Making Sense - Sam Harris - August 17, 2016


#43 — What Do Jihadists Really Want？

Topics
jihadist beliefs and motivations martyrdom
Hosted by
Sam Harris
Mentioned
Mujahideen Noam Chomsky Fawaz Gurji Alhamdulillah Prophet Abraham Creator Darwin Dabik Glenn Greenwald Richard Feynman Stephen Hawking LaRossi Abala George W. Bush Robert Pape Omar Mateen James Bond Westerner Durkheim Muhammad and 7 more
#42 — Racism and Violence in America #44 — Being Good and Doing Good

Episode Stats


Length

48 minutes

Words per minute

152.33

Word count

7,340

Sentence count

450

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

58

sentences flagged

Hate speech

86

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

ISIS has a new issue of its magazine, Dabik, and it's a good one. In it, I read an article I wrote about why we hate you, and why we should listen to what members of ISIS have to say for themselves. And if you have any lingering doubts about whether or not ISIS is a religious phenomenon, then you need to listen to their answers to the question: Why do they do what they do? And what makes them do it? And why do they believe what they tell us about what they believe? And how can we make sense of what they say to us about their motivations and what they think about the world they live in? I think we can all agree that they have a good idea of who they are and what their motivations are, and that we should all listen to them for ourselves to see what they really believe about the rest of the world and the things they do to achieve their ultimate goal of ushering in the end times, which is to destroy the world as we know it. And we should also listen to the people they say about themselves to make sense out of their own motivations and their own ideas of the things that they believe in the world. And that makes perfect sense to us, too, because they are telling us what they actually believe in. And that's why they do it, not because we should be asking them to tell us what we think we should do it and not what we should believe in order to be a better version of the truth about what we believe in or what they want to do in the first place which is heaven . that which they really does make sense to them. in their own words. of the universe of their motivations why they should be doing it of themselves what they are doing it. and why they really want to be here, and how they really are not what they should do of it and why it matters who they really is their reasons for doing it, to do it . that they want so that they are it to be and how they should do this the best they can do it and why it s good if they is the best, why they want it in order is what they do it in the this is their best

