Discussing Islam with Piers Morgan (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_782)
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
163.37506
Summary
Gad Saad, a Global Ambassador at Northwoodwooden university, joins me to discuss Islamophobia and why it doesn't really exist. We discuss the dictionary definition of Islamophobia, and why most Muslims are not bigots.
Transcript
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Even more fast than I get your response to Gad Saad,
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And you and I have been having a little very friendly
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I want to start just by what Mehdi Hassan told me
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about Islamophobia, because I don't want to put words
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in your mouth, but I think you're kind of of the view
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it doesn't really exist and that you shouldn't be silenced
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Now, Mehdi Hassan, and I subscribe to this as well,
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relentless attacks that someone like Tommy Robinson
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has done on Islam and Muslims in the way that he's done
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so many times, it's eventually pretty painfully obvious
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to people that you're coming at this from a bigoted position.
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And therefore, by the dictionary definition of Islamophobia,
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if it comes from a place of hate, that actually is
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So if I were to say that Jews are inherently diseased,
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they are degenerates, they are evil, they're parasites,
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If I say there are teachings in the Torah that are abhorrent,
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given today's moral codes, that wouldn't be anti-Semitic.
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So if you were to make dispositional statements about individual Muslims,
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But if you say anything you want about the codified content of Islam,
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then by definition, that cannot be Islamophobic.
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OK, so let me play you a little mash-up of examples, I would say,
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where Tommy Robinson has displayed Islamophobia
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We will unify every community against the hostility
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Islam is a fascist, violent ideology which masquerades as a religion.
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Every single Muslim watching this video on YouTube.
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On 7-7, you got away with killing and maiming British citizens.
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We embrace migrants that come to this country and love it.
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The problem is Islamic migrants come to this country and declare war.
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Now, when you hear all that, and in particular, it felt to me
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that what he said about 7-7, which was a bunch of extremist terrorists
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who happened to be Muslim committing terrorism,
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when you basically, at a crowd with a loud hailer in your mouth,
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embrace every single Muslim in the country and say you're all to blame
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for killing and maiming British, that is Islamophobic, isn't it?
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The number one predictor of child abuse is if there is a step-parent in the house.
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It is 100 times greater predictor than all other predictors.
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And yet, most step-parents are perfectly lovely and kind and don't commit abuse.
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So understanding statistical reasoning and causal inferencing is important.
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Since 9-11 alone, there have been 46,000-plus terror attacks committed
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That is an absolute fact, notwithstanding the fact that out of 2 billion Muslims,
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So we can point to 7-7 and say that that was driven by Islamic ideology,
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while also speaking from the other side of our mouths,
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that most Muslims that we'll ever meet are peaceful.
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What the peaceful Muslims would say is that actually it's the twisting
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of the Islam ideology by extremists that is the problem.
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It's not a genuine interpretation of Islam, because the vast majority of Muslims are peaceful.
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If that wasn't true, then wouldn't de facto most Muslims commit acts of terrorism.
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Most Jews eat prosciutto and also eat shrimps, but they're not practicing a more gentle form of kosher law.
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They simply ignore the fact that kosher laws dictate that you don't eat shrimps and that you don't eat prosciutto, right?
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I'm not practicing a more peaceful version of Judaism.
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I just ignore that which I don't wish to apply.
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Most Muslims don't commit those acts because they are kind and decent people
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who choose to ignore whichever they don't wish to follow in their texts.
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But does Islam contain endless quotes, endless edicts that are profoundly problematic to the kuffar?
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But so the same thing, you're saying you would have the same view of Christianity, for example, would you?
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Well, if Christians were going around right now quoting passages from the New Testament
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and committing 46,000 plus terror attacks in nearly 70 countries since 9-11 alone, then I would say we need to worry about those texts.
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If there were Talmudic extremists doing that, then we would worry about that.
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But I don't know many guys called Mordechai Rubenstein looking for Malakites to kill them.
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I know more Muslims than most people will ever meet in their lives.
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This doesn't take away from the fact that there is a astounding problem with Islamic terrorism.
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But I would say that to give you two parallels, two very different things.
