Asra Nomani on the ‘Unholy Alliance’ Between the Woke and the Islamists

“He came to visit a home that I was renting in Karachi, and he went off for an interview. And he never came back. The man whom he was supposed to interview had set a trap for Danny. It was actually a kidnapping scheme. And Danny was never to be seen again.”

In 2002, Wall Street Journal correspondent Asra Nomani was in Pakistan to investigate the Islamist ideology behind the 9/11 attacks—in defiance of State Department warnings—when her colleague, Daniel Pearl, was kidnapped by ISIS terrorists—and brutally beheaded.

“That was the moment that I knew, deep in my heart, that we were in this war with this extremism. And what was that extremism defined by? It was defined by sectarianism and it was defined by the most illiberal of ideas, which is that there is a hierarchy of human value in the world,” explains Nomani. “And that’s when I first confronted the fundamental idea of ‘identity’ as a weapon.”

Since then, Nomani has become an activist on many fronts, first as a Muslim reformer—“I, as a Muslim feminist, was declared ‘Islamophobic’ because I dared to challenge the sexism within my faith and the intolerance,” she says—and now as an ardent advocate of parental rights.

“They want a dumbing down of the United States of America, and that is why they came after my son’s school,” says Nomani.

She is the author of “Woke Army: The Red-Green Alliance That Is Destroying America’s Freedom.” We discuss her book and talk liberal values, the line between free speech and character assassination, Big Tech, and soft power.

“Soft power can be more damaging and can weaken a nation and a people even more than bullets or bombs,” says Nomani.

Interview trailer:

Watch the full interview: https://www.theepochtimes.com/asra-nomani-on-the-unholy-alliance-between-the-woke-left-and-the-islamist-right-that-is-destabilizing-america_5246700.html

FULL TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek: Asra Nomani, so good to have you back on American Thought Leaders.

Asra Nomani: Thank you so much, it’s my honor. It’s so nice to have you in my home.

Mr. Jekielek: It’s fantastic to be here. It’s a difficult time in American history. This is something you have been charting, and that we’ve discussed numerous times. You’ve always identified yourself as a classical liberal. Is this whole idea of classical liberalism here in America coming to an end?

Ms. Nomani: There’s a war for the values of classical liberalism. What are they? They are simple ideas like individual freedom, free speech, and the actual value of family. Also, there is something else really important to me, which is a sense of equality, and a sense that there is no hierarchy of human value. That to me is the greatest tragedy right now, because we are in this existential threat to that kind of value system in which we really do view each other for the human beings that we are. Unfortunately, I see the kind of sectarian, divisive ideologies that so many of us have fled in order to find homes in America. I see that now taking root in the United States.

Mr. Jekielek: You’ve approached this question from a number of different vantage points. I remember we were on a panel about religious freedom together. Then, you’ve been in the parental rights movement. How did you become this fierce defender of classical liberalism or cognitive freedom?

Ms. Nomani: To me it’s about cognitive consistency. It’s about living with ethical congruity. How did this happen? It happened through a childhood and young adulthood of living in the freedoms of America, but also an incongruence with many of the messages that I was getting as a young Muslim girl. I was born in India and my family came here to the United States to enjoy the freedoms that America has provided us because of the values of classical liberalism, and the opportunity for equal opportunity. Indeed, the hierarchies of human value that have existed in so many nations around the world were ones that we were abandoning, like women’s rights, equality, and free speech.

These were just joyful experiences that I had as a young girl growing up in the United States. But I was feeling an incongruence with some of the ideas that I was hearing and that were actually embedded inside of me from being a Muslim. Inside of the very traditional and fundamentalist interpretation of Islam, you are denied principles like free speech, because you are ruled by laws of blasphemy that can judge you and criminalize you.

You are denied individual rights, because you are now defined by the collective sense of how you’re supposed to live, how you’re supposed to marry, where you’re supposed to travel, and what you’re supposed to do for a living. Through most of my life I was trying to find peace, and it was actually in tragedy that I found the greatest clarity of my life.

Mr. Jekielek: Please tell me about that.

Ms. Nomani: It was a reality I could never have imagined in my life. I had become a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. I have been able to rise to the highest levels of journalism in the United States of America. In the summer of 1969, I had arrived as a girl who knew not a word of English. Then, at the age of 23, I got a job at the Wall Street Journal.