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Well, as I said in my last podcast, ISIS just released a remarkable document in the latest 0.99
00:00:27.440 issue of their magazine, Dabik, which is named after a city in Syria where they believe they
00:00:32.000 will wage a final battle against a crusader army and usher in the end times. So I promised to discuss
00:00:38.740 that in a separate podcast, which I'll do now. The whole magazine is fairly astonishing. I'll
00:00:45.640 provide a link to a PDF on my blog, but I warn you that some of the pictures are disturbing.
00:00:51.860 There's a photograph of a man getting his head cut off, which leaves absolutely nothing to the
00:00:56.720 imagination. But I'm going to read some relevant parts of the magazine on this podcast. And one
00:01:02.880 thing that should alarm you is how well written it is. The writing in this magazine is actually better
00:01:09.520 than you'll find in your average Salon article or on The Intercept. In fact, it's as well written as
00:01:17.060 Fawaz Gurji's new book on ISIS, published by Princeton University Press. And the copy editing
00:01:23.440 is actually better than in that book. I'm not exaggerating. I spotted a typo in the Gurji's book
00:01:31.800 in the first few pages. I haven't seen any typos in this copy of Dabik. And it may sound like a strange
00:01:38.180 thing to say, but good writing and good copy editing is a very bad sign. It tells you something about the
00:01:46.620 caliber of people they've managed to recruit. The article I'm going to focus on and read in its entirety
00:01:52.920 is entitled, Why We Hate You and Why We Fight You. And I think it will inevitably be said that there's
00:01:59.180 something self-serving about my reading this to you, because it confirms more or less everything I've been
00:02:03.960 saying about jihadism for the last 15 years. And perhaps there is something a little self-serving about it,
00:02:09.200 because, as you know, I've been pilloried for my views on this topic for about as long.
00:02:17.000 But this really isn't a matter of my just saying, I told you so. I actually think it's important that
00:02:24.060 if you have any lingering doubts about whether or not ISIS and jihadism generally is a religious
00:02:29.880 phenomenon, that you clarify those doubts and just listen to what members of ISIS have to say for
00:02:38.020 themselves. But before I get into that article in particular, here is what I think any honest reader
00:02:44.660 will get from this magazine as a whole. The fundamental concerns of these people are theological.
00:02:51.640 The claim they want to press and substantiate in nearly every paragraph, and which motivates
00:02:57.220 everything they do, is a claim about the exclusive legitimacy of their religion. Every other way of 0.85
00:03:04.380 life leads to hell. They really believe this. Now, most of you, I would wager, have no idea what
00:03:11.060 it's like to believe that either paradise or an eternity in fire awaits you after death. And because
00:03:18.040 you haven't ever believed this, you probably waste a lot of fuel wondering whether anyone actually does.
00:03:24.020 I want to recommend that you stop doing that, and simply accept that jihadists believe what they say
00:03:30.680 they believe. Just accept it as a working assumption. If you do that, you will suddenly
00:03:37.140 find that everything they do, including suicide bombing, makes perfect sense. So I recommend that 1.00
00:03:43.880 you simply listen to what these people have to say for themselves, as you would any other people who
00:03:48.500 are making extreme sacrifices towards some end. The disposition not to do this is really strange.
00:03:56.020 Well, let's say you went to a medical school, and you asked students why they were pursuing
00:04:01.420 careers in medicine. How disposed would you be to second-guess their answers? I mean, what they're
00:04:08.840 doing is fairly difficult, right? They're spending all this time in school. They're incurring massive
00:04:13.780 student debt. They're spending their days indoors dissecting cadavers when they could be at the beach.
00:04:19.380 What on earth are they up to? Well, if you ask them, they will tell you, and you won't waste any time
00:04:26.160 wondering whether they have some other motive that bears no resemblance to what they say. I mean, there
00:04:31.240 might be some diversity of reasons, but 90% of medical students will give you more or less the same
00:04:37.560 story. They'll say that they want to help people, that they want a meaningful career, where they know they're
00:04:44.140 doing good in the world. They want a high prestige career. They want to be paid well, okay? And they
00:04:50.060 might have scientific interest in biology and medical research. You'll hear answers like this, and these
00:04:55.980 answers make sense of their behavior. You won't hear someone say, I wanted to be a professional
00:05:01.980 football player and found that I just wasn't quite good enough to turn pro, and so I decided to find the
00:05:07.300 thing that was closest to the thrill of sacking a quarterback. And so I became a dermatologist,
00:05:13.220 right? That wouldn't make sense. It wouldn't make sense to imagine that was the underlying motive.
00:05:21.360 So why do jihadists do what they do? Well, they are telling us ad nauseum. They're telling us even when
00:05:29.220 we don't ask. And a magazine like Dabiq advertises their concerns and aspirations
00:05:35.060 with utter clarity. And you might want to say it's just propaganda. And it is propaganda. But it only
00:05:42.920 works as propaganda because many Muslims share these aspirations and concerns and believe the same 0.59
00:05:50.000 doctrines. To call it propaganda doesn't mean that it's dishonest. For these ideas to successfully
00:05:57.300 recruit people means that they find these ideas compelling. So whether Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi believes
00:06:04.700 every word in this magazine isn't the point. The point is that this material is a highly successful
00:06:11.900 means of recruiting foreign-born jihadis. The point is that many people find these ideas persuasive. 0.99
00:06:21.000 And that's not an accident. Now, recruiting and inspiring jihadis overseas is obviously
00:06:27.200 different from getting Iraqis and Syrians to fight for ISIS at home. And there's no question 0.55
00:06:32.300 that many locals have been recruited out of fear. Fear of Shiites with whom they've been
00:06:37.340 locked in a sectarian civil war. And fear of what ISIS will do to them if they don't support
00:06:41.720 the caliphate. So who knows what percentage of local Sunnis really support the extreme Salafi
00:06:47.860 jihadism of ISIS. It's probably a terrifying percentage, but it's not everyone. But here we're talking
00:06:54.600 about the spread of Islamism and jihadism globally. Okay, so we're talking about persuasion. We're 0.93
