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.
