http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisf...-muslim-animus

This article bas been brought up by three distinct posters in the last few days:

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...6&postcount=10

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=363

http://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/sh...&postcount=354

I figured that it might be worth its own thread if there's something in particular about the article worth discussing (as opposed to it being a sub-point of some other discussion).

I tend to agree with PZ Myers: both right, both wrong. But Harris is way more wrong than Greenwald.

Militant, "fundamentalist" Islam (ie Islamism) is indeed monstrous, and the "Muslim world" on balance seems like a pretty ****ty place, but Harris is delusional if he thinks "tens of millions" of Muslims are literally plotting the death of Westerners. There just aren't that many people that give a **** about doing much of anything except making a living and trying not to get killed. And even accepting the premise that Islamism is barbarous in the extreme, the solution to the "problem" of Islam is not to bomb the **** out of them with flying killer robots or trying to block immigration from "Muslim" countries. I put that in quotations, because the three most-populous majority-Muslim countries (Indonesia, Pakistan, and Bangladesh) are not in the Middle East and have relatively low rates of radicalism (Pakistan is a tricky case, because it has a lot of crazies, but also a big populace to dilute them) compared with, say, Saudi Arabia.

The fact that Harris makes a point that only the neocon/fundies in the US and the fascists of Europe "appreciate" the threat the way he does might give him a clue that he's a little off the reservation.

In a garbled, stream-of-consciousness piece of commentary in regards to this set of articles, yesterday on FB I posted:

I'm pretty torn. On the one hand I think Harris borders on hysteria in his assessment of the dangers of Islamic fundamentalism. On the other, it's really frustrating hearing his views distorted so flagrantly. Attacking a childish cartoon of his views, rather than the genuine fallacies he actually holds, isn't going to help change his or his fans position.

There's a good article here that lays out quotes from the Hussain piece next to Harris' own words showing the distortions going on. Worth noting, however, that most of the actual non-distorted arguments Harris presents are completely open to strong criticism, without the need for misrepresentation.

I have mused before that it is often very, very difficult to make a strong case that someone is being bigoted or racist or sexist or Islamophobic or other such things. People know today not to make the overt examples like "all blacks are bad" or "all Muslims are violent" or whatever else, and so even if strong, bigotry often is more identifiable as a pattern of focus and that even the most ridiculous single statements, especially for someone with Harris's ability to write circles about things, can always sort of be intellectualized away. So one can say Harris is being Islamophobic, and he can respond that he is just making objective criticisms of a religion just as he does for Christianity, that he doesn't have any personal animosity to individual Muslims or whatever, and from that point on the debate almost always gets lost in the muck. While I think lots of people probably are bigoted in various ways, it is pretty rare that I read a compelling take down of someone that successfully make a strong case that they are indeed bigoted.

honestly if you need to distort Harris's views (on just about everything) to find something to criticize, you are doing it wrong

To save Aaron doing it and it turning into another public tiff, this sounds an awful lot like an unfalsifiable hypothesis.

Yeah, there's a ton of stuff I disagree with him on (not just politics), but I'd rather have Harris in a debate than, say, Dawkins, despite Dawkins views being much closer to my own.

Just in case it wasn't clear, I wasn't aiming to render judgement on harris being or not being islamophobic, more noting that it is rare that you can see someone effectively demonstrate someone else as being objectively bigoted. For instance, I don't think the GG piece establishes the case that Harris is necessarily bigoted (or the piece GG tweeted with the same accusation).

I don't know why Harris has any credibility at all. His prejudiced statements are even demonstrably untruthful when he's being "factual".

Harris' credibility lies mostly in his popularity. I don't think that there's really any forum other than public perception where he's proven himself to be of great intellectual substance*. You can search around SMP for threads about him, and you'll find that many of his views don't hold up well to scrutiny. The criticisms in those threads are focused primarily on the intellectual content of his positions, and nothing about characterizing him as an Islamophobe.

