02/26/15 – Daniel Haqiqatjou – The Scott Horton Show

Hey, I'm Scott Horton here.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
Our first guest on the show today is from MuslimMatters.org and is co-author of an article, What is Islamic?
A Muslim Response to ISIS and the Atlantic.
Daniel, welcome to the show.
I won't try and fail to say your last name.
Could you say it for me, please?
Yeah.
So, the last name is pronounced Haqiqat Jun.
So it's a mouthful for sure, but thanks for having me on the show.
Yeah, I was not going to be able to get that right, but thank you very much for joining us.
I really appreciate it.
I really appreciate this article.
There have been a few different articles pushing back against the Atlantic peace, but I really like how you just kind of take us through it in listicle format here.
It's the best way to get our head around it, I think.
Why not?
So I guess, first of all, if you could, please tell the people very briefly about this article in The Atlantic by Graham Wood, what ISIS really wants, and then we'll get to the objections here.
Sure.
Yeah.
So, what we're trying to do with this piece is really try to put some context behind The Atlantic's essay from Wood, and really try to show that he presents it as a kind of theological analysis of ISIS.
And really, there's no problem in that in and of itself.
Of course, we need to understand these violent groups in order to fight against them or to be protected against them.
But he's going further, and he's saying that, well, ISIS is actually Islamic, and this is dangerous because I'm a Muslim, I'm living here in Los Angeles, my family's here, there's millions of Muslims in the United States, and we all practice Islam.
So if you're telling the people, the American people at large, that look, this violent criminal group is actually following the teachings of Islam, then that raises a lot of suspicion about Muslims here, and it's dangerous, it's breeding Islamophobia.
We saw a lot of hate crimes recently directed against American Muslims, and also in Europe and France, a lot of violence directed toward our communities.
So this is dangerous, it's alarming, and what was particularly egregious about Wood's piece is that he's kind of presenting it as objective reporting, because it's nothing new.
I mean, there are a lot of different bigots out there talking smack about Muslims and Islam, but he was kind of taking this more supposedly objective route, and we kind of wanted to uncover what's really going on underneath that surface or that facade.
Well, and it's been a huge article, and it's getting mentioned all over the place.
I read somewhere they're saying it may be the most widely circulated Atlantic piece ever.
And I just want to hit myself on the head when I read this.
And the thing of it is, is there's a lot of truth in the article, it's mostly, it seems like the lie is by omission, I think that's a lot of y'all's criticism, is what's not in there.
And to be fair to Wood, although he kind of doesn't deserve it, but it seems as though since he wrote this thing, he's been very happy to retweet and acknowledge all these criticisms against him.
And I saw him on Fox News, where they thought they were going to bring him on to give us some good old-fashioned Daniel Pipes, Frank Gaffney Muslim bashing, and the first thing he said was, now listen, ISIS and their view is completely contrary to everything that every other Muslim has ever believed since the religion was invented, including all the billion-something of them that live on the planet today right now, so let's just get that clear.
So yeah, too bad he didn't start the article that way, but at least now he seems to be backpedaling a little bit.
Sorry, there's no Muslims who have ever agreed with these guys, ever.
But yeah, no, they're Islam distilled though.
I guess every other Muslim doesn't believe in their own religion, you're all just a bunch of Easter Sunday types and that's it.
Yeah, yeah, precisely, and he has kind of backpedaled a little bit.
I mean, in the original article, he has one line that says, you know, he says nearly all Muslims don't agree with ISIS, but I mean, the damage is done, like you've already put out this piece, and he's gotten a lot of coverage on Fox News and other outlets like that.
So it's really playing into this kind of agenda that's been laid out for him, and he kind of plays the part really well as this kind of academic, even-leaning-left voice that agrees with us that it is really Islam that is the problem.
So it's dangerous.
That famous Cheney-I-even-the-New-York-Times-says kind of thing, right?
