Shaun King – Interviewed in Istanbul about Gaza being Banned from Instagram and Converting to Islam
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There are vice presidents at Meta that would
call me and wish me happy birthday.
The wife of Mark Zuckerberg gave over a
million dollars to our charity.
So I saw myself as a protected person.
Your followers is different than others, so they
took you as a target.
He says, Sean, there are both corporations and
governments that are asking Meta to remove you
from the platform.
My account was one of the three most
shared accounts in the world.
If losing Instagram played even a small role
in me becoming a Muslim, I'm glad I
lost it.
Ladies and gentlemen, Salaam Alaikum and welcome to
the new episode of Digital Intifada.
Today, we have an extraordinary guest, Sean King,
who has been a powerful voice for justice
and human rights.
His activism spans various causes, but today, of
course, we will be focusing on his advocacy
for Gaza.
Sean, thank you.
Thank you very much for accepting our invitation
and being with us today.
I'm glad to be here.
Thank you very much.
You have been a stubborn advocate for many
social justice causes and your support for Gaza
has been particularly powerful, unstoppable.
I wonder what specifically drew you to, you
know, to have this, all what you have
done and to champion the cause of Gaza.
Well, there are probably two, two big things.
And so thank you for asking that question.
And I love being able to answer it
because so many people only came to know
me after October 7th made the assumption that
that was the first time I ever advocated
for Palestinians in the world.
I've been advocating for Gaza and the West
Bank and Palestinians for most of my adult
life.
I told you earlier it was all the
way back in 2001 when I was a
student at Morehouse College that we traveled to
South Africa to the United Nations Conference Against
Racism.
And something happened there.
I don't think I even got to tell
you this.
At that conference, Nelson Mandela spoke, Fidel Castro
spoke, Yasser Arafat spoke.
At that conference, in the middle of the
conference, and we had front row seats like
they treated us like gold there, two nations
got up and left the conference.
If I asked you to guess who the
two nations were that got up to leave,
you would probably guess right.
It was the United States and Israel.
This is in 2001.
I'm a teenager.
And that was the first time you know
about Palestine and Gaza.
I hadn't to be, I've said this publicly,
I knew nothing about the Palestinian cause, the
Palestinian plight.
And most of my classmates that went, we
didn't either.
And I joke because we were used to
being the most popular students in whatever room
we went to.
And when we got to South Africa, the
most popular students in every room were Palestinians.
And the first question we asked ourselves is,
who are these people?
And why do South Africans love them so
much?
And it was then and there that we
started realizing the historic relationship between South Africa
and Palestine, between that went back long before
that went back a generation that they had
fought against apartheid, that they had supported South
Africans.
And so it was there that many of
my classmates and I developed a heart for
Palestinians.
And we kind of got a crash course
on why they were so popular in South
Africa.
So to this very day, you see South
Africans advocating for Palestinians.
That relationship goes back decades.
So from 2001 forward, any chance I've gotten,
I've always tried to advocate for Palestinians.
But today, for me to put the effort
and energy that I have into advocating against
this genocide, it really comes out of my
personal relationships with Palestinians.
Some of my very best friends in the
world are Palestinians.
Before October 7th, I had friends living in
Gaza.
I still have close friends living in Gaza,
living in the West Bank.
So for me, it was personal.
Friends who had advocated for me for years,
who had marched with me, protested with me,
and never expected anything in return.
Palestinians who showed up for African-Americans fighting
against police brutality or mass incarceration.
So for me, this was a relationship.
You fight for your friends.
And Palestinians have been my friends for a
long time.
Well, I can ask you how you used
your old platforms for Gaza.
I mean, the whole world knows how you
dedicated your social media for advocating for Gaza.
And of course, first, before we speak about
how they tried to stop you, what's the
examples of the impact that you got from
that advocation?
Well, I saw my role from October 7th
on as telling really the non-Muslim, non
-Arab world what was going on there.
At that point on...
It's very important.
Most of the social medias are having followers,
let's say, who knows already about Palestine, but
specifically your social media or your people that
they know you, they are people who hearing
Palestine and Gaza for the first time, which
is very crucial.
So for me, on October 6th, I would
say 90% of my followers were not
Muslims.
And most of them didn't really, probably could
not have pointed to Gaza on a map.
