Sam Harris: Making sense of Gaza

The difference between Muslims and Westerners?

Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan debate Gaza:

Andrew Sullivan:...It seems as if when you criticize Israel, every Jewish American takes it personally. That, I think, makes debate about this very tough. Do you not think that your being a Jew affects the way you talk about this thing? I mean, you seem more emotional about this than many other subjects I’ve talked to you about.

Sam Harris: No, I really don’t. I get emotional trying to keep words like “genocide” from losing their meanings. But I think my being Jewish is irrelevant. I’ve told you that if the Jews decided to assimilate perfectly and cease to be Jews, I would celebrate this decision. And this is how I live my own life. I’m Jewish only in the sense that when it came time to have children, I needed to get screened for the Tay-Sachs gene.

Sullivan: So you feel the same way about Israel as you would feel about Pakistan or England?

Harris: Well, I’m still a Jew in the sense that I know a good pastrami sandwich when I see one. So I’m acculturated in a way that I’m not with respect to Pakistan. But do I harbor any sympathy for the religious project of Judaism? Not at all. Nor do I have any nostalgia for an ancestral homeland in the Middle East. 

In fact, when I walk the streets of Jerusalem and feel a romantic thrill for antiquity, it’s the Christian thrill that I feel: I think about Jesus having walked those streets. So I’m not the Jew you’re looking for. The truth is that I just want to live in a sane, global, civil society where religion no longer divides human beings from one another. It is time we recognized that we are all members of the same sect: humanity.

However, there is another thing I do get emotional about—and that’s the threat of Islam, especially when it is systematically obfuscated by my fellow liberals who should know better.

If you want to get to the core of my response, emotionally, here is the kind of thing that drives me absolutely nuts: If a Jewish artist in New York covered a copy of the Koran in pig blood, and the act were well publicized, half the Muslims on earth would take to the streets. 

But when a group like ISIS starts crucifying noncombatants, or attempts to starve 40,000 men, women, and children to death on the side of a mountain, there are no significant protests at all. This psychopathic skewing of priorities extends not only to the “Arab street” and its lynch mobs; it extends to the talking heads on CNN. 

Spokesmen for a group like CAIR, devious blowhards like Reza Aslan, and liberal apologists like Glenn Greenwald would also attack the artist—and, if he got butchered by a jihadist on Park Avenue, they would say that although such violence had nothing at all to do with the noble of faith of Islam, the poor bastard surely got what was coming to him. He was too provocative; he should have had more “religious sensitivity.” And yet these people say scarcely a word about the mass murders of Muslims, by Muslims, committed on a daily basis in a score of countries.

Of course, some Muslims do denounce terrorism or groups like ISIS, but they almost always do this in a dishonest and self-serving way. They will say that these people “do not represent Islam.” But this is just obscurantism. When not actually lying and seeking to implement their own sinister agenda—here I’m thinking of a group like CAIR—they are just expressing their fear of being associated with such sickening behavior. 

Most Muslims don’t want their faith tarnished. They don’t want any hassles from the TSA[Transportation Security Administration]. They don’t want to be stigmatized.

All of this is perfectly understandable but perfectly wrongheaded, given the reality of what is going on in the world. The scandal here is that so few Muslims are speaking honestly about problematic doctrines within their faith. The few who are—such as Asra Nomani, Irshad Manji, and Maajid Nawaz—are heroes. 

The crucial difference is that they admit that the doctrines related to martyrdom, jihad, blasphemy, apostasy, the rights of women, etc. really are at the bottom of all the intolerance and violence we see in the House of Islam. And, needless to say, these brave people are regularly denounced and threatened by their fellow Muslims.

Everything we needed to know about the masochism and moral blindness of the Left, we should have learned during the Salman Rushdie affair. There we saw the whole problem in miniature—the infantile rage of religious maniacs concerned about their so-called “dignity” side-by-side with the complacency, sanctimony, hypocrisy, and cowardice of their liberal apologists. And it’s this same schema that is shaping world opinion about the war between Israel and the Palestinians. If you detect any emotional charge in me, that’s where it’s coming from...

...The final point I’ll make is to remind people of who those neighbors[of Israel] are: Hamas is a death cult—as are ISIS, Al-Qaeda, Al-Shabab, the Taliban, Boko Haram, Hezbollah and every other jihadist organization we could name. Despite their differences, they are in fact the same death cult. 

And in case our readers imagine that jihadists don’t have global aspirations, they should pay attention to what they say among themselves (read, for instance, The Management of Savagery). It’s in this sense that I claimed in my blog post that we’re all living in Israel—an assertion you found ridiculous. 

This death cult is springing up everywhere: It’s more or less ubiquitous in the Muslim world, obviously, but it’s also in Boston, with the Tsarnaev brothers who woke up one morning and decided that the best use of their short time on earth was to bomb the Boston Marathon. 

The fact that they didn’t have a formal link to any established terrorist organization is irrelevant. It’s the ideas of martyrdom and jihad that are the problem. These ideas have entranced millions of people, and they are spreading...

Andrew Sullivan's blog is The Dish.

Patrick Cockburn is good on ISIS.