Even a liberal Atlantic admits that this isn't George H.W. Bush and Bill Clinton's fault that we have a problem with terrorism.
This isn't because Madeleine Albright went on TV and gloated and mocked the Arab and Muslim people of the Middle East and said, yes, 500,000 dead children is worth it for a policy that is obviously not working to remove Saddam Hussein anyway.
No, no, no, it's not that a bunch of American monsters butchered and starved a million people to death and laughed about it.
That's not the problem.
The problem is this terrible perversion break-off of Judaism and Christianity, this Islam.
You just got it all wrong, obviously, or else how come you're all so violent?
Yeah, precisely.
I mean, that's kind of the narrative here that Wood's Atlantic piece is really serving.
I mean, the irony is that even when it comes to President Obama, just recently there was this countering violent extremism summit that they had in Washington and what was alarming to a lot of Muslim groups, advocacy groups in the U.S. is that it focused heavily on Muslims and this idea that there's this threat of home-grown terrorism, which we haven't seen.
We've seen a lot of FBI entrapment, as you mentioned, but it's ironic that we have a president and he says, I don't want to use the term Islamic terrorism to describe ISIS or Islamic.
I don't want to call ISIS Islamic and that's what Obama said, but in the past he has called on Muslims to denounce ISIS, which I mean, Muslim groups have been for quite a while, but still he makes that connection with Islam.
Why should Muslims in particular have to denounce ISIS?
Why can't we look at American foreign policy and see that as in a big, big, major way culpable for the rise of this group?
I mean, there's also been a lot of turmoil in that region for decades.
It's not just Obama's fault that this group has come along at this time, but still, even with Obama, you have this focus on American Muslims and in the piece, we describe this as kind of a McCarthyism reborn here, where as opposed to communists being under the spotlight or alleged communists, now Muslims are the alleged terrorists or we're guilty until proven innocent.
We have to be the focus in these countering violent extremist summits and even back in 2011, there were sessions in Congress looking at this issue of the American Muslim community.
So, I mean, a lot of dynamics there.
All right.
Yeah.
And that's a great place to pick this interview up.
On the other side of this break, we're talking with Daniel H. from MuslimMatters.org.
We'll be right back.
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All right, you guys, welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
It's my show, The Scott Horton Show.
And we're talking about ISIS and Islam and what white non-Muslim Atlantic writers write about ISIS and Islam with Daniel H., co-author of this piece at MuslimMatters.org.
What is Islamic?
A Muslim response to ISIS and the Atlantic.
And when we were interrupted by the break there, Daniel, you were talking about this McCarthyism kind of witch hunt atmosphere.
And you're absolutely right, and to me it's so manufactured and obvious that, you know, because there are no enemies, really, you know, they have to kind of make them up.
And where, you know, the Soviet Union actually existed, and when they had their alliance with the Chinese, they dominated a good third of the planet under their communist totalitarianism.
There is no Islamo-fascist caliphate, except for now, finally, over the last year, there's arisen one in the worst part of the worthless desert of Iraq that's left over after the Shiites took Baghdad with George Bush's help.
And you know, the eastern part of Syria, where they have one major city, and all of the rest of Syria is still under the control of the government there.
And so this is the Islamo-fascist caliphate that we're all supposed to be so terrified of, that we all know that our government created, you know, indirectly in the first, well, and somewhat directly in the first place.
And so, well, what the hell, how about hate and fear your neighbor?
How about all Muslims here and there are out to get you?
It's good you mentioned McCarthy, because that's trying to pretend that the Kremlin was in your neighborhood somehow.
And communism had gone way out of style by then anyway.
The chance of communists having real, you know, power and influence in America by the era of Joe McCarthy was long gone.
So anyway, it's the same kind of level of nonsense.
And yet, I'm still only looking at it from a privileged, supposedly, a white guy with an English surname.
I'm not having to live under this.
I'm just watching on the sidelines of Paul.
