Dia Khan
About
Documentary filmmaker, founder of Fuuse, UNESCO Goodwill Ambassador for artistic freedom
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Claims by Dia Khan (20 of 55)
Female performer targeted by conservative Muslim community
Khan, as a young female performer of North Indian and Pakistani classical music in Norway, was targeted by her parents' conservative Muslim community who viewed music as a low, dishonorable profession associated with prostitutes, leading to escalating harassment including knives pulled on her, attacks at concerts, and abduction attempts, forcing her to flee to London at 17.
Western support once flowed to the same jihadi networks
Abu Muntasar, a founding figure in recruiting European and American Muslims to foreign battlefields (Afghanistan, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir), noted that during the anti-Soviet era the West considered this a holy war of benefit to itself and supplied weapons and logistical support to the mujahideen, whereas the same force is now viewed as wholly negative because the enemy changed.
Recruiters differ from followers in their motivations
Khan found that extremist recruiters and leaders like Abu Muntasar were driven by genuine commitment to faith and geopolitical realities, whereas their followers were driven by a sense of purpose, belonging, and reverence for a father figure they lacked—and leaders skillfully redirect those unmet feelings into a political cause and ultimately violence.
Extremism offers visibility and significance as reward
For someone who feels invisible, powerless, and insignificant, extremism offers immediate real-world rewards: suddenly everyone cares about you, you're on newspaper front pages and newscasts, and the most important men on the planet—like Obama at the time—must think about, talk about, and worry about you, which is extraordinarily intoxicating.
Being Muslim is insufficient to explain terrorism
Khan argues that since there are roughly 6-7 billion (she elsewhere says 1.67 billion) Muslims in the world, if the only qualifier to be a jihadi were being Muslim, everyone would already be dead—so religion alone is not enough of a qualifier, and the psychological and emotional vulnerabilities are what explain why some men act while the vast majority do not.
Death threats from both extremes are interchangeable
Khan reports receiving death threats from both jihadists and white supremacists, and observes that the threats and descriptions of what they want to do to her are so similar in kind that 'it might as well be the same guy,' revealing the similar personalities drawn to both movements.
Muslim woman interviewer disarms even hardcore men
Khan found that as a Muslim woman, even the most hardcore fanatic jihadi types found it difficult to be hostile to her if approached non-antagonistically, because of a 'strange courtesy thing'—provided she made clear she comes as herself, they come as themselves, and both leave their baggage at the door.
Getting embedded with the National Socialist Movement
After most white supremacists refused to speak with her, Khan persuaded Jeff Schoep, head of the National Socialist Movement (the largest and oldest neo-Nazi group in America), to grant her one hour, which turned into a nine-hour car ride from Detroit to Charlottesville filming with him and his group, on the deal that she would match whatever they did to walk in their shoes.
Blue-collar Nazis showed more camaraderie than suited leaders
Khan was most surprised to find a deep difference between working-class neo-Nazis and the suit-and-tie leaders like Richard Spencer and Jared Taylor: Spencer treated his own followers with contempt and was escorted to safety in Charlottesville, whereas Jeff Schoep refused a car and walked back through the counter-protesters with his group because his followers couldn't fit in the cars.
Ideology-driven extremists are harder to reach than emotion-driven ones
Khan argues that people deeply committed to an ideology like Spencer and Taylor have a barrage of argumentative tactics, a worldview built over a long period by cherry-picking arguments and reading biased material, and are seeking power—making them much harder to reach—whereas emotion-driven followers can connect to her humanity and thereby their own.
Ken the neo-Nazi fully left the movement
Ken, a Ku Klux Klan and neo-Nazi member featured in White Right with a swastika tattoo on his chest, was expelled from his university, spoke to a Black pastor and his all-Black congregation who responded with kindness, and months later called Khan to say he had completely left the ideology, was having his tattoo removed, and—despite saying in the film he'd never break bread with a Jew—had done exactly that.
Working-class grievances are hijacked by the far right
Khan argues that while working-class racists have some legitimate socioeconomic grievances—there is a real underclass of very poor white Americans—the far right hijacks and manipulates that pain and misdirects the anger toward immigrants and people of color rather than toward figures like Trump, even though a working-class man has far more in common with the immigrant he hates than with Trump.
White supremacists blame a Jewish conspiracy for demographic change
Khan explains the 'Jews will not replace us' conspiracy theory as the belief that Jewish people are orchestrating a plot to force multiculturalism onto white European and American countries and shift the demographics (America projected to be non-majority-white in 20-25 years) as revenge for World War II, a panic further inflamed by the election of a Black president as a symbol of white power loss.
Lack of human contact makes discourse on Muslims toxic
Khan argues that the majority of Americans and Brits know very little about Muslim people and have no human connection with 'the other,' so the only thing they know is stereotypes (Muslims are terrorists coming to blow us up), which is why conversations about Muslims become toxic and impersonal and makes it easy for someone like Trump to play the fear card.
Post-9/11 treatment of Muslims worsens after every attack
Khan argues that setting aside contested hate-crime data, her own day-to-day treatment as a Muslim drastically changed after 9/11 and worsens after every terrorist attack committed by a Muslim extremist, and that she prayed the Norwegian terrorist Anders Breivik would not be a Muslim precisely because attacks against people like her rise whenever a perpetrator is Muslim.
Networks of women actively deradicalize fighters in war zones
Khan describes a loosely knit network of women across war zones—pious, secular, liberal, believing and non-believing—who are actively confronting extremism, deradicalizing men who fell into al-Qaeda or ISIS, dismantling militias, and maintaining peace in times of war, yet whose names are unknown and who never get invited onto shows like Bill Maher or written about in the New York Times.
Charlottesville rally recruited across America
Khan recounts that at the Charlottesville rally white nationalists and supremacist groups gathered from all around America, chanting 'Jews will not replace us' and slogans about deportations, and that she marched embedded with the National Socialist Movement's leader Jeff Schoep, being pepper-sprayed and witnessing intense violence.
Left must re-engage the working class
Khan argues that the left must re-engage the working-class constituency, because if it does not, the only people left in the field to engage working-class people are the extreme right—and there are real, but surmountable, challenges of diverse and multicultural societies that require political and personal will to make work.
Fear of instrumentalization silenced her for years
Khan explains that for years she was suffocated into silence about abuse within Muslim communities because she feared white people—left or right—would instrumentalize that pain to promote anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim hysteria, until she concluded that silence made her part of the problem and that one can speak out about intra-community abuse while also opposing colonialism, bad foreign policy, and violence against non-Muslim women.
Superpower emerges one-on-one, not in groups
Khan observes that all her most dangerous, hostile experiences occurred when white supremacists were in large groups where testosterone, anger, and name-calling are whipped up, whereas her ability to build human connection—her 'superpower'—only worked one-on-one; Richard Spencer, notably, was never around her alone.
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