In an op-ed for Mondoweiss, Theodore Sayeed says of Sam Harris, “He is most happy when he can frame the discussion of war in religious terms. Israel is post-religious and the Palestinians are not. Therefore secularists should side with Israel. America is post-religious and Muslims are not. Therefore secularists ought to side with America. And because Muslims often use religious language to discuss political matters, because they say jihad instead of let’s fight back, and because they call their dead martyrs instead of fallen heroes, their concerns are not territorial at all, they are irrational superstition about which there can be no prospects for dialogue.” Such simplistic dehumanization of the Muslim world does not stand up to even a casual level of scrutiny. Many atheists, like Harris, see conflict in the Middle East as rooted in a cultural failure of Islam to adapt itself to modernity rather than as a political aspiration to freedom from U.S.-backed regimes. The Arab Spring protests in Egypt demonstrated that this culturalist assumption does not hold. “Popular sovereignty, not God’s sovereignty, was the basis of the Tahir Square protests; Muslims and Christians marched together. The slogans were demands for rights, dignity, and social justice. All of this confounds the clash of civilizations theses, which holds that ‘Islam has bloody borders’,” writes Arun Kundani, author of The Muslims Are Coming: Islamophobia, Extremism, and the Domestic War on Terror. ISIS is barbaric, that much is for certain. All war is barbaric, but to pretend our warfare is ethical and somehow sanitized is to abandon all reason. To pretend our occupation of the Middle East (44 U.S. military bases and an aircraft carrier group permanently parked in the region) isn’t the root cause of Arab-Muslim motivated terrorism is not only to ignore the founding charter of al-Qaeda, but also the terrorists who actually carry out the deeds. Our permanent military occupation of the Middle East and our propping of despotic regimes has led to economic oppression and resulted in visible moral atrocities, including the torture and abuse of Iraqi prisoners. It was the U.S. that gunned down dozens of Iraqi civilians and two Reuters journalists in a single outing, while the crew of the Apache gunship laughed and cracked jokes.
Posted on: Fri, 05 Sep 2014 16:18:42 +0000
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