The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #608 - Ali Rizvi

00:00:06.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:33.000 I know in your country it's frozen solid and you escaped, came down here, did a little drinking last night?

00:00:42.000 Um, maybe.

00:00:46.000 Maybe.

00:00:46.000 Oh, no, no, yeah.

00:00:48.000 Yes, definitely.

00:00:48.000 So I've been drinking lots of water, and that's why I was telling you that, you know, these long podcasts.

00:00:54.000 I was just wondering if I could take a pee break.

00:00:55.000 You could absolutely take a pee break.

00:00:57.000 Do not be intimidated by the long form.

00:00:59.000 We're just trying to have a conversation here.

00:01:01.000 No, no, I'm fine.

00:01:02.000 You're working on your new book, and your new book is entitled The Atheist Muslim.

00:01:02.000 I'm good.

00:01:07.000 That's a working title.

00:01:08.000 Is that like jumbo shrimp or military intelligence?

00:01:12.000 Is that one of those oxymorons?

00:01:14.000 It was partly a tongue-in-cheek thing, and then there's a serious element to it, too.

00:01:19.000 The tongue-in-cheek thing is I have a friend who calls herself a feminist Muslim. 1.00

00:01:24.000 I'm not going to name her right now.

00:01:27.000 So I always have fun conversations with her.

00:01:30.000 She's sort of nominally religious.

00:01:32.000 And I was like, how can you be a feminist Muslim? 1.00

00:01:36.000 Isn't that like being a meat-eating vegetarian? 0.55

00:01:39.000 It's a contradiction.

00:01:41.000 And she's like, well, no, there's parts of it that I like, parts of it I don't like.

00:01:46.000 So I just...

00:01:47.000 I mean, she's essentially saying that she cherry-picks.

00:01:50.000 So I figured...

00:01:50.000 Right.

00:01:51.000 And then, you know, there's other things, like there's LGBT Muslims in Toronto.

00:01:56.000 Really?

00:01:56.000 There's a big community.

00:01:57.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:01:57.000 They're great people.

00:01:59.000 Transgender Muslims. 0.64

00:02:00.000 Transgender Muslims, gay and lesbian Muslims. 0.94

00:02:03.000 That's a small crowd. 0.88

00:02:04.000 It's hard to find your peers.

00:02:07.000 Yeah, it's actually quite sizable.

00:02:09.000 Really?

00:02:10.000 Yeah.

00:02:10.000 Like, wait a minute, 10 people?

00:02:11.000 How many transgender Muslims are there?

00:02:14.000 Oh, I don't know a number.

00:02:16.000 But they practice.

00:02:17.000 Yeah, they practice.

00:02:19.000 They're religious.

00:02:20.000 They do Friday prayers and things like that.

00:02:23.000 They have a lot of events that go on.

00:02:25.000 But clearly, in the Muslim religion, like homosexuality, there's a lot of areas of that that are looked down upon.

00:02:36.000 Right.

00:02:36.000 So how does one justify that or rationalize that in their head?

00:02:40.000 I think what's happening is the Muslim community that's in North America.

00:02:44.000 In Canada, the United States, they're a little bit more progressive.

00:02:48.000 They're sort of going through what all of the other religious groups went through when they came here.

00:02:52.000 The religion part is really more of an identity issue.

00:02:57.000 They have broad beliefs, like they'll believe in God, they'll stick to some traditions, but a large part of it, they're integrating pretty well.

00:03:08.000 It's very different in Europe, it seems.

00:03:11.000 Sort of like American Jews perhaps. 0.99

00:03:14.000 Like a lot of American Jews are not really religious at all. 0.99

00:03:16.000 Like I have a lot of friends that will call themselves Jew.

00:03:19.000 Like my friend Ari Shaffir.

00:03:20.000 Clearly an atheist. 0.76

00:03:22.000 But yet, if you talk to him, he'll tell you he's a Jew.

00:03:24.000 Yeah, and that was kind of the idea, the title of the book.

00:03:30.000 It's a jab at the cherry-picking thing.

00:03:33.000 I was thinking, if you can cherry-pick, you can be a feminist Muslim, an LGBT Muslim. 1.00

00:03:38.000 I can cherry-pick all the way to non-belief.

00:03:45.000 I'll keep the things I like.

00:03:48.000 I love the Ramadan feasts. 0.98

00:03:49.000 I grew up with that.

00:03:52.000 It's just very communal.

00:03:54.000 Families get together.

00:03:55.000 The Eid holidays are great.

00:03:55.000 It's great.

00:03:58.000 Tax-exempt status.

00:03:59.000 Why not keep that?

00:04:02.000 You only have tax-exempt status if you operate a religion, though, right?

00:04:06.000 You do, yeah.

00:04:06.000 I'm kidding about that.

00:04:07.000 You're going to have to operate your own church.

00:04:09.000 Yeah.

00:04:10.000 I probably won't be doing that anytime soon.

00:04:12.000 You can do it if you want to.

00:04:14.000 My friend Alex Gray does that.

00:04:16.000 Our friend Alex, the painter?

00:04:17.000 Yeah.

00:04:17.000 He's this amazing psychedelic artist, and he has this organization called the Chapel of the Sacred Mirrors.

00:04:25.000 And what he essentially does, is done, rather, is create his own religion.

00:04:31.000 And he has tax-exempt status, although his...

00:04:34.000 I think...

00:04:36.000 The state recognizes it, but the town doesn't want to recognize it.

00:04:40.000 They want local taxes.

00:04:43.000 It's very interesting.

00:04:45.000 It's because people are cool with religions as long as they're really old. 0.99

00:04:50.000 As soon as you know who made the religion, even Mormonism gets looked down upon because Joseph Smith, although he lived in the 1800s, there's a historical record of Joseph Smith that's pretty easy to track.

00:05:02.000 Yeah.

00:05:03.000 Whereas, you know, Scientology is the most made fun of, and that is by a science fiction writer in the 1950s.

00:05:10.000 It's the easiest to track.

00:05:11.000 It's like, it's right there.

00:05:12.000 Yeah. 0.94

00:05:13.000 Anything newer than that, you're like, come on, get the fuck out of here.

00:05:15.000 Like, you can't... 0.93

00:05:16.000 I know, you wouldn't believe it.

00:05:17.000 Even those older religions, if you brought them back, if they started recently, some of the... 1.00

00:05:21.000 It's just, you know, when religious people make fun of Scientology and modernism, it's always entertaining. 0.95

00:05:27.000 It's hilarious.

00:05:27.000 You know, you're talking about, like, well, yeah, angels are real, and...

00:05:30.000 Virgin births really happen, but this fucking Mormon shit. 1.00

00:05:38.000 It's kind of funny when you look at it. 1.00

00:05:40.000 I saw this comic where there were these two religious groups fighting.

00:05:44.000 They were running against each other with swords.

00:05:47.000 And one of them was screaming, 2 plus 2 equals 5. The other one was saying, 2 plus 2 equals 3. And they were about to fight about it.

00:05:54.000 And that's really what it's like sometimes when you look at it.

00:05:56.000 Well, did you see the anger from the people that were upset at Neil deGrasse Tyson for tweeting about Isaac Newton who was born on December 25th?

00:06:09.000 Was it Darwin or Newton that was born on December 25th?

00:06:12.000 It was Newton.

00:06:13.000 And he was tweeting about this great man being born on this great day.

00:06:13.000 Yeah.

00:06:13.000 Was it Newton?

00:06:21.000 And so many fucking religious people got really angry at him, although he said nothing negative whatsoever about religion. 0.99

00:06:28.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:06:29.000 But they were like, you know, you're shitting on our holiday. 0.99

00:06:32.000 To me sort of highlights what religion is for a lot of people. 0.99

00:06:36.000 It's a group that you belong to.

00:06:38.000 It's a team.

00:06:39.000 Like, I'm a Patriots fan. 1.00

00:06:41.000 You know, don't fuck with our team. 0.99

00:06:43.000 I mean, it really does become something like that. 1.00

00:06:45.000 And when you're talking about American Jews or Muslims maybe perhaps that don't really follow all of what's in the Quran, they just decide to cherry pick. 0.99

00:06:56.000 It's kind of a similar thing you're dealing with.

00:06:58.000 It is a similar thing.

00:06:59.000 It's probably a good thing.

00:07:00.000 I mean that's how people sort of progress forwards, right? 0.99

00:07:04.000 I mean, we're talking about Jews and the Old Testament is, you know, we're talking about killing gay people. 1.00

00:07:10.000 Like Leviticus 20.13 says it. 0.99

00:07:12.000 It says, you know, if there's two men and you find them, you know, together in the way that a man should be with a woman, then they will be put to death. 0.67

00:07:19.000 That's exactly what it says. 0.94

00:07:20.000 But most Jews don't really take that seriously.

00:07:23.000 They've moved beyond it.

00:07:25.000 Even, you know, Christians, you know, one of the things I look at is Catholics.

00:07:30.000 The Pope says you should not use birth control or abortion is a bad thing.

00:07:36.000 The majority of Catholics are pro-choice.

00:07:38.000 They have premarital sex. 0.90

00:07:41.000 They're perfectly fine with all these things.

00:07:43.000 Do you think the majority are pro-choice?

00:07:46.000 Over here in the US, they are.

00:07:47.000 Is there a statistic that proves that?

00:07:50.000 I don't know the exact number, but the majority of Catholics in the United States are actually pro-choice.

00:07:50.000 Yeah, there is.

00:07:55.000 That's interesting, because I would have not thought that was true.

00:07:58.000 I would have thought that it would probably be, at the very least, 50-50, but at the very, more likely, skewing towards pro-life.

00:08:06.000 No, it's definitely, I mean, they are pro-choice.

00:08:08.000 Joe Biden's Catholic, he's a practicing Catholic, and he's also pro-choice. 1.00

00:08:12.000 He's also an idiot, though. 1.00

00:08:14.000 You know, when we were comics back in the early days. 1.00

00:08:18.000 He's a funny idiot, though. 1.00

00:08:20.000 Yeah. 1.00

00:08:21.000 Well, people forget about this, about Joe Biden, but, you know, not to...

00:08:25.000 Everybody makes mistakes, and I'm sure it probably wasn't his fault, but in the 1980s, he was running for president, and he plagiarized a huge chunk of John F. Kennedy's speeches.

00:08:35.000 Yeah, he did.

00:08:36.000 And we used to do Joe Biden night at Stitches, and Joe Biden night would be like, we would all go up and try to remember each other's acts.

00:08:44.000 Like, I would try to do my friend's act, and he would try to do my act.

00:08:47.000 We'd steal each other's jokes.

00:08:49.000 It was like an inside thing that we would do on open mic night.

00:08:52.000 Yeah.

00:08:53.000 That this guy...

00:08:55.000 I forget who came up with the idea, but he was such a known plagiarist that we would call it Joe Biden night.

00:09:02.000 Yeah, I think that was one of the major things that killed his campaign, if not the only thing.

00:09:06.000 Yeah, but now he's the vice president, and it's sort of never brought up.

00:09:10.000 Yeah, I think he's done...

00:09:12.000 There's a lot of stuff he's done that I think kind of redeemed him.

00:09:16.000 Right, but how did that not come up when he was debating Sarah Palin?

00:09:20.000 It did.

00:09:21.000 It didn't come up during the debate, but during the campaign, there were people who tried to bring it up.

00:09:25.000 But I think that it had been so long, and he had done so much more since then, like with foreign policy, with the violence against women legislation and so on, that people were willing to...

00:09:38.000 Let him get past it.

00:09:39.000 He has a really strong personal story too that he emphasized.

00:09:44.000 So I think he was able to move past that.

00:09:47.000 It's interesting because a lot of times things like that are real career killers.

00:09:51.000 And it was as far as like him being the actual president president.

00:09:54.000 Like when people talk about Hillary running for president, no one's talking about Joe Biden running for president.

00:09:59.000 Have you noticed that?

00:10:00.000 Like no one.

00:10:02.000 Is he running for president?

00:10:02.000 No one.

00:10:03.000 No, he's not. 0.99

00:10:04.000 But he's the vice president for eight fucking years and no one hates him. 0.99

00:10:04.000 He's not, right? 0.99

00:10:08.000 You know, it's not like he's Dan Quayle, where everybody's like, get that fucking moron out of office. 0.99

00:10:13.000 He never did, like, even in the other campaigns, whenever he's run, he never really did too well. 0.99

00:10:19.000 I mean, he was running against Obama, too, back in the way, and then Obama chose him as vice president.

00:10:24.000 I think he's always in, like, the single digits.

00:10:27.000 Right, but I mean, he is the vice president.

00:10:29.000 You would think that that would be, like, a prime candidate to keep the Democrats in a position of power.

00:10:35.000 But no, they're looking towards a woman instead.

00:10:35.000 Yeah.

00:10:38.000 They're like, dude, you're a liability.

00:10:41.000 It was like Dick Cheney, right? 0.99

00:10:42.000 He was also vice president, but there's no fucking way he was going to... 0.99

00:10:46.000 Well, he's probably the most hated vice president ever. 0.99

00:10:51.000 Dick Cheney, like the most despised. 0.99

00:10:53.000 Like, there's some people that supported him for sure, but the people that hated him really fucking hated him. 0.98

00:10:58.000 Yeah, they did.

00:11:00.000 It was just such a money trail. 0.96

00:11:01.000 You know, pointing him directly to Halliburton and all the, you know, the weapons of mass destruction fiasco and all that shit. 0.97

00:11:08.000 I just think, like, it just seems really dodgy to me. 0.89

00:11:11.000 Like, I always feel like there's something under the surface that's just really explosive and evil.

00:11:16.000 Like, he comes across that way.

00:11:17.000 Yeah, he definitely doesn't come across warm and compassionate and interesting.

00:11:21.000 Yeah, it's hard to understand a guy like that.

00:11:24.000 Especially a guy that's gone through some serious health issues and it doesn't seem to have softened him at all.

00:11:30.000 Like what, four heart attacks?

00:11:31.000 Well, he's got a new heart.

00:11:31.000 Something?

00:11:33.000 He had a heart transplant, which is insane.

00:11:36.000 And before the heart transplant, he had some sort of a device that eliminated his pulse.

00:11:42.000 He didn't have a pulse.

00:11:43.000 There was some artificial method of pumping blood through his body, and if you checked his pulse, it didn't exist, which is probably in the Bible somewhere.

00:11:53.000 You know, a guy who causes the death of millions.

00:11:56.000 I mean, he's directly connected to the death of at least a million people, and he doesn't have a pulse. 1.00

00:12:03.000 Yeah, that's some dark shit. 0.99

00:12:06.000 Yeah, that's a hell of a way to articulate it. 0.99

00:12:08.000 If it's accurate, it's accurate.

00:12:12.000 I don't know how we got on this, but what we're talking about is people that are in groups.

00:12:17.000 I mean, there's good things involved in being in a group because it gives you some support and it gives you...

00:12:23.000 Some feeling of camaraderie and that you belong to a social structure.

00:12:29.000 But the real issue, though, is groups against other groups.

00:12:29.000 Right.

00:12:34.000 You know, diametrically opposed groups.

00:12:36.000 Like right now, being a Muslim is a very unpopular thing in a lot of parts of the world.

00:12:42.000 Yeah.

00:12:42.000 This Charlie Hebdo thing, this most recent ISIS video where they burn the Jordanian pilot alive.

00:12:48.000 Yeah, that was just kind of shaking over hours with...

00:12:53.000 I didn't watch it.

00:12:53.000 I didn't watch it either.

00:12:54.000 I've seen it all at this point.

00:12:57.000 I know what it looks like.

00:12:58.000 I've seen the beheadings and the assassinations and it's just like, okay, I get it.

00:13:03.000 There's evil people.

00:13:04.000 I get it.

00:13:05.000 But it's just like this.

00:13:06.000 It's almost like if you were a conspiratorially minded person, if you're the type of person that believes black helicopters are circling in your house every day, taking scans of your phone and Yeah, I am.

00:13:19.000 You would say, okay, it's almost like we're creating this monster that's so unbelievably horrific and so impossible to feel any sympathy towards.

00:13:34.000 That's like you want them all wiped off the face of the planet.

00:13:38.000 It's almost like they have become...

00:13:41.000 They're so evil and their acts are so horrendous that it's the perfect instigating The perfect method of instigation.

00:13:53.000 If you were an evil dictator or the evil head of some sort of government and you had this desire to go to war with another country, what you would create would be ISIS. You would say, all right, we need some bullshit CIA propped up organization. 0.99

00:14:10.000 It's not real. 1.00

00:14:12.000 And we need them to be just so heinous, so beyond belief, that everyone agrees we should go over there and fuck them up. 0.99

00:14:21.000 Yeah, I totally see the logic of that. 0.99

00:14:24.000 Obviously, I don't think that's the case.

00:14:26.000 I don't think that's the case either.

00:14:27.000 But if it was going to be the case, ISIS is the perfect candidate. 0.99

00:14:32.000 Yeah, it's a prototype.

00:14:33.000 That's exactly what you'd want.

00:14:35.000 Yeah, it's like right out of Hollywood casting, right?

00:14:37.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:14:37.000 And you know what's...

00:14:39.000 This whole idea that they're a fringe and that they don't have a lot of support.

00:14:45.000 It is one thing that, yes, they don't represent all Muslims.

00:14:48.000 They don't even represent the majority of Muslims and everything. 1.00

00:14:52.000 Unfortunately, I think they have a lot more support than we'd like to believe.

00:14:56.000 Everybody who comes out and says that they're just a friend, just a group of guys who are doing this stuff and nobody really follows them, that's not true.

00:15:05.000 There's a lot of support.

00:15:07.000 You see it online.

00:15:08.000 I've talked to people online in Pakistan who are totally in support of ISIS. It's bizarre.

00:15:15.000 They won't go out and commit those acts themselves, but they'll definitely cheer it on.

00:15:21.000 Well, I follow some people online that are in ISIS. I follow their Twitter accounts.

00:15:26.000 Yeah.

00:15:26.000 You know, I don't follow them so they know I'm following them.

00:15:29.000 I follow them so I bookmark their Twitter page and I go back to it.

00:15:32.000 Yeah.

00:15:33.000 I'm sneaky like that.

00:15:34.000 But...

00:15:36.000 I mean, I hate to say this, but they do occasionally have good points.

00:15:42.000 And one of the good points was after they beheaded one of these guys, I forget which guy, I think it was a journalist that got beheaded over there.

00:15:50.000 It was one of the American guys they beheaded. 0.96

00:15:52.000 This guy wrote...

00:15:54.000 One guy loses a body part and everyone goes crazy, but thousands of people lose their entire lives and no one blinks an eye.

00:16:06.000 I think the way he said it is thousands of people's bodies are blown to bits and no one blinks an eye.

00:16:12.000 Yeah, that's a tough thing to argue against.

00:16:15.000 Whenever this kind of thing happens, you always have the Noam Chomsky kind of I don't think it's as simple as that.

00:16:34.000 I mean, I'm not saying that everything that the US is doing is great and I'm defending all aspects of American foreign policy.

00:16:41.000 But if you're going to have that balance, you got to sort of level the competition.

