When I printed out this Al-Jazeera America article two days ago, the title was “Atheism’s astonishing hypocrisy toward Islam.” Today the title has changed to “New Atheism’s astonishing hypocrisy toward Islam,” so I guess they want to zero in especially on Sam Harris and Richard Dawkins, who take the brunt of this piece (Sam’s picture is at the top of the article).
The piece is by Usaid Siddiqui, a Canadian freelance writer, and at the end there’s a disclaimer: “The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Al Jazeera America’s editorial policy.” Perhaps, but I can’t help but think that someone in management approves of the article’s sentiments, because the piece is so dumb that no reputable news organization would print it. Here are Siddiqui’s claims:
1. “New atheists single out Muslims for criticism”. Siddiqui mentions Craig Stephen Hicks, the murderer of three Muslims in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and claims that while Sam won’t condemn atheism for spurring the killings, he routinely condemns Islam for inducing murder:
The Feb. 10 killing in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, of three Arab-American students, allegedly by atheist Craig Stephen Hicks has led some to compare militant atheism to Islamic militancy. Atheists are not happy with the comparison.
. . . [Harris] denied any link between atheism and Hicks’ actions. Harris insists that the comparison was unwarranted and atheists’ crimes have nothing to do with their beliefs, not least because there exists “no atheist scripture or doctrine.” Hicks said he was a fan of New Atheists such as Harris and Cambridge University professor Richard Dawkins.
Harris’ efforts to distance atheism from violent acts committed by individual atheists exposes his hypocrisy toward Muslims and Islam, which he routinely portrays as being distinctively violent.
. . . By defending atheism after the actions of an ideological fanatic such as Hicks, even when they treat Islam as the key factor behind the actions of Muslim extremists, atheists such as Dawkins and Harris expose their biases.
First of all, Dawkins is not a “Cambridge University professor”, which bespeaks the level of fact-checking in Siddiqui’s piece. As everyone knows, Dawkins was at Oxford but is now retired. He was never affiliated with Cambridge.
More important, Sam Harris said, after decrying the murders, that we didn’t know what caused Hicks to commit them. And we still don’t. If we find out that Hicks was motivated by New Atheists to do the murder, then I’m sure Sam will have something to say about it. Until then, all sane people have reserved judgment. In fact, Hicks expressed sympathy on his Facebook page for Muslims facing American bigotry. Siddiqui ignores all that.
But it’s plainly true that, at present, Muslims are distinctively violent among religionists. Members of which religion routinely kill more people than members of any other? It isn’t Christians, it isn’t Buddhists, and it isn’t Quakers. Adherents of extremist Islam pose more dangers to life and to democracy than members of any other faith, extremist or not, and it’s a falsehood for Siddiqui to claim otherwise. And to imply that Harris has never criticized other faiths is simply wrong. Remember that one of his best-selling books was Letter to a Christian Nation.
In a truly ludicrous comparison, Siddiqui tries to portray the violence inherent in atheism by citing the actions of a drunk Frenchman who went after an empty mosque with plaster grenades and a rifle. What he says is this: “For example, in February a court in France sentenced a 69-year-old man to prison for throwing plaster grenades and shooting at a mosque in western France. ‘I am a republican, an atheist, and what happened at Charlie Hebdo infuriated me,’ the attacker told authorities.”
But Siddiqui doesn’t mention the bit of the report from France24 that precedes that quote:
Chaillou launched four plaster grenades and fired a rifle at the mosque in the city of Le Mans on the night of January 7, hours after two gunmen killed 12 people in a deadly rampage at Charlie Hebdo’s Paris offices. There were no casualties in the mosque attack.
Chaillou, who has been detained since his arrest in mid-January, told investigators he “doubted” there would have been anyone at the mosque at the time of the attack.
On Tuesday he told the court “he was not proud” and described being upset by the death of the Charlie Hebdo journalists. The pensioner said he had been drinking and his action was “spontaneous”.
Challious’s actions were unconscionable, and he was sentenced to three years in jail for what he did. But how on earth can you pin this on the New Atheists? Here we have a drunken Frenchman motivated by an attack on Charlie Hebdo to make a gesture that he was sure wouldn’t hurt anybody. He could just as well have been motivated by liquor, jingoism, pure bigotry, or a misguided attempt to make a statement about extremist Muslims wrecking his country. Whatever his motivation, it’s hard to see how Harris, Dawkins, or New Atheism bears a scintilla of responsibility. Had the guy even read any New Atheist works? And to claim that this action is the moral equivalent of ISIS’s brutality, mass slaughter, and genocide is simply ridiculous.
