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Sam Harris speaks truth to power with a defense of free speech and Fitna at, of all places, HuffPo.
[...] The controversy over Fitna, like all such controversies, renders one fact about our world especially salient: Muslims appear to be far more concerned about perceived slights to their religion than about the atrocities committed daily in its name. Our accommodation of this psychopathic skewing of priorities has, more and more, taken the form of craven and blinkered acquiescence.There is an uncanny irony here that many have noticed. The position of the Muslim community in the face of all provocations seems to be: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we will kill you. Of course, the truth is often more nuanced, but this is about as nuanced as it ever gets: Islam is a religion of peace, and if you say that it isn't, we peaceful Muslims cannot be held responsible for what our less peaceful brothers and sisters do. When they burn your embassies or kidnap and slaughter your journalists, know that we will hold you primarily responsible and will spend the bulk of our energies criticizing you for "racism" and "Islamophobia."
[...]
Nature, arguably the most influential scientific journal on the planet, recently published a lengthy whitewash of Islam (Z. Sardar "Beyond the troubled relationship." Nature 448, 131-133; 2007). The author began, as though atop a minaret, by simply declaring the religion of Islam to be "intrinsically rational." He then went on to argue, amid a highly idiosyncratic reading of history and theology, that this rational religion's current wallowing in the violent depths of unreason can be fully ascribed to the legacy of colonialism. After some negotiation, Nature also agreed to publish a brief response from me. What readers of my letter to the editor could not know, however, was that it was only published after perfectly factual sentences deemed offensive to Islam were expunged. I understood the editors' concerns at the time: not only did they have Britain's suffocating libel laws to worry about, but Muslim physicians and engineers in the UK had just revealed a penchant for suicide bombing. I was grateful that Nature published my letter at all.
In a thrillingly ironic turn of events, a shorter version of the very essay you are now reading was originally commissioned by the opinion page of Washington Post and then rejected because it was deemed too critical of Islam. Please note, this essay was destined for the opinion page of the paper, which had solicited my response to the controversy over Wilders' film. The irony of its rejection seemed entirely lost on the Post, which responded to my subsequent expression of amazement by offering to pay me a "kill fee." I declined.
I could list other examples of encounters with editors and publishers, as can many writers, all illustrating a single fact: While it remains taboo to criticize religious faith in general, it is considered especially unwise to criticize Islam. Only Muslims hound and hunt and murder their apostates, infidels, and critics in the 21st century. There are, to be sure, reasons why this is so. Some of these reasons have to do with accidents of history and geopolitics, but others can be directly traced to doctrines sanctifying violence which are unique to Islam.
[...]
It is perverse for the western media to lament the lack of an Islamic reformation and willfully ignore works such as Wilders' film, Fitna. How do they think reformation will come about if not with criticism? There is no such right as 'the right not to be offended; indeed, I am deeply offended by the contents of the Koran, with its overt hatred of Christians, Jews, apostates, non-believers, homosexuals but cannot demand its suppression.
It is time we recognized that those who claim the "right not to be offended" have also announced their hatred of civil society.
All of this essay is excellent. Read it all.
Posted by Robert at May 5, 2008 5:29 PM
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Not as sharp as Bruce Bawer's recent piece in THE CITY on the widespread and craven capitulation to Islamic intimidation by the (oh-so-understanding-and-tolerant-to-death) West, but prickly enough to get noticed.
Any anti-dhimmi articles are welcome and needed.
Especially in venues where you wouldn't expect them.
Ariana must have been pinched by a sheik.
Posted by: profitsbeard![[TypeKey Profile Page]](http://www.jihadwatch.org/dhimmiwatch/nav-commenters.gif)
at May 5, 2008 6:27 PM
Exactly what I have been saying all along. Brave men like Sam Harris are invaluable because they reach forums which automatically ignore men like Robert Spencer.
And this should put another nail in the coffin of the idea that 'atheist are to chicken to take on Islam'.
I particularly enjoyed the contrast of Islam to the FLDS.
Posted by: Fanusi Khiyal at May 5, 2008 6:35 PM
Way to go Sam! Keep talking reality, especially to those who need to hear it most.
Posted by: RalphInfidel at May 5, 2008 7:08 PM
Perhaps, as a Greek, Ariana has inherited a folk memory of 500 years of Islamic domination.
Posted by: MP at May 5, 2008 7:50 PM
Very good essay.
Posted by: Borg at May 5, 2008 9:19 PM
In his first sentence Harris gives the most straightforward name yet to the threat facing our civil society: "traditional Islam".
"The problem is not, as is often alleged, that governments cannot afford to protect every person who speaks out against Muslim intolerance. The problem is that so few people do speak out. If there were ten thousand Ayaan Hirsi Ali's, the risk to each would be radically reduced."
Slow, silent acquiescence of private individuals and commercial concerns to Islamic norms is troubling, but it is alarming that we hear so few people in our own government speaking out, and that those who do are not applauded as defenders of our constitutional rights, but condemned as zealots or xenophobes. How many hundreds of thousands of lives and tens of trillions of dollars have been spent protecting those freedoms up to this point in history? By what virtue or logic are we freely surrendering those rights now, at the height of our relative power and prosperity, to such a stubbornly degenerate enemy?
Harris is correct when he says it is not a problem of excessive government expense to protect every individual who speaks out against Muslim intolerance. The problem is government's unwillingness to protect our collective rights as individuals, as nation, and as a civilization no matter what the cost.
Our government's unwillingness to squarely confront the root of the problem: traditional Islam and its conflicts with our guarantees of Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is a prescription for painful cultural suicide.
Yes, traditional Islam is a good tag for it, perhaps our government could use that in place of "Jihad". After all, Harris could hardly be labeled a "Christian zealot with a pen."
at May 6, 2008 4:27 AM
I highly recommend Sam Harris' 'The End of Faith'.
