Losing our Spines to Save Our Necks

Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks

This article is too long and somewhat tedious. Sam Harris wanted to present this in a much broader form. Almost everyone was too afraid to publish it. Nearly all of us are spineless when push comes to shove.

Losing Our Spines to Save Our Necks

Sam Harris, HuffPost

Geert Wilders, conservative Dutch politician and provocateur, has become the
latest projectile in the world's most important culture war: the zero-sum
conflict between civil society and traditional Islam. Wilders, who lives under
perpetual armed guard due to death threats, recently released a 15 minute film
entitled Fitna ("strife" in Arabic) over the internet. The
film has been deemed offensive because it juxtaposes images of Muslim violence
with passages from the Qur'an. Given that the perpetrators of such violence
regularly cite these same passages as justification for their actions, merely
depicting this connection in a film would seem uncontroversial. Controversial
or not, one surely would expect politicians and journalists in every free
society to strenuously defend Wilders' right to make such a film. But then one
would be living on another planet, a planet where people do not happily
repudiate their most basic freedoms in the name of "religious sensitivity."

Witness the free world's response to Fitna: The Dutch government
sought to ban the film outright, and European Union foreign ministers publicly
condemned it, as did UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. Dutch television refused
to air Fitna unedited. When Wilders declared his intention to release
the film over the internet, his U.S.
web-host, Network Solutions, took his website offline.

Into the breach stepped Liveleak, a British video-sharing website, which
finally aired the film on March 27th. It received over 3 million views in the
first 24 hours. The next day, however, Liveleak removed Fitna from its
servers, having been terrorized into self-censorship by threats to its staff.
But the film had spread too far on the internet to be suppressed (and Liveleak,
after taking further security measures, has since reinstated it on its site as
well).

Of course, there were immediate calls for a boycott of Dutch products
throughout the Muslim world. In response, Dutch corporations placed ads in
countries like Indonesia,
denouncing the film in self-defense. Several Muslim countries blocked YouTube
and other video-sharing sites in an effort to keep Wilders' blasphemy from
penetrating the minds of their citizens. There have also been isolated protests
and attacks on embassies, and ubiquitous demands for Wilders' murder. In Afghanistan, women in burqas could be seen
burning the Dutch flag; the Taliban carried out at least two revenge attacks on
Dutch troops, resulting in five Dutch casualties; and security concerns have
caused the Netherlands to
close its embassy in Kabul.
It must be said, however, that nothing has yet occurred to rival the ferocious
response to the Danish cartoons.

Meanwhile Kurt Westergaard, one of the Danish cartoonists, threatened to sue
Wilders for copyright infringement, as Wilders used his drawing of a bomb-laden
Muhammad without permission. Westergaard has lived in hiding since 2006 due to
death threats of his own, so the Danish Union of Journalists volunteered to
file this lawsuit on his behalf. Admittedly, there is something amusing about
one hunted man, unable to venture out in public for fear of being killed by
religious lunatics, threatening to sue another man in the same predicament over
a copyright violation. But it is understandable that Westergaard wouldn't want
to be repeatedly hurled at the enemy without his consent. Westergaard is an
extraordinarily courageous man whose life has been ruined both by religious
fanaticism and the free world's submission to it. In February, the Danish government
arrested three Muslims who seemed poised to murder him. Other Danes unfortunate
enough to have been born with the name "Kurt Westergaard" have had to
take steps to escape being murdered in his place. (Wilder's has since removed
the cartoon from the official version of Fitna.)

Wilders, like Westergaard and the other Danish cartoonists, has been widely
vilified for "seeking to inflame" the Muslim community. Even if this
had been his intention, this criticism represents an almost supernatural coincidence
of moral blindness and political imprudence. The point is not (and will never
be) that some free person spoke, or wrote, or illustrated in such a manner as
to inflame the Muslim community. The point is that only the Muslim community is
combustible in this way. 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."

