- It doesn't make any
sense to have a woman
in Mormon underwear on the
cover of "Sports Illustrated."
- No one's saying Mormon
women can't be athletes.
- Exactly, and it also
doesn't make any sense
to have a woman in a burkini
on the cover of "Sports Illustrated."
Nobody's saying women can't
wear Mormon underwear,
nobody's saying women can't wear burkinis,
but for us to pretend that
this is some empowering,
feminist thing that should be
celebrated, that's the lie.
(tense music)
- Hey, I'm Dave Rubin, and
this is "The Rubin Report."
Just a quick reminder
to click Subscribe on our YouTube channel
and hit that little
freakin' bell over there
so that you actually see the
videos when we put 'em up,
and share 'em, and all that good stuff.
Okay, joining me today is a true fighter
for liberalism in the
best sense of the word
and the author of the new book
"Unveiled: How Western Liberals
Empower Radical Islam."
Yasmine Mohammed, welcome
back to "The Rubin Report."
- Thank you so much for having me, Dave.
It's great to be here.
- I am glad to have you here, my friend.
This is your third "Rubin
Report" appearance.
- That's right. (chuckling)
- Pretty, pretty, pretty good.
Just quickly, before
we really get into it,
last time you were here
I interviewed you solo,
and we're gonna recap some of your story,
which is just absolutely incredible.
And then I had you and Faisal on together
and there was an author here from--
- "Der Spiegel."
- "Der Spiegel,"
which is a big German magazine,
and I had you on talking about
your fight for liberalism,
and leaving radical
Islam and the rest of it,
and Faisal as a Iraqi
refugee coming to America,
fighting for freedom, and
then "Der Spiegel" put me
on the cover of the
magazine saying something
like I'm the leader of the alt-right,
so I don't know what you're
gonna do to me today.
(Dave and Yasmine chuckling)
- That was terrible.
That was absolutely shocking.
The word Nazi was in
that article too, yeah.
- I thought bringing in someone like you
would offer me a little
cover, and yet here we are.
- I'm a Nazi too, Dave.
(Dave and Yasmine laughing)
- All right, you're right.
So let's get right to it.
So I really think you are one of, truly,
I'm just gonna pat you
on the back to start.
I think you're one of the most brave,
fearless, fun, joyous,
decent people that I know.
- [Yasmine] Thank you, gotcha.
- And your story is incredible.
It's incredible and it's exactly so much
of what is happening right now,
so for anyone that didn't
see the original interview,
can we just do a five-minute
sorta recap of your life.
Give me your whole life in five minutes
so that we can then shift into this.
- Okay, I'll try as hard as I
can to get into five minutes,
but essentially I grew up
in a fundamentalist Muslim
household in Canada.
So here I am, living in the free West
but essentially under
Sharia in my own home,
so I feel like I have
one foot in each camp.
And so growing up in a
fundamentalist Muslim household
meant that I went to Islamic schools,
the hijab was put on me at nine years old,
I was forced into a marriage with a man
who turned out to be jihadi,
a member of Al Quaeda.
Actually, he was one of the people
that trained the terrorists that bombed
the American embassies in Tanzania,
so a horrible human being.
And I was able to get away,
I had a daughter with him,
and then was able to get away from him
and start a new life
with my daughter and I
because we're living in
a free, secular democracy
that supported me in that decision.
And I stayed quiet,
living my life with my
daughter for many years,
until the infamous episode
with Sam Harris and Ben
Affleck on "Bill Maher,"
and that day I was really shocked to see
that everybody on my Facebook
page and all my friends
were totally supporting Ben Affleck
and against this guy
that Ben was yelling at.
- Yeah, can you just quickly,
I know most of my
audience knows the story,
but can you quickly recap
what that's all about,
because, as you know, my wake up,
I came from a liberal New York family
and literally my political wake up
was the exact same moment.
I was watching it live as
you were watching it live.
We weren't gonna meet for five years,
and so many people, not just us,
woke up at that very moment.
- Yeah, it's a pretty shocking
little microcosm of everything, you know?
So essentially Sam and Bill
were talking about liberals
and how--
- Bill Maher.
- Sorry, who did I say?
- No, no, well,
you just said Bill.
I just want people, everyone
to be sure we're talking
about Bill Maher here.
- Yeah, yup, yup.
Sam Harris and Bill Maher were talking
about how liberals will
get so excited, and happy,
and applaud loudly if
we talk about supporting
the real values like women's
equality, LGBT equality,
free speech, all those kind of things,
but then if you talk
about how those values
are nowhere to be seen in
the Muslim-majority world,
or if we talk about the fact
that in countries like Egypt,
like close to 90% of people believe
that if you leave the religion of Islam
that you should be executed.
These are concerning numbers,
these are concerning things,
that if we care about liberal values,
we should care about them universally,
not just within our close
proximity geographically.
And as they were talking,
Ben Affleck got really irate
and he started yelling at them,
and calling them gross and racist
because he felt like, exactly, he was,
it's like he decided he
wanted to be exhibit A
to embody exactly what they
were talking about, you know?
- Mr. Virtue signal.
Let's roll.
- Mr. Virtue signal,
and he went ahead and just did exactly
what they were talking about,
which was to get all upset
that they were talking about Islam;
meanwhile, this is the
same person, of course,
that did a movie criticizing
Christianity, "Dogma,"
criticizing dogma in general.
- That's literally what
the entire movie's about.
It's actually a pretty funny movie, yeah.
- But then why can't we also criticize
other religions that
also deserve criticism?
- How much of it for you was
that Sam clearly laid out
something that I now talk
about all the time here,
that you're allowed, not allowed,
you must criticize ideas
and must not be bigoted towards people?
It's such an obvious thing
when you think about it,
but people can't, or not people,
a certain set of people seem to be unable
to detangle those things.
You could criticize the
Old Testament all you want,
the New Testament.
That doesn't mean you hate
Jews or you hate Christians.
Or you would criticize a political party.
That doesn't mean you everyone who,
say, a Republican or a Democrat.
But for some reason with this issue,
it seems almost inextricably intertwined.
- I don't know if it's that intertwined.
I think that they just pretend that it is,
to be perfectly honesty,
because it's sort of like
if Ilhan Omar says something
and people criticize
her for what she said,
the response is, "Oh, you
hate her because she's black
"and because she's Muslim."
It's like nobody has mentioned
her skin color or her religion.
We're talking about the
words that she has tweeted
or the words that she has said,
but it's just a way, I
think, of deflecting.
And, in fact, that
episode with Sam Harris,
the reason why I started to speak up
was because everybody
that was attacking him
was attacking him not because
of anything that he said
because everything that he
said made absolutely sense.
They were attacking him
because of his skin color,
because he's American, white, and male,
and so that's what they were against.
So I said, "All right, well,
I am Arab, female, and--"
- That's good enough!