While I disagree with one of his central premises - that belief in God is irrational - he argues his points very capably.
For example, in one chapter he discusses torture. Now I would guess that most of us are opposed to the use of torture (I know I am, though water-boarding falls into a gray category that could certainly be described as psychological torture but where no physical damage actually occurs). Harris argues that it is absurd and contradictory to oppose the torture of terrorist captives while at the same time supporting air-strikes on terrorist havens in which women and children may be killed.
One can talk of the moral component of "intent"...but Harris makes a compelling argument: those opposed to both war and torture are not being incongruent; those of us who support the military struggle against Islam - which invariably entails the inadvertent killing of innocents, but who oppose coerced interrogation...have some sorting out to do.
Posted by: Cornelius at May 6, 2008 8:04 AM
Silence = Death
It is time to denounce "Political Correctness" as the Orwellian nightmare that it has become.
Posted by: tanstaafl at May 6, 2008 8:45 AM
The author Z.Sardar"violent depths of unreason can be fully ascribed to the legacy of colonialism".The Arabian Peninsula was not colonialized during the 7th century when Mohammad slaughtered the Jewish Tribes of the Arabian Peninsula.The Arabian Peninsula was not colonialized after Mohammad death when his coreligionist destroyed the Christian Civilizations of the Levant,Mesopotamia and North Africa and the Persian Zoroastrian Civilization of Iran and the Greco-Buddhist Civilizations of Central Asia.
Posted by: RED at May 6, 2008 4:08 PM
Ralph Infidel,
Speaking of straightforward, here are some more quotes (from different sources) from Harris:
“We are at war with Islam. It may not serve our immediate foreign policy objectives for our political leaders to openly acknowledge this fact, but it is unambiguously so.”
“It is not merely that we are at war with an otherwise peaceful religion that has been ‘hijacked’ by extremists. We are at war with precisely the vision of life that is prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran, and further elaborated in the literature of hadith, which recounts the [sayings] and actions of the Prophet.”
"To be even-handed when talking about the problem of Islam is to misconstrue the problem. The refrain, “all religions have their extremists,” is bullshit—and it is putting the West to sleep. All religions don’t have these extremists. Some religions have never had these extremists. And in the Muslim world, support for extremism is not extreme in the sense of being rare. A recent poll showed that about a third of young British Muslims want to live under sharia law and believe that apostates should be killed for leaving the faith. These are British Muslims. Sixty-eight percent of British Muslims feel that their neighbors who insult Islam should be arrested and prosecuted, and seventy-eight percent think that the Danish cartoonists should be brought to justice. These people don’t have a clue about what constitutes a civil society. Reports of this kind coming out of the Muslim communities living in the West should worry us, before anything else about religion worries us."
"But consider how we, as atheists, tend to talk about Islam. Christians often complain that atheists, and the secular world generally, balance every criticism of Muslim extremism with a mention of Christian extremism. The usual approach is to say that they have their jihadists, and we have people who kill abortion doctors. Our Christian neighbors, even the craziest of them, are right to be outraged by this pretense of even-handedness, because the truth is that Islam is quite a bit scarier and more culpable for needless human misery, than Christianity has been for a very, very long time. And the world must wake up to this fact. Muslims themselves must wake up to this fact. And they can."
at May 6, 2008 10:57 PM
Kinana of Khaybar quoting Sam Harris:
"But consider how we, as atheists, tend to talk about Islam. Christians often complain that atheists, and the secular world generally, balance every criticism of Muslim extremism with a mention of Christian extremism. The usual approach is to say that they have their jihadists, and we have people who kill abortion doctors. Our Christian neighbors, even the craziest of them, are right to be outraged by this pretense of even-handedness, because the truth is that Islam is quite a bit scarier and more culpable for needless human misery, than Christianity has been for a very, very long time. And the world must wake up to this fact. Muslims themselves must wake up to this fact. And they can."
Harris really nails reality with this one. All we can ask of him is to keep it up, and hope that other voices join his.
Write another book Sam, and I'll buy that one too.
at May 6, 2008 11:25 PM
I don't see any "nuance" with regards to Islam.
Defy Islam and you die. End of story!!
As for the abandonment of our spines to save our necks: my prediction is that the western democracies will lose BOTH (and maybe their souls in the process).
We are living a lie by believing that Islam can be appeased. (It's not going to happen that way). Living a lie never leads to a happy ending. Ever.
Posted by: pythagoras at May 6, 2008 11:28 PM
Question -
what IS 'The Huffington Post"?
Is it purely online or is it paper/hardcopy as well?
Who runs it?
Please excuse my Australian ignorance!
Posted by: dumbledoresarmy at May 6, 2008 11:30 PM
"what IS 'The Huffington Post"?
Is it purely online or is it paper/hardcopy as well?
Who runs it?
Please excuse my Australian ignorance!"
Posted by: dumbledoresarmy
Arianna Huffington http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arianna_Huffington is one of a number of Liberal American bloggers who have found it possible to actually make a living with this new technology. Her blog http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ is one of the highest ranked political blogs on the web. Arianna is often cited in the MSM for the "insight" she brings to politics and she is a regular guest on news and talk shows. That Sam Harris could get his article published in the HoffPo is a significant accomplishment, and I was surprised to see this as Robert apparently was, too.
at May 7, 2008 1:28 AM
The levels of hypocrisy are staggering. When the Muslims have out bred everyone else and are the majority, the journalists are going to hope/wish that the 'moderate', secular, and truly 'peaceful Muslims are in charge.
.
absurd thought -
God of the Universe says
Islam is the most peaceful
no religion has them beat
never say otherwise
:)
.
at May 7, 2008 6:44 PM
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