I've written about Shazia Hobbs at least once before as a possible "Best Cop" -- and it doesn't necessarily matter if she is an actual "ex-Muslim", since unfortunately I have had sufficient experience with ex-Muslims who continue to defend Islam (go here then scroll down to "My 2009 interactions with ex-Muslims at the CEMB discussion forum"), even if only elliptically and sideways (while using rhetoric that sounds robustly anti-Islam until one examines it more closely). Shazia has become known for telling her story in an autobiography, The Gori's Daughter, and in her activism to raise awareness of the Muslim rape gangs. The term gori is a racist slang term used by Pakistanis to refer to white girls -- which Shazia, as the daughter of a Scottish woman and a Pakistani father, was (at least half white; enough for Muslim racists). Significant for my brief excerpt below is Shazia's experience of not only living as a Muslim in a half-Pakistani family, but also spending her formative years in Pakistan with her parents and extended Muslim family and neighbors, before her parents moved back to the UK.
Her interviewer from which I culled this excerpt, Hashim Almadani, I had not heard of before. He seems to be one of a growing multitude of Internet pundits who have an active Twitter life, have many YouTube videos, interview people, get interviewed by other people -- all while generally weighing in on sociopolitical issues of the day, often alluding to, if not revolving around, the problem of Islam. Even after perusing Almadani's blog, while I learn that he was born in Iraq and raised there, and finally left there in 2009 to emigrate to the UK, I can't tell whether he's a "secular" Muslim, or an ex-Muslim (the only truly, coherently secular way to be).
At any rate, they had an interesting exchange at one point in the interview, where we had a glimpse of how we really are, as Bill Maher refreshingly likes to say with pointed verve, "better than they are".
Shazia Hobbs: One bad day in the UK was better than ten good days in Pakistan because [in the UK] if you have no money if you have no job you can still eat; if you have no job and you have no money and you're ill, you can still get treated, your children can get an education. But if you live in Pakistan and you have no money. you don't eat --
Hashim Almadani: Yeah, you're dead!
Shazia Hobbs: Yeah. So here in the UK, it's different
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