- What's the third thing?
- Well, also you grew up Muslim.
That might have some value
in this equation, right?
- Right, and I'll just go ahead
and I'll say the exact same
thing that Sam is saying,
and then you'll have to
respond to the actual message.
- Oh, but you do find out
that that was not the case.
- (chuckles) Yeah, no, I
didn't calculate correctly
because apparently I can
still be a white supremacist.
- Yeah, it's actually pretty--
- (chuckles) You know?
- So had you ever, was the
reason that your wake up
in that moment watching
that television show,
was the reason that you had
never heard it so obviously explained
and seen a reaction that
was so over the top?
Were you thinking sort of this stuff?
'Cause, for me, as a big lefty and working
at "The Young Turks" and all that,
I had been seeing it,
but suddenly it was like,
"Whoa, that's all of it right there."
- Yeah, so I hadn't been seeing it at all,
and, in fact, when Sam started
to speak and he started
to talk about the concentric
circles and everything,
I started to get really excited
because mainstream media.
I mean, this guy is on Bill Maher's show.
I've been watching Bill
Maher since I was a teenager.
And I was so excited that this
is part of mainstream conversation now.
People are gonna start talking about this.
People are gonna talk about people
being hacked to death in
the streets of Bangladesh,
or people being whipped in
the streets of Saudi Arabia,
or women going to prison in Iran.
I mean, et cetera, et cetera.
All of these problems in the Muslim world
that we should be addressing.
Gay people being executed in
15 Muslim-majority countries.
Why isn't this an conversation?
Why hasn't anybody mentioned this?
We have a whole month where we
have pride flags everywhere,
but that never comes up again.
It's only people within this
close geographical proximity.
So I was really excited to hear
Sam and Bill having this conversation,
and then it was such an
incredible punch to the gut
to have Ben Affleck shut them down,
because I was like, "Oh, my God, really?"
Like, "Can you just, please?
"You don't understand
anything about this world.
"You don't understand the value
"of these men finally speaking up."
And for him to shut them
down, it was really hurtful.
It was really upsetting.
- So let's back up for a
second because you're talking
about the geography related to all this,
and you mentioned a couple other countries
that are not that close
to Canada and the U.S.,
but you grew up with a lot
of those rules in Canada.
I think that's hard for a
lot of people to understand.
Can you just talk, I know
we've done this before,
and we'll actually link to
your original video in this.
But can you talk a little bit more about,
like, I don't think people
can really understand
that you grew up Canadian
in Western, you know,
in a Western country and lived
under some of these laws.
- Absolutely, and, in fact,
Faisal grew up in Iraq,
and him and I talk all the time
about how his upbringing was more--
- More liberal.
- More liberal than mine was,
and that has a lot to do with the fact
that when you're not in a
Muslim-majority country,
sometimes the family members
become a lot more zealous
because they're super concerned
about you picking up ideas
from the non-believers,
so they wanna have a very tight,
they wanna make sure that
your bubble that you live in
is very separated from
the non-believers outside.
- Were your parents first-generation
immigrants to Canada?
- Yeah.
- And were they
fundamentalists on the way in?
- No, they weren't.
So neither of them were
practicing, really.
They were just born Muslim,
and pretty secular upbringings,
and it wasn't until, well, they separated,
my mom and dad separated,
and my mom was alone with three kids.
She started looking for support,
started looking for community,
and so she went looking at the mosque.
She went to the mosque and
that's where she found a man
who offered to take her on as
his second concurrent wife,
so he was already married,
already had three kids.
- This is in Canada.
- This is in Canada,
and I have to express,
these are very common things.
This isn't just my story.
This is very common that there are people
that I speak to all over the states,
all over the Netherlands, all over Europe,
all over the U.K., Scotland, everywhere,
that tell me about how they also grew up
in households with more than one mother,
more than one wife to the husband,
and going to Islamic schools,
and living in their own
little bubble of Sharia.
It's not like my story is unique.
- Are they technically married?
Are the mosques actually
performing that marriage?
It's obviously not done in a civil way
in a place like Canada.
- Yeah, so that's exactly it.
So the first wife would be his legal wife,
and then the second wife, third, fourth,
would be Islamically married.
So, yes, the mosques are
performing these marriages,
and quite often what ends up happening
is he will go on social assistance
and each one of the other wives
will apply as single moms.
Quite often the government
is sort of aware of what's going on,
but they don't do anything about it.
This is an issue in Canada where there's
millions of dollars
spent in this direction,
but they don't wanna say anything about it
because, of course, cultural relativism.
Even though it's against the law,
this is the subtitle of my book,
because things are against the law,
but when a Muslim does it,
people are afraid to touch
it with a 10-foot pole
because they don't wanna
come off as being racist,
or Islamophobic, or bigoted, or whatever.
And then, of course, that
is a real slippery slope
that can lead to things like
the rape gangs in Rotherham,
where journalists, politicians,
everybody was too scared
to say anything because
most of these rape gangs
were being led by Pakistani Muslim men,
and so they stayed quiet about it.
That, of course, allowed these girls,
some as young as 11, to
continue to be raped.
So that's what happens
when we turn a blind eye.
There are victims under there.
- So, all right, the subtitle of the book,
"How Western Liberals
Empower Radical Islam."
You wake up, you've lived through this.
It sounds like you, basically,
immediately realized,
oops, this isn't gonna
be as great as I thought.
You sorta thought the dam was
gonna break and it was like,
holy cow, people are
gonna start understanding.
The left's gonna wake up.
Liberals are gonna wake up.
You quickly found out that
wasn't what was happening.
What else happened at that time?
Did you start seeing support from places
maybe you didn't think you
were gonna get support?
- Yeah, so initially I
came out as anonymous,
and I started getting messages like crazy
from people all over the Muslim world
who were excited that
I was telling my story,
happy that I was telling my story,
and asking me to be their voice,
so telling me their stories as well.
And then I got to a certain,
you know, it wasn't very long.
I was probably about a year into it
when I started to just feel ashamed.
I was like, here I am using a a fake,
you know, "Confessions of an Ex-Muslim,"
'cause I'm afraid to use my real name.
- Right, that was your original
experiment, right?
- That was my original thing,
and I don't have my face out there.
And these are people that are living
in countries like Pakistan,
where they can go to prison
for just questioning anything
to do with the religion that
would be considered blasphemy,
and thrown in prison.
So I started to feel like,
here I am living in a
free, secular country.
I have to be, you know, I gotta man up.
I gotta put my face out
there, put my name out there.
And so that's actually what initially
was the catalyst for me to start speaking.
So that was, their support,
and it still is their
support that keeps me going,
especially women in countries like Iran
when they take off their hijab
and they're posting videos.
Women in Saudi Arabia
taking off their niqabs and burning them.
The women all over the
Muslim-majority world
that are fighting back against
the literal patriarchy,
those are the women that I really
wanna be here to support,
and they're the fuel.
