Part V: ISIS, Islamic Reform, History, and Being Quoted out of Context

In Part V, we go over a breadth of topics ranging from Islamic history to the question of being quoted out of context. One of the first points I raised was that there would be no Talmudic parsing of individual sentences or words. I’m not on the witness stand and this format is creepy enough. But that is exactly what happens with the word “nonsensical.” At one point, while talking about how much he hates the journalist Murtaza Hussain, Sam Harris, brings up the fact that I co-authored an article with him (this was his attempt to impugn my credibility), and this ensues:

SH: But to come back to the point I was actually making. Murtaza Hussain, your co-author —

OA: — Can you tell your listeners what that article was, what we were co-authors of?

SH: It was Op-Ed in The New York Times.

OA: And what was it about?

SH: I forgot.

Classic Harris. Brings up an article based on who the co-author was, tries to use it as a cudgel, and knows nothing about what the article was about — in this case, a virulent criticism of the maltreatment of migrant workers in Qatar and the Gulf. This is not what serious intellectuals do.

SH: We can get into history if we ever get there, but the issue is that today, every one of these degrees of commitment to attitudes and behaviors that are totally hostile to everything we care about in an open, civil society. There are degrees of commitment to those noxious, and divisive, and dangerous beliefs and behaviors that one can draw directly out of scripture. And yes, undoubtedly, there are Muslims who want to live in open, creative, peaceful societies, who do their best to ignore the least convenient passages in scripture, just as Jews do, just as Christians do, and I have always acknowledged the presence of these people. And in fact, the extreme version is I hear from the ex-Muslims or the Muslim freethinkers or Muslim atheists who are in hiding, trying to figure out how to better their lives and their societies, in a context where to speak too plainly about the problem of scripture or the problem of believing that the Qur’an is the eternal and perfect word of god, is to apply, if not a death sentence to yourself, to a life-deranging contest in their society.

OA: Yeah. I think you denigrate those people though when you say that they don’t take their religion seriously. They take the jihad verses seriously, but they contextualize them within the history of Islam and they don’t think that any two-cent preacher with an ugly beard on their face can just denounce another Muslim as takfir or can blow up a suicide vest with children around. The hardcore Salafis and Wahhabis and ISIS folks, they need to be opposed — you can use the the Qur’anic tradition, the Qu’ran itself, the Islamic tradition, the Islamic precedent, to oppose them and there are reformers in these communities who have doing that because they are the primary victims of them. It’s not that, “Oh, there are these jihadist verses over here and this licenses extreme killing of civilians at any time or terrorism at all times.” I mean, Bernard Lewis, for example, who I think we would agree is a great historian, he said himself in his books on Islam that there is nothing in the Islamic text or Islamic history that would justify the kind of suicidal terrorism that we have seen in modern times. The people who are on the front-lines against the jihadists and violent Salafists, are using the texts and the traditions and the laws and the precedents, to oppose them to their face.

SH: It’s interesting that you bring up Lewis because he’s often disparaged as a neocon shill by Islamists and Muslim apologists.

OA: I think he’s a very good historian.

SH: So many of your fellow Muslims — I would say most — hate the guy.

OA: Many on the left in general dislike him as an orientalist.

SH: Much of my view of Islam and the relevant history here has been informed by Lewis, but just to back up here, what do you think Maajid is doing, or attempting to do in reforming Islam? You give him no credit for his efforts here, he is precisely engaged in this kind of theological effort to contextualize, to rebut, to find some way forward, theologically for even the most devout Muslims.

OA: Do you think that’s new, Sam?

SH: It’s not new but it is rare and the proof of its novelty to you should be just how reliably someone like Maajid is disparaged by his fellow Muslims. And it’s not only Maajid, it’s anyone else who is doing similar work gets disparaged as an apostate as a sell-out as an uncle tom as a porch monkey.

OA: Well, I never used those words.

