^
Also, justperusing, I don't know. Tzortzis is a weird subject for me, because I might actually be projecting, and it was like right on the heels of binge watching his videos that I threw up my hands and said fuck it all, this Islam thing isn't working out. So I may be imagining it, but I do feel like I see a lot of my old self in Tzortzis, and just the language he uses and some of the shit he says makes me bristle--I recognize those tricks, that's
my move. I guess it's a "it takes one to know one" ordeal. Or I might really just be imposing my issues on him.
But beyond that, he's definitely a tricky guy. Almost everything he and iERA does is just dripping with dishonesty. Two instances relevant to CEMB, actually, that I can recall: on a webinar, he admits that he's been going around selling snake oil disguised as scientific miracles, and starts whining that they've been caught in their laziness and that it started to backfire and saying that
now we're going to have to have a better narrative,
now we're going to have to be more intellectually honest, et cetera. The other time was with the CEMB report on iERA where, instead of owning the terrible things he and his cohorts have said in the past and amending them should there be a reason to, he calls the report authors liars for not contacting him to check and see if his opinions happened to change recently, or if he'd like to provide a more innocuous statement than the incriminating ones.
So many quotes of his are delicately worded damage control statements that only other fools can fall for, and they barely disguise something ugly and dangerous. He's made a lot of statements that basically boil down to stuff like this:
No, I'm not homophobic, how dare you, I just adopt the mainstream view that gays are immoral and are going to hell, what's so bad about that? No, I didn't compare gays to cannibals, I just said, like cannibalism, being gay will always be wrong. Or
no, I've never said apostates should be killed, because we're not living in a sharia state right now but if we ever were, good news, beheading is a painless way to exterminate the apostates, how dare you say that I've ever promoted violence against apostates? It's just Tzortzis in a nutshell. A writhing, slippery snake. Take it from someone who has been there before.
Topic: Dawahman banned for homophobic views