2. China persecutes people in the name of atheism. Siddiqui cites China’s policy of suppressing and jailing members of Falun Gong and tearing down Christian Churches. He quotes a Chinese official as showing that this is all motivated by atheism:
Don’t tell me that our Marxist doctrine of atheism cannot overcome something like Falun Gong,” then-President Jiang Zemin wrote to senior members of his party, demanding action. “If it can’t, it will become a big joke all over the world!”
Well, of course atheist regimes have committed brutalities, but what does this have to do with New Atheism? Did Sam Harris or Dawkins inspired the Communist Chinese, or do they approve of what they do? Hell, no. Maoism started well before these guys said anything about atheism, and before Harris was even born. Further, they’ve both discussed how totalitarian regimes, sometimes atheist ones, can suppress religion as a challenge to its authority, or even behave as if they were religions, with leaders like Mao and Kim Jong-Il imbued with god-like status. New Atheists are neither responsible for nor approve of the actions of such regimes, and whatever perfidy is committed in the name of “old” atheism is detestable.
3. New Atheists don’t recognize that “Islamic” terrorism isn’t really Islamic at all, and they’re hypocrites for concentrating on the religion.
New Atheists could rightly argue that CPC’s [Communist Party of China’s] atheist rhetoric is a cover for maintaining the party’s grip on power and for buying influence within the ruling elite. Yet their failure to recognize similar external and political influences behind acts of terrorism committed by individual Muslims is hypocritical. For example, Chérif Kouachi and Saïd Kouachi, the brothers who attacked the Charlie Hebdo offices, came from the lower classes of French society, had little education and worked menial jobs. They were recruited and radicalized by a congregation member, Farid Benyettou, who, among other things, showed them videos of the 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq.
The images included photos showing the notorious Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse, which was a catalyst for anger among Muslims around the world. “It was everything I saw on the television, the torture at Abu Ghraib prison, all that, that motivated me,” Chérif Kouachi told his lawyer.
So clearly it was poverty and dispossesion that led to the Charlie Hebdo attack. Never mind that the killers were “radicalized” and shouted Islamic slogans during their deed—that’s simply irrelevant. (And was this true of the un-oppressed Tsarnaev brothers? Siddiqui is silent on that issue.) And of course part of their radicalization involved Abu Ghraib, which no longer exists and was seen in the U.S. as shameful, with some of the participants prosecuted for their brutality. Nope, nothing to do with Islam at all.
Not only that, but some other Muslims condemn the terrorism of extremist jihadis, so it’s not Islam!
By contrast, prominent Muslim leaders and organizations routinely condemn terrorist activities carried out in the name of Islam. Several Muslim organizations expressed outrage over the Charlie Hebdo tragedy. But this did not stop Harris or Dawkins from blaming Islam for the attacks. After the Paris shootings, Dawkins steered clear of any rational analysis and shared a series of defamatory, anti-Islam tweets. Similarly, he was quick to emphasize the faux explanation that the Chapel Hill killings concerned a parking dispute. [JAC: We still don’t know if this played a role. Unlike everyone else, Siddiqui apparently can see directly into the mind of Hicks.]
Harris has blamed the Quran for the horror of the ISIL. “Belief in martyrdom, a hatred of infidels and a commitment to violent jihad are not fringe phenomena in the Muslim world,” Harris wrote in September. “These preoccupations are supported by the Koran and numerous hadith.”
An account from a former ISIL captive contradicts this claim. French journalist Didier François, who spent more than 10 months in ISIL’s hands, told CNN’s Christiane Amanpour last month that he never saw an ISIL fighter read a Quran or talk about religion. The group was rather obsessed with more secular matters and apparently never forced any of its hostages to convert to Islam.
This is what I call the Argument from Distraction. Simply avoid all the annoying counterevidence—the interviews of pro-ISIS extremists by Graeme Wood, the statements of the terrorists themselves that they’re carrying out the dictates of the Qur’an and the hadith, the murder of apostates and forced conversion of captives to Islam—and simply cite some Muslims who condemn the terrorism. That surely shows that religion isn’t behind the terrorism—doesn’t it? And by all means quote a French captive of ISIS and ignore Graeme Wood’s powerful and convincing argument that ISIS is acting out the Islamic hopes for a caliphate. It’s like arguing that because some Christians condemn the bombing of abortion clinics and shooting of abortion doctors, then Christianity certainly can’t have motivated those acts of terrorism. And which New Atheist ever claimed that ISIS represents all Muslim thought and behavior?