SH: But you’re totally disparaging him and his whole project and you’re essentially articulating the same project. You’re saying this should be done and I can show you how Maajid is attempting to do just that and yet you’re saying Maajid has no credibility, he’s an opportunist, this is completely defamatory of the tradition, and our collaboration together is just the height of arrogance and selfishness and intellectual waywardness and the stuff he spells out in the book is very much along the lines of what you just described.

OA: Perceptions are very important and historically, left-wingers and progressives and reformists, who were either bankrolled by or associated with right-wingers or what we would today call neoconservatives, have basically been co-opted, and it creates the perception — for example, if Martin Luther King was supported by the John Birch Society, would his values and his views and his work contain the same merit? Maybe. But he would lose a lot of support in the African-American community, I can guarantee you that.

SH: Those charges that you’ve made in this article about Maajid and Quilliam, insofar as I understand them, are false. So let’s just get those. Let’s just get back to the text and keep plotting along.

OA: Can I make one point quickly about reform not being new? In 2004, the King of Jordan held a giant conference in Amman, invited all the major Sunni scholars to give a fatwa — Shia scholars, Sunni scholars, people who are very widely followed, who have huge platforms in the Middle East and they gave a fatwa together saying that no ordinary Muslim could pronounce takfir on another. It was a message of peace known as the Amman Message and I request that your followers look it up. So this is not new. 126 scholars condemned ISIS’ views on slavery just last year, point-by-point. Amina Wadud in 2005 led the first publicly mixed gender prayer. Leila Bakthiar produced the first feminist interpretation of the Qur’an. This is an ongoing process, so when you enter the debate and Maajid claims — or at least has this aura about him — as him being the first reformer, it alienates a lot of people on the ground and you speak to those people, and you know the first thing you’re going to hear is? That he doesn’t have standing in the legal sense, and in the political and moral sense in those communities.

SH: Well let’s get to that because you make that charge below, again I want to keep moving through this systematically.

OA: Sure. [Begins reading from article]: It is in the context of Project Islamic Reformation that the atheist neuroscientist Sam Harris and the redeemed radical Maajid Nawaz have published their latest book, “Islam and the Future of Tolerance,” put out by no less a publishing house than Harvard University Press. The book is structured as a conversation between Harris and Nawaz, who go back and forth over issues ranging from polling data suggesting Muslims support corporal punishment to the Islamic justifications for jihad. Compressed into its 128 pages is the entire Reformation Project, except that the book’s contents are as thin as its subject is grand. For a work whose title includes the words “Islam” and “future of tolerance,” the Harris-Nawaz pamphlet consistently veers from the ahistorical into the nonsensical and back again, almost always at Harris’s urging.

SH: OK, well is still a little more throat-clearing from you, but I want to respond to the charge that what I’ve said in the book is either historically inaccurate or nonsensical. Now, our differing readings of history are going to be difficult to reconcile here given how difficult everything has been thus far. But that, I think, doesn’t actually matter much, because as I told Maajid in the book, nothing in my account turns on history. In my view we have to deal with the world as we find it. Whatever the origins or the significance of something like the crusades, that doesn’t change the fact that we have to deal with groups like ISIS today and the attraction their ideology holds for millions of Muslims. So, whatever happened a thousand years ago has no bearing, in my view, on the ethical or political legitimacy of violent jihadism today.

OA: Look, the Qur’an was the same as it was a thousand years ago, and there was music and civilization and poetry and peace at that point and there is terrorism today. Which means it’s not textual, it’s political.

SH: Let me just finish this point. Whatever you think about the height of Muslim civilization doesn’t change the fact that millions of Muslims today think that cartoonists and novelists should be killed for their impiety. Debating the history, in my view, is a waste of time. The only reason why I brought it up in the book — or challenged Maajid’s reading of history — is I think many people, yourself included, are accepting a far too rosy picture of Muslim history, which is a kind of mythology, really, and it’s becoming more current in academia for reasons that are obviously political. That’s my response to the charge of being ahistorical.