- Are you shocked at how
fearful people are in the West?
You're just describing these
incredibly brave people
who literally could lose their
life and everything else,
but that people in the West are afraid
to say what they think, be who
they are, and the rest of it?
- Yeah, absolutely, it
makes me (chuckles).
It's infuriating, actually.
Like I mentioned, these
people can go to prison
and they can be killed for speaking out.
Over here, you've got people
where it's your First Amendment.
Free speech is like,
there's a reason why it's
in the First Amendment,
it's that important, and they are instead,
they've got these
self-imposed blasphemy laws.
Like in Saudi Arabia, and Pakistan,
all those other countries,
the government will get
you for speaking out,
but here, they get each other.
It's really shocking to me and sad.
- Were you also shocked that,
'cause there is a world
of either ex-Muslims,
or Muslim reformers, or whatever,
and I've had some of them
on the show, actually.
Were you shocked how sort of at odds
even that world sorta seemed to be?
So that it's many times
someone like you comes out,
you defend liberalism,
and then they'll even,
those guy who are supposedly the reformers
will even attack someone like you.
- Yeah, I think that there's always,
the thing is about people
that leave their communities,
(chuckles) it's like herding cats.
- Yeah. (chuckles)
- You know? (laughing)
We're not the wallflowers, right?
The wallflowers are still
in (chuckles) the religion.
So I think that when you
get a bunch of people
that are willing to be
vocal in this sphere
or willing to walk away
from their communities,
those people are usually,
they've got some fight in them,
and so you see all sorts of schisms
and sometimes negative interactions,
but I don't necessary
see that as a bad thing.
I come from a world where everybody
followed the exact same book,
and everybody had to,
in Islam it's called the
(speaking in foreign language).
So it's this long, thin,
almost like a tightrope,
and underneath the tightrope is hell,
and you have to walk
this long, straight path,
narrow path, and you have
to be very, very careful
never to stray or you're gonna
burn in hell for eternity.
So there was no variation in anything.
Everybody thought the same,
everybody spoke the same,
everybody acted the same,
and so now out here in the real world
where people have different ideas,
and people disagree, and whatever,
I don't see that as a bad thing.
I'm happy to see it.
- Yeah, it's interesting
because when I started
doing some shows with people like you,
the amount of hate I got from that crew,
the supposed reformer crew,
I was just like, "You know what, I tried.
"It was an interesting thing.
"I thought this was a nice
way of defending liberalism."
And, basically, I haven't
touched this topic
in probably since literally
the last time you were here,
which is almost three years ago.
So even though I had
Faisal on a few weeks ago,
we really just talked about
foreign policy and geopolitics
because there's a certain
opportunity cost that comes
with defending liberalism in
liberal Western societies,
which is quite bizarre.
- Yeah, yeah, but you know what?
You're doing it. (laughing)
- (chuckles) I guess.
- We're doing the best we can.
- We're doing the best we can.
So this is sort of where
I'm at with all of this,
and we don't have to make this
specifically about religion.
Do you think there is
something inherently flawed
or that liberalism has
some sort of weakness
that these people have
been able to either exploit
or unearth that maybe
we couldn't see before?
- Yeah, unfortunately,
I think that that's true
and they've been very
transparent about that.
So the Muslim Brotherhood
clearly said that we're going
to spread Islam without
raising a single sword,
and the way that we're gonna
do that is through three means:
number one, through the
wombs of Muslim mothers;
number two, through
immigration; and number three,
through using secular
laws against themselves.
And, in fact, Hassan al-Banna,
who is Tariq Ramadan's grandfather,
so the person who started
the Muslim Brotherhood,
said, "We need to have
our children in the West
"so that they can
understand the Western mind,
"so that we know how to
infiltrate," basically,
because us, 'cause he was Egyptian,
doesn't matter even if
we live in the West,
we're never really gonna
understand their mindset.
We're not gonna know
how to work against it.
So, yeah, that was part of the plan.
- So what do you think the
weakness is of liberalism?
You know I talk about
classic liberalism a lot.
I do believe it is the best set of ideas
to create the most human flourishing
and allow people to be
themselves, and govern themselves,
and live the lives they wanna live,
but I have come to a certain
unfortunate conclusion
that it might have a soft
spot and they've gone for it.
What do you think it is about?
Not what they're trying to do,
but do you think there is something
within liberalism itself?
- I think that the problem with liberalism
is that people aren't standing up
for liberalism as much as they should.
So what ends up happening--
- Do you think that's
an inherent problem of liberal,
of the openness of liberalism
allows that to happen?
Like that, I'm starting to
get to that spot.
- Yeah, look.
I'll tell you what I mean.
So I gave the example of
the rape gangs in the U.K.
Also in the U.K.,
once every hour a girl
goes to the emergency room.
There's a case reported of
FGM, female genital mutilation.
For the past 30 years, it's
been against the law there,
but nobody's ever been prosecuted.
There's my personal story in there
of me going to the judge, basically.
It went through social services,
and through police and everything,
and I ended up going to family court,
where I told them about how
my family were beating me,
and I showed them the bruises,
and they all understood what was going on,
and in the end, the judge said,
"Listen, you come from a
culture where that's acceptable.
"That's the way your family
chooses to discipline you,
"so that's their right."
- Unbelievable.
- So this is what I mean.
If we stood by our principles,
if we stood by our values, and we said,
"Look, this is what liberalism means
"and this is the stop sign," right?
But this failure that
I think you're seeing,
and that I'm seeing too,
is that there's no stop sign.
Where's the boundary?
You have to have a point where you say,
"Yes, we're inclusive.
"Yes, we accept you, up until then.
"Up until you cross this line right here."
- So would you say that
it's moral relativism,
that you referenced earlier,
that has somehow seemed into liberalism?
I mean, to me, that's what
created the progressives.
You had decent liberals who just wanna,
like even now when
they're virtue signaling
about gays, and blacks, and
Muslims, blah, blah, blah,
I'm like, most of you aren't bad people.
You're just confused
about what the issues are
and you're confused about what freedom is,
but then this moral relativism
seeps in and for some reason,
I mean, it's probably
for a whole other show,
but, I mean, I do have a lot
of thoughts on why liberalism
has this soft underbelly
that accepts that,
where something like conservatism
maybe because of religious connection,
which is a pretty bizarre position
for someone like you
to have to think about,
has protections against it.
- Yeah, I think that's
actually the biggest problem
I can see with the progressives right now,
is that they remind me too
much of religious people.
It reminds me too much of the
world that I walked away from.
So these progressives, the far-left ones,
they've got this cancel
culture, for example.
Well, you see that with
Scientologists, suppress a person.
Muslims will kill you if
you leave the religion.
You can be ex-communicated,
ostracized, or canceled.
Do you know what I mean?