4. New Atheists in fact help inspire the brutality of extremist Islam, so they’re partly responsible!
In generalizing about and singling out Muslims, Harris and other New Atheists make ISIL’s work easier. “When Westerners start talking about Islam as a uniquely or inherently violent faith that is fundamentally different from other religions,” wrote Salon’s Andrew O’Hehir, “They stumble into the trap laid for them by the fundamentalists, who tell their followers that Muslims are uniquely hated and uniquely persecuted by the West.”
This is the fault of the Islamic fundamentalists, not New Atheists. All of the latter, including me, recognize that there are varieties of Islam, and only some forms breed terrorism. (But we also note that many Muslims who wouldn’t commit that violence nevertheless either overtly or tacitly approve of it.) This is simply the truth. What Siddiqui is doing here is asking New Atheists to simply shut up, for their arguments could be distorted by Islamic fundamentalists to incite more hatred. This is just one more misguided argument among many. And really, how many members of ISIS have heard of Richard Dawkins or Sam Harris?
5. Finally, all religions and belief systems are equally bad. This claim is the last resort of the religious apologist:
Neither Muslims nor atheists have a monopoly on violence. People of all backgrounds and faiths engage in violent activities. As such, it is unfair to categorize attacks by Muslims as a reflection of Islam while actions of adherents of other faiths get the lone-wolf label. By defending atheism after the actions of an ideological fanatic such as Hicks, even when they treat Islam as the key factor behind the actions of Muslim extremists, atheists such as Dawkins and Harris expose their biases.
My response is the Argument from Orwell: “All animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.” It’s foolish to argue that because some Christians engage in violent activities in the name of Christianity, then all religions are equally violent. That’s crazy.
And no New Atheist I know of has tried to exculpate other religions from their bad activities, as anyone would know who read The God Delusion or The End of Faith. By bringing up Hicks, Siddiqui is dragging a red herring here, for we still don’t know what made Hicks kill—though apparently Siddiqui does!
In the end, Siddiqui proves only this: he knows as little about New Atheism as he knows about how to make a convincing argument. He is motivated by anger, perhaps defense of Islam, or perhaps by other emotionally-conditioned beliefs, and his emotion has not only clouded his judgment, but led him to write an embarrassingly bad article. Shame on Al-Jazeera.
They would love to be able to say that killing Muslims is a consequence of atheist hatred, because they think it lets them off the hook of Islam being the motivation behind beheadings, suicide bombings, etc.
It does not.
Once again, a well-reasoned and supported take down. Thanks for cutting through the BS!
I side with Jerry on this piece – motivation of shooter is unknown. However, there’s usually a lacking of consistency with these violence arguments. If atheist apologists want to say that atheism had nothing to do with Stalin’s body count (it did; he was trying to eradicate religion), then Catholicism didn’t motivate the Crusades or Inquisition – it was just politics, power, or control (like the McCarthy era). Who cares, ultimately? People find excuses to kill with or without religion.
That is trying to put the cart before the horse, as Jerry’s article notes. There have been many totalitarian regimes that were anti-religious, and some of them relied on atheism to take up the slack.
As for Stalin, communisms’s anti-religion started with Marx, Soviet’s started with Lenin, and “Stalin’s role in the fortunes of the Russian Orthodox Church is complex.”
“During World War II, the Church was allowed a revival as a patriotic organization, and thousands of parishes were reactivated … Stalin had a different policy outside the Soviet Union … ” [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stalin#Religion ]
And all this time the Soviet union had official freedom of religion. If Stalin was trying to eradicate religion, he didn’t leave a paper trail, and he wasn’t consistent.
Indeed. Stalin was a sociopath. He killed his own soldiers and his own people because HE WAS A SOCIOPATH!
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Atheism doesn’t motivate anyone to eradicate religion – it’s a pared back, metaphysically minimalistic stance. It says nothing more than that the person in question doesn’t believe in a god. There’s no instrumental connection between being an atheist and wanting to eradicate religion – there is however an instrumental link between wanting your ideology, in Stalin’s case communism but it could be any ideology, including humanism, to triumph over all others and eradicating religion.
