25: Michael Peterson (The Staircase) Part 3

Transcript

Coming up next on The Jordan Harbinger Show, I mean, I've talked about it in my book how my mom would actually name my friends, she would name them like Tiffany was my best friend, and she'd use her name and be like, Are you prepared to kill Tiffany when the caliphate rises like it was? It was that insidious. It was that deeply manipulative. Welcome to the show. I'm Jordan Harbinger on The Jordan Harbinger Show, we decode the story's secrets and skills of the world's most fascinating people. We have in-depth conversations with scientists and entrepreneurs, spies and psychologists, even the occasional former cult member, investigative journalist, the legendary Hollywood director, war correspondent or economic hitman. And each episode turns our guests wisdom into practical advice that you can use to build a deeper understanding of how the world works and become a better thinker. If you're new to the show or you want to tell your friends about the show, I suggest our episode starter packs. These are collections of our favorite episodes organized by topic that will help new listeners get a taste of everything that we do here on the show. Topics like persuasion and influence negotiation, communication, China and North Korea scams and conspiracy debunks crime and cults and more. Just visit Jordan Harbinger.com/ start or search for us in your Spotify app to get started. All right, on this episode, I hate doing trigger warning, but trigger warning. There's a lot of trauma. There's child slash adult abuse stories here. It gets heavy. Our guest, Yasmin Mohammed, sums up the abuse as an IV drip of poison that never stops. So, yeah, like I said, a little bit heavy here in there. That said, this is a fascinating episode about growing up in a fundamentalist extremist religion, namely fundamentalist Islam. Our conversation today goes deep into the repression of women in fundamentalist Islam, terrorism and Islam, religious freedom and human rights a whole lot more. Of course, I got to do the whole not all religious people thing here. I feel the need to say that before people say I'm enabling bigotry or some other such cancel culture accusations when we're talking about one a very insider perspective on an extremist version of a religion. So I think we can all kind of get behind that. And if you can't, well, then this is not the episode for you. This is a two parter. There's a lot to say on this subject. She is a great guest, and we went pretty long here. My video guy Ian summed it up as, Oh my god, this is going to take up my whole hard drive and my whole weekend. So you're welcome in. And here we go with Yasmin Muhammad. I did want to do this show initially, your stories are so interesting. And in my defense, I wrote this joke before Salman Rushdie got stabbed, but I said, Why should he get all the fatwas? Maybe I can be the first podcaster to get a bounty on my head by the Ayatollah. But it's not funny now because he just got attacked a few days ago. And yeah, well, when we first came on, I asked how you were doing and you said, Yeah, it's been a weird few days. I would imagine this is a scary time for anybody speaking out against Islam or about Islam. That's not speaking in favor of religious fundamentalism, essentially. Yes, it's a scary time. It's it's also really infuriating, though, because more than the fear. So Salman Rushdie once said that terrorism is the art of fear, and the only way to defeat terrorism is to not be afraid. And I live by that. I've been living by that for a while. Obviously, he has every reason to be living under fear, and he chooses not to have someone like him can choose not to live in fear. Then obviously the rest of us can as well. Now, as we'll get into later on with my ex being a member of Al Qaeda, I was scared into silence for many, many years, 15 years. In fact, because I was afraid of his network and who he knew and who could. I changed my name. I changed my daughter's name. We never stayed in the same place for too long. I mean, I truly lived in fear. You reach a point where you just get tired of it. You just get angry instead. You just like, You know what? I'm not doing this. Come and kill me if you want to. I'm not doing this anymore. I'm over it. And what I felt when this whole Salman Rushdie thing happened was that same immediate sense of defiance like, Oh, you know, oh, you don't like his book? OK, watch, watch us give his book out for free. It's kind of like after the Charlie Hebdo. Actually, it was the Samuel Paty. He's the teacher in France who was beheaded because he showed some Charlie Hebdo cartoons. And after that, some cities in France, like Montpellier, took those cartoons and they projected them on buildings. And I thought that was the most perfect response. That's what you do in the face of these people that are telling you, you are not allowed to have free expression, you are not allowed to have free speech, you are not allowed to have an opinion. You say, OK, watch this Watch my opinion. Watch my free expression express itself. And that's what I want to do right now. So I'm working with a group called the Clarity Coalition. So we're a coalition of Muslims, ex Muslims, Jews, Christians, atheists. It doesn't matter. Just all of us are working towards the same goal of defending liberties against Islamists. And so what we're going to try and do is have a event in the actual same place where Salman Rushdie was attacked, and that event will be all about free expression. And it's going to be just to show that we will not capitulate. We will not be terrorized. We refuse to cower. It's so interesting this event where he was stabbed. I was talking online. Someone said, You know, this is what he had coming. It's just, you know, Instagram trolls or whatever Reddit trolls and other people said, Well, we don't have a motive yet. And I said, Come on, guys. This is a guy who's had a fatwa. So like a religious, what is a fatwa? It's like the Ayatollah Khomeini said, Go kill this guy and I'll give you three million bucks. It's like a contract on your head, like the mafia. But for Islam, I guess, right? Absolutely correct. A fatwa just means a decree decree could be anything. And this one is saying any Muslims who believe in a law and want to protect the prophet go and kill Salman Rushdie, and you will be a hero for all Muslims. I mean, if you read the wording of it, it could not be more like you just said it's a mafia hit on this guy's head. Kill him and we'll give you three million dollars and we will all worship you and congratulate you. Right? So when people say they don't have a motive yet, I'm like, Come on, this is ridiculous. Let's not pretend we don't know what this is about. And people were like, You're racially profiling because of the guy's name. And I'm like, Well, I'm using clues that everyone else has to come to a conclusion. That's quite reasonable. It's totally different. And it's not like, we don't know if the guy committed the crime. I didn't say, Look, there's a brown guy in the audience. It must have been him. It's that guy who did it. He's on camera. He he's there. And it's this kind of ridiculous gymnastics that people go through to say, Well, we can't jump to conclusions. We can't say we know why this happened, and it's just unbelievable how much blowback I got. People were like, Oh yeah, look what Israel is doing. And I'm like, Yes, that stuff's bad, but also. We're not talking about that right now. That's not the same issue. Oh well, America uses drone strikes. Yeah. I'm not for those, either, but look, that's the guy that stabbed that guy in New York. Let's not get off topic. It's unbelievable how much blowback I got from seemingly real people online that were just who otherwise might even be reasonable, but just lose their frickin mind when it comes to being politically correct. And look, we'll get into that in a second because there's so much more to your story. I sort of got to experience just a tiny droplet of what you've experienced in your journey to speak out against this in the last few days were I. If anybody thinks you're exaggerating about the PC blowback of criticizing fundamentalist terrorism from Islam, Islamists or