* I'll note he has a PhD in neuroscience, but most of what he speaks on these days has little grounding in hard science.

Here is Sam Harris's reply.

I think I agree most with this statement. I disagree with Harris on some important issues, both religious and political, but I thought Greenwald's case against him was very weak and based on selective reading of the evidence. For instance, an important part of his case is that Harris is not primarily focused on criticizing religion, but Islam in particular. It's true that Harris views Islam as a more evil religion than Christianity or Judaism (as a moral realist, such statements have real weight for Harris), but it is obviously false to anyone familiar with Harris's writing to view this as somehow negating his criticism of other religions or religion generally. It is worth pointing out here that Harris wrote an entire book focused on Christianity and its role in the U.S. Also, Harris asserts that Buddhism is a better religion than Christianity--does that statement also bother Greenwald?

At heart, the problem seems to be that Greenwald thinks it is unacceptable to argue for or believe that Islam is worse than other religions. You can reject religion. You can even be anti-religion. But claiming that Islam is particularly bad is not acceptable. This is why Greenwald claims: "When criticism of religion morphs into an undue focus on Islam - particularly at the same time the western world has been engaged in a decade-long splurge of violence, aggression and human rights abuses against Muslims, justified by a sustained demonization campaign - then I find these objections to the New Atheists completely warranted."

Also, I think it worth pointing out again that the political views of Hitchens and Harris are not particularly characteristic of the New Atheists either--both Dawkins and Dennett are liberals, and Dawkins was an outspoken opponent of the war in Iraq. So I don't think the line that Greenwald wants to draw--from Harris's claim that Islam is a worse religion to more hawkish views on the Middle East and civil liberties really stands up.

Sam Harris is depressingly dishonest in his arguments throughout. He gives a long and verbose response so I'll just give one simple example of this.

"We should profile Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it."

We all know what he means by this but he covers himself from accusations of prejudice in a rather specious manner.

"I explicitly include white, middle-aged men like me in the profile"

So now the first sentence doesn't make much sense. He explains it like this.

"My point is that we should be giving less scrutiny to people who obviously aren’t jihadists."

So why not just stick to the last sentence if that's what he means ? My guess is he wanted to say the first sentence regardless as he knows it's offensive.

I agree with Greenwald that villification of Islam is particularly unhelpful and unsavoury as it feeds into the right-wing political narrative that we should attack Islamic country A or B but my objection to Harris is purely on the facts. Islam does not have violence at its core. The Hadiths are just opinion as is whatever Islamic extremists say. The Koran is the revealed word of God and that does not support his underlying premise about Islam being violent "from its core" and this is the basis of all his views about Islam. Harris complains that

"Unfortunately, many of my most voluble critics cannot clear this bar—and no amount of quotation from the Koran, the hadith, the ravings of modern Islamists, or from the plaints of their victims, makes a bit of difference.)"

That is not a failing of his critics but due to his inability to support his assertion from the Koran itself rather than worthless quotation from what he calls "the ravings of modern Islamists" etc etc.

Perhaps I am just projecting the parts I like and suppressing the parts I don't, but I don't think this was a particularly important part of his case, despite a few sentences on the christianity vs islam comparison. His core criticism, in my view, is one that Harris is making hyperbolic, unjustified and fearmongering claims about Islam that relentlessly paints it in a negative light. In principle, this point stands or falls regardless of whether Harris additionally makes such vacuous criticisms of christianity or not. It is useful, perhaps, to identify that some of Harris's most extreme comments (like his view on the threat to western civilization posed by Islam) are ones specifically about Islam, but the principle problem is the claims themselves, not whether they are or are not also been uttered by Christianity.

For instance, if Harris was truly equal in his criticism of both religions making equally ridiculous caricatures about both, Greenwald could equally well write much the same article. Indeed, i doubt he would deny Harris certainly has an anti-religion animus and not just an anti-Islam animus, it is just that his feelings against Islam appear to be somewhat stronger and lead to statements that are that much more ridiculous than what he says about Christianity.