How? It was because I had been affirmed and celebrated in the classrooms in which I had grown up, and by a lovely teacher named Mrs. Alki in seventh grade who handed me and all our classmates little green journals. With it I would become a young writer. That was the America in which I was able to prosper. Then, all of a sudden on 9/11, I saw this collision course between the most extreme interpretation of my faith of Islam and America.

I got on a plane to Pakistan like so many journalists did, defying all the state department warnings. A colleague of mine also headed to Pakistan, a journalist by the name of Danny Pearl. Danny was a great friend from the newsroom in Washington, DC. We bonded over beach volleyball and he introduced me to American music. I learned how to go to open mic night with him in this neighborhood called Adams Morgan. Danny was just a great guy.

On January 23rd, 2002, he came to visit a home that I was renting in Karachi. He went off for an interview and he never came back. The men whom he was supposed to interview had set a trap for Danny. It was actually a kidnapping scheme and Danny was never to be seen again. He never came back. Instead, what we saw instead were these things that they call sign of life photographs.

The photographs had a gun to Danny’s head. They had his hands in shackles. Literally, they held his humanity hostage, everything that was the beauty and joy that I knew of as Danny. Then, Jan, you know what we got? We got the ransom notes. First, they said that Danny was a spy for the United States. They used his American citizenship, and by proxy, him being white, to demonize him as a spy for the U.S.

A couple of days later, the local press reported that Danny was Jewish and that put a target on his back. He went from being a spy for the CIA to a spy for the Mossad Israeli Intelligence Agency. Danny was none of that. He was just a good guy who had learned to write using the pen for truth and justice in the world. In the weeks that followed, we learned that Danny had been slain, brutally beheaded.

That was the moment that I knew deep in my heart that we were in this war with this extremism. What was that extremism defined by? It was defined by sectarianism and it was defined by the most illiberal of ideas, which is that there is a hierarchy of human value in the world. Danny, because of being American, white, Jewish, and by being of Israeli ancestry, was now at the bottom of that hierarchy of human value.

That’s when I first confronted the fundamental idea of identity as a weapon to lay siege on not only the spirit and the soul, but also the body. Danny’s identity was used to justify his being taken from this earth. Jan, that is when I really came to recognize those classical liberal values that had allowed me to be the strong woman that I had become in the United States of America, were values worth fighting for. My first terrain was within my Muslim community.

Mr. Jekielek: Then, you became a Muslim reformer. In the process of doing that, you faced a lot of personal attacks. You’ve done some amazing investigative work figuring out what actually happened to you as a Muslim reformer. I want to touch on that as well.

First, I want to jump into your work here in Fairfax County, Virginia, where we are now, and in nearby Loudoun County, where you became a parental rights advocate. It very much centers around this idea of identity that you just pointed out. It’s the uniting issue.

Ms. Nomani: Out of Pakistan, my niece likes to say I brought back a souvenir and that was a little baby. I found out in the days that we were trying to find Danny that I was pregnant with a boyfriend that didn’t work out. But my parents embraced this new chapter in my life, welcomed me back to my hometown in West Virginia, and I brought this little baby into the world. I chose to raise him in America and brought him here to Virginia to go to the great public schools of Virginia.

There I believed that I could raise him with those same classical liberal values with which I had been raised and with which America had embraced me. He was a successful little boy. I became his Lego robotics coach and helped coach boy’s volleyball. It was here in this house that I worked with him on algebra, and we just had our own little life.

Then, we had the great success of my son being accepted into the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology. Like its name sounds, it’s for kids that are really smart in math and science, and entry was based on a merit admission back then. My son worked hard, and so did all the other kids. In the fall of 2017, he walked through the doors of the school. I became a PTA mom.

I learned that some of the most diverse communities in any school in the country were within those walls. We had sugar cane juice at the parent teacher meetings. We had biryani from India because the school student body is 70 percent Asian, 10 percent black, Hispanic and other identities, and 20 percent white. Of the white students, many of them are from Eastern European countries, children of immigrants who have fled communism.

Many of the Asian students are from India and from China. Many families had fled communism in China to create, just like my family, a new reality in the United States. Here we are, living a nice regular life. Then, the killing of George Floyd happens in the spring of 2020. All of a sudden there was a new race war launched, and guess what? Our kids at TJ were in the crosshairs.

