Will Dove  00:00 We think of radical Islam as something that happens in other countries, such as Hamas murdering innocent Israelis,  or stories of honor killings of women in countries like Saudi Arabia or Afghanistan. We like to believe that these sorts of abuses could never happen in our country. But the truth is they do happen every day. In Canada today, there are Muslim extremists who marry multiple wives under Sharia law. And they treat those wives and their children buy them like property. And when those women go to Canadian authorities for help, the vast majority of the time nothing had done because the authorities fear of being labeled as Islamophobic. Even our courts have upheld the right of extremists to beat their own children.   Will Dove  00:55 Yasmine Mohammed is the author of the book "Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam". Her story is a brutally honest account of her childhood and young wife under the extreme abuses of a radical Islamist stepfather, under forced marriage to an Al-Qaeda terrorist. And these things didn't happen in a faraway country. They happened right here in Canada, and they're still happening.   Will Dove  01:26 In fact, I would suspect as Canada continues to open its doors to Muslim extremists. They have become everyday occurrences. I will caution you that Yasmine's story is extremely disturbing. But I also want you to know that I believe this is one of the most important interviews I have ever done. Yasmine is trying very hard to help others like her, the abused and ignored victims of radical Islam who have or are trying to escape. And by watching and sharing this interview, you can help because it doesn't matter how many brave victims like Yasmine speak out. Nothing will change until we, the people who have the power to influence our governments add our voices to hers.   Will Dove  02:27 Yasmine, thank you so much for taking the time for this interview.   Yasmine Mohammed  02:31 It's my pleasure, Will. I'm looking forward to our conversation.   Will Dove  02:35 It was my wife who put me on to your book "Unveiled". And I have to say that it is quite probably the most disturbing thing I have ever read in my life. Absolutely horrible. I would like you to tell your story. And I'd like to start at the beginning. But before we do, there's one term that's going to come up a lot. And I think I need to ask you to explain to our viewers, what does haram mean?   Yasmine Mohammed  03:01 Forbidden, it's Islamically forbidden, something that's gonna get you in hell, burning in hell for eternity.   Will Dove  03:09 Alright. I'd like to start with your mother. And how it is that she came to be married to a radical Islamist - your stepfather.   Yasmine Mohammed  03:26 I usually call him the man who my mother married, which is much more of a mouthful, but I don't like to even refer to him as any part of my family.   Will Dove  03:37 That's perfectly understandable, given the way she treated you. So how did your mother come to be married to this man? Because she was not a radical Islamist.   Yasmine Mohammed  03:48 No, she wasn't. She was born and raised in Egypt and had a perfectly normal secular childhood. Egypt was very open-minded in those days, like the most of the Middle East. And if you see the old pictures of even Libya, Afghanistan and Iran, and you're gonna find women in the universities, women in miniskirts like it was like normal life the same way it was around the rest of the world in those days. My dad was born and raised in Gaza and he went to university in Egypt, and that's where him and my mom met. Neither of them were practicing Muslims or anything. They came from Muslim families, but that was about it. And they moved to San Francisco, and they had my sister there. Then they moved to Vancouver, Canada, where they had my brother and I, and their marriage fell apart.   Yasmine Mohammed  04:44 So my dad ended up moving to Montreal, and my mom was left in Vancouver with three kids on her own. So she went to the local mosque just looking for community, just looking for support and friendship. She was not at all looking for anything religious at the time, it was just because she's from Egypt and she's in a new city, and she doesn't know anyone and she's alone. And so she thought she would go looking for maybe other Arabic speaking women or something. And she came upon this man that you mentioned, who was living in the mosque at the time.   Yasmine Mohammed  05:22 This is in the early 80s, when the trajectory of the Islamic extremism was just getting started. It was the regime and Iran had just taken power the Islamic regime. And there was like this influx of political Islam that was just like spreading all over the Middle East at that time. So it's like pro-Islamic, anti-West, both were very hand in hand. And so that's what this guy was. And that's what my mom got caught up in at that time. And so you may have heard of the Muslim Brotherhood, because they're the most popular of these groups, there are countless of these groups, and they all go by different names. And it's almost like a game of cups where they just change their name or change their, you know, but it's the same people and they have the same goals. But as soon as one group gets identified as extremists, then they just change course and continue on their way.   Yasmine Mohammed  06:33 So my mom got caught up in this and she became a born again Muslim, that's what I call her. She just jumped in there, just completely became a zealot. She started going to all outside of university, taking courses from their master's degree in Islamic Studies, which was the most and still is the most prestigious Sydney University in the world. And she just became so anti-West, and this guy just came into our lives.   Yasmine Mohammed  07:09 And suddenly, the word you mentioned, everything was haram, everything was forbidden. Suddenly, my mom had to start covering her hair. And we weren't allowed to play with our non-Muslim friends anymore. Like I didn't even have a concept like my best friends are Chelsea and Lindsay. And I never thought of me being Muslim and them not being Muslim, like these words were never in our house before. And then suddenly, it was like, no, no, they are non-believers. You can't be friends with them. I can't go down the hallway and play Barbies with Chelsea and Lindsay anymore. Like that's what I did every day after school. Suddenly, it was like, no, you can't ride a bike, can't go swimming, can't listen to music, like everything was just forbidden, forbidden, forbidden. And the only thing that we could do was memorize Quran and pray five times a day. Like if we didn't do those things, we would get beaten and my sister and I were putting hijab.   Will Dove  08:11 I want to jump in with two questions before you continue. First of all, how old were you at this point in time?   