If I have not too grossly reframed GG, then I would said I broadly agree with the spirit of that point and do indeed find many of Harris's views on Islam egregious in ways that I simply don't for his views on religions more generally or christianity in specific.

There is a second issue which I think also floats around many of these topics which is the consequence of holding (more more correctly many people holding) a particular view. Suppose Harris genuinely made identical criticisms of Islam and Christianity. In the context of a christian country like the US, it could well be that the consequence of exposure to the view on Christianity would lead to introspection on a privileged institution in society in need of attention focused on its negative lights and so the consequence of his success in propagating this point being a net positive for the US. At the same time, since Islam is vilified in the west, not deified, saying identical negative things about it has the consequence of entrenching the crude stereotypes, animosity, and support for warfare and other violence, and being a net negative.

I am not trying to suggest people should only utter things where the consequences of uttering them are positive, or anything of this nature. But I think at least a partial explanation for the strength of the reaction that some on "the left" feel towards the anti-Islam stuff is not based on the fact that they feel it is wrong (although GG and others certainly think that) but also that the consequences of this wrong belief really matter where they care less about the consequences of saying similar wrong things about Christianity. That Harris goes even further in his vilification of Islam and says things that are even more wrong there (and which has very much worse societal consequences) strengthens the pushback even further.

PZ on the topic

http://freethoughtblogs.com/pharyngu...eart-atheists/

PZ Myers is usually right in his assessments of people, and Sam Harris is awfully reactionary when it comes to Islam and turrurizm (despite being liberal in all other aspects). Having said that, people love jumping on Harris, and Hitchens before him, without reading his work. The problem is that left wingers are sometimes keen to attack 'new atheism', and 'new atheists' often fight the wrong battles and obsess about non issues simply because religion is remotely involved. If they both reflected more we would have a much better movement in both camps (most atheists are progressive leaning and many progressives are secular).

Yeah, I don't think your reading of Greenwald's article is very convincing. You say that in principle Greenwald's core criticism "stands or falls regardless of whether Harris additionally makes such vacuous criticisms of christianity or not."

But listen to this:
Greenwald is not objecting to Harris's criticisms of Islam as a specific example of a general critique of religion. Rather, he is claiming that Harris's criticisms of Islam is uniquely different from his criticisms of other religions and, because unjustified, based on an irrational animus towards Muslims in particular.

How would it be the same article? Greenwald primarily writes about politics, and presumably what is driving him is his view that Harris's undue emphasis on the badness of Islam ends up motivating his neo-conservative political beliefs. If Harris thought that Christianity and Islam were equally bad, then it would no longer serve as a motivation for his political claims.

The crucial difference is this: Greenwald does not want to argue in this essay that Harris's anti-religion animus is irrational. Rather, he argues that the heightened degree of Harris's animus towards Islam is irrational.

I think you're reading something into this article that simply isn't there. Sure, it is possible that Greenwald thinks that Harris's antipathy to religion more generally is also irrational. However, he certainly doesn't make that claim in this article. If anything, he is careful to bracket off that point by differentiating Harris's comments about Islam from his more general criticism of religion--about which he makes no comment.

Do you believe that to be true?

That's the religion so that is the basis for claims about it. "X" said this or "Y" wrote the other doesn't count for much. Frankly it is ludicrous to claim that killing everyone else is at the core of any religion but that's what Sam Harris expects us to believe.

...so, is that a yes or no?

And so it is. Why pick on Islam ?


So what ? Greenwald obviously finds Harris' Islamophobia intellectually dishonest.

I stated my position in the "Atheists stop struggling with your faith" thread. There isn't an interventionist God so belief is irrelevant in this life. However I think it's wrong to live like a mongrel and these religious types know a thing or two about how to live right.