00:16:48.000 So, you know, the U.S. has this, you know, the biggest, strongest military in the world, got loads of nuclear weapons and so on.

00:16:55.000 If ISIS had all of that, how bad would they be and what would they do?

00:16:59.000 That's when you really sort of get an idea of the intentions.

00:17:04.000 And intentions matter.

00:17:05.000 Right.

00:17:06.000 So, you know, they do what they can and they go all out.

00:17:11.000 And they, I think that...

00:17:14.000 You know, like the Yazidis that they killed, right? 1.00

00:17:16.000 Or the Christians that they're killing in Mosul or the poor people, the women and the gay people, they're throwing off buildings and, you know, crucifying and stoning to death. 1.00

00:17:24.000 These are not people who are oil hungry. 0.98

00:17:27.000 They're not people who have been sort of invading their lands or anything like that.

00:17:31.000 These people have nothing to do with it.

00:17:33.000 They just have some of their crimes. 0.91

00:17:34.000 They're just Shia. 1.00

00:17:35.000 They have a different belief in a different strain of Islam or they're apostates.

00:17:41.000 You know, they left Islam. 1.00

00:17:42.000 They changed their mind.

00:17:44.000 Or they're, you know, they're a Christian, they're non-Muslims, they're infidels who are not going to subscribe to the, you know, the ISIS philosophy. 1.00

00:17:51.000 They're not going to pay that tax, the jizya that they want them to pay. 1.00

00:17:54.000 So, like, you know, I think that the foreign policy thing is an excuse, specifically for people like ISIS. It is, like, it helps them recruit people, for sure. 0.74

00:18:07.000 It doesn't hurt, but I don't think that that's the primary motive.

00:18:12.000 What do you think the primary motive is?

00:18:14.000 I think there's a lot of primary motives.

00:18:16.000 I think, you know, like the U.S. foreign policy is one thing, too.

00:18:18.000 But this is actually part of the religious belief.

00:18:21.000 And you've had Sam Harris here, you know, he's talked about this as well, like beliefs and behavior.

00:18:25.000 And most of the time, you know, when they're You know, when you have an entire world and you're seeing these guys and they're, you know, accurately quoting the Quran, I mean, there's a couple of verses in the Quran that say, behead disbelievers, you know, 812, you know, you can Google that, 0.51

00:18:40.000 like Surah 8, verse 12 and 13. 47-4 is another one that says, you know, behead disbelievers.

00:18:47.000 So they actually quote this stuff and they say Allahu Akbar when they do it and they call themselves the Islamic State.

00:18:55.000 And they don't just target, you know, People who are involved in U.S. foreign policy or anything like that.

00:19:04.000 They actually target poor people, Yazidis, minority groups, Shias, gay people who are in Iraq and Syria.

00:19:15.000 That's what they do.

00:19:17.000 So it's a lot more complicated.

00:19:19.000 I think it is part of their religious belief.

00:19:21.000 And one thing you're going to see when you go to their Twitter accounts is that they genuinely believe what they're doing is right.

00:19:26.000 They think it's okay.

00:19:27.000 When you're supported by the religion that you've sworn allegiance to and sworn your life to, when you're supported by the text, it really...

00:19:37.000 I mean, that's sometimes all you need to justify horrendous, horrible acts.

00:19:42.000 You just need to know that you're doing it in the name of God.

00:19:45.000 Well, the text is the religion, in this case.

00:19:48.000 Like, the one thing that's universal...

00:19:50.000 You know, people say Muslims are not a monolith, and they're not.

00:19:53.000 I mean, there's 1.6 billion Muslims in the world, so they're obviously not all the same. 1.00

00:19:56.000 The ones in Indonesia, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, they're all very different from each other.

00:20:01.000 But the one thing they all have in common is the Quran and belief in the Prophet Muhammad.

00:20:06.000 So the Quran, again, you know, has different interpretations, but it's supposed to be an immutable text.

00:20:12.000 And unlike a lot of Christians and Jews who don't believe that they're, like, You know, like with Christianity, if you say that the Bible is a literal word of God, you're part of, I think, just 30% of the US population.

00:20:27.000 I think it is 30% that is considered fundamentalists, where they believe that it's a literal word of God.

00:20:34.000 Islam among Muslims, among the vast majority of Muslims, that is a fundamental requirement to believe that it is the literal word of God, like the idea of scriptural inerrancy, that anything in the Quran, it can't be wrong.

00:20:48.000 So you'll have the more progressive people who try to justify it, they'll never say, well, you know, that verse in the Quran, I don't believe in it, I don't think it's right.

00:20:58.000 They'll try to justify it by saying, at that time it was okay, Or it's being mistranslated, or the word kill actually means embrace, you know, whatever it is.

00:21:06.000 They look at the Arabic roots, you know, just find other justifications for it. 0.99

00:21:13.000 But unfortunately, to the rest of us who can read it now, you can Google it in all kinds of different translations and interpretations and, you know, commentaries.

00:21:24.000 You just find it online, and when you see the words, the words are what they are.

00:21:30.000 I want to be real clear here that I'm not justifying what they're doing or not trying to exonerate them from the horrific nature of what their crimes are, but what I was going to get to was that, is that dissimilar?

00:21:46.000 This belief that you can kill people because of the Quran, because they're not following the word of the Quran.

00:21:52.000 Is that dissimilar than this belief that you can launch drones into these non-specific areas where, you know, this idea of surgical targets is pretty preposterous at this point.

00:22:04.000 When you look at the number of people, the overwhelming number of people that are innocent, that are killed by drones, Versus the number of people that are guilty.

00:22:13.000 If you look at that and you look at this being sanctioned by the United States government, the Constitution, our ideas about law and justice and war, Those are also just things that are written down on paper.

00:22:28.000 Mm-hmm.

00:22:42.000 But it is one nation under God, ultimately.

00:22:45.000 This is what we say when we pledge allegiance now since the 1950s, since they were worried about the big communist scare.

00:22:52.000 It used to be one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all, right?

00:22:57.000 Now it's one nation under God. 0.59

00:23:00.000 That was all because of communism.

00:23:02.000 Most folks don't even realize that wasn't even in there until the 1950s.

00:23:06.000 It was a reaction to the atheists.

00:23:08.000 The Red Scare.

00:23:10.000 But this is a justification.

00:23:13.000 The horrific acts that are committed In war, non-specific targets.

00:23:19.000 I mean, when I say non-specific, obviously they're trying to get someone that's in a place. 0.83

00:23:25.000 But, you know, when you're shooting a fucking missile where you know a guy's cell phone is, that's fairly non-specific. 0.96

00:23:32.000 Yeah, relatively speaking. 0.99

00:23:35.000 Relatively speaking.

00:23:36.000 What are the numbers?

00:23:38.000 I think the numbers versus the amount of casualties that are civilians versus the actual people they're trying to kill with drones.

00:23:47.000 It's some insane number.

00:23:48.000 It's like more than 80% civilians.

00:23:51.000 So the drone thing is a little...

00:23:53.000 It's also a complicated issue.

00:23:55.000 Right.

00:23:55.000 There's this writer.

00:23:57.000 Her name is Farhat Taj.

00:23:59.000 She lives in Norway now, but she's from that area.

00:24:01.000 She's from North Waziristan, where a lot of the drones were.

00:24:04.000 And she wrote this article a couple of years ago.

00:24:07.000 I think it was in the Daily Times, an Asian paper.

00:24:10.000 And what she talked about was...

00:24:12.000 It's sort of the different groups that are in that area, in like northwestern Pakistan, the Pak-Afghan border. 0.93

00:24:19.000 And she said that the locals over there, a lot of times, you know, they feel like they're caught between the Taliban that's sort of taken over the whole area and they, you know, they go out and they put, they're shooting young girls in the head for going to school and they're, you know, doing all this other bullshit.

00:24:35.000 And then on the other hand, there's the Pakistani military, And they're coming in with their planes, and they're trying to bomb, and that's even more nonspecific.

00:24:42.000 So they feel a lot of them are actually in favor of it.

00:24:48.000 That's what she said.

00:24:48.000 There's many of them.

00:24:50.000 I don't know how true that is, but it's definitely a plausible claim.

00:24:58.000 It's kind of anecdotal, though.

00:25:00.000 One person saying a lot of them are in favor of it.

00:25:03.000 What happened was, after she said this, there were a lot of other accounts that came out.

00:25:07.000 That said the same kind of thing.

00:25:09.000 I mean, they weren't saying that everybody's in favor of it.

00:25:11.000 They're saying that it's not as clear-cut as people think it is.

00:25:16.000 So, like, with drones, you know, for instance, if you...

00:25:19.000 Like, the idea is that when you...

00:25:21.000 You know, these are decisions that are, you know, you've got to choose between bad and worse.

00:25:27.000 Like, complicated decisions are never...

00:25:30.000 You know, clear-cut, good or bad.

00:25:32.000 So I don't like the drone strikes.

00:25:32.000 Right.

00:25:35.000 I think it sucks that sometimes they're necessary. 0.57

00:25:38.000 But unfortunately, I think sometimes they are necessary.

00:25:40.000 Like, these are people who are...

00:25:41.000 If you have a sniper who's going around killing, you know, hundreds of people, and you want to stop him, and, you know, he's around a place, and you have a choice between, you know, targeting this guy and taking him out, and that may kill a few civilians, whereas if you don't do that, it'll go out and, you know, he'll kill hundreds more people,

00:25:58.000 then...

00:25:59.000 And you're making that call.

00:26:01.000 That's a really tough call to make.

00:26:02.000 I don't know if I could do it.

00:26:04.000 But when you're running countries and when you have a foreign policy, when you have to do something about something that's happening, then it's a call that you have to make and it's a choice between bad and worse.

00:26:17.000 It seems so intensely archaic, doesn't it?

00:26:19.000 One of the articles that I pulled up was talking about an attempt to kill 41 men resulting in the deaths of an estimated 1,147 people.

00:26:31.000 So the drones, in their attempt to kill 41 different people, have killed more than 1,147 people.

00:26:43.000 Well, Farhat Taj, she talked about this too.

00:26:48.000 So in that area...

00:26:50.000 Nobody's allowed there.

00:26:51.000 Okay, so you're not...

00:26:53.000 Like, journalists don't go there because it's too dangerous.

00:26:55.000 What area is this?

00:26:55.000 Even...

00:26:56.000 This is in northern, south...

00:26:59.000 Pakistan.

00:26:59.000 Yeah, in Pakistan.

00:27:00.000 Now the army's in there because they're fighting against them recently after the Taliban has been, like, really focusing all their attacks within Pakistan.

00:27:08.000 They've attacked the army school...

00:27:11.000 And killed all those kids and so on.

00:27:13.000 So now they're in there.

00:27:15.000 But before, when a lot of these figures were coming out, she said that there's no UN people, there's no independent sort of watchdogs or agencies that are looking at it.

00:27:26.000 No journalists can go in there.

00:27:28.000 No politicians can go in there. 0.99

00:27:29.000 Even the police, the Pakistani police, is scared to go in there because it's just completely ruled by the Taliban, all these sort of militant elements.

00:27:36.000 So A lot of these numbers, like if you look at the, I think there was a report, detailed report from Stanford, and they talked about how these numbers were arrived at.

00:27:46.000 And there's a wide range.

00:27:48.000 Some people report they're very low, other people report they're very high.

00:27:52.000 That's not to say there haven't been civilian casualties.

00:27:54.000 There have been, and that's terrible.

00:27:57.000 But I think during Bush's time, when he just carried out a few drone strikes, they were relatively non-surgical.

00:28:04.000 I think Obama, one of the reasons that he decided to go ahead and continue the drone strikes is that he found it the most surgical and the most accurate compared to all of the other options that they had.

00:28:15.000 That's pretty scary when you think about, well, it makes sense.

00:28:18.000 It's the bad, choosing bad and worse, right?

00:28:20.000 But it makes sense when you look at the numbers of innocents that have been killed in the Iraq war.

00:28:24.000 Like, I mean, it's arguable that it's close to a million humans, rather.

00:28:24.000 Yeah.

00:28:31.000 I mean, that's an insane amount of innocent people that have been killed by feet on the ground, missiles, bombing campaigns, all of the above.

00:28:39.000 And when you compare that to drone strikes, that's the only way, kind of, like, what they're saying, like, it's more surgical than that way.

00:28:49.000 Then, you know, sending a bunch of tanks and a bunch of troops into an area is less surgical. 0.98

00:28:56.000 It's like, what the fuck is war, man? 0.98

00:28:59.000 It eventually comes down to this that war sucks, and if we're going to have that debate, I will agree with you. 0.99

00:29:05.000 When you can avoid it, you can. 0.94

00:29:05.000 It's terrible. 0.94

00:29:07.000 But if you're of the view that sometimes it is necessary to prevent even larger atrocities, and sometimes you need to do it to stop it, I think...

00:29:18.000 Which is the view that I have.

00:29:20.000 I think that the more surgical your methodology is, and it seems like drone strikes tend to be a better option than the other ones.

00:29:31.000 I mean, there's elements of it that I know about the debate, like the fact that you're sitting far away.

00:29:36.000 It's very sort of inhuman.

00:29:39.000 There's no contact.

00:29:40.000 You're very detached because it's like a remote control and they're firing off a missile. 0.99

00:29:45.000 That part of it sucks. 0.99

00:29:48.000 There's a lot of things about it that suck, but I just don't know how else. 0.96

00:29:54.000 I don't know what other options there are to handle the situation.

00:30:00.000 It is affecting them.

00:30:02.000 The Taliban seem to be more upset about the drone strikes than anybody else.

00:30:06.000 That means that it is kind of hitting them.

00:30:08.000 They do know that the world has a lot of sympathy for civilian casualties.

00:30:13.000 They know that And that itself, just the fact that they know that they can use these civilian casualties to their benefit, that automatically shows you that there is an ethical difference between both sides.

00:30:28.000 So it's not...

00:30:30.000 Well, you're saying that meaning that they do it on purpose, that they have areas set up in high civilian population areas, knowing that they'll get hit in those areas and it will cause civilian deaths so that those civilian deaths will be used to sort of promote their cause.

00:30:45.000 Yeah.

00:30:46.000 I mean, they absolutely do that.

00:30:47.000 I mean, think about it.

00:30:48.000 Again, you were talking about getting in the mind of...

00:30:50.000 You know, conspiracy theorists.

00:30:51.000 I mean, think about if you were one of those people and you knew that, you know, that a lot of people don't agree with you.

00:30:58.000 Everybody thinks that, you know, you're back in the stone ages and so on.

00:31:00.000 But the one time you get a lot of sympathy is when there are a lot of innocents killed.

00:31:04.000 And then, you know, everyone, all these powerful political figures and journalists, everything around the world suddenly start, you know, sort of coming to your side against your enemy.

00:31:14.000 Right.

00:31:14.000 Then why wouldn't you exploit that?

00:31:16.000 When you have nothing, you have like shitty weapons, you know, you're living in the middle of nowhere.

00:31:20.000 And if that's the only power you have, that's one of your strongest weapons.

00:31:24.000 You know, you'd exploit it.

00:31:25.000 Everybody would.

00:31:27.000 Well, I can certainly see that, but I can also certainly see the argument that one of the best recruiting methods for the Taliban or Al-Qaeda is having your family blown up by a drone.

00:31:38.000 You know, and that has happened too.

00:31:41.000 Yeah, it works.

00:31:42.000 That's what I'm saying.

00:31:43.000 This is really, really complicated.

00:31:44.000 It's so complicated.

00:31:46.000 Are we in a state of perpetual war?

00:31:50.000 I don't know.

00:31:53.000 I'm not qualified to answer that question.

00:31:55.000 What is a weird war in that sense?

00:31:58.000 Because all the wars throughout history seem to have been about someone trying to take over something.

00:32:05.000 Whereas this one seems to be, at least a big part of the root of it, seems to be religious ideology.

00:32:13.000 It is, yeah.

00:32:14.000 It takes you back to the Samuel Huntington paper, The Clash of Civilizations.

00:32:18.000 What is that paper?

00:32:20.000 He predicted, he was this political scientist, and in the 90s he wrote this paper and later expanded it into a book, and it was called The Clash of Civilizations.

00:32:28.000 It was sort of a prophecy about the future and what kind of conflicts people are going to get into, and he said that it wouldn't be ideological.

00:32:36.000 This is about the post-Cold War.

00:32:38.000 And he said it won't be ideological, it'll be cultural, and it'll be between religious groups.

00:32:45.000 And he actually talked about the Islamic world and about seven or eight other civilizations and how they're going to get into cultural conflict.

00:32:54.000 And he was conservative and a lot of people criticized it.

00:32:59.000 And at that time I thought it was kind of I wasn't completely, completely in line with it.

00:33:04.000 But now, as time goes on, every once in a while I go back to To revisit the paper.

00:33:10.000 And it seems to make more sense, almost like he kind of knew what he was talking about.

00:33:14.000 Have you ever tried to look objectively, like if you were the engineer of modern society or modern civilization, and you tried to look objectively, like sit in a high chair with a desk above the earth, and go, all right, how do I fix this mess?

00:33:29.000 How do I stop all these silly monkeys from blowing each other up and shooting rockets from robots that fly above their cities?

00:33:38.000 Blowing up bombs in their buildings. 0.99

00:33:40.000 How do you stop that?

00:33:42.000 Have you ever tried to see, like, is there a way, like a long-term, short-term, any-term way, to sort of engineer this away?

00:33:50.000 I think the long-term, I think we discount the role of ideology and belief when it comes to this.

00:33:58.000 And I don't know how to solve it, but I know one way to move closer to solving it, and that's just being honest about what the problem is.

00:34:07.000 You know, a lot of the problem, like for example, the Islamic State, you know, they're yelling Allahu Akbar, you know, quoting the Quran and everything.

00:34:14.000 I mean, this is weak, but, you know, cartoons, people making cartoons and then getting shot up for it.

00:34:20.000 Like, you know, these are all things that, you know, there is an identifiable issue.

00:34:26.000 There's a root cause here that everybody seems to deny, like including all the prime ministers and like this has nothing to do with religion.

00:34:34.000 I grew up in Libya, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan.

00:34:38.000 I didn't come to North America until I was 24. I grew up in pretty much Muslim-majority countries and some very conservative ones all the time.

00:34:47.000 Whenever I hear people say that this has nothing to do with religion, it just doesn't make any sense to me.

00:34:53.000 Is that like an American liberal, convenient thing to say because it makes you look super sensitive and very Noam Chomsky-esque?

00:35:01.000 Well, yeah, it does.

00:35:05.000 I don't know what goes into it.

00:35:07.000 I know that there's a lot of fear.

00:35:09.000 People don't want to criticize this.

00:35:10.000 We saw what happened with Salman Rushdie all the way up to the Paris attacks.

00:35:15.000 So there is a fear of that.

00:35:16.000 There's also a fear of being seen as a bigot.

00:35:19.000 I call it Islamophobia-phobia.

00:35:24.000 That's a great word.

00:35:26.000 Islamophobia phobia.

00:35:27.000 I love it.

00:35:29.000 It's something that a lot of people relate to immediately when they hear it.