Yasmine Mohammed  08:17 I was about six years old.   Will Dove  08:20 Thank you, because you're gonna find some really nasty things about your mother later on in the story. I have to ask, what was she like as a mother before she got involved in radical Islam?   Yasmine Mohammed  08:35 My memories of her before were like going to Dairy Queen making pancakes for us. Going to McDonald's, like as a kid, you don't really have an understanding of like, is it a good mom? Like, do you have a neglectful mom? Do you have a good mom, you know what I mean? But she wasn't as horrible as she became. I'll say that much. It was with an adult's view, I can recognize that she was depressed. I remember a very common thing which she'd sit and eat sunflower seeds, watch soap operas all day, and she'd have the mound of sunflower seed shells. I would go to school, and I'd come back and the mound would just be that much larger and that was just like a daily thing. And she always watch like the same soap operas right after each other. And we come in the door when it was right in between all my children in general hospital like it was just like clockwork. And I think about it now and I realize, yeah, she must have been depressed. She must have been unhappy. And that's what possessed her to go to the mosque in the first place because she was just looking for some sort of support system. But it was the 80s and in those days you did a lot of just playing outside by yourself.   Will Dove  10:11 Right. But what I'm trying to establish here is that other than being depressed, which was put a natural, she was divorced with three kids. She was a fairly normal mom up to that point.   Yasmine Mohammed  10:22 Oh, yeah.   Will Dove  10:23 Alright. Now we're at the point in the story where she had gone to the mosques, she had met Munir who had been living there, she had gotten involved in radical Islam. Please continue from there.   Yasmine Mohammed  10:35 So when this man entered our lives, it was like a bomb dropped, and everything changed. My mom changed most of all. So one of the things that became forbidden was music, we're no longer allowed to listen to music. So before this man entered our home, we constantly had country music playing. My mom loved country music, she loved Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers, Hank Williams, those records were always playing. And he sat us down on the carpet in front of him and took my mom's records and started to break them, and handed the shards to us and said, "Break these".   Yasmine Mohammed  11:17 And I looked at my mom, and I was shocked, like what are you doing? This man came into our home, and he's breaking your stuff, are you going to react? My brother came into my room and started breaking my toys, I would be livid. But she just stood there looking down at her feet. And she didn't say anything, and she didn't react. And that was a message for us that there's a new sheriff in town. The mom that you knew is nothing more than a figment of what she used to be. And this is the guy who's in charge now. I would love to say that he was abusive towards her or that he coerced her into this or that.   Yasmine Mohammed  12:16 You know what I mean? That she was like a victim in all of this. But she just, the hook, line and sinker, just like jumped into this world. And by the end, she was more of a zealot than even he was. And when I say the end, I mean, by the time I left the family and had nothing to do with anybody. She was even more into that world than he was. So she really, really did embrace it. And a lot of it for her was guilt. Like she really felt like she needed to repent for all of her years of like, belly dancing and wearing mini skirts and having boyfriends and you know what I mean just like living a non-Muslim life. And so she felt like she needed to repent for all those years. So she needed to be extra-Muslim. And she needed to raise us to be so extra-Muslim, so as to make up for all of what she saw as her sinful past. And so yeah, that was our life. And then my sister and I were put in hijab, we were put into Islamic schools.   Yasmine Mohammed  13:31 This political Islam thing just kept growing and growing like our mosque went from having the Imam, was this man from India who was more like a guru. He was just like a chill Indian Imam that would tell stories at the Friday sermon. And then an Egyptian moved in, and he was the new Imam of the mosque and his wife were in Nepal. And we'd never before that seen somebody wearing covered head to toe in black at our mosque. And that was like the bar was set. And suddenly, all of the Friday Sermons were about killing Jews, and the infidels, and Islam must conquer the world. And it just became very angry and violent. And then suddenly, everybody was in Nepal, like it just became so much more common. Everybody became so much more radicalized over those years. And having the Islam school there meant that the kids are being so much more radicalized because they're very much separating us from the world around us.   Yasmine Mohammed  14:42 So we were in this complete Islamic bubble, we were in a bubble of shadia. Even though we're living in Canada, we're not interacting at all with the outside world. We're only interacting with each other, in the mosque, in the school, in the community. We'd have picnics together on the weekends, like it was always Islamic community. And no matter what it was that you were doing, you're getting your car fixed, you're going to the bank, you're going, whatever it is that you're doing, you always go to the Muslim person that works in that place. And there was always this, nudge nudge, like I'm a Muslim like you. And so then you end up getting like the employee discount, or whatever it is, like, there was just like this, you just lived in this.   Yasmine Mohammed  15:34 It was a cult basically, you know, it's like a cult. And that us and them, I cannot overstate how strong that was. So, I mean, even as a kid, I remember asking my mom so many times, because all of them would just go on about how much they hate the West, and how Canada's such a horrible country, and these infidels, these non-believers are all gonna burn in hell, and blah, blah, blah. And so your natural question is, why are you here? Why would you be here? If you're going to just hate everything about it? Why don't you stay in Egypt? Or you're in Pakistan, or you're in Sudan, or wherever you're all coming from? Like, why did you come here just to hate where you live? It doesn't make any sense.   Will Dove  16:24 Do you have an answer for that?   Yasmine Mohammed  16:27 Well, the answer is because your duty as a Muslim is to spread Islam. So you have to go into these infidel countries, and sort of like, do Dawah. Dawah is the word for missionary work, like to spread the word. And so that's why they were there.   