00:07:00.500 talking about the power of ideas. We're talking about a worldview that must be argued for, and which
00:07:06.760 some percentage of Muslims in any society will find compelling. And when you read this magazine,
00:07:13.200 you find that above all, jihadis are concerned about religious error. They really are concerned about
00:07:20.580 the deviance of Christianity, which they consider a form of paganism, and about rival interpretations
00:07:25.840 of Islam. And needless to say, they're horrified by secularism and atheism and homosexuality. 0.99
00:07:32.120 They're concerned about the worship of anything beyond the single reality of Allah, whether it's the 0.80
00:07:37.900 worship of Jesus or the Virgin Mary, or more metaphorically, things like money and pleasure and the arts and
00:07:44.600 science. And the writers of this magazine go on at great length about how irrational it is to believe
00:07:51.380 that a world as orderly as ours could have arisen from chaos. They give a long argument from design
00:07:57.700 that is at least as lucid, or as silly, depending on your view, as any offered by the Discovery Institute.
00:08:04.260 They consider every sign of order in our world, including the beauty of nature and the cuteness of
00:08:09.440 babies, and the neurobiology of vision, and the details of energy metabolism in the body,
00:08:15.720 and the functioning of our immune systems, as well as the faculty of reason itself, to be evidence of
00:08:21.360 a benevolent creator. On their account, the harmony between man and nature cannot help but attest to the
00:08:27.300 reality of a just God. And this is spelled out in great detail in a magazine that prominently
00:08:34.120 celebrates the indiscriminate slaughter of innocent people. To read this magazine is to discover that
00:08:40.500 the oft-mocked line that was delivered by George Bush in his Texas drawl, they hate us for our freedom,
00:08:47.400 is actually true. It is especially true if you include freedom of speech and belief. And those among you who
00:08:54.040 think that they must have some other motive, that they must hate us for our foreign policy, as any rational
00:08:59.980 people would in the aftermath of colonialism. Well, you're simply wrong, and dangerously so,
00:09:06.640 as they make absolutely clear. So everything that has been said and written by people like Noam Chomsky
00:09:12.860 and Robert Pape and Glenn Greenwald, and the dozens of prominent Muslim apologists about the motivations
00:09:19.860 of jihadists, this whole pornography of self-doubt that they've been peddling for more than a decade, 0.54
00:09:26.720 all of this is pure delusion. The people who are attracted to the jihadist cause are actually
00:09:34.180 concerned about the work of Darwin and Marx and Nietzsche and Durkheim and Weber and Freud,
00:09:42.720 who they call, quote, the engineers of Western decadence. They are revolted by the, quote,
00:09:47.900 sodomite pride they see on display in the West. There's a testimonial from a European convert to
00:09:56.340 Islam that's worth pondering. A woman, actually. And she talks about what it was like to convert in
00:10:01.840 Finland, and about how Christianity never made any sense to her. Because, of course, it doesn't make
00:10:06.780 any sense. Jesus is both a man and the Son of God, and God himself. He's divine and all-powerful,
00:10:15.000 and yet he gets crucified and humiliated. This is ridiculous. Christians haven't been able to make 1.00
00:10:21.040 sense of the Trinity for 2,000 years. Islam actually is more straightforward than this,
00:10:27.240 which is a real advantage. There's just God, and you are his slave. Get with the program or burn in hell.
00:10:36.220 The magazine actually contains a long article on biblical criticism that does a very good job of 0.92
00:10:41.460 dismantling Christian doctrine. The level of theological concern these people have,
00:10:47.580 the absolute primacy of their claim to being metaphysically correct, is really impossible
00:10:52.560 to exaggerate. They care about nothing else. There's only one question that makes any sense.
00:10:59.700 How can you avoid hell and get into paradise after you die? That question is the black hole
00:11:06.820 at the center of their worldview that sucks everything into it. So, this Finnish woman, 1.00
00:11:13.020 who was born Christian, writes,
00:11:15.100 What struck me most as I was reading the Quran were the verses about hellfire,
00:11:19.220 and the punishment, and the hereafter. End quote. Which isn't a surprise, obviously,
00:11:24.120 because the whole point of the Quran is to admonish you to submit to Allah,
00:11:28.120 or else go to hell. And she talks about how she converted to Islam, and how her parents 0.68
00:11:32.760 disapproved, and then she married a Muslim man and had a child, and then the happy family
00:11:39.360 decamped to the caliphate. And then she writes,
00:11:43.680 I can't even describe the feeling when you finally cross that border and enter the lands
00:11:48.580 of the caliphate. It is such a blessing from Allah to be able to live under the caliphate. 0.91
00:11:53.900 There are so many people who made several attempts to come, but just haven't been able to make it yet.
00:11:58.200 Of course, when you come to the caliphate after sacrificing everything for the sake of Allah, 0.99
00:12:02.780 you'll continue to be tested. You're going to see hardships and trials. But every day,
00:12:07.740 you're thankful to Allah for allowing you to perform hijra, that's migration, and to live 1.00
00:12:13.700 under the sharia. Life in the Islamic State is such a blessing. You face difficulties and hardship.
00:12:19.760 You're not used to the food or the change of life. You may not know the local language.
00:12:24.160 You hear bombings, and the children may get scared. But none of that takes away from the
00:12:28.420 gratitude you have towards Allah for allowing you to be here. Also, unless you're living here,
00:12:33.580 you don't realize what kind of life you had before. The life here is so much more pure.
00:12:38.620 When you're in Dar al-Kufar, the lands of disbelief, you're exposing yourself and your
00:12:43.760 children to so much filth and corruption. You make it easy for Satan to lead you astray.
00:12:48.780 Here, you're living a pure life, and your children are being raised with plenty of good
00:12:53.700 influence around them. They don't need to be ashamed of their religion. They are free to be
00:12:58.560 proud of it and are given the proper creed right from the start. After four months of being here,
00:13:03.800 my son was martyred. And this was yet another blessing. Every time I think about it, I wonder
00:13:08.600 to myself, if I stayed in Dar al-Kufar, what kind of end would he have had? What would have happened
