As ISIS slaughters and beheads its way through the Middle East, the apologists for Islam are making their usual excuses: ISIS isn’t expressing “true Islam,” or, if it is, “the West brought it on through colonialism,” and so on. I won’t have that, and, of course, neither will Sam. Unless you are so blinded by what ISIS declares as its motives, or are so contemptuous of the West that any reaction by Muslims can be blamed on colonialism, or are such a reverse bigot that you think that jihadis must be excused for their violent reactions, then you must conclude that ISIS is motivated by one thing: religion—the desire to establish an Islamic caliphate and wipe out the infidels. If it’s all due to the West, why are they killing mostly Muslims or those of other faiths who weren’t “colonialists”? It’s maddening to hear the likes of Glenn Greenwald and others excuse Islamic rage. They are as blind to the truth as are creationists. It distresses me that you can be just as blinkered by soft-brained liberalism as you can by religion.
But I digress, because I want Sam Harris to do the talking. On his website essay for today, “Sleepwalking toward Armageddon,” Sam goes after the Islamist apologists: not those who say ISIS is okay, but those who say that it’s not really Islam, or it’s not really motivated by faith. I didn’t realize that Obama said that last night, as I didn’t hear his talk (I didn’t want to), but Sam did. In his piece he goes after Obama’s mealymouthed attitude towards ISIS—meant, of course, to avoid upsetting the rest of the Muslim world.
A few snippets:
In his speech responding to the horrific murder of journalist James Foley by a British jihadist, President Obama delivered the following rebuke (using an alternate name for ISIS):
“ISIL speaks for no religion… and no faith teaches people to massacre innocents. No just God would stand for what they did yesterday and what they do every single day. ISIL has no ideology of any value to human beings. Their ideology is bankrupt…. we will do everything that we can to protect our people and the timeless values that we stand for. May God bless and keep Jim’s memory. And may God bless the United States of America.”
We’ve already covered that one here. But the President said more last night (italics):
In his subsequent remarks outlining a strategy to defeat ISIS, the President declared:
“Now let’s make two things clear: ISIL is not Islamic. No religion condones the killing of innocents, and the vast majority of ISIL’s victims have been Muslim…. ISIL is a terrorist organization, pure and simple. And it has no vision other than the slaughter of all who stand in its way…. May God bless our troops, and may God bless the United States of America.”
Sam’s reaction, on the money:
As an atheist, I cannot help wondering when this scrim of pretense and delusion will be finally burned away—either by the clear light of reason or by a surfeit of horror meted out to innocents by the parties of God. Which will come first, flying cars and vacations to Mars, or a simple acknowledgment that beliefs guide behavior and that certain religious ideas—jihad, martyrdom, blasphemy, apostasy—reliably lead to oppression and murder? It may be true that no faith teaches people to massacre innocents exactly—but innocence, as the President surely knows, is in the eye of the beholder. Are apostates “innocent”? Blasphemers? Polytheists? Islam has the answer, and the answer is “no.”
. . . But a belief in martyrdom, a hatred of infidels, and a commitment to violent jihad are not fringe phenomena in the Muslim world. These preoccupations are supported by the Koran and numerous hadith. That is why the popular Saudi cleric Mohammad Al-Areefi sounds like the ISIS army chaplain. The man has 9.5 million followers on Twitter (twice as many as Pope Francis has). If you can find an important distinction between the faith he preaches and that which motivates the savagery of ISIS, you should probably consult a neurologist.
Understanding and criticizing the doctrine of Islam—and finding some way to inspire Muslims to reform it—is one of the most important challenges the civilized world now faces. But the task isn’t as simple as discrediting the false doctrines of Muslim “extremists,” because most of their views are not false by the light of scripture. A hatred of infidels is arguably the central message of the Koran. The reality of martyrdom and the sanctity of armed jihad are about as controversial under Islam as the resurrection of Jesus is under Christianity. It is not an accident that millions of Muslims recite the shahadah or make pilgrimage to Mecca. Neither is it an accident that horrific footage of infidels and apostates being decapitated has become a popular form of pornography throughout the Muslim world. Each of these practices, including this ghastly method of murder, find explicit support in scripture.
And the most telling part is Harris’s indictment of Westerners, often academics, who excuse this stuff, or blame it on “other factors”:
But there is now a large industry of obfuscation designed to protect Muslims from having to grapple with these truths. Our humanities and social science departments are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars deemed to be experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other diverse fields, who claim that where Muslim intolerance and violence are concerned, nothing is ever what it seems. Above all, these experts claim that one can’t take Islamists and jihadists at their word: Their incessant declarations about God, paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy are nothing more than a mask concealing their real motivations. What are their real motivations? Insert here the most abject hopes and projections of secular liberalism: How would you feel if Western imperialists and their mapmakers had divided your lands, stolen your oil, and humiliated your proud culture? Devout Muslims merely want what everyone wants—political and economic security, a piece of land to call home, good schools for their children, a little leisure to enjoy the company of friends. Unfortunately, most of my fellow liberals appear to believe this. In fact, to not accept this obscurantism as a deep insight into human nature and immediately avert one’s eyes from the teachings of Islam is considered a form of bigotry.
Note how his passion is, as always, expressed in great prose.
As I told one of these apologists, a Chicago colleague who blamed Muslim killings (mostly of Muslims, of course) as a natural reaction to Western colonialism, “What would they have to say to convince you that it really was religion that motivated them?”
That last paragraph is pure truth, and I have nothing but contempt for those who tie themselves in intellectual knots to blame anything but religion for the evils it causes. Like Sam, I hasten to add that not all Muslims are killers or oppressors of women, but must I keep saying that? When a Christian, motivated by the view that blastocysts of Homo sapiens are equivalent to adults, kills an abortion doctor, must we always tack on the caveat, “But of course not all Christians are like that.”? Of course they’re not. But there are many Muslims who share the ideals of ISIS and celebrate their barbarity.
Sam has some solutions to the problem (difficult ones, of course), but before we can even begin to solve the problems wrought by groups like ISIS, we must honestly admit to ourselves what is motivating them.