other fundamentalists, like just go online and start talking about this and you will find seemingly otherwise normal people just take their brain out and throw it in the trash can and type of response to you. It's just unfair and believable. I think what's most shocking about your story? One of the things that's most shocking. Yes, there's crazy abuse that you suffered. The abuse was intertwined with your religion, but all of these seemingly Stone Age practices and abuses that happened to you actually happened in Canada. And what you describe in the book sounds like something you'd hear. I expect to read that from somebody says I grew up in a rural province in Afghanistan and Pakistan, Peshawar or something like that. Not I grew up in White Rock or outside of Vancouver. You know, that's not what you expect to hear. I was actually surprised that that was the most surprising part of my book for so many people. Yeah, we should friggin know better. I mean, when people cross geographical boundaries, their their ideology is carried with them in their mind. It doesn't matter if they're in Canada or in America or in Germany or in France or in Sweden. It does. They're the same. These belief systems are carried within them. So yeah, when you have these Islamic schools, when you have these mosques, when you see these young girls in hijab, it's no different than what's happening in Afghanistan. It's no different than what's happening in Saudi Arabia. It's just a different geographic location. But they're all following the same book. It's the same ideology. It's literally, in many cases, the same book, because aren't isn't there kind of a is it Wahhabi version of the Koran that the Saudis give out everywhere? And it's more extreme than a lot of the other versions I think of. I don't have a good comparison of Korans in my head, but I know that the Saudis are pretty conservative when it comes to this stuff. Well, actually, the Koran is not any different. It's always the same in Arabic. What is different is the translation. So the Saudi translation is not quite as whitewashed as watered down as some other translations, so it's more direct and it offers some interpretations that are seen as like extremist interpretations. So if you read the Koran in Arabic, let's just take Chapter four, verse 34, for example, because this is the thing that I would like to express in the Koran, it says in that chapter, verse 34, it says if you fear, arrogance or disobedience from your wife, then first admonish her. And if she doesn't listen that, don't share the bed with her. And if she still doesn't listen, then beat her. That's what it says in Koran verbatim. Those are the words, supposedly the words of Allah. So you'll find some translators won't. Translated as beat her, they'll translate it as hit her lightly or her gently, you know? But the Saudi version will say, beat her. This is what I mean by interpretations like when you're like me and you're Arabic is your first language and you read these kinds of things when you read it. The interpretation is it's understood the way you understand the language, you know. But when you're translating it into different languages, people can soften it a little bit changed things a little bit. And what I said they offer their own interpretation is there's another area in the Koran that talks about cursing. There's many verses that talks about cursing Jews and Christians and non-believers, but this one just talks about cursing those who do wrong and those who have gone astray. And then the Saudi version will translate in brackets they'll say, like the Jews and Christians, and so others will say, Oh, no, no, no, you're making this more extreme. You shouldn't be doing that. So it's important to note that although the Saudi version in English looks more extreme than it is, the more extremist interpretation the Koran does not change. It's the same. Gotcha. And it's all violent because I'm picturing people that I know that that grew up in the United States, that don't speak Arabic but are Muslim. And they're like, Do the book my parents gave me does not say that. I swear it doesn't say that. Like, Come over and read it for yourself, but they're not reading the original Arabic. They're reading the like you have the Jews that are. Reforms that are like I'm Jewish, but only on holidays, they're kind of maybe that way in terms of Muslims there, like I would never do this. My parents never taught me this, and it's because they weren't taught this. But when you look at what it actually says, you're just looking at, it's like Old Testament where it's like, So I'm supposed to stone you to death because you stepped E war to what is it, mixed fabrics or something like that and your clothing. And it's like, Well, nobody does that. Well, actually, yeah, there for sure are Christians that would do that. They live in other places or they did that thousands or hundreds of years ago. That's part of the that's what it says. It doesn't get translated into the version that you get at your local church down the road because it's frickin creepy. It's weird. Yeah, it doesn't fit. You're absolutely correct. And what's worse here is that it's not up to personal interpretation. It's up to the Sharia law people, the scholars of the religion, the scholars of Islamic law. It's up to their interpretation. And that's why in 15 different countries, if you're gay, you're executed or if you leave Islam, you're executed all sorts of punishments. There's a woman that I just posted about right before I started this interview with you, who got sentenced to 34 years in prison in Saudi Arabia, she's considered a terrorist. I saw that because she retweeted a few things in support of Saudi Arabian feminists. It's not like talking about, Oh, if you mix fabrics, they're going to stone you like. That's something that never happens. These things happen. These things are happening every single day, all across the globe. What is in that book is actually reality. Nobody's following the Old Testament anymore. None of those punishments are in any laws of any countries. But the Islamic law is in many countries around the globe. People are suffering daily because of it. I'd like to say, Oh my God, I couldn't believe that she got that harsh prison sentence for. She's not even an activist on Twitter who's stirring up trouble. She retweeted and followed people who were activists, and then if they carry out the sentence, her life is over. She's probably like, How old is she? Twenty five? Yeah, she's young. So she's going to be in prison until she's the age of a lot of people who have grown kids. She's not going to have a life now, basically. And she has young children as well that she's not going to get to see. That's even worse. I'm hoping they go, OK, maybe we're going to let her go. We got the news story. Everybody's scared, let her out. But I just don't. I don't know if that's how Saudi Arabian justice system works when it comes to religious police. They don't seem like people who are thinking rationally because they are religious police, which two things that are from an American Western perspective totally should be separate and not part of the same thing, but religious police. It's a foreign concept for us, literally and figuratively. So you recount from childhood abuse for not memorizing the Koran, which is interesting because it seems like are you memorizing it in Arabic or are you memorizing it in English? No, it's in Arabic. And memorizing the Koran is what's valued. Not understanding it right? Not discussing it, not critically analyzing it or anything. It's just regurgitating it. And so they teach kids from a young age to just repeat it. Now it is written. It's first had classical Arabic, so it's not exactly the kind of Arabic that we would speak today. But if you are an Arabic speaker, it is pretty clear what's being said most of the time. Some things you have to look up and say, it's a word that we don't use it anymore or something like that. Eighty percent of Muslims don't even speak Arabic. I have to say that like, it's a that's a good point. Majority people don't really realize that, and that proves other points that you've made in your book and elsewhere, which is a lot