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One, as somebody put to me on X today, you know, during the years when the IRA were committing appalling acts of terrorism,
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it would be like saying, well, then all, you know, according to Tommy Robinson, his logic would say all Irish people are to blame for the maiming and killing, right?
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Which clearly would have been an outrageous thing to say.
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Secondly, and I raised this with someone on the show who was incensed that I would even draw this parallel, but I said, why not?
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If you look at the number of mass shootings in America in the last 30 years,
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they're almost exclusively perpetrated by deranged young white men.
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So does that mean that we should, by the same logic, say, well, there's all these terrible mass shootings going on.
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They're all being committed by the same type of profile of person.
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Therefore, all young white men in America have to be treated with deep suspicion, which is what Tommy Robinson would.
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That's why I have a problem with the Tommy Robinsons of this world.
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It's not his message and banging the drum about the rape gang scandal.
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It's just, he's such a flawed messenger for all sorts of other reasons.
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And the reason that's problematic is because he gets used by people who are trying to avoid accountability
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because they say, well, look at this guy, the one who's shouting loudest about us.
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He beats up policemen and gets convicted for it.
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He's nearly wrecked trials involving the rape gang scandals.
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He's made a Syrian refugee boy's life, utter hell with his lies.
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In other words, by demonizing the messenger, those who should be held to account are able
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to hide behind Tommy Robinson being the flag bearer for all this.
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Look, Tommy Robinson has some issues in his past.
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I don't know all of them, although I've had a chance to have long conversations with him.
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He never, in my presence, said anything that struck me as bigoted or racist.
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Christopher Hitchens, whom I'm sure you know well, he's a compatriot British.
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I employed him when I was editor of the Daily Mirror.
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I know what you're about to say to me about what he said about Islamophobia.
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Before you say it, and you're right to say it, I would point out I hired him during the
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Iraq war because he supported that war and the paper opposed it before, during and after.
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And I thought it was important to have a voice in the paper up against John Pilger, actually,
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quite often, who was obviously viscerally against the war.
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But I let Hitchens run riot, even though I thought he was completely wrong.
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And even though I look back on it now and I'm convinced he was completely wrong.
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So Hitchens wasn't always right before you say to me what he said about Islamophobia,
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Well, I mean, yes, I can make the point about what he said about Islamophobia.
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But the point that I was going to make is that Christopher Hitchens is,
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and I think you'll probably agree with this, one of the most eloquent speakers that we would
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He speaks with a beautiful vocabulary, as does Douglas Murray.
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So they may say things that are, in terms of their content, absolutely indistinguishable
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But Tommy Robinson's style, his accent, is one that serves as an aesthetic injury to the
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And therefore, people react to Tommy Robinson because of his style of delivery.
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Elon Musk, who, as you know, is a good friend of mine, has a direct way of speaking that
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That doesn't in any way imply that what he is saying is not veridical.
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So we have to differentiate between the substance and the content.
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I've always said that, actually, about Donald Trump.
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Same thing, that the rhetoric often bears little relation to what he actually does.
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I also think it's important to focus on what people actually do.
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My problem with Elon, who I think is a complete genius, my problem over this week has been
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the way he's targeted Jess Phillips, a female MP, in my view, wrongly and inaccurately, but
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By calling her a genocidal rape apologist, he's put a massive target on her head where
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people have now been arrested for threatening her life.
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And we've had two members of Parliament, including a young woman, who've been murdered in the last
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I just think that kind of language crosses a line.
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I've been accused of being the orchestrator of the killing of Gazan children.
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I sit as a professor who's 60 years old in Montreal doing evolutionary psychology research.
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I have nothing to do with the killing of anyone in Gaza, yet I am the baby genocidal killer.
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So, of course, I empathize with the point that you're making.
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And that's why I said that sometimes Elon might be very blunt in the way he says what
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he says, but the content of what he's saying, the ire that he has, really is coming from
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Britain does suffer from an orgiastic form of suicidal empathy, the topic of my forthcoming
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book, because they're much more desirous of protecting the sensibilities of their Muslim
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population than to worry about the integrity of the bodily and the integrity of children.
