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Tag Archives: ISIS

Sam Harris: The Meaning of the Paris Attacks

16 Monday Nov 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Essay, Politics, Religion

≈ Comments Off on Sam Harris: The Meaning of the Paris Attacks

Tags

Charlie Hebdo, civilization, Daesh, France, interview, ISIL, ISIS, Islam, Islamic State, Islamism, Jihadis, Jihadism, Lawrence O'Donnell, Maajid Nawaz, morality, Paris, Paris Attacks, Podcast, religion, Sam Harris, Still Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon, terror, Terrorism, The Last Word, violence

Paris Terror Attacks

“This is the big story of our time, and it is an incredibly boring one. Let the boredom of this just sink into your bones: realize that for the rest of your life, you’re going to be reading and hearing about, and otherwise witnessing, hopefully not firsthand, the lunacy and attendant atrocities of jihadists.

Please pay attention to the recurrent shrieks of Allahu Akbar. This is the cat call from the Middle Ages, or from Middle Earth, that we will have to live with for the rest of our lives. So this fight against jihadism — this is a generational fight. This is something we are doing for our children, ultimately, and for our children’s children.

We have a war of ideas that we have to wage, and win, and unfortunately we have to wage it and win it with ourselves first. And again, this requires an admission that there is such a war of ideas to be waged and won.

We have grown so effete as a civilization as to imagine that we have no enemies — or if we do, that they are only of our own making… It is not mere wartime propaganda that we will one day look back on with embarrassment to call ISIS a death cult. To call them barbarians. To call them savages. To use dehumanizing language.

They are scarcely human in their aspirations. The world they want to build entails the destruction of everything we value, and are right to value. And by “we” I mean civilized humanity, including all the Muslims who are just as horrified…

We have a project that’s universal, that transcends culture; that unites everyone who loves art and science and reason generally, who wants to cure disease, who wants to raise each new generation to be more educated than the last. And this common project is under assault…

And unfortunately, most of us have to keep convincing ourselves that evil exists, that not all people want the same things, and that some people are wrong in how they want to live and the world they want to build. And if we can’t convince ourselves of this once and for all, well then we’ll have to wait to be convinced by further acts of savagery of the sort we just saw in Paris. Why wait?”

__________

Comments from Sam Harris on the preface to his newly republished essay “Still Sleepwalking toward Armageddon”.

You’ll find more of Sam’s takes on these issues in his newest book, coauthored with Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance. I was lucky enough to meet Maajid two weeks ago in Washington and can enthusiastically recommend this quick, clarifying read. Watch Sam and Maajid talk about the roots of their conversation and the conclusions they’ve made in the following clip from The Last Word with Lawrence O’Donnell:


The photograph was taken this weekend as mourners gathered at The Place de la République in Paris.

More for the Francophiles:

  • The ultimate poem about the city of lights: “In Paris with You” by James Fenton
  • Meet Napoleon Bonaparte
  • A few of the best words from some indomitable Frenchmen: Jules Renard, Blaise Pascal, Edmond de Goncourt, Alexis de Tocqueville, Albert Camus

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Maajid Nawaz: Why Not Calling ISIS “Islamic” Hurts Muslim Reformers

06 Friday Mar 2015

Posted by jrbenjamin in Current Events, Debate, Politics, Religion

≈ Comments Off on Maajid Nawaz: Why Not Calling ISIS “Islamic” Hurts Muslim Reformers

Tags

debate, Douglas Murray, extremism, ISIS, Islam, Islamic State, Islamism, Jihadism, Maajid Nawaz, Muslims, Quran

Maajid Nawaz

“When President Obama gave his speech, he said, ‘We will not allow these people to claim they are religious leaders. They have nothing to do with Islam.’

No. They are not “Islam” — of course they’re not. Nor am I, nor is anyone, really, because Islam is what Muslims make it. But they have something to do with Islam. If you’re going to argue with one of them — and I do all the time — you’re not discussing Mein Kampf. You’re discussing Islamic texts…

And just to clarify — one sentence:

What is Islamism? Islam is a religion; Islamism is the desire to impose any version of that religion on society.

It’s the politicization of my own religion. What is Jihadism? The use of force to spread Islamism.