There's so many--
- Our friend Pete Boghossian
calls it a secular religion.
That's what he calls--
- Absolutely.
- Radical leftism.
- Mm-hmm.
So when we're talking about
liberalism, I'm here for it,
but then when we start to talk
about this far-left progressive,
secular-religion people,
those guys remind me so much
of the guys that I just ran away from,
like risked my life and
risked my daughter's life
to get away from, so I
want nothing to do them
just as much as I want
nothing to do with them.
But the problem is here in the middle
where there's rational-minded people,
these guys on both sides
are just nasty. (chuckling)
You know what I mean?
If you think of the Westboro
Baptist Church people
standing there with like God hates fags,
or the jihadis with their behead anybody
who criticizes Islam--
- Both bad, I'm happy to criticize both.
- Yeah, and then on this side,
you've got those guys that
were blocking that old lady
and her walker that was
trying to get to your talk,
you know what I mean?
- Whose husband fought
the Nazis in World War II
and they're calling her a Nazi.
- Unbelievable, so, I mean,
they're just angry people
that are unwilling to engage
in just decent interaction
with other human beings,
but they want people to walk
on that long, straight, narrow path.
They decide what that long,
straight, narrow path is, right?
And they want everybody to walk on it.
That's what I'm totally against.
- In a weird way, though,
is it scary for you as someone
that left a fundamentalist
line of thinking
to see that as the secularists
become fundamentalists,
it almost seems to me that
everything happening right now
is just the end of secularism,
which really blows.
That's the best way--
- I hope not.
- Well, that it almost seems like
what the progressives are offering us,
and the moral relativism,
and post modernism,
and identity politics,
and all those things,
which is so the reverse of
liberalism and Western belief,
that that is secularism on
steroids, you know what I mean?
I truly hate to say that.
- I think that, well, as you
know, I'm a college professor
and my students are like
18 to 25 demographic,
and I really do believe,
maybe I'm being a hopeless
optimist right now,
but I really do believe--
- You sorta have to be
in your business, wouldn't you?
- (chuckles) Yeah, I feel
like there is a post-woke,
they're called Zoomers now (laughing).
- [Dave] Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- I really feel that they roll their eyes
at all of these things,
and I honestly feel
like those people that
we're talking against,
I feel like they're gonna
fizzle themselves out
before they're able to bring
down secularism or liberalism.
I really--
- Do you see signs of that?
So your signs are saying
that young people now
that you're teaching,
and, believe me, I see
plenty when I go to colleges.
There's plenty of people
standing up against this,
but I would say for as many
that stand up against it,
we just don't know how many
are afraid to for the same reason.
- That's exactly it, and that's exactly
what the religious
thing reminds me of too,
because when I was Muslim
and I was doubting,
and I was questioning,
and I didn't like the
things that I was hearing,
I wasn't gonna say anything
because I'm gonna be attacked for it.
And I'm gonna be not just attacked,
I'm gonna be demonized for it, right?
If I just say these things,
it's like, oh, how could
you question the faith?
You're a non-believer.
You're us and them.
You're now the enemy.
And it's exactly the same thing
that's happening over here.
I mean, my daughter's in,
you know, she's studying
to be a social worker
and in that field it's super left.
I mean, she had a question
in one of her final exams--
- [Dave] Oh, God.
- It said, "Gender is a social
construct, true or false?"
And she was like,
"Mom, I had to answer it
incorrectly to get the grades."
You know what I mean?
And so many stories like that.
And, so yeah, so she
bites her tongue in class
because she wants to pass,
and sometimes in discussions she'll notice
that there are other people
that are sort of saying things too,
but like she was telling me the other day,
as soon as the discussion started,
her teacher just shut
it down and was like,
"Different people have different opinion.
"Different people," and she's like,
"Literally, that's the point of school,
"is that different people
have different opinions.
"Why are you guys even scared
to have these conversations?"
- Is that a doubly intense thing for you?
Because not only your backstory
and everything that you've told us here,
you're also on college campuses.
So you're like really hit
with this monster all the time, basically.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, I
try to as much as I can
just focus on all of the positive things
that are going on, you know?
But it does bring me down.
Quite often I just feel like
I just wanna quit everything
and just move to a deserted island,
but there are enough thing
that I see that keep me going.
- I'm looking into some land somewhere.
I don't wanna say what
we're doing (laughing).
- No, don't (laughs), don't
say it on air. (laughing)
- Did I ever tell you about the time,
I think I was speaking
at University of Arizona
and, I don't know, there
was a couple hundred kids,
and there was a kid towards the back
who was brown-skinned,
happened to see him,
and it wasn't the brown skin
that alerted me in any way,
it was that he looked very
glassed over in his face,
really sort of lost and
sorta, and you can pick that.
You speak in front of public.
Sometimes your eye just gets
caught to a particular person.
It might be the body
language or whatever it is,
and I could see he was also really sweaty
and he kinda looked glossed over,
and I just was a little nervous.
Like, you just don't know
these days, you just, whatever.
Anyway, I'm doing the meet and greet after
and I see him in the line,
and he comes up to me,
and he gets really close to me,
and he says, "Can I hug you?"
He hugs me and then he
says, "I'm like you."
I didn't know what he meant at first,
and then it took me a second,
and then he said, "I'm gay."
Oh, and his name was Mohammed,
and I thought this is just so twisted
that someone like him has to live in fear
while he lives in Arizona.
And it's, like, you see this
over, and over, and over.
- Yeah, and that's why it's so meaningful
when you go and do these talks.
That's why it's so meaningful
when Sam was on Bill Maher's show.
Or it's so meaningful when
Sam was doing his TED Talk
and he was talking about
women in Afghanistan
having to cover themselves up in bags
and why we don't care about that,
and why we're not talking about.
It's so meaningful to
people like me and this guy,
who were brought up, I mean, him probably,
you know, it's Arizona,
and, for me, it's Canada.
You think that these kinds of
things only happen over there,
in these countries under
these strict Sharia regimes,
but anywhere, we're within,
these ideas cross borders, right?
So if we're within that community,
you really have to keep
your personal thoughts,
your doubts, your
homosexuality, your feminism,
your any ideas that go,
that are sort of dissonant in any way,
you have to be so quiet about it,
so to see somebody else talking about it
is just incredibly healing.
- So to be crystal clear,
for those of us, including the two of us,
who would never want anyone
to be bigoted towards Muslim people,
and who want Muslim people to live free
and practice their religion
however they want--
- I want all people to live free.
- Of course.
What do you think the reformers,
are the reformers making any headway?
It's sort of hard to say.
And what can the liberals do even?
'Cause every time the
liberals get involved,
it doesn't work out well for the liberals,
and then it actually, in many ways,
it seems like it hurts the reformers
'cause then they doubly seem
like sellouts or something.
But do you think the reformation,
you know, other religions have
gone through reformations.
