Name: Joe Rogan Experience #1107 - Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz
Uploaded: 2018-04-19T01:48:27.000Z
Description: Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1107 - Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-04-19. Transcript available.

Watch the stand-up comedy video 'Joe Rogan Experience #1107 - Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz' from PowerfulJRE on Comedy Buff. Published 2018-04-19. Transcript available.

Joe Rogan Experience #1107 - Sam Harris & Maajid Nawaz

four three two one boom and we're live gentlemen sam majid how are you good
thanks pleasure to
meet you pleasure yeah thanks for uh coming here yeah i'm very happy to get you
guys together i
mean that was i've been kind of looking to do this for at least two years and
finally it's arrived
what's been your ultimate goal like what was it well he i mean major is just a
superstar that needs
more exposure i mean he's like he should be running half of civilization i mean
he's he's
really that's one of those quotable things you can put on the back of a book
isn't it yeah it's a good
one yeah but you shouldn't put that one it has to be in the back of the book
for sure definitely not
on the front people who read it and go superstar i can't blurb the book we
wrote together unfortunately
so yeah that is an issue you're too kind sam thank you it's uh it's very
generous um are you are you
you suing the southern poverty law center is that what's going on yeah i in
fact have an update for
everybody because uh you know we crowdfunded uh a lot of the early costs for
the case against the
southern poverty what what did they do what is it what is it let me back up a
please um once upon a
time uh yours truly a british muslim uh of pakistani origin was listed in the
united kingdom on the
thompson reuters world check database under a category red terrorism
designation while at the same time
being listed across the atlantic in the united states by the southern poverty
law center as an
anti-muslim extremist so i was both a muslim terrorist and an anti-muslim
extremist according to
two separate lists and of course that speaks to some of the polarization in our
times in how irrational
this conversation around extremism islam integration muslims in the west has
become
i sued thompson reuters world check the database this database is no joke it's
like hsbc and many many
other banks use this database uh for background checks on whether clients can
have a bank account
with them so as a result of for example thompson reuters and their database uh
quillium which is a
counter extremism organization i founded 10 years ago had its bank account shut
down in the united states
because of the thompson reuters world check database system that hsbc subscribes
to anyway we sued them
they paid damages they issued an apology and they uh uh took my name off this
uh terrorism designation
list they have on their world check database maja i think maybe you should back
up further and just give
that your kind of your short form bio in terms of why would you ever be on a
terrorist watch list i'll do
that um but at the same time the southern poverty law center had listed me as i
said as an anti-muslim
extremist so we are also uh taking legal action uh against them and um i i will
get to your point
but i think just want to say that the i've just uh held a law firm on retainer
claire lock and they
were the ones that sued the rolling stone magazine for that college rape
scandal yeah that's right um
successfully got uh won that case claire lock which is uh an announcement made
here exclusively with
you no one else knows this yet we have retained claire lock uh they are writing
to the southern
poverty law center as we speak um i think they've got wind of it the southern
poverty law center as of
i think either yesterday or the day before they've removed the entire list that's
been up there for
two years all right they've removed the entire list which also had ayan hersi
ali on it
and it's no longer available on their website now is there logic that if you're
a critic of islam
of radical fundamentalist islam that you are somehow or another a racist extremist
so that's pretty much what they've said if you criticize islam um ayan myself
who have come from
within the community who have had that experience that somehow that makes us
anti-muslim um there are
a number of logical errors involved in that logical leap that they've made do
they have any distinction is
there anything that they write that sort of points to why they would say that
uh one of them honestly the
listed one of them was that i had a bachelor party in a strip club a year
before i got married
that makes you an anti-muslim extremist that was one of the reasons listed what
oh the 9 11 hijackers
weren't a strip strip club on 910 right so that was that that really really
listed that they actually
listed that which is part of the reason why we can prove malice because what
has that got to do with
anything that but that doesn't yeah that doesn't make any sense yeah so that
was that was a primary
reason it was one of the three main reasons they originally listed and another
one was again false
they claimed that i had called for the criminalization of the face veil for muslim
women in the west
which wasn't true i had called for a policy to be adopted where in banks and
airports where you're not
allowed to wear a motorcycle helmet you also shouldn't be allowed to cover your
face face in the name of
religion which is very different to calling for the criminalization per se of
the face veil that's like
saying you're not allowed to wear a motorcycle helmet in a bank so i believe in
the criminalization of
motorcycle helmets it's just absurd yeah it's ridiculous um so it was a mischaracterization
of
my um opinion the article two yep and the other one uh they the the reason they
i can't even because
they kept changing their reasons the actual website has been um we've got the
archive and it's been
they've been changing it each time people have been pointing out the stupidity
of their allegations
so why do they accept what is the southern poverty law centers i mean this is a
painful irony because
if you roll back the clock now you know 20 or some odd years their reasons to
