Theo Padnos
speaker
157 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Theo Padnos’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
So they had no more will to fight.
That's the difference. They believe that they're progressing either to Jerusalem or to heaven. In either case, it's good. To...
I would say there's no difference. You'd say there's no difference. No. At one point, Baghdadi in Baghdad goes, hey, all those people who used to call themselves Jabhat al-Nusra, they're now ISIS. That was his declaration. The way that Jabhat al-Nusra started was he dispatched his four best friends who he had come to know at the American prison in Iraq.
He said, go over to Syria and take over that nation.
And those people were Jolani, Adnani, and another guy called Kahdani. They were a family of happy terrorists at that point. And it grew and grew and grew and grew. And the philosophy was exactly the same. I know that the reporters and the academics, they go, oh, there are these important distinctions between the two.
But I defy you to go and find some dude in both of these organizations and go, what are the distinctions? They're not going to be able to tell you. They don't know.
The difference was that they had more money at the time. Like, Jabhat al-Nusra needed cash.
Of course. And the reason why I went with Jabhat al-Nusra instead of ISIS was because they made an arbitrary decision. These people in these cells in this building are going that way with Jabhat al-Nusra. And those people in a slightly different cell in the same building are going with ISIS. How do you think you came out of the experience?
Psychologically, I am much improved, for which I'm very grateful to my former captors. It is a tonic and a life-affirming experience to almost lose your life. As cancer survivors know, and as people who've been in car crashes know, it's like you come this close to death, and you go, oh my God, it was almost all taken away from me, and now I have a second chance.
I wouldn't say faith in humanity.
No, no, no.
No, I think you would be, I think that the system that they inflict on all their prisoners is good for all humankind. That's what it's there for. And I think that it would do the exact same thing to you that it did to me, which is that you would say to yourself, my only chance of living is to submit. You know, when you came back, I think you would be stronger.
No, no, I wanted it to end.
There was just, you know... At first, of course, you combat the thing. You're in your denial phase. Like, I got to fight this. But eventually you go, it's too strong. I can't fight it. And they are too strong.
Probably during the captivity because it's like I so much believed that I was not going to come out of this alive. I gave up on ever coming back to America. I went in kind of thinking, you know what, I'm a writer. I'm like a journalist. This is sort of what I do. I'm good at this shit. And within maybe a few weeks, I'm like, okay, I don't need that stuff. I don't need that stuff. Who cares?
I just want to live. And anyway, so I gave all of that up. I also gave up coming home. I was like, I don't need that America place. Who gives a shit? I could be happy here. I could have been happy there.
Well, not in my head. No, I have a beautiful work of art that is about what happens when you submit to a cult like this. That you wrote while you were there? Yeah, that they allowed me to write because they didn't know what I was writing.
No, in English. They're not good at English, these guys. You can know something about their education by the fact that they can't understand a word of any language except Arabic. They don't want to because Arabic is the language of God. They want to know more of the Quran, but they don't. Tell me about that day when you were released.
So much of what they were telling me at the time was like nonsense. You know, we're going to kill you. We're going to hang you. We're not going to kill you. We're going to send you home. You're going to be going to live here as a dummy, like you're going to pay taxes and be a citizen of our state. And for two years they had been like making up lies for me.
So when they finally said we're going to send you home, I didn't believe them. I thought they might be putting me in this truck because they're going to drive me out into the field to kill me. But at a certain point, we stopped at a clothes shop. I got rid of all the clothing they had given me, which at this point, I was dressed like them. I was in a Mujahid outfit. So I got rid of that.
Showing 121–140 of 157 · page 7 of 8
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