Will Dove  16:56 And I suppose, it wasn't the logic of what their answer. And the fact that they never talked to anybody who wasn't a Muslim never occurred to them.   Yasmine Mohammed  17:09 Yeah, so as I was gonna say, between you and me, it had more to do with the medical support, everything, healthcare, education, safety, just cleanliness, there's so many, obviously, so many perks to living in a first world country versus wherever it was that they came from. So that's really the driving force behind it, like they were willing to put up with these infidels that they hate, if it meant that they can get all of these things in return. So they're basically just taking what they can get from the society. The opportunist, basically.   Will Dove  17:57 And I want to get back to that later. But right now, I'd like to continue your story. And, folks, I have to warn you that the next part of Yasmine's story, if you're of a sensitive nature, this is extremely disturbing. We're going to talk about horrible abuses of children, of Yasmine herself. Munir, I'm sure you'll tell the story of the plastic stick, please tell that story.   Yasmine Mohammed  18:27 So he would use different sticks, wooden sticks, and they would always break and so he got this plastic orange stick from somewhere that was like a whip, basically, a hard whip. And what he would do is he would tie my feet to the bottom of my bed with my skipping rope or whatever, and use that plastic stick to hit the bottoms of my feet. Now, this was before I started going to Islamic school. So I was like in Grade one and two. And he would do that because then the bruises and the cuts were hidden from any teachers. As once we started going to Islamic schools, it didn't matter where on our body or what he used after that, like he would just take off his belt or hang us upside down in the garage and whip us like there was no restriction after that. He wasn't hiding from any teachers.   Will Dove  19:53 I'd really like people to understand just how severe these beatings were. Struck your feet tied to the bed. He's beating them with this plastic stick. And I remember in the book you're saying, initially, you're really relieved, because it wouldn't leave splinters behind. But you found that the plastic stick hurt a heck of a lot more. As it beat you so badly on the bottoms of your feet, that you could barely walk.   Yasmine Mohammed  20:20 Yeah, that's true, I couldn't step down on my feet. I'd have to walk on the sort of outside of my feet. And they would start to heal, and then you step down, and then they rip open and it wasn't just the beating, it was a lot of time afterwards as well. And they don't even get a chance to heal before your next beating, because we're getting beaten for missing a prayer. And, again, by now I'm like, maybe seven years old or something. And to ask a little kid, to remember to pray five times a day and to not miss a prayer, they're gonna forget. And I didn't want to, I didn't like him. And I didn't like his stupid rules. I didn't like memorizing the Quran. I didn't like doing this stupid, we'll do that you had to do before every prayer and get yourself all wet. And I didn't like the prayer. And I didn't like anything about him. And so I was resentful, I was angry. And so I would push back. And I wouldn't pray unless I was told to over and over and over again because I hated it. And so I was always getting in trouble. My sister was very different from me, she was more like my mom hook, line, and sinker. My sister and I are always being compared to each other.   Will Dove  22:28 How old was your sister at the time?   Yasmine Mohammed  22:30 She's three years older than me.   Will Dove  22:33 All right.   Yasmine Mohammed  22:37 But, she and my mom are always very close, she was always my mom's favorite. And when she saw that it made my mom happy for her to start doing these things, then she just did them as well. She had an easier time than I did with the switch. I really was very resentful, because at the time, it was like my sister was older than me. So she had been to sleepovers. She'd been to a McDonald's birthday party, a bunch of stuff that I was looking forward to. I was riding a tricycle and I was looking forward to getting to ride a two wheeler and my sister already had a two-wheeler. And so it was like, there were so many things at that age that you look forward to. And then you have somebody come along and be like, none of that stuff that you were looking forward to is going to happen anymore. And so I was really resentful that my sister had a chance to do all these things, now the rules change, and I'm not gonna get to do all the things that I had to watch her do and wish that I could do one day. But anyway, that was the least of my worries, things just got worse and worse from there.   Will Dove  24:03 Can we move on? And I'm sorry, Yasmine, I know this is difficult. But people need to understand what is being done to children right here in our country. And that's still happening. So, please take your time. But tell the story about the garage, the belt. They thought they'd killed you.   Yasmine Mohammed  24:33 Yeah, so every Eid which is a Muslim celebration of when Abraham was supposed to kill his son, and he didn't. And so Muslims every year kill a goat or a lamb or something. They slaughter an animal sort of in a symbolic, slaughtering something for, like sacrificing it for a law. And so we had a meet hook. By now we had moved out of our apartment and we'd moved into his house. We were living in his basement, his real wife was living upstairs with his real children. And then my mom and us were living downstairs.   Will Dove  25:32 I think we have to clarify at this point in time that your mother married this man under Sharia law, not really.   Yasmine Mohammed  25:39 That's right.   Will Dove  25:41 His legal wife living upstairs. And you were all living in a pretty much unfinished basement.   Yasmine Mohammed  25:49 That's right. Yeah, so the idea is that, the first one is the legal wife, and then any subsequent wives after that are, as you say, Islamic wives and so technically that's nothing illegal. Like, they're not like trying to legally marry more than one woman, which just meant that my mom had, zero rights as a wife, because she's not really his wife. And she got treated as such, she was definitely the second, the subordinate. And that was very clear by the living arrangement alone. And so at this point, they had seen that I'd written my name in a book as Jasmine, instead of as Yasmine. And they took that as me wanting to be Western, wanting to be Canadian. I was always taught and it's a common thing that gets told to Muslim kids that are born in the West which is just because if you're born in a barn doesn't make you a horse, if you're born in Canada doesn't make you a Canadian, if you're born in England doesn't make you British, you're a Muslim above all else. That's where your loyalty lies. Don't ever have any connection to this land that you happen to be born on, it's not yours.   