exist were great i mean
this was the the flagship organization that was suing the kkk and you know
sovereign citizens and just
the far right you know white nationalist christian nationalist movements in the
u.s and in in some
cases to great effect and their and their concern obviously about you know
extremist hate groups in
the u.s was totally valid and i mean it became i mean now now that we see how
morally confused they
are people have been shining a light on them and they and they've they're this
bloated organization
that's been taking in way too much money and they're i mean it's not it it
suffers from other signs of
corruption or conflicts of interest but back in the day you know morris dee's
was you know bringing
the kkk to court and bankrupting their various chapters and that all that
looked fantastic and now
the social justice warrior moral panic moral stupidity virus has gotten into
their brains and
they can't differentiate someone like majid from a right-wing christian neo-nazi
hater of islam right or hater of of you know people from the middle east uh and
and so it is
with ian her salian i mean now ironically you're off the website now i'm on it
i think i'm on it in a
in a far more transitory way but the the the article that was written about my
podcast with charles murray
by vox hit the southern poverty law center hate watch page and so there you had
articles about neo-nazi
groups articles about the austin bomber and then me and and my podcast with
charles murray i definitely
want to talk about that but i want to give people your background for the
reason why you were on the
list in the uk in the first place had to do with your actual background so so i
was born and raised in
essex in the united kingdom and i came of age in what i now refer to as the bad
old days of
racism in the united kingdom much has changed since then for the good but in
those days uh there were
serious um uh cases of violent racism that i faced uh hammer attacks machete
attacks by actual neo-nazis
i mean i've grown up this is the irony of this southern poverty law center
listing i've grown up fighting
neo-nazis on the streets and they've been attacking me with hammers and machetes
because of the color of my skin
and you've got a bunch of white guys in alabama uh designating me in the same
breath as they would
designate these neo-nazis but that when i grew up and having that experience
being um falsely arrested
by essex police on a number of occasions profiled while the genocide in bosnia
was unfolding against
muslims in bosnia um i often say to an american audience when i'm speaking
about this we are now here
with you on the west coast in this beautiful new studio you have
congratulations thank you um and
imagine a genocide was unfolding on the east coast against a group of people
with whom you identified
and even if it's just on a human level human beings but you know even within
that a community
identification would impact you in a way for example if you defined yourself as
uh jewish and
there was a genocide against jews on the other side of this very continent of
this very country how
it would impact you on on the west coast um well sarajeva sarajeva from london
it takes us less time
to fly from london to bosnia than it does from new york to la and so it really
had a profound impact
on muslims across europe when that genocide was unfolding and and things were
never the same again
it radicalized an entire generation of course ideology had a lot to do with
that but the anger
originally came from the genocide so at the age of 16 what with the domestic
racism and the uh situation
in in bosnia unfolding as it did i joined uh hezbo tahrir which is a uh a non-terrorist
still legal in
america and in britain and across europe uh islamist organization it was the
first of the global islamist
organizations that aspired to resurrect the notion of a caliphate which we've
subsequently seen to a great
damaging effect in the form of isis caliphate um and uh their method of coming
to power was by
infiltrating militaries in muslim majority countries uh recruiting army
officers and then instigating
military coups whether that be in turkey in pakistan in egypt these are the
countries they they targeted
and their aim would be to then through the military coup set up this caliphate
which would then be an
expansionist caliphate uh and would conquer the world i mean that's it sounds
crazy that's what they
believe and that's what they're very very serious and intent on bringing about
and now people when i
say that believe me because they've seen the isis experiment unfold but i
joined a group that sought
to do that um through non-terroristic means at the age of 16. i ended up on the
leadership of that
organization in the uk uh ended up co-founding that group in pakistan in 1999
where i went i left the uk
went to pakistan um was among the first the vanguard of british pakistani
members that went out there to
set the group up uh they've been about three or four uh coup plots in pakistan
since and army officers
have been arrested for being members of this group and many of them still in
jail um i spent a year in
pakistan went back um while studying for my degree in the university of london
i would fly monday uh would
fly on saturdays and sundays to copenhagen in denmark i co-founded the danish
pakistani chapter of this
group and then the third year of my degree because i was doing law and arabic
um resulted in me having
to go to an arab country for the language year and so i chose egypt and uh a
day before the 9 11 attacks
in 2001 i ended up in egypt i went to alexandria enrolled in the university of
alexandria to study for
the year of arabic language which was the third year of my degree um of course
9 11 happened and
the climate changed the security climate changed all over the world something
we didn't know about nor
predicted and on the first of uh um april 2002 my house in alexandria was raided
by the egyptian
state security i was blindfolded my hands were tied behind my back i was then
driven through the desert
into cairo to the dungeon of the state security headquarters um in a building
known as uh as uh
al jihaz which was the main headquarters of 