00:13:14.180 to him? Alhamdulillah. Praise be to God. He was saved from all that. And what could be better than
00:13:20.700 him being killed for the cause of Allah? Obviously, it's not easy. But I ask Allah to allow us to join 0.98
00:13:27.500 him. End quote. Well, that's a fairly chilling passage. I'm going to read it again, because you
00:13:35.120 weren't ready for it. As you listen again, assume that this is a psychologically normal person
00:13:42.320 who simply believes in the reality of martyrdom and paradise. Which is to say, she believes that
00:13:49.360 this life is fundamentally unimportant. It's merely a test of faith. Believe the wrong thing,
00:13:56.020 and you will go to hell for eternity. Believe the right thing, and you'll go to paradise.
00:14:01.420 Eternity is all that matters. I'll read the relevant part again. Of course, when you come to the caliphate, 0.92
00:14:07.740 after sacrificing everything for the sake of Allah, you'll continue to be tested. You're going to see
00:14:13.320 hardships and trials. But every day, you're thankful to Allah for allowing you to perform
00:14:17.720 hijra and to live under sharia. Life in the Islamic State is such a blessing. You face difficulties and 1.00
00:14:24.360 hardship. You're not used to the food or the change of life. You may not know the local language.
00:14:29.900 You hear bombings, and the children make it scared. But none of that takes away from the gratitude
00:14:34.800 you have towards Allah for allowing you to be here. Also, unless you're living here, you don't 0.99
00:14:39.180 realize what kind of life you had before. The life here is so much more pure. When you're in
00:14:44.240 Dar al-Kufar, the lands of disbelief, you're exposing yourself and your children to so much filth and 0.60
00:14:49.920 corruption. You make it easy for Satan to lead you astray. Here you're living a pure life, and your
00:14:56.820 children are being raised with plenty of good influence around them. They don't need to be ashamed of
00:15:02.040 their religion. They are free to be proud of it, and are given the proper creed right from the start.
00:15:08.080 After four months of us being here, my son was martyred, and this was yet another blessing.
00:15:13.100 Every time I think about it, I wonder to myself, if I stayed in Dar al-Kufar, what kind of end would
00:15:18.620 he have had? What would have happened to him? Alhamdulillah. Praise be to God, he was saved from all
00:15:24.840 that. And what could be better than him being killed for the cause of Allah? Obviously, it's not 1.00
00:15:30.540 easy, but I ask Allah to allow us to join him. Okay, so picture what happened here. She had a young
00:15:38.340 child who, four months after her sojourn in the caliphate, got, what, blown up? Crushed by falling
00:15:48.480 concrete? Who knows? But she thinks it's the best thing that could have happened to him.
00:15:54.560 Okay, she's from Finland, right, which incidentally has one of the best school systems and social
00:15:59.100 safety nets on earth. And rather than raise him there to become a doctor or a novelist or an
00:16:05.320 entrepreneur, or to become one of those things herself, she moves to the hellhole of Iraq as the 0.99
00:16:13.580 wife of some religious maniac and decides to live in a cloth bag and now celebrates the fact 0.97
00:16:21.440 that her son, who could have been anybody, is now dead. And his death doesn't even rise to the level 0.90
00:16:31.160 of some of the other inconveniences she lists. You're not used to the food, the change of life,
00:16:36.960 the local language, the sounds of bombs. Oh, and my son got killed after four months. But that was
00:16:42.240 actually a good thing. This is the world these people are committed to building. A fantasy world
00:16:50.020 of gratuitous religious bullshit that strips all the value out of life. Where the death of a child 1.00
00:16:58.720 who was intentionally deprived by his parents of every real opportunity in life is a cause for
00:17:06.460 celebration. This is the enemy. Not some psychopath who would be killing people anyway, and who's now
00:17:14.580 merely doing these things, quote, in the name of Islam. No, the enemy is any ordinary person who becomes 0.99
00:17:23.760 infected by these extraordinarily stupid ideas. The enemy is someone just like you, who simply got 1.00
00:17:32.680 convinced that the only things that matter in this life are martyrdom or victory for the one true
00:17:40.840 faith. They want to conquer the world for Islam or die trying. So they can't lose. Really, they can't 0.99
00:17:49.840 lose. Can you imagine how good it must feel to know that you can't lose? Think of all your concerns in
00:17:58.120 life. Think of everything you want. Think of everything you don't want and everything you want
00:18:04.580 to avoid. You probably care about your career or your children's education. You don't want too many
00:18:11.600 pesticides in your food. You want political stability in your society. You'd like your favorite museums
00:18:18.880 or movie theaters or restaurants not to close for lack of funds. You probably want to get in shape or
00:18:26.180 stay in shape. You certainly don't want to get cancer from something that a nearby chemical plant has
00:18:31.600 released into your groundwater. Think of all the ways you can lose. And now imagine that you have a
00:18:39.460 belief system that nullifies all of that. Oh, my son died? Good. What a relief. Now he's safely in
00:18:48.700 paradise. And I hope to be there soon myself. If you don't understand the power of that, you have
00:18:57.280 no idea what we're dealing with. And you lack empathy. You haven't been able to get into these
00:19:05.120 people's heads because you are stuck in your own. And they have made it so easy for you to get into
00:19:12.300 their heads. In fact, you have to make every effort to stay out. You have to imagine that they
00:19:18.460 are lying, endlessly lying, for some inexplicable reason. When taking their claims at face value makes
00:19:26.620 perfect sense of their behavior. And when imputing other motives to them makes their behavior entirely
00:19:33.380 mysterious. So just listen. Do your best for the next few minutes to see the world through their
00:19:42.620 eyes. Why we hate you and why we fight you. Shortly following the blessed attack on a sodomite 0.85
00:19:52.200 crusader nightclub by the Mujahid Omar Mateen, American politicians were quick to jump into the spotlight
00:19:58.960 and denounce the shooting, declaring it a hate crime, an act of terrorism, and an act of senseless
00:20:05.700 violence. A hate crime? Yes. Muslims undoubtedly hate liberalist sodomites, as does anyone else with 0.74
00:20:14.360 any shred of their fitra. Fitra is human nature that recognizes good and evil. As does anyone else with 0.99
00:20:22.020 any shred of their fitra still intact. An act of terrorism? Most definitely. Muslims have been 1.00