of Muslims don't share any cultural. What would you even call this like facets or cohesion right there? You're talking about people who live in Indonesia, they live in Dubai. I mean, they don't share food, they don't share clothing other than traditional Islamic garb, maybe on women. For the most part, they don't share language. They don't have a shared history other than stuff that happened, you know, supposedly thousands of years ago that appears in the Koran. They're on the other side of the world, and they haven't communicated until recently for a long time. Absolutely correct. Absolutely correct. It's like expecting a Catholic person in Mexico to share the same culture as a Catholic person in Italy. Well, no, they don't. They're completely different people. The different language, like you said, all of the things that you said, but they share a religion. And so there's they're going to have some things that overlap and those things that overlap are always religion. And so people always refer to Muslims as some monolithic cultural group. First of all, there's nothing monolithic about Muslims. Second of all, they are not one cultural group at all. They're very, very distinct, different cultural groups. And even when I say Arabs within that, there's like 22 different kinds of Arabs and within the Arab countries, you know, there are other ethnic groups that don't have their own state so that. You know, like the Bedouins and things. Exactly, yeah. The Yazidis that so there are so many different kinds of people in there that are just being erased. And there's these memes that show because this is the most visual way to show the contrast of women. There's like twenty five different women on this meme, dressed in their traditional garb from all these different countries Yemen, Egypt, everywhere. What they used to look like before Indonesia. And then everybody covered in black head to toe and saying, You know, you have to understand that Islam, that these people were colonized by Muslims. These people's cultures were erased by Islam. We talk today, you know, we puff up our chests as we speak up so loudly against the, you know, when the United Kingdom was colonized or when France would colonize, rightfully so. Mm hmm. I'm Egyptian. My family is from North Africa. We don't even have anything to do with Arabs. And Egypt is now called the Arab Republic of Egypt, and our language is Arabic, and we call a lot of Egyptians, call themselves Arabs. A lot of them these days are saying, I'm not an Arab, I'm an Egyptian. Same thing is happening in Iraq, even in Saudi Arabia. Like you said, the Bedouin groups and the groups in Morocco and Algeria and all over their cultures have been arranged and they're trying to get them back again now. Bosnia comes to mind. When I lived in former Yugoslavia, a lot of the Serbs would say, What are these Bosnians doing? They were just colonized by Arabs or by moors or whatever it was back in the day. And now they're saying they're almost like, We're here to rescue you from this bulls**t. You know, what are you doing? You're trying to defend this, this thing. So a lot of Serbs are saying, like, Yeah, we're destroying ma*s. We're not trying to destroy your culture. We're destroying these occupiers that came in hundreds of years ago. Why are you so bent out of shape about it, which obviously that argument doesn't hold a lot of water, somebody who's grown up that way for five generations, you know? Yes, you're going to hurt their feelings when you destroy their places of worship and their holy sites. But I kind of understand where the line of thought comes from, at least even if I don't agree with it. Your mom married this guy who had other wives, which, you know, in case you weren't paying attention illegal in Canada, he had the wives apply for social assistance. I assume that's illegal to do to have multiple wives and then have them all apply for assistance. It happens all the time. That seems like a kind of I mean, that's a despicable practice to have a bunch of single mothers that really aren't single. They're married to you. So you just don't have to do anything because you have five welfare families or three. That's kind of gross, no matter what. Absolutely. Where you look at it, yeah, you're just leeching at that point for no good reason. Oh, yeah, but they don't think of it as leeching. They think of it as if the infidels are stupid enough to do this, then why would we not take advantage of it? Yeah, it's there. We're doing it right in front of them and they're letting us and they are very aware of this happening. They're very aware of it happening, not just in Canada, but all over the United Kingdom as well, and probably in other countries. I wouldn't be surprised. But they don't do anything about it. They don't want to rock the boat. They don't want to offend Muslims. The millions of dollars of taxpayers money that's being funneled to people who don't need it is not important to them to investigate. You're listening to The Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Yasmin Mohammed. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by Text Expander. Text Expander is on my short list of tools that I cannot live without. It saves me and my entire team literally hours each month. Text expander is basically keyboard shortcuts, but on a whole other level, you're probably thinking I can just copy and paste or I already have keyboard shortcuts, but text expander is way more powerful than that. You can create custom message templates where you can fill in a name or a date, or you can include a dropdown of different message options, depending on what you want to send. I use it all the time, but it's especially handy if you need to send out mass messages that are customized, like responding to LinkedIn or social media or other business. 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And by the way, many of the guests on our show already subscribe and contribute to this course. Come join us. You'll be in smart company where you belong. Now back to Yasmine Muhammad. It's an annoying practice in what really sucks is there probably are tons of single moms, Muslim or not that are now going to go through an extra rigorous process to verify that they're not doing so. They're just making it harder for people who actually need this because maybe not the presumption, but certainly there is some evidence that people are abusing the system. So it's just annoying to hear about this in so many ways because I'm married and I have two kids and we have a lot of help from family, I can't even imagine how hard it is to be a single parent that has a nine to five job. I work from home like I'm on Easy Street, and it's still really, really hard with two kids. So to have a single mom who's now got to like, get documents together and prove that they're not scamming the system because some people are like stupid infidels are going to pay me to have three wives. It just really gets under my skin, and I'm sure that I'm not the only one who feels that way. Describe your living situation with this so-called uncle and his first wife, because this is it's bizarre by any measure. The first wife is a French-Canadian convert to Islam, and she lived upstairs, so she lived in like the normal house. And my mom was the second wife, so she was the subordinate. And so we lived downstairs in the unfinished basement, basically. And so there is a real hierarchy between first wives and second wife, and this is a common thing all across the Arab world and even the western world. When there are people that have more than one wife, the first wife is sort of the the dominant. And then every subsequent wife after that is subordinate to her. So, yeah, so that was us. We were the subordinate family and we knew it. It's really horrible now to look back and realize how much I internalize that. And you just don't sure I didn't realize how much it affected me to know that, that I was subordinate. Growing up, it's like, Oh, these are the kids that are most important, and I'm the I'm part of the family that's not as important. So an emotional and physical abuse aside, it would be like if you had two kids and you said, Now listen, your brother's the one I love