And so after October 7th, I kind of
saw my job as a translator, like as
a literal translator.
I would get friends of mine to translate
videos and I would put captions on them.
Cultural translation.
Yeah, but a cultural interpreter, a cultural translator
to try to explain to people, here's what's
happening, here's what I see.
And I would try to put it in
a language that anybody could understand.
I have kids that follow me on social
media.
I have elders that follow me.
And I wanted people, no matter what their
religion or background, to be able to say,
I didn't understand that.
And so I saw my role as informing
people that normally would get their news from
unreliable places when it comes to Gaza, to
inform them in a way that they never
were.
And I saw my job as pointing people
to people in Gaza and the West Bank
that they should follow.
So, hey, let me explain to you what
you see, but also please follow this woman,
please follow this man.
And so I think my biggest pride before
I was banned from Instagram was helping hundreds
of Palestinians grow their base.
And today, most of them are still on
the platform and are able to advocate for
themselves, which still gives me great joy.
So they couldn't stop you, basically, by banning.
But speaking about the ban and how did
they gradually ban all your platforms, I think
not only Instagram, but many websites and other
social media platforms that you were active on
it.
And I can see that the thing that
you mentioned is very important, that mentioning others
so they can continue, even if you are
not there.
But again, did they stop you?
I mean, you lost millions in a second
and then you suddenly, Shaun King is not
there anymore.
It has two sides, the followers side, people
that were hearing from you and your side.
Of course, the other side where you like
when people that are continuing now to share
about Gaza and raising the awareness and they
know you through you.
But I'm very curious to know your side.
How do you continue what you do?
Is that the end of your advocates on
social media?
And how do you go from there?
So I have to be very honest.
It was a really effective strategy to ban
me from the platform.
And I had put so many of my
eggs in the Instagram basket, if you will,
that it was the main platform that I
used.
And so for and that wasn't just since
October 7th.
For years, I poured my heart and soul
into developing a community there.
And I had ignored almost every other platform.
And so I hadn't really grown my base.
I had millions of followers on other platforms,
but I wasn't really using them.
And so to ban me from this platform,
Instagram at that time was really the primary
place people were able to tell stories about
what was happening in Gaza.
So it did hurt me.
It hurt me personally.
It hurt me professionally.
It made it very difficult for me to
be that translator that I felt I had
become to be able to show a different
type of person what was going on there.
So in that sense, it was very effective.
And it surprised me.
I mean, I've said this publicly, I've spoken
at META.
I've been a guest speaker multiple times at
META.
I was friends with countless employees at META.
When I say friends, there were vice presidents
at META that would call me and wish
me happy birthday, that when they would see
that my children were sick, they would write
me and say by name.
How is your son doing?
How is your daughter doing?
They are on the board of these platforms.
The wife of Mark Zuckerberg gave over a
million dollars to our charity.
So I saw myself as a protected person.
In October, November, employees at META would contact
me to help them mediate conflicts with Palestinians.
So I saw myself, I was proud of
my work.
I felt like, OK, this platform is a
place where we can do this advocacy and
I'm safe here.
I never thought I would be banned.
I thought I would always be on Instagram.
And I learned a painful lesson that the
platform is truly owned by Zionists, controlled by
Zionists, and they chose their own beliefs over
what I thought was like a genuine relationship.
So they disappeared?
What excuses they gave you?
I mean, when they banned you, those friends,
you couldn't just...
There is a man who works there to
this day that I saw as a personal
friend.
To this day, he won't reply to a
text message, an email, a phone call.
I tried to call him just last week.
And so in early December, someone at META
told me, Sean, in a high level senior
meeting, they are talking about ways they can
ban you from the platform.
And I posted this as soon as I
got off of that conversation.
I didn't say the person's name, but I
said, a senior executive at META.
And here's what he told me.
He said, Sean, they're trying to tie you
somehow to terrorism so they can justify banning
you from the platform.
And here's what he said.
He said, Sean, there are both corporations and
governments that are asking META to remove you
from the platform.
And I still didn't think it was going
to happen, though.
That's returned us to the question of you
are not the only person who has millions
of followers.
Many advocates for Gaza, for Palestine at the
time are still going on having millions.
But you personally, again, having people, as you
have said, 90% of them are non
-Muslims, are causing problems to Zionists because new
people started to know about Gaza.
