Stop Speaking the Predator’s Tongue — “Refusal Is a Universal Language” | Shahid Bolsen

Well, you know, it's an old concept that you're supposed to speak the language that people understand. Right? You you if you wanna communicate with people, you have to speak the language that they understand, and that usually is referenced in the context of the oppressed versus the oppressor. You know? And that's interpreted to mean, if not said explicitly, that the only language that the oppressor understands is violence.

Or else the only language they understand is money, profit, what have you. So usually when people invoke this truism, that's what they're talking about. You know, like saying, you can't go to a violent people in a language of peace. You can't go to a profit driven people in the language of morality. And okay, that's logical.

That's all logical and true, I believe that. Generally speaking, that's, there's nothing wrong with that idea. But my point is, I don't want to communicate with you. You understand? I don't wanna learn your language.

Why should I? I don't wanna start learning your ways. I don't wanna start learning your language. I don't wanna start learning your approach. And if the only reason that I am learning all of that is so that I can talk to you, what's the point?

I don't have to deal with you at all, you know. If you're not learning my language to talk to me, I'm not gonna learn your language to talk to you, why should I? What's the benefit of communicating with you anyway? We just don't have to talk, you know. You have an ugly language.

You have a primitive language. And yes, I'm not just talking about language in the linguistic sense obviously. I'm talking in terms of that truism. If the only language, that you know is the language of violence, then we have nothing to talk about. If the only language that you know is the language of money, then we have nothing to talk about.

You know, if you don't speak the language of peace, you don't speak the language of morality, if you don't speak the language of justice, well then we're never gonna be able to communicate anyway. And if I learn your language, if I learn your language of blood and greed and injustice, then I have let you degrade me. No. Why should I accommodate you to talk to you in your language, when in fact there's nothing meaningful, there's nothing beneficial that I can get, from that kind of conversation. That's refusal.

And refusal is a universal language. You know, you don't need to speak Chinese or Vietnamese or Arabic or French in order to understand what it means when someone gives you the cold shoulder. Everyone understands that. When someone ghosts you, that's that's a language all on its own. When someone ignores you, that's understood no matter what language you speak.

You're not part of our conversations if you do not speak our language. And when we are speaking in the language of sovereignty, when we're speaking in the language of stability and peace and dignity, and you come with the language of subordination, the language of destabilization and degradation and violence, we have nothing to say to each other. And if you don't learn our language then we never will have anything to say to each other and I'm not gonna learn your language. I'm not a native speaker of that tongue. You understand me?

And yes, if I start learning your language, I start learning your lexicon, then I'm gonna start learning your idioms, your axioms, your frames of reference. And pretty soon your ways will start contaminating my ways. I might lose grasp of my native tongue, and this is all a major part of colonizing the psyche, you know. Remember, I'm using language as an analogy here, even though it does work also literally, you know. When you learn the colonizer's language, you start using the colonizer's language, literally their language, like English or French or what have you.

Then you get comfortable in their language and you start to lose track of your native language, you know, literally, linguistically. But metaphorically it's the same. You learn their language and you lose your own language. You start using their frames of reference, you start using their theories, their philosophies, their interpretations, their world view, their paradigms, you know, their understanding. And then you forget your own, you forget your own paradigms, own understanding.

And now they've got you. And look, before anyone says, but they force themselves on us, so we have to deal with them effectively. That's why we have to learn their language. Yes, course, I understand. But we're Muslims.

We know how to deal with people who force themselves on us. We have that in our language. We don't have to learn their language in order to know how we're supposed to manage in that kind of a situation. We follow our own rules. And no, that doesn't just mean, you know, violence or armed resistance.

We have a very high language in Islam, a very complex moral and intellectual language in Islam that gives us a vast vocabulary for dealing with any issue. We have a whole repertoire of strategies for dealing with aggression, for dealing with conflict. It's revealed in the Quran, it's revealed in the Sunnah, the stories of the prophets, you know, and fourteen hundred years of history and jurisprudence. No. Our language is vast.

Our language is vast and sophisticated intellectually, morally, culturally, politically. You have a primitive binary language, we don't. The important thing here is to recognize that they do operate in a completely different framework from us. Recognize that they do speak a different language. And understand from that that this means that we are not going to communicate period.