the most. I mean, you're not a close second, but you're a second and you over there, you're the third. So you're kind of on the chopping block. If I ever decide, I don't like your mom, but all right, kids, we're just going to live like one happy family and the kids. Of course, they're not going to ignore that that exists. They're going to act that way, and they're going to grow up with that idea that you are second class or third class citizen even in your own home. So why would anybody outside your house treat you well if that's how you're treated by your dad? Yeah, the whole idea of polygamy is such a misogynist idea. It's so insidious. It is so manipulative. It is used to control women in so many ways. There's this constant kind of hanging over your head that if you don't have a boy, if you just keep on having girls, then he's going to marry another wife. If you get sick and require and aren't able to like, clean the house and cook and do the dishes or whatever, then he'll get another wife. It's just like this constant threat if you start to get fat, if you get wrinkly, he's going to get another younger wife. Like, it's just this. Women are commodities, women are chattel. Women are this thing that needs to perform up to his standard, or he's just going to replace her with another one. And what often happens, too, is that, yeah, he'll be filled up with four. But then if one of them misbehaves or whatever that he'll just get rid of her and then fill in another one in her place because the four is the maximum. And what's important to note here is that men can divorce women very easily. They just have to use their magical voice. They have to just say the words You are divorced. If they say the words, you are divorced three times by the third time, poof, they're divorced. That's it. There is no mechanism for a woman to divorce a man these days. When a woman wants to divorce a man, she can go to an Islamic court and hope and pray that the judge will listen to her and will grant her the divorce. But there is no actual mechanism in Islam for that to happen, so it's completely up to the judge to decide. So if you look at the imbalance between how easy it is for a man to divorce his wife and how just unheard of it is for a woman to divorce her husband, that gives you another inkling as to the misogyny. Yeah, the power imbalance is just not. It's not even in the same universe as I was reading online that in order for a woman to get divorced in an Islamic court, it basically you have to say something like my husband is forcing me into prostitution and it's against the Koran for me to do this because I'm a mother. And then they're like, Oh, is that true? And the guy basically has to say, yep and admit the whole thing or have real obvious evidence like other people, men test. Defying or like a video recording of him being like, you have to go bang that dude for money so I can buy a new car. I mean, it's really not like, Look, we don't get along. He hits me. Sometimes it's not even that. It's that's tough rocks. You're the wife. It has to be so egregious that actually, this man's rights in the Koran are superseded by these other things that are in the Koran that say, you just can't do that to humans. And that's a tall bar. Yes, like a really tall bar. Impossible, right? Because you can light people on frickin fire, according to certain things in the book. So I've read online again, I'm not a scholar here. You can throw people off roofs if they're gay, so you really have to like the main struggles to imagine what you would need to do to get a divorce as a woman under Islam other than, like, like I said, with the prostitution thing. Tell me what your life was like with this man, because your mother. Look, I know she's your mom. This is going to sound super polite. She is nuts. I mean, that is super polite, actually. Yeah, that's the polite version of what I kind of wanted to say. But she she grew up this very privileged, privileged situation hurt her. Your mother's uncle was the first president of Egypt, so she was like, I assume kind of loaded growing up, you know, living the life, living the dream she was when she was young. But as it happens in these countries, when there is a government in power and then the next government comes into power, they have to like, eradicate the guy before they have to like, flatten him and his family. There is no like a peaceful transfer of power, ever. And so, yes, when she was young, she was incredibly they were very rich. She was very privileged. They had all sorts of, you know, huge mansion and servants and blah blah blah. But when she was still young, they lost everything. So she didn't continue growing up like that. They still thought of themselves as fancy people, even though they were all like sardines shoved into this apartment building together. They still in their minds. They were, you know, descendants of right. Your mother obviously endured some abuse, too. She poured hot oil down her brother's throat, which as a parent just makes me want to cry immediately. That wasn't my mother. It wasn't. That was a story of a woman that was telling me that her mother had done that. Ah, yeah. And that was to show that people read my book and they think, Oh my gosh, I can't believe things are so horrible. I can't believe things like that happened. And as many people from Afghanistan and Somalia and Sudan and Yemen and all around the world, you know, they read my book and they think that I lived a fairytale existence because you got to go to school and things like relative, yeah, yeah. I think of girls in Afghanistan right now and how they're living. Just compare my life and how I grew up to girls in Afghanistan right now who are not allowed to go to school, not allowed to leave the house unless they're covered head to toe in this burka, you know, they're not allowed to get educated in order to get jobs. They're not allowed to. They're not allowed to do anything they can barely allowed to breathe. And so I was always very aware of it being so much worse for so many other people. And I did always feel privileged as part of the reason why I didn't write the book for so long because I felt like, who am I to whine when there's so many people that have it so much worse? But then in the end, it wasn't about whining, it was about educating, and it was about letting people know this is happening in your backyard. And if you don't care about what's happening in Afghanistan or what's happening in Pakistan, what's happening in Saudi Arabia, then care about what's happening on your own soil. At least it's creepy to think that that's happening in my neighborhood, potentially. Tell me why your mother was the perfect vessel for religious fundamentalism because it seems odd to people that somebody who grew up privileged and had everything is going to then go, Oh, I want to live this almost acidic lifestyle where everything is kind of crappy, especially for me as a woman and my kids. I think it sheds light on the type of people who get sucked into this stuff. Yes, and that's exactly right. So I had asked myself that question so many times as well. And I have discovered through watching so many documentaries and reading so much on cults that single mothers are uniquely vulnerable to this. They get victimized. They get pulled into cults quite easily. Like I explain in my book, my mom and my dad were together in San Francisco and they moved to Canada, and that's when their marriage fell apart. So she didn't really know anybody in Canada, and he left her. And so here she was alone with three kids. So she went to the mosque looking for community, looking for support. She wasn't especially religious at all, but it was community issue, and she spoke Arabic and she was looking for other people that speak Arabic. She was looking for that community connection. And that's when it all went pear shaped. That's where she found this guy. And the thing about Islam is that it really is simple. It's a very simple religion. Black and white, right and wrong, and there's no room for nuance and there's no room for gray. And she was very depressed at that time. She was very kind of looking for guidance, looking for support, looking for something. And this