On my birthday, June 7th, 2020, the principal of the school, Ann Bonitatibus, sent all of our families an email. I thought it was like my little birthday email, and I got it that night. But it was a scolding in which she said that families from such diverse backgrounds and with such stories of struggle coming to the United States needed to check our privileges. She said that we needed to change the racial demographic of the school, so that it would match the racial demographic of the county.

What is the racial demographic of the county? 20 percent is Asian, whereas, 70 percent of the school is Asian. We were the wrong kind of minority now. It was for 18 years then that I had been seeing this reality of identity politics inside my Muslim community, and a new identity politics emerging in the United States. Now all of a sudden, I was in the crosshairs, and so was my son and all these amazing families.

That summer I recognized really fast that the same type of identity politics that had targeted my friend Danny Pearl, had shifted to a new group in the United States; Asian families, immigrant families, and anybody who refused the narrative of this network that I call the woke army. A new fight began.

Mr. Jekielek: You found yourself in the crosshairs. On the other hand, you jumped in and started working on it.

Ms. Nomani: Honestly, Jan, I didn’t even know the extent of it. It’s like everything where you just jump into the deep end and you don’t even know where the waters will take you. I didn’t realize the abyss that it is. You can use so many metaphors. It’s like jumping into quicksand, because it will suck you up. It’s like going into these dark waters of poison and toxicity that will try to spit you out so hurt and so damaged.

But the lesson that I had learned from my years earlier fighting for Muslim reform was that you just have to stick to your core values, and you have to be unapologetic for what they are. That requires a lot of meditation and reflection so that you are always guided by those values and not any kind of negative objectives. Because those that oppose you will try so hard for you to abandon your values so that you will become like them. That’s a constant mental check every day.

Mr. Jekielek: There’s an alliance of people with illiberal values. Please tell me, what is this woke army? It doesn’t make sense that there would be such an alliance.

Ms. Nomani: Yes. When you think about it seems contradictory. That is partly why this alliance is unholy—they really contradict each other’s values. Half of this unholy alliance that I confronted is the Islamists, which describe those people in Islam who believe in political Islam, the Muslims who want theocracy, and people who believe in religious law as the law of the state.

That’s a very, very dangerous prescription for the secular democracies that we have. It’s also a destructive order for any nation. Think of Iran, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia and how their regressive interpretations of Islam have become just inhumane forms of denying people’s human rights and civil rights.

These Islamists have now aligned with the Leftists in the United States and around the world. They manifest in so many different forms like socialists, communists, and even Antifa sometimes. They work together to undermine classical liberal values and the freedoms that we know in the United States.

Mr. Jekielek: As we were preparing for this interview, I learned that this whole alliance was catalyzed to some extent by the Trump candidacy, and then the Trump presidency. Please explain this to me.

Ms. Nomani: In the early days of the Muslim reform movement we were challenging the Islamists in the way that they’re interpreting the religion in mosques, in the political states, in the world like Saudi Arabia and Qatar. You’re going to just swoon at the idea of this, but I was glamourous, the hero of the month. That was what our liberal community embraced, where the values of women’s rights challenged tyranny. It was a really fundamental idea that you think would be consistent all through the history of the United States.

But something really frightening happened. I noticed with the start of the Obama administration that the Islamists were now aligning with the Democratic Party, and they were entering into this unholy alliance of values. They actually do not believe in ideas like my body, my choice. They do not actually believe in equal rights or the kind of LGBTQ rights that the Democratic Party was embracing.

I saw that build up. I saw money start flowing into the Muslim organizations from traditionally liberal philanthropists. I wondered how they could justify it. I realized they were using race. What the Islamists had started to do was take this really complicated legal theory of critical race theory and declare that Muslims were a race, and you were being racist if you dared to criticize extremism within the faith.

What they developed for themselves in the war of ideas was a shield. That kept developing through both the Obama administrations. When the 2016 election was happening, that alliance first tried to defeat Donald Trump as president. When he won, on the night of the election, I saw the battle cry go out from the Islamist organizations for literally an overthrow of the government.