And you basically were shaking the world.
I have the best illustration I can make.
I have a friend who is an African
-American civil rights activist in the United States.
He called me this past week and he
wanted to know why I was critiquing the
policies of Kamala Harris regarding Gaza.
And I asked him, I said, before you
and I argue about this, I said, please
just first tell me honestly, what do you
know about Gaza?
And here's what he said to me.
It was so instructive.
He said, Sean, once you were banned from
the platform, I never really saw anything about
Gaza on my timeline again.
And immediately...
It's obvious why they banned you.
So I was reaching a type of person
that other people, Palestinians often aren't reaching.
Because generally Palestinian influencers or any people have
millions, they have Palestinians, they have Muslims, even
if they are in America or any part
of the world.
But you're specifically, as we have been seeing,
that your followers is different than others.
So they took you as a target.
In November and December, my account was one
of the three most shared accounts in the
world, more than any president in the world
in those two months.
So I knew the account had power and
I knew it had impact.
It was naive of me to trust those
friends.
I just didn't, I didn't think it would
happen that way.
Do you think that this Muslim world or
the Ummah in general needs a solution for
this?
This is a dead end for anything that
you want to do.
And then suddenly they can't stop you because
they own these platforms.
Well, what we've learned is painful.
And it's something that African-Americans in the
United States have been talking about.
When you not only don't own a platform,
but you're not even having representation on the
board of that platform, they can make a
decision against your best interest any day they
want.
Right now, there are virtually no Muslims on
the board of any major tech company.
And so, yeah, not only are there not
Muslim vice presidents or CEOs or owners or
major shareholders sometimes.
It's not about Muslims as well.
Even the African-Americans are not represented.
Have almost no representation.
And so we have to ask ourselves one,
either how do we have more representation at
these companies?
Or how do we build companies that may
be meant for everybody where we still have
greater ownership and representation?
Because at any moment, we can be removed
from any of these platforms or suppressed on
any of these platforms.
And what we've seen is there's virtually nothing
you can do about it.
What I've had to tell people is it's
not illegal to do what they did to
me because it's their company.
They own it.
It's like if someone was yelling inside of
a restaurant, they can remove that customer.
And even if they own the restaurant, it's
their restaurant.
And so they didn't want me on the
platform, even though what they did was unjust.
I think it even violated their own policies.
What my attorneys have said is showing their
policies are meant for them to follow.
But if they don't want to follow their
own policies, it's not illegal.
And so they don't have to follow them.
If they want you gone, you can be
gone.
That's really needing a long-term strategy.
For sure.
I think we take lessons many times, but
we still have hopes that we have one
day very soon, inshallah, to have our own
platforms to fight for our rights.
But again, for now, I mean, currently, I
can see you are not stopped.
You're still everywhere around the world, speaking any
chance you get for Gaza, for Palestine.
What is the current projects?
What are the work that you do that
excites you these days?
Because I can see still that you have
a lot of energy that you speak and
work for, for Gaza.
I think I have to start with one
thing.
When I was banned from Instagram, I was
very bitter about it.
I was sad.
I would still get my phone out to
open the app and realize they made it
to where not only did they ban my
account, they banned every business account that I
have.
I had a podcast page that had 300
,000 followers.
They banned that.
They banned my civil rights organization's page, which
was not even a page about Gaza.
They banned it.
Anything touching me, they removed.
To this day, if I open another account,
it's banned within minutes.
I don't even do it anymore.
At first, I was bitter and frustrated and
even confused.
What am I supposed to do next?
This is how I planned on doing this
advocacy.
After a few months, I actually started to
see it as a blessing.
As people may know, during Ramadan, the first
day of Ramadan, my wife and I became
Muslims.
I've said this publicly.
I wanted to come to that, because I'm
so curious to know whether if all this
what happened to you was one of the
reasons or the main reason for you to
convert.
Well, I have to say, I don't trust...
Should we say to accept, not to convert?
Well, I don't trust myself enough to believe
that if I was still on Instagram, that
I would have become a Muslim.
If I was on Instagram now, doing what
I was doing, I probably wouldn't have six
million followers.
I would have 10 million followers.
And I would just be chugging along every
day, doing what I was doing, advocating, raising
money for charities and causes.