00:35:32.000 It is true.

00:35:33.000 I hate that term, Islamophobia.

00:35:35.000 Look, what about Christianophobia?

00:35:37.000 What's hilarious to me is that a lot of quote-unquote progressive, very left-wing people will openly mock Christianity while defending Islam or by labeling people Islamophobic or conservative.

00:35:51.000 Yeah, I mean, you gotta stay consistent.

00:35:53.000 If you're a true liberal, and everybody's saying this, well, unfortunately, not everybody's saying it.

00:35:58.000 I wish more people were saying it. 0.94

00:35:59.000 But, you know, if you are, for instance, opposed to killing gay people, you should be opposed to killing gay people, whether it's in the KKK manifesto, or in the Bible, or in the Quran, or in the Republican Party, you know, or in Uganda. 0.99

00:36:13.000 It doesn't matter what it is. 0.99

00:36:16.000 If you're opposed to something, you should be opposed to it across the board.

00:36:18.000 It doesn't suddenly become respectful.

00:36:21.000 Okay, now, well, it's in the Bible, so we've got to respect that.

00:36:25.000 Respect for ideas is just such an overrated...

00:36:29.000 It's considered a virtue, respecting people's ideas and beliefs.

00:36:34.000 Ideas are not people.

00:36:36.000 That's the problem with the word Islamophobia, is that it implies criticism of an idea.

00:36:42.000 And there is genuine anti-Muslim bigotry. 0.72

00:36:45.000 People do commit hate crimes against Muslims. 0.82

00:36:48.000 But Muslims are people.

00:36:51.000 They're entitled to respect.

00:36:53.000 They have rights.

00:36:54.000 Islam itself is not a person. 1.00

00:36:56.000 It's just a book.

00:36:57.000 It's an ideology.

00:36:58.000 It's an ideology.

00:36:59.000 It's a bunch of ideas in a book.

00:37:00.000 So it doesn't have rights, and it's not entitled to respect.

00:37:04.000 So the idea of Islamophobia is a phobia of ideas that are irrational and ancient.

00:37:09.000 That seems to be pretty smart.

00:37:11.000 But it's connected somehow or another to racism.

00:37:13.000 This is where it gets weird because progressive people don't want to criticize anybody with extra melanin.

00:37:19.000 Anybody that's remotely browner than them gets immediate free pass. 1.00

00:37:23.000 But see, like the Boston Bombers, right?

00:37:26.000 They were from...

00:37:27.000 Dagestan?

00:37:28.000 Yeah, they're from...

00:37:29.000 Were they from...

00:37:30.000 Caucasus? 0.76

00:37:31.000 Is that how you pronounce it?

00:37:32.000 Caucasus? 0.76

00:37:32.000 He doesn't know. 0.76

00:37:33.000 He's the wrong dude.

00:37:34.000 He knows what Beyonce's weight is.

00:37:36.000 He knows what her ring size is and shoe size.

00:37:39.000 He knows when she was born.

00:37:40.000 He knows who she used to date.

00:37:42.000 Oh, we need to talk later.

00:37:43.000 Don't.

00:37:43.000 That's great.

00:37:46.000 They're actually...

00:37:47.000 The Boston Bombers are actually from a place where the word Caucasian The Caucasus Mountains.

00:37:54.000 Yeah, the Caucasus Mountains.

00:37:55.000 So they're from there.

00:37:56.000 So, you know, they were white. 0.96

00:37:58.000 The underwear bomber was black. 0.78

00:38:01.000 The Jose Padilla was Hispanic.

00:38:05.000 So it's not a race.

00:38:06.000 All these people were Muslim.

00:38:08.000 And the thing is, if you're saying that criticizing Islam is somehow racist, you're assuming that all of Islam is a race.

00:38:16.000 What does that make you?

00:38:18.000 That itself, I mean, that's That's exactly what racism is, when you assume that everything, that the entire religion is one race.

00:38:18.000 Right.

00:38:24.000 Yes, we're completely ignorant. 0.99

00:38:26.000 There's some white, blue-eyed Muslims, you know? 0.99

00:38:30.000 Oh yeah, there's lots of them.

00:38:31.000 If you look at Mecca, you see like the people that are in Mecca, you'll see red-headed people, red-haired people that are walking around with the traditional garb on, circling Mecca.

00:38:41.000 Yeah, and there's, in Turkey, so, you know, Turkey's a big Muslim country, Egypt's a big Muslim country, there's Indonesia, there's Iran, where everybody's Persian, There's the Arab world, and there's South Asians.

00:38:52.000 It's just racially incredibly diverse.

00:38:57.000 It's not really a race.

00:38:59.000 I think I saw something.

00:39:00.000 There was this woman wearing a niqab.

00:39:02.000 And someone wrote a funny comment about it and got the face veil and the full cover, the burqa.

00:39:09.000 And someone's like, you know, that's what you're doing is racist.

00:39:13.000 I'm making fun of this. 1.00

00:39:13.000 And I'm like, can you tell me what fucking race she is? 1.00

00:39:16.000 Can you see? 1.00

00:39:17.000 How is that racist?

00:39:18.000 That's mind-blowing.

00:39:19.000 You don't even know if it's a man or a woman.

00:39:21.000 These are knee-jerk liberal ideas that are promoted in universities.

00:39:25.000 The hyper-sensitive, hyper-progressive atmosphere that literally eliminates objective thinking and reasoning.

00:39:33.000 Because you are already automatically expected to behave in a certain way, or think in a certain way, because that is the progressive manifesto.

00:39:41.000 Your ideas, like you're not supposed to criticize Islamic people, it is Islamophobia. 0.68

00:39:46.000 The idea that we're supposed to be in their land, that this is Islamophobia. 0.96

00:39:51.000 And that word is just so fucking thrown about over the last decade or so. 0.99

00:39:55.000 It's toxic. 0.97

00:39:56.000 And I was trying to give the example of myself, is that if I went back to Saudi Arabia or any of the countries where I grew up, and if they knew the stuff that I write, then I have reason to be Islamophobic. 0.90

00:40:08.000 Because by their Islamic laws, it's just not something I like thinking about, what could happen to me. 0.85

00:40:14.000 Well, you're an apostate.

00:40:15.000 I'm an apostate, yeah. 1.00

00:40:16.000 You should be beheaded, right? 1.00

00:40:18.000 Isn't that the idea? 1.00

00:40:19.000 Yeah, technically, I should be beheaded. 1.00

00:40:20.000 What the fuck, man? 1.00

00:40:22.000 You should be phobic of those ideas. 1.00

00:40:24.000 I know, so it's legitimate.

00:40:26.000 Yeah, as legitimate as it gets.

00:40:27.000 Phobia means irrational fear, and it's not irrational by any means.

00:40:30.000 Well, phobia means a fear, right?

00:40:32.000 Does it mean irrational?

00:40:33.000 Does phobia mean irrational?

00:40:35.000 I think the medical definition is an irrational fear.

00:40:38.000 I think any fear of being beheaded, it's super rational.

00:40:44.000 Exactly.

00:40:45.000 So that's why.

00:40:45.000 That makes it even more of a misnomer.

00:40:47.000 Yeah, if somebody writes down, I want to cut your fucking head off, and you're a phobic of that person. 1.00

00:40:53.000 Like, what? 1.00

00:40:54.000 Of course you have. 0.99

00:40:55.000 I want to cut my head off because of a belief. 0.84

00:40:59.000 So, you know, there's that aspect. 0.99

00:41:01.000 And then there's also the anti-Muslim bigotry, which is a separate thing.

00:41:04.000 Which is real.

00:41:05.000 Yeah.

00:41:05.000 And it's based on people.

00:41:06.000 It's targeting people.

00:41:07.000 And, you know, I have been on the receiving end of that as well.

00:41:10.000 I mean, that has happened. 1.00

00:41:11.000 I mean, people have told me after the, you know, Charlie Hebdo attacks and people said, you know, you guys are scum. 1.00

00:41:15.000 You should get out of here. 0.99

00:41:16.000 Where have you heard this?

00:41:17.000 This is like on Twitter, Facebook messages.

00:41:20.000 Like I'll get emails.

00:41:21.000 Real people or eggs? 0.85

00:41:23.000 They sounded pretty real.

00:41:24.000 You know what I'm saying?

00:41:25.000 Was it like a person where you could track their account, you could read their...

00:41:29.000 Yeah, I knew them.

00:41:29.000 Oh, no, no.

00:41:30.000 I know who these people are.

00:41:32.000 Oh, you know them in person?

00:41:33.000 In real life?

00:41:34.000 No, not in person.

00:41:35.000 No, not in person.

00:41:36.000 Over here, fortunately, I haven't really had that.

00:41:39.000 The only sort of personal thing I've had is the TSA, the airport, the random checks.

00:41:45.000 I always get selected for the random check and things like that.

00:41:47.000 Look at you.

00:41:49.000 There you go.

00:41:49.000 So that happens.

00:41:51.000 And then, you know, my passport has, you know, my record of living in all these different Middle Eastern countries and things like that.

00:41:59.000 And the name and the skin color.

00:42:01.000 So that does put me in the same category.

00:42:05.000 So I share that experience with a lot of people who do look like me and have the same name that I do.

00:42:09.000 Right.

00:42:11.000 The problem with the word Islamophobia is that I think it's an injustice and it's actually an insult to the struggles of Muslims who have genuinely been victims of anti-Muslim bigotry to use their pain and their experience and exploit it to stifle criticism of Islam.

00:42:30.000 Yeah, I would say that that makes sense.

00:42:33.000 You know, sort of the same way anyone who disagrees with feminist ideology is automatically some sort of a woman hater, a misogynist, someone who's just a bigot in some way against the female gender. 0.99

00:42:49.000 That's just how it is, man.

00:42:51.000 People love to silence ideas with a real simple categorization of you. 1.00

00:42:57.000 You are a racist. 1.00

00:42:59.000 You are a warmonger. 1.00

00:43:02.000 I saw someone who wrote that about Christopher Hitchens, that he was a sexist and a warmonger. 0.56

00:43:09.000 I'm like, okay, did you read any of what he wrote?

00:43:13.000 Did you listen to any of what he said?

00:43:15.000 That's...

00:43:16.000 That's kind of hilarious.

00:43:17.000 Like, to categorize someone and dismiss them so openly like that.

00:43:20.000 Yeah, with the labels.

00:43:21.000 And I think a lot of times, you know, you don't even have definitions for these terms.

00:43:25.000 When you say Islamophobia, if you ask, you know, someone, a Muslim, a liberal Muslim in Boston, you know, what Islam is, they'll give you a very different definition.

00:43:35.000 Than someone who's in ISIS or the Taliban.

00:43:38.000 Oh, sure.

00:43:39.000 So they have different definitions of it.

00:43:41.000 I think feminism is the same way. 1.00

00:43:43.000 You can talk to 10 different feminists and they'll give you 10 different definitions. 1.00

00:43:46.000 Well, there's a real problem with groups in that sense, ideological groups in that sense, whether it's men's rights advocates or...

00:43:54.000 I mean, men's rights advocates are some of the most fucking hilarious people online to read their websites and their discussion groups and... 0.99

00:44:02.000 Just a bunch of angry fucking weirdos. 0.99

00:44:04.000 That's a recent discovery. 1.00

00:44:05.000 I actually didn't know about these guys until like a couple of years ago.

00:44:09.000 I didn't know about them until I was accused of being one. 0.99

00:44:11.000 Somebody called me an MRA and I go, what the fuck is that? 0.99

00:44:16.000 Some angry woman was barking at me on Twitter, calling me an MRA. I forget what it was about. 1.00

00:44:21.000 So I went and looked at it, and I was like, oh, fucking Christ. 0.99

00:44:26.000 I found the community. 0.99

00:44:28.000 I tapped into this vein of men who need to fucking get over it. 0.99

00:44:32.000 Yeah, I know. 0.98

00:44:34.000 And what really sucks sometimes is that When you have a certain agenda associated with just a really radical, insane group, then even if they have legitimate viewpoints about something, supposing they have one or two points that are legitimate.

00:44:52.000 I guess if you're talking about the men's rights.

00:44:55.000 Custody.

00:44:56.000 Child custody.

00:44:57.000 And alimony.

00:44:58.000 Those are the two that make sense to me.

00:44:59.000 So that's where it ends.

00:44:59.000 There you go.

00:45:00.000 Yeah, that's like a rational conversation you can have.

00:45:03.000 The problem is that anytime you start talking about those issues...

00:45:07.000 You'll automatically get labeled as part of that group.

00:45:09.000 Sure, yeah.

00:45:10.000 So there's this sort of smearing, you know, painting you with the same brush as everybody else.

00:45:15.000 Well, one of the most hilarious things that I read was that men's rights advocates are unnecessary because feminism addresses equality. 0.81

00:45:23.000 And once women are treated as completely equal then and only then, Should we address men's rights? 0.55

00:45:29.000 And I'm like, that's hilarious.

00:45:32.000 Like, that is just some weird, angry girl who no one wants to touch, and she just has a lot of bitterness.

00:45:38.000 And this is what they're spouting out.

00:45:40.000 I've always actually...

00:45:41.000 I was talking to a friend about this yesterday, that I think when you have movements, when you have, like, organized movements, it's something that you want to achieve...

00:45:52.000 Being in opposition to something just makes a lot more sense and it's more unifying than standing for something.

00:45:58.000 Can you explain that?

00:45:59.000 Like, you know, if you have, say, the feminist movement, right?

00:45:59.000 Yeah.

00:46:05.000 When feminism meant... 1.00

00:46:08.000 Equality, you know, economic, social, political equality for men and women, then, you know, we're all feminists. 0.99

00:46:13.000 You know, we all had that.

00:46:14.000 We opposed gender inequality.

00:46:16.000 We're humanists.

00:46:17.000 I mean, to say it feminist, it just identifies you very specifically with one gender, and that's the issue. 0.93

00:46:23.000 But I'm saying supposing feminism was defined as that, as something that's in, it's a movement that's in, or an ideology that's in opposition to gender inequality or patriarchy or whatever it is.

00:46:33.000 Then it unifies everybody.

00:46:36.000 But the moment it starts standing for something, like, okay, you're not a feminist if you're not pro-choice. 0.91

00:46:40.000 You're not a feminist if you believe that Males and females are not exactly the same, you know, psychologically.

00:46:47.000 Or if you don't subscribe to this, like, sort of gender sociology theory or, you know, whatever it is.

00:46:53.000 The moment you start excluding people based on that and you start talking about what feminism stands for rather than what it stands against, then you start getting fragmentation.

00:47:02.000 And I kind of feel the same way with religion and a lot of atheists.

00:47:06.000 I like the anti-theist position that when you're opposed to You know, the idea of religion and faith and believing things without evidence.

00:47:15.000 You know, we're doing things for no other reason apart from the fact that it was written in a book, you know, 2000 years ago.

00:47:22.000 If you're opposed to that, you have a lot of people, you know, who will be part of your movement.

00:47:27.000 But the moment you start saying, well, atheism stands for being, having this political stance on something, where it means that you have to like what, you have to agree with what Glenn Greenwald says, you have to be in a social justice, then you start excluding people.

00:47:41.000 Right.

00:47:42.000 Well, then you get into Atheism Plus. 0.67

00:47:43.000 You know what Atheism Plus is?

00:47:45.000 I do.

00:47:47.000 Someone explained this to me briefly, but I never really follow up on it.

00:47:51.000 It's a hilarious group of social retards that have decided to make a religion out of atheism. 1.00

00:47:56.000 And so they've connected atheism with a system or a group of social values and ethics.

00:48:02.000 Yeah.

00:48:02.000 And attached this idea, it was just a lack of belief in a deity to, on top of that, all these things that anyone with any ethics ordinarily, automatically believes in.

00:48:16.000 Sexual discrimination, gender discrimination, racial discrimination, all those things that moral, ethical people already disagree with, they've attached that to atheism and called it atheism plus.

00:48:27.000 Yeah.

00:48:28.000 So, you know, standing against all those other things.

00:48:31.000 But now it becomes like an ideology.

00:48:34.000 It's essentially, in a way, like a religion. 0.99

00:48:36.000 Because to ascribe to atheism plus, you have to be someone who, you know, these people that go to these conferences and you listen to their speeches, These fucking droning, boring... 0.97

00:48:49.000 They should call Atheism Plus, duh. 0.99

00:48:52.000 Because anyone who's intelligent already thinks, yeah, of course, if you're a balanced person, you shouldn't believe in racial discrimination.

00:49:00.000 Of course you wouldn't support sexual discrimination.

00:49:02.000 Of course you wouldn't support, you know, fill in the blank.

00:49:06.000 You know, of course you would be pro-women's rights.

00:49:08.000 Of course you'd be pro, you know, there's a whole group of desires that they have or ideological desires that they've attached.

00:49:18.000 To this idea of atheism.

00:49:21.000 It's a hilarious movement.

00:49:22.000 I think that's exactly, that was a point I was making, that the moment atheism starts standing for something beyond just not believing in a god, the moment that happens, you start, you know, there's this fragmentation that starts to take place.

00:49:37.000 And I just think that it's better, like the anti-theist position, just the idea that, okay, It's been many many years and now this whole religion thing like respect for religion and all the stuff that's being done in the name of it this is kind of enough so all of us rational people I'm going to take a position against this.

00:49:56.000 Find something else to guide your actions apart from these sort of archaic social and legal codes.

00:50:05.000 And if we had that position, you could have people from all kinds of...

00:50:09.000 subscribe to all kinds of belief systems.

00:50:12.000 They can join your cause.

00:50:15.000 But the moment you start saying, well, if you're an atheist, then...

00:50:18.000 You have to stand for this, or you have to be pro-choice.

00:50:20.000 There's a lot of pro-life atheists that are still atheists.

00:50:24.000 Right.

00:50:25.000 So you can't...

00:50:26.000 Well, that's why they call it atheism plus in their ideas.

00:50:30.000 But if you listen to the talk, it's a lot of these really weak guys who just are looking for social brownie points and trying to get women to love them by standing so powerfully and strong in favor of equality.

00:50:41.000 It's like there's a certain aspect of feminism that's sort of in... 1.00

00:50:47.000 Sort of engaged themselves with atheism and they've kind of embedded into it and these radical feminist ideas have also like become a part of atheism plus and it's very strange to listen to what they say and completely intolerant of other people's ideas and aggressive in attacking and doxing and going after people who disagree or who they think have you know in some way or another just You know,

00:51:14.000 stood out against what their ideas are.

00:51:17.000 That I have seen a lot.

00:51:18.000 Yeah.

00:51:19.000 Aggressive.

00:51:19.000 And it's...

00:51:21.000 I was recently thinking that all these labels, like...

00:51:23.000 You know, when you see what...

00:51:26.000 Some of the atheist activists that are out there, especially now that it's such a big movement.

00:51:30.000 There's a lot of really, really angry people.

00:51:32.000 Yeah.

00:51:33.000 And for good reason in some ways.

00:51:36.000 No, I understand where it comes from.