Our capitulations in the face of these threats have had what is often called
"a chilling effect" on our exercise of free speech. I have, in my own
small way, experienced this chill first hand. First, and most important, my
friend and colleague Ayaan Hirsi Ali happens to be among the hunted. Because of
the failure of Western governments to make it safe for people to speak openly
about the problem of Islam, I and others must raise a mountain of private funds
to help pay for her round-the-clock
protection. 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.

As for infringements of my own speech, my first book, The End of Faith,
almost did not get published for fear of offending the sensibilities of
(probably non-reading) religious fanatics. W.W. Norton, which did publish the
book, was widely seen as taking a risk--one probably attenuated by the fact
that I am an equal-opportunity offender critical of all religious faith.
However, when it came time to make final edits to the galleys of The End of
Faith, many of the people I had thanked by name in my acknowledgments
(including my agent at the time and my editor at Norton) independently asked to
have their names removed from the book. Their concerns were explicitly for
their personal safety. Given our shamefully ineffectual response to the fatwa
against Salman Rushdie, their concerns were perfectly understandable.

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.

A point of comparison: The controversy of over Fitna was
immediately followed by ubiquitous media coverage of a scandal involving the
Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (FLDS). In Texas, police raided an
FLDS compound and took hundreds of women and underage girls into custody to
spare them the continued, sacramental predations of their menfolk. While
mainstream Mormonism is now granted the deference accorded to all major
religions in the United
States, its fundamentalist branch, with its
commitment to polygamy, spousal abuse, forced marriage, child brides (and,
therefore, child rape) is often portrayed in the press as a depraved cult. But
one could easily argue that Islam, considered both in the aggregate and in
terms of its most negative instances, is far more despicable than
fundamentalist Mormonism. The Muslim world can match the FLDS sin for
sin--Muslims commonly practice polygamy, forced-marriage (often between
underage girls and older men), and wife-beating--but add to these indiscretions
the surpassing evils of honor killing, female "circumcision,"
widespread support for terrorism, a pornographic fascination with videos
showing the butchery of infidels and apostates, a vibrant form of anti-semitism
that is explicitly genocidal in its aspirations, and an aptitude for producing
children's books and television programs which exalt suicide-bombing and depict
Jews as "apes and pigs."

Any honest comparison between these two faiths reveals a bizarre double
standard in our treatment of religion. We can openly celebrate the
marginalization of FLDS men and the rescue of their women and children. But,
leaving aside the practical and political impossibility of doing so, could we
even allow ourselves to contemplate liberating the women and children of
traditional Islam?

What about all the civil, freedom-loving, moderate Muslims who are just as
appalled by Muslim intolerance as I am? No doubt millions of men and women fit
this description, but vocal moderates are very difficult to find. Wherever
"moderate Islam" does announce itself, one often discovers frank
Islamism lurking just a euphemism or two beneath the surface. The subterfuge is
rendered all but invisible to the general public by political correctness,
wishful thinking, and "white guilt." This is where we find sinister
people successfully posing as "moderates"--people like Tariq Ramadan
who, while lionized by liberal Europeans as the epitome of cosmopolitan Islam,
cannot bring himself to actually condemn honor killing in round terms (he
recommends that the practice be suspended, pending further study). Moderation
is also attributed to groups like the Council on American-Islamic Relations
(CAIR), an Islamist public relations firm posing as a civil-rights lobby.