There are shitty people everywhere – atheists and theists. That’s why it’s so important to disentangle the emotive, knee-jerk arguments from the arguments that make sense. I am not, on the basis of bare-bones atheism, causally impelled to do anything at all. On the basis of new atheism you could argue that I may be causally impelled to question the justification for people’s religious beliefs. On the basis of religion however you could argue that I may be compelled to do any number of things which are jotted down for posterity in scripture, many of which are exactly what we see going on around us. When the perpetrators explicitly tell us that their motivation is religious the argument is even stronger.
If someone wants to suggest a link between my behaviour and a particular ideology they need to do a lot more than just point out a correlation. I don’t think Stalin was compelled to vanquish religion because of atheism for the same reason I don’t think Silvio Berlusconi had sex with a load of prostitutes because of his Christianity or Anders Breivik murdered all those people because of his Christianity.
What’s interesting to me is the power he ascribes to “New Atheism”, as if it were a monolithic block of “believers”, like ISIS, set on their own agenda of violence and world-domination. Of course, these people are used to such delusions: it’s a firmly embedded idea in many Muslim minds that Jews, although they make up less than half a percent of the world’s population, are nevertheless responsible for most of the world’s problems and actively seek world domination through a series of evil conspiracies.
It reminds me of what an anti-Chavez activist said of the “Chavenistas” in Venezuela: “What they say YOU are, THEY are; what they say YOU’RE doing; THEY’RE doing.”
I’m rubber and you’re glue; bounces off me and sticks to you.
That tactic is also used by Vladimir Putin and his cronies: accuse your enemies of doing the very thing you’re doing. So it’s Europe and America who are meddling in Ukraine’s affairs. The Russian media ran a report about a rabbi fleeing Kiev because of anti semitism and edited it to look like he was referring to western sympathisers whereas it was actually Russian loyalists he was fleeing from.
In Russia, nastiest thing you can accuse your enemy of being is a fascist. It works too.
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What a lovely Straw Man he’s erected here.
The major emphasis of New Atheism is on the need for regular rational criticism of religion, as opposed to the extremes of either privileging religion in the name of faith or settling the matter through violence — which is ultimately the only alternative if reason is ruled out. If someone is going to criticize New Atheism specifically they can’t include either raging individuals who appear to have acted against these principles or repressive regimes which never endorsed these principles in the first place. Harris will have a field day with this.
It’s like someone blaming the ACLU, Amnesty International, or other civil liberty or human rights organizations for police being ambushed and shot in Ferguson. See where promoting the ideals of tolerance and respect will get you? What right now do progressive liberals have to criticize the KKK and its policy of lynching innocent people? No difference between them.
I saw the Amanpour interview he refers to. His analysis of it is, imo, poor. The journalist’s analysis of DAESH was extremely contradictory, and he seemed still very conflicted about his what happened. He was saying the kind of things you’d expect Greenwald to say if he went through the same experience; reality and prior entrenched beliefs were fighting for dominance in his mind.
Religious people feel very threatened by New Atheism. They are desperate for a way to discredit it. Their attempts have so far all fallen flat, and unless Yahweh/God/Allah turns up they will continue to do so. It’s like trying to prove evolutionary theory, or germ theory, or 1+1=2, incorrect.
Whether we acknowledge it or not, there is a philosophical war going on and it’s getting bogged down in this idea of which religions are bad, which ones are good and that we must respect them all because they all go through a violent phase. The real battle should be between reason and faith. Anything else is a distraction. All supernatural, mystical beliefs whether it’s Quakerism, Buddhism or maoism or marxism, must be on the chopping block. Mystical thinking is the problem in the world today made more frustrating because of our soaring progress in science and technology. For some reason, there is a backlash with the majority of human brains revolting against change and progress. Go figure…
I love the bit where he writes:
“which he routinely portrays as being distinctively violent.”
Portrays? Er…ISIS? Charlie Hebdo? 911? London tube bombings? Hello?
Someone should tell Siddiqui we are equal opportunity disbelievers
You could contact Al-Jazeera and ask for an opportunity to publish a response to the piece.
I like to think this typical, flailing piece of nonsense will be taken seriously only by the usual suspects. It’s exhausting reading the same calumnies over and over again – Jerry, thank you for taking this pillock apart.
I think the two big blocs of fervently anti- and fervently pro-Islam opinion are only going to become more poisonously partisan. Gnus are a small part of a tiny, mongrel coalition of politically and religiously disparate voices who are prepared to be honest and reasonable about Islam – it’s in the interest of both the big blocs that we all shut the fuck up. They will keep coming for us until we do, or until we actually get through.