Yasmine Mohammed  27:28 And so any sense that they would get that we were feeling some sort of connection, love, allegiance anything towards Canada or towards the West in general was like the worst possible thing you could do because it's us and them so you are liking something that is of them, like the evil infidels. And so when they saw that I changed the first letter of my name so that it looked like Jasmine, they got so angry that they thought that they would do something that would leave a real message that are you trying to be Western or whatever was going to be severely punished. And so he hung me up tied my feet together with rope, my ankles and...   Will Dove  28:47 Take your time Yasmine, please.   Yasmine Mohammed  28:58 I remember just apologizing, just screaming "I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'll never do it again." I was already hysterical because I knew what they were going to do. Because they've done it to my brother. And so they hung me upside down. And then he just kept whipping me and whipping me and then I don't remember. I must have blacked out. And then when I came to, I could hear them panicked. Panics that they had killed me, my mom was screaming because she's like, "What are we going to do now? Look what we did, how are we going to explain this?" Like that was the problem.   Will Dove  30:29 Not that they might have killed you? And correct me if I'm wrong here, he had beaten you with his belt with the buckle. And you were how old at this time? Six? Seven?   Yasmine Mohammed  30:47 Yeah, I must have been seven or eight, I think at this time. And when something like that happens, you end up just like, you stop resisting. Like, you just submit, you succumb, you shut your mouth, you pray five times a day, you get up before the sun to do your first prayer. And you don't complain, it keeps you in line, which is exactly why they would do this. But the problem with that is that you have to regularly do that. And you have to escalate it every time. And so that was our life, just a concept keeping us back in line again. Now I say us but like, out of all of the kids, even his kids upstairs. It was really just my brother and I were the only ones that ever really resisted. And with my brother that ended when he was about fourteen. When he came at him with a broomstick handle. And my brother raised his arm and he stopped it. And that sort of, that was like the end of it. Munir did anything to him again after that, because my brother was now probably stronger than him because he's like an older man at this point.   Yasmine Mohammed  32:36 And so and there's a, which you're probably aware, that honor violence and honor killings it's usually the girls that are the victims. There is this an extra layer of control over the girls. And it's so important for the girls to be subservient and good Muslims. And so the fact that I was always pushing and questioning and talking back or mumbling under my breath, or whatever it was that I did to show my resistance, like that was a constant. That's what got me in trouble because they needed me to submit.   Yasmine Mohammed  33:35 And my mom had always, the phrase that she would always say is, "I'll just bury you in the backyard and tell everyone that you moved to Egypt." And I was much older when I realized that that was a phrase that a lot of moms told their kids and I was speaking to Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who you're probably familiar with and she said that she was speaking with some, because she does a lot of work cases on honor killings and stuff like that. And she was speaking to a police officer who said to her, I can't even begin to imagine how many girls are buried in backyards throughout America. They always just say like, "Oh, she's moved to Pakistan, she's moved to Somalia, she's moved to Egypt, she's moved to Iraq, whatever country and quite often we are moved to those countries ,married off and that's what they tried to do with me to control me and to keep me in line.   Yasmine Mohammed  34:45 But before that, so what happened was with these beatings is, the Islamic school at that time was only an elementary school, they hadn't yet built the high school. And so I was allowed to go to a public school for high school. And when I was there, again, my mom discovered that I had non-Muslim friends, because she expected I guess that I was going to go to school with hijab, and that nobody would want to be my friend and that I would be a wallflower, and recluse or an outcast or whatever. But she discovered that I actually had normal some friends, and she was livid. And she said that she was going to take me out of school, and I wasn't going to be allowed to go back to public school again.   Yasmine Mohammed  35:38 And so I was very obviously sad about that because going to school was my only opportunity to breathe. And so one of my teachers, Mr. Fabrro, who was my drama teacher, so we were really close, in drama, it's different than your other classes, where it's academic, and you're sitting in your desks, but in drama, you get really close to your teacher. And he's like, "What's wrong? Are you okay? Something seems to be up with you, you're not your normal self." So I told him, I told him about everything that was going on at home, because I felt like, he's an adult, and he might be able to do something about this, he might be able to help me.   Yasmine Mohammed  36:27 And he told me that he now had to alert the authorities, "I have to call the police because it's my duty as a teacher." and I was like, "Oh, my God, here we go." Like, I was so terrified of what was going to happen. And he's like, don't worry about it, everything's gonna be okay. And this was like, near the end of the school year. And it went, obviously, he alerted the police. And then Child Services got involved. And then there was this huge investigation where all the kids were being interviewed. And it was, his daughter had gone to school the year before and she'd had marks on her face that were very clearly fingers. And so, even though she didn't say anything, one of her teachers had already alerted the police and said, "This girl's being hit at home, I can see that she's got these finger marks on her face." And she was too scared to say anything. And she was like, no, no, no, it's nothing, whatever. But there was an investigation on this man already on the books.   