Even when one finds a true voice of Muslim moderation, it often seems
distinguished by a lack of candor above all things. Take someone like Reza
Aslan, author of No God But God: I debated Aslan for Book TV on the
general subject of religion and modernity. During the course of our debate, I
had a few unkind words to say about the Muslim Brotherhood. While admitting
that there is a difference between the Brotherhood and a full-blown jihadist
organization like al Qaeda, I said that their ideology was "close enough"
to be of concern. Aslan responded with a grandiose, ad hominem attack saying,
"that indicates the profound unsophistication that you have about this
region. You could not be more wrong" and claiming that I'd taken my view
of Islam from "Fox News." Such maneuvers, coming from a polished,
Iranian-born scholar of Islam carry the weight of authority, especially in
front of an audience of people who are desperate to believe the threat of Islam
has been grossly exaggerated. The problem, however, is that the credo of the
Muslim Brotherhood actually happens to be "Allah is our objective. The
Prophet is our leader. The Qur'an is our law. Jihad is our way. Dying in the
way of Allah is our highest hope."

The connection between the doctrine of Islam and Islamist violence is simply
not open to dispute. It's not that critics of religion like myself speculate
that such a connection might exist: the point is that Islamists themselves
acknowledge and demonstrate this connection at every opportunity and to deny it
is to retreat within a fantasy world of political correctness and religious
apology. Many western scholars, like the much admired Karen Armstrong, appear
to live in just such a place. All of their talk about how benign Islam
"really" is, and about how the problem of fundamentalism exists in
all religions, only obfuscates what may be the most pressing issue of our time:
Islam, as it is currently understood and practiced by vast numbers of the
world's Muslims, is antithetical to civil society. A recent poll showed that thirty-six
percent of British Muslims (ages 16-24) believe that a person should be killed
for leaving the faith. 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 have been brought to justice.
And these are British Muslims.

Occasionally, however, a lone voice can be heard acknowledging the obvious.
Hassan Butt wrote in the Guardian:

When I was still a member of what is probably best termed the British Jihadi
Network, a series of semi-autonomous British Muslim terrorist groups linked by
a single ideology, I remember how we used to laugh in celebration whenever
people on TV proclaimed that the sole cause for Islamic acts of terror like
9/11, the Madrid bombings and 7/7 was Western foreign policy. By blaming the
government for our actions, those who pushed the 'Blair's bombs' line did our
propaganda work for us. More important, they also helped to draw away any
critical examination from the real engine of our violence: Islamic theology.

It is astounding how infrequently one hears such candor among the public
voices of "moderate" Islam. This is what we owe the true moderates of
the Muslim world: we must hold their co-religionists to the same standards of
civility and reasonableness that we take for granted in all other people. Only
our willingness to openly criticize Islam for its all-too-obvious failings can
make it safe for Muslim moderates, secularists, apostates--and, indeed,
women--to rise up and reform their faith.

And if anyone in this debate can be credibly accused of racism, it is the
western apologists and "multiculturalists" who deem Arabs and Muslims
too immature to shoulder the responsibilities of civil discourse. As Ayaan
Hirsi Ali has pointed out, there is a calamitous form of "affirmative
action" at work, especially in western Europe, where Muslim immigrants are
systematically exempted from western standards of moral order in the name of
paying "respect" to the glaring pathologies in their culture. Hirsi
Ali has also observed that there is a quasi-racist double-think on display
whenever western powers trumpet that "Islam is peace," all the while
taking heroic measures to guard against the next occasion when the barbarians
run amok in response to a film, cartoon, opera, novel, beauty pageant--or the
mere naming of a teddy bear.

Have you seen the Danish cartoons that so roiled the Muslim world? Probably
not, as their publication was suppressed by almost every newspaper, magazine,
and television station in the United
States. Given their volcanic
reception--hundreds of thousands of Muslims rioted, hundreds of people were
killed--their sheer banality should have rendered these drawings
extraordinarily newsworthy. One magazine which did print them, Free Inquiry (for which I am proud to have written), had its stock banned from every Borders
and Waldenbooks in the country. These are precisely the sorts of capitulations
that we must avoid in the future.

The lesson we should draw from the Fitna controversy is that we
need more criticism of Islam, not less. Let it come down in such torrents that
not even the most deluded Islamist could conceive of containing it. As Ibn
Warraq, author of the revelatory Why I Am Not a Muslim, said in
response to recent events:

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.