That's a fact. And I think that's been our error. There are many many people across the global South. It isn't that we failed to learn the colonizers language. It's that we mistakenly thought that they spoke our language.

Understand what I'm saying? Meaning, we mistakenly thought that their moral language, their ethical language, their intellectual language, We thought that was the same as ours and it isn't. It isn't at all. And yes, have to understand that like I said, their their language is a primitive language. I know that.

I know it because I grew up speaking that language. And again, no, I'm not talking about English. You know, we're talking about the moral language, the cultural language, the philosophical language, the paradigmatic civilizational language here and it's a primitive language in the West. It's a simplistic language in the West. I can't emphasize enough how important this is for you to understand if you come from the global South of the Muslim world.

They are handicapped in terms of their internal civilizational development because of the simplicity of their language. See again, think about the phrase, talk to them in their language or talk to talk to them in the language that they understand. Right? That's how it goes. Okay.

First thing that means is that they do not speak your language. We focus too much on how how how this means that we are not speaking their language. But we need to focus on the fact that they do not speak our language, you know. If your language is the oneness of Allah, the oneness of God, and our servitude, and our accountability to Allah, while their language is power is God, and power means the ability to force others to do whatever you want, but we can't communicate in those languages. Those are two completely different languages.

There's not even a way to translate the difference in these languages, you know. Let me be clear here also that the West does not speak the civilizational language that they print on their brochures. You know, rights, freedom, liberty, reason and so forth. These are marketing slogans. So don't think that that's their civilizational language.

No. That's packaging. And you won't understand that unless you are looking at them from the vantage point of your own pure epistemology. You have to look at them from where you are and see what you see and call what you're seeing according to your own definitions. Because if you let them tell you what they're doing, then you're never gonna be able to make it add up.

Because what they're doing and what they say they're doing are two completely different things. If you listen to them, it's gonna be like wearing noise cancelling headphones while listening to like an audiobook of Jordan Peterson's 12 Rules for Life while your family is screaming and getting slaughtered downstairs. And you won't be able to hear them because you hear Jordan Peterson telling you about how great the West is. I'm telling you, you need to pay attention to what's really going on with western so called civilization. Not what they tell you, not what they say, not what they what what what they say to gaslight you about what they're doing.

You already know this in your gut. I mean, you've seen them burn villages to save villages in Vietnam. You've seen them sanction children to defend human rights. You've seen them bankrupt whole countries, populations to protect free trade. See, they always attach noble slogans to their savagery.

And if you accept their epistemology, then you're gonna be basically accepting to inflict upon yourself cognitive dissonance. No. You have to look at them from your own vantage point. And you have to define their actions by your own terms. And determine for yourself what they truly believe by your own objective observations from that vantage point.

Their civilizational language is might makes right. And then they repaint or they redefine what right is by telling you that right is whatever might just did. That redefining and that repainting is what, the so called western civilization calls its values. Please understand me. That's what they think values are, just packaging.

That's what they think values are. So look at the contrast, these two civilizational languages. The Tahitic grammar of Islam, which whether or not Muslims live up to it, The grammar of Islam binds power to justice under divine audit. But you can contrast that with the predator grammar of the modern West, which binds morality to power only for presentation purposes. It's like putting a heart emoji on the side of a missile.

Okay? When western officials speak, you're usually hearing one of three layers. Layer one is the myth, you know, the sacred words that are recited for legitimacy. Universal rights, rule of law, democracy, you know, rational progress, reason, liberty, so on and so on and so on. Then level two is the interface, which is the language that's used to satisfy the elite and to write policy papers, to secure markets for capital.

That's gonna be about governance, reform, transparency, inclusion, development and so on. And then you get down to layer three, that's the real operative language, the real program code. The moral language that actually allocates pain and profit, victimization and exploitation, extract, enclose, securitize, neutralize resistance, institutionalize impunity, might makes right. Okay? The first two layers are just soundproofing around the third layer.

You understand? The first two layers are only there to obscure the third layer, which is their real language. They cushion their viciousness with virtue. That's what those other two layers are about. Islam doesn't work that way.

And I'm not being idealistic about this. Now, I'm not saying that Muslims are perfect. Sin and hypocrisy exists among Muslims just like it does anyone else. Sure. But the grammar does not authorize that.