00:51:38.000 I mean, look, religious ideology, especially radical religious fundamentalism, has done horrible damage to people, and there's a lot of people that grew up in that, and they have an extreme backlash against it, and so they're angry because of that.

00:51:51.000 Yeah, and no, I'm completely...

00:51:52.000 I'm not saying that they shouldn't be.

00:51:54.000 I'm totally with that.

00:51:55.000 I mean, if I... I had the life that Ayaan Hirsi Ali did, where I grew up and underwent genital mutilation and all these things, as a woman.

00:52:06.000 I would be angry, too, if I was oppressed by it.

00:52:10.000 Raif Badawi knows about the blogger in Saudi Arabia.

00:52:13.000 Which one is this?

00:52:15.000 There's a blogger that they have jailed in Saudi Arabia, and they've been lashing him.

00:52:20.000 They last him 50 times.

00:52:22.000 Okay, so I'll tell you.

00:52:23.000 Tell me, sir.

00:52:24.000 So he...

00:52:25.000 It's actually someone that I know.

00:52:27.000 My girlfriend's a really good friend with his wife and his kids and everything.

00:52:32.000 So we know them personally.

00:52:34.000 And he started a website called Free Saudi Liberals.

00:52:38.000 So he wanted to start talking about liberalism and sort of just different innovative non-status quo ideas in Saudi Arabia.

00:52:47.000 And...

00:52:49.000 He essentially got a jail sentence for 10 years with a thousand lashes.

00:52:54.000 So they would take him out into the public outside a mosque after Friday prayers in Al Jafali Mosque in Jeddah.

00:53:01.000 And they'd just take a cane and they'd lash him 50 times every Friday until the 1,000 lashes are complete.

00:53:09.000 So they did the first set, I think about four or five weeks ago.

00:53:14.000 And so we all started writing about it.

00:53:17.000 All of us really became a huge story.

00:53:20.000 There was a lot of pressure.

00:53:21.000 And then the Charlie Hebdo attacks happened.

00:53:23.000 And the Saudi ambassador was in the free speech rally in Paris.

00:53:27.000 And I think that was on a Sunday.

00:53:30.000 And they'd actually lashed Raif on Friday.

00:53:34.000 And he was in the free speech rally.

00:53:35.000 So a lot of people wrote it.

00:53:36.000 I wrote a piece for CNN about it.

00:53:40.000 You know, just talking about the double standard.

00:53:41.000 So how many lashes has this guy received so far?

00:53:44.000 50. And it was supposed to continue every week, but he had a medical review and the doctors said that he's not fit to be lashed the next week, which is fucking bizarre because basically they said that his wounds haven't healed enough yet.

00:53:59.000 To create new wounds. 0.67

00:54:00.000 To create new wounds. 1.00

00:54:01.000 Jesus fucking Christ. 1.00

00:54:02.000 So let his wounds close up before we rip them open again. 1.00

00:54:05.000 And last, what are they using to beat them with?

00:54:08.000 They use a cane.

00:54:10.000 They use a really sharp cane.

00:54:11.000 Like a bamboo cane with edges to it, like what they used in Singapore?

00:54:14.000 What I know about it is, yeah, it's a cane like that, but apparently it's got a very sharp edge, so it does cut open your skin.

00:54:21.000 Slice you open 50 times.

00:54:22.000 Yeah, 50 times.

00:54:23.000 Jesus Christ.

00:54:25.000 They don't even have to hit you.

00:54:26.000 They can just hit you lightly, and it will still cause cuts on your body. 0.97

00:54:30.000 But they're beating the shit out of this guy with this. 0.96

00:54:32.000 Yeah, and there is a distribution. 0.87

00:54:35.000 You have to distribute it between, like, the knees all the way up to the upper back.

00:54:39.000 Oh, my God.

00:54:39.000 So he's scarred for life.

00:54:41.000 Yeah, he's scarred.

00:54:42.000 I mean, his wife was just really, really upset.

00:54:47.000 Her name's Insaf.

00:54:47.000 And after the first lashing, you know, he was in really bad medical condition.

00:54:52.000 He wasn't getting any medical help.

00:54:54.000 And she just said, she's like, you know, I don't think he's going to survive it.

00:54:57.000 And he's, you know, like when you talk to him, he's just like a very gentle, very nice, you know, thinking kind of guy, just very sort of, you know, introspective.

00:55:08.000 And he's like really more of an intellectual kind of person.

00:55:11.000 I mean, he's not very physically robust or anything like that.

00:55:15.000 What did he write?

00:55:19.000 He just wrote sort of like liberal things.

00:55:21.000 He started talking about how religion and politics should be separate, just the basis of secularism.

00:55:27.000 There was one post that I liked that he wrote that was about astronomers.

00:55:33.000 There was some Saudi cleric religious leader with a lot of influence.

00:55:39.000 You know, who was essentially saying that, you know, I think he said something like traveling to planets is haram or, you know, he was saying something about astronomy.

00:55:47.000 Haram?

00:55:48.000 Haram means sinful. 0.98

00:55:48.000 Yeah. 0.98

00:55:50.000 Ah.

00:55:50.000 So, and if I remember this correctly.

00:55:52.000 And he essentially wrote this really sarcastic thing about Sharia astronomers.

00:55:56.000 He was like, oh...

00:55:58.000 I didn't know these Sharia astronomers existed, and we should just forget about what all the scientists are saying, what all the telescopes do, and we should just listen to these guys because they have knowledge nobody else has from centuries ago. 0.99

00:56:10.000 So he would write sort of sarcastic things like that.

00:56:13.000 He never openly challenged religion being wrong or anything, but he was just an advocate for secularism.

00:56:21.000 So, and that's really all he did.

00:56:23.000 I mean, I know, you know, people tend to think that like, well, what did he really do?

00:56:28.000 You know, but I can't, you know, I can't say it any other way.

00:56:28.000 Right.

00:56:33.000 The guy, all he did was he just blogged on this thing called Free Saudi Liberals.

00:56:36.000 Oh, man.

00:56:39.000 And so Saudi Arabia is another, like I grew up there, right?

00:56:43.000 I was there for about 12 years, so I could talk about that forever.

00:56:47.000 But King Abdullah just died, right?

00:56:50.000 And I always tell people this, that the month that James Foley was beheaded in August 2014, that same month, Saudi Arabia beheaded 19 people.

00:57:03.000 And it wasn't just for murder.

00:57:06.000 They were beheaded for sorcery, for cannabis smuggling.

00:57:13.000 It would probably resonate with you a little bit.

00:57:16.000 All kinds of crimes that are not really crimes.

00:57:19.000 Both of those resonate.

00:57:20.000 I'm a sorcerer as well.

00:57:21.000 I don't like to talk about it, but I do a lot of witchcraft in my spare time.

00:57:26.000 I have a few cats. 0.99

00:57:29.000 Fucking sorcery? 1.00

00:57:30.000 What does that mean? 1.00

00:57:33.000 How do you get beheaded for sorcery? 0.99

00:57:35.000 What is sorcery? 1.00

00:57:37.000 Black magic, doing spells on people.

00:57:40.000 Oh my god.

00:57:42.000 Yeah, promising people that you can, if they can't get pregnant, it's like, okay, I can get you pregnant. 0.99

00:57:48.000 Oh god.

00:57:49.000 Sorcery, huh? 1.00

00:57:50.000 You can get your head cut off for sorcery in Saudi Arabia. 0.99

00:57:53.000 And that's our allies, right? 0.98

00:57:54.000 It's happening as we speak.

00:57:56.000 It's still doing it.

00:57:57.000 And they beheaded, I think, 10 people in January.

00:57:59.000 Oh my god.

00:58:00.000 And these are public beheadings with a sword.

00:58:04.000 So you could watch.

00:58:06.000 Yeah.

00:58:06.000 So if I flew over there, I could watch a beheading?

00:58:09.000 You know what they would do if you flew over there and you were a foreigner? 0.91

00:58:12.000 It would be in the middle of a marketplace or outside a mosque, and they would push you up to the front because you're a foreigner.

00:58:18.000 They want to show you.

00:58:19.000 How they rock it.

00:58:20.000 Yeah, you'll see kids running towards the scene when execution is about to happen or lashing is about to happen.

00:58:26.000 The video of Raif is online when he was lashed.

00:58:30.000 It's online?

00:58:31.000 Yeah, it's online.

00:58:32.000 Someone actually secretly filmed it.

00:58:34.000 But what you can really see is you can see people running towards where the lashing was about to take place.

00:58:34.000 Oh, no.

00:58:39.000 How clearly do you see him getting lashed?

00:58:42.000 You don't see it very clearly.

00:58:44.000 Is he naked?

00:58:45.000 No, no, he's not.

00:58:46.000 He's clothed, and then he's got his hands in shackles.

00:58:49.000 He's got his head raised upwards.

00:58:50.000 So they're beating him through the clothes.

00:58:52.000 They're beating him through the clothes.

00:58:54.000 And from a distance, you can't really appreciate it.

00:58:57.000 What it's like, because, you know, the cane is really, really sharp, and so you don't know exactly what happens.

00:59:04.000 You can't see it very clearly, but the thing that is most striking about that video is the people around it.

00:59:11.000 There's like hundreds of normal, regular Saudis that have gathered around.

00:59:16.000 They're cheering afterwards, and they all yell Allahu Akbar when the lashes are complete.

00:59:20.000 Oh, my God.

00:59:21.000 And there's little kids, like five-, six-, seven-year-old kids, and they're all excitedly running towards the scene and so on.

00:59:27.000 So these are things that they see in public.

00:59:30.000 Not a lot of people here know this.

00:59:33.000 In Riyadh, the place where they do the public executions, at least when I was there, it was called Chop Chop Square.

00:59:39.000 What?

00:59:41.000 Chop Chop Square?

00:59:42.000 That was the sort of affectionate term for it.

00:59:46.000 Yeah, there was a market in the middle of which there was Chop Chop Square.

00:59:49.000 But if you criticize that, you're Islamophobic.

00:59:52.000 Did you know that?

00:59:53.000 Yeah, because then they'll say, well, this has nothing to do with Islam.

00:59:58.000 And then you'll show them the verses in the Quran that actually say that you can behead people.

01:00:02.000 For all kinds of things, and they'll say, well, that's mistranslated, misinterpreted, and it was, you know, at a different time.

01:00:08.000 Sorcery! 0.87

01:00:08.000 19 people? 0.87

01:00:11.000 In August, the month that James Foley was beheaded by ISIS, the Saudi government, our ally, the one that Obama just recently went, you know, to pay respects to the king.

01:00:23.000 And Fareed Zakaria actually asked him, he asked Obama about, he's like, are you going to mention the blogger that they have jailed?

01:00:31.000 And he didn't.

01:00:32.000 He's like, well, you know, right now I'm just going to pay respect to the king, you know, but with human rights abuses, you know, with our allies, it's very tough to have that dialogue. 0.99

01:00:41.000 What kind of fucking allies are there? 0.99

01:00:43.000 That's like having a friend who has a slave. 1.00

01:00:45.000 It's like, I really love the dude.

01:00:46.000 I don't want to talk to him about his slaves, but he's got this guy shackled up in his basement and the guy's digging holes for him.

01:00:52.000 He's a good dude, though.

01:00:53.000 I don't want to talk to him about it.

01:00:54.000 He's my friend.

01:00:55.000 We're going to barbecue.

01:00:56.000 You know what they did was King Abdullah, he's a little bit like the Pope.

01:01:02.000 He just says something that's really common sense to the rest of us.

01:01:06.000 Like, yes, I think women should be allowed to vote. 1.00

01:01:09.000 We'll start doing that in 2015. And everybody praises him.

01:01:13.000 Like, he said something amazing.

01:01:14.000 It's like, you know when the Pope says...

01:01:16.000 Okay, maybe condoms are okay.

01:01:18.000 He gets this sort of disproportionate praise for saying it, even though...

01:01:23.000 It's a rational thing that everybody agrees with.

01:01:25.000 That everybody should.

01:01:25.000 So they're getting praised and lauded for pretty much bringing their people...

01:01:35.000 I'm glad you're not in the 17th century anymore.

01:01:38.000 I'm glad you're in the 19th century.

01:01:39.000 It's such a low standard.

01:01:42.000 It's a really low bar for them.

01:01:44.000 Abdullah, I'm working on this story right now.

01:01:46.000 I just talked to these two women.

01:01:49.000 Well, I saw this story where King Abdullah's own daughters, so he's got like a shitload of wives and a whole bunch of kids. 0.58

01:01:55.000 And he had this one, I think it was a Jordanian wife, and he had four daughters with her.

01:01:59.000 He didn't have a son, so he wasn't happy about that.

01:02:02.000 And he's had them under house arrest, imprisoned for 15 years.

01:02:08.000 Why?

01:02:10.000 Because they spoke up about male guardianship.

01:02:13.000 There's a law in Saudi Arabia that says that women are not allowed to do anything without the permission of a male guardian.

01:02:21.000 Like travel, work.

01:02:23.000 Really?

01:02:24.000 Yeah, they can't.

01:02:24.000 Some things they can't even do with the permission.

01:02:26.000 They're not allowed to drive.

01:02:28.000 Yeah, I've heard that.

01:02:29.000 So they can't do that even with permission of a male guardian.

01:02:33.000 Pretty much anything else, whether it's working or traveling or any of that stuff, they can't do it without express permission of a male guardian.

01:02:43.000 So they spoke out about it, because their guardian was their dad, who was a king who they barely even knew, and their mother, she's also female, so it really restricted a lot of things that they could do.

01:02:58.000 So they started talking about gender discrimination, issues, The situation of women in Saudi Arabia.

01:03:05.000 And they did an interview in 2013. And it's online.

01:03:08.000 It's with Russia Today, with RT. I think that's what it stands for, Russia Today.

01:03:15.000 And they were able to get a Skype connection and do this interview.

01:03:18.000 And they spoke out.

01:03:19.000 And after that, nobody really heard from them again.

01:03:21.000 They didn't do any other interviews.

01:03:24.000 So I actually got in touch with...

01:03:29.000 So here's where my connection happened is I went to a school called Manar al-Riyadh, which was like an English medium school for foreigners and Saudis as well in Riyadh.

01:03:40.000 And she was in the girls' branch.

01:03:42.000 And I knew these two girls who were in the girls' branch who went to school with her, who were good friends with one of the daughters, the youngest one.

01:03:51.000 Her name is Jawahar.

01:03:53.000 And when they found out about this imprisonment, they were just shocked.

01:03:57.000 I mean, they went to high school with this girl, and she was King Abdullah's daughter.

01:04:01.000 So I'm actually working on a piece about that.

01:04:03.000 I just did a whole interview with them for an hour.

01:04:07.000 It's about a week ago.

01:04:09.000 And it's just, the whole story is crazy because Abdullah is being, you know, Cameron, Obama, everybody's been praising him as a reformer and all the things that he's done for women.

01:04:23.000 In Saudi Arabia.

01:04:24.000 His own four daughters have been imprisoned.

01:04:30.000 They've been starved.

01:04:32.000 Their dog died of starvation because they weren't getting enough food.

01:04:37.000 All these things that have been happening. 0.57

01:04:39.000 The hypocrisy and the double standard is just amazing.

01:04:43.000 Westminster Abbey in the UK flew their flags at half-mass when Abdullah died.

01:04:51.000 This is a guy who sanctioned all those beheadings. 1.00

01:04:53.000 I mean, he can stop that shit if he wants to. 1.00

01:04:57.000 The sorcery beheadings and the lashing of bloggers and the imprisonment of his own daughters. 1.00

01:05:02.000 He could stop that.

01:05:02.000 He could have stopped it.

01:05:03.000 And he didn't.

01:05:04.000 He just said that we'll allow women to vote in 2015. Fuck. 1.00

01:05:09.000 And everybody's like, good job. 1.00

01:05:11.000 We'll allow women to vote on things that we agree with only. 1.00

01:05:14.000 And you don't really get an option to vote on a lot of things.

01:05:14.000 Exactly.

01:05:17.000 Like, do you want a king?

01:05:19.000 No, I don't want a king. 0.96

01:05:20.000 Do you think that people should have their head cut off for sorcery?

01:05:24.000 I would say that's not progressive. 0.67

01:05:26.000 Yeah, that's his own, that's his call.

01:05:29.000 So it's a different world out there.

01:05:33.000 Yeah.

01:05:35.000 That's why it's hard when you're there and you come here, and when you hear the Noam Chomsky thing or the Glenn Greenwald thing, You know, we need to...

01:05:49.000 Stop all this Islamophobia.

01:05:51.000 Yeah, when you see the apologism, it immediately cuts you off.

01:05:55.000 And it affects people like Rafe Badawi, the blogger.

01:05:59.000 And it affects people like that.

01:06:01.000 It actually harms them.

01:06:02.000 I mean, the people that we should be getting behind and supporting in those parts of the world are the dissidents and the reformers.

01:06:10.000 And there are a lot of them.

01:06:12.000 You don't hear from them because they can't speak.

01:06:14.000 Well, because they're terrified.

01:06:16.000 Like, the same way people are so terrified of Islam that when this Charlie Hebdo thing came out, no one, no one on the left, like, actively criticized it or published those images or, you know, put it on the front pages of their magazines.

01:06:32.000 It wasn't something that was done.

01:06:34.000 It wasn't like something where everyone stood in unity and said, everyone's terrified.

01:06:39.000 They're terrified that they're going to be next. 0.93

01:06:41.000 They're going to get their heads cut off. 0.99

01:06:42.000 They're going to get shot. 1.00

01:06:43.000 Someone's going to storm their office and gun them down because they also published the cartoon.

01:06:48.000 And Sam Harris made a really good point. 0.96

01:06:50.000 It was the one chance that journalists had uniformly to stand up against this type of shit and just everyone published it. 0.99

01:06:59.000 Every fucking magazine, every newspaper, everyone across the world published those images. 1.00

01:07:03.000 But everybody was like, fuck that. 1.00

01:07:05.000 Self-preservation took over. 1.00

01:07:08.000 Did you see that thing on Sky News?

01:07:11.000 There was this woman who was interviewing, like when they did the reprint and they put the cover of, you know, they put Muhammad on the cover again, you know, crying and so on.

01:07:22.000 So she was interviewing somebody about that.

01:07:25.000 And then the woman that she was interviewing started pulling up the paper and showing the cartoon. 1.00

01:07:30.000 And she immediately cut away.

01:07:33.000 It's like, I'm sorry, we can't show that, and I'm so sorry to anybody who was offended, and so on.

01:07:37.000 Anybody who was offended at a cartoon.

01:07:39.000 That's amazing.

01:07:41.000 You know the stuff, there's a lot of...

01:07:43.000 My mom gets upset at me sometimes. 0.98

01:07:46.000 She's like, you know, can you do the criticism, but don't do the mockery. 0.69

01:07:51.000 And...

01:07:52.000 What does that mean?

01:07:54.000 Well, it just means that when you make fun of it, when you draw cartoons, when it's insulting, then it's different.

01:07:59.000 And I understand where she's coming from.

01:08:00.000 But I think mockery is super important.

01:08:03.000 If you think about the interview, the Seth Rogen movie, you have all of these journalists and everybody writing all these inquisitive, biting critiques of the North Korean regime.

