My far-too-long blow by blow against Sam Harris continues here.

So, in Pt I, we saw that Sam Harris dismisses some types of the supernatural as fanciful and obvious inventions of man, while others (coincidentally, ones he personally enjoys) are both logical and morally desirable.

Unfortunately for Harris, the amount of evidence for both propositions is roughly equal (namely: none).

Hypocrisy and personal blinders are hardly unusual, though Harris takes it to something of an extreme. Whereas he detests religion in general, and loves some aspects of Eastern religion, he has a profound, frothing hatred of one religion in particular: Islam.

Yes, that’s right. Harris jumped on the Muslim-bashing bandwagon, post 9/11, like so many other Americans. His reasons are… rather poorly thought out.

See, Harris has a particular revulsion for suicide bombing, which is carried out almost exclusively in the contemporary world by bombers who happen to be Muslim. (A vanishingly small percentage of all Muslims of course)

Forgive me in advance for quoting some of his hate speech here but it’s necessary, I think, to make the point.

In fact, suicide bombing is now so commonplace in our world that most of us have lost sight of just how unimaginable it should be. It is, perhaps, the least likely thing human beings could ever be inclined to do. What, after all, is less likely than large numbers of middle class, educated, psychologically healthy people intentionally blowing themselves up—in crowds of children, in front of the offices of the Red Cross, at weddings—and having their mothers sing their praises for it? Can we even conceive of a more profligate misuse of human life? As a cultural phenomenon, suicide bombing should be impossible. But here it is.

Why is suicide bombing so bad compared to, say… dropping bombs from 30,000 feet? Or doing it with remote controls like the IRA? Harris, oddly enough, doesn’t say.

Harris also must lack much in the way of imagination, if a suicide bomber killing him or herself at a cafe is the most profligate misuse of human life he can think of. Suicide bombing is, at heart, murder in pursuit of a cause, usually political. We studied the effects of small scale terror operations like these in a class I had on political revolution in my undergrad days actually; it can be quite effective, if well tailored and targeted, at swaying public opinion. In that respect, suicide bombing isn’t wasteful, it’s exceedingly efficient and cost-effective.

Compare that to dropping atomic weapons on Japan, even as it attempted a diplomatic surrender through Soviet back-channels. Hundreds of thousands dead, to serve no legitimate military purpose. Sure, some people allege that Truman wanted to scare the Russians… which worked out great, since they were already well on the way to stealing our atomic technology, and we had just happened to use up our last two prototypes killing civilians in a broken country. If anything, dropping the bombs on Japan made us far LESS safe. (Certainly, dropping ALL of our remaining nuclear arsenal was moronic. What if we had actually NEEDED that third bomb?)

If you want a less flashy example, how about the thousands of people who die in the United States, every single year, from food-borne illness? Five THOUSAND people die each year that way, and every single one of those deaths is both, by definition, preventable and pointless. Here are the CDC figures on the subject: 76 million Americans get sick each year, 300k are hospitalized, and 5k die.

Source: The Centers for Disease Control

Isn’t that pretty profligate, Sam?  How many of those deaths are the result of poor conditions in slaughterhouses, of untreated sewage used as fertilizer, or unsanitary conditions in factories and processing plants?  Remember the salmonella outbreak last year with jalepenos?  How about the peanut scare?  How about the recall of chili dog sauce, or the Jack in the Box scandal?  On and on and on.

RJ Eskrow, also writing for the Huffington Post at the time, skewered Harris nicely on these issues, and played the same word substitution games with Harris that I did.

As for Harris, his words could be used against any religion (or lack thereof). Take this sentence:

How many more architects and electrical engineers must fly planes into buildings before we realize that the problem of Muslim extremism is not merely a matter of education?

Now imagine we’re in World War II. Replace “buildings” with [sic] and replace “Muslim” with “Shinto” – or just “Japanese.” Or imagine these are the 1970’s, when U.S. saw wealthy young college students blow themselves up making bombs in a Greenwich Village apartment. SLA fighters, having assassinated a popular school superintendent in Oakland, have just ended their own lives rather than surrender to police. The Red Brigades and the Red Army Faction are committing acts of terrorism in Europe. Then rewrite Sam’s next sentence accordingly:

How many more middle-class American and European citizens must blow themselves up and kidnap or kill noncombatants before we acknowledge that atheist terrorism is not matter of poverty or political oppression?

