Prominent ex-Muslims on Gaza and Christianity: an Ideological Disaster
Apostate Prophet, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sarah Haider, Yasmine Mohammed embrace the enemy of their enemy
A few weeks ago YouTube recommended me a video by PragerU named ‘A Palestinian explains Hamas in 5 minutes’. Knowing PragerU’s general agenda, noting the topic they chose, that got me thinking about the absurdity of our political and media landscape.
The only people who will speak on the evils of Hamas are those who find no guilt in Israel. The people who do find guilt in Israel, on the other hand, will completely deny its right to exist, and will demand official statements from every pop star on the matter. I have witnessed very few people making the conscious effort to stay outside this dynamic and simply provide information.
When your only sources of information on a war are the two sides at war (and their activists and sponsors), it’s not information you’re getting, it’s propaganda. That’s not a trap I want to be in.
Yet here I am, accepting my fate. And I’ve been watching a few popular ex-Muslims to find out how they see the conflict. As an ex-Evangelical and atheist, the ex-Muslims I’ve been exposed to have been English speakers who have partnered with or been interviewed by ex-Christians. That is the lens I’m looking through. I very much welcome comments by Muslims and ex-Muslims on their experiences, observations and opinions.
My impression is that many public ex-Muslims have forfeited intellectual honesty in an ‘end justifies the means’ campaign.
They’ve taken the side against violent Islam, and any enemy of Hamas has become their friend. Israel, despite its violations of international law and its far-right government, is one of those friends. Christianity has also become an ally for some of them, and they seem to see it as a sort of remedy against Islam. And the tens of thousands of dead in Gaza are rarely mentioned in their discourse.
Despite the deep trauma I acquired while in Evangelical Christianity, I would not wish death upon Evangelical Christians. So what is happening in these people’s minds?
I’d like to start with the perspective of the one of the total of two public ex-Muslims I found who looked critically at what’s happening. I may reach similar conclusions to his by the end of this article, but I want him to be at the first to speak to you.
A voice of reason
Apostate Aladdin has 34.3K subscribers. Like other ex-Muslim YouTubers concerned with retaliation against apostates, he wears a mask when on camera. In this video, at 19:44 minutes, he says,
The people that Apostate Prophet and David Wood fearmonger to about the dangers of Islam creeping into their lives… most of them have never truly faced any of it, and likely never will. And whatever valid criticism and warning these two have about Islam, it gets buried under their hypocrisy and hate.
At 24:32 minutes, he explains,
The world of a vocal ex-Muslim activist is a hostile world, regardless of where we are. It’s no secret that Muslims generally do not take kindly to apostates, especially ones who are critical to their religion openly. They demonize us, threaten us and persecute us if they can.
That is a reality that a lot of non-Muslims are afraid to acknowledge lest they be perceived as bigoted and hateful. That makes us isolated, and we struggle to find allyship or community, and sometimes we lose touch with the Muslims in our day-to-day lives — out of necessity or comfort. Perhaps that reduces our exposure to Muslims to the worst examples we see online or in our lives. Add that to the anti-ex-Muslim hostility rubbing off on us, and it’s feasible that some of us get stuck in that spiteful state for a very long time.
In the Arab world, it’s a lot more difficult to accuse an ex-Muslim of bigotry or racism, because they’re among their own kind. And they’re constantly exposed to Muslims, because they live among them. That comes with its own challenges to ex-Muslims, but it also grounds us and reminds us that there’s more complexity to humans than what they say they believe.
I will quote Apostate Aladdin again later, when we’re deeper in the mess created by Apostate Prophet. But for now, let’s look at a famous new Christian.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali converted to Christianity and thinks that ‘queers for Palestine’ is a stupid concept
Ayaan Hirsi Ali is an author and activist. As a young woman in Kenya she was radicalized by the Muslim Brotherhood. Later in life she escaped to Western Europe and deconstructed her faith. She became friends with Richard Dawkins, and was welcomed warmly by what outsiders seem to call ‘New Atheists’. She was described as the horsewoman to go with the Four Horsemen of Atheism (Hitchens, Dawkins, Harris, Dennett).
Most recently, her conversion to Christianity was announced with this article on UnHerd in November 2023: Why I Am Now a Christian.
That article has been discussed broadly, including on Medium. I’d recommend Dustin Arand’s article Ayaan Hirsi Ali is Just Cosplaying Christianity.
So I’d like to summarize for you a conversation Ali had with Richard Dawkins after the article came out, here. Dawkins’s recent dive into persistent public transphobia has made me cautious of him, but in the case of this conversation, I find his typical directness incredibly useful. He insists on the important questions until she attempts an answer. “You don’t really believe these fables, do you?” And when she does answer, the reason for her faith is “I want to believe”. The reason for her faith is “Christianity is the antithesis to Islam”. The reason is “I was deeply depressed, my therapist suggested that I was spiritually compromised, so I tried religion”.
