberal anymore? We're not liberal anymore. No, I think what we are seeing is a shrinking of the options we have. So 20 years ago, when we were saying, 30 years ago, 20 years ago, when we were saying,

look, we are a liberal society, we have these laws, we should be able to, our society should be able to withstand these kinds of shocks. That was one thing. But the, again, rational thing to do was to say, we're not going to change our laws and our structures and our attitudes, but we are going to help them change. And that hasn't happened. And so now we've pushed ourselves into O'Connor, where we are either going to become, we will have to get used to living under Sharia law, as many, by the way, people, native people in Europe, and increasingly in America, who haven't asked for it, are forced to live with it,

because of the reckless immigration policies of the people we elected to govern us, the majorities we elected to govern us. And so the options we have are shrinking, and I think we are now in a place where we have to say, it's okay for people to hold whatever views they wish to hold. But the licensing, and we've talked about the license to open schools, the license to open mosques, the license and the charity statuses, the money that these people get, who have clearly seditious.

And now we understand, we know what we're talking about now. I think that could be stopped. I think we could deport, if they're not citizens, we could deport, we could pass laws to stop this. I said the characteristic, the strongest characteristic of an open society is the ability to learn from our mistakes and from others. There are other countries you mentioned the UAE. You did not mention Saudi Arabia. Singapore is another country.

There are a number of countries who are confronted in Saudi Arabian UAE, Muslim countries, who are confronted with this particular flavor of sedition. And they've been warning us for years and years saying you guys are committing suicide. The way you deal with this problem is wrong. And I think it's time that we now start to heed what we've been told.

Now, that is on the elite level, on the mass level. I think you'll just have to go back to, you know, what is the, what do we have that can inoculate young hearts minds against the message that the radical Islamists are spreading. We have a very beautiful, old counter message and it's called Christianity. And the Christian message for those who are seeking spirituality, who are seeking a meaning and a purpose in life, and who end up in the wrong hands, and they end up with the wrong lots, whether they are Islamists or the woke, I think the churches, the institutionalized, established churches, have a better, more effective and more

homemade. It is very much in sync with their own identities. I think on that level, there is there's plenty of alternatives. It's just that there's no one pushing it. If you go back to Shamima Begham, the only people who are trying to talk to Shamima Begham fill her head with, and her identity and answer maybe her questions, what is it to be a good person?

How can I help society? Is there something bigger than myself that I can sacrifice my life to. The people who are giving these answers are the Islamists, it's the woke, it's just the wrong lot. What about, you know, good, older, boring Christianity,

if you want to put it that way, love thy neighbor. You know, kind of, there is an existing story. I know you've spoken to John Peterson and others, but the West has a lovely story to tell. It's a story of life. It's a story that celebrates life.

It's a story that celebrates merit, that celebrates art, that celebrates equality, that celebrates and protects women. It's a beautiful story to tell if we want to tell it. Ojan, do you think we're looking back, because I was, I think Constan was as well, we love the whole new atheist movement. We don't need God. We have logic, science and rationality. What do we need God for? God's something that the peasants used to say.

used to do in the early 20th and the 19th century and all the other ones. Yeah. You think looking back on it now, that was a grave error of judgment? I've come out to say it was a grave error of judgment. And in fact, I remember feeling just massive rage when the American Association of atheists took away Richard Dawkins. They had honored him with a prize, and they took away the price because he wasn't giving into the woke demands.

And so atheism went woke, the American Association, that is the adoption of a new nihilistic religion. And I know we talked a lot about humanism. But again, humanism number one is born out of Christianity. It is Christianity saying, I don't need to believe in God and I don't need to hear the Bible, because every kind of moral good that you've extracted out of those religious teachings, I can now have it in a secular way.

That's great, but you haven't established anything close to an institution that is competitive when it comes to what radical Islam and the other organized religions, whether young or old, are doing. So I think right now the ball is in their courts, the humanist courts, to say, well, then get up and get going. But as they start going, maybe we should use the existing organizations that we have. I think we touched on Jonathan Haidt. I focus on radical Islam and its spread and the threats that it poses. But another big threat to our society is what is happening to the youth, this explosion in anxiety, depression, mental health, illnesses, addictions, overdose on fentanyl and other drugs.

And I think Jonathan Haid made the remark that he sees this particularly, and he was talking about young girls who are susceptible to suicidal ideation. etc. And he said he sees this problem much stronger within liberal secular households and much less so in religious households. I have seen this with the radical, when you look at radical individuals that are attracted to radical Islam, the solid Muslim house, if you go in a Muslim household and the Quran is already familiar to you, the teachings are already familiar. you already know the distinction between political and non-political Islam. Those ones tend not to go with political Islam. And so there is something in general about religion filling the spiritual needs

and the need for meaning in human life, whether that religion is Judaism or Christianity or Islam or Buddhism, Buddhism or something else. And so I think it was wrong of the secular West to throw out Christianity as quickly and as completely as we did it. It's also as well, you know, you talk about, you know, of course, spirituality is important and so on and so forth.

