The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - December 22, 2025


Discussing Islam on Indian TV (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_946)

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Suicidal Empathy Modi Saad B. Boxing Badminton Erdogan Shabbat Hijra Kind
The Pros and Cons of Gossip (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_945) Islam and Islamism Are Peaceful - Islamismism is Dangerous (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_947)

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

149.09

Word count

1,489

Sentence count

95

Harmful content

Misogyny

3

sentences flagged

Toxicity

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

13

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Saad Chatterjee, a scholar at the University of Mississippi, author of The Parasitic Mind, How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense, and the forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy, Dying to Be Kind, joins us to discuss the single biggest threat to India s future: Islamic extremism.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.160 Praised by Prime Minister Modi for appreciating India's civilizational culture,
00:00:05.540 scholar at the University of Mississippi, author of The Parasitic Mind,
00:00:09.360 How Infectious Ideas Are Killing Common Sense,
00:00:11.880 and the forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy, Dying to be Kind,
00:00:16.700 joins us now to answer a few, and I have to say this, viewers, blunt questions,
00:00:22.040 shone totally off PR.
00:00:25.060 And I'm going to begin by asking these questions.
00:00:28.920 Mr. Saad, thank you very much.
00:00:30.720 You've been praised by Prime Minister Modi for your admiration of India and its culture.
00:00:35.500 In your view, what is the single biggest threat to India's future today?
00:00:39.420 External aggression, internal decay, or ideological subversion?
00:00:47.420 I mean, I would probably say that the latter,
00:00:50.720 in that I know that India has a very rich tapestry of cultures and languages
00:00:57.520 and spices and foods,
00:01:00.180 but I know that there's a problem that the entire globe is facing,
00:01:05.080 and that's coming from an ideology that may not be consistent
00:01:09.940 with some of the liberties and freedoms that we take for granted.
00:01:12.860 So, without knowing too much about the internal machinations of Indian politics,
00:01:17.660 I would say the same problem that the rest of the world faces
00:01:20.980 is the one that India faces.
00:01:22.340 So, clearly, you're referring to the elephant in the room,
00:01:26.140 and I'm going to name it, Islamism. 0.74
00:01:28.160 You argue it's an ideology, not a reaction.
00:01:31.800 Why do so many still insist it's merely a response to Hindu or Western assertion,
00:01:37.120 and why is that, I would have to say and ask you, a dangerous lie?
00:01:41.080 Well, because we've evolved the prefrontal cortex here in the front of our brain
00:01:49.340 in order to be able to invoke our capacity to reason,
00:01:53.240 part of our capacity to reason is to understand statistical regularities.
00:01:58.980 So, for example, if there have been,
00:02:01.440 this is a real statistic, which I am underestimating the actual number,
00:02:06.240 there have been over 48,000 plus Islamic terror attacks
00:02:11.960 since 9-11 alone in nearly 70 countries.
00:02:17.360 Surely, we can't be arguing that each of those instances of 48,000 Islamic attacks
00:02:23.140 are due to some boogeyman retaliation to something, right?
00:02:27.320 Especially when the terrorists themselves will usually tell you exactly why they're doing it,
00:02:33.200 and oftentimes, they tell you very truthfully it is stemming from particular tenets of their faith.
00:02:39.700 So, yes, there might be a few instances where it is some form of retaliation,
00:02:44.320 but generally speaking, Islam, this doesn't mean that most Muslims are not perfectly lovely and nice.
00:02:49.920 I come from Lebanon.
00:02:51.100 I've known more nice Muslims than most people will ever meet.
00:02:55.340 But Islam divides the world into two camps. 1.00
00:02:58.800 It's a dual system.
00:03:01.080 There is Dar al-Harab and Dar al-Islam.
00:03:03.700 Those are Arabic words which mean the house of Islam and the house of war. 0.97
00:03:08.700 Any country that is not yet under the dominion of Islam is under officially the house of war. 0.99
00:03:15.660 So, that's the best explanation for what we're seeing around the world.
00:03:18.560 Well, India has repeatedly warned against naming the problem,
00:03:21.820 and all of us are pulled up if we do.
00:03:24.640 What happens to a democracy that refuses to identify the ideology challenging it?
00:03:32.580 Well, imagine if you go to see your physician,
00:03:36.520 but you have a value system that says that your physician should never name the diagnosis
00:03:44.120 of whatever it is that ails you.
00:03:47.100 So, it is more important to ignore the problem than to actually name it and hopefully address it, right?
00:03:55.000 This is exactly why, so I have two books that are relevant to this.
00:03:59.680 My 2020 book, The Parasitic Mind, explains what happens to human minds
00:04:04.420 when they are parasitized by ideological capture.
00:04:07.960 And then in my forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy,
00:04:11.200 I explain what happens to our emotional system
00:04:14.640 when it is hijacked by, you know, parasitic impotence, right?
00:04:18.920 So, it becomes more important to not be labeled Islamophobic
00:04:24.380 than to protect young children in Britain.
00:04:26.980 As you probably know, the grooming gangs in Britain over the past 30 years
00:04:31.040 have gone up and down Britain, 0.97