01:08:19.000 And all it does is, you know, because Kim Jong-un wants to be taken seriously.

01:08:23.000 And he gives him, you know, he's like, okay, I'm legitimate.

01:08:25.000 Everybody's criticizing me and, you know, they don't like what I do. 0.98

01:08:29.000 But when you make a movie with, like, dick jokes and, you know, the kind of thing that the interview was, and you make fun of it, he goes apeshit. 0.95

01:08:39.000 Well, how come they didn't go apeshit over the Team America movie? 0.98

01:08:43.000 They did, actually.

01:08:44.000 Yeah, Kim Jong-il was not happy about it.

01:08:44.000 Yeah?

01:08:46.000 Of course he wasn't happy, but nothing happened.

01:08:49.000 It wasn't like what's going on with this.

01:08:51.000 Yeah, it wasn't like what happened here.

01:08:52.000 And I'm not sure exactly why they didn't.

01:08:54.000 That was a longer time ago.

01:08:56.000 Maybe his dad's a little more chill.

01:08:58.000 Probably.

01:08:58.000 Is that possible?

01:09:00.000 He might be more sensitive.

01:09:02.000 The young one.

01:09:03.000 Yeah, maybe he feels less legitimate because he just kind of got it from his dad.

01:09:08.000 He's a little insecure, I think, probably. 0.97

01:09:10.000 Well, he's got a fat face. 0.88

01:09:13.000 Yeah, that's going to do it. 1.00

01:09:14.000 Lazy fuck. 1.00

01:09:15.000 It's going to work out. 1.00

01:09:21.000 That's the thing.

01:09:21.000 When you have this kind of mockery, like the dick jokes and the cartoons piss these people off a lot more because they want to be taken seriously.

01:09:31.000 They can't do it through ideas because their ideas are all bullshit. 1.00

01:09:37.000 Women can't drive or you should be beheaded if you leave the religion or change your mind about what you believe and so on. 1.00

01:09:43.000 Those aren't the kind of things that you're going to get people flocking to you with through rational discourse.

01:09:50.000 So you have to use other means.

01:09:53.000 Why is that part of the world so archaic in their beliefs?

01:09:57.000 Is it because that's the cradle of civilization?

01:09:59.000 That's the oldest form of symbol?

01:10:01.000 What we know today, like the oldest civilizations that we're aware of that we can track is like 6,000 plus years ago, which is Mesopotamia, right?

01:10:10.000 The Middle East, Sumer, Iraq, Babylon. 0.79

01:10:13.000 Those areas, that's like where we believe Civilization sort of began, and those same areas have the most archaic form of religion and social justice.

01:10:25.000 Their ideas are so barbaric in a way, or so old.

01:10:31.000 I mean, the idea that women have to cover themselves in veils, and these oppressive ideas, it's the exact opposite of where the world is heading, especially because of the internet.

01:10:42.000 There's more and more openness, The exchange of information is quicker than it's ever been before. 0.99

01:10:47.000 And it's really hard to hold on to a really stupid idea today. 1.00

01:10:51.000 A stupid, oppressive idea. 1.00

01:10:53.000 But in that part of the world, not so much. 1.00

01:10:56.000 And it's like this momentum.

01:10:58.000 The momentum of the past is so strong.

01:11:01.000 Well, you know, one of the reasons for that...

01:11:03.000 That's where I think our role comes in a little bit.

01:11:07.000 Or the role of the West, the U.S., is...

01:11:12.000 You know, the reason that the Saudis are lashing right for the reason that they're beheading people for sorcery has nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy or Western imperialism or really anything like that. 0.77

01:11:24.000 But the reason they've been able to maintain it, the reason they can actually, you know, keep those archaic legal codes in place and not really have to do anything about it is because, you know, they're very rich.

01:11:40.000 They have a lot of oil.

01:11:41.000 They don't really need to progress.

01:11:43.000 They're making that money.

01:11:45.000 And the reason that they have that is because we've all propped them up.

01:11:50.000 We have supported them.

01:11:52.000 Do you remember when King Abdullah visited Texas, I think it was in 2005, and then George Bush was holding hands with him?

01:12:01.000 Yeah, they were walking around holding hands.

01:12:03.000 Yeah, and they kissed each other on the cheek. 0.96

01:12:04.000 Like a couple of queers. 1.00

01:12:10.000 Yeah.

01:12:10.000 So you had that, and then a few years later when Obama, his first year of his presidency, he was at the G20 summit in London, and there was a controversy where everybody thought he bowed to the Saudi king, which he sort of did, right?

01:12:25.000 When he met him, he shook his hand and he bowed.

01:12:29.000 So that's kind of, that symbolizes where the U.S.-Saudi relationship is.

01:12:34.000 But they have to do that.

01:12:36.000 It's not just, you know, we can blame the leaders for being allies in Saudi Arabia, but, you know, it's sort of the same thing that you see when, you know, people driving around their SUVs, filling them up with gas.

01:12:47.000 And I will say that, you know, Every time we fill our cars up with gas, we're all bowing to the Saudi king. 0.53

01:12:52.000 We're all doing exactly the same thing.

01:12:54.000 Sort of.

01:12:54.000 With fracking now, it's kind of changed quite a bit.

01:12:57.000 You know, the United States produces more gas than anyone now.

01:12:59.000 Yeah, and that should change.

01:13:02.000 And I think that it is a positive thing.

01:13:04.000 I mean, whatever the controversy is about fracking right now, you have to make everything safer, obviously.

01:13:08.000 But eventually, anything that helps us get off foreign oil.

01:13:14.000 Because that's what funds it.

01:13:15.000 Yeah.

01:13:16.000 Well, there's these areas like Abu Dhabi and Dubai and the areas that were just 50, 60 years ago barren.

01:13:25.000 I mean, there was nothing there.

01:13:26.000 And now there are these thriving, huge cities.

01:13:30.000 And the economy has just blossomed out of oil.

01:13:35.000 Yeah, it's oil and then tourism and things like that.

01:13:38.000 But it's not really innovation.

01:13:40.000 It's not like they're providing some sort of service or manufacturing any kind of goods or they've got any even cultural elements that are going around all over the world that is able to monetize.

01:13:51.000 Well, how does that change?

01:13:51.000 How does that change?

01:13:53.000 Well, that's the reason for their success.

01:13:55.000 You said it yourself.

01:13:56.000 It's the oil.

01:13:56.000 You change that and you change things drastically there.

01:14:02.000 The thing that would put an end to all of them is if they ran out of oil or if we didn't need their oil anymore.

01:14:09.000 Would that though?

01:14:11.000 It seems like there's so much momentum on their side.

01:14:14.000 The culture has been so firmly established.

01:14:17.000 Their mindset has been so firmly established.

01:14:20.000 This adherence to radical Islamic philosophy and ideology is so firmly established.

01:14:26.000 How does one ever change that?

01:14:29.000 You change it when you have to, right?

01:14:32.000 When you have to move on with life, when you can't maintain that. 0.81

01:14:36.000 If the rest of the world is moving on and you are not able to stay in that bubble, when you need to have international trade relationships, when you are dependent on diplomatic relations with other countries and you can't just get away with the shit that you do all the time, then that's how countries evolve.

01:14:52.000 That's how they progress.

01:14:53.000 They haven't needed to do that yet because they're fine.

01:14:57.000 They're in their bubble.

01:14:58.000 They've got a lot of oil money.

01:14:59.000 Everyone's happy.

01:15:00.000 Everyone's well-fed.

01:15:01.000 I mean, they're obscenely rich.

01:15:03.000 Like, you know, when I was there? 1.00

01:15:05.000 Oh, they're fucking crazy rich. 0.95

01:15:07.000 When I was there, like, just going into Riyadh, you can't, as a tourist, you can't go into Riyadh, and this is... 0.99

01:15:13.000 I'm talking about the 90s.

01:15:14.000 I mean, you know when you see those movies with all the futuristic cities and stuff?

01:15:20.000 It really looked like that.

01:15:22.000 The architecture, the buildings, the highways.

01:15:25.000 It's beautiful to see.

01:15:26.000 The people that are walking around are all wearing burqas.

01:15:31.000 Ancient clothes with the most sophisticated modern city.

01:15:35.000 It's like such a weird contradiction.

01:15:39.000 It is really strange.

01:15:40.000 And there's one royal family that's running it.

01:15:43.000 There's a whole bunch of brothers.

01:15:44.000 It's kind of like the people who live there and come stay there for a little while and go away, all the expatriates, it's like they're running a hotel. 1.00

01:15:56.000 It's like a family running a hotel and it's got all its money and sort of American accounts, Swiss accounts, you know, wherever.

01:16:03.000 And people just check in and check out all the time.

01:16:07.000 You get paid according to your passport.

01:16:09.000 I met a dude, I don't want to say his name, who's a prince in one of those places who listens to my podcast.

01:16:16.000 We had a long conversation about MMA. Well, I hope he's listening now.

01:16:19.000 He may be.

01:16:21.000 He's a young guy.

01:16:22.000 It was weird talking to this young guy who's probably...

01:16:25.000 We didn't discuss his finances, but I'm assuming he's insanely wealthy.

01:16:29.000 But he just wanted to sit down with me and talk about the UFC. He's a big fan.

01:16:34.000 We had this weird conversation about, you know, strategies and tactics and fighters and the trends and where things are moving and changing.

01:16:43.000 But, you know, I'm talking to, you know, a guy who could one day be the head of one of these gigantic governments.

01:16:52.000 I mean, I guess you call it a government.

01:16:54.000 It's not really.

01:16:55.000 Monarchy?

01:16:56.000 Would you call it a monarchy?

01:16:57.000 I mean, it's a kind of government.

01:16:57.000 Yeah, it's a kind of...

01:17:00.000 Yeah, but it was very strange.

01:17:03.000 Very strange to have this conversation, you know?

01:17:05.000 It is, yeah.

01:17:06.000 It's a really different world.

01:17:08.000 It's like another planet.

01:17:10.000 And to be fair, his was less suppressive.

01:17:13.000 We're not talking about, like, Saudi Arabia, beheading people over sorcery.

01:17:16.000 It's not that, but...

01:17:19.000 That part of the world, it's almost impossible, I think, for a lot of people who are apologists for that part of the world to rationalize it or to understand it the way you do.

01:17:33.000 You know what?

01:17:34.000 It's really unbelievable, and I understand that now.

01:17:37.000 When I was there, Just explaining the way that things happen there to people over here, it's just so removed and so alien that people either shut it out of their mind or they don't believe it.

01:17:53.000 I've seen that a lot.

01:17:55.000 I'll tell you stories.

01:17:56.000 What I'm doing in my book is when I talk about these things, I try to bring personal anecdotes into it before I go into the topic in detail because it helps It helps people to relate to it.

01:18:11.000 So this is something that happened when I was in fifth grade.

01:18:13.000 So I went to the American school there, which is kind of why I talk like this.

01:18:18.000 And when I was in fifth grade, we made snowflakes during the winter.

01:18:21.000 I got a paper.

01:18:23.000 Fold up a piece of paper and you cut it and you make snowflakes.

01:18:25.000 And we decorated them with glue and glitter and our names and so on.

01:18:30.000 And the teacher put them up on the door, right?

01:18:33.000 Or the bulletin board.

01:18:34.000 I can't remember exactly.

01:18:36.000 And, you know...

01:18:39.000 You take a lot of pride in that kind of stuff when you're a kid.

01:18:41.000 I was like 10 or 11 years old.

01:18:43.000 And there's a Ministry of Education guy who used to come in and he used to check the school to make sure everything is operating correctly.

01:18:49.000 You know, like you had to say winter holidays, you couldn't speak about Christmas, you couldn't have red during Valentine's.

01:18:55.000 So he saw the snowflakes and started yelling at the teacher in Arabic.

01:18:55.000 And so on.

01:19:01.000 The teacher didn't even know Arabic.

01:19:03.000 In front of all the kids.

01:19:05.000 And he just took a pair of scissors and he cut one of the tips off of each of the snowflakes.

01:19:11.000 So I remember thinking, I was like, wow, I worked really hard on that.

01:19:15.000 He just amputated one of the tips off the snowflakes.

01:19:18.000 And then we asked the teacher what happened.

01:19:20.000 We wanted to know.

01:19:23.000 That's when I found out about the Star of David.

01:19:26.000 So the Star of David has six points.

01:19:28.000 So anything that has like six points is apparently banned there.

01:19:33.000 So she told us about the Star of David.

01:19:35.000 She said it's a sign of the Jews.

01:19:37.000 So this was my introduction to the Jews.

01:19:39.000 I didn't really know anything about the Jews before.

01:19:41.000 But I just thought, I was like, wow, these must be scary people, whoever they are.

01:19:48.000 The guy's cutting tips off his snowflakes. 1.00

01:19:51.000 Cutting fucking snowflakes. 1.00

01:19:52.000 Christ. 1.00

01:19:53.000 So I went back and asked my dad about it.

01:19:57.000 My dad was a professor, so he was a fairly rational guy.

01:20:01.000 And then he told me about the whole Israel-Palestinian history, explained it to me as well as I could understand it.

01:20:06.000 And then he pulled out a map.

01:20:08.000 It was one of those inflatable globes.

01:20:11.000 And he tried to show me Israel on the map.

01:20:13.000 And it wasn't there.

01:20:15.000 This map, we bought it in a bookstore in Riyadh.

01:20:19.000 There's no Israel on those maps.

01:20:21.000 There was no Israel. 0.98

01:20:22.000 It wasn't even like they labeled it something else or they made it all Palestine.

01:20:26.000 I remember this distinctly.

01:20:27.000 There was a border.

01:20:28.000 They'd drawn the border and the rest of it was the same color as the Mediterranean.

01:20:32.000 Same color as a sea?

01:20:34.000 Yeah, it was as a sea.

01:20:34.000 So it was just like a little notch.

01:20:39.000 I remember we bought the World Book Encyclopedia.

01:20:42.000 You know, around that time.

01:20:44.000 That was a big thing.

01:20:45.000 Encyclopedias are obsolete now.

01:20:47.000 And they'd taken out the entries on Israel and evolution and everything.

01:20:52.000 You know, you pay a lot of money for it and they took it out.

01:20:54.000 So they'll do those things.

01:20:56.000 Now, what I'm saying is, you know, this was my introduction.

01:21:01.000 This is what I saw.

01:21:02.000 And fortunately, my father was rational and, you know, he told me the right story.

01:21:07.000 But there were a lot of other kids that also went home.

01:21:10.000 They asked their parents the same questions.

01:21:12.000 You know, what is the Star of David?

01:21:13.000 Who are the Jews? 0.94

01:21:14.000 And I don't know what kind of responses they got.

01:21:18.000 I don't know what they were told.

01:21:19.000 So you live with that in school.

01:21:24.000 You live with that as a kid who's, even if you're a foreigner, even if you're going to an American school, you know, you have these ideas around you.

01:21:33.000 And the kids who are in the Saudi schools, which are separate, like foreigners are not allowed to go to Saudi schools.

01:21:41.000 Their textbooks are just insane, the kind of stuff they have about Jews, about infidels, and everything.

01:21:48.000 They actually teach this stuff to kids.

01:21:52.000 In the UK recently, there was a Saudi school that was in the UK, and they were using some of these textbooks, and there was a big brouhaha about it.

01:22:00.000 A brouhaha.

01:22:02.000 Oh yeah.

01:22:03.000 Love that term.

01:22:04.000 Yeah.

01:22:05.000 Sorry.

01:22:06.000 I always wanted to say that at rehearsing. 0.97

01:22:09.000 I was like, I'm going to fucking say brouhaha. 0.99

01:22:12.000 That's incredible that they had to cut your snowflake. 1.00

01:22:15.000 Your snowflake was symbolic of these evil wizard Jews doing their sorcery. 1.00

01:22:21.000 Nobody would have made that connection. 0.98

01:22:22.000 But that's what I mean.

01:22:24.000 It's stuff that's so unimaginable and things that you wouldn't even think of.

01:22:29.000 I watched a documentary once on these suicide bombers and there was a school that they were running where they had these images in this children's school of these kids that had blown themselves up and they had images of them,

01:22:47.000 you know, these holy images of them covered with their explosive vests and they had a saying on the wall above them that said, The children of today are tomorrow's holy martyrs.

01:23:02.000 And it's just like trying to wrap up Yeah.

01:23:29.000 Yeah.

01:23:30.000 It's impossible.

01:23:32.000 It didn't make any sense.

01:23:34.000 It didn't fit.

01:23:35.000 I tried to find a place for it in my head.

01:23:37.000 I tried to shove it in there somewhere.

01:23:39.000 I'm like, this has got to be fake.

01:23:40.000 It can't be real.

01:23:41.000 No, it's a tough thing.

01:23:42.000 I'm realizing more and more as I live here.

01:23:46.000 With every passing year that people who have been raised here, it's very difficult for them to comprehend that mindset.

01:23:52.000 I grew up in a Shia Muslim family.

01:23:55.000 Can you explain the difference for folks who don't know?

01:23:58.000 What is the difference between Sunni and Shia?

01:24:00.000 They're basically two different schools of thought.

01:24:03.000 After the Prophet Muhammad died, you had his best friend. 0.74

01:24:11.000 His name was Abu Bakr, which is what the current ISIS caliph is named after.

01:24:15.000 And you had his son-in-law and his cousin, and his name is Ali.

01:24:21.000 So I'm named after.

01:24:24.000 I don't know how that ended up, like what we're named after, but anyway.

01:24:28.000 So what happens is you have these two different lines, and there was a conflict about, you know, people were, they couldn't decide who the successor was going to be.

01:24:38.000 Some people kind of flocked to the caliphate, which was Abu Bakr and the other caliphs, and others flocked to the imams.

01:24:45.000 Which was Ali.

01:24:46.000 So it was a successor.

01:24:47.000 It was just basically a conflict about who the successor was going to be and different people took different sides.

01:24:53.000 That's the long story short.

01:24:56.000 Well, that became incredibly confusing to Americans when the Iraq War went on and we realized that, oh, okay, there's a war going on now that we killed Saddam Hussein between the Sunnis and the Shias.

01:25:09.000 It's like, what?

01:25:10.000 Wait a minute.

01:25:11.000 The Muslims don't like each other? 1.00

01:25:14.000 Like, what kind of crazy shit is this? 1.00

01:25:16.000 They've been fighting, and it's not just the Sunnis and Shias. 1.00

01:25:18.000 There's a whole bunch of other factions.

01:25:19.000 What other factions?

01:25:20.000 What are the other ones?

01:25:21.000 Oh, there's too many names.

01:25:23.000 It's like, you know, if you're talking about all the different Christians.

01:25:25.000 Rattle off a couple.

01:25:27.000 Episcopalians, Lutherans.

01:25:29.000 So, yeah, there's the Sunnis and the Shias. 1.00

01:25:31.000 They're primary.

01:25:32.000 Within the Shias, you've got two different groups.

01:25:34.000 There's the ethnoseries, which is the 12ers, and they believe in 12 imams. 1.00

01:25:38.000 And then there's another group that split off after the 6th imam.

