I wanted to share, a bit of personal experience when it comes to online muslim spaces, as I'm sure that most people on the grad are not familiar with them. I know everyone here is aware that the US, Saudi Arabia, and Qatar have fermented Wahabbism within the Muslim community as a way to divide and conquer West Asia. However, I don't think many comrades are aware of how that organically manifested in the English speaking online Muslim community.

As someone who was in that space, and nearly fell down certain rabbit holes, I think it would be useful to describe the experience.

First of all, I should remind unaware comrades that I'm a practicing Shia Muslim, Jafari school to be specific (Ithna-Ashari, aka Twelver). My parents come from both Syria and Iran respectively and were also born Shia, so I've always been in an explicitly Shia Muslim community irl.

Next, important thing to note is the time frame of what I'll be talking about. I only started using social media (reddit) after moving on from high-school younger then most in the US, and some time into college, so around 7 or 8 years ago.

Obviously, when I started using reddit, I wasn't a committed communist, but I wasn't exactly fond of your average redditor due to the vicious Islamophobia. I'd join Muslim meme groups, primarily r/izlam at first, which at the time was quite a bit more chill then it is now.

Having to engage with the constant Islamophobia produced on reddit is something I've said was a major radicalized factor into becoming a socialist. However in the brief period before I was fully comfortable calling myself a socialist, I was part of a growing contingent of Muslims online who were getting very sick of a particularly bigoted source of reddit Islamophobia, the "Ex-Muslim" community, heavy emphasis on the quotation marks.

I say that because at this point everyone is aware that the community is heavily astroturfed, and basically just filled with hindutvas larping and mentally colonized west worshippers.

Anyways, due to r/Izlam not allowing discussion of the topic, another group emerged known as r/extomatoes, tomatoes being a derogatory term for ex-muslims, especially of the reddit vareity.

(I'm pretty sure that sub is now banned or splintered off into more extreme variations now, but I wouldn't recommend looking into them.)

At first it was a community where a lot of us could vent our frustration at the constant Islamophobia being spread online, and to mock some of the more obvious fake stories on the ex-muslim subreddit. Other communities like "islamic history memes" would come about for similiar reasons, usually stemming from wanting to have a space away from islamaphobic content on mainstream subreddits.

This obviously bred toxicity, but at the start these communities were largely places to avoid western bigotry and celebrate Muslim identity instead of being derided as backwards and savage.

Soon after these communities emerged however, a trend behan to occur. The vitriol once pointed at islamaphobes would eventually lead to conspiracy theories and hostilities to all attempts to analyze and do critique of mainstream understandings of Islam.

It started with an aggressive stance towards the "progressive Islam" subreddit, due to them caving to western concepts of liberalism for interpreting Islam (this isn't an unfair criticism of that community, but I'd argue there's more to be discussed). Then there was the promotion of some of these Dahwa bros, primarily, Mohammad Hijab.

This would start to bother me and others in the community due to Hijab's anti-shia stance. These community were originally made for the sake of venting about bad faith attacks against Muslims, not another battle ground for sectarianism (as had been the case in the thoroughly Wahabbi r/islam). From here I, and many other shias along with Sunnis uncomfortable with sectarianism, began quietly disengaging with these communities, with some Shias occasionally defending shi'ism from bad faith attacks by Wahhabis.

It wasn't very long before these communities one by one began becoming aggressively anti-Shi'ite, and a lot of us, myself included, just exited out of them, not wanting to deal with it anymore.

The same pattern also slowly overtook r/izlam, albeit with a delayed reaction, and the only muslim space on reddit that wasn't becoming a Wahabbi cesspit was r/Shia (which is actually more based politically then most other subreddits, as well as being less toxic).

At the sane time as thus was happening online, I was going to college and becoming a socdem and, soon after, a democratic socialist. I mainly discovered Hassan Piker (I know opportunist cringe, but I still argue that he used to be more radical) and from there found Hakim, Second Thought, and other online socialists. I never really stumbled with being a communist, I just sorta learned more, and moved forward in my political journey.

I never had an "anti-tankie" phase as a socdem, I just had a slight skepticism/curiosity about prior socialist expirements.

"If the US could lie about Muslims and commit atrocities in the West Asia, why wouldn't they lie about Socialism and other anti-western societies" was my general thought process, along with having seen some of the countries the US demonized and knowing much if their claims were horse shit.

Regardless, to end, I saw many of these Wahabbi influences affect online spaces and warp the opinions of Sunnis against Iran.

When the speaker talks about how the UK had no space for pro-resistance politics, I can attest that he is correct. A lot of these Dahwa bros came from the UK, and they are primary factor in trying to foster Western Sunni Muslim Men into an idealogy that is beneficial to western imperialism, and stoked by a fear of Persian domination.

I even have people in my Shia community who know young men that have converted to Wahabbi Sunni Islam and use their prior experience as a Shia to slander us, and they've built up an audiences of hundreds or even thousands very quickly by doing this. It's an entire ecosystem that western social media algorithms bolster.

This is, in my opinion, the reason why before any kind if Pan-Arabism or Arab socialist movements can be revived, the house of Saud must be destroyed along with all the other Arab monarchies. They are the most substantial obstacle to West Asian - North African sovereignty, and the damage they have done is multi-generational.

I found a YouTube link in your post. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:

• yewtu.be
• inv.nadeko.net
• yt.artemislena.eu
• piped.video