They were chanting the same chant that they had been chanting in Tahrir Square in Egypt to overthrow the Mubarak regime and bring in the Muslim Brotherhood. Concurrently, most people know that the Democrat groups and the far Left in the United States were rallying against Donald Trump. An activist named Linda Sarsour in Brooklyn put out the battle cry from the East coast, and rallied people to the streets of New York to join the resistance. That’s when “The Resistance,” was coined.

Donald Trump isn’t even in office yet. He has simply been elected, but now the woke army has been galvanized to go into the streets. We all know what happened in the weeks and months that followed. Linda Sarsour became a leader of this new movement called the Women’s March. It wasn’t just a march for women, it was a march for women opposed to Donald Trump.

Who were they starting to exclude? They wanted to exclude Jewish feminist women from Israel. In this woke armies’ new order, there was a hierarchy of human value, and in their universe of intersectionality—the new term that they were introducing to the political landscape—Israeli feminists were at the bottom. Because to women like Linda Sarsour from the Muslim establishment, they were the colonizers, and they were the white supremacists.

Jan, it was just so obvious to me that this new network was now going to work to not only undermine Donald Trump, but also the freedoms that we know in the United States. Because they were now aligned with people with very illiberal ideas, with a vision for the world that is not one of equality and human rights. That’s when I really became aware of the threat that we were facing as a nation.

Mr. Jekielek: What is the vision of the woke army?

Ms. Nomani: The common vision as I can now see it unfolding on the political landscape and in our K-12 schools is multifold. There is this real hope to bring the sectarianism that divides a nation to our country. We can see it happening everywhere now. We see it from the workplace to K-12 schools. We see segregation and separation of people based on identity. It’s so disheartening for me to see this, as a young girl who grew up in the United States where we had defeated those ideas. They want a dumbing down of the United States of America.

That is why they came after my son’s school, where they were coming against the idea of meritocracy, including merit-based education and admission. We have seen that whittling away in our system with the absence now of advanced placement classes and honors classes. There’s a new concept called equitable grading, which is getting rid of Ds and Fs, because it makes kids feel bad.

There are concepts like equal outcomes for every child. They are bringing into their universe a dumbing down of the United States. Finally, the thing that I want to really emphasize is with my friend Danny, they slayed him. They took his body from this earth. What we also have to take seriously is the slaying of people’s spirits, and the demoralizing of human beings to the point that it is spiritual death. I don’t say that lightly at all.

So many people feel helpless and hopeless against this woke army. They are living in fear of being canceled for what they say. They work in jobs where they sought to accomplish, and where they spent their entire lifetimes. Now, they live in almost intellectual prisons and spiritual prisons, because they are not self-expressing.

I know what it can mean to the soul to live in shame. In those months after my friend Danny’s murder, as I lived with this reality of that murder and the prospect of bringing my son into the world as a single mother, I knew shame. I know how much of a dark shadow it can cast on our lives. It can plunge a person into depression and anxiety, and these are crises that we’re facing in the United States. It is a war on the spirit of America and Americans. I don’t want to see that happen to a single child, let alone a human being.

Mr. Jekielek: I want to clarify one thing. Initially, when you were talking about the people that killed Danny, you were talking about Islamic terrorists. Then, you’re talking about the woke army in general, but it’s a leap to go from one to the other. People may say, “Asra, you’re conflating two very different things here. These people, maybe they’re misguided, but they’re going for social justice.” But on the other hand, you have these violent extremists who decapitate people.

Ms. Nomani: A lot of people have seen the ways that totalitarian regimes and tyranny ultimately do lay claim to people’s lives. We have the testimony of the parents from China who fled the Cultural Revolution as children. At that time, it started as ideas and then children had to turn their parents in. Parents were also cast as the enemy of the state. Lives were lost. We can see on the streets of our cities that people think they can lay siege on other human beings, sometimes because of their identity.

That kind of racial injustice was one that I thought we had rejected as a society. I thought we were all connected by the idea that nobody could be targeted because of their identity. But now, we see targeted assaults on Asian families and on immigrants, not by the far-Right, now as it’s so often cast, but by activists of the woke army. I’m so impassioned about it, because I do know that violence happens only after you have embedded really divisive ideas in a society that pit people against each other.

Mr. Jekielek: Do you have a chapter in your book about character assassination? This is something that you yourself experienced. You went on this journey with the help of a lawsuit to try to figure out who was behind this. Those are two things I want to explore.

