March 28, 2018

Guests:

• Shazia Hobbs: Hobbs is a former Muslim. When she was 18, she was made to have an arranged marriage that she did not want, which resulted in her suffering great abuse and beatings from her husband. After 3 years, she left her husband and was disowned by her former community. This is a tragic story, and we empathize with her greatly. We also philosophically agree with her that female genital mutilation must end. All that said, all of her credibility goes directly into the rubbish bin because she is clearly working with Tommy Robinson, noted conman and xenophobic agitator. Tommy Robinson tried to pick up on a 15 year old Muslim girl on Twitter, so if she's involved with him, it begs serious questions. All that said, genital mutilation is a problem, and there are a lot of non-Tommy Robinson related organizations working hard to stop it.

Narratives:

Most of the first hour of the show is dedicated to building up and screaming about anti-China narratives. Part of this is absolutely rooted in providing cover for Russia by saying, "but what about China, they're the real bad guys!"

This argument would hold more water if the things that Alex chose to criticize China about were more rooted in reality. Take, for example, this clip:

According to Alex Jones, China has the "keys to the kingdom," an analogue to something in the movie Elysium, because of course it's something from a movie. He's making the claim that China has control over all our telecommunications and that Google gave them that access recently.

The problem is that Alex is lying about what Google did. If you read the actual story, it's very clear that what Google did (which still isn't great) is that they moved the encryption keys for Chinese Google iCloud users to a local company in China, which all but guarantees that the government will have access to users' information. This has literally nothing to do with iCloud data for customers around the world; they are not encryption keys for anything except Chinese users.

A legitimate criticism would be that Google should defend privacy, and maybe should choose to cease doing business in China, rather than give the government free reign to access users' data. An illegitimate one is what Alex is doing: creating a fake version of the story to scream about because it kind of fits in with his larger conspiracies about China and Google.

Alex spends a lot of time on the show kind of obsessed about how cultures treat women. His contention is that the West is "based on worshiping women:"

His argument fails to account for the fact that women weren't allowed to vote for the first 144 years that America was a thing. It also fails to account for the fact that until 1922, women lost their citizenship if they married a foreigner, because it was just assumed that she had to be subservient to her husband (women still wouldn't be able to retain their citizenship if they married an Asian man until 1931). Alex seems to not know that it was completely legal to just not allow women to practice law in the United States until 1971. This is to say nothing about how until very recently, the idea of beating your wife was so common and uncontroversial that it was a frequent joke in popular culture.

If these are some of the manifestations of a culture that "worships women," we need to examine what the hell worshiping means. We know damn well what he's talking about, and false worship is nothing more than a bullshit public face for suppression and cultural abuse.

Also, this sort of shit would sound a lot less like a rationalization for him to treat women like things (instead of as autonomous individuals), if he didn't say that a female caller was sexy, completely unprompted later on this very show:

Alex has an interview on this episode with Shazia Hobbs, and most of it is just Alex trying to use it as an opportunity to attack London mayor Sadiq Khan as an "Islamacist."

What this came from is that in a video for the End The Hate campaign, Khan read a tweet of Hobbs's and editorialized that she was preaching hate. For context, the text of her tweet is as follows:

“If you use a knife to mutilate your daughter’s vagina will the full force of the law be brought down on you? Asking for a Muslim. Thanks.”

I'm thinking, possibly, that the reason one might have a negative response to this tweet is the "asking for a Muslim" part. It kind of paints the picture that Muslims are the only people who engage in genital mutilation, which is patently absurd. Christians throughout Africa engage in the practice, among plenty of other groups around the world. It's not an Islam issue, it is a men abusing women issue.

This highlights one of the very interesting hypocrisies of Alex Jones and his circle's approach to Islam. On the one hand, they argue that all Muslims are violent and dangerous because they believe that the Koran is violent, and Islam is a very orthodox religion. They make this argument to imply that whatever words are literally in the Koran, all Muslims must literally follow.

But then, as it relates to female genital mutilation, they will ignore that the prophet Mohammed said:

“Trim, but do not cut into it, for this is brighter for the face (of the girl) and more favorable with the husband”

They will ignore that Islamic scholars have interpreted the texts on the issue to be prohibiting of the behavior of genital mutilation, but permissive of circumcisions that do no harm to the recipient. Dr. Abd al-Rahmân b. Hasan al-Nafisah wrote an article on Islam and female circumcision where he concluded:

“In Islamic Law, preservation of the person – the life and bodily soundness of the person – is a legal necessity. Anything that compromises this legal necessity by bringing harm to the person is unlawful”

It is much easier to scapegoat an entire community than it is to realize that all groups contain abusers, and figuring out who they are is a complicated process. In American culture, we've seen how abusers like Harvey Weinstein use their positions of influence as shields that protect them from the truth getting out. It's no different in other cultures, even if the positions of influence aren't "fame," but instead "community stature" or something along those lines.

Anyway, this is all to say that Alex is stupid.

But on this episode, he's not just stupid, he's incredibly scary. There is a real violent anger in Alex on this show, and it just keeps popping it's head up:

This sort of rhetoric is wildly dangerous, and is a sign of where Alex's head is at. It's a really sad glimpse into a man full of impotent rage, lashing out at an imaginary enemy while scapegoating real people who suffer real consequences, all the while sexualizing his female callers.

This was a pretty messed up episode.