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If only new atheists would stop sneering at “sophisticated theology” and start seriously trying to understand the kinds of alternatives that are available to those who still find in religious belief some overall sense of meaning and purpose in their lives … Al Jazeera would have absolutely nothing to complain about.
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“New Atheists in fact help inspire the brutality of extremist Islam, so they’re partly responsible!”
Reminds of White Stripes and “Effect and Cause”
“You’re like a little girl yelling at her brother cause you lost his ball…”
Or more generally, “Now Look What You Made Me Do!“
These arguments are so depressing. They are the same false arguments trotted out over and over again and they are so poorly argued it’s just demoralizing to have to engage them.
The whole premise seems to be if there is a bad guy somewhere and you can show that he is atheist, then it’s the fault of atheism that he is a bad guy. I’m so sick and tired of hearing the ridiculous argument that totalitarian regimes with atheist leaders were totalitarian simply because their leader was atheist….it’s simply insulting to the people they killed because it makes their deaths seem absurd and trivial. Stalin was a sociopath – he slaughtered his own damn soldiers! What atheist edict says to do that? Where did Marx even say that?! Further, like others have mentioned above, personality cults were the new religion in totalitarian regimes and Stalin had a doozy of one!
“Further, like others have mentioned above, personality cults were the new religion in totalitarian regimes and Stalin had a doozy of one!”
Is it reasonable to say that religion is essentially (a subset of) a personality cult?
Religion is the ULTIMATE “personality” cult, made worse by the fact that the personality worshiped is wholly imaginary.
I’m not sure. Religion seems to be the best mechanism for making ideas stick. Totalitarian regimes eventually disintegrate, the personality of the personality cult dies, but religion endures.
What is demonstrated by saying some members of ISIS don’t read the Koran? Many xians don’t read the bible.
Hicks, insofar as I know, was not a New York Yankees fan. Therefore, anyone showing a lack of allegiance to the New York Yankees must be a vile immoral beast. Q.E.D.
It is chilling to think replacing New York Yankees with religion makes this a sensible statement to a majority of the country…
Nailed it.
Every New Atheist that I’ve read (or listened to, or heard of) is a vociferous advocate for the right of individuals to practice their chosen religion freely, and to their right of individual conscience. None of them wish to prohibit anyone from practicing religion. Sure, they’d like to persuade them that doing so is wrongheaded. But they hardly advocate the use of state power to prevent it — let alone advocate that anyone engage in private violence to interfere with religious practice.
Just on #1: isn’t it funny how Hicks himself didn’t single out Muslims for criticism, instead equivocating them to Christians?
The elephant in their room is the fact that if Islam did not exist neither would this problem.
For anyone who’s interested, and who can watch BBC IPlayer, there was a particularly good The Big Questions this morning on BBC1 asking ‘does Islam have a problem with apostates?’. It was quite chaotic. An ex-muslim(who of course the believers hated) as well as Usama Hasan of Quilliam and a couple of Muslim regular spokespeople who really were pressed by the host to decry executing apostates and with depressing inevitability refused. It was as raw an episode as I’ve seen.
It’s the second of the three twenty-minute debates. Well worth catching.
Wow, I’d love to see it. Unfortunately, I can’t – being a Canadian we are denied seeing everything 🙁
That’s weird. I don’t know how extensive access to IPlayer is in other countries, but even if it’s only available in a few places I’d have thought Canada would’ve been one of them. I always thought it was a pretty liberal, free kind of country. Having said that most of my knowledge of Canada can be reduced to: mounties, ‘abowt’, big beautiful forests, South Park The Movie and Arcade Fire. I’m really not proud of this.
I’m pretty sure the episode will get uploaded onto YouTube pretty soon. Try having a look there in a while. It was the best bit of this series so far, besides the post-Charlie Hebdo debate with Douglas Murray which was riveting and emotionally intense.
So, in other words, the countless acts of horrific violence committed by Moslems who explicitly claim they are acting in the name of their religion, citing line and verse from the Quran, are “really” due to poverty and dispossession. However, any isolated act of violence by anyone suspected of being an atheist is invariably done because of their atheism, regardless of whether they’re drunk or sober. I don’t quite “get it” yet. Maybe after a few more sessions in Room 101…
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🙂 I like to read the fighting cat.
Today I saw a lovely thin cat in a shop, she looks like Hili, light color stomach and white paws…
Good old All-Jizz, it’s not like they would ever follow the line of their paymasters on religion, not like Faux News, eh?