But I wonder, you know, how bad it sucks to be Muslim in America and be under this cloud of suspicion raised by these liars, these propagandists.
Yeah, I mean, it's, it is frightening.
You know, my, my first name is Daniel.
And if you probably saw me on the street, you wouldn't know that I'm a Muslim unless I told you.
But as for my wife, for example, or other family members, my wife wears the hijab or the Muslim veil.
And you know, we do get dirty looks.
And it's kind of scary with the shootings that happened in Chapel Hill.
Pretty much, you know, it seems clear as a hate crime that Craig Hicks, the shooter was, you know, upset or he was angered by the fact that the husband and wife, the wife was wearing the veil, the Muslim veil, and that enraged him.
And he went on this kind of shooting rampage.
So it's, that was a terrible tragedy, and it really rocked the American Muslim community.
And so, you know, we have to worry about, look, is there anyone following us?
Is anyone, you know, trying to keep tabs on us?
It's very frightening.
And I mean, other groups have gone through this before in the past.
I mean, look at World War II, Japanese internment.
We haven't reached that level yet, thank God, for Muslims.
But I mean, there's, you know, the discourse that's happening around us is very hated, hatred, you know, a lot of hatred, a lot of fear that's being peddled to the American people.
And it's, you know, it's sad that your own neighbors can't, you know, look at you with suspicion.
Well, and the whole thing is such a mess, too, because, and especially if you're asking somebody who is even susceptible to this kind of propaganda to then, you know, discriminate in a careful way, I mean, you know, they end up just attacking Sikhs or, you know, they don't realize, for example, most American Arabs are Christians, not Muslims.
And most American Muslims are Asian, not Arabs, this kind of thing, you know, like they just end up lashing out at people who've done nothing, or you end up with FBI agents targeting people who are from communities, like in the Lodi, California entrapment case, where the Pakistani community in Lodi had been there for generations, right?
And then all of a sudden, they're treated as this alien presence, like they all just landed there from Mars or from, you know, enemy land across the sea or something.
And it was only because the FBI themselves had drummed up this fake crisis by infiltrating an informant into the community that was mining its own business.
Right, absolutely.
And I think that, you know, it's just an example of pure racism.
And people sometimes ask, well, Islam is a belief, you know, it's a religion, it's not a race.
How can you be racist against Muslims?
Well, you know, you see non-Muslims who look brown, who are brown and look Muslim, they're getting targeted.
It's not like bigots are interrogating their victims as to what they believe.
So it is, you know, the manifestation, the ugly face of racism, you know, that has plagued our country for centuries.
Yep.
Well, you know, and it only takes a certain amount of the population to really believe in it, to kind of get everybody else to think that, well, there must be kind of something to it if they don't know anything about it.
And you know, like you mentioned how often in the article you guys talk about how, you know, organized, you know, Muslim groups constantly denounce extremism and terrorism and yet are constantly accused of never denouncing terrorism.
And of course, it's all BS anyway, right?
You know, your next door neighbor does something.
You don't owe me an apology for that anyway.
That doesn't mean anything anyway.
But of course, people, you know, the organized groups are doing everything they can to prevent themselves from being even further marginalized by trying to get out ahead of these accusations, but still doesn't seem to do any good.
Yes.
I mean, that's the frustration is that there are Muslim groups even before 9-11, like even with the Oklahoma City bombing, there are Muslim groups that were denouncing that, you know, as, you know, an act of terrorism, even though that Muslims weren't involved with the Oklahoma City bombing.
But even back then, you know, Muslims have been constantly and regularly denouncing terrorism and this kind of egregious violence.
But you know, that message falls on deaf ears.
And at some point, it just becomes like banal, it becomes tiresome to engage in this kind of back and forth of, you know, these accusations, unfounded accusations against Muslims and then having to constantly apologize.