Yasmine Mohammed  37:38 And so when I spoke up to Mr. Fabrro, that's strike two. So you'd think that the Child Services people that are doing these investigations would kind of like have an inkling like, well, where there's smoke, there's fire. But they went through and they did the investigation, and it went to court, and essentially the judge deemed at the end, he said, "Well, this is your culture. This is how they choose to discipline you." And so that's it, like he wasn't going to protect me, he wasn't going to take me out of that home. As far as he was concerned. This was their religious freedom or their cultural freedom to abuse me in this way.   Will Dove  38:33 Yes and if I recall correctly, from your book, the judge ruled that corporal punishment in Canada isn't illegal. I can't imagine how this judge can equate corporal punishment, which is typically in this country taking a spanking a child, to what was done to you. It boggles the mind.   Yasmine Mohammed  38:55 Yeah.   Will Dove  38:56 I wanted to touch on one thing. When Mr. Fabbro got involved, at some point, you were told that this might result in Child Services taking you away from your family. How did you feel about that?   Yasmine Mohammed  39:08 I was ecstatic. I was like, "I hope that's what happens at the end of this because these people will torture me if I don't get out." Like while the investigation was going on, people were watching, there were ministry officials that were paying attention and so they weren't really going to do anything to me. And, but if the investigation ended, and he was deemed to be innocent, and I was left in that house, like I knew that it was going to be so much worse than it had been because now it's going to be with this sense of like, "Oh, you thought you were going to get out of here? Oh, you thought you were gonna go to the infidels for help? Well, look at you now. And now we can do whatever we want to you, because what are you going to do? Go running to the police for help again? You're not getting any help from them. So you have nothing. So you have to sit here and take it." And that's exactly what happened. That's exactly what happened.   Yasmine Mohammed  40:16 It did become so much worse than it was. Because they felt at that point that they had carte blanche, like what's going to stop them. And plus it came with anger, "Oh, you tried to put me in prison? Did you? And my mom, too, she was like, you've embarrassed me. You tried to put him in prison?" You know what I mean? It was like I was the bad one for trying to defend myself from an abuser.   Will Dove  40:47 Yeah, and it got much worse, as you said after that. And this is the point where I think I have to ask you, you were a child, where did you find the strength to survive this? What do you think it was that allowed you to do this?   Yasmine Mohammed  41:07 It was the year that I first tried to commit suicide, it was not just because I'm physically standing here. It broke me and she didn't take me out of school, of course, as promised, and because now she could just do whatever she wanted. And you just, again, like I mentioned before, you just turn into a shadow of your former self, because fighting gets you nowhere. Pushing back gets you nowhere. I mean, look how far I took it. I went so far, like if you were in the mafia, I would be considered a rat. You know, like, I spoke out against my cult, the "us". I went to the them, asking them for help, like it was the most despicable trait, traitorous betrayal like I couldn't have done anything worse in their eyes.   Yasmine Mohammed  42:26 And so they treated me as such. I was like a vermin in the house.   Will Dove  42:38 I think at this point, we're gonna have to step ahead and folks, on the details in this book "Unveiled" that we're skipping over, I strongly urge you to read it. But because Yasmine has limited time, I want to touch on the really important stuff. Like we have to move ahead to a song.   Yasmine Mohammed  42:53 Oh, okay. Yeah. So, just very briefly, I'll say that, you know, when I graduated from high school, we went to Egypt as a family and I thought it was for the summer but I woke up in the morning and my family were all gone. They left me in Egypt. And the idea was like for reprogramming, you're now in a Muslim country, if surrounded by Muslims, none of this like liberalism and feminism to aspire to, like, this is it your you know, you can stop, hoping for that life outside of the bubble. And when I was there, my mom tried to get me married to my cousin. And I finagled my way out of that, and I got back to Canada. You know the story because you read my book, but I'm just trying to skip as quickly as possible. It wasn't easy, but I got out.   Yasmine Mohammed  42:53 And because I did that, it was an embarrassment for my mom, everybody knew that I was supposed to marry my cousin. Everyone in the family knew, all of her friends do, blah, blah, blah. And the fact that I had like, I outsmarted her and I wasn't going to marry him was a real embarrassment to her. And so I mean, from a relationship that I've already described to you from the get go has always been very difficult between the two of us now, at this point, it was like the worst it had ever been. Because she was just so horrified that I would embarrass her like that.   Yasmine Mohammed  44:37 And that's when she brought this man that she said that I needed to marry. It was the only way that she was going to forgive me for all of my past transgressions. And I have to mention to you as well, that in Islam, there's this concept of heaven is at the feet of your mothers. So if your mother doesn't approve you going to heaven, it doesn't matter if you're like, the best of the best humans, never missed a prayer, always fasted in Ramadan, blah, blah, blah, doesn't matter. If your mother doesn't approve for you to go to heaven, you're not going to go to heaven. And that gives her God-like power, really, because she's saying, like, if you don't marry this man, you are going to spend eternity in hell, because I will not let you get to heaven. And you are not my daughter, and I don't want you to come to my funeral. And you're not going to be allowed to live in this house, and all sorts of threats.   Yasmine Mohammed  45:43 And on top of all those threats, I just wanted peace. I just convinced myself, I thought, if I do everything that she wants, like, let's see what happens. You know, my whole life, I've resisted her. Let's see what happens if I just do what she wants. Let's see what happens if I become like, my sister, and I just embrace this. So they put me in black Nepal, head to toe and black, black socks, black gloves, my eyes weren't even showing, I accepted it. Fine, tet's try this. Marry this man. Fine. I married him. And I didn't know at the time that he was a terrorist. I didn't know that he had been with bin Laden in Afghanistan before coming to Canada. But I knew there was something not right about him. And I didn't want to marry him. And I remember crying to my mom about it. But because of all of those reasons, just so much manipulation and coercion. And in an Islamic marriage, the woman doesn't even need to be there and I wasn't there. Your presence is irrelevant. It's between the man and your mahram. So every woman has a guardian. Every woman is a dependent for her whole life. There's always a male guardian that speaks for her on all matters.   