I’d recommend Apostate Aladdin and Secular Spirit’s reaction to this debate here.
Now, I remember hearing Hirsi Ali say the phrase ‘the mind virus of wokeism’. I googled her name together with that phrase, and behold. A Fox News article titled Ayaan Hirsi Ali says wokeism has ‘remarkable similarities’ to White supremacy: ‘The rotten idea of our time’.
Hoover Institute scholar and activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali linked wokeism to White supremacy in her address at the National Conservatism conference in Orlando.
Where did I go next? To the website of the National Conservatism Conference, of course. Take a look at a few of this year’s speakers.
But let’s stay with the Fox News article for a second. I have a paragraph for you that we’ve all been waiting for. Ali has an answer to a common complaint, namely that no conservative person can define the nebulous ‘wokeness’. She says,
“One reason why it’s difficult to pin down wokeism is- is that the theories of deconstruction are constantly expanding with grievance after grievance. Sometimes I think this ambiguity is intentional. If you can pin an idea, you can expose it… But if its meaning keeps shifting, with the grievance of the day, it becomes elusive. It’s not social justice theory. Weirdly, though, it’s not a theory at all… You can’t treat it like other theories that is by taking it through the process of scrutiny for certification or verification.”
You see? It is wokeism’s own fault that conservatives can’t pin it down. But we must believe that it is scary.
For a person who deconstructed her faith, the implication that we’ve deconstructed too hard is quite funny. Perhaps she thinks she herself deconstructed too much? Perhaps she thinks she should not have deconstructed the need for religious faith, only Islam.
But above all, for the purpose of my article, I’ve cited this paragraph to help us locate Ali within conservatism. Her important role is not only to be the person of color that makes racists look less racist. Her role is to intellectualize their insane takes.
What does she get out of it? I’d venture to guess that she gets something that feels like a weapon.
An atheist ex-Muslim, just like any other ex-religious person, spends a lot of time between the hammer of religion and the anvil of pure chance. On one side, judgement from religious and ignorant people. On the other side — a worldview that leaves you and your loved ones at the mercy of godless chance.
But unlike most other ex-religious people, the ex-Muslim often fears for his life. The enemy insists that apostasy must be punished by death. A weapon would be useful.
As for a possible financial motivation… I dare not speculate on who funds Ali. I have no information on this. But we do know that conservatives have their think tanks, they have their churches providing funding, and theoretically, if you support Israel, AIPAC may want to give you a hand.
Moving on. You know what they say if you’re LGBT and you call for a ceasefire in Gaza.
“Those Muslims would throw you off a building, why do you support them?”
What do you suggest then, should I support those who murder them? Including their children and their queer people? However woke Israel tries to look, its dumb bombs don’t discriminate. They don’t stop and ask ‘Are you queer?’ before they turn you into meat chunks.
But Ayaan Hirsi Ali has this to say about Queers for Palestine:
Families, if you’re a Muslim family and within your family, there’s someone who’s suspected of being gay, it’s the obligation of the family to commit honor killing. So it doesn’t even go as far as the government and tribunals and trials. But when that happens, it’s done quite publicly, and it’s done in the most gruesome fashion. So ‘queers for Palestine,’ I think, is another manifestation of how our society is really becoming stupid.
Once the dog whistles start to fly, is there a way back into sanity, or have we lost Ali the way we lost Rowling? I’m pessimistic.
YouTuber Apostate Prophet went to Israel hand in hand with a manic Christian apologist
Ridvan Aydemir, a.k.a. Apostate Prophet, is apparently the ex-Muslim YouTuber with the largest following — 511K subscribers. A couple of years ago he started teaming up with David Wood, a radical Christian apologist who got famous for losing touch with reality in his ‘testimony’ video. I remember I got irked out of following Apostate Prophet when that happened.
This year Ridvan went on a trip to Israel together with David. During that visit, I saw him nodding along to an Israeli political scientist who claimed that ‘the notion of Palestine being Arab emerged only in the 60s’.
Ridvan thinks that some of the Israeli illegal settlements in the West Bank are bad and some are good. His stance on the war is that the IDF should go harder on Palestinians.
I searched ‘David Wood’ on Ridvan’s YouTube profile, I’m scrolling, and the list of videos they made together just won’t end. Observing David and Ridvan in conversation, I hear not only a shared hatred of Islam, but also an ex-Muslim who challenges many religious people but never his friend. David makes fun of Ridvan’s atheism and never gets a reaction that would imply that Ridvan has self-respect.
Let’s go back to Apostate Aladdin, because I want an ex-Muslim view on this that isn’t bloodthirsty. In a live stream on YouTube, he said,
A lot of ex-Muslims are distressed, because they look at the vocal ex-Muslims and they see that they’re so flippant about it, they’re so gleeful about the war. They’re so pro-Israel to the point where they won’t even acknowledge that settlements are bad, they think it’s justified, and they [the many ex-Muslims] feel troubled.