OA: Christopher Hitchens praised the works of the Islamic Golden Age and Bernard Lewis did as well. People on the right.

SH: I’m not saying there was no golden age —

OA: — You de-emphasize it.

SH: I do de-emphasize it, because 1) I think it’s exaggerated, and 2) I think it’s actually not relevant to dealing with ideas as they’re currently accepted.

OA: It’s not exaggerated. The preservation of Aristotle, the advancements in optics and mathematics and political economy — these are not exaggerations.

SH: You mention that below, and let’s just deal with it when they come up in your text. I’m happy to talk about it, I’m just telling you why it’s not actually relevant to get in those details.

OA: And as for free speech, I hope we can get into that — the Danish cartoons and the Rushdie affair, because to me, again, you conflate theology with politics and political circumstances here. Those were politicized incidents that certain preachers used for their own self-interest, in one case, Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran, and in the other, an individual by the name of Ahmed Abu Laban, a supporter of Osama Bin Laden. And I hope we can get into the details, because it’s not reducible to the Qur’an or jihad or those evil, backwards Muslims over there.

SH: Alright, again, back to your text. There was a charge of being ahistorical and a charge of being nonsensical. You really think you can back up this charge that what I say here is ahistorical or nonsensical? “Nonsensical”? Really? That’s the word you mean?

OA: Well, I think it flirts with and proceeds on the point of nonsense, at times, both for its superficiality and it’s surface-level analysis, and second, for the fact that it completely excludes and excuses and takes no interest in, the politics of the situation. You are someone who has rightly condemned and talked about ISIS and militarism — in a very honest way, I should say — and yet you take no interest in the conditions that produced ISIS in Syria and how ISIS became a band of radicals that was decimated a few years ago to this mega-terrorist organization. If there was one ISIS member on earth, we wouldn’t be talking about ISIS. The fact that it exists and it has 25,000 people, Sam, has to do with politics. And your book did not address that at all.

SH: OK, well, I don’t think it has to do with politics, so we just disagree there and I hope we can have a reasonable conversation on that, but if we’re going to have a reasonable —

OA: — It was defeated in 2011.

SH: What was defeated in 2011?

OA: Al Qaeda was on the run — al Qaeda in Iraq, the predecessor organization of ISIS was basically defeated, very near to decimated in 2011. When the Syrian civil war happens, it [al Qaeda in Iraq] has territory, it has ground, the secular president of Syria releases jihadists from prison, they flood the Syrian opposition and the next thing you know, there is a Caliphate. And he [Assad] doesn’t attack them — there are no attacks against ISIS when it’s growing like a cancerous virus — there are no attacks against them until the West intervenes. And those are the reasons why, instead of ten people being in ISIS, there are 25,000. And why they’re in the front of our minds right now.

SH: But what you have to explain, if you’re going to ascribe the cause of ISIS to politics, you then have to explain why someone living in the UK, with the benefit of a degree in computer science, a third generation British citizen, or someone in medical school, or someone living in the United States and the victim of nothing, who enjoys all the freedoms that you and I do, can wake up tomorrow morning and decide that what really have to do with their lives is sacrifice their life to fight along the jihadis in Syria and Iraq right now. Now, if you’re going to call that political, if you’re going to give some tortured reading of their obviously religious motives, and their statements about paradise and their statements about Islam and their resort to the scripture, and you’re going to call that politics, then words don’t mean anything. But I’m still stuck on this word “nonsensical,” because I think this word means nothing. You say that what I say in this book is “nonsensical.” I would be amazed if you can find a single statement in the book that is nonsensical. I will pay you a $1000 for every nonsensical statement you can find of mine in the book. Go ahead, bankrupt me.

OA: I don’t have your book in front of me right now.