Science isn't going to keep you warm at night and particularly when you're faced with, you know, things like failure. health, you know, failing health of loved ones, et cetera, et cetera. But something else that religion gives you is a sense of community. Yes. I don't, you know, I don't find it a coincidence that, you know, Muslims call each other brother and sister and so much, you know, there's a real comfort to that.

We need community. And that's something the new atheists, I don't think, factored in really. I'll... So the good depiction, I think, I would give with the new atheists was a whole number of new atheists I met who had read infidel and would come to me and say, I come from a household or I come from a community where I was subjected to religious intolerance, almost as extreme or just as extreme as the one that you went through. And so, in reacting against that, it was out with religion and in with now this new community of. atheists, but as a new community of atheists, I think we assumed quite a lot. I think we assume that simply by leaving behind religious intolerance, you will come out and you will shed superstition, you will appreciate reason and humanism, and you know, you'll flourish. There's

really no need for, there's no need for the establishment of a community. or an institution or it is all there. You will know to find it because you are now guided by reason. And I think we failed to see that that's not how things work. And for a lot of those people who had left the intolerant religious backgrounds, they fell into a void, into loneliness, into, yeah, the lack of community. And the people who came from agnostic, atheist or non-religious backgrounds are also finding themselves in modern times falling into the same, you know, lack of a sense of community, lack of a sense of purpose and seeking and getting lost. And so I think that with my friends who are still atheists

and who still think that atheism is reason, reason can protect us from all of these threats, I think we simply, I underestimated. And maybe even that's the wrong way of saying. I simply didn't see it. I just, I only saw the negative, bad side of religion. And I also made the mistake of going along with the declaration that all religions are the same.

And in fact, that's absolutely untrue. It is, all religions are not the same. There are different religions that have gone through different developments. And some religions are quite superior to others. a religion that tells you that it's all about death. All you have to do is sacrifice yourself for the sake of Allah and in the end what awaits you is paradise. In its extreme form, that religion is a cult of death

because you just have to look forward to dying because the reward is going to come after you die. That's a very, very different religion that has in its foundations that the founder of the religion died so that you can live and that your sins are. forgiven. So the story of Hibarath and the story of forgiveness and the story of love and story of love thy neighbor, it's a very radically different story from the story of Islam.

And so it is, I think it was a bit juvenile to promote the idea that, you know, all religions are bad, all religions are stupid, and also to negate, perhaps the good side. Religion has some good things, some good functions, if you will. And that's what we're now witnessing once in the West more than anywhere else when you throw that out. I just spent about three weeks on tour with Jordan Peterson, as you mentioned, hashing out some of these issues. And one of the, he brought me over to disagree with him and one of the things that I kept asking him, and you know, Jordan, he answers and 20-minute paragraphs that don't necessarily address the central core of your question. But one of the things I kept asking him in different ways at different points is, do you believe

in God? And we had long back and forth about it. Reading your article about becoming a Christian, I found it very interesting because you said many of the things you've said today. I think your analysis is spot on in terms of a vacuum of belief creates alternative religions like wokeness, but also creates the space for other more forceful religions that have a clear idea what they're about to come in. What you didn't say in your article is that you believe in God. Do you? I do believe in God, yes.

And I said this to Richard Dawkins the other night when in the dissident dialogues. I choose to believe in God. I've been, I found myself in that place of complete disconnection and despair and struggled with years and years of depression and tried to do it, you know, the way a good old atheist would do it by going to science and seeing psychiatrists and psychologists. And I learned a lot from them. I learned a lot about the human brain, the human mind, I learned a lot about addiction and all the rest of it. but if you ask me now that I've come out of this depression, what exactly happened? I think it was when I surrendered to the idea that, yes, this is I am undergoing or going through a spiritual,

as one of the therapists put it, spiritual bankruptcy. So I fell to my knees and prayed, and it is only then I felt this sense that something was lifting. and something was lifting because I was feeling connected to something much more powerful than myself. And I don't know how to describe that. And I followed that up with wanting more and the choice of becoming a Christian, choosing Christianity. Because I grew up with Islam, so I know what that holds. And looking at the other far eastern religions, I see some of the women.

there, but perhaps too far away from me, but feel very much at home with Christianity and with the legacy of Christianity. And so I'm not ashamed or embarrassed about it, but I do want to emphasize that's a personal and very intimate, if you will, decision. And it's not something that I want to impose on others or, but I'll say, if I see, let me rephrase it. In the past, I would have discussions with people who would talk about the advantages of religion and I would just laugh at them and go along with people who are saying, ah, they're too weak, too frightened in the dark, too non-s, that kind of thing.