And I don't know that I would have
made the decision to become a Muslim.
Here's why.
When I lost the platform, it removed so
much noise from my life, good and bad.
I lost beautiful relationships, but I also stopped
seeing hate and false accusations.
Threatening.
Threats.
Trying to think, maybe.
Yeah.
And so what it ultimately did for me
was it caused me to have the space
to really think about who am I?
What do I want to be?
What direction do I want my life to
go?
And it really allowed me to have space
in my heart and mind to think about
deeper issues, deeper questions.
It allowed me to have, like, very open
conversations with my wife about what it would
mean for us to become Muslims.
And I think if I was still on
there, that I might just still be doing
what I was always doing.
I'm at the point now.
I mean this with every fiber of my
being.
If losing Instagram played even a small role
in me becoming a Muslim, I'm glad I
lost it.
I would lose it over and over again
because your question was, what am I doing?
What excites me?
What makes me happy in today's life?
A huge part of my daily life now
is learning what it means to be a
Muslim.
I've been a Christian my whole life.
I was a pastor.
I've been a devout religious man.
And so I've always cared about God, the
ways of God.
I've cared about sacred texts.
I went to seminary to train to be
a pastor.
But these five months of being a Muslim
have been some of the best five months
of my life.
They've been not only because I'm learning every
day, but I have a new order, a
new sense of direction in my life.
And I think one of the most beautiful
things that people tell me is, Sean, you
might have lost six million followers, but you
gained two billion sisters and brothers.
And I feel it.
You would have to be a Muslim to
understand what that means, that we are happy
when we see each other.
I was a Christian for 25 years.
I couldn't tell if a Christian was happy
to see me or not.
In fact, in America, there are Christians that
don't even want to be in the same
room with each other.
And it's not that there aren't disagreements among
Muslims.
Of course there are.
But around the world, we are happy to
share salaam with each other.
We are happy to pray with each other.
My family, we've been here in Istanbul for
almost four weeks.
It's hard to communicate to a non-Muslim
how beautiful it is.
For me, I don't speak Turkish.
I don't speak Arabic.
To be able to go into a mosque,
into a masjid, and pray with a thousand
people who don't speak the same language as
me, but we share the same prayer, we
share the same posture.
And it's a beautiful shared experience to know
that a billion of us all over the
world are praying the same prayers at the
same times, facing in the same direction, that
we share the same text, and that we
care about a lot of the same issues.
And so Islam has very quickly become the
center of a lot of my life and
of my wife's life as well.
How that reflected on your advocacy now?
Now, after you are now a Muslim, I'm
sure that you have different reactions from your
own community, from different Muslims around the world,
and how you relate now this new life
with the advocacy, especially for Gaza.
You know, in two or three ways.
I also, I don't know that I'm completely
confident, in fact, I wouldn't say I don't
know.
I would not be a Muslim today had
this genocide not taken place.
I'm not glad that I have no joy
in it taking place, but it was me
seeing up close and personal, the faith, the
Islamic faith of Palestinians, seeing their prayer, seeing
them quote the Quran in the worst moments
imaginable.
It was men and women who had just
lost their most precious family members, calling me,
telling me that they still believed in the
will of Allah.
And I would see it as a non
-Muslim in October, November, all the way through
Ramadan and say, what is this?
How is this possible that someone could experience
so much suffering?
And I had a conversation with Imam Omar
Suleiman, this was in December, and I asked
him a really important question.
He knew that I was close to accepting
Islam.
And I asked him, I said, I want
to be sure that it's not just that
I love Palestinian culture or that I love
Yemeni culture.
I asked him, I said, is this Islam
that I love or is it Palestinians?
And he said, Sean, you really can't separate
Islam from Palestinians.
He said, yes, there are beautiful parts of
Palestinian culture.
But he said, what they would tell you
is that it is Islam that's getting them
through each day, every day.
And he said, yes, there is a unique
way to be a Muslim as a Palestinian
that all of us in the world see
and admire and wish that our faith could
be as resilient and as strong as theirs.
And it was literally just sitting in the
front seat of his car talking to him
where I realized, OK, then it's not just
my love of Palestinian people or Palestinian culture,
but it is the expression of Islam through
them in their in the worst moments imaginable
that really won my heart to Allah and
won my heart to what it would mean.