00:20:28.740 commanded to terrorize the disbelieving enemies of Allah. But an act of senseless violence? 0.95
00:20:35.320 One would think that the average Westerner by now would have abandoned the tired claim that the
00:20:40.780 actions of the Mujahideen, who have repeatedly stated their goals, intentions, and motivations,
00:20:47.200 don't make any sense. Unless you truly and naively believe that the crimes of the West against Islam and
00:20:54.020 Muslims, whether insulting the Muslims, whether insulting the Prophet, burning the Quran, or waging 0.99
00:20:59.040 war against the Caliphate, won't prompt brutal retaliation from the Mujahideen, you know full well
00:21:05.780 that the likes of the attacks carried out by Omar Mateen, LaRossi Abala, and many others before and
00:21:12.100 after them in revenge for Islam and the Muslims make complete sense. The only thing senseless would be for 1.00
00:21:18.980 there to be no violent, fierce retaliation in the first place. Notice the order of their grievances.
00:21:25.940 Insulting the Prophet, burning the Quran, or waging war against the Caliphate. These people don't have 0.83
00:21:32.460 ordinary political concerns about the Palestinians or anyone else. This will become even clearer by the
00:21:39.580 end of the article. Back to the text. Many Westerners, however, are already aware that claiming
00:21:45.300 the attacks of the Mujahideen to be senseless and questioning incessantly as to why we hate the West
00:21:51.400 and why we fight them is nothing more than a political act and a propaganda tool. The politicians
00:21:57.320 will say it regardless of how much it stands in opposition to facts and common sense, just to garner as
00:22:02.860 many votes as they can for the next election cycle. The analysts and journalists will say it in order to keep
00:22:08.040 themselves from becoming a target for saying something that the masses deemed to be, quote,
00:22:12.420 politically incorrect. The apostate imams in the West will adhere to the same tired cliché 0.99
00:22:18.440 in order to avoid a backlash from the disbelieving societies in which they've chosen to reside. 0.92
00:22:23.960 The point is, people know that it's foolish, but they keep repeating it regardless because they're
00:22:28.880 afraid of the consequences of deviating from the script. There are exceptions among the disbelievers,
00:22:33.980 no doubt. People who will unabashedly declare that jihad and the laws of Sharia, as well as everything 0.94
00:22:39.560 else deemed taboo by the Islam as a peaceful religion crowd, are in fact completely Islamic.
00:22:45.560 But they tend to be people with far less credibility, who are painted as a social fringe. 0.60
00:22:50.260 So their voices are dismissed, and a large segment of the ignorant masses continues believing the false 0.67
00:22:55.720 narrative. As such, it becomes important for us to clarify to the West, in unequivocal terms,
00:23:02.260 yet again, why we hate you and why we fight you.
00:23:07.840 1. We hate you, first and foremost, because you are disbelievers. You reject the oneness of Allah, 0.99
00:23:17.460 whether you realize it or not, by making partners for Him in worship. You blaspheme against Him,
00:23:24.480 claiming that He has a son. You fabricate lies against His prophets and messengers,
00:23:29.220 and you indulge in all manner of devilish practices. It is for this reason that we were
00:23:35.300 commanded to openly declare our hatred for you and our enmity towards you. Quote,
00:23:40.900 There has already been for you an excellent example in Abraham and those with him, when they said to
00:23:46.700 their people, Indeed, we are disassociated from you and from whatever you worship other than Allah.
00:23:53.080 Allah, we have rejected you, and there has arisen between us and you enmity and hatred forever,
00:24:00.100 until you believe in Allah alone. End quote.
00:24:04.060 Furthermore, just as your disbelief is the primary reason we hate you,
00:24:09.440 your disbelief is the primary reason we fight you, as we have been commanded to fight the
00:24:14.580 disbelievers until they submit to the authority of Islam, either by becoming Muslims or by paying 1.00
00:24:20.440 the jizya for those afforded this option, and living in humiliation under the rule of the Muslims. 1.00
00:24:27.180 And for those who don't know, the jizya is a protection tax that Jews and Christians, 0.98
00:24:31.880 the people of the book, can pay to live as Jews or Christians under the boot of their Muslim overlords. 0.92
00:24:41.840 Thus, even if you were to stop fighting us, your best case scenario in a state of war would be that
00:24:47.740 we would suspend our attacks against you if we deemed it necessary in order to focus on the
00:24:54.100 closer and more immediate threats before eventually resuming our campaigns against you.
00:25:00.100 Apart from the option of a temporary truce, this is the only likely scenario that would bring you
00:25:06.460 fleeting respite from our attacks. So in the end, you cannot bring an indefinite halt to our war
00:25:13.260 against you. At most, you could only delay it temporarily. Quote, and fight them until there
00:25:20.260 is no fitna, paganism, and until the religion, all of it, is for Allah. End quote. Two, we hate you 0.76
00:25:30.060 because your secular liberal societies permit the very things that Allah has prohibited, while banning
00:25:36.440 many of the things he has permitted, a matter that doesn't concern you because you separate
00:25:41.520 religion and state, thereby granting supreme authority to your whims and desires via the
00:25:47.700 legislators you vote into power. In doing so, you desire to rob Allah of his right to be obeyed,
00:25:55.200 and you wish to usurp that right for yourselves. Quote, legislation is not but for Allah. End quote.
00:26:02.080 Your secular liberalism has led you to tolerate and even support, quote, gay rights. To allow alcohol, 0.99
00:26:10.000 drugs, fornication, gambling, and usury to become widespread, and to encourage the people to mock
00:26:16.840 those who denounce these filthy sins and vices. As such, we wage war against you to stop you from
00:26:24.040 spreading your disbelief and debauchery, your secularism and nationalism, your perverted liberal values, 0.98
00:26:31.280 your Christianity and atheism, and all the depravity and corruption they entail. You've made it your 0.99
00:26:38.640 mission to, quote, liberate Muslim societies. We've made it our mission to fight off your influence 1.00
00:26:45.060 and protect mankind from your misguided concepts and your deviant way of life. Three, in the case of
00:26:54.200 the atheist fringe, we hate you and wage war against you because you disbelieve in the existence of your 0.99
00:27:00.860 Lord and Creator. You witness the extraordinarily complex makeup of created beings and the astonishing and