There's a reason that most
Jews are mainly liberal,
which upsets a lot of conservative people,
but they're mainly liberal,
usually, I think, in the
better sense of liberalism,
or Christianity, obviously,
went through a reformation.
The church went through a reformation.
Do you sense that Islam can
go through a reformation?
- I think that there are people
all over the Muslim world
and the Western world that are Muslim
that are pushing back
against fundamentalism.
ISIS did a lot to help people to see
this is what your religion teaches.
This is the end game right here.
So it got a lot
of Muslims--
- What would you say
to people that say that's not
what the religion teaches, or?
- Then I would say read about
the religion. (laughing)
Read the Koran, read the Hadith,
read the way the prophet lived.
Not everything ISIS did was
following the prophet's example,
but the sex slavery,
throwing gay people off
of a highest rooftop.
A lot of the things that they did
were just following in
the prophet's footsteps.
Let's not forget that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi
had a PhD in Islamic studies.
- You mean the austere
religious scholar--
- Yes!
Oh, my God.
- According to
"The Washington Post"?
- So this is your question,
about what the left can do,
or what liberals can do
to support the reformers,
or to support the people
in these countries
that are fighting back,
is how about you not
support the fundamentalists?
How about if you not call a terrorist,
I mean, the most vicious,
disgusting terrorist,
leader of the most horrible
terrorist organization
we've ever had to date,
how about you not call
him an austere scholar?
How about that?
How about you not take--
- But what do you think is
happening in the newsroom?
So let's remove this from college kids.
- A lot of problems?
Let's remove this
- I don't know. (laughing)
- from Twitter.
Is it just like, has this,
or you think it's just
a massive mind virus
that has just run through the intuitions?
Media, political, whatever.
- We saw this in Canada too
when we were talking about bringing,
Justin Trudeau was talking
about bringing ISIS
fighters back into Canada
and the conservatives we're,
of course, against that idea,
and so he retorted with calling
the conservative leader Islamophobic,
because he didn't wanna
bring back ISIS fighters.
It's like--
- Wait, there's a lot there.
First, wait, so for
them, what was Trudeau,
anyone think, anyone with half a brain,
I don't wanna give Trudeau
more than he deserves,
but if you have half a brain,
if you leave your country to fight ISIS,
you should not be allowed to come back,
or to fight for ISIS
or any terrorist group.
You shouldn't be allowed to come back.
I don't think that's a racist thing.
That's not Islamophobic.
- It has nothing to do with race.
It has nothing to do with Islam.
It has to do with the fact
that this is a criminal.
This is a terrorist.
This is a horrible human being.
And so for you
- What do you think
- To not to be able to--
- is happening
in Trudeau's brain.
- They just cannot recognize
that people with brown skin can be bad,
that's what it comes down to.
If this person had gone to
Germany to join the Nazis,
(chuckles) you know what I mean?
- Right.
- And then decided,
oh, and had burned his passport
because he was so in support of the Nazis
and now he's decided to
come back to Canada again,
there's not gonna be any
open arms for that person,
but for some reason there's
just like this misfire
when the person has brown
skin or when they're Muslim.
It's really the bigotry of low
expectations, is what it is,
is they're not treating
the religion of Islam or Muslim people,
they're not treating them the same
as they would treat everyone else.
So you see like when I
talk about FGM in the U.K.
Okay, once every hour a girl
is getting her clitoris
chopped off with a razor.
If it was a white family that did this
to their blonde girl,
those people would be in
prison in a heartbeat, right?
- Front page.
And everybody, yeah, front page news.
Everybody would be just
absolutely disgusted and horrified
that anybody could do
this to their own child,
but because they're from Somalia,
then we're just not gonna,
we're just not gonna talk about it.
- Do you think all of this
ultimately strengthens the far-right?
Because that seems to be sort of
where we're seeing a
lot of that in Europe,
and I think we're now starting to see
some signs of it here
in the United States,
and I'm not talking about
the Westboro Baptist Church,
just like some remnant of the KKK,
but something more perverse
that feels like maybe it's
starting to bubble up,
and in a weird way it makes sense.
I'm not excusing it, but it's like,
oh, this sorta makes sense,
just if you understand human psychology.
- I think that those
people always existed,
that are just, you know,
that hate Jews just 'cause their Jews,
or they hate Somalis
just because they have
dark skin or whatever,
but in this climate,
I think it was Maajid Nawaz that said it,
or maybe it was Sam
Harris, I can't remember,
that if we, the rational-minded people,
are not speaking about
these issues rationally,
then we are just leaving
it to the irrational
to start having these conversations.
Unfortunately, what ends up happening
is that the people that
are in this rational sphere
are craving for anybody
to say these things,
and then it's unfortunate that sometimes
it comes from the mouth of somebody
that you wish it would
come from over here,
you know what I mean?
And so they end up getting support
maybe because of that one issue,
and I think that's probably,
a good example of that
is the way Asra Nomani
voted for Donald Trump, was exactly that.
- And then what happened to her after,
I mean, just a pile on.
- What happened to her after.
- It was just unbelievable.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Actually, I never hear of her anymore.
Is she even still in the game?
- She's still in the--
- Come to think of it, I
mean, I follow her on Twitter.
I've not seen a tweet of
hers in God knows how long.
I don't know if she's,
I don't know if it's shadow banning or--
- She's writing a book
right now, so she's busy,
but she's still in the game.
But it's, like, I can't
remember who said this analogy,
I'm stealing it from somebody right now,
where they said if the house is on fire
and you can see the fire everywhere,
but all the people are saying things like,
"It's a fire of peace," (laughing)
or like, "There's no problem here,"
then if somebody's got the door open,
even if it's Boris
Johnson or Donald Trump,
or doesn't matter who it is.
Somebody got the door open
over there and they're saying,
"Yeah, there's a fire guys; I can see it,"
you're gonna head for
that person and be like,
"Yes, thank you, sanity."
You know what I mean?
- Yeah.
- So I think that in a way
it probably does get more supporters,
but that's on us, you know?
That's because we're over here
pretending that everything is fine
and that there's nothing to talk about.
- It's interesting, I can give you
another fire analogy
that is from Bill Maher.
He talks about how
liberals, for some reason,
or lefties, the house is burning down,
and instead of figuring
out how to get out,
which is what you're
describing, they're going,
"There's a dust bunny
in the corner over there
"and we better fight about how
to clean up the dust bunny,"
and the whole house is gonna burn down
and then you just got a bunch of people
with a lot of rubble on top of 'em.
- That's so good.
I love that.
- It's just another version
of what you just said there.
- That's exactly it.
- The in-fighting, the in-fighting,
instead of going, "Guys, we
got a bigger problem here.
"Could we (chuckles), look over this way."
- Absolutely, 100%
behind that analogy too,
and that's something,
like if we talk about
feminism, for example.
We're fixated on are
air conditioners sexist?