religion came along and again, she had it in her already because she grew up in Egypt. She grew up in a Muslim majority country. So all of this stuff was already familiar to her, even though she wasn't practicing. But it basically told her The reason why your life is bad is because you're not following the religion properly. You're not covering your hair. You're not praying five times a day. You're not really Koran. You're not doing all the things that you're supposed to do. So if you did all the things that you're supposed to do, you would find happiness, you would find peace, you would find prosperity, right? She bought the bulls**t if she thought that if she repented for all her of her years of wearing makeup and miniskirts and dating boys and listening to music and whatever, and if she just started to become a better Muslim, then she would get paradise in the end. On the same sort of angle here, why do you think Western kids from affluent families went over to join ISIS in decent numbers? You probably have a fairly inside slice unique perspective on this, because that was mystifying. You know, when I heard that people went to join ISIS, I was like, Oh, these are going to be these like incel alone. No friends, nothing to live for. But it turned out like, it's like a medical student who's got a residency at a hospital in the UK, and you're like, What are you doing? You're blowing up your whole life. You're going, go die in a ditch unceremoniously away from your parents and your brothers and sisters. So in the same way that some people growing up Christian are hearing all the time about the apocalypse, the apocalypse is coming and blah blah blah. We always hear about how the caliphate is coming, how Islam will rule the world, how Muslims will get rid of the infidels. We're going to kill off all the Jews and Muslims are going to control this whole world, and the whole world will go back to a law the way it should be. Everybody on the planet will be praying to a law. And you hear about this day in and day out. Every single, every single sermon on the Friday prayers is on and on and on about this how Muslims will be victorious, blah blah blah. And so the virus was in our minds in all of our minds, and all ICIS had to do was activate it. Yeah, caliphate is here and everybody that had been hearing from their birth that this was going to happen and you have to be prepared when it happens. You have to be ready to go fight for a law. When it happens, you have to be willing to stand with your Muslim brothers and sisters against the infidels. Are you ready for that? Are you prepared for that? I mean, I've talked about it in my book How My Mom would actually name my friends. She would name them like Tiffany was my best friend, and she'd use her name and be like, Are you prepared to kill Tiffany when the caliphate rises like it was? It was that insidious. It was that deeply manipulative. And, you know, it's all kind of like, you just say what you need to say. You do what you need to do because it's not really real and you don't think it's ever going to be real in your lifetime. But there you go. It ended up becoming real. And that's why when people think that these guys got or these men and women got groomed over the internet in like six weeks or something, it's an absolute joke. No, they were not groomed over the internet. These kids were born and raised in this ideology. This is all they heard growing up all the time. It's like when you think something isn't going to happen in your lifetime. And then like if Jesus came back, all these people that are waiting for Jesus to come back. Imagine if he did how they'd react. You know, they would be so happy that they were alive when this when this wonderful miracle happened. And that's exactly how Muslims reacted when when ISIS came to be. I would imagine growing up in this culture makes it more difficult to relate to your secular friends in Canada. You said your parents were your mom was asking you to pledge to kill your friends. Not a hypothetical at that point, either. But you're taught non-believers are enemies. And on the other hand, those are the people that are being nice to you. Your mom is like selling your clothes or giving your clothes away. When you move without your permission and your friends are giving you gifts and presents and asking you to come over and ride bikes, which you're not allowed to do because this weird obsession with girls Hyman's. But that's a whole nother thing. You got to really feel like a square peg trying to fit through the round hole living in the West. Growing up like that, a hundred percent, absolutely. And as so many of us have said, it's like you feel like you're not just in a foreign country, but on another planet, which is so crazy is I'm born and raised in Canada. You hear my voice. It doesn't sound like I have an accent. It sounds like it is part of Canadian culture my whole life. I was so detached from Canadian culture. I mean, my. Husband is Canadian now, and we're around the same age, and he can talk about like songs that came out or shows or movies like he was floored. What do you mean? You haven't seen jaws like he couldn't believe it? What do you mean? You haven't seen Goonies? I'm like, I remember hearing these words, but no, I've never seen these movies. I've never listened to these songs and it was like we were in a bubble. We were in the society, but we weren't a part of it. We were completely separate, living parallel. And you can physically see that in in so many countries today, like like in France or in Sweden, in Europe, in the UK. My gosh, it's very clear there. One woman that I was speaking to grew up in Scotland, and she grew up in such a Pakistani ghetto that she actually does have an accent and her mother, Scottish, her mother was a convert. Wow. But she was was so separated from the rest of the world around her, and you see the same thing with the Hasidic Jewish communities in New York. You'll find people there that are like they've only ever spoken Hebrew, like, you're in New York or Yiddish? Yeah, yeah. And you don't even speak English without an accent. We're physically there, but we're not a part of the of the society. This is the Jordan Harbinger Show with our guest, Yasmin Mohammed. We'll be right back. This episode is sponsored in part by HIV, and you may have heard buzz about ketone supplements and how they can boost your workouts by helping your body use fatty acids for fuel. But do they work? I was skeptical at first until I tried it, so I've been taking vitamins, ketone IQ supplements before my morning workouts, and I'm a believer now. I suppose that just the shot of Ketone IQ gives me energy, but also focus. It's kind of like a feeling of being in the zone without the anxiety and jitters of coffee. When you know when you've had too much coffee, you just feel horrible and like your heart's going to explode. Ketone IQ comes in portable, convenient shots, and Vernon wants you to know that it's back in stock. Perfect for on the go cycling rides, long runs, even running from meeting the meaning back to back. One fair warning and I've gotten a lot of feedback from you guys about this as well. The taste is bitter. It tastes like it works. They know it. I like that. They don't try to hide the flavor with sweeteners. You've had that stuff too. It's kind of gross. Just keep it pure, baby. I don't want to scare you away from trying it, but just be prepared for the taste. It does really work. I feel much more focused and less hungry during workouts. Better endurance. I don't get that slow down towards the end, nearly as quick. So if you're working out hard or you're training for something, definitely give Ketone IQ a try. And I'm curious, write in and let me know what you think as well. For 20 percent off your order of Ketone IQ, go to the Amazon.com promo code Jordan. Again, that's HIV Amazon.com promo code Jordan for 20 percent off Ketone IQ. This episode is also sponsored by Human Monsters podcast. Do You Love True Crime? If you're ready to take on another true crime obsession? Check out human monsters. Fair warning the show does not spare any details. 