Is what Muslims say about us true? There’s this narrative that ex-Muslims are paid Zionist shills, and they’re unempathetic and hateful. And then they look to people like David Wood or Apostate Prophet and they see confirmation, and they feel stateless. They feel like they don’t know who to identify with. I hope that they can see that we don’t all have that opinion.
Secular Spirit, who was the other side in that live stream, added,
Yeah, the sheer number of Palestinian ex-Muslims, atheists who reached out to me over the past couple of months… it was really revealing to me that there is this voiceless community. Wow, there’s actually someone who sees the problems with what these big ex-Muslims are doing.
Source: this video at 1 hour 51 minutes.
Yasmine Mohammed wants me to shut up
Yasmine Mohammed, who I remember being interviewed by Seth Andrews years ago, now errs on the side of ‘Hamas is the main culprit of the war in Gaza’. Yasmine’s videos in the past few months don’t ever consider the tens of thousands of victims in Gaza and the collective punishment they have suffered. The only time I heard her mention those victims was when she said, in this video, “Those people protesting in the streets for the liberation of Gaza, none of them paid attention to the We Want to Live campaign”.
I do not feel the need to apologize, Yasmine, for not receiving or researching information on the Gazan We Want to Live campaign. My lack of knowledge or interest back then does not mean that I have to shut my mouth forever.
If my neighbor Recep Tayyip Erdoğan ever decides to take back the Bulgarian land that his country once owned, and you come out to protest for my freedom, I will not ask you what you were doing last time Bulgarians protested against the high prices of electricity, the corruption or the homophobia in our country.
Israeli bombs supplied by the West killed tens of thousands in Gaza, and a lot of people in the West got activated and protested. We’ll all have to accept this truth. It tends to be the hardest to swallow for people like Yasmine, who do not want Gazans to be treated as humans.
Ex-Muslim organizations don’t seem to have an opinion… but…
Judging by the websites of Ex-Muslims of North America and the Council of Ex-Muslims of Britain, those two organizations have no opinion on the Gaza conflict. This may be because of the (perhaps varied?) positions of their donors and members.
Or because they would not want to look bad in front of ex-Evangelicals and their organizations. We ex-Evangelicals tend to be skeptical of unconditionally supporting the state of Israel. We remember the John Hagees of this world who offer that unconditional support — so that Israel can fulfill biblical ‘prophecy’ and bring forth the end of the world.
And then there’s Sarah Haider, cofounder of Ex-Muslims of North America, who is free to express her individual views on X.
You see an example of two things Sarah is concerned about: wokeism and Islam. It’s a strange combo, but apparently wokeism is letting Islam f*ck it to bits, and we will soon witness their chestbursting babies.
Return of the chestbursting babies
Andrew Gold’s YouTube channel Heretics promises varied points of view and then interviews mostly conservatives. I’ll give you two of his titles: The Left’s Hypocritical Love Affair With ISLAMISM — Nuriyah Khan and Woke Useful Idiots HELPED Islamists Take Power — Apostate Prophet.
I’ve no energy left to explore this topic. I do remember ex-Muslims getting mad at some liberal people’s support for World Hijab Day. I myself do not support World Hijab Day, but I will not call people useful idiots. They feel like they’re supporting women’s rights to wear whatever they want. And a lot of hijabi women will honestly tell you that this is exactly what they want to wear.
If someone wants to put an end to Western liberal support of World Hijab Day, they should strive to inform people in the West of the origin and meaning of hijab. You can’t teach people you’ve insulted. They just won’t be in the mood for it, you know.
So that’s as far as my contribution goes specifically on the ‘liberals in bed with Islam’ topic. Because the amount of information my mind holds and my feeling of disgust are overwhelming.
The research I did for this article has left me disgusted with how prominent ex-Muslims halt on their way to free thought. Then they take a sharp right toward hateful, almost fascist ideas, and pull people with them.
A minute for Salman Rushdie
I have not seen Rushdie identify as ex-Muslim, but his words are heard and read and respected in this sphere. I was in shock when I heard of the knife attack two years ago, and I’m delighted to see him victorious and happy, still freely expressing himself and continuing his career.
Middle East Eye quotes him:
I have been in favour of a Palestinian state for most of my life. But if there were a Palestinian state now, it would be run by Hamas and we would have a Taliban-like state. A satellite state of Iran. Is this what the progressive movements of the western left want to create?
I would not be so sure in my predictions of this parallel universe. Simply because of a factoid I learned at the very start of Israel’s offensive last year: “For years, Netanyahu propped up Hamas. Now it’s blown up in our faces” (The Times of Israel).
This is not a mic drop. I did not just win a debate against a great writer. The conflict is still complicated, all radical religions are still dangerous, ethnic cleansing is still happening. Religious freedom is not easy to achieve, educating people is difficult in such heated, bloodied times. And I will always be repulsed by those who use outrage and fear to grow on social media and dehumanize a group of people.