Can we build chairs so
that men can't man spread?
You know what I mean?
We're concerned about all
of these little things
and it's like, okay, but how
about these women over here
that are being throw in prison
because they want to wear
what they wanna wear.
Do you know what I mean?
Or these women over here
that just wanna drive a car.
Or these women, you know--
- Come on, bigot.
- Yeah, like, but what's
the bigotry though, right?
Isn't that the bigotry?
- Well, that's the bigotry.
I mean, that's--
- That's the bigotry,
is they're saying,
"I don't care about
those women over there."
In fact, it's empowering for them
to cover themselves up
head to toe in black
in the searing heat of the desert.
That's great for them, not for me.
For me, I wanna go free the nipple,
but for them, it's empowering
for them to cover themselves,
and, in fact, let's celebrate that.
Let's put a hijab on Barbie,
and let's put a swoosh on a hijab,
and let's put it on the cover
of "Sports Illustrated."
- Is that the part that makes you
crazier than anything else?
- Yes.
- Because when you see this,
literally, they'll have
everything you just described.
Nike has the hijab and the whole thing,
but they would never do
that for Mormon women,
or where's the, Orthodox
Jewish women wear a wig.
Where's the wig with the logo?
In any other religious sense,
people would be like, "This is bananas."
No one's saying that women
shouldn't be allowed to do these things,
no one's saying they shouldn't
be allowed to wear what they want,
but sort of like the corporate,
ugh, gimme me, I was gonna say something
that was gonna be a
gross, sexual reference.
Like, just the corporate
need to suck this thing off.
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- You know?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
No, absolutely, I mean,
it doesn't make any sense
to have a woman in Mormon underwear
on the cover of "Sports Illustrated."
- No one's saying Mormon
women can't be athletes.
- Exactly, and it also
doesn't make any sense
to have a woman in a burkini
on the cover of "Sports Illustrated."
Nobody's saying women can't
wear Mormon underwear,
nobody's saying women can't wear burkinis,
but for us to pretend that
this is some empowering,
feminist thing that should be
celebrated, that's the lie.
That's the problem right there.
- Do you think part of it is
just for the average person?
Like, let's try to give these people
as much credit as possible.
The average advertising
executive out there.
Every commercial now that you see,
there's always a woman in a hijab in it.
Like, literally, Reese's Pieces,
and we all like Reese's Pieces,
and I'm a Muslim with Reese's Pieces.
Okay, great.
- Yeah, fantastic.
- But they do this in
all these commercials now
and I don't, for me, it's like, of course,
that's wonderful that everyone
can eat Reese's Pieces
and everyone can play sports, we love it,
but they do it because it's their way of,
because they think inclusivity
is the number one thing,
and how else could you show inclusivity
as opposed to just showing people?
So they think they're doing something good
but they're bizarrely
then protecting things
that would never protect them.
- Yeah, you're right, and
that's why technically
the title of my book should have been
"How Western Liberals Inadvertently
Empower Radical Islam."
So, yeah, they're not doing it on purpose,
but they are doing it, essentially.
Look at how everybody
just attacked Mitt Romney
for the fact that he was
Mormon, do you know what I mean?
If we did take, let's say,
a whole bunch of Mormon
symbols and had them,
like if Nike put their swoosh on it,
and if we had them on
Reese's Pieces commercials,
and in Banana Republic,
and in Marks and Spencer,
and, literally, any flat surface,
we just splashed all of these
Mormon symbols all over the place,
people would be responding
appropriately, right?
People would be like, "Why
are you celebrating Mormonism?
"Why are we valuing this
far, fundamentalist ideology?
"We shouldn't be doing this."
- I don't even think
they would go that far.
I think most people
would say Mormons can be
whoever they are and do whatever the want,
but we just don't need it to
be promoted through all of our
mainstream channels.
- That's exactly it.
We don't need to slap our logo on it.
You know what I mean?
Mattel didn't create Mormon
underwear for Barbie.
Why would they create a hijab for Barbie?
That's all I'm saying.
I'm not saying these people aren't allowed
to make whatever choices they wanna make
or wear whatever they wanna wear.
I'm saying that we here as free liberal,
enlightened country of secularists,
we really should not be celebrating
fundamentalist aspects of religion.
And, in fact, I just wanna add,
most Muslim women in
America do not wear hijab,
but we're only celebrating
the ones that wear hijab.
Hillary Clinton ignored the
women who won a gold medal.
She ignored her and instead focused
on this woman over here
because she has a hijab on.
It's very clear that we're not celebrating
American-Muslim women in general
or just being inclusive of
different types of Americans.
We're specifically
supporting the American women
that look like fundamentalist Muslims
because they are wearing the hijab.
Those are the ones that get celebrated.
Those are the ones that get
on the cover of magazines.
Those are the ones that get
splashed on every flat surface.
- So as all of this happens to you,
and you write a book about this,
and you enter the online
world and the whole thing.
We talk a lot about this privately.
What do you make of what's happening,
broadly speaking, on the right?
That you're a woman, you're
brown, you're liberal.
You're supposed to be
hated by these people,
if we listen to the just, you know,
the non-thinking meme that's out there,
but that's not really the case.
- No, I mean, I see a big difference
in just openness to diversity of ideas.
So this long, straight path
that I was taking about,
I see that very clearly on the left,
but on the right, I
can talk about the fact
that I don't believe in Christianity,
and I don't believe in any religion,
and, in fact, I think that it's toxic.
I can talk about being pro-choice,
and I always will be pro-choice,
and there's nothing you can ever say to me
that's gonna ever get me to
consider not being pro-choice.
- And that's a deal-breaker
for a lot of conservatives,
but they're still happy to talk to you.
- They're still happy to talk to me
because we agree on certain things.
Like we agree, obviously, the
way we feel about the left.
They agree with how I feel
about fundamentalist Islam,
but we don't necessarily
agree if we're gonna
be talking about
fundamentalist Christianity.
There are a lot of secular people
on the right that do agree with me,
but what I mean to say is
that the variation in thought
is more accepted on the
right than it is on the left.
Not the liberal, classical liberal,
not the typical left,
but that little far-left
crazies over here.
There's no variation in thought.
You need to speak perfectly.
You can't even get a pronoun wrong
or you are just evil, right?
But on the right, they're
more willing to just sit back
and disagree with what I have to say,
but not try to shut me
down, or not demonize me,
or not, you know, they wouldn't
call me gross and racist
if I had something to say
that completely disagreed
with their value system or
with their belief system.
Having said that though,
there are quite a few people on the right,
on the far-right, who
I've interacted with,
who they'll get mad at me
because I have a white husband,
and we've made a brown baby,
so I've not ruined that lineage.
I get that kind of attack.
I get attacks for, oh, once
a Muslim, always a Muslim.
We just don't want your
type in our country anyway.
Go back to where you came from.