The Quran gives no quarter to sin and to hypocrisy. And it defines what it is. And the Sunnah of Rasulullah sallam hones that definition further, the law codifies it and the hereafter punishes it. In Islam, the program language is the moral code. That's the that's the the only layer we have.

Obedience, justice, mercy, accountability, protection of life, intellect, lineage, property, and faith. We fail often, but failure is breach not design. In the western order, breach is not failure, breach is design. See, the Muslims, we did not build a moral and ethical language, a civilizational language. We didn't build that around us.

We built ourselves around the moral and ethical and civil civilizational language that Allah revealed and that embodied. Do you understand? We did not create the code. The code created us. That's why we're Muslims in the first place.

And that's why we're Muslims first. Not Arab, not African, not Asian, not American, not European, not so called black and not so called white. We are Muslims. Our nation is the ummah, the middle nation. Okay?

That's a moral citizenship. It's a belief based nationalism, a belief based identity. We don't get to sprinkle glitter on filth and call it diamonds. We have to be real. We we have to be real or we risk losing our citizenship.

We risk having our passport revoked that is our means by which we enter Jannah. We lose our whole sense of identity when we don't take Islam seriously. It's not packaging for us. But that predator moral grammar, that's different. The western so called civilization, their code is cruelty.

That's their program code. Not the user friendly operating system that you see. Their first rule in language is to convert every relationship into an extractive interface. You know, land becomes an asset, water becomes, I don't know, a future con a futures contract. All human attention becomes a source for ad revenue.

Identity, is nothing but something to use for branded advocacy, merchandise. The second rule is to monetize any sort of asymmetry. If I control finance, law, and tech, it doesn't matter what you have because you need me to let you even access what you have. They convert their own their their dependency on the resources that others have into those people's dependency on them Until they thank you for extracting their wealth. And then they always wrap extraction in moral language, you know.

Human rights audits that are bundled with privatization. Democracy promotion that's supplied via regime change. You know, humanitarian corridors that always track pipelines. And then and then you always try to offload risk. This is also their language.

Environmental collapse, labor injury, currency crises, always push the liabilities down to the periphery, down the chain to the periphery, to the poor and to the unborn. And then it's part of their language to always make sure that they have an architecture for impunity. If you're in the core, then your crimes are accomplishments. But if you're in the periphery, even accusations will earn you sanctions and conviction. Adaptive hypocrisy is part of their language.

Contradiction doesn't wound their reputation. It's a strategic asset for them. Today's principle is whatever validates yesterday's actions, yesterday's atrocity, yesterday's pillage. But Islam starts from the opposite pole. Power is a trust.

Wealth is custodial. The creation of Allah's nature is not a set of asset classes, it's a set of ayat. Science from Allah's that will indict you if you exploit them unjustly. Every human being is both an and a a slave and a steward. Your wealth carries embedded claims from the poor.

Even your business contracts can be worshipped if they honor justice, and they will be sinful if they cheat. There's no lobbies on your mokhiyama. This grammar ties every domain, governance, trade, family, environment, all back to a single axis. Did you keep trust with Allah and with his creation? Or did you transgress the boundaries and commit Notice in the Islamic language, language of Islam, a a human being's failure triggers repentance and repair because the standard is external to power.

But in the predator grammar, power rewrites the standard so that failure never even registers. They rewrite what is moral according to what they're capable of doing. When the West talks about rights, they mean marketable license, you know, unevenly enforced. Rights are protected, when they secure investor mobility and suspended if they obstruct extraction in any way. Just ask any sanctioned country about their right to food and their right to medicine.

When they talk about freedom, the only freedom that they are serious about is deregulation of capital. When they talk about democracy, it means the status quo of tyranny by the unelected rich. It's just packaging for regime change in every other part of the world. If our governments block foreign acquisition then our people deserve democracy. If our government green lights your extractive deal then it means that our governments are stable.

And when the West talks about reason what they mean is the exclusion of morality from judgment. Rule of law so called descends with full force upon the weak on behalf of the strong. If you're weak, they prosecute. If you're rich, they negotiate. Settlements above, sentences below.

Look, these aren't bad words in and of themselves. They're captured words. We don't reject the concepts. We reject any claim that you actually believe in those concepts or practice those concepts. You only use those concepts for camouflage.