Ms. Nomani: I had been a young student of the art of propaganda as a master student at American University. I had actually studied it from a professor who had come to the United States from Iran who had witnessed the Iranian revolution. It was a propaganda that brought the Ayatollah Khomeini to power and brought this Islamist interpretation of Islam to power. I knew how propaganda can be used in the war of ideas, and then also be weaponized to slay enemies of the ideas that these character assassins are promoting in the world.

The first witness that I had of that was my friend Danny Pearl. Before Danny’s killers slayed him, they waged a character assassination campaign on him; first as an American, then as a Jew, and then as a son of Israel. That was used to discredit him as a human being and to dehumanize Danny.

When I came back to the United States, I started challenging the interpretation of Islam that was used to dehumanize Danny. What did my enemies do? They started their campaign to dehumanize me, and they assigned all sorts of ulterior motives to my campaign. They turned the word Zionist into a slur and used that to discredit me.

I knew that character assassination has been used since the beginning of time against any political enemy to try to eliminate them. But the internet had allowed these assassins to be anonymous, just like you said. They wore masks and I didn’t know who they were. In the summer of 2017, I learned that there had been an article published about me on an anonymous website called Loonwatch.com. It had been created literally on April Fool’s day 2009 to smoke out the so-called loons, who they called Islamophobic.

Who was in that category? None other than me. I, as a Muslim feminist, was declared Islamophobic, because I dared to challenge the sexism within my faith and the intolerance. Their new allegation was that Muslim reformers are funded by the government of Israel. That was enough for them to try to eliminate us as credible voices in our community.

In the larger narrative in the United States, I was going from a glamor hero to zero. I wondered, “Okay, what is this? Who are they?” I learned that in the U.S. you can file a John Doe complaint. It’s a complaint of defamation that I was alleging against these anonymous character assassins.

Mr. Jekielek: The defamation, to be clear, is that you’re funded by Israel.

Ms. Nomani: Yes.

Mr. Jekielek: It’s a falsehood, as I understand it.

Ms. Nomani: Yes, exactly. I’m an open book. I was ready to have them go through my bank accounts. I feared nothing in terms of disclosure. So, there I was. Here at my dining table, the same one where I taught my son math and reading and writing, I filed subpoena after subpoena against the platforms that are called internet service providers that gave voice to these people. Who are they? Folks like Facebook, Twitter, and places where they could have their anonymous identities.

There was one platform that a lot of people might have heard of called GoDaddy, where you can register a website. They had registered Loonwatch.com at GoDaddy. I sent off my little subpoena. The anonymous accounts have a certain number of days where they can fight your subpoena. They didn’t fight it. One day, Jan, I got a thumb drive. In that thumb drive was all of the backend documentation for the people who held that account at Loonwatch.

It was every phone call they had made to the customer service office. It was every complaint that they had filed. I went through the hundreds of pages, and in the U.S. you got to pay with a credit card when you sign onto these subscriptions. There, I found that this character assassination campaign had been led, funded, and run by an organization called the Council on American-Islamic Relations [CAIR], an organization that touts itself as a civil rights organization for Muslims.

But what they had been doing for years, and what they continue to do, because Loonwatch continues to stay alive as a website, is run this domestic disinformation and character assassination campaign, not only against Muslim reformers, but also ex-Muslims, conservatives, the Republican Party, nations like Israel, India, and anybody who dares to challenge their Islamist interpretation of the Muslim faith.

Speaker 3: We reached out to the Council on American Islamic Relations, CAIR, but did not immediately receive a response.

Ms. Nomani: That was a really liberating day. You might wonder why should I bother? Why did I spend this time? Character assassination is a weapon of war. It was really important for me to understand who the combatants were in this situation. It led me to half of the woke army, because CAIR had now embedded itself in the Democratic Party, and in the far-Left and progressive organizations of the United States. They were now laying siege on America.

I put them in my book and I documented them, because I want people to read the book and see the blueprint for how the woke army works in the United States. I want to save readers the suffering that I’ve experienced in order to learn these lessons. I also want folks to understand this tactic of character assassination is so often used to make you lose your own confidence about your value system, and to make you wonder and doubt yourself.