00:27:08.200 inexplicably precise physical laws that govern the entire universe, but insist that they all came about
00:27:14.500 through randomness and that one should be faulted, mocked, and ostracized for recognizing that the
00:27:20.780 astonishing signs we witness day after day are the creation of the wise and all-knowing Creator
00:27:27.100 and not the result of accidental occurrence. Quote, or were they created by nothing, or were they
00:27:34.360 creators of themselves? End quote. Your disbelief in your Creator further leads you to deny the day of
00:27:41.240 judgment, claiming that, quote, you only live once. Quote, those who disbelieve have claimed that they will
00:27:47.660 never be resurrected. Say, yes, by my Lord you will surely be resurrected, and then you will surely be
00:27:54.620 informed of what you did, and that, for Allah, is easy. End quote. Four, we hate you for your crimes
00:28:03.380 against Islam and wage war against you to punish you for your transgressions against our religion. 0.95
00:28:09.980 As long as your subjects continue to mock our faith, insult the prophets of Allah, including Noah,
00:28:16.380 Abraham, Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad, burn the Quran, and openly vilify the laws of the Sharia, 1.00
00:28:24.380 we will continue to retaliate, not with slogans and placards, but with bullets and knives. 0.99
00:28:31.080 Five, we hate you for your crimes against the Muslims. Your drones and fighter jets bomb, 1.00
00:28:37.720 kill, and maim our people around the world, and your puppets in the usurped lands of the Muslims 1.00
00:28:42.940 oppress, torture, and wage war against anyone who calls to the truth. As such, we fight you to stop 0.99
00:28:50.160 you from killing our men, women, and children, to liberate those of them who you imprison and
00:28:55.260 torture, and to take revenge for the countless Muslims who have suffered as a result of your deeds. 0.99
00:29:02.260 Six, we hate you for invading our lands and fight you to repel you and drive you out. 0.99
00:29:08.100 As long as there is an inch of territory left for us to reclaim, jihad will continue to be a personal 0.98
00:29:14.740 obligation on every single Muslim. Now, lest wishful thinking obscurantists and the usual pseudo-journalist
00:29:24.760 masochists mistake those last two reasons for rational political objectives, the authors of this essay
00:29:31.940 quickly close that door. So, listen closely to this. What's important to understand here is that
00:29:38.900 although some might argue that your foreign policies are the extent of what drives our hatred,
00:29:44.260 this particular reason for hating you is secondary, hence the reason we addressed it at the end of the
00:29:50.000 above list. The fact is, even if you were to stop bombing us, imprisoning us, torturing us,
00:29:56.680 vilifying us, and usurping our lands, we would continue to hate you. Because our primary reason 0.84
00:30:03.820 for hating you will not cease to exist until you embrace Islam. Even if you were to pay the jizya 0.99
00:30:10.180 and live under the authority of Islam in humiliation, we would continue to hate you. No doubt we would 1.00
00:30:16.540 stop fighting you then, as we would stop fighting any disbelievers who entered into a covenant with us. 1.00
00:30:21.560 But we would not stop hating you. What's equally, if not more important to understand, is that we
00:30:28.760 fight you not simply to punish and deter you, but to bring you true freedom in this life and salvation
00:30:36.140 in the hereafter. Freedom from being enslaved to your whims and desires, as well as those of your clergy
00:30:42.980 and legislatures, and salvation by worshiping your creator alone and following his messenger. We fight you
00:30:50.700 in order to bring you out of the darkness of disbelief and into the light of Islam, and to liberate you
00:30:56.560 from the constraints of living for the sake of worldly life alone, so that you may enjoy both the
00:31:02.020 blessings of worldly life and the bliss of the hereafter. The gist of the matter is that there is
00:31:08.340 indeed a rhyme to our terrorism, warfare, ruthlessness, and brutality. As much as some liberal journalist
00:31:15.260 would like you to believe that we do what we do because we're simply monsters, with no logic behind
00:31:20.240 our course of action. The fact is that we continue to wage and escalate a calculated war that the West
00:31:27.800 thought it had ended several years ago. We continue dragging you further and further into a swamp you
00:31:34.400 thought you'd already escaped, only to realize that you're stuck even deeper within its murky waters.
00:31:40.600 And we do so while offering you a way out on our terms. So you can continue to believe that those,
00:31:46.480 quote, despicable terrorists, hate you because of your lattes and your timberlands, and continue 0.93
00:31:52.780 spending ridiculous amounts of money to try to prevail in your unwinnable war. Or you can accept 1.00
00:31:58.880 reality and recognize that we will never stop hating you until you embrace Islam, and we'll never stop 1.00
00:32:06.060 fighting you until you're ready to leave the swamp of warfare and terrorism through the exits we provide,
00:32:12.920 the very exits put forth by our Lord for the people of the scripture, Islam, jizya, or as a last means of 0.99
00:32:21.600 fleeting respite, a temporary truce. End quote. Now, I think it really is difficult for many of you to
00:32:32.080 appreciate how attractive this message is for those who are susceptible to it. It really is the total package,
00:32:41.680 especially for men. As we've seen, even women can be recruited to this cause. But the attraction for
00:32:48.860 men, or a certain type of man, is much easier to see. This worldview has everything, from the pleasure
00:32:58.080 of contemplating the beauty of the universe, to the brotherhood of fighting alongside one's fellow 0.97
00:33:03.960 soldiers for a just cause, to the illicit thrill of being in the mob and not having to take shit from 0.93
00:33:11.060 anyone, to the joy of being able to endlessly split hairs with your fellow amateur theologians. 0.79
00:33:18.460 It's like you're a spiritual James Bond. It's like you get to be a Navy SEAL and a priest.
00:33:24.520 You get to worry, really worry, about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.
00:33:31.960 And you get to carry an AK-47 and use it to your heart's content, fully convinced that the creator
00:33:39.600 of the universe wants you to do it. So you get to be a total badass and feel spiritually pure at the
00:33:46.880 same time. Did you ever know anyone who got really into yoga? They just got obsessed with it,
00:33:52.580 like it was the answer to all their problems. And they got into the subtleties of it. They were
00:33:58.180 really thinking about their chakras opening, the energy centers in the body. And they spent a lot