00:04:34.100 raping thousands and thousands of British white girls. 0.99
00:04:37.220 But the police thought in their twisted calculus 0.91
00:04:41.100 that it would have been too Islamophobic and bigoted
00:04:44.720 to actually name the problem. 1.00
00:04:46.680 If a few children have to be raped, so be it. 1.00
00:04:49.400 At least we are kind and tolerant. 0.99
00:04:51.060 Well, so political correctness is a problem.
00:04:52.920 Okay, now you've said open societies are uniquely vulnerable.
00:04:57.900 But I want to ask you, is this true
00:05:00.560 that Islamism exploits free speech, secularism, 0.99
00:05:04.360 and tolerance to weaken countries from within?
00:05:07.220 It's 100% true.
00:05:11.820 The Muslim Brotherhood stood on top of the mountain
00:05:15.360 and screamed it to the entire world to hear them.
00:05:18.980 And yet, of course, we all refuse to hear it.
00:05:21.100 By the way, it's not just the Muslim Brotherhood who said this.
00:05:24.480 They said, we are going to conquer the West.
00:05:27.340 And I hope all of your Indian listeners pay close attention to this.
00:05:31.320 We are going to conquer the West in three ways.
00:05:34.440 We're going to conquer it through the womb of our women, right? 1.00
00:05:37.980 So, for example, most Westerner countries right now
00:05:40.600 have a fertility rate that's well below replacement rate.
00:05:44.020 And so, if you've got Muslims who are procreating at a rate of four children a family 1.00
00:05:51.980 versus, you know, we're creating at 1.3%
00:05:55.180 1.3 children per family,
00:05:57.220 we can calculate what the demographic outlook looks like.
00:06:01.300 It's not a difficult calculation to make.
00:06:03.280 So, that's number one, through the womb of our women. 1.00
00:06:06.100 Number two, we will conquer the West through hijra. 1.00
00:06:10.740 Hijra is the Arabic word for immigration.
00:06:13.600 And how beautiful it is when the West has decided that an open-door policy
00:06:17.840 is the best way to exhibit that we are kind and compassionate.
00:06:21.860 And number three, to your exact question,
00:06:24.400 we are going to conquer the West by using your miserable freedoms against you.
00:06:29.820 So, they scream it loudly, and we ignore it proudly.
00:06:33.860 Okay, so let me ask you, because there is this action-reaction theory
00:06:37.980 that dominates academia and media.
00:06:41.180 Where does this come from?
00:06:45.760 Well, it comes from an internalized set of values
00:06:49.820 that suggest that it is gauche, it is inappropriate,
00:06:54.680 it is offensive to ever criticize someone's religion.
00:07:00.280 Good people don't do that, right?
00:07:02.340 And so, this is why, by the way, if you forgive me for saying this,
00:07:06.280 in one of your earlier questions,
00:07:07.980 you put a whole bunch of qualifiers, radical, extremist Islamism.
00:07:12.520 There is no such thing.
00:07:13.920 There's only Islam. 1.00
00:07:15.120 Erdogan, the president of Turkey, stated that exactly.
00:07:18.740 There is no radical Islam.
00:07:20.500 There's no moderate Islam. 1.00
00:07:21.760 There's just Islam. 1.00
00:07:22.660 A million Islamic scholars have said that.
00:07:25.720 Much of Islam is itself political.
00:07:28.480 90% plus of it is political Islam.
00:07:32.900 And there's about 10% that's sort of the spiritual elements, right?
00:07:37.480 So, there is no something that is outside of Islam,
00:07:41.440 but yet we don't feel comfortable saying that,
00:07:43.640 because it feels as though it's wrong to criticize it.
00:07:46.680 Let me give an analogy.
00:07:48.440 Badminton is a sport that starts with the letter B.
00:07:52.120 Boxing is a sport that starts with the letter B.
00:07:55.740 They're both sports, but they're not equally likely to inflict brain damage to you, correct?
00:08:01.900 So, by the same logic, all religions are not equally likely to function harmoniously
00:08:08.920 within a system of secularism and personal liberties.
00:08:13.040 The quicker we realize this, while being perfectly kind and tolerant and welcoming of individual Muslims,
00:08:22.640 the better the world will be.
00:08:24.440 My final one.
00:08:25.400 The denial of Islamist radicalism hurts, and that's my worry, Indian Muslims the most.
00:08:30.820 Would you agree?
00:08:31.300 I do, of course. 0.93
00:08:35.860 Look, the biggest victims of Islamic terror happen to be Muslims themselves, right?
00:08:42.720 So, this is why the idea, but, you know, it's only 1% that are committing the violence. 0.85
00:08:47.760 That's a bit of a canard, because why aren't the rest of the beautiful, peaceful, kind Muslims
00:08:54.120 standing up and saying, no more.
00:08:57.380 It's been 1,400 years of this.
00:08:59.780 You're no longer going to do this in the name of my faith, or we're going to reform our faith.
00:09:06.140 So, I completely agree with you that if the Muslims were able to be fully liberated from 1.00
00:09:14.260 the shackles, now, by the way, you could still be proud of an endless number of elements of
00:09:20.580 Islamic heritage.
00:09:21.720 There is beautiful Islamic poetry, and there is Islamic philosophy, there's Islamic architecture,
00:09:27.380 right?
00:09:28.280 I'm Jewish.
00:09:29.480 Now, that doesn't mean that being Jewish means that I have to make sure to light the
00:09:33.900 Shabbat candle at 421, exactly.
00:09:36.500 I can ignore those elements, and yet still be proud of my heritage.
00:09:41.380 And so, what I would implore Muslims to do is be proud of all of the elements that you should
00:09:46.940 rightly be proud of, and maybe soften some of the elements in your religion that are
00:09:52.160 inconsistent with our 21st century liberties.
00:09:57.340 Ghat Saad, thank you very much for speaking to us.