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The fact that he went after this person is regrettable.
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But again, I think the fact that you and I and others are having these important conversations,
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And actually, having Mehdi first, you now having Matthew here, who has his views about
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It's not a million miles away from what Matthew said about the woke ideology getting in grip
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of our country in a way that so many people in officialdom felt incapable or too terrified
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to do the right thing because they were fearful of retribution and being accused of, you know,
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That's why, you know, I was interested in what you were saying to me.
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I'm not saying that any criticism of Muslims or Islam is wrong or unacceptable by any means.
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I think every group of people, whoever they are, I'm a Catholic.
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The Catholic Church sex scandal, abuse scandal was utterly horrific.
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You know, it's just one of the most unspeakable things imaginable.
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That people purporting to be priests were out there abusing children for decades.
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And I, as a Catholic, feel totally ashamed about the total lack of accountability, the
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So I feel exactly the same way about my own church as I do about what's happened here
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with these British Pakistani Muslims towards, predominantly British Pakistani Muslims, towards
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But this, I think you and I talked about this before, Gad.
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The woke ideology was definitely a contributing factor here.
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People did not want to put their head over the parapet because they were terrified of getting
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Look, cultural relativism is a pathogenic idea that I discuss in The Parasitic Mind because
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it purports that who are we to judge the cultural practices, the religious practices of another
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So if another culture wants to cut off the clitorises of five-year-old girls, who are you to
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There are absolutist, deontological, moral principles that any decent person should abide
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Cutting off the clitorises of literal girls is never okay.
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And so you're exactly right that the coupling of these parasitic woke ideas with the reflex
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of suicidal empathy, put them together, you end up with a cocktail that leads us to the
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Do you feel, notwithstanding that, the way that I feel, which is I do think the Trump
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victory and the scale of it and Elon Musk's contributing factor to that, which was, I think,
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enormous, by going all in with Trump, I think he had a very persuasive effect, particularly
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But do you feel, as I do, that the woke worm is really turning hard, that people are sick
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of it, they're sick of what they see as a modern form of fascism, they are sick of what
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they see as, as Musk calls it, the woke mind virus?
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And that the ad we were talking about earlier of Kamala's for they, them, Trump's for you,
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this whole personal pronoun bullshit, the gender ideology bullshit, which was manifested
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so spectacularly badly with the trans women in women's sport, destroying the integrity
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of women's sport, and so on, that it's all on the retreat.
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And the reason I think we could say that with some authority now is the incredible statement
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from Mark Zuckerberg, which is six minutes long and is one of the most extraordinary
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U-turns I could ever remember a serious public figure like him coming out with, where he
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basically has just thrown the towel in on this stuff, even down to saying that the Facebook
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fact-checkers were the problem, because they were coming at the fact-checking from a sort
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of woke ideology point of view, which is not fact-checking, and so on.
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But also saying from now on, you will be allowed to have what have been deemed unacceptable views
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about gender, about all these issues. And I would say, hurrah! It doesn't give you an excuse
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to be a vicious bigot, but it should give you the excuse, in fact, the right and the freedom
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Yeah, so I do think that, of course, thank God that Trump won. He will serve as a doorstop
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against the woke insanity. But I keep trying to remind people not to be complacent in the
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following sense, Pierce. It took about 50 to 100 years for many of these parasitic ideas
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to develop into the big woke monster that we eventually saw, right? So some of these ideas
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were spawned on university campuses close to 100 years ago. For example, cultural relativism.
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Postmodernism developed on university campuses, you know, about 50, 60 years ago. So these ideas
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have not been completely extinguished. Yes, Donald Trump coming in, he'll be able to clean house
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very quickly, but the battle will be much longer. So we can't be complacent. Hopefully it won't take
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50 to 100 years to eradicate all those bad ideas, but it doesn't start and end with Trump. It's a good
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Yeah. Gadsak, great to have you back on Uncensored. Let's not leave you so long next time.
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It's been very civilised. Very civilised. A template in civilised, reasonable debate.
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Matthew, what did you make of that? Oh, I agreed with most of it. Yes.