00:34:03.680 of time adjusting their diets, eating only pure foods, because their bodies were now these instruments
00:34:10.100 of spiritual realization, and they just had to be tuned perfectly. So picture that level of
00:34:16.840 infatuation. Imagine a man who's just totally into yoga, and he's convinced that he's
00:34:22.560 found this ancient path to wellness and enlightenment. But then he discovers another
00:34:27.840 aspect to it, just as true. In addition to all the purity and subtlety and the refinement of
00:34:35.780 his understanding of the body, just the preciousness of that whole enterprise, he learns that he gets 0.98
00:34:42.260 to kill the bad guys. He's not some pussy in a leotard. He's a yoga assassin. He gets to kick ass. 1.00
00:34:50.700 He's in the mob. There's actually one testimonial in this issue of Dabiq from a convert from Trinidad 1.00
00:34:59.180 who said that his family back home, when they get any hostility from anyone, they say,
00:35:05.460 you better watch out. We have a son in ISIS, right? And that gives them street cred. So he's a wise guy
00:35:11.440 now, right? He's a made man, and he protects his family from afar merely by the power of his reputation
00:35:19.980 for violence. That's part of the attraction. And then there's the problem of women, right? So imagine 1.00
00:35:27.260 being a guy who's grown up in isolation from women or never felt confident with them. So he's either in
00:35:34.480 a traditional Muslim context where contact with the opposite sex is highly circumscribed or he's just 0.92
00:35:40.660 someone who felt isolated socially by a lack of confidence and a fear of rejection. Picture a young
00:35:46.500 man who has spent his entire life being the least confident guy in the bar. But now he's been recruited
00:35:54.760 into a cult that gives him a new understanding. Okay, all those hot chicks who he was worried about 0.99
00:36:00.620 rejecting him. Well, now they're his slaves, whether they're his wife or wives, he actually can have
00:36:07.600 more than one, or his actual sex slaves. He rules. He is to be feared and obeyed. So he might have been 0.72
00:36:18.300 bored with his life before, and he might have seemed destined for a life of boredom. But now his life
00:36:24.640 has suddenly become this massive first-person shooter game where he's been inducted into a fraternity of
00:36:33.160 tough guys and given absolute dominion over women. Picture the emotional attraction of that to a certain
00:36:42.720 type of man. And then add the intellectual or pseudo-intellectual component to it. So whatever
00:36:49.960 his actual intellectual accomplishments, at the level of his mind now, he's suddenly a philosopher
00:36:57.780 and a scientist and a priest all rolled into one. Because God has simply given him the truth about
00:37:05.200 the cosmos in the Quran. And this is a truth about which every infidel in history, including Einstein 1.00
00:37:12.840 and Darwin and Richard Feynman, was ignorant. And they will pay for their ignorance in fire for 0.99
00:37:20.540 eternity. But our hero has escaped their errors and their arrogance. Okay, so he's better than a 0.87
00:37:28.320 genius without doing any real work. His humility has made him better than everyone, right? This is the
00:37:35.640 biggest humble brag in human history. I'm just a lowly worm, but I'm better than you. And I'm sure as hell 0.97
00:37:43.380 better than an infidel like Stephen Hawking. So imagine a person's estimation of himself being exalted by all 1.00
00:37:52.440 this. That's what we're dealing with. Now, ordinary Muslims and their apologists will recoil from these 1.00
00:38:02.880 observations. They will point out that there are millions of devout men and women, even within
00:38:08.360 conservative Muslim societies, who do no harm to anyone, right? Most Muslims don't want sex slaves, 0.99
00:38:16.200 even though they're sanctioned in the Quran. And then they'll flip this coin and insist that people 0.97
00:38:21.860 in other religions, and people at every point on the spectrum of belief and unbelief, commit atrocities 0.58
00:38:28.660 from time to time. Now, this is all true, of course, and truly irrelevant. As I wrote somewhere,
00:38:36.640 the groves of faith are now ringed by a forest of non-sequiturs. Okay, here's the basic picture.
00:38:44.840 Whatever else may be wrong with our world, it remains a fact that many of the most terrifying 1.00
00:38:51.960 examples of human conflict and stupidity would be unthinkable without religion. And some religions 1.00
00:38:59.500 are worse than others. This Finnish woman's celebration of the, quote, martyrdom of her child, 0.69
00:39:05.720 that's religion. And it's not every religion. That's what a belief in paradise gets you.
00:39:12.660 A Hindu wouldn't believe that. A Buddhist wouldn't believe that. A Jew wouldn't believe that. And 0.96
00:39:21.820 needless to say, an atheist wouldn't believe that. And this belief, and its horrific implications,
00:39:29.880 is not the product of U.S. foreign policy. Or perhaps one of you wants to ask Noam Chomsky
00:39:36.100 whether we've dropped too many bombs on Finland. And the other ideologies that inspire people to
00:39:42.440 behave like monsters, whether it's Stalinism or fascism or the crazy cargo cult that we see in North 0.96
00:39:50.120 Korea, these political movements are dangerous precisely because they so resemble religions. 0.98
00:39:57.360 The sacrifice for the dear leader, however secular he might be, is an act of cultic conformity and worship.
00:40:04.140 Whenever human obsession gets channeled in these ways, we see the same ancient framework upon which
00:40:11.640 many religions were built. In our ignorance and fear and craving for order, we created the gods.
00:40:20.620 And ignorance and fear and craving keep them with us.
00:40:25.180 Now what defenders of religion cannot say is that anyone has ever gone berserk or that any society ever
00:40:32.440 failed because people became too reasonable, or too intellectually honest, or too unwilling to be
00:40:39.460 duped by dogma and demagoguery. This skeptical attitude is all that an atheist like myself recommends.
00:40:48.720 And it's typical of nearly every intellectual pursuit apart from theology and bad politics.
00:40:54.100 Only on the subject of God, or when indulging rank political tribalism, can smart people still imagine
00:41:02.360 that they reap the fruits of human intelligence, even as they plow them under.
00:41:07.800 Now, nearly 15 years have passed since a group of mostly educated and middle-class men decided to
00:41:15.420 obliterate themselves, along with 3,000 innocents, to gain entrance to an imaginary paradise.
00:41:23.000 And this problem has always been deeper than the threat of terrorism.
00:41:27.900 And our waging an interminable, quote, war on terror is no answer to it.
00:41:33.320 Yes, we must destroy al-Qaeda and ISIS and similar groups.