Will Dove  47:28 And your silence was considered to be consent.   Yasmine Mohammed  47:31 You got it. So I didn't even need to be there. Because they don't even offer you the dignity of saying I do. You don't even need to be there. You're irrelevant. And so I ended up marrying this man that was forced onto me. And within a week of the marriage, he came home, we were living on the 17th floor. And the curtains were open. And he started yelling at me and calling me a whore and talking about everybody can see you and I can't believe you're walking around this house without a hijab on with the curtains open. And I was like, who's gonna see me? People in helicopters? And that was it. So that was the first time he beat me.   Yasmine Mohammed  48:35 And, as you know, I've been physically abused my whole life practically. So to be honest, this was just like a real disappointment. I was like, "Oh, here we go again, like, I'm not gonna get out of this, this is not gonna end." And so I went to my mom, and I was like, I can't, I cannot. Like you already left me to be beaten by the man that you married for my entire childhood. And now you're forcing me to marry a man who is going to continue to beat me. You can't do this to me, let me out. And she said, "Well, you've only been married a week and if he, if we separate now, like if you divorce him now then everybody's gonna say that he left you because you weren't a virgin. And that's going to be embarrassing to me in the community."   Yasmine Mohammed  49:26 Now, in Islam, there's no such thing as a woman divorcing her husband. That's not a thing. Like she's not autonomous enough to make that decision. A divorce is instigated by a man. He divorces the woman by his magical mouth. He's just utters the words "I divorce you." If he says it three times, then you're divorced. So if a divorce were to occur, it's immediately assumed that he discarded her for whatever reason. So that was my mom's explanation to me as to why I needed to stay married to him longer. Because everyone in the community knows you've only been married a week, and they're gonna think that my daughter wasn't a virgin. And that's why the marriage ended so quickly. So just stay with him a bit longer. And so I said, "Okay, in order for you to save face, I will stay with him a bit longer, but I'm not going to let him touch me because I will not risk getting pregnant."   Yasmine Mohammed  50:29 And at this point, we're in the elevator going up. And as the elevator doors are closing, she says to me, you can't say no to him, because in Islam, you are his property. And she started quoting scripture to me. Like he's allowed to beat you because chapter 4 āyāt  34 says that if you fear disobedience, or arrogance from your wife, beat her. And I was arrogant when I said, "What are you afraid of people in helicopters." So because I talked back, I was arrogant, and so he had every right to beat me. And as far as not letting him touch me, I didn't have that right. Because I was his property, just like he could beat me, he can rape me too. And if I refused, then I was the one who was going to be cursed by the angels all night. And so I mentioned the elevator doors, because still to this day, if I'm in an elevator for too long, I have that same panic that I had.   Yasmine Mohammed  51:41 But when she told me that you have to stay with this man, and you have to let him beat you. And you have to let him rape you. So of course, I ended up having, getting pregnant and it was my daughter that instigated my freedom because him and my mom started talking about taking her to Egypt and getting female genital mutilation done on her, which is essentially taking a razor blade, slicing off her clitoris and selling her shut. My perfect, beautiful little baby girl, they're talking about doing this to her. And so I knew I had to get out of that house before they had a chance to do anything to her.   Yasmine Mohammed  51:41 And again, so many things happen, it was not easy. And if it weren't for the flap of a butterfly's wing, I would not be sitting here talking to you today. You know how many things I had to go through. But eventually, I got away from him, I got away from my mom, my daughter and I got our own little place. And I started going to UBC. I was on student loans. I'm so grateful even though Canada really betrayed me as a child, if it weren't for being able to get student loans, I wouldn't have been able to get out of that house and to be able to get my freedom, to get my education and get my freedom. So I'm grateful for that.   Yasmine Mohammed  53:37 And when I was in the university, I took a history of religions course that allowed me to critically examine Islam for the first time in my life, before that, you're not allowed to question you have to just accept it. But in this class, my prof was a Lebanese. And he kind of like encouraged me to look at the Quran and to look at the Ḥadīth. And I was like, intellectually bombarded with all this information that I was never allowed to have before. And I was allowed to question and think. It was crazy. Just everything was disentangling.   Yasmine Mohammed  54:22 And then 9/11 happened. And so when 9/11 happened that was like, I was already being bombarded intellectually and now I'm being bombarded emotionally as well. I'm watching my family, my community, my friends, everyone around me joyous in celebration over innocent people dying. I'm watching these towers burning and people jumping to their death and then watching other people. Just jubilant, full of you know, feel like so empowered. And so just morale has just been boosted and that's when I realized I cannot be a part of this religion anymore, I will not raise my daughter to be part of a group of people who will feel joy over innocent people dying, I cannot, I can't do this.   Yasmine Mohammed  55:25 And so it was just a perfect storm of that, being in that course, and having 9/11 happened, and just by the end of the year, I was like, I'm done with this religion. But of course, it's very dangerous to renounce the religion because the punishment for that is execution. And that doesn't have to be carried out by any law or court system, that can be carried out by any believing Muslim, including my mother, who was the first person to threaten to kill me. And so I stayed quiet for many, many, many years. Also, because who would understand like, there was just too many layers, right? It was politically incorrect for me to speak about this religion in an honest way. Because everybody was like, obsessed with, it's racist, it's a form of phobic xenophobic, we can say anything we want about any other religion or any other ideology. But if you say anything about Islam is just like, that's the sacred cow, right?   