Source: The Huffington Post

No kidding. This argument, in fact, often gets extended by the likes of scumbaggy Ben Stein to blame atheism for the Holocaust, because Hitler may have held some atheistic tendencies. Of course, he also expressed admiration for religion’s ability to motivate people to obey, and stated that he wanted to elevate Germany to a position of worship (as a God), so I think people like Stein are aiming for the wrong target. How about Mao, Stalin or Pol Pot though? They seem like pretty committed atheists, and they certainly got a lot of murder and oppression done. Stalin in particular brutally oppressed the Orthodox church in Russia, until it became politically useful to stop.

Somehow I don’t think Harris would agree that this justifies cracking down on atheist thought.

Ok, so we’ve seen that Harris flipped out, probably over 9/11, and over the relatively small number of deaths caused by suicide bombing. Surely if a few thousand deaths offends him this greatly, the estimated million or more people we’ve killed in Iraq sends him to the fainting couch, or has him denouncing US foreign policy from the rooftops?

I have never written or spoken in support of the war in Iraq. The truth is, I have never known what to think about this war, apart from the obvious: 1) prospectively, it seemed like a very dangerous distraction from the ongoing war in Afghanistan; 2) retrospectively, it has been a disaster. While much of the responsibility for this disaster falls on the Bush administration, one of the administration’s great failings was to underestimate the religious sectarianism of the Iraqi people. Whatever one thinks about the rationale for invading Iraq and the subsequent prosecution of the war, there is nothing about the resulting conflict that makes Islam look benign—not the reflexive solidarity expressed throughout the Muslim world for Saddam Hussein (merely because an army of “infidels” attacked him), not the endless supply of suicide bombers willing to kill Iraqi noncombatants, not the insurgency’s use of women and children as human shields, not the ritual slaughter of journalists and aid-workers, not the steady influx of jihadis from neighboring countries, and not the current state of public opinion among European and American Muslims. It seems to me that no reasonable person can conclude that these phenomena are purely the result of U.S. foreign policy, however inept.

Source: Sam Harris.org

Hmm, not so much.

I’m not even sure where to begin with that one. However, perhaps we’ll take that first claim, that Harris never wrote in support of the War in Iraq. Lesse… ah, here we go:

The war in Iraq, while it may be exacerbating the conflict between Islam and the West, is a red herring. However mixed or misguided American intentions were in launching this war, civilized human beings are now attempting, at considerable cost to themselves, to improve life for the Iraqi people.

Source: The Huffington Post (Sam Harris Column entitled ‘Bombing Our Illusions’, from 2005)

Ah yes, the ‘civilized’ people were trying to improve the life of the Iraqi people. That must be why we killed so many of them, and appointed a series of puppet dictators like Maliki to serve our interests.

This is not to impugn the work of many people who did go to Iraq with that goal, from some soldiers to NGOs to reporters. But Harris glosses over the larger goals and motivations of our occupation to frame it as the good, civilized West helping out those silly, savage Muslims. What a tool.

The terrible truth about our predicament in Iraq is that even if we had invaded with no other purpose than to remove Saddam Hussein from power and make Iraq a paradise on earth, we could still expect tomorrow’s paper to reveal that another jihadi has blown himself up for the sake of killing scores of innocent men, women, and children. The outrage that Muslims feel over U.S. and British foreign policy is primarily the product of theological concerns. Devout Muslims consider it a sacrilege for infidels to depose a Muslim tyrant and occupy Muslim lands—no matter how well intentioned the infidels or malevolent the tyrant. Because of what they believe about God and the afterlife and the divine provenance of the Koran, devout Muslims tend to reflexively side with other Muslims, no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This is solidarity born of religious delusion, and it must end—or a genuine clash of civilizations will be unavoidable.

Muslims in Iraq and elsewhere have been traumatized by war and by decades of repression. But this does not explain the type of violence they wage against us on a daily basis. War and repression do not account for suicidal violence directed against the Red Cross, the U.N., foreign workers, and Iraqi innocents. War and repression do not account for the influx of foreign fighters willing to sacrifice their lives merely to sow chaos. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is not George Washington with a hood. Sawing the heads off of civilian contractors, humanitarian workers, and journalists is not “resistance” to oppression. It is the work of men who left their hearts in the 7th century. Civilization really does have its enemies, and we have met — and, perhaps, made – many of them in Iraq.

Source: Ibid

Don’t you just love unsourced claims? Does Harris have polling data on why Iraqis, at that time, felt the way they did? Sociological studies? Interviews?