01:25:43.000 Into a separate sort of like descendancy.

01:25:45.000 And those are the, they're called the Ismailis. 1.00

01:25:49.000 In the Sunnis, you've got Salafi Sunnis, which is a lot of the ones in Saudi Arabia who are very conservative.

01:25:56.000 You have four major schools of thought within the Sunnis.

01:25:59.000 There's the Do you want the names?

01:26:02.000 I mean, it's like Humbly, Shafi, Maliki, and Hanafi. 0.94

01:26:05.000 So these are four different schools of thought.

01:26:07.000 They practice different things. 0.97

01:26:08.000 Like, for instance, the Shafi sect does, for them, female genital mutilation is mandatory. 0.97

01:26:17.000 Mandatory. 0.97

01:26:18.000 Mandatory.

01:26:18.000 So in Indonesia and in a lot of Southeast Asian countries, you know, Indonesia, where Reza Aslan says that women are 100% equal to men, I would say, yeah, when it comes to circumcision rates, they are.

01:26:30.000 More than 80% of men and women there are circumcised.

01:26:34.000 Well, circumcision for a man, though, is not nearly as brutal as circumcision for a female.

01:26:39.000 You're just cutting off skin.

01:26:40.000 You're not cutting off the clitoris. 1.00

01:26:42.000 There's four different kinds of...

01:26:45.000 FGM, according to the WHO. So that ranges from just nicking the clitoris to all the way to removing the clitoris and the labia. 0.92

01:26:53.000 So nicking it is just sort of a scarring? 0.98

01:26:56.000 A ritual, yeah, a nick. 0.99

01:26:58.000 It's still pretty fucked up. 0.98

01:27:00.000 And they're all banned over here. 0.99

01:27:02.000 So there's different grades to it.

01:27:07.000 So that's one example, right, of the Shafi sect.

01:27:10.000 And then the Maliki, they have a different belief. 0.82

01:27:12.000 The Hanafis have different beliefs.

01:27:13.000 So, and they'd range and, you know, there's really liberal ones within each sect.

01:27:19.000 There's really conservative ones.

01:27:20.000 So it's very wide.

01:27:22.000 Like, you know, you have jihadists who will actually go out and they'll carry out these martyrdom operations.

01:27:28.000 And you have Islamists who agree with political Islam, but not all of them are necessarily going to carry out these operations. 0.91

01:27:36.000 And then you have Moderate Muslims, and a lot of moderate Muslims are extremely conservative, and they do believe in all those conservative things like, you know, being gay is not a good thing, woman should cover herself. 1.00

01:27:47.000 So a lot of moderates will believe this, but they reject the political ideology of Islam.

01:27:53.000 And then you have liberal and progressive moderates, and they're different as well.

01:27:57.000 So it's a very, you know, it's 1.6 billion people.

01:28:02.000 It's extremely, extremely diverse.

01:28:04.000 Which is the more conservative faction?

01:28:09.000 The Sunni or the Shia? 0.95

01:28:12.000 There's conservative elements in both.

01:28:14.000 Just to give you an example that may be more recognizable to you is the Iranian theocracy.

01:28:21.000 If you can keep that closer to your face.

01:28:23.000 You don't want to vary too much in the sound.

01:28:25.000 You can just pull it towards you.

01:28:26.000 It moves around a lot.

01:28:27.000 Oh, yeah, cool.

01:28:28.000 But it's weird.

01:28:29.000 These things are very directional.

01:28:30.000 Sorry.

01:28:30.000 All right.

01:28:31.000 There we go.

01:28:31.000 Oh, there.

01:28:31.000 Yeah, that's louder.

01:28:33.000 So the Iranian theocracy is a Shia theocracy. 0.98

01:28:37.000 So that's extremely conservative Shia Islam.

01:28:40.000 The Saudis are Sunni.

01:28:42.000 It's extremely conservative Sunni Islam.

01:28:45.000 What do they hate about each other, that they're willing to go to war?

01:28:49.000 The Bronx successor. 0.81

01:28:50.000 It's a historical difference between Shias and Sunnis.

01:28:54.000 So it's like Baptists going after Catholics. 0.75

01:28:56.000 Yeah, sort of in that way.

01:28:59.000 And yeah, pretty much similar.

01:29:00.000 They just have different ideas of what the belief should be.

01:29:03.000 And there is an element of labeling people who don't agree with you non-Muslims.

01:29:08.000 So a lot of Saudis will say that the Shias are kafir, they're apostates, because they rejected belief in the caliphs.

01:29:17.000 And then that makes them punishable by death. 1.00

01:29:21.000 And you know, you have to go out and you have to kill them. 1.00

01:29:23.000 And there's also an ethnic... 0.99

01:29:25.000 There's the Arab and Persian ethnic rivalry.

01:29:28.000 So it's extremely complicated, and that's why Bush I ended up in such a mess when he went into Iraq.

01:29:37.000 This is a hard thing to understand for a lot of people.

01:29:41.000 From what I read, I don't think he had any idea.

01:29:45.000 I don't think he knew the difference between Shias and Sunnis beyond just a superficial level. 0.56

01:29:50.000 He probably had no idea that that was going to go down, that there was going to be some sort of a brutal civil war.

01:29:55.000 To try to reclaim power.

01:29:57.000 I mean, no one in this country had any idea that that was going to happen.

01:30:03.000 There was going to be a civil war between the two competing factions of Islam.

01:30:07.000 I have a friend who's...

01:30:07.000 Yeah.

01:30:10.000 His name is Faisal Mattar.

01:30:11.000 He grew up in Iraq, and he started the global secular humanist movement while he was in Iraq.

01:30:18.000 So he became a target for a lot of people.

01:30:20.000 And the global secular humanist movement now has, I think, 300,000 followers on Facebook and so on.

01:30:26.000 So it became huge.

01:30:27.000 And he was also from a Shia family, and he was targeted by Al-Qaeda.

01:30:31.000 And they managed to kill his brother.

01:30:33.000 After that, he was running around over all kinds of different countries until he finally got refugee status in the U.S., and he came here recently.

01:30:43.000 He's full of stories about Iraq and how complicated it is.

01:30:48.000 Some of the other people I've talked to, they say that the reason Saddam Hussein was so effective is because he ruled with an iron fist, and he kept all of these sort of religious rivalries.

01:31:13.000 Yeah, that's what it seems like from our point of view, from our...

01:31:22.000 Confused point of view when all that was going down.

01:31:24.000 There was a very strange moment where most Americans were standing back going, wait, wait, wait, what's going on?

01:31:30.000 Like, they're competing against, they're fighting with each other?

01:31:33.000 Like, in their two rival sections?

01:31:35.000 What?

01:31:36.000 No one knew that there were rival factions of Islam.

01:31:40.000 This guy Reza Aslan, he is a very interesting sort of polarizing figure. 0.99

01:31:48.000 Some people think that he is an interesting historian, a voice of reason, and other people think he's completely disingenuous and not just incorrect about certain things, but that he's full of shit. 1.00

01:32:05.000 Yeah. 0.99

01:32:06.000 That's sort of Sam Harris' take on him, is that he's just dishonest.

01:32:11.000 I agree with Sam Harris on that.

01:32:13.000 I think he's very dishonest.

01:32:15.000 What is his objective?

01:32:16.000 Like, what is he trying to do?

01:32:17.000 Because my friend Duncan is enamored by him.

01:32:19.000 My friend Duncan read his book on Jesus and he's just, he said it's an absolutely fascinating book and just really thinks the guy's very interesting.

01:32:27.000 But then I talked to Sam about him and Sam said that he had some really dishonest dealings with him, some conversations with him where...

01:32:35.000 Yeah.

01:32:36.000 He's, like, I've only read the stuff he's had.

01:32:39.000 I've had some exchanges with him on Twitter and so on.

01:32:41.000 And he's sort of like a very classic apologist.

01:32:46.000 And he's Muslim.

01:32:48.000 Yeah, he's Muslim.

01:32:49.000 I don't know about his belief.

01:32:51.000 I'm not sure whether he really is a practicing or believing Muslim or not.

01:32:55.000 But he's definitely an apologist.

01:32:57.000 And he's one of these guys who, whenever anything terrible happens, he's like, well, we've got to look for the root cause.

01:33:03.000 Islam is not the root cause. 0.94

01:33:04.000 And at one point, he...

01:33:08.000 He's one of those guys who responds with everything with accusations of bigotry and Islamophobia.

01:33:13.000 He'll just call you a bigot.

01:33:15.000 And he knows especially that people here, especially liberal white Westerners, that's the last thing they want to be called.

01:33:22.000 It's just a great way to shut down the conversation.

01:33:25.000 And people know this.

01:33:26.000 People in the Muslim world, generally, they know this.

01:33:31.000 Yeah.

01:33:51.000 And I think he uses that a lot.

01:33:54.000 And one of the things that he said, for instance, is that he actually wrote, he's like, these books, the Quran, the scriptures, they don't mean anything in and of themselves.

01:34:04.000 These words have no meaning.

01:34:06.000 It is a people, like a misogynist, violent person will bring their meaning out and they'll see in it what they want.

01:34:12.000 Like as if the book is full of Rorschach texts.

01:34:14.000 It's like inkblots that you can interpret and these words don't mean anything. 0.57

01:34:20.000 And I was just thinking about the implication, and I wrote this for the Richard Dawkins website, is, you know, if he's saying that, like, these people, they didn't get their ideas from the book, the book has nothing to do with it, then he's saying that all the people in the Muslim world are disproportionately inherently violent and misogynistic.

01:34:39.000 Because if the words don't have any meaning, then they've just chosen to behave this way.

01:34:39.000 Right.

01:34:44.000 It's got to be something in their DNA. And they're rationalizing it with those words that don't mean anything.

01:34:48.000 And that's bigoted.

01:34:50.000 Essentially, that's actually even more bigoted because you're saying that these people are inherently like that.

01:34:55.000 It's in their DNA. That's the way the people are.

01:34:58.000 It's not that they've been misled by some ancient ideology.

01:35:02.000 And you can't fix it, right?

01:35:04.000 It's like because they're just like that.

01:35:06.000 So to me, that's a much worse position to have.

01:35:10.000 It's a much more bigoted position to have.

01:35:12.000 And to neglect obvious causes, like, you know, when we talk about root causes, anytime someone says, Allahu Akbar, if they do something, or they say, Jesus made me do it, we always kind of ignore that.

01:35:26.000 Like, okay, let's ignore that.

01:35:27.000 Let's look beyond it.

01:35:28.000 But when you're looking beyond something, you're never going to see what's in front of you.

01:35:32.000 Right.

01:35:32.000 So if I tell you I did something, a horrific act because it was my political beliefs or because I played a certain video game or I liked a certain band or...

01:35:42.000 I was pissed off about U.S. foreign policy.

01:35:45.000 You'll take that at face value.

01:35:47.000 Everyone will.

01:35:48.000 The moment anybody says U.S. foreign policy, you know, Reza Aslan, Glenn Greenwald, I'll be like, oh, okay.

01:35:54.000 They said what the cause was.

01:35:56.000 We should believe them.

01:35:57.000 But way more than U.S. foreign policy, they're telling you why they're doing things.

01:36:02.000 They're doing it for God.

01:36:03.000 They're doing it for the afterlife.

01:36:05.000 But when we listen to that, we don't take that at face value.

01:36:08.000 We're like, no, that's impossible.

01:36:10.000 It has to be something beyond it.

01:36:12.000 It's the only thing that we don't believe.

01:36:16.000 That religion and religious belief can actually do these things.

01:36:20.000 They can actually trigger people to act on them.

01:36:25.000 That's almost impossible to fix.

01:36:29.000 It's a tough thing to fix.

01:36:31.000 And I... There's this one after that...

01:36:34.000 You know about the attack on the school in Pakistan where they killed 140 people and 132 kids.

01:36:40.000 And they just went and there were like seven suicide bombers that just went in and they just took out all those kids.

01:36:46.000 And they aged 12 to 14. So that shook up the world.

01:36:51.000 And...

01:36:53.000 After that, I was talking online to this Taliban sympathizer.

01:36:56.000 I don't know if he was a member of the Taliban, but he was definitely a sympathizer.

01:36:59.000 And he told me something that was actually really chilling.

01:37:06.000 And he said, it's not that I believe in an afterlife.

01:37:11.000 I know there's an afterlife.

01:37:13.000 He's like, we don't think of death as an end.

01:37:16.000 You know, death is, like, this is just a human concept, something people who believe in materialism believe.

01:37:23.000 We know that death is not an end.

01:37:25.000 And then he pointed out the Urdu word, which is the language from Pakistan, for death, which is intikal.

01:37:32.000 And intikal actually means transition.

01:37:34.000 It doesn't mean end.

01:37:36.000 You know, it doesn't mean death as we know it.

01:37:38.000 So he said even the word for death means transition, means you're moving on to another world.

01:37:44.000 And then he went into more detail.

01:37:47.000 He's like, these kids, if kids have had the chance to sin, there's a higher chance of them going to hell. 1.00

01:37:53.000 But if they're young and innocent, Oh, fuck Christ. 1.00

01:38:11.000 And then he said that... 0.99

01:38:16.000 I'm trying to remember all of it, because there were some really important elements of what he said that gives us insight into how they think.

01:38:22.000 Yeah, and then he said the reason that we blow ourselves up, he's like, you know, we're killing ourselves.

01:38:26.000 If death was such a bad thing, we wouldn't do it ourselves.

01:38:28.000 But we know where we're going, and we know where we're taking the kids as well.

01:38:32.000 So we just don't think of it in the way that you do.

01:38:35.000 And most Muslims, you know, and he was talking about all the Muslims condemning it.

01:38:40.000 He's like, most Muslims, their faith isn't as pure. 1.00

01:38:44.000 Really believed that there was a heaven.

01:38:46.000 They were doing the right thing.

01:38:46.000 They were going to get there.

01:38:47.000 They wouldn't be mourning this.

01:38:49.000 They would be celebrating it.

01:38:50.000 He's like, but they are of poor faith. 1.00

01:38:52.000 And, you know, we're of the right faith.

01:38:54.000 And I would say, you know, when you...

01:38:55.000 So that's the mindset that you're going up against.

01:38:58.000 And how do you fight it?

01:38:59.000 You fight it like that scene from Aliens where he says you've got to pull out and nuke it from orbit.

01:39:05.000 Ever see that scene where Bill Paxton...

01:39:07.000 This is different from what you were saying about the drones earlier.

01:39:10.000 Yeah, it seems like we need to nuke the entire world.

01:39:13.000 Start fresh with new monkeys. 1.00

01:39:16.000 People are just so fucked. 1.00

01:39:18.000 The fact that a human being in 2015 can literally operate and think that way. 1.00

01:39:23.000 No, it was absolutely amazing.

01:39:26.000 But it's important to...

01:39:28.000 I was watching this movie and I... No, was it a TV show?

01:39:30.000 And someone said something.

01:39:33.000 Well, they said that the moment you demonize your enemy or the moment you call your enemy the devil, You're not going to be able to understand them.

01:39:42.000 The moment you've decided that they're the other and that this is just pure evil, you'll never understand their motivation for why they do what they do.

01:39:51.000 I think it's important.

01:39:53.000 That was a very eye-opening conversation for me.

01:39:55.000 I'm sure.

01:39:57.000 Please go on.

01:39:58.000 I was just saying, I've heard that before.

01:39:58.000 No, no.

01:40:00.000 People have told me that since I was a kid.

01:40:03.000 I was raised religiously.

01:40:06.000 You know, that, you know, it's not permanent, you know, this life is just temporary and it's the afterlife.

01:40:11.000 But I don't think anybody really, like, truly, truly believes that that's it and that's why this life is useless.

01:40:18.000 People still get upset when their loved ones die and, you know, they still fear death.

01:40:22.000 They don't want to die early.

01:40:23.000 If they really, really thought that they were going to someplace great afterwards, it wouldn't be that much of a fear for any of us. 0.99

01:40:30.000 I mean, imagine, like, if you thought, okay, my death is a fucking ticket... 0.99

01:40:34.000 Eternal bliss. 0.99

01:40:35.000 Then it's not something that would scare you if you really, really knew that.

01:40:39.000 And these people really know that. 0.75

01:40:41.000 And they're all too willing to kill themselves and kill others. 0.99

01:40:46.000 The Charlie Hebdo thing confused the shit out of me. 0.99

01:40:50.000 Not that people were willing to kill people over the cartoons, I kind of already had that idea in my head, but the reaction by a lot of left-wing progressive people in the United States condemning the racism of those cartoons. 0.99

01:41:03.000 I was like, what the fuck are you even talking about? 0.95

01:41:06.000 You're talking about a massacre, a horrific, murderous massacre, and you've chose to condemn the quote-unquote racism of these cartoons. 0.99

01:41:25.000 Mm-hmm.

01:41:38.000 What is that?

01:41:39.000 That apologist thinking, that weird sort of thinking that's embodied by a lot of those really progressive left-wing, like really radical left-wing people.

01:41:50.000 I think there's a sensitivity to hurting people and hurting their feelings.

01:41:56.000 Over murder?

01:41:57.000 Over murder, yeah.

01:41:58.000 I think that they think...

01:42:00.000 They'll always say that I'm not defending the murders.

01:42:03.000 That was horrific.

01:42:04.000 But.

01:42:04.000 I condemn it.

01:42:05.000 And there's always a but.

01:42:06.000 And then there's this whole sort of justification for it.

01:42:10.000 This is a sensitive thing for me because I'm a free speech absolutist.

01:42:16.000 When I grew up, there's a lot of things I couldn't say.

01:42:19.000 I have a friend who's in jail for 10 years and he's been sentenced to lashing for doing exactly what I do here.

01:42:27.000 So when I look at it, him and I both grew up in Saudi Arabia.

01:42:31.000 We're both writers.

01:42:32.000 We're both pro-secularism.

01:42:34.000 But when I say something, I can say it and it's fine.

01:42:41.000 And when he does it, he gets lashed and tortured.

01:42:44.000 So free speech is a big thing for me. 0.90

01:42:47.000 So coming here, I just don't think when it comes to the cartoons or the movie, the interview, people are saying, well, it's a shitty movie anyway.

01:42:53.000 I didn't think so.

01:42:54.000 I thought it was hilarious.

01:42:55.000 But when they start talking about the content of what is being criticized or attacked, I just think it's completely irrelevant.

01:43:04.000 In the context of what's happening, it doesn't matter what was in the Charlie Hebdo paper.

01:43:10.000 Do you think they're doing that because they're terrified of retribution and they're so terrified that they're willing to side with the murderous Religious fundamentalists because they're almost worried that they're going to get attacked themselves. 0.57

01:43:25.000 They're like, well, you know, I mean, those cartoons were kind of really racist.

01:43:29.000 And I mean, I'm not saying that the murders were cool, but I'm saying like, hey, why are you promoting like horrible racist cartoons?

01:43:36.000 I mean, let's look at that.

01:43:38.000 That's where the Islamophobia-phobia comes in.

01:43:40.000 They don't want to be called bigots.

01:43:42.000 They have a certain way of talking.