So just like there are
some crazies on this side,
there are some crazies on this side,
but I think that this middle ground here
is full of both left and
right people, and that's,
like I said to you when I
was here a few years ago,
I really believe that
this is the largest group,
that we just haven't found a way to,
we're just not at loud.
Like, these guys, if it bleeds, it leads.
So these guys are loud and obnoxious,
and so then they're
getting all the airtime,
but all the rational people in the middle,
I think we're the majority.
- In a weird way,
it's almost like we're
fighting human psychology,
to be rational.
A couple days ago, I
spoke at Sacramento State,
and we knew that there were gonna be
some of these white
nationalist people there,
and a local news group came,
and I gave what I think
was probably the best speech of my life,
'cause I've been thinking
about a lot of this
'cause I'm writing my book,
and I was really sharp,
and I took all the questions I could,
I didn't censor anybody or anything,
and it actually went totally fine.
There was some minor screaming,
like minor, minor, marginal stuff,
but nothing happened.
Nobody was attacked,
nobody was thrown out,
no fire alarms were pulled,
and then, of course, they don't cover it
on television because it was a peaceful
exchange of ideas--
- Exactly.
- And yet had anything crazy happened,
just one person really screamed
or had I done anything
on tour or whatever,
it's like now we're on
the news, the local news,
and then it gets picked up
by CNN, and America's racist,
but whenever you diffuse things as sane,
somewhat centrist people,
nobody has a freakin' clue.
- Absolutely.
- Which is a problem.
- This is a probably because then people
start to feel like the world's gone crazy,
and they start to feel like things
are way worse than they really are.
I don't think, and we give them too much,
because we think that things are so bad,
we give them too much credence.
There's too much credibility given
to these people who say crazy stuff.
Why are we even paying attention to them?
This Jessica Yaniv from my
hometown of Vancouver, BC.
So went to estheticians and insisted
that they wax Jessica's
(chuckling) balls, basically.
- Right, so to be clear,
she is a biological male.
Nobody has a problem with her identifying
as a trans person, but she has balls.
- Yeah, she has balls,
and there are many reasons
why these women refused,
one of which being it's a completely
different skillset as an esthetician,
you know what I mean?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah, it's
probably a different tool.
- There's some very different things.
A very different wax or different methods,
you know what I mean?
These are physically very
different body parts.
And so these women just weren't,
they didn't have the
knowledge required to do this,
and she took that and ran with it
to the Human Rights Tribunal
and said that it was a
violation of her rights,
et cetera, et cetera.
Oh, my God, how much
airtime she got, right?
Ricky Gervais is tweeting about her,
and it's just all over the place.
Blaire did a really great
video on her, Blaire White,
just all over the news,
and that is somebody
that as a society we should
just be either ignoring.
(chuckling) You know what I mean?
It should have just been,
luckily, the Human Right Tribunal,
the judgment, it was against her,
so everything turned out fine in the end,
but she just got way too much airtime.
We spent too much time and energy
talking about somebody like that.
And so it makes everybody say things like,
"Wow, the trans community, they are nuts!"
It's like, no, Jessica Yaniv is nuts.
- Yeah, but we ignore all the ones
that are just living their lives.
That's what I always say
about the bathroom thing.
It's like trans people can
go into whatever bathroom
they wanted to pretty much forever
and there's really been no
- It's never been a problem.
- issues with it, and now
we find one issue with it,
we blow it up into a national
emergency where suddenly,
literally, when it was happening
in North Carolina, I think,
Obama was like, "We're cutting funding
"to the state if they
don't," and it's like,
I think we might have blown this thing
out of proportion, guys.
- Totally, totally being blown
out of proportion all the time,
and I think that that's really dangerous,
and I just wish that we
could get to the point
where we just ignore
stupid things, you know?
Like there was, was it Bed, Bath & Beyond
that they had to take down their pumpkins,
they had black pumpkins, and they said,
"We're gonna take these
pumpkins off the shelves
"because they're pumpkins with blackface."
Like jack-o'-lanterns, right?
They're Halloween--
- I missed this one.
Somehow I missed this one.
- Yeah, so when people, when somebody
writes you a letter--
- They still do have
the 20% off coupons though, right?
- I think those are--
'Cause people freaked
- You're good with that.
- about those.
Yeah, okay, good.
- But, I mean, if you're
Bed, Bath & Beyond
and you get a letter
from a nut job saying,
"You need to take these off the shelves
"because these jack-o'-lanterns
have blackface,"
you know what, send them
a 20% coupon. (laughing)
- Yeah.
- Do you know what I mean?
- Give 'em five 20% coupons.
- Yeah, just like, shh, go back home.
Everything's gonna be okay.
You don't take them off the shelves.
You don't listen to
these idiots. (laughing)
You know what I mean?
- But that also, it still
gets back to that thing
about the weakness of liberalism, I think.
And I hate to say it, like,
I truly hate to say it,
that it's like these
institutions and companies,
to watch social justice infect everything,
and for some reason liberals,
and, of course, I don't mean everybody,
but they don't stand up for it.
They always take the
path of least resistance.
- And I think that's the problem.
I don't necessarily think that
liberalism is the problem,
I think that the problem is that liberals
are not standing up for liberal values.
And we talked about this when
I was here last time, before,
just Western values, enlightenment values.
Why do we feel like that's
a bad thing to support?
- Well, now the memes out there,
well, it was all white men.
It was John Locke and it was
all white men, Adam Smith.
It was all white men.
- Who cares!
- John Stuart Mill, white guy.
- Yeah, it's like in all
of these colleges now,
where they're taking down
all the pictures of the poets
and statues because
these are all white men.
- Most of them wrote poetry
in the name of whiteness,
did you know that?
- Oh, goodness.
Yeah, the point is that that's
really the problem right there.
That's the crux of the issue right there,
is they're not looking at the value itself
or the issue itself,
but they're looking at the
color of the skin of the people,
and that works both ways too, right?
To go back to the Rotherham rape gangs,
that was the problem there too.
Instead of just looking and saying,
"Oh, my God, thousands upon thousands
"of girls are being raped.
"We need to do something about that,"
they went, "Wait a minute,
but they're being raped
"by men with brown skin, so hold up.
"We have to address this differently."
No you don't!
Those are still girls being raped.
Doesn't matter if they're being raped
by white men, or black men, or brown men.
Irrelevant.
- Is the other part of this,
and we sort of referenced
this earlier about,
so when there were all
those rapes in Germany
a couple of years ago on New Years,
and they didn't want, and
they sort of covered it up,
and basically the only people
that were talking about it
online were people on the right,
and Breitbart was covering
it, and Drudge maybe,
and a few things like that,
and then so then what happened
is the mainstream media is like,
"See the way they're blowing
this thing out of proportion,"
but then regular Germans
who I've talked to said,
"No, this was real.
"This was a real thing that happened."
