Might be just worth knowing that Tommy Robinson-admiring Mahyar Tousi regularly bigs up the regime of Shah Pahlavi on X.
So it's worth recalling the methods of interrogation deployed by the Shah's Savak torturers, which included - apart from the conventional electric wires attached to genitals, beatings on the soles of feet and nail extraction - rape and 'cooking', whereby the victim was strapped to an electrified bed of wire that became a red hot toaster.
Bacon slicers, domestic cookers and acid were also put to imaginative use by the Savak torturers. No wonder that, in 1975, Amnesty International pronounced the Shah’s government to be one of the worst violators of human rights.
This statement is also displayed prominently during the video:
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Note how it is unfalsifiable: either someone is a Muslim even if they make statements to the contrary. It is also effectively essentializing Muslims, making them out to be a fifth column in our midst. In other words, it is an example of anti-Muslim bigotry.
As well as being an attempt to arouse an animus against Muslims in general, Wolf's claim is also incorrect. There
are genuine ex-Muslims and they can be read about in Simon Cottee's groundbreaking study
The Apostates: When Muslims Leave Islam, which reveals that outside of Muslim-majority societies, former adherents of the faith are not living in fear for their lives but do tend to be ostracized and have to deal with the consequences of that.
Then there is Ali Rizvi, author of the critically acclaimed (by Richard Dawkins and Steven Pinker among others)
The Atheist Muslim: A Journey From Religion to Reason, and Alom Shaha, who wrote
The Young Atheist's Handbook: Lessons for Living A Good Life Without God.
I would defy anyone to read those two books and then maintain that their authors are dissimulating. For example, does Shaha appear to be practising
taqiyya here?
As well as writing books and the scripts for quite a few TV programmes and short films, I have written articles for a number of print magazines as well as several online publications, including Gua…
alomshaha.com
Shaha's book also has a foreword written by Jim Al-Khalili, the well-known Iraqi-British theoretical physicist, science populariser and broadcaster. Khalili is on record as having declared: "as the son of a Protestant Christian mother and a Shia Muslim father, I have nevertheless ended up without a religious bone in my body".
Returning to the notion of
taqiyya, or concealment of ones true beliefs, it is usually deployed by Shia Muslims to protect themselves from persecution, and nothing more than that.
To sum up, I would be very wary of Tousi TV and the kind of people Tousi interviews on it.
Unless they are recognised authorities on Islam and international terrorism, and in possession of the relevant academic credentials, they should be treated with caution.
Two such authorities are Shiraz Maher (author of the definitive work on Salafi-Jihadism) and Peter Neumann (who wrote Radicalized: New Jihadists and the Threat to the West).
Both post on X. Maher has yet to comment on Magdeburg but Neumann has. Unfortunately, his tweets are in German, so I'm off now to get my brother to have a look at what he has been saying and to get him to translate the gist for me. This bit was in English though and was presumably posted about Taleb al-Abdulmohsen:
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