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Because man, they are just putting their neck out, sometimes going into these episodes, especially the ones that are risky. Talking about China or talking about a certain religion, I mean, this is really they are really putting their their butts on the line to learn more about our sponsors, all the discount codes, they're all at. Jordan Harbinger RT.com Slash deals and you can only search for sponsors using the search box on the website at Jordan Harbinger RT.com as well. Thanks so much for supporting those who support us. It really does keep things going, and it makes it possible to continue creating these episodes week after week now for the rest of Part one with Yasmin Muhammad as a parent of small children or any children. A lot of the book was actually very, very hard to read, as you might imagine, because you grew up in what almost sounds like Abu Ghraib, a level of abuse and control. And yes, I realize the irony of using that example. But I do it on purpose because it really is. You're living in a basement and like even other people came over who were other, I guess, sort of strict Muslims and the like, what are you doing? Why is your family living like this? It's just weird, man. You got to move them out. And finally, I think you're I'll say weird uncle, even though he's your mom's husband, even he was kind of finally embarrassed into making changes just because it was so repressive. It was just weird by any standard. Seemingly at that point. Yeah, and it's not even just about normalising child marriages, but it's about revering child marriages because Muslims are taught that the Prophet Muhammad is the best example for all humanity for all time. So what? However he lived, his life is the best way to live your life. So that is what they say about a man who married a six year old child. So that's why there are so many girls forced into sex slavery. It's essentially sex slavery. These are children. It's really upsetting how Muslim women can be victims of child marriage themselves and then go ahead and push their daughters into child marriages as well. Like, it's become such a vicious, normalised thing. It's like female genital mutilation. Same thing. The most vicious things about women become so normalised, and to be honest, the women are just as responsible as the men are. So this sort of misusing their set, but everyone misuses it sort of brings about the question here. The idea that is the religion, the abuse here or is religion merely the vehicle for the abuse here? In other words, do you think you would be abused by this family and these people, even if you had no organized religion because it sure sounds like they were a bunch of kind of kooky, nutty, abusive people? So I have two responses to that question. The first one I'm stealing from Sam Harris, where he brings the example of the family of Jehovah's Witnesses, who have a little girl who needs a blood transfusion. And if she doesn't get that blood transfusion, she's going to die. But they choose to let her die because blood transfusions are against their religion. When that happens, we don't think, are those people just crazy? And, you know, wanting to just kill their daughter? Would they kill their daughter even if they were a Jehovah's Witnesses? Are they just the kind of people that don't value human life? Like, we wouldn't ask that question in that context? That's true. But for whatever reason, it's different when it comes to Muslims. So from that, you can glean that my answer is these people are indoctrinated into a belief system that turns them into monsters. It erases their humanity. It tells them your basic humanity and what you believe to be right and wrong. You must ignore and you must follow what you are told to do and you just like every other cults, they can be led to drink in the Kool-Aid and killing themselves and their kids, or all of the other ridiculous things that people have done. It's an indoctrination. It's a brainwashing. And the second answer to that question is this religion offers sanctuary to abusive people. So when we go back to that verse and I mentioned about instructing a husband, if you fear disobedience or arrogance from your wife, then you should do X Y Z and then beat her. Now that's not to say that every man is going to beat his wife if he fears arrogance or disobedience from her. But it's going to say that when a Muslim man chooses to beat his wife, he's got doctrinal support. He's got support from the creator, the almighty creator of the universe, to beat his wife. And so there is no court system, there's no law enforcement, there's no criminal system. There's no nothing that is going to supersede. There's no human that's going to tell him, you can't beat your wife after a law has given him permission to beat his wife. So, yeah, it indoctrinate them into this belief system and then it creates a protection for them to continue. Like when we were talking about the child marriage issue. That's why the child marriage issue is so difficult. This is why we can't progress. This is why these Muslim countries can't progress. And this is why it's so difficult for feminists to get any progress in these countries is because the religion has fossilized people's minds into fourteen hundred years ago, it was just stuck. And so while cultures grow and change and progress in this religion forces people to just get stuck in time. It is the root of so many of the evils that are happening in these countries, because if you break this, if you allow people secularism, then if people aren't brainwashed into doing these things and feeling that if they don't do them, then they're going to burn in hell for eternity or they're never going to go to heaven, then they won't want to naturally do them. That does make a lot of sense. It's sort of hard to separate what percentage of this is being born into the wrong family versus what percentage is cultural or what percentage is, Hey, this is what this book encourages or even mandates in many cases, because a lot of folks are going to say, Hey, this is not the normal everyday experience of a Muslim woman growing up in Canada. Come on, Jordan, you're cherry picking an example. It's particularly horrible. And on the other hand, you're right, if we don't criticize things that need to be criticized, they don't progress. They they fossilize. They calcify. We got rid of slavery and other horrible things here in the West Way. Too late, I might add. Do we have work to do? Yes, we know this because we hear criticism of America and Canada every single day in the news, all over the place. But somehow it's just not OK to criticize these other cultures to back to what we were talking about at the top of the show. You go online and you go, Yeah, it's really backwards that this place. I was talking about Iran and North Korea on a podcast, and it was a live thing. And I said, These are terrible governments. They don't do the, you know, the people who live there are. And someone was like, Aren't you being a little ethnocentric? And I was like, It's ethnocentric, mean standing up for people to have the right to be gay without getting thrown off of a roof or thrown into a concentration camp because they didn't worship the fat old leader of this country or the old group of old men that marry kids, then yeah, I guess I'm being ethnocentric in that I stand for human rights and these people stand for authoritarian, oppressive, totalitarian nonsense. It's just like, why are we trying to draw this weird line where I'm the weirdo for sticking up for people who don't want to be raped as a child? That's just weird. I absolutely agree with that. 100 percent people have taken this cultural relativism as moral relativism. This ethnocentrism to like some ridiculous degree where they forget that we're all human beings. So an ethnocentric, you know, that would be something like judging French people for eating frog legs or judging, you know, Chinese people for eating scorpions. You know, I know they don't all do that, but that is one they're. Yeah, that's you saying. That's gross. Meanwhile, here we are over on this side of the world eating, I don't know, deep fried butter. Yeah. Yeah. Corn dogs. Right, right. Course. If you think about it, yeah. Any hot dog related item is