So for anyone in the in the global South, the next time any western envoy comes to you talking about make wanting to have a partnership or make a deal, there's five silent tests that you should run-in your head. Is there symmetry in enforceability? In other words, can they be held to the same terms that they impose upon you? And if not, it's unfair and it's a myth. It's a setup.

Then ask yourself, who absorbs the downside risk? The pollution for example, the default inflation that might happen. If it's only on you, it's a setup. Then ask yourself, can you withdraw without financial asphyxiation, without sanctions, without covert destabilization? If not, it's a setup.

Ask yourself, are you free to publicly criticize the deal without being throttled, without reputational assassination? If not, this is a setup. Ask yourself, would they accept to have the identical terms, the identical logic used on them. If not, this is a setup. See, the only reason to learn their language is so that you know what they're really saying, so that you can understand what they're saying.

You can learn their language but never use their language. You can't use their language without degrading yourself because again, it's a primitive moral language. So you have to be ruthlessly bilingual. You understand? Understand, be fluent in their interface, but rooted in your own epistemology so that you can accurately identify what their real code is.

What the code is that they're actually following underneath the pretty interface. You know, translate outward but anchor inward. And if you're gonna use their terms, their concepts, every time you use one of their, you know, glamour words, you need to bind that to a non fungible Islamic definition and a measured test. Don't say freedom unless you add freedom from debt slavery, freedom from, data harvesting without consent, freedom from wage coercion, Freedom from compulsory complicity in oppression. You understand?

Don't say development unless you add childcare, fair labor, actual metrics of human well-being, you know, community food security. Gaza supplied not besieged. If they refuse the test, then you have exposed the packaging. Before you enter into any arrangement with the West, trade, security, media licensing, whatever, run a quick RPI style audit. Who holds the decision authority in this relationship, in this agreement, in this partnership?

Who controls the critical inputs? Who can retaliate without cost? How adaptable are we if we pull the plug on this agreement? What dependencies are we locking ourselves into? Map your positives, map your exposures, and if the spread is too wide, then no amount of strategic partnership language is gonna save you.

You're negotiating surrender terms, not partnership terms, you know. This is a concern when we're talking about the GCC for example, partnering with BlackRock, and with a national OCGFC for establishing a new Middle East, for establishing the vision for the new Middle East. I've said all along that there are risks involved in this because these people are predators. The a national OCGFC are predators. And right now particularly in of course Gaza and also in Syria, I think that we're seeing a battle going on between the military industrial complex aligned, nationalistic OCGFC which supports Zionism.

We're seeing a battle now between them and the allied faction of the a national OCGFC and the GCC and BRICS. A battle for controlling outcomes in the region. And the the the the danger is because the the a national OCGFC is not as invested as BRICS and the GCC in the vision for the region. They have contingency options for how to continue profiting from destruction. They all agree that stability is best, that that's the optimal outcome, but the military industrial complex, the neocons, the nationalistic, Zionist, OCGFC, they're not going down without a fight.

But in my opinion, in my estimation, BRICS and the GCC are in a stronger position in terms of their the relative power index vis a vis the a national OCGFC and vis a vis the nationalistic OCGFC. So don't learn their language in order to communicate with them in their language. Learn their language to expose that their real moral language employs deception and camouflage all the time. The West cannot function without narrative legitimacy. Its machine requires constant laundering, narrative laundering.

So withdraw your consent for their narrative. Attach conditional access. The exchange has to be on our terms, you know. If you want access to our capital, well we want accountability for you. Then you have to either negotiate on on real terms or escalate nakedly, burning the whole narrative.

That's what's happening now. And remember, Islam does not need to imitate western hypocrisy in order to win. Now, our comparative advantage is that our declared grammar and our moral machine code are meant to be the same thing. When we fail, we repent. When they fail, they just rebrand.

That's a structural vulnerability for them, so exploit that. Stop debating their brochure, their pretend language. Speak to the engine. Anchor in tarhid. Audit power.

Weaponize truth. Repossess captured words, refuse relationships that hide slavery in the fine print. The middle nation, the ummah is not gonna out spin empire, but we will out truth empire, we will out trust empire, we will outlast empire by aligning our speech with the reality that all power answers to Allah subhanahu wa ta'ala. Predators rule by darkness, but a steward stewardship rules by the light. So flip the switch and watch the cockroaches scatter.