The biggest pivot or change that I've made,
and I think I would have to be
banned from social media to be able to
see this, is for the first time in
my life, I'm practicing something that I always
tried to practice, but couldn't.
I truly cared so much about what other
people thought of me.
And when you're on social media, it's hard
not to.
You see the comments.
People would make viral videos about me, and
those would be the most viral videos those
people had ever made.
And it would be hard to see that
and for it to not affect you.
I'm finally at the point where the question
I'm asking myself, consciously and subconsciously, is not
what are people saying about me, but it
is how does Allah see me?
How are my decisions seen in this way?
From am I honoring God with the decisions
I make?
And and so now my advocacy is not
around will this post be engaged?
Will this post get likes or comments or
shares or even will this change the way
the world sees an issue?
It is to say, is Allah pleased with
what I'm doing?
And so it's not that my advocacy has
changed, but how I see it has changed.
It's given me more courage where now I'm
not worried if I'm popular or not.
Now I don't I don't want to lie
and say I don't care at all about
what I care about what you as my
friend, I care about what you think of
me.
I care about what my wife thinks of
me.
But I but beyond that, it's I primarily
want to ask myself, does this honor Allah?
And if it's popular, unpopular, if it's viral
or not viral, it doesn't matter to me.
Masha'Allah.
I can listen to these stories for hours
and hours, but the program has, you know.
Sure, yes, yes.
I can't, you know, finish it without asking
you a message to people, to young people
who are willing to do stuff, but they
don't know where to start.
Or a lot of people, they do stuff,
but they don't know whether they are on
the right way or how to have the
courage to continue and, you know, to have
that courage that you have it after all
what you have been facing last few months.
There are there are maybe three things that
I would encourage people to do that I
try to do on a daily basis.
One, just regarding Gaza and Palestine in particular,
do everything you can to support men and
women in Gaza, in the West Bank, follow
them, support them, comment on their post.
And if you can be their friend, encourage
them in direct message, pray for them, support
them if they ask for your support.
Like relationships are essential for me and for
others.
And so do everything you can to support
the men and women there.
None of us know we're at almost 300
days as we record this into this genocide.
I didn't think it would last for 30
days.
I didn't I definitely think it would last
100 days.
I still remember when we were saying it's
almost 10 days of genocide.
This should stop.
I can't believe that it's almost as you
said.
I remember when they crossed 100 kids who
had been killed.
I never thought it would get to 500.
Now, we've really lost count after 15,000
kids.
So do everything you can to support Palestinians,
not just in Gaza.
Yes, yes.
And any voice that you can do.
Secondly, find out what you can do where
you live.
If you're a college student, not just protest
on your college campus.
See if your college is invested in these
arms companies.
See if they're invested in companies that we
should be boycotting.
Any day now, even Netanyahu has announced he
believes he's going to be charged and a
warrant issued for his arrest by the International
Criminal Court.
It is ethically wrong to be invested in
a nation that has been charged with war
crimes.
And so see that your university or that
your corporation, your job or your investments at
your place of employment.
Are they investing in these arms companies?
And people are shocked when they find out.
Actually, they are.
Why?
Because they're profitable.
These companies are making the most money they've
ever made.
Because the United States, the United Kingdom, Germany
and other nations are investing billions of dollars
into arming Israel.
So just see what you can do where
you are.
Lastly, just begin to understand that this is
something that we're not going to be working
on for a few more months or even
a few more years.
Experts have said it would take 15 years
just to remove the rubble.
This is a commitment all of us need
to say, I'm committed for the rest of
my life to these people and to this
place.
That's a commitment I've made.
And once you've made that commitment, this is
a lifelong commitment for me.
You'll see your role differently.
You'll see your place differently and just be
open to new projects and new ideas.
Inshallah, I believe in Palestinians and specifically the
Gazans.
We'll remove them in six months, not 15
years.
Because they've done everything that we couldn't even
imagine.
Absolutely.
Shaun, thank you very much for sharing with
us your insights and your journey.
It's really honoring us to have you here
today with us.
And welcome again to Turkey and welcome to
be a Muslim.
Thank you, brother.
Thank you.
And special thanks to our viewers for tuning
in to Digital Intifada.
Stay informed, stay engaged.
Until next time.