Because trust me, when they did this to me, there were many, many moments when I felt so just defeated. I put my pen aside, I was paralyzed. I couldn’t write. There was one time when I remember laying in the fetal position on my bed. It was my mother, who is now 83, who stood at the frame of the door and said to me, “Asra, you don’t live in a village. You live in the United States of America. You do not have to live with shame.”

I wiped away my tears and acted even in the face of my fear, because that’s what I’ve heard courage is. It doesn’t mean that we don’t feel fear. It doesn’t mean that we aren’t scared, but we still act. That’s what I wanted people to really witness, because it’s those tactics of character assassination that are now being used against parents. I went from being called a Zionist as a slur, to now being a white supremacist.

Mr. Jekielek: I’ll jump in with one more, Islamophobe. You have certainly been called an Islamophobe, and you’ve been called many other things. How do you respond when people say this?

Ms. Nomani: I thought about it, and I researched it. I looked at how the word had evolved over time, and then, I saw it was just another weapon of war for these Islamist nations. It was a term that had been created in the 1990s as some Muslim groups were looking at the dynamic of racism inside the UK. In 2005, after the 9/11 attacks, governments like Qatar and the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia were facing real economic consequences of the fact that extremists from within Islam had created tension for Muslims inside the West. They had to find a defense.

It was with this organization called the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, like a mini-UN for all the Muslim majority countries in the world. They decided that they were going to run a 10-year campaign waging a war on Islamophobia. They are the ones who weaponized it in order to then shield themselves from criticism for the way that they run their countries. What has that meant? When the Islamic state was merging, President Obama went to the microphone and said that there was no Islamic in Islamic state.

Barack Obama: ISIL is not Islamic.

Ms. Nomani: He had been duped by these Islamist countries and organizations into thinking that it would be racist to call out the Islamic state. Fast-forward to today, we now have an international day by the United Nations for fighting Islamophobia. It just was celebrated, because they’ve institutionalized it as a way to keep any kind of criticism from their nation states. Qatar sponsored the World Cup, and they have had such a shoddy record of labor rights. It became Islamophobic to talk about those laborers that had been killed in the building of the stadiums.

It was something that I learned in the early days of the parent movement in fighting against any of the smears about us being racist. We have to be unapologetic in our values. To me, it became the most important strategy against those accusations and that character assassination. You have to lay your head to rest every night on your bed, and live with the values that you have, and the values that you practice every day.

If you know in your heart that you are motivated by these classical liberal values that align with the conservative values of equality and justice and individual rights, then you can withstand all of those smears, because they’re just used as weapons. Soft power can be more damaging and can weaken a nation and a people even more than bullets or bombs.

Mr. Jekielek: Indeed. We just had an episode recently about the Chinese Communist Party’s United Front Work Department, which is all about wielding soft power. It has had an incredible impact on the West, the U.S., and Canada. I don’t blame this umbrella group of the different Muslim organizations for wanting to protect themselves, like in the wake of 9/11, which I observed myself.

In fact, I was quite concerned that people that look Middle Eastern or Muslim would be targeted in some way in a North America reeling from 9/11. I was motivated to try to help people who might find themselves in that situation back then. My point is, Islamophobia feels like a real word.

Ms. Nomani: The term that should have been used, and that we should use to address the reality of this hate that does exist in the world is anti-Muslim hate. If somebody is hating on another human being because they are Muslim or look like they’re Muslim, then it’s anti-Muslim hate, just like if you were racist against somebody for any identity that they may have.

But what they were able to do in a very clever way was not only protect this very justifiable point that you’re making against hate, they were also able to then create a shield for the very intolerant and illiberal ideology that they embrace. That’s the problem that I have with it. My solution is a really simple one that would have had a dual purpose of protecting Muslims from any kind of hate, but also eliminating the extremism that we absolutely have within the religion.

If they had as organizations owned up to the extremism from a place of challenging it, and then rejecting it and refusing it, we would have stood up for Muslims, which is what I have tried to do all the time. Because I remain a Muslim and fight for that interpretation of Islam that my parents raised me with. The problem is that many of these organizations have been propped up by those nations that have promoted this Islamist interpretation.

If we were to challenge the interpretation of Islam that believes in a theocracy, what would that mean? That would mean undermining the entire system of those nations. It’s self-preservation. Even China, they’re coming up with a strategy to defend themselves and their system.