01:43:45.000 Have you ever noticed?

01:43:46.000 Yeah, they do.

01:43:47.000 These people that are super progressive and super liberal, they have this weird accentuation of certain words.

01:43:52.000 I'm not saying that it's cool to murder all those people, but let's look at why were they so upset.

01:44:01.000 Yeah.

01:44:02.000 It's, you know, it is what it is.

01:44:05.000 We live in an easy culture.

01:44:07.000 It's easy.

01:44:07.000 Yeah, people are more upset about, it's not, there's this value, the value of freedom of speech, okay, which I think is extremely important.

01:44:16.000 Taken for granted very much so by Americans in some cases.

01:44:19.000 Oh yeah, very taken for granted.

01:44:20.000 That's something that I, and Faisal, the guy from Iraq I told you about, he says the same thing, you know, when he came here.

01:44:26.000 A lot of people are sort of apologists about it because there's a freedom of speech and then there is this sort of political correctness and not to offend anybody.

01:44:34.000 And people will say, one thing I've been hearing a lot is freedom of speech doesn't mean the freedom to offend.

01:44:40.000 What does that mean?

01:44:42.000 That's exactly what it means.

01:44:45.000 There's no point of freedom of speech.

01:44:47.000 And it means you have the freedom to talk about being offended by that freedom of speech that other person expressed.

01:44:54.000 Yeah, everybody can say the fact that you can have this conversation about what freedom of speech means is that's what freedom of speech is.

01:45:00.000 And if the whole reason it's protected so strongly is because it means the right that all of us have to offend other people.

01:45:10.000 Right, which is why I have a huge issue when people say something that other people deem to be offensive, they automatically go after their employers and try to get them fired.

01:45:20.000 Like, this isn't just a freedom of...

01:45:21.000 You're not just speaking about them.

01:45:24.000 Now you're taking action to try to get them fired, which is very different.

01:45:29.000 This is a very different kind of activism, and it's mean.

01:45:34.000 Like, what you're doing is like...

01:45:36.000 There's a negativity attached to it that's very strange.

01:45:41.000 It's an aggressive negativity, a rebound from something that they believe is incorrect.

01:45:49.000 It's very weird.

01:45:50.000 They have the right to be offended, but they don't have the right not to be offended.

01:45:56.000 That's the idea.

01:45:58.000 Nobody has a right not to be offended.

01:46:00.000 If you don't like something, you don't have to listen to it.

01:46:02.000 Or counter speech with speech.

01:46:04.000 Exactly.

01:46:06.000 That's a very good way of putting it.

01:46:07.000 Counter speech with speech.

01:46:08.000 Counter freedom with freedom.

01:46:10.000 If you don't like the way someone expresses themselves, talk about the way they express themselves and what specifically you find incorrect about it.

01:46:17.000 And that's how dialogues get started.

01:46:18.000 And people become illuminated by those sort of dialogues.

01:46:22.000 Even people that have opposing ideas.

01:46:24.000 You can see where a person comes from.

01:46:27.000 Even if you don't agree with it, you can see where a person comes from.

01:46:31.000 We also talked about hate speech because I think one of the biggest problems with France and Europe and a lot of European countries is that they have laws against hate speech.

01:46:42.000 In the US, you have laws against hate crimes, but hate speech is protected as part of free speech, and I think that's right.

01:46:50.000 Remember the Westboro Baptist Church ruling, where the Supreme Court voted 8-1 to allow them to picket funerals?

01:46:57.000 And as much as that idea is abhorrent, or anything the Westboro Baptist Church does is abhorrent, That is their right, and they should be able to do it as long as it's not a crime and it's his speech.

01:47:10.000 But, you know, they have, in France, they've got Holocaust denial laws.

01:47:14.000 They have rules against, you know, attacking, you know, like, let me put it this way, the very same things, same rules, that their hate speech laws were actually used by the government at times to warn Charlie Hebdo.

01:47:31.000 Like, you know, what you're doing is you're engaging in hate speech.

01:47:33.000 So the same hate speech laws that actually protected the killers, right?

01:47:39.000 Protected their right to express themselves and to say, okay, do everything from subjugate women to, you know, impinge on gay rights, for instance. 0.59

01:47:51.000 Like, all of those same things, the same hate speech laws were used to warn the Charlie Hebdo people.

01:47:56.000 I mean, they had that fashion designer...

01:47:59.000 Who was arrested for anti-Semitic remarks that he made in a bar.

01:48:02.000 Right.

01:48:04.000 Amazing.

01:48:05.000 Yeah, so if you have hate speech laws, if you have things like that, then that causes a lot of issues.

01:48:10.000 It doesn't work very well for people who are making the cartoons, like Charlie Hebdo, and actually ends up protecting their attackers and their ideology.

01:48:18.000 When I look at the apologists, especially in America, I often wonder whether or not It's a case of people, it's like very similar to people almost like winning the lottery and becoming spoiled and not appreciating the earning of that money. 0.93

01:48:35.000 Or someone who inherited millions of dollars and you usually find them all fucked up and drunk and become drug addicts. 0.95

01:48:43.000 They're so spoiled. 0.99

01:48:45.000 They're so spoiled by this freedom that they don't appreciate it.

01:48:50.000 It's almost like we've had so much freedom and it's gone on for so long with no consequences that until you actually see personally the effects of those consequences of free speech, you don't appreciate free speech for what it really truly is.

01:49:03.000 You may disagree with someone, but if you disagree with their ability to express themselves, you're a part of the problem.

01:49:11.000 Yeah.

01:49:12.000 Yeah, I agree with all of that. 1.00

01:49:14.000 I think those cartoons are stupid as fuck. 1.00

01:49:18.000 I wouldn't draw them. 1.00

01:49:19.000 I wouldn't waste my time drawing those cartoons. 0.99

01:49:21.000 I think they suck. 0.99

01:49:22.000 It's not my culture. 1.00

01:49:23.000 I don't get it.

01:49:24.000 Maybe if I spoke French and I understood where they were coming from, I would think it would be funnier. 1.00

01:49:29.000 But to think that there's something wrong with them doing it to the point where you're bringing that up instead of a mass murder on a magazine.

01:49:39.000 Shooting the cartoonists, and the thing you want to discuss is like, well, those cartoons are really racist.

01:49:45.000 Yes, the merit of the content has nothing to do with it.

01:49:49.000 It shouldn't even be an issue.

01:49:50.000 I don't even know why it was an issue.

01:49:53.000 Spoiled.

01:49:54.000 And there's this idea that supposing we said that the cartoons were hate speech, and they were criticizing an ideology that a lot of people found, a belief that a lot of people were very sensitive about.

01:50:06.000 Or like a historical public figure who's been dead for a long time and, you know, that people are sensitive about.

01:50:11.000 So, supposing you had that, you know, again, you know, sort of even the competition there.

01:50:18.000 You know, pull out, they used to lampoon religions, all the religions, it wasn't just Islam. 0.92

01:50:23.000 So, you know, pull out the Bible, pull out the Quran, open it up to certain things and, you know, there's more hate speech in those books than there could ever be in the Charlie Hebdo cartoons.

01:50:36.000 If you're talking about incitement to violence, you know, killing infidels, apostates, you know, go to Deuteronomy. 0.93

01:50:42.000 And if you go to Deuteronomy 20 and you read it, it reads like an ISIS rulebook. 0.86

01:50:48.000 It says, you know, go into the land, you know, put the sword to all of the men, you take the women and the children as slaves.

01:50:55.000 I mean, that's exactly what it says.

01:50:57.000 And then in the Quran, 47.3, it says the exact same thing.

01:51:00.000 Well, why is it then?

01:51:01.000 What is it about radical Islam where they don't just have that written, but take that and use it in a form of practice? 0.97

01:51:10.000 Whereas radical Christian fundamentalists very rarely go out and kill gays. 0.90

01:51:15.000 They very rarely, you know... 0.95

01:51:17.000 Yeah, they did do it for a long time.

01:51:20.000 The Inquisition?

01:51:21.000 Yeah, so they did.

01:51:22.000 So it was during that time that they did do it.

01:51:25.000 And there is a response a lot of times when you talk about Islam, when you criticize Islam.

01:51:29.000 They say, well, Christianity had its dark ages too, you know, several centuries ago.

01:51:33.000 I'm like, yeah, and how would you have reacted when that was happening then?

01:51:37.000 That's the same way you have to approach what's happening now with Islam because, you know, they're going through the same thing.

01:51:42.000 The books are really not that different.

01:51:44.000 Like the New Testament's a little nicer.

01:51:46.000 Like in the New Testament, all the torture begins after you die.

01:51:50.000 It's like the Old Testament's only during your life.

01:51:53.000 In the Quran, it's a bit of both. 0.81

01:51:55.000 Well, how did Christianity rise above? 0.98

01:51:58.000 How did they get past that into this lesser retarded stage that they're at right now? 1.00

01:52:03.000 It's secularism, separating religion and state. 0.80

01:52:05.000 So the good thing about secularism is that it allows freedom of religion.

01:52:08.000 It's the only system that allows every religion to really openly The complete religious freedom for everybody.

01:52:17.000 But at the same time, it separates that from politics.

01:52:19.000 So it allows a system of coexistence.

01:52:22.000 And I kind of, I always think that there's several steps to enlightenment.

01:52:28.000 I mean, for me, enlightenment would be if nobody had any religious beliefs at all.

01:52:32.000 Everybody was just kind of operating rationally.

01:52:33.000 That would be very nice.

01:52:35.000 Hasn't happened anywhere yet.

01:52:36.000 But I would say that, you know, you'd have a reformation.

01:52:39.000 And after the reformation, that would get you to secularism, where you separate religion and state.

01:52:44.000 And then you move to a point where, you know, people can actually have that conversation and they can, you know, reject irrational beliefs entirely.

01:52:51.000 But the step before Reformation, in order to have a Reformation, you have to, especially in the Muslim world, you have to reject the idea of scriptural inerrancy. 0.92

01:53:01.000 You know, you have to stop taking the Koran literally, not just justifying the stuff that's in there, but just saying, okay, you know, there's this in here, we don't believe that anymore.

01:53:11.000 And stop thinking that it's the literal word of God, which is a very tough thing to do.

01:53:16.000 The Jews did it and the Christians did it. 1.00

01:53:18.000 What becomes the basis of your ideology then?

01:53:21.000 It seems like people want an ideology.

01:53:24.000 They want to have some sort of a very rigid set of rules and patterns of behavior.

01:53:33.000 We're good to go.

01:53:48.000 Writings and stories from the Bible, from the Old Testament especially.

01:53:52.000 If you tried to say today that you found a book and that this book was written last week by God and he wanted me to read it to you. 0.97

01:54:01.000 And apparently, fuck all these scientists, there was actually just two people. 0.98

01:54:05.000 It was Adam and Eve. 0.99

01:54:06.000 And that's where people came from.

01:54:07.000 And Eve actually came from Adam's rib. 1.00

01:54:09.000 So that bitch is super lucky. 1.00

01:54:11.000 She fucked up the whole thing because she talked to the snake and she ate an apple. 1.00

01:54:15.000 And the snake told her, eat the apple. 1.00

01:54:17.000 But God said, don't eat the apple. 1.00

01:54:19.000 She ate the snake, and so because of that, we're fucked. 1.00

01:54:21.000 And they realized they were naked. 0.99

01:54:23.000 And people go, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. 1.00

01:54:25.000 Shut the fuck up. 1.00

01:54:26.000 Get out of here. 1.00

01:54:27.000 Just stop it right there. 0.99

01:54:28.000 Just get out of here, dummy. 0.99

01:54:29.000 Who taught you about life? 0.99

01:54:31.000 But see, when you say all of that stuff...

01:54:35.000 And when we were talking about Mormonism and Scientology earlier, I mean, this stuff sounds so much more insane than Mormonism and Scientology.

01:54:42.000 It's right up there. 0.99

01:54:43.000 Well, the Scientology stuff's pretty fucking insane. 0.99

01:54:46.000 No, that is pretty insane. 1.00

01:54:47.000 The whole thing about the Thetans and, you know, you're fucking from a volcano or some shit. 1.00

01:54:53.000 They drop your soul in a volcano. 1.00

01:54:55.000 But this stuff is just as...

01:54:58.000 It's all nutty.

01:54:59.000 It's all...

01:55:01.000 Obviously fiction.

01:55:02.000 All obviously fiction.

01:55:04.000 And the more we become illuminated about the actual true nature of matter, of biological life, the process of atoms, and the subatomic particles, and when we get deeper and deeper into the very nature of reality itself,

01:55:20.000 the more we can explain, the less religion becomes valid.

01:55:23.000 And the more it becomes pretty obvious that someone in a very distant time where there was no science and there was no There was no base of knowledge where it had been accumulated over thousands of years of people slowly but surely measuring things and figuring things out and coming up with newer and better ways to measure things that were based on the discoveries of people before them.

01:55:43.000 And we're all, all of us, I mean, the reason why we celebrate guys like Isaac Newton or Darwin is because we've all piggybacked on their discoveries and learned more.

01:55:52.000 And every scientist and every biologist and every anthropologist has dug up bones.

01:55:57.000 We've added another little piece to this puzzle that's constantly evolving and growing and changing. 0.99

01:56:02.000 And then something like religion comes along that says, stop all this fucking learning. 1.00

01:56:06.000 Cut it out. 1.00

01:56:07.000 I mean, the very idea of it is anti-progress because you're supposed to rely on some old ancient shit. 0.99

01:56:15.000 It's like going back to when Galileo was imprisoned or Copernicus was chastised. 0.97

01:56:20.000 Going back to when these people were thought of as enemies of God because they had these...

01:56:28.000 We're good to go.

01:56:56.000 It's just a whole idea that you start with the assumption that, okay, this could be wrong.

01:57:01.000 How do I prove that it's right?

01:57:03.000 And with faith, it's different.

01:57:05.000 You start with the conclusion.

01:57:07.000 You're like, this is my conclusion.

01:57:08.000 I don't need evidence for it.

01:57:09.000 Now I'm going to work backwards and see what I can do to strengthen my belief.

01:57:12.000 It's two completely different dynamics.

01:57:17.000 Yeah, I mean, the idea that the two of them can coincide, it seems less and less viable as time goes on.

01:57:23.000 Yeah, just the basics, when you look at the basics, the way that they work.

01:57:28.000 And it also seems like as time goes on, because of these ideas being less and less compatible, the opposing factions, science and religion, are more vehemently opposed to each other.

01:57:40.000 They're more aggressive about their denial, or they're more aggressive about their Non-accepting of these fundamentalist ideas.

01:57:50.000 Scientists today are more aggressive about their ideas that atheism is the way to go and that these religious fundamentalist ideas that are being pushed on people are a form of ideological poison. 0.97

01:58:04.000 They fuck with the mind because they give the mind these very rigid Patterns that you're expected to adhere to and conform to and if you do not I mean the idea of like if you don't believe or you fall out of faith You should you're supposed to have your head removed. 1.00

01:58:20.000 I mean that should tell you right there What is what do you think you think with your fucking head? 1.00

01:58:24.000 Well, you've been thinking too much. 1.00

01:58:25.000 So we're gonna cut your fucking head off Don't think you need to abide by this shit that was written down on parchment Back when they thought the world was flat and the sun was 17 miles away. 1.00

01:58:36.000 Like that's what you need to abide by because otherwise you're gonna fuck up our party. 1.00

01:58:42.000 Yeah, it kind of brings you back to the whole community thing that I think a lot of people they want that identification and they want that sense of identity and you know group identity that religion gives them.

01:58:54.000 They need it so much that that's why they take just attacks on Their ideology, personally.

01:59:01.000 Yeah, and they cheer when there's reprisal for these attacks.

01:59:05.000 These verbal attacks.

01:59:06.000 I mean, there's people that cheered when those guys were murdered.

01:59:11.000 There's people that cheered all the time.

01:59:14.000 Where I grew up, people used to celebrate it all the time.

01:59:16.000 I mean, like educated people.

01:59:18.000 They wouldn't say it to...

01:59:20.000 Like, within our own living room, we're sitting there, you know, educated uncles and aunts who had, you know, been overseas and they'd studied overseas, they came back, you know, when...

01:59:31.000 Something like 9-11 would happen or, you know, any kind of attack against America would happen, even with civilians.

01:59:36.000 You know, be completely supportive of it.

01:59:38.000 But, you know, when they'd go out and they'd talk to their white friends, they'd be like, you know, yeah, this is terrible. 0.50

01:59:45.000 We condemn it.

01:59:45.000 There are root causes for it.

01:59:48.000 We should understand what their legitimate grievances are and why they did it, but that doesn't justify the murder.

01:59:53.000 But alone in your house?

01:59:55.000 Oh, yeah, a lot of times.

01:59:56.000 Really?

01:59:57.000 Like, what would they say?

01:59:58.000 Unfortunately, not particularly in my house, but...

02:00:00.000 Extended family, family friends, I mean, just on a daily basis, we're surrounded by it.

02:00:05.000 I mean, when the Salman Rushdie Fatwa came down, you know, a lot of my extended family, a lot of my friends, you know, teachers at school and everything, they all supported it.

02:00:17.000 Whoa! 0.71

02:00:19.000 Killing a guy who wrote a book. 0.75

02:00:21.000 Not even a good book. 0.75

02:00:21.000 Yeah. 0.75

02:00:24.000 Yeah, I've never been able to read it.

02:00:26.000 Like, I like Salman Rushdie and I've read some of his stuff, but Satanic Verses just couldn't.

02:00:31.000 It's just really dense and I can't...

02:00:33.000 It's not interesting.

02:00:36.000 It just, yeah.

02:00:37.000 It takes a lot of focus, I think, to really get through it.

02:00:40.000 You need to sit down and really...

02:00:42.000 Well, you need to be interested in it.

02:00:44.000 But it's just bizarre because, I mean, it's not even specifically about Muhammad, right?

02:00:48.000 I mean, the Satanic Verses is...

02:00:51.000 It is about Muhammad's life.

02:00:54.000 Sort of?

02:00:55.000 The satanic verses were...

02:00:56.000 I guess the way the Quran was supposedly revealed was that Muhammad got these revelations from above and at one point he got these revelations that said that certain elements of idolatry are okay.

02:01:11.000 It was like these three idol gods and you know, okay fine, we can respect that or people that follow them, they're okay.

02:01:18.000 And then later on he's like, no, no, that was Satan talking to me.

02:01:21.000 It wasn't God.

02:01:22.000 So those were the satanic verses.

02:01:24.000 Right.

02:01:24.000 So they didn't end up being part of the Quran.

02:01:28.000 And that's where Salman Rushdie got the idea.

02:01:31.000 So it was based on an actual documented piece of sort of Islamic history.

02:01:38.000 And he changed the name of Muhammad and he had a lot of similar elements.

02:01:43.000 It was symbolic of his life.

02:01:45.000 So because he changed the name, he thought he was going to be okay?

02:01:48.000 Yeah, I mean, he knew that it was a satire, like Animal Farm.

02:01:52.000 He used animals to represent real people.

02:01:54.000 Right.

02:01:55.000 So he did this.