And now I think from my experience, I think there's a great deal of wisdom in there, and that brings us back to a sense of humility. That brings me back to a sense of humility. But I am not standing on the streets with the Bible proclaiming the gospel. I think you would look great in one of those sandwich boards with a megaphone. And a bell. Yeah Yeah Yeah And I think for public figures to come out And admit

Doubts Admit the things that they struggle with I think there's a form of moral leadership That We were Perhaps some of us were too embarrassed To come out and And share

And so there is There is something in, I didn't, you know, I didn't need any persuasion to say, if you're a young person and you're struggling with the same things, you feel it's all meaningless. It's okay for you to have these feelings and it's okay for you. There is a way out. There's, there's a light somewhere there. This is what worked for me. I don't know if it will work for you, but this is what worked for me. I think that is, again, a very Western civilization. thing instead of punishing people for their suffering because it's a deviant. I think the compassionate

thing to do is to say, how can we, what can we help, what can we do together to help you get better? Well, one of the things that I'm really grateful for is I think in the, one of the benefits of new technology is the ability to have discussions like this. And I think, older media like television was much more about sharing certainties. You have two people, five minutes each, or three minutes each, or 20 seconds each, and you deliver your certainty about this. You know, there is no, there is. In these conversations, we have the ability, as you say, to actually talk about what it is that you're thinking, why you're thinking it, where you're unsure, what journey you're on. Because that's actually, I think, where most people are. I don't

think most people live their lives through the prism of 20 second sound bites about their certainty about something. Most people are in the place of inquiry and openness to ideas, I think. And so it's interesting to me. I suppose the question is, and again, this is something I asked Jordan repeatedly is, can you put the toothpaste back in the tube? You know, I call my generation the children of Dawkins. How do, you know, but I also sense that a lot of people, people our age and younger too are in the inquiry of what is meaning, what is purpose, how do we connect to others. And like you say, it's unavoidably obvious and painfully obvious that a, that vacuum that

new atheists were so looking forward to opens up the space for new things to come in that are not even going to be as good as what we had before. I mean, wokeness to me is an awful religion. I mean, one of the worst in many ways. And then also in the geopolitical environment that we operate in and the global environment culturally, we have challenges, we have competitors, and we have to rediscover a strength and confidence in the values of our civilization, or we will go the way of every civilization that has lost as way in the past.

Yeah. So I'll say if you're a young person and you want to know a great deal about biology, read Dawkins and listen to Richard, he has a great deal of knowledge and wisdom to impart there. If you want to understand the roots of our civilization and how we got here and the meaning, you know, putting the toothpaste back in the tube, listen to Tom Holland. And you see, both men, very much Western, in fact, both of them British, have this background in scholarship and taking their scholarships very, very, very seriously. And these are the two individuals, but I think they represent a whole world of a whole civilization

that is, that managed to dominate the world and to lead the world because it allows for that. It allows for these different inquiries and perspectives and these conversations. And I think what you were talking on, talking about earlier, about the little bit of certainty, you come in and you say your piece of certainty,

and then you turn it into a contest with winners and losers. I think that created a sort of polarization of ideas. If you're poor Dawkins, you can't be poor Tom Holland, which is, of course, nonsense. And so I think part of it is to bring young people back into the realm of, for me, actually, the realm of reason and spirituality, where they can coexist faith and reason, and where you say, if you're seeking development

and evolution and growth on this plane, you go to this end of the library. And if you're seeking it on this end, you go to that end of the library. But the library is full of, that Western library is full of all of this knowledge and wisdom. And I think we've lost a bit of that. Ayan, thank you so much for coming on the show.

It's always a pleasure. Before we head over to our locals, where our supporters get to our their questions to you. Our final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about as a society that we really should be? Restoration.

Which is the title of your substack, by the way. So I'm glad you slipped that in. Tell us more about what people can find out there. I think for many years we've talked about what our problems are and it's good and we should continue to talk about what the problems are and diagnose them. But perhaps now that we've come to understand most of them,

We should restore our institutions. We should restore, again, the story, the foundational stories, these principles, and celebrate them. And yeah, and I want to be a part of that. Restore the relationship between men and women, restore the relationship between parents and children, between the generations. There's a great deal of restoration work to be carried out. I mean, that is a great mission. and I think we're very lucky to have people of your caliber participating. We certainly aspire to doing the same.

So thank you for coming on, Ayan. It's a great honor to have you back on the show. And of course, head on over to locals where we ask Ayan your questions right now. I'd like to ask Ayan if she expects a general return to Christianity as Islam grows in political influence in the West.