It puts you again in this kind of psychology that you're always under suspicion and that has major impact to, you know, the psychological health of the American Muslim community.
So we shouldn't, you know, forget that aspect.
And other, you know, racialized minorities experience that as well.
Well, you know what, let me double back and try to play devil's advocate some more on this thing.
There's this expert, Bernard Haeckel, who says, and you quote him in here from the Atlantic article, saying that, hey, man, the people who deny that ISIS is, you know, to their very bones, Islamic, you know, and Islam in practice, why they're just basically lying about their own religion.
They have a cotton candy view of their own religion and that all of this stuff is straight out of the text.
So, I mean, is that right?
Is it is it not the case that, I mean, after all, Caliph Ibrahim has a Ph.
D. in Islam from Baghdad University, they say, and all of this.
So they sure call themselves the Islamic state.
Maybe you're just, you know, it's not your flavor of Islam.
And so you're in denial and not willing to admit the, you know, profound, radical Islam, fundamentalist extremism, terrorism going on here.
What about that?
Yeah.
So this Bernard Haeckel, I mean, he's from Princeton.
He's an academic there.
And it's I mean, one connection or one interesting connection is that, you know, Bernard Lewis, one of the main intellects behind the Iraq invasion and one of the advisors to George W. Bush was Bernard Lewis, also from Princeton.
And so, you know, sometimes we have experience with academics misguiding our foreign policy.
But that's just a side note.
But as far as Haeckel here, you know, he's taking a very academic approach to what Islam and what is Islamic.
And he basically admits in within that article, as well as other supplementary clarifications he made that were quoted in thinkprogress.com basically says, look, as far as I'm concerned as an academic, if you're a Muslim and you just cite anything within the religious text, that's all it takes to be Islamic, like from an academic perspective, you're Islamic.
So he's using this very loose, broad definition of what is Islamic.
And what we point out is that, look, if you know, you can have any killer or mass murderer call themselves a Muslim and do all kinds of atrocities and maybe cite something in the Quran or the Bible, for example, or any other religious text and then say, oh, yeah, this is an Islamic act or this is a Christian act or a Judaic act.
And we went by that.
It's not, you know, that's not how we're using the term Islamic.
When we say something is Islamic, we mean that it's, you know, implied or it's the text and Islamic law is directing you to do this.
And as it turns out, you know, all Islamic scholars, not just in the West, but even in the Arab world and all over Asia, have denounced ISIS and said that, you know, what you're doing is not in accordance with Islamic law.
And for Wood to just talk to a few, you know, as we call them ISIS fanboys that he interviews and then come up with a determination that, oh, yeah, what they're saying is right and ISIS is Islamic, you know, that's completely biased.
And it's not really objective reporting if you're kind of omitting all these other voices.
Yeah.
In fact, even in the article at the beginning, although he doesn't really develop the argument or he kind of denies the importance of his own point, he compares ISIS and their view of Islam to sort of the Branch Davidians view of the Bible and not that they were murderers.
They only defended themselves.
But he's just saying no one would claim that just because David Koresh, you know, has even memorized massive parts of the Bible, that that means that he's gets to be the expert on telling what the rest of the world, what Christianity is and means.
No, actually, he had his few dozen followers and that's about it.
And if you had asked any other leaders of any other denominations of Protestants or Catholics or anybody else in America, they would have said, no, actually, that ain't quite right.
They would have found plenty of reason to explain why he doesn't deserve the influence he has over his group, et cetera, et cetera.
And so that's kind of built right in there.
And then he kind of turned or turns around and and ignores that point that this is obviously, you know, a pretty bad break off.
And then, of course, he he doesn't bring up the context of any of the history.
I don't even know if he really even brings up the Iraq, the second Iraq war, much less the first Iraq war and the era of the blockade and the sanctions and all the reasons that Al-Qaeda said that they attacked us in the first place and or even why it would be that the average Arab Muslim born in the 21st century would even look and listen to one of these crazy Salafist, Takfiri, whatever bin Laden night radicals who who advises you ought to die in battle soon instead of living a life.