No, of course not. He knows why they did what they did, and how they felt, because he is Sam Harris the all-knowing, and they’re just… silly, ignorant Muslims.

*rolls eyes*

Leave the social science to actual social scientists, Sam. You’re clearly unqualified.

For a bonus, look at that comparison of Washington and his tactics to the violence and mutilation going on in Iraq. Just how ignorant IS Sam Harris, anyway?

George Washington more or less started the French and Indian war with his campaign against the French immediately preceding the surrender at Fort Necessity; amongst other horrors were the murder of a captive Frenchman by one of Washington’s allies, and the scalping of dead French soldiers.

Source: Wikipedia

So when an Iraqi mutilates the dead or murders captives, it’s because he’s a Muslim, and when people under Washington’s command do it… it’s because… they’re good British citizens (and/or allied Native Americans)?

What?

Plus there’s this classic passage: “Sawing the heads off of civilian contractors, humanitarian workers, and journalists is not “resistance” to oppression. It is the work of men who left their hearts in the 7th century. Civilization really does have its enemies, and we have met — and, perhaps, made – many of them in Iraq.”

Harris presents these decapitations as despicable acts (which they most certainly are), but tries to lay the blame for mutilating the dead on early Islam (hence the 7th century crack).

One of many issues with that: the aforementioned scalping.

Scalping, aka the mutilation of a living or dead person by cutting their scalp off with a knife, has been widely practiced throughout history. In the ancient world, the Scythians did it; the Anglo-Saxons and the Norman French also scalped in the 9th century, and white settlers and Native Americans did the same in America.

Sources: Wikipedia
The Encyclopedia Britannica

So what is it that Harris objects to? It obviously isn’t the mutilation of the dead and captured in general.

For that matter, the US goverment is in the business of mutilating captives in the War on Terror for which Harris shows such enthusiasm:

The 25 lines edited out of the court papers contained details of how Mr Mohamed’s genitals were sliced with a scalpel and other torture methods so extreme that waterboarding, the controversial technique of simulated drowning, “is very far down the list of things they did,” the official said.

Another source familiar with the case said: “British intelligence officers knew about the torture and didn’t do anything about it.”

Source: Think Progress

We’re also, much like Al Queda, in the habit of routinely and gruesomely murdering our prisoners in this war.

The record could not be clearer regarding the fact that we caused numerous detainee deaths, many of which have gone completely uninvestigated and thus unpunished. Instead, the media and political class have misleadingly caused the debate to consist of the myth that these tactics were limited and confined. As Gen. Barry McCaffrey recently put it:

We should never, as a policy, maltreat people under our control, detainees. We tortured people unmercifully. We probably murdered dozens of them during the course of that, both the armed forces and the C.I.A.

Journalist and Human Rights Watch researcher John Sifton similarly documented that “approximately 100 detainees, including CIA-held detainees, have died during U.S. interrogations, and some are known to have been tortured to death.”

Source: Glenn Greenwald

I intend to cover Harris’ reprehensible advocacy of torture more in a later post, but include it here to illustrate his continuing hypocrisy on Islam. Harris flippantly asserts that mutilating the dead is a ’7th century’ mindset, ignoring the enormous volume of evidence that a wide variety of people, of differing faiths and nationalities, have done it down the centuries since. He complains of cruelty perpetrated by our enemies in the ‘War on Terror’, but ignores our own savagery (though admittedly, the Binyan Mohammad stuff wasn’t available when he wrote the 2005 column. He still endorses torture on his current website though, so he’s not off the hook).

There is one obvious unifying theme here. If you commit a horrible crime, an act of violence or terror, and you’re a Muslim, Harris assumes that your religion is the cause. Harris then uses that ‘evidence’ as proof that the entire religion is inherently violent and disreputable. Yet, when anyone else does it, Harris is silent on their larger motivations. He doesn’t assume that the United States tortures people out of religious sadism, or that we invaded Iraq out of a religious motivation, despite evidence for that position*.

It is the very definition of a double standard.

*See this article on the infamous Lt. General Boykin, who likes to give speeches on how the US is a Christian nation fighting Satan, or how he knew he would win in a conflict because his god is real and his enemies isn’t. Etc.

Sources: CBS News, Wikipedia

Or see the scandal of US troops in Iraq and Afghanistan trying to convert the local inhabitants.

Source: Democracy Now