And then what happens is
the people who were like,
and then it came out that
it was really happening.
Like, it was very clear
that it was happening,
and then maybe some
minor media touched it,
but basically it makes those people
who were the ones screaming
about it first go,
"Well, the media's against us
and this is horrible stuff."
It feeds their, it
feeds the narrative too.
- It does, it does, unfortunately.
Yeah, and not only does
it feed the narrative,
it feeds the hate too.
It feeds those insidious people.
So in Sweden, for example,
where they refuse to
talk about anti-Semitism
and how it has risen so
much, so now it's like,
I think it went from
something like 12% to 50%,
or something like that.
It just keeps on growing.
As long as you don't talk about it,
as long as you don't identify it,
as long as you don't try to fix it,
it's just gonna continue to fester,
and is that what you want?
Really, that can't be what they want.
They don't want to be
empowering those people
to just keep going because
nobody's talking about it.
- You know what's funny--
- We're getting away with it.
- You know, I was on tour with Jordan
and we went all over the world.
We went to all the Nordic countries.
In Sweden, we ended up doing two shows
because the first show sold
out in literally 30 seconds.
- Wow.
- And we were there,
and everyone, you know, if
you listen to all the lefties,
they're were saying, "Well,
we should be more like Sweden.
"We should be more like Sweden
and the Nordic countries."
Everyone that came to our shows,
and I get it, it's a
self-selected group of people,
they're completely afraid
of saying what they think.
That was the running theme.
The shows there, when we got on stage,
it was like people were
like, it was like--
- Starving about it.
- Like they were like,
(exhales sharply), like that.
It was actually, I can't
get the vision though
of if nine-year-old Yasmine in full garb
would have know that
20-some-odd years later
she'd be on YouTube talking
about waxing people's balls.
I had that in my head
for the last five minutes
and I just had to get it out, otherwise...
But there's a beauty to that, isn't there?
I mean, there really--
- There is a beauty.
I wish I could have know that any of this
was even an option back then
because back then there was no internet.
There was no way for
us to all communicate.
There was no way for these
voices to be heard, right?
Mainstream media were just deciding
what was gonna go on our
little TV with five channels
and that was it, you know?
And I really felt so alone,
and so stuck, and really crazy,
because everybody around me,
I describe it like a school of fish.
Everybody's going in this direction
and you don't really think about it.
You're not given the
opportunity to think about it.
You just move along with them.
And if you move on your own,
it's just so terrifying,
but even as a kid, I was
always questioning things,
and things didn't make sense to me.
Imagine being a nine-year-old girl,
being told that you need to revere a man,
a 53-year-old man that
raped a nine-year-old girl.
Like, you have to love him more
than you love yourself, you know?
That's pretty gross.
That's traumatizing to have
to stop the part of your brain
that is disgusted at the prophet of Allah,
you know what I mean?
Because how could you.
He's like the most perfect
example of humanity for all time,
and so you get filled with this self-hate
and this self-doubt, but I
think that what you're doing now
with these YouTube videos and, obviously,
Twitter, Facebook,
social media in general,
with people being allowed
to express their views,
there's no gatekeepers,
well, I mean, they are,
but (laughing) to a lesser extent.
So not only can we reach people
like that young man you
spoke about in Arizona,
but we can reach people
in Iran, in Saudi Arabia,
and Sudan, and Somalia, and
Pakistan, and Bangladesh.
It's crazy, but they,
just like I was as a kid
growing up in Canada,
feeling crazy because I don't
wanna express how I'm feeling
because everybody around
me disagrees with me,
they have an outlet now,
and what they're living, of course,
is way worse than what I was living
because at least I got to see both worlds.
I got to see outside of the bubble.
I wasn't part of it,
but I saw it over there,
and I knew that there was a reality
that was way better than
this reality in here.
And so I had something to strive for,
whereas in a lot of those countries,
up until recently, they
couldn't even see it.
They didn't know that it existed.
There's a great quote in the
documentary "Misrepresentation"
where they say, "You cannot
be what you cannot see."
And that was exactly
it right there, right?
I saw Sheryl Sandberg.
I saw, at the time,
it's kind of ironic now,
but Sinead O'Connor and how
she cut that picture, you know?
And I saw Madonna
fighting against religion,
and all of those things.
John Lennon's "Imagine," no religion.
There were ideas permeating
through that bubble into my head,
but I still felt very
alone, very separate,
very just scared, and I
wish that I had been able,
you know, I'm so happy now
that people--
- Yeah, you're doing it now.
- Get that other side.
- So just one more thing for you,
although, that was a beautiful
closing to an interview.
So just could you talk a little bit
about how difficult it
was to publish the book
because you ultimately self-published,
and we've talked about it privately,
but you said to me, basically,
if this was about leaving Christianity,
or leaving Judaism, or leaving Mormonism,
or certainly leaving
Scientology, whatever else,
you're gonna get a book deal real quick.
You're gonna have a Netflix special,
and there'll be a documentary,
and a fiction version,
and dat dat dat da da.
- Yeah, and this is,
that's going back to that whole thing
of identity again, right?
So if I had gone through
this exact same experience,
somebody else went through it,
leaving the Westboro Baptist Church,
or leaving Hasidic Judaism,
or leaving the Mormon
church, whatever it is,
they will not touch my
story with a 10-foot pole
because of the color of my skin
and because of the fact that
I came from a non-white,
what's viewed as a non-white religion.
So they're not comfortable criticizing
or celebrating somebody who is criticizing
the ideology of the brown people,
but the issues within Islam are
much, much more exaggerated,
like they're much worse than they are
from Scientology, or Westboro Baptist,
or any of those other
fundamentalist Christian ideologies
that people are happy
to speak out against.
Please speak out against
these, that's fantastic.
There's definitely a problem there,
and we definitely should celebrate people
like Leah Remini, or Megan Phelps-Roper,
or anybody that leaves
these horrible ideologies,
please celebrate those people,
but can we also celebrate all people?
What about Ayaan Hirsi Ali?
What about what she has overcome?
I can't think of a single
human being that has overcome
more than what that woman has overcome,
but we demonize here.
- She's the barometer.
To me, if you say to somebody,
"What do you think about Ayaan Hirsi Ali?"
Now, I guess some people
aren't gonna know her,
but if you know her and you
have to think for a second
before answering how wonderful she is,
and brave, and all those
things, you are confused.
- Yeah, and if she had
white skin, and blonde hair,
and overcame those things
in a Western context--
- Woo!
- We'd have statues of her.
You know what I mean?
People would definitely
recognize how amazing she is,
but because she's from a
different part of the world
and her skin is a different color,
then they're not willing to celebrate her,
and, to me, that is the epitome of racism.
- That's a second great ending by you.
You're getting good at this.
All right, you guys can get
"Unveiled" at Yasmine's website,
which is yasminemohammed.com.
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