Yasmine Mohammed  56:37 And it wasn't until an episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, where Sam Harris was the guest and Ben Affleck was on the show. And you might remember it because it's quite a famous episode, where Ben Affleck just kept stopping the conversation and calling Bill and Sam racists and set telling them that they're gross, because these two men were trying to talk about how, in many Muslim majority countries, people like me, should be executed, free thinkers should be executed. And they're saying like, this is a problem and then Bill refer to a poll in Egypt, because in Egypt right now, you don't get killed for leaving a religion, but you get put in an insane asylum. But they did a Pew Research poll where they asked Egyptians, "Do you think that we should instead kill people who renounced the religion?" And 86% of the people said, "Yeah, kill them."   Yasmine Mohammed  57:49 And so myself, my mom being from Egypt, and myself, having lived in Egypt for a couple of years, and someone who renounced Islam, I really saw myself in the people that Bill and Sam are trying to talk about, that's me, and for Ben Affleck to jump in there and shut the conversation down. And why? Because you're white, straight American men, you have no right to talk about this. Not because he was engaging with the argument in any way, but just in instead attacking these men for immutable characteristics. And so that's what made me decide, okay, brown skinned Arab woman. And I will say, the exact same thing that these men are saying, and then it will be harder to shut me down, because of my immutable characteristics. So they'll be forced to engage with the actual argument. And that's what made me finally write my book was just out of frustration, really, it was still very scary. I mean, you read the foreword, or the preface, where I talked about how scary it was to make that initial decision.   Yasmine Mohammed  59:05 But I'm very grateful that I did it. I've been able to meet people like you and so many other wonderful people. Mr. Fabrro, him and I connected again, and he wrote the foreword for my book, actually. So he has been incredibly supportive and loving, and I'm really grateful to have him back in my life again. The books have been published in 15 different languages. So there's a lot of people all around the world that are understanding and, unfortunately, relating to a lot of what I wrote about. And I now have a podcast where I speak to people, predominantly women who have got through sometimes way worse things that I've been through, people read my story and they think wow, like that's so extreme. It's not, it's not extreme. It is so common. And if you watch my podcast like story after story after story, girls being left in Somalia, girls being left in Iraq, girls being left here and there, that's what they do. Girls being beaten, girls being threatened with death over removing their hijab, you know what I mean?   Yasmine Mohammed  1:00:23 There's this one young girl, who was telling us the story of when she was 14 years old, she was sent to Iraq and married off and she had her first child at 15. Still with her three kids, she managed to get out and to become free. And she's free today. It's just the most unbelievable stories like these women, they should each have a blockbuster movie. But instead were silenced, were ignored. I mean, it's nice if we're ignored, actually we're demonized. We're told that we're hateful because we're talking about our trauma and our experiences, that makes us the bad people.   Yasmine Mohammed  1:01:08 So I'm really grateful to people like you who have the courage, to bravely allow me to come on your platform, share my story and let people know the truth. We are whistleblowers, we are risking our lives to be whistleblowers. And it's so demoralizing. And it's so sad. And it's so frustrating when we're speaking out, because we care about the West, because we care about our countries, care about our homes, and we can see what the Islamists are doing. And we can see how they're infiltrating your governments and your media and your public policy. And you refuse to protect yourself and protect your values. Because you think that that's going to make you a bad person and instead you demonize us, you demonize the people who are trying to warn you about what we know is happening. And it's not just in Canada, it's in Canada, America, UK, it's all over Europe, it's everywhere. And it's incredibly frustrating. So, thank you.   Will Dove  1:02:21 I wanna talk about some of those very disturbing statistics that you put in your book about your own efforts. There's one last personal question about your story that I'd like to ask. And I know you say that there are other people out there whose stories are even worse than yours. But I invited you to this interview. And I said this to you in the email when I asked you, most Canadians are decent people. And they will be incensed by this, but they can't do anything though they know about it. And so they have to know just how bad it is. And so you have a daughter by assault and that wasn't the only child. What happened to the other one?   Yasmine Mohammed  1:03:08 I miscarried with the second child that I would have had with him. But it was that miscarriage that forced me to recognize how important it was for me to get out of that house. Because when I discovered that I was pregnant a second time, I gave up. I was like, that's it. We're moving to the shower. And I'm going to become a terrorist's wife. Because by then CSIS had contacted me and had told me that he was part of al Qaeda and there is what was I going to do, I had a high school education. And I could not imagine myself being able to support two children on my own with zero support from my family. Because as I knew, and it did happen, I dishonored the family when I left him because to have a daughter who is divorced is a dishonor on that family. And so I knew that I would be by myself. I would be all alone. So when I found out that the baby doesn't have a heartbeat, I realized and felt like it was my fault. I felt like the baby didn't survive because I didn't want it. Because I was very, very, very angry at myself that I didn't get out fast enough. And now I had a second kid.   Will Dove  1:05:22 It wasn't the reason, Yasmine. That wasn't why you miscarried,   Yasmine Mohammed  1:05:25 No, it wasn't.   Will Dove  1:05:26 Why did you miscarried?   Yasmine Mohammed  1:05:27 I miscarried because he would kick me down the stairs and beat me as I was rolled up in a ball and I thought I was protecting the kid, but him kicking me on my back, that's probably what did it. I mean, we can't know for sure. But I wouldn't be surprised.   