SH: Listen, I’ll give you a year to do this. Either you’re going to use words that you actually mean, or not. Now is “politics” going to be one of these words like “nonsensical.”

OA: Look, Sam, unlike you, I don’t cry about being quoted out of context every single time there’s a word you can dispute. To me, an analysis that excludes politics is nonsense. It’s not worthy of a serious debate because politics, especially in this time, is everything. It matters exceptionally.

SH: OK, let’s take those statements. “Politics is everything.” Any analysis of anything in human affairs that does not include politics is nonsense. Those are claims about how deep politics reaches that I think are quite obviously false, but if we’re going to talk about something like that, we have to use words that make sense and we have to — you’re attack on me just now, about “I don’t cry every time someone quotes me out of context” — the lack of charity and the lack of understanding in what I go through dealing with this issue is much of the problem we’ve been talking about thus far. I’ve been trying to shine some light for you on what it’s like to be a well-intentioned public person raising this issue, where every fucking word is parsed, in the least charitable, most inflammatory way, and where someone is obviously misrepresenting you, where their purpose is to misrepresent you. No one on the other side cares — the constituency you are talking to, the people who would read your Salon article and love it, and say “Oh, finally, there is another takedown of Sam Harris and Maajid” — the people who forwarded it on Twitter, because they loved it, like the Glenn Greenwald’s of the world —

OA: — I don’t think he did. He and I disagree about foreign policy a lot.

SH: You have a colleague, I don’t know if you still consider him a colleague, but you have co-written an article with the person who I think is the worst actor in this space, Murtaza Hussain. So I write an article entitled “The End of Liberalism?” and the purpose of the article is to worry about the rise of fascism and to worry about how the liberal blindness to the problem of Islamism is empowering the fascists of Europe, and I wrote this in 2006. And there’s a line in there which in context is absolutely clear that I am worrying that liberals are empowering fascists. The line is that in certain situations the people who speak most sensibly about the problem of Islamism —

OA: — are fascists

SH: are fascists.

OA: Do you still stand by that today?

SH: In a given context, it’s absolutely possible.

OA: There are many liberals and leftists who speak sensibly about that.

SH: More and more so, we’re talking about something I wrote ten years ago. But this is a problem — the swing to the right, which is now even becoming more obvious after the refugee crisis, and the swing to the right in our own country, where you have someone like Trump launching a credible bid for the presidency, something that would be unimaginable four years ago — that is, again, I would argue, a failure of liberals on this issue. But to come back to the point I was actually making. Murtaza Hussain, your co-author —

OA: — Can you tell your listeners what that article was, what we were co-authors of?

SH: It was Op-Ed in The New York Times.

OA: And what was it about?

SH: I forgot.

OA: It was called “Qatar’s Showcase of Shame” and it was about the immense human rights violations bordering upon slavery that migrant workers there are facing. So it’s completely irrelevant to this quotation and I think what he was — and look, I’m not Murtaza, and I don’t think you guys are probably going to have a conversation about this — but I think what he was doing is expressing the kind of anger many people have towards you for at least empowering or sympathizing with the far right in Europe.

SH: No, but I absolutely was not sympathizing with the far right.

OA: Hitchens called it an irresponsible comment.

SH: What Hitchens said about it — and it’s a very difficult thing to parse because it was in the context of writing a review of Mark Steyn’s book — but his comment was ambiguous in the context of what he was saying about Mark Steyn, but Hitch and I never got a chance to talk about the fillip he delivered against me in that essay and I consider that an instance of friendly fire, but in any case, Hitch and I were as, I think you know, were totally in sync on this issue, and he was even more hawkish than I was on specific questions of U.S. foreign policy.

OA: The big difference between you two is that in his words he never dehumanized Muslims, at least in my readings.