Everybody can understand why they would do that, because they don’t want to self-destruct. But that doesn’t mean we buy into it, and we definitely don’t enable it, and we definitely don’t participate in it. I’m so glad that you brought up that nuance, because it doesn’t have to be either or. We can fight that extremism, and we can stand up for Muslims against hate.

Mr. Jekielek: The significant contingent of the woke army is deeply opposed to parental rights. They believe that some other entity should have the rights over the children. On the other hand, and I’m not an expert on the issue of people who have very fundamentalist interpretations of Islam, they probably wouldn’t be very happy with that. So, the woke army isn’t entirely uniform here, is it?

Ms. Nomani: It’s in a collision course with itself, absolutely. The opportunity exists now in this parent’s issue to isolate parts of this woke army from itself. I see it happening in school districts, like in Detroit and in Minnesota where we have large Muslim communities, that exactly like you said, want to raise their kids, like most parents want to do. They don’t want their child at the age of 10 to be able to keep secrets from them about their gender pronoun or which bathroom they want to enter, which the far-Left in the woke army is pushing in the United States right now.

They’re also having this reflection about this unholy alliance in which they have now created an establishment, really. I think that we have to be careful. Those families that come out of the Islamist movement, they are not completely aligned with classical liberal values.

You don’t want to compromise your own classical liberal values of equal rights and human rights and individual rights, no matter what position you may have. On issues of morality, we all agree that by the time a person is an adult, they’re allowed to make their personal decisions about marriage, and about how they’re going to live their lives following the laws of the land. Oftentimes, that becomes a clash.

I’ll never forget how I jetted to Doha, Qatar, one time to debate somebody from the Islamist wing of the woke army, who was arguing that Muslim women are not allowed to marry anyone that they choose. I gave a valiant defense of the right of a Muslim woman to marry anyone that she wants to marry, and I won. My side won because the young women there in the audience voted. They wanted those same classical liberal values that we love and most people would like to practice in the world if they were allowed.

Mr. Jekielek: You’re obviously a big advocate for free speech, and at the same time criticizing the interpretation of Section 230, or how it’s used. You feel like these platforms should be held accountable for the speech they allow. This is a big issue right now. We’ve seen huge overreach on the side of the platforms and government in this area. Given everything we’ve seen with the Twitter Files, and the Missouri v. Biden exposures, which you’re probably familiar with. Where do you stand now on the free speech platform censorship issue?

Ms. Nomani: Yes, I am one hundred percent for free speech, but I also recognize that there are rights and responsibilities that come with free speech. Having been a journalist all my life, I learned very early on that journalists cannot engage in libel, and truth is the only and best defense for libel. Who is held responsible for the journalist’s work? The publishing company. What Section 230 does is to shield publishing platforms from any responsibility for the material and content that’s published on their platforms.

When it comes to defamation or untruths, they have no responsibility. Publishing houses go through great lengths to make sure that they aren’t violating libel laws, or FCC laws and regulations. Those are really serious, and they cost a lot for a company to make sure that they have those guardrails.

In society, what I have seen firsthand, is that people have now weaponized Big Tech to launch these character assassinations on people. I don’t think that they should be allowed to have a wild, wild west terrain on which to do it. Somebody has to be held responsible. It absolutely has to be the individuals.

That’s why if people do it anonymously, we have to allow the means to unmask them. I’ve gone down to unmask folks and hold them personally responsible, but also the platforms should be held responsible for violations that we’ve established in law of limits on free speech, like defamation or inciting people to violence.

Obviously, the platforms have decided that they’re going to act not only as moderators and platforms, but also as publishing houses by censoring many conservative voices. They’ve taken their own liberty to deny certain people their free speech rights, but they take no responsibility. That’s what I really believe that tech giants have to be forced to do.

Because if we don’t do it, then these platforms will continue to be used indiscriminately for the soft power objectives of foreign governments for domestic disinformation and domestic character assassination in ways that our courts and our laws do not protect the people, and really the United States of America.

The tyrants that are out there in the world that want to destabilize America will use all the freedoms that we allow against us. They now have willing participants in the U.S. who will do their dirty work for them. It’s really important to stand up for those free speech rights that we have, and yet, not allow them to be weaponized against us.