Will Dove  1:06:02 Yasmine, thank you very much for having the courage to tell these horrific stories. And as I said folks, there's a lot more in the book. But Yasmine's time is limited, so I want to move on to first of all, let's talk about how these radical Islamist we're marrying up to four wives in Canada, under Sharia law, are gaming the system. They're really doing it.   Yasmine Mohammed  1:06:33 Yeah, it's a very common tactic. And the government is aware of it. I've spoken to people in the ministry who know that this is happening, but there's nothing that they can do about it. Because as is always the answer, if you speak about anything, you're the Islamophobic. So what's very common is a man will have his wife, and then he will have his three other wives. And each one of those three has children. And each one is on social assistance. And each one of those is getting government housing. And so each one of them is applying as a single mother. So he's like, married with four wives, but only one of them is a legal wife, and the other three are Islamic Sharia wives.   Yasmine Mohammed  1:07:27 And so even though they know that this is happening, and that these women are actually married to this man, and he is not responsible for providing them housing or food for the kids or anything, because taxpayers are doing that for him. There's nothing they can do about that because they say it's Islamophobic to even look into that. And like I said before, they play the game of saying, well, that's just like, he's got mistresses, what are you going to do? Arrest people for having mistresses? And so that's just one of the ways that they are using the system, like I said earlier on in our conversation, using the system to their advantage just being opportunists.   Will Dove  1:08:19 Right. Let's talk about some things that are happening outside of Canada, because you have, you've put some statistics in your book that are just horrifying. Abuses by children and of children by mothers in the Middle East. Around six in every 10 children experience physical punishment. Highest rates are in Central African Republic, Egypt and Yemen. Eleven cases of child abuse reported daily, there's sexual exploitation of boys, raping of young girls, in one case, a girl who was married to this man at nine years of age and raped at nine.   Yasmine Mohammed  1:09:05 Just like the Prophet.   Will Dove  1:09:08 99.3% of women in Egypt have reported being sexually harassed, the country that you lived in for a couple of years. They can honor violence in the US. And these of course are, I don't know if it's always a killing, but often it is. And especially of girls, who have supposedly shamed the family. Fifty-two percent of these are by the victim's father. And the average age of the victim is 25. And they're doing this around the world. Supposedly just democratic countries like Canada and the US and Great Britain. And it's happening right here to people's noses.   Yasmine Mohammed  1:10:01 Yeah in Mississauga, Ontario there was a young girl named Aqsa Parvez, who was 16 years old, and she refused to wear a hijab, her father and brother, they suffocated her with the hijab that she refused to wear. Like that's a message like...   Will Dove  1:10:28 But that was a rare case of them being caught at it.   Yasmine Mohammed  1:10:32 Yeah, you're absolutely correct. And that's why even these numbers, we can never know. We can never know how many of these cases are, as you say, people are getting caught, or it's getting reported. Because most of the time, it is, like I mentioned before, it's like a mafia, everybody covers or the perpetrators of the crime. I mean, in America, there was that famous case of the man, the taxi driver, who, again, Egyptian killed, shot two of his daughters. And for years and years, he was on the FBI's most wanted list. And they finally discovered him in his son's house. In his son's house. They had all been protecting him. The whole family was protecting him. Like this man killed your sisters. And he's protecting him in his house.   Yasmine Mohammed  1:11:33 There's a documentary out called "Banaz", a love story. And that's about a young girl in the UK, who on five different occasions, she went to the police saying, "My father is trying to kill me. My father is trying to kill me. My father is trying to kill me." And they never paid attention to her. And they never listened to her. They didn't take her seriously. And eventually they found her in a suitcase, buried in her father's backyard. The stories are endless.   Will Dove  1:12:14 They are and I want to get back to your book now. Because you talked about being censored if you try to tell the story, and nobody wants to tell it. You actually had trouble getting this book published. This is one of the most compelling, honest, frank books I've ever read. I can't imagine a publisher turning it down. So what was their excuse?   Yasmine Mohammed  1:12:43 It's Islamophobic. We're too afraid to publish it, or there's going to be too much backlash. One of the agents that was trying to get the book published for me is Neil Blair, who is JK Rowling's agent. That's how far up this goes. He even could not get this book published for me. Because they said, we have the security concerns because of Salman Rushdie, and etc. And I gave up and I wasn't even going to publish it. I was done. I was like, nobody wants to hear my story. I'm over it. I don't care. I was so demoralized.   Yasmine Mohammed  1:13:34 But it was Sam Harris, who really encouraged me to self-publish. He told me like, forget all of these people. Your story needs to be heard. People do want to hear it. Because it really makes you feel like you're so insignificant and unimportant. And what you have to say has zero relevance, you know what I mean? When you're just constantly being told, "No, no, no, no, no". So I self-published it in English. And like I said, since then, I've had publishers from all around the world reach out to me. So I'm grateful that it's been translated in so many other languages and other countries have been a lot more brave than Anglophones. My French publishers from Quebec. Quebec is different than the rest of Canada in that day recognize the importance of secularism, the importance of pushing back against religions that try to overstep. But there, it's not the same, obviously, in all of Quebec, and it's certainly not like that, generally in Canada.   Will Dove  1:14:52 Yasmine, I hope that you have reached a point in your own healing where you don't need to hear this, but I'm going to say it anyway. Any man, any man, who has ever treated you, like you were inferior, was dead wrong. You are undoubtedly one of the strongest, bravest people I have ever known. And you are second to no one. Thank you so much for everything you've done.   Yasmine Mohammed  1:15:19 Thank you, Will. Thank you so much. That's very sweet.