SH: There are people who are misreading Hitch in the same way someone like Murtaza is misreading me to make him out to be a genocidal monster. There are people who are going around and saying that Hitch once said in a talk that he would have celebrated the annihilation of the country of Iran, or he wanted to kill all Muslims outright, but when you look closely at what he was saying in that latter case, he was talking about members of al Qaeda in Iraq, and then someone like PZ Myers — this biologist-blogger-troll — says that he’s talking about killing all Muslims. But this is the kind of thing that happening to everyone who touches this issue and your collaborator on that piece you just described, Murtaza Hussain, is the worst offender on this point. He’s the one — and I was happy you pushed back against this in your article — he was the one who called Maajid a porch monkey, but he in this article is claiming that I am a fascist, who loves fascists, who is supporting fascists, who would support the Golden Dawn Party, who wants to turn immigrants into lamp shades. But when you actually read my article, clearly all I am doing is worrying about the rise of fascism, and I actually say in the article is that these people are almost as bad as the jihadists themselves. So there’s no way for a charitable reading, or even a coherent one.

OA: I think Murtaza was responding to a number of comments you have made.

SH: No, he was telling people that I am a fascist, and he has done it over and over again. And to come back to Hitch’s disagreement with me —

OA: “Irresponsible.”

SH: What was irresponsible is that line was so easily lifted out of context and used to slam me falsely and used apparently to signal some kind of support for fascism that it was irresponsible to write something that could be so easily lifted out of context.

OA: It’s outrageous to say something like that, to write a sentence like that.

SH: It was not outrageous in context, but it was irresponsible to not foresee how it would be used against me, or how it could be used to some alternate purpose.

OA: I think it was inaccurate too, though. I’ll give you an example of a writer who has criticized multiculturalism from the left —

SH: You’re changing the subject, I don’t want to go down this path. The only reason I brought this up is because of the line you just spoke — “I don’t cry every time I’m quoted out of context” —

OA: I expect it.

SH: But you’re denying how malicious this is. Because with a certain level of malice, it is impossible to write anything and not have it used against you uncharitably. My classic example here is if I wrote somewhere that “Black people are apes. White people are apes. We are all apes. Racism doesn’t make any sense.” Someone like Murtaza Hussain now —

OA: This is nonsensical because there’s no evidence he would do that. Look, I know Murtaza — I don’t know him well — but he’s well-intentioned and he attempts honesty —

SH: What he did in this article on fascism was every bit as egregious as this. There’s a Muslim on Twitter, who, I don’t know if he’s published elsewhere, he’s a lawyer on Twitter, I believe his handle is something like @MuslimIQ. He used this quote out of context. In one of my books — I believe it was Letter to a Christian Nation — I said rape is natural. Orangutang’s rape. Dolphins rape. Human beings, going back centuries, have raped. No would ever argue, on the basis of the fact that rape is natural, among primates, that it is good. Or that it is worth defending. Or that it is not worth condemning. Or that rapists shouldn’t be in prison.

OA: I mean, you have to be held accountable for your words. I would never write that kind of sentence. “Natural” has a certain meaning — I would say that “rape is evolutionarily engrained,” according to how we have evolved as a species.

SH: I was talking about the naturalistic fallacy. It’s called the naturalistic fallacy for a reason. The idea that everything that is natural is somehow good is obviously wrong, and I was proving that it was wrong by reminding people that rape, among other things we are desperate to get rid of, like tribal violence, is perfectly natural. And if someone can go back and take the sentence out of context, and then pretend that you are using it in defense of rape — if you’re going to say that is a justifiable thing to do intellectually, you’re no one worth talking to. You’re intellectual career is over.

OA: You’re quoting other people’s words and you’re asking me what I think of them. I didn’t launch that allegation against you.

SH: You just declared some sympathy for it just now.

OA: I said I would have phrased it differently — I would have phrased your viewpoint differently.

SH: But you put the onus on me for phrasing it that way when in context it was absolutely clear. You are going to denude our discourse of everything valuable if you play by these rules.

OA: I don’t know how we got off on this tangent.