Why would they listen to them other than because there are explosions going off all around them and because people that they know have been killed violently by Americans or people in the Americans employ, et cetera?
Why else would they target us?
And that's the real lesson here, it seems to me.
It's the same thing about Paul Wolfowitz and Richard Pearl.
They were the crazies in the basement in the Bush senior term, and they were allowed to kill people in South America, but they weren't allowed to mess with Middle East policy at all.
Once September 11th happened and Paul Wolfowitz said, hey, we got the blueprint for what is to be done, people decided, hey, this guy seems to know what he's talking about, even though, of course, he didn't.
But it's the same sort of thing here that this is all we're talking about real human beings in time and space.
It's not like we were all floating on clouds living out of, you know, simply what books say.
It's a it's a planet.
It's a war.
And in this article, he just kind of forgets the war, that there's a freaking war going on here, man, and that there has been.
Yeah, I mean, the things that the Iraqi people have gone through and now the Syrian people as well.
I mean, I don't think that we living here have any conception of the horrors that they have experienced.
I mean, just in terms of being occupied, you know, birth defects when it comes to the use of depleted uranium that the U.S. used in their munitions, causing these like nightmare inducing birth defects to your children.
You know, you've had family members blown to bits or maimed, raped by soldiers.
I mean, there's been a lot of cases of this and it's just horrific.
And a lot of the suicides that we see amongst U.S. military personnel is because of this kind of what they have seen, post-traumatic stress and what they've they've done or been commanded to do by their superiors.
And so it's very depressing on all sides.
And then, you know, if you've experienced that kind of apocalyptic circumstance and that lived reality, then it's no surprise that you're going to have a warped sense of what, you know, life is and how to deal with it.
That's not to excuse any of the atrocities and, you know, crimes that this group is committing by no means.
Of course not.
I'm saying I'm not saying that, but it that that it goes a long way in understanding and explaining kind of where they're coming from.
And it's much more relevant to look at that as opposed to like, you know, these guys citing a verse of the Koran, for example, like that's, you know, all Muslims read the Koran like we're not all violent, murderous criminals like this.
So what's the difference there?
All right.
And now, by the way, and I'm sorry, we're overtime, but if you could talk for just, I don't know, 30 or 45 seconds or a minute about I guess we could do about a minute about this joint letter that was signed by virtually every Sunni religious authority on Earth last year about ISIS.
Could you describe that, please?
Because it did not get much play on TV, I don't believe.
Yeah.
So basically, all of these clerics are coming together and they're denouncing in point by point, you know, on a theological level, why ISIS is wrong about the specific things that they do, because, you know, they do cite texts and they do try to, you know, manipulate texts to, you know, post hoc justify the crimes that they commit.
So that's kind of a nitty gritty rebuttal to that.
And I definitely recommend people read that who want to know the specifics there and how ISIS is, you know, crazed theology kind of connects, you know, to what they're doing and how actual religious authorities, Muslim authorities throughout the world have responded to that in detail and then judge for yourself.
And then also, I mean, one thing that Wood kind of implies is that Muslims who deny that ISIS is Islamic are kind of being politically expedient and they're just saying that because they're living in the West and they don't want to kind of draw this heat to themselves.
But you know, a lot of these scholars signing this response to ISIS, this document, they're not living in the U.S., they're not living in Europe.
They're from all over the world.
They don't have this kind of agenda or this kind of self-preservation as a motive.
They're just responding authentically to these religious arguments and providing rebuttals.
So definitely check that out.
Yeah.
All right.
I'm sorry.
We're way over time.
But thank you so much for your time, Daniel.
And say your last name for me again, please.
Hafiqatju.
All right.
There you go.
And he's at MuslimMatters.org.
I really appreciate it.
Thanks, Scott.
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