The danger of not naming this ideology is twofold. Firstly, within the Muslim context, those liberal Muslims, reformist Muslims, feminist Muslims, gay Muslims, dissenting voices, minority sects, the Ismailis, the Shia — all these different minorities within the minority of the Muslim community — are immediately betrayed.

How are they betrayed? Because you deprive them of the lexicon, the language to employ against those who are attempting to silence their progressive efforts within their own communities. You surrender the debate to the extremists…

The second danger is in the non-Muslim context. What happens if you don’t name the Islamist ideology and distinguish it from Islam?

President Obama in his speech said there’s an ideology we must challenge, and he didn’t name it.

So, think about it, you’re sending out the message to the vast majority of Americans: there’s an ideology you must challenge, but you don’t tell them what it’s called. What are they going to assume? The average American is going to think, ‘Yeah, I’ve got to challenge an ideology — it’s called Islam.’

You’re only going to increase anti-Muslim hatred, increase the hysteria, like ‘he who must not be named’ — the Voldemort effect, I call it — by not naming the ideology. Because the average guy out there is going to assume the President is talking about the religion itself.

But if you distingiush Islamist extremism and say, ‘Look, Islam’s a religion. We’re not going to tell you whether Islam is good or bad, peaceful or not. We’re not going to define that for you. What we can say is you mustn’t try to impose that on anyone else. If you do, that’s called Islamism, and that’s what we have a problem with.'”

__________

Recent comments from Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamic extremist who was imprisoned for several years in Egypt and escaped to denounce radicalism and found the London-based counter-extremism group Quilliam. If the west is going to make it out of its conflict with Islamism in tact, we need a Muslim voice like Maajid’s to pop up for every extremist mullah. At the moment I don’t think the ratio is in our favor.

I encourage you to watch the entire discussion, which includes the brilliant Douglas Murray, and to buy Maajid’s remarkable book about the making and unmaking of a terrorist Radical: My Journey Out Of Islamist Extremism.

More on the subject:

  • Douglas Murray answers ‘Should we call terrorists Islamic?’
  • Christopher Hitchens’s resisting racial Islam 101
  • The cartoons the media will actually show us

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Why Liberty?

17 Friday Oct 2014

Posted by jrbenjamin in Freedom, Political Philosophy

≈ Comments Off on Why Liberty?

Tags

Chicago Tribune, Communism, Freedom, Government, H. L. Mencken, ISIL, ISIS, Jihadism, Law, libertarian, libertarianism, liberty, October Revolution, political philosophy, politics, Prejudices, Salafism, Spanish Civil War, Totalitarianism, Why Liberty

H. L. Mencken“I believe that liberty is the only genuinely valuable thing that men have invented, at least in the field of government, in a thousand years. I believe that it is better to be free than to be not free, even when the former is dangerous and the latter safe. I believe that the finest qualities of man can flourish only in free air – that progress made under the shadow of the policeman’s club is false progress, and of no permanent value.

I believe that any man who takes the liberty of another into his keeping is bound to become a tyrant, and that any man who yields up his liberty, in however slight the measure, is bound to become a slave…

In any dispute between a citizen and the government, it is my instinct to side with the citizen… I am against all efforts to make men virtuous by law.”

__________

From H.L. Mencken, writing in his article “Why Liberty?”, published in the Chicago Tribune on January 30th, 1927.

I had to reread this essential essay after scanning the sixth chapter of Mencken’s Prejudices a few nights ago and running across his consummately cool statement that, “Every normal man must be tempted, at times, to spit upon his hands, hoist the black flag, and begin slitting throats.” Of course the thought is only metaphorical — and its overt violence only meant to instill verve, not aggression, in the reader — but under the shadow of the monsters now slitting throats under black flags across Iraq and Syria, the paragraph didn’t sit well. But that’s not Mencken’s fault, and there could be no more durable, stalwart rebuke of Takfirism, Salafism, and all other totalitarianisms than his article “Why Liberty,” published only a decade after the October Revolution and a decade before the Spanish Civil War.

Read on:

  • Douglas Murray debates the question, If we don’t stand for Western values, who will?
  • Krauthammer explains why he is optimistic about the future of America
  • Gore Vidal dissects what ‘pursuit of happiness’ means today

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