SH: We got off on this tangent because you said “I don’t whine or cry when someone quotes me out of context.” And I’m trying to point out to you how sinister this has become.

OA: Listen, you talked about radicalization and didn’t give me a chance to respond. Now you’ve talked about all these other people who I have nothing to do with except for Murtaza —

SH: — Except for the worst offender who you just defended in the context of my raising the issue as blameless and rational.

OA: Listen, you have said things that many people would find not only offensive, but yes, bigoted. And that are inaccurate, for example. Things like “Some propositions” — and you can finish the quote for me. [Some propositions are so dangerous it may be ethical to kill people for believing them]

SH: If you are not going to play by the rules of understanding what someone is actually communicating in context, then you can say anything about anyone. You can make anyone look like a bigot.

OA: It’s kind of like reading a holy text. You approach it with your own agenda.

SH: A plausible reading, a consistent reading, a taking of it in its totality, not an obviously dishonest reading, gets you something extreme and hostile to tolerance and hostile to pluralism. That is the problem.

OA: That’s factually inaccurate.

SH: Then it’s a total mystery why the Muslim world is the way it is.

OA: You don’t want to talk about politics. You don’t want to talk about the Syrian civil war, you don’t want to talk about Saudi power, you don’t want to talk about Iran. These are all factors that empowered an ideology — a political ideology — that did not exist before. A specific doctrine marshaled by a specific organization. You don’t want to engage in all these factors, as if we can isolate theology in a lab.

SH: Well, we can. If someone can wake up tomorrow and decide to look into Islam, someone who lives in Marin, like John Walker Lindh, or someone who lives in Orange County, like Adam Gadahn, who joined al Qaeda. Someone can decide, “Listen, I live in a culture that just wants me to drink more Starbucks and watch more music videos, and no one is oppressing me, I just want to get in this Islam business, let’s see what’s here,” and he can get led down the path to extremism —

OA: Led down the path, right, by whom?

SH: By the fucking text.

OA: Or by the fucking terrorists, too. And the radicals. If you look at the statistics that came out of France — 80% of the jihadists come from non-religious families. A majority of them go to join ISIS with their friends.

SH: That is a totally misleading statement. To come out of a non-religious family means nothing. It does not exonerate religion. There are people who find religion in their teens, their twenties, it doesn’t tend to happen in your eighties. There are people who find religion in the context of a non-religious upbringing. That doesn’t make their commitment or belief in the theology in any less religious.

OA: They find religion, that’s right. They’re “born again” into it. Added to it is this sense of excitement and joy for recreating or creating for the first time a utopian project that gives their lives a lot of meaning. If these people wanted to go and study Islam, understand it, and get the Qur’an, the textual nuances of it, they’d go and enroll in a fucking PhD program.

SH: Like al-Baghdadi? Al-Baghdadi has a PhD in Islamic Studies. Are you saying that he doesn’t have enough understanding of Islam? Is that really what’s the deficit there?

OA: I’m not sure how credible Baghdad University or wherever he went and studied this, but I will tell you this: Knowing people who have studied this for their entire life, people like Shahab Ahmed who put out very scholarly studies of this, and would basically disagree with you on everything — it’s not easy to understand. It’s not easy to understand Sharia, which is 1,400 years of precedent and law. It’s not easy to understand the original, classical Arabic in the Qur’an, in the language that it is written, and to understand the debates around it. The same way that it is very difficult to understand the Constitution [of the United States]. The Tea Partiers thumping the Constitution in their hand might think that they understand what the Constitution says, and even lawyers who are running for president don’t understand what it says, but it is a very complicated document and there are many varying interpretations and views on it that require a certain level of intellectual sophistication and institutional recognition. So, yes, I would say that if they actually wanted to understand the Qur’an and the text —

SH: This is just the point. The problem is that there are multiple understandings and this is a good thing. It’s possible to understand Islam and its texts in a way that is not the Wahhabi way. The fact that that is possible is the only ray of daylight we have here, and that possibility is something that Maajid Nawaz, is trying to push as many people in the direction of, as am I, as are you, ostensibly —

OA: — Not ostensibly. Actually. Though I don’t claim to be a reformer.