02:01:56.000 He had fictional characters and, you know, sort of different time settings.

02:01:59.000 And he thought it would be okay because he had fictional characters because he didn't mention Muhammad by name.

02:02:04.000 I don't know if he thought it would be okay.

02:02:07.000 I mean, I think that he knew that there would be some backlash.

02:02:12.000 I didn't think at that time.

02:02:14.000 I'm not sure if he really thought that he would have to go under hiding.

02:02:17.000 He probably would have never wrote it.

02:02:19.000 I mean, is he okay now?

02:02:21.000 Is he allowed to just go anywhere now?

02:02:23.000 Like, did they ever release or relieve him?

02:02:26.000 I don't know if he travels with armed security.

02:02:29.000 I mean, I don't know him personally, but he does tend to do all the talk shows and everything.

02:02:35.000 I mean, he was really under hiding in those first, like, ten years.

02:02:38.000 And this is where the spread the risk comes in.

02:02:40.000 I think there's so many people talking about this stuff now that we're not in the rusty days anymore.

02:02:46.000 Right.

02:02:47.000 There's a lot of people who are talking about it, writing about it.

02:02:50.000 It's all online.

02:02:53.000 So that process has started.

02:02:55.000 So in that way, I'm a little bit optimistic.

02:02:57.000 The fact that Salman Ersteen can really show up at talk shows, you see him everywhere.

02:03:01.000 He does public speeches.

02:03:03.000 He does debates.

02:03:05.000 I wonder what it's like if he does the Bill Maher show.

02:03:08.000 I wonder what kind of security they have.

02:03:10.000 Yeah, I don't know.

02:03:10.000 I'm not sure.

02:03:11.000 I wouldn't want to be there to see it in person.

02:03:14.000 Yeah.

02:03:14.000 Because, you know, you wouldn't want to be there the day it goes down.

02:03:19.000 Well, you know, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, she does travel with armed guards.

02:03:22.000 Yeah?

02:03:23.000 Does she?

02:03:24.000 Yeah, that's pretty well known.

02:03:26.000 So she still does.

02:03:29.000 And it's actually tougher for women who decide to change their mind about Islam.

02:03:37.000 Because, you know, like with my girlfriend, she's also like a secular activist.

02:03:42.000 Whenever anybody wants to send me hate mail, hate messages, they'll always, you know, sort of argue with me. 1.00

02:03:51.000 They'll be like, you know, you're bullshit, everything you're saying, it sucks. 1.00

02:03:54.000 You know, are you going to go to hell or, you know, you should get your head chopped off, whatever it is. 1.00

02:03:58.000 You know, they'll say things like that. 1.00

02:03:59.000 But with her...

02:04:01.000 It's always a sexual thing.

02:04:03.000 The threats that she gets are... 0.98

02:04:05.000 Rape threats. 0.99

02:04:07.000 Rape threats. 1.00

02:04:08.000 All kinds of things that they would do.

02:04:11.000 And she'll get hundreds of them.

02:04:13.000 Hundreds?

02:04:14.000 Yeah, hundreds.

02:04:15.000 Now, what do you do when you get those?

02:04:18.000 Do you report those to the FBI? Do you save them?

02:04:21.000 Do you document them?

02:04:22.000 Yeah, we save them and we do...

02:04:25.000 I mean, the hundreds actually happened in one incident.

02:04:28.000 There was a politician...

02:04:29.000 In Pakistan, who she knows personally and who has been sort of very vocal in his opposition to the Taliban.

02:04:38.000 And she just said that she supports him, right?

02:04:41.000 And just because of that and because he is under a lot of threat.

02:04:46.000 And she had some argument with some of the people who opposed him.

02:04:50.000 And then the rape threats started coming in.

02:04:53.000 And so at that point, you know, we would report it.

02:04:56.000 So we will report things like that.

02:04:58.000 I can't talk too much about what happened.

02:05:03.000 But most of the time they come from overseas and some kids sitting in villages with a laptop or a cell phone and sending threats.

02:05:12.000 But there's always a chance that one or two of them are real and this is obviously a real issue.

02:05:18.000 But generally, it's a lot worse for women than it is for men.

02:05:22.000 Because there's this idea, especially among conservative cultures and a lot of the Muslim culture, is that if a man decides not to follow religion, that's a separate thing.

02:05:36.000 But if a woman decides not to follow religion, she's lost all morality. 1.00

02:05:40.000 So she'll do anything. 1.00

02:05:41.000 She'll drink, she'll have sex. 1.00

02:05:43.000 Crazy bitch. 1.00

02:05:44.000 Yeah, exactly. 1.00

02:05:45.000 How dare she. 1.00

02:05:45.000 Drink and have sex. 1.00

02:05:47.000 She's trying to be like an American. 1.00

02:05:49.000 Exactly.

02:05:49.000 That's how they measure morality.

02:05:52.000 There is a lot of the people who kill people and they behead people and stuff, they're really upset.

02:05:58.000 When they talk about morality, like lapsed Western morality, they talk about... 0.97

02:06:02.000 Chicks in miniskirts. 1.00

02:06:03.000 Drinks, sex, things like that. 0.99

02:06:06.000 Unbelievable.

02:06:07.000 But they don't think of the murder and the martyrdom and all that.

02:06:11.000 Those things are virtuous.

02:06:12.000 They actually think that those things are good.

02:06:14.000 It's so backwards.

02:06:16.000 It's so...

02:06:17.000 I mean, the word archaic, I keep using it, but that really is the word.

02:06:22.000 It's such an ancient version of thinking. 0.91

02:06:26.000 It's almost like an operating system that's so outdated, like you're trying to fuck with DOS. You know what I mean? 0.96

02:06:33.000 You're trying to get on Twitter, but you're only using DOS. It's like, god damn. 0.99

02:06:38.000 The operating system of fundamental religion is so fucking broken. 1.00

02:06:43.000 A lot of times they think that they have the updated software. 0.99

02:06:46.000 We have the most recent religion, you know, like Islam came after Christianity, it came after, and then we had this great civilization, which they did at one point. 0.66

02:06:58.000 And why are we in such bad shape in all over the world?

02:07:03.000 So that's frustrating.

02:07:05.000 Sorry, I watched this speech once where this guy was talking about He was asking questions or the audience was asking questions about certain aspects of Islam and how do they know whether, you know, if one religion says one thing but Islam says another.

02:07:20.000 And his answer was, it's very simple, because Islam is the truth.

02:07:24.000 And everybody starts clapping.

02:07:25.000 I'm like, wow!

02:07:29.000 That's hilarious.

02:07:31.000 It's hilarious.

02:07:32.000 What we should look into is, like, you know, there is precedent for this.

02:07:37.000 Like, we were talking about the holy books earlier, and the holy books are very similar.

02:07:41.000 A lot of the stuff is, like, the Old Testament actually mentions stoning non-virtual brides to death.

02:07:47.000 The Quran doesn't even mention it.

02:07:49.000 It's in the Hadith, which is a separate sort of like a lesser source of guidance in Islam.

02:07:55.000 And so there's many things that are in all of the scriptures that are pretty abhorrent.

02:08:02.000 But how is it that, you know, Jews and Christians were able to move past it? 1.00

02:08:07.000 I mean, they had their dark ages, too. 1.00

02:08:09.000 They did some really fucked up shit at one point. 0.99

02:08:12.000 But they moved past it and they're here now. 0.99

02:08:14.000 What is the answer to that?

02:08:16.000 I think that, like, and this is one of the things I'm exploring in my book.

02:08:21.000 I think, like, with Jews and with Christians, they were able to, like, have a genuine reformation where they're able to bond and come together on a sense of community rather than ideology.

02:08:35.000 Like, you know, if you're Jewish, you can be an atheist Jew, you can be an agnostic Jew, you can be a secular Jew.

02:08:40.000 You can be an Orthodox Jew, but nobody's ever going to say, okay, you're not a Jew anymore.

02:08:44.000 Right.

02:08:45.000 Because you did this, you eat bacon or whatever.

02:08:48.000 With Christians, again, we were talking about the Catholics, right? 0.99

02:08:51.000 A lot of them are pro-choice.

02:08:54.000 They'll still end up going to church.

02:08:56.000 But you can't be an atheist Christian. 0.85

02:08:59.000 Technically, you can't be an atheist Christian.

02:09:01.000 Not even technically. 1.00

02:09:02.000 If you tell Christians that you're an atheist, they'll look at you like you're just shit on a plate. 1.00

02:09:07.000 Right. 1.00

02:09:07.000 I mean, they are not interested in hearing that. 1.00

02:09:10.000 There's a strong faction of Christianity, fundamentalist faction of Christianity, that they are incredibly upset at the word atheist or atheism.

02:09:20.000 No, it's a very bad word. 0.98

02:09:21.000 I mean, they actually think of atheists as worse than rapists. 0.98

02:09:24.000 I think I was reading that. 0.99

02:09:28.000 They had a survey on who you despise most. 0.99

02:09:32.000 People actually think atheists are worse than rapists. 0.99

02:09:35.000 But at the same time, you don't get... 0.98

02:09:37.000 You don't get murders.

02:09:39.000 And you don't even get excommunicated from the community just because you use condoms.

02:09:44.000 No one's going to say, okay, you use birth control, so you're not a Catholic anymore. 0.54

02:09:48.000 But with Islam, a lot of Muslims are still in that. 1.00

02:09:53.000 You can sit 10 people down.

02:09:55.000 One of them's going to say, music's a sin.

02:09:56.000 Another one's going to say, you've got to cover your head.

02:10:03.000 Right.

02:10:22.000 Belonging to a religious group gives you. 0.95

02:10:24.000 Which is a benefit for a lot of people.

02:10:26.000 That sense of community is so huge for a comfort to people, providing people with this group that they can rely upon and they feel connected to and joined with.

02:10:39.000 There's a lot of benefit to that. 0.97

02:10:41.000 The idea that it has to be attached to some archaic belief system To some ridiculous old shit that was written down when people had a very poor understanding of reality. 0.99

02:10:53.000 Very poor. 0.98

02:10:55.000 And that's what's really bizarre about the Islamic religion, is that at one point in time, you know, in the early... 1.00

02:11:03.000 You know, just like the 1200s and before, Islam was at the forefront of science and philosophy and writing.

02:11:12.000 I mean, it was one of the Islamic world, the Muslim world, was one of the more advanced cultures on earth.

02:11:19.000 Yeah.

02:11:19.000 And it wasn't really, again, this is where we make that distinction between Islam, the religion, and the Muslims.

02:11:26.000 Followed it.

02:11:27.000 And a lot of this was done by the Mutazilites, which was a very sort of open-minded, very progressive sect of Muslims.

02:11:37.000 And so a lot of those things happened not because of Islam, but despite it. 0.94

02:11:43.000 Even back then?

02:11:44.000 Yeah, even back then.

02:11:45.000 It's always been like that.

02:11:46.000 I mean, Newton was a religious Christian.

02:11:49.000 He was like a virgin, though, too.

02:11:50.000 Wasn't he really weird? 0.53

02:11:52.000 Yeah, he was a virgin.

02:11:55.000 At that time, there was no evolution.

02:11:57.000 Nobody knew about evolution.

02:11:58.000 It was pre-Darwin and everything.

02:12:00.000 So there's a lot of things he didn't know.

02:12:01.000 If he had known, he may not have been.

02:12:04.000 We can't speculate on that.

02:12:05.000 But, I mean, he was a religious Christian, but we don't identify his achievements.

02:12:10.000 As Christian achievements.

02:12:12.000 Right, I see what you're saying.

02:12:13.000 We don't identify like Albert Einstein's achievements as something, and he wasn't even, Albert Einstein wasn't even religious.

02:12:23.000 So with this, the fact that there were Muslims in a certain part of the world that were engaging in a lot of scientific inquiry, and they were really moving forward, and they were being progressive, and they're making new discoveries.

02:12:36.000 This is something that is more of a testament to science and to free thinking than it is to the religion itself.

02:12:47.000 They just happen to be Muslims.

02:12:49.000 That's similar to the fact that Darwin, when he was proposing his theories, the predominant scientific community was Christian.

02:12:57.000 Most of the people that he told his ideas to were in opposition of these ideas initially because It went opposite of their Christian beliefs.

02:13:07.000 We think of scientists today as being almost universally secular, or at least the ones that we pay attention to and respect, we think of them as having, at the very least, an agnostic religious base.

02:13:20.000 But back then, they were predominantly Christian.

02:13:23.000 Yeah, a lot of them.

02:13:24.000 In America and, yeah.

02:13:24.000 They were.

02:13:26.000 Everywhere.

02:13:27.000 I think what we do is we sometimes look at it the other way around.

02:13:32.000 When you had all that scientific progress happening in sort of the golden age of Muslims, then that was happening again, like it was happening despite the fact that it was Islam. 1.00

02:13:46.000 Now when you have all of these, all the terrorism, all these things happening, there's a direct relationship between words and the scripture and what they're doing.

02:13:55.000 So what we do is now we say, okay, just because they're Muslims, you know, they just happen to be Muslim.

02:14:00.000 That's why they're doing it.

02:14:01.000 But at that time, we actually attribute it to Islam when it's really the other way around.

02:14:06.000 Right?

02:14:06.000 That makes sense.

02:14:07.000 Like there isn't anything in the Quran that...

02:14:11.000 I mean, the Quran says strange things just like any other holy scripture. 0.99

02:14:15.000 In Surah 86, verses 5 to 7, it says that man was created from a fluid ejected between the backbone and the ribs.

02:14:25.000 So essentially it's saying that semen or sperm was created in the chest.

02:14:30.000 The backbone and the ribs?

02:14:32.000 The backbone and the ribs.

02:14:33.000 It could be like the belly, right?

02:14:36.000 It could be like this rib.

02:14:38.000 Yeah, I mean, you can broaden it and you can try to justify it.

02:14:40.000 It could be like where your liver, the lower ribs.

02:14:44.000 You think so?

02:14:45.000 Yeah, it could be.

02:14:45.000 I think it's just the testes, man.

02:14:47.000 It could be.

02:14:48.000 It could be all sorts of...

02:14:49.000 That seems like a pretty vague...

02:14:51.000 There's a lot of ribs.

02:14:52.000 Yeah, it's like saying Chicago's in the Western Hemisphere.

02:14:54.000 Yeah.

02:14:55.000 But you miss the Western Hemisphere because this is really, you know...

02:14:59.000 There's absolutely no scientific basis to that whatsoever.

02:15:02.000 Right.

02:15:02.000 It's just flat out wrong.

02:15:05.000 But, you know, they...

02:15:07.000 So it doesn't have any, the Quran doesn't necessarily, it's not conducive to, you know, robust scientific inquiry.

02:15:14.000 Right.

02:15:15.000 But it is unfortunately linked, like, you know, the words of the Quran, the scripture, it is linked to a lot of the violence that you see, a lot of the subjugation of women that you see.

02:15:26.000 And that connection It's something that should be acknowledged.

02:15:30.000 That's Islamophobic.

02:15:32.000 How dare you? 0.94

02:15:32.000 There you go. 0.94

02:15:33.000 I'm a racist. 0.99

02:15:34.000 You are. 1.00

02:15:34.000 You're racist against yourself. 1.00

02:15:36.000 You son of a B. How dare you? 1.00

02:15:36.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:15:38.000 Gross and racist. 0.99

02:15:39.000 Gross and racist. 1.00

02:15:40.000 Gross as well? 1.00

02:15:40.000 Just like... 1.00

02:15:41.000 Yeah.

02:15:42.000 Ben Affleck.

02:15:43.000 Oh, yeah. 1.00

02:15:44.000 He was a silly boy. 0.99

02:15:44.000 That's right. 0.99

02:15:46.000 Yeah, that Ben Affleck thing was pretty weird, huh?

02:15:49.000 I think he was just trying to get brownie points, though.

02:15:52.000 I really do.

02:15:53.000 But it's just that on that show, like, the fact that that happened, it was such outrage everywhere.

02:15:59.000 Yeah.

02:16:00.000 Like, I've just noticed that when someone says something like that, or if there's a Quran burnt or cartoons drawn, there's just, like, a lot of outrage.

02:16:06.000 But it's just not the kind of thing you see when people...

02:16:10.000 Burn people alive.

02:16:11.000 Yeah. 1.00

02:16:12.000 Then you get hashtags.

02:16:13.000 When Boko Haram, like, you know about Boko Haram?

02:16:17.000 Killing 2,000 people, kidnapping all those schoolgirls. 0.98

02:16:20.000 Yeah.

02:16:20.000 You get hashtags and things.

02:16:22.000 You don't get the kind of outcry that you get over cartoons.

02:16:25.000 Yeah.

02:16:26.000 Well, that was in Africa, too.

02:16:28.000 And we have a way of just going, ah, it's over there.

02:16:31.000 You know, like Darfur.

02:16:32.000 Yeah.

02:16:32.000 There's like 500,000 people killed by an Arab, the Janjaweed militia.

02:16:37.000 We could go on and on and on forever, right?

02:16:40.000 Yeah, we could.

02:16:41.000 Yeah.

02:16:42.000 Before I get too depressed, let's end this.

02:16:45.000 Yeah.

02:16:46.000 When will your book be available?

02:16:49.000 I'm still working on it right now.

02:16:50.000 We're...

02:16:51.000 I'm in the middle of negotiating, talking to publishers.

02:16:56.000 It's still happening.

02:16:57.000 There's more interest in it than I thought there would be.

02:17:01.000 It's a good thing.

02:17:02.000 I'm looking forward to it.

02:17:05.000 I think the timeline is probably...

02:17:06.000 I would say about a year.

02:17:08.000 That's, like, my personal goal.

02:17:10.000 Well, let me know when it's done and it's out, and let's do this again, man.

02:17:13.000 This is great.

02:17:13.000 Yeah, it'd be awesome.

02:17:14.000 Give people your Twitter address.

02:17:15.000 What is your Twitter address?

02:17:16.000 Twitter address is Ali Amjad Rizvi.

02:17:19.000 It's A-L-I-A-M-J-A-D-R-I-Z-V-I. And a website they can go to as well?

02:17:26.000 A website, you can just Google it, and I've got Huffington Post archives.

02:17:30.000 It's just huffingtonpost.com slash Ali hyphen A hyphen Rizvi.

02:17:35.000 Great conversation, man.

02:17:36.000 I really appreciate it.

02:17:36.000 It was a lot of fun.

02:17:37.000 Yeah.

02:17:38.000 Thank you.

02:17:38.000 I don't want to say fun, stimulating, depressing at times, but educational.

02:17:42.000 Well, at least it's enlightening.

02:17:43.000 Yes, very enlightening.

02:17:44.000 Thank you.

02:17:44.000 You've got to have a diagnosis before you get into management.

02:17:47.000 A diagnosis is not the fun part.

02:17:49.000 Yeah, exactly.

02:17:50.000 Well, thank you, brother.

02:17:51.000 Appreciate it.

02:17:51.000 Yeah, thank you.

02:17:54.000 Thank you.

02:18:09.000 Thank you.

The Joe Rogan Experience - February 04, 2015

Joe Rogan Experience #608 - Ali Rizvi

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