gross. Yeah. When I when I grew up, my best friend was Persian, when I was a kid and they sat on the floor and eat dinner. And I remember one day I said, This is so weird. And her mom, his mom, said, It's not weird, it's just different. And I was like, Oh, that's true. It's just different. I'm used to sitting at a table that's ethnocentric. I was like, nine. Exactly. This is different. We're talking about human rights. Nobody in their right mind is going well. Some cultures rape kids, and that's just the way they are. Yeah. Well, actually, let's give the example of your wedding, because this is perfect. This is a perfect example of just how bizarre this is. The story of your wedding paints such a grim image you wrote. I'll just start you off with a quote from your own book. I just sat there is strange women did my makeup, and I kept crying and ruining their work. They would just touch it up and continue. Nobody thought to ask what was happening or why we were doing this. And in Islam, silence is consent. So if you're getting married and you just cry through it, that's consent. And it's again, remember, this is Canada. This is not a village in Yemen or Saudi Arabia somewhere or Oman or whatever. This is a girl getting married in Canada and is crying nonstop uncontrollably, and everyone's like, Oh, OK, I'm just going to wipe that thing a mascara off and redraw it. And you'd think sane people would go, What the hell is wrong with this picture? You're supposed to be happy. You're obviously not happy. Somebody's got to talk to your mom and say, this is obviously not right. Your daughter's crying and shaking. It's like you would expect somebody to be when they're hearing the verdict on in a murder case for their son or themselves. This is you in the makeup chair at your own wedding, and nobody thinks, Oh, maybe we should be concerned about this. No, because that's probably what they looked like on their wedding day. And that's what they expect their daughters to look like on their wedding day. And it's just brutality, but it's normalized brutality. So it's like when I was referencing before female genital mutilation, child marriage. So many aspects of this misogynist religion are carried out by other women. This kind of brutality of women, these kinds of vicious things that happen to women wouldn't be able to happen without the consent and active participation of other women. And as a really difficult thing for me to come to terms with, it really was because it's so easy to say, Oh, it's the men, oh, it's patriarchy. But you know, it's women that take a razor blade to a little girl's clitoris and slice it off. It's not men that are doing that. Yeah. Thank you for using that example because I don't want people to be able to say that this is some kind of one off thing. I mean, there's a practice of a lot of this in a lot of places. And also, you mentioned that. Maybe there's not FGM, female genital mutilation happening in Canada, although I bet there is. But you can take your daughter to another country to go visit family and she comes back without a clitoris, right? I mean, that's how this works a lot of the time. That's exactly it. Yeah, which is horrifying. From the U.S., from everywhere. This is something that the Ayaan Hirsi Ali Foundation is is working strongly on in the UK. The statistics were absolutely atrocious. The numbers of girls that were ending up going to the doctor because of complications, because FGM is done, you know, these are not done by professionals with their sterilized equipment, right? These are just like aunties. It's not a done no. This is just random, you know, stop happening in and they have like a party and it's like, it's this big celebration because she's like entering womanhood or whatever. It's not regulated in any way. And so they would go for, like you said, vacation cutting. They would take the girls to wherever Somalia, Egypt and come back and there'd be complications. And then so they'd end up in the hospitals in the UK, astronomical numbers of kids with complications due to this mutilating of their bodies for no reason. And even though it's against the law, even though it's a criminal offense, nobody's ever been prosecuted. When you don't prosecute people for doing a criminal activity, you're basically saying, Hey, don't worry about it, just keep going. Nothing's going to happen to you. You are endorsing it. It's like criminalizing it as a waste of time anyway, and they know that nothing's going to happen to them. It's crazy to me to think about when you think about female genital mutilation, because if you look, if you circumcised a young boy, OK, it's a medical thing. It happens in a hospital. And it's not the same. I think a lot of people don't realize that this is more like cutting someone's penis in half. Rather than cutting off the foreskin, you're cutting away a piece of the foreskin. Yes, it's a piece of it. I'm sure it hurts. It's different when it's a baby, although I still think it's barbaric. TMI, my son's not circumcised, but it's a completely different ballgame. I think people like to equate these things, and it's just not the same. You're talking about taking, in many cases, a young pre-teen girl and literally cutting off a piece of her vagina, not cutting off of the tip of the skin. It's just completely different and way more painful and again, not regulated. If you tried to circumcise your kid in your bathroom and you took him to the hospital and they said, What the hell happened? And he said, Well, I didn't want to pay the doctor, so I took scissors to my son's penis and I may have screwed it up, and I didn't realize they would take your kids from you. And if we heard about religious fundamentalists marrying 13 year old girls off to old men, we would kick the door in and send in a SWAT team. We did that in Waco, Texas. The Branch Davidian cult was marrying young girls, and the whole country was like, What the hell? And we burned it down and accidentally killed pretty much everyone inside, except for the women and children who were let go. Not exactly the FBI's finest moment, but we did something very drastic about that. When it happens in Canada, we say, Well, you know, we have to respect people's religions and it's ridiculous. It's insane, it's actually insane. It's actually insane because you're talking about us all as if we are all human beings. That's why, because you're not differentiating between this group of people and this group of people, you're saying, we're all human beings, we all have the same bodies. When you beat this child or beat this child, they're going to have the same amount of bruises. They're going to have the same amount of psychological childhood trauma. When you cut this girl's clitoris or you cut this girl's clitoris or whatever it is that you're doing, you're marrying off this nine year old child or you're marrying off this 13 year old child, whether it's happening in Afghanistan or whether it's happening in Texas. These are human beings. These are young girls and they deserve to be protected. But what's happening is other people do not view us as equal human beings to them. They see us as something different. They see us as something subhuman, to be honest. They really don't think that when these things happen to us, that we are just as traumatized by it as they would be if it had happened to them. They think that for some reason, when it happens to us, it's OK because of the accident of birth, because we have been born on a different part of this spinning rock that we're all on. That somehow makes us fundamentally different from them. That's one of the most difficult things for me to be able to understand from people who call themselves liberals anti-racists where they can say in one breath, they can go on and on about how they support the LGBT community. But then when you talk about OK, but in Iran, they'll execute people for being gay and then they'll tell you that you're being ethnocentric or that you're being Islamophobic or whatever. Like, like. Exactly like you said at the top of this conversation, it's like they remove their brain and they throw it in the garbage before they're able to have a conversation with you. Suddenly, they forget what feminism