SH: There’s this diversity of opinion but what you seem to be denying is that there is a plausible reading of these texts — basically what you’re saying is that everyone who is a Salafi or a Wahhabi or a Deobandi, or some other intolerant strand of Islam, everyone who is an Islamist, is insufficiently educated on the topic of Islam. They don’t read the books enough. That is demonstrably untrue.

OA: I think that they spin, for example, the doctrine of jihad and takfir according to their own politics.

SH: But on your account, everyone does that. Any liberal Muslim is going to do the same thing. He’s going to spin it in the direction of his politics, or more likely, ignore it all in the direction of his politics, which is a good thing.

OA: I hope that the liberal will actually understand history, which, unlike you, I think is very important because this terrorism wasn’t happening before. You keep saying this, and it’s really annoying, that the Salafis and the Wahahbis and ISIS have a “plausible” reading of the text. Well, most Muslims, 98% or around there, condemn ISIS and don’t consider them legitimate Muslims —

SH: Again, I don’t know what poll you’re pulling that from, but let’s just accept it —

OA: — I have it in front of me. 100%.

SH: I’ll accept it, but first of all, it’s not true. There are polls in places like Saudi Arabia that show shocking support for ISIS.

OA: And that should not be a surprise, because Saudi Arabia was the first state that had the exact same ideology, an ally of ours, that expanded and proselytized this around the world.

SH: But there are even Salafis who reject ISIS.

OA: Yeah, they’re quietists.

SH: And there are people who want a Caliphate who don’t think that Baghdadi’s got the right Caliphate.

OA: Historically, Sam, the traditionalists and later the Salafists were politically quietist — they did not want to engage in politics because they saw it as corrupting. So ISIS’s agenda here is completely ahistorical and novel in that sense. That’s the reason why history is important, especially if you’re a Muslim person. I guarantee you this — and coming from this community, I’m certain of it — I only began to understand and appreciate the complexity and richness of Islamic history — the part that you want to de-emphasize that Bernard Lewis does not — I only began to understand and appreciate that, and even become aware of it, by the time I got to university. I’m more educated than most Muslim people on this — I can only imagine, if I had a conversation. In fact, I don’t have to imagine it. I’ve had this conversation. They don’t know about it. For them, Islam is born the day they were for all they care, and it’s what they see on television. So it’s very important. The history is very important for this reason.

Going back to the polls, yes, 100% of Lebanon, 94% in Jordan, 84% in the Palestinian territories, who are being occupied — they still condemn ISIS.

SH: Even Hamas condemns ISIS.

OA: These groups are not the same.

SH: Yeah, they’re not the same, but in many respect,s they’re the same with respect to their beliefs about Jews and women and jihad. They’re just not aligned politically, and they’re not precisely aligned theologically. But they’re close enough to be part of the same problem I have with Islamism.

OA: Theologically they’re actually father apart than you think. Hezbollah —

SH: — You imagine that I am uninformed on this topic, I am not. But I’m saying these are distinctions without a difference for my purposes.

OA: For example, Hamas has offered Israel a truce in the past. They work with Israel on security. They’re still a terrorist organization — not that you’ve asked me to say that, but I think that they are. ISIS would never do that. Al Qaeda would never do that.

SH: And also it’s very likely that Hamas would do it based on theological reasons in a way — you can also offer a truce in a totally cynical and predatory way, where you’re just basically re-arming during that truce. As you know, there’s a theological basis for that.

OA: Hamas also stopped suicide bombing for theological and political reasons, and now they actually have to rein in Islamic Jihad and other farther-right-wing groups within the Palestinian territories who want to suicide bomb. And so look, there’s more complexity here.