Mr. Jekielek: How do we deal with that? How do we deal with disinformation and propaganda that can be done at scale. We’ve seen it can be done by foreign adversaries that seek to destroy our way of life, this classical liberal value system. Then, we see our own structures using the same means to basically get a population to believe something or behave a certain way. It’s very hard to say that it’s okay in this instance or not okay in that instance. How do you actually solve that question? I don’t actually know.

You can imagine a world where there are just battles of propaganda, and here’s the kicker. The kicker is that some portion of us as a society are deeply susceptible to what I call the megaphone that manufactures perceived consensus in society. You can tell them to turn on a dime. These are highly educated people in many cases and well-intentioned.

Ms. Nomani: And you’re absolutely right that this is an operation that happens within our own nation. Matt Taibbi testified in Congress at a committee called the Weaponization of the Government Against the People. That’s basically what you could call the committee. I saw firsthand the memo by the National School Board Association telling the Biden administration that they needed to act against these acts of domestic terrorism happening at school board meetings. Days later, it was here in this room that I saw the Attorney General of the United States of America declare that he was going to sick the FBI on parents like me.

Just imagine what was going on in my head. I have literally gone to Guantanamo Bay to chase terrorists. I have chased terrorists around the world. Here in Northern Virginia, we have parents working for the U.S. intelligence agencies, the U.S. military, and law enforcement—just imagine these people of good conscience now having the federal government making them the enemy.

That’s why I got in my car and I went to the local Walmart and I got these letters and I put them on these scrubs that I bought, and declared, “I am a mom, not a domestic terrorist.” In my kitchen, I just posted a video unapologetic about this phenomenon. The government turned on us so quickly and so fast. It was only us refusing that narrative and that propaganda and that character assassination unapologetically. We have now been able to expose them, defeat that effort, and stand up to them. We are now defining the election issue of the presidential race in 2024.

We have made education and parent rights a number one issue. These guys were just such fools in trying to take us on. If anybody has been a parent, they know that your kid can just put a knife in your heart by just saying something like, “Mom, you’re such a loser.”

You think, “Oh my gosh, how did I go from being a mom to a loser?” Calling us domestic terrorists, white supremacists, and QAnon moms is nothing compared to the gentle barb that a child puts in your heart. The debate on the propaganda, on everything from issues of health and vaccines and masks to education and economic policy, will be in every sphere.

The greatest duty we have as citizens of not only this country, but this world, is to think through what we are being told. Keep being a Nancy Drew on information, and ask, “Where is this coming from? What’s the source? What’s the footnote? What’s this? Who’s that? Who funded what?”

Learn your 990 IRS statement in order to investigate who funds a nonprofit that puts out a campaign trying to convince you of this or that. That’s our duty, because soft power is the easiest way to dismantle a nation, and to capture the hearts and minds of people. It can happen from within, and it can happen from external forces. We have a duty to not be captive to it, as best we can.

Mr. Jekielek: How do we deal with this idea of disinformation? Because we don’t want someone here in this country deciding for us what’s disinformation and what isn’t. At the same time, we have massive disinformation campaigns being waged upon us by these foreign actors.

Ms. Nomani: And domestic actors.

Mr. Jekielek: Right.

Ms. Nomani: Yes.

Mr. Jekielek: These efforts are sustained. You can have the CCP putting billions of dollars towards pushing disinformation messaging. How do you deal with that? Do you just let it happen? No. You have to have some kind of way to deal with that. But then, how can we make sure that that same system isn’t used against the American population? As we’ve learned, it’s precisely those kinds of systems that have been created for foreign intelligence work that are now being used on Americans.

Ms. Nomani: What I would ideally like in any kind of situation is that you have a war of ideas, that actually ends up being a war of ideas that doesn’t actually target human beings as character assassination campaigns do. Unfortunately, that’s a tactic of it, because in the war of ideas, if you can discredit human beings, you think you’ve won in that battle.

Mr. Jekielek: Asra Nomani, it’s such a pleasure to have you on.

Ms. Nomani: Thank you so much, Jan. I’m so honored to be here, and I wish for moral courage for everyone.

Mr. Jekielek: Thank you all for joining Asra Nomani and me on this episode of American Thought Leaders. I’m your host, Jan Jekielek.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

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