In the United States of America, I see that Muslims as individuals, as organizations,
as a community are present everywhere. If anything there's more listening to them than
less of listening to them. I want to juxtapose that with the plight of Christians and Jews
and Atheists and ex-Muslims and gays in the Muslim world. I'm not talking about the war-torn
places; I'm talking about the places where there is order and the way Muslim societies
respond to that. And if I were a vocal Muslim individual or a vocal Muslim organization,
I would use my energy to highlight what we as Muslims, those of us who were brought within
Islam in our own countries are doing to Christians and various sects of women and Jews and all
that. So, I have to be quite honest with you, I don't buy much of this whole victim thing.
Then there's another metric. In places where people are oppressed and persecuted, people
don't go there. Christians are fleeing Muslim countries. Muslims are flocking to originally
Christian countries. I'm not a Christian. I'm not religious in the least. I'm an atheist.
But it's a mere observation. So I think in a way these organizations are playing not
only non-Muslim Americans, but they're also playing the Muslim communities that they target
to make them feel that they're victims of some illusion, some form of persecution that
they are not in order to band them together and then manipulate them. And it's up to us
to investigate these things.
I remember in the Netherlands, a band of Muslim women saying we've been spat upon. And we
said, "Who did the spitting?" And we looked into it. Nobody did the spitting. She said
ultimately the woman who said she was accused said, "I thought he was going to spit on me,
but it didn't happen." Women who were saying, "We were looked at differently," well, if
you cover yourself from head to toe in black you are going to attract attention. I know
a little bit about Islam. The whole idea of covering the Muslim woman is based on so that
you as a woman may not attract attention. If you find yourself in a society where people
are not covered from head to toe in black and you cover yourself from head to toe in
black, you are going to attract attention. So if people look at you, it may not be because
they hate you or they want you out of the country; it may be because you are interesting.
You are just as if you have walked off a Darth Vader set. That's probably why they're looking
at you. I think we need to have this sort of honest conversation with them instead of
indulging that I am a victim of. But obviously they're hiding and this is what we're seeing
in our own society that all kinds of segments of people in our society feel that they are
a victim of this or a victim of that in the freest society in the world. If you're victimized
in America, goodness me, how would you have survived the rest of the world?