is. They forget what liberalism is. They forget what human rights are. They forget what religious fundamentalism is. They recognize it. When it's Christian fundamentalism, of course they do. My God, right? Try and not bake a cake for a gay couple, and they'll remind you that they're very aware of what Christian fundamentalism is. But when it comes to Muslim fundamentalists, when it comes to Muslim extremists, when it comes to them stabbing writers, the Batley Grammar School teacher in the UK, is in hiding with his whole family, and he's still better off than the teacher in France who was beheaded in the streets when he was on his way home to his wife and son. All of these things are happening and we can't talk about it. Are you kidding me? If these were the Westboro Baptist Church doing this, or if these were any group with white skin doing this, you would be able to have this conversation and you would understand why this criticism is very valid and why we need to have this conversation. But because they happen to have a little bit more pigmentation in their skin or because they happen to come from a different geographical location, suddenly they can't have this conversation and they can't recognize it. So the only difference is that they're not seeing us all as human beings. You're right, it's kind of like the only logical conclusion is you're just put in a separate category because of cognitive dissonance and the fact that it doesn't. These two ideas that we can't be racist, but also it's not racist to say these certain things about this one particular kind of religion. It's like, Oh, my brain can hold these two things together. So I'm just going to err on the side of not thinking critically about this at all. You started to break free of this, especially while you were back in Egypt. You were taught to originally ignore your gut feelings and your intuition because it's from the devil. And any time you questioned anything with respect to Islam, you were literally slapped in the face or at least rebuffed. No room for critical thought in the household. I think your mother was kept saying the devil makes you question, which is really rich coming from. I mean, wasn't Islam, weren't they like the earliest scientists? I mean, there was this whole renaissance where the science was developed by these and that it's like, Now let's throw that all at the window. Go back like five more years to get rid of all our gains here. You give a really good example of how your Egyptian extended family responds to curiosity and questions. Tell me about your uncle. He's eating like this candy bar. This is such a great metaphor for the level of thinking that's not going on over there. It was such a moment for me. It was such a shocking moment. But yeah, he was eating a candy bar with crisps in it that had, like, you know, puffed rice Rice Krispies. And he said, I wonder what these crispy things are and my chocolate bar and I said, it's rice. And he started laughing and he's like, What do you mean? It's roast? Hahaha. And I'm sure there's some chicken in there too, right? Like, ha ha ha i like because rice and Egyptian food is like, it's a staple. You know, it's like if you think of like Asian food or something, you know? So it's always very savory and it's always part of every meal. So he just could not. He couldn't believe that it would be rice puffed rice that was in his in his chocolate bar. And I'm like, Read the ingredients. He's like, I don't need to read the ingredients. What do you think? I am stupid. Of course it's not rice, and I'm like, Just read the packaging that he wouldn't even read the packaging because he was so sure that there's no way that it could be rice in there and that it was so stupid for me to even come up with this, you know, c**kamamie idea that there could be rice in his chocolate bar. And yeah, that's pretty much what it is like. You know, they they're so sure that they know that they're unwilling to learn, they're unwilling to look further. Once you say, I know, once you say this is the truth, I know the truth. You stop learning at that point. It's not just ignorance, but it's ignorance that is just celebrated and enshrined as almost like a virtue. Yes. I'm not going to read the label because it might tell me something that I don't want to know and disagree with, and I'm so deluded that I'm not even uncomfortable saying that I might learn something else. I'm just going to pretend it can't happen. Yes, and that is exactly why the term Islamophobia is used to shut down criticism to shut down conversation because they don't even want to engage in discussion. They don't even want to engage in any kind of discourse because it's like, this is the truth, and we cannot question it. And that's it. We must move forward. And it's like cyborgs. This is the software that's been put into them and they cannot like, you know, like a horse with blinders. They cannot look. They cannot speak. They cannot acknowledge that there could be any other ways of looking at the world. I wanted to give you a quick. Site of the episode I did a while back with skating legend Tony Hawk, Tony virtually defined the entire sport of skating and was innovating in the knees before anyone even gave it a second look. His marketing and business savvy and stories of some very close calls really made this a good one. I picked up skating at the tail end of its first boom in the 70s. That was the trend. And then when I discovered the possibilities and I literally saw people flying out of empty swimming pools, that was my wow moment. There was like a danger factor. There was this edgy factor and I just devoted myself to it. I wonder how to fly for guys who considered yourselves nerds an outcast, you were pretty tough. That is the defining moment. If you want to do this seriously or continue to do it is the moment you get hurt. One of my worst injuries at the beginning was I got a concussion and knocked my teeth out. I knew when I woke up in the pro shop of the skate park that I wanted to get back out there and do it. I can't believe people still recognize me. I can't believe that I get recognized for skating because that was never something. There was a goal. There was never something that was an option when I was younger. The most famous skaters when I started skating were only known to a very small group of skateboarders. They were in the ski magazines. They were definitely not on TV. They weren't considered sports stars. I still feel strange that I get recognized. You know, it's weird skateboarding now. Some people get into it to be rich or famous. When I got into it, neither one of those things was even possible. For more with Tony Hawk, including how he almost lost control of his brand entirely. Check out episode three to four of The Jordan Harbinger Show. All right, like I said, lots to discuss here. That's the end of part one, part two coming up in just a few days may already be out, depending on when you're listening to this. She's a great guest, as you can hear, and much more to dig into in part two links to all things Yasmin Mohammed will be in the show notes to Jordan Harbinger accom transcripts in the show notes videos on YouTube advertisers deals and discount codes, all at Jordan Harbinger RT.com Slash Deals. Please consider supporting those who support the show, especially in controversial episodes like this one. 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The fee for the show is that you share it with friends when you find something useful or interesting. If you know somebody who's really interested in this kind of extremist religion or an inside, look at this kind of thing or is like one of those hardcore atheists, they might like this to definitely share this episode with them. The greatest compliment you can give us is to share the show with those you care about. In the meantime, do your best to apply what you hear on the show so you can live what you listen and we'll see you next time. Hi, everyone, this is Gillian with court junkie. Court Junkie is a true crime podcast that covers court cases and criminal trials, using audio clips and interviews with people close to the cases. Court Junkie is available on Apple Podcasts and podcast WonderCon.