00:41:39.440 And given the significance that jihadists throughout the world now place on the caliphate,
00:41:43.820 I think smashing ISIS decisively would be a very good thing to do.
00:41:47.920 As things currently stand, jihadists still imagine that they're in the process of conquering the world.
00:41:53.780 We should make that impossible to imagine.
00:41:56.800 But humanity has a larger project.
00:41:59.760 To become sane.
00:42:01.140 If September 11th should have taught us anything, it's that we must outgrow our attachment to divisive mythology.
00:42:09.660 We must find our consolation in our capacity for love and creativity and a real understanding of ourselves and the world.
00:42:19.180 This is possible.
00:42:21.500 It's also necessary.
00:42:23.660 And the alternatives are bleak.
00:42:25.340 But in the meantime, we have to admit that we are at war with jihadism and Islamist theocracy. 0.95
00:42:33.860 In a way that we're not at war with any other strand of religion.
00:42:38.040 And Muslim moderates, wherever they are, are at war with jihadism and Islamist theocracy. 0.89
00:42:44.860 And if they're not, they're not moderates.
00:42:49.520 Finally, I'm going to give you the closing passage from this issue of Dabiq.
00:42:54.660 Just to give you a final sense of how clear these people have been about the kind of world they want to build.
00:43:02.580 When you listen to statements of this kind and hear them, you will understand that seemingly crass statements like,
00:43:13.540 you're either with us or with the terrorists, are true.
00:43:18.640 There is no middle ground here.
00:43:21.260 Just listen.
00:43:21.880 This is not only what they say they want.
00:43:26.880 This is what they say so as to successfully recruit others to their cause.
00:43:33.100 And it works.
00:43:35.120 If ever you hear someone say this is just propaganda,
00:43:39.220 you have to recognize what a meaningless rejoinder that is.
00:43:45.000 It's propaganda that works.
00:43:47.680 It's propaganda that is believed.
00:43:49.760 These are honest confessions of a worldview.
00:43:54.240 And they are attractive.
00:43:56.440 Quote, 1.00
00:43:56.940 The clear difference between Muslims and the corrupt and deviant Jews and Christians 1.00
00:44:01.920 is that Muslims are not ashamed of abiding by the rules set down from their Lord 0.99
00:44:06.760 regarding war and enforcement of divine law.
00:44:10.460 So if it were the Muslims instead of the Crusaders who fought the Japanese and Vietnamese
00:44:15.100 or invaded the lands of the Native Americans,
00:44:18.080 there would have been no regrets in killing and enslaving those therein.
00:44:22.420 And since those Mujahideen would have done so bound by the law, 1.00
00:44:26.100 they would have been thorough and without some politically correct need to apologize years later.
00:44:31.780 The Japanese, for example, would have been forcefully converted to Islam from their pagan ways.
00:44:38.040 And if they stubbornly declined, perhaps another nuke would have changed their mind.
00:44:42.280 The Vietnamese would likewise be offered Islam or beds of napalm.
00:44:47.620 As for the Native Americans, 0.99
00:44:49.700 after the slaughter of their men,
00:44:51.920 those who would favor smallpox to surrendering to the Lord,
00:44:55.540 then the Muslims would have taken their surviving women and children as slaves, 1.00
00:44:59.600 raising the children as model Muslims 1.00
00:45:01.500 and impregnating their women to produce a new generation of Mujahideen. 0.99
00:45:05.380 As for the treacherous Jews of Europe and elsewhere, 1.00
00:45:09.720 those who would betray their covenant,
00:45:11.980 then their post-pubescent males would face a slaughter that would make the Holocaust sound like a bedtime story, 0.72
00:45:17.540 as their women would be made to serve their husbands' and fathers' killers. 0.99
00:45:22.820 Furthermore, the lucrative African slave trade would have continued, 0.84
00:45:26.560 supporting a strong economy.
00:45:27.960 The Islamic leadership would not have bypassed Allah's permission to sell captured pagan humans, 1.00
00:45:34.140 to teach them, and to convert them,
00:45:36.520 as they worked hard for their masters in building a beautiful country.
00:45:40.400 Notably, of course, those of them who converted, 1.00
00:45:42.860 practiced their religion well,
00:45:44.660 and were freed,
00:45:45.640 would be treated no differently than any other free Muslim. 0.98
00:45:48.780 This is unlike when the Christian slaves were emancipated in America, 0.61
00:45:52.680 as they were not afforded supposedly government-recognized equal rights
00:45:56.160 for more than a century.
00:45:57.960 And their descendants still live in a nation divided over those days.
00:46:02.020 All of this would be done not for racism, nationalism, or political lies,
00:46:06.840 but to make the word of Allah supreme.
00:46:10.300 Jihad is the ultimate show of one's love for his creator,
00:46:13.680 facing the clashing of swords and buzzing of bullets on the battlefield,
00:46:17.580 seeking to slaughter his enemies,
00:46:19.600 whom he hates for Allah's hatred of them. 0.94
00:46:22.560 A religion without these fundamentals
00:46:24.620 is one that does not call his adherents to fully manifest
00:46:28.040 and uphold the love of the Lord.
00:46:30.800 End quote.
00:46:32.420 This is followed by a picture of a man getting his head cut off.
00:46:37.180 Well, I hope it's clear
00:46:41.060 that these are not people
00:46:43.660 we will ever be able to negotiate with.
00:46:47.260 And they have already told us
00:46:49.120 that they would view any truth
00:46:51.680 as an opportunity merely to just gather strength
00:46:54.960 for further attacks against us.
00:46:57.460 So, there really are some circumstances
00:47:02.340 where war is the answer.
00:47:07.280 Now, the question of how to wage this war
00:47:10.260 is a genuinely difficult one.
00:47:11.860 And it would be much, much better 0.61
00:47:15.360 if Muslim armies 0.96
00:47:18.460 who did not share this ideology
00:47:22.040 were turning their guns
00:47:24.960 on this death cult.
00:47:27.340 But in the absence of that effort,
00:47:31.440 non-Muslim armies are clearly going to have to do this. 1.00
00:47:34.860 And until that's done,
00:47:38.200 until the caliphate is no more,
00:47:42.060 until the jihadists
00:47:43.800 have suffered a defeat
00:47:45.980 so resounding
00:47:47.760 that no one can even pretend
00:47:50.220 their cause
00:47:51.520 is still viable,
00:47:53.700 we are going to continue to see
00:47:55.600 the violent machinations 1.00
00:47:58.000 of religious lunatics 1.00
00:47:59.380 directed at us. 0.99
00:48:01.820 They've told us as much,
00:48:03.380 and we should take them
00:48:05.120 at their word.
00:48:07.080 And on that happy note,
00:48:08.660 I will see you next time.
00:48:10.020 Thank you.