Nicely put, Hank.
Why? Harris already declared his support for her candidacy.
Erhm no. One can be a liberal internationalist like myself without supporting torture or opposing the so-called “Ground Zero” mosque. Not to mention the hilarity of someone calling Bill Maher and Sam Harris their two biggest intellectual influences. I’d be less embarassed to see someone call himself a Stalinist.
That’s very unfortunate. It’s a sad, sad statement for the Democratic Party that it’s perceived as more open to Sam Harris then Ross Douthat.
I don’t really like Bill Maher, it doesn’t seem like he incorporates nuance into, well, into anything. I like the format of his show, and many of his guests are great. And he doesn’t really care a whole lot about whether what he says is popular or not, which is convenient when he happens to be right about controversial subjects, like he is on issues where he agrees with Sam Harris.
He claimed that the suffering caused by torture isn’t worse in nature than other suffering caused by war.
And he said the Ground Zero Mosque was in bad taste, and also that Muslim Americans should be allowed to build a Mosque anywhere a church or synagogue is allowed. The points he makes in the article you are referring to have the grand advantage of being true. Because of this, they are going to grow like an old school bank account with high compounding interest, carving out a huge, rational middle ground in public opinion. Any political entities with lasting nation power in America, in the future, will reflect a comprehension ofthese somewhat stark realities driving global affairs.
So you’re saying that the people literally telling us why they dislike “western values” and turned to jihad in their own words are wrong? You are literally saying they don’t know their own reasons for being radicalised? How can you possibly say this with a straight face?
Ok, if I got this correctly Hank Beecher is basically a liberal hawk or (probably more accurately) a conservative Democrat.* So he’s in tune with Hillary.
Personally I’m to the left of that. I’m a fan of the Obama Doctrine: Don’t Do Stupid Stuff. Avoid pointless wars. Don’t think that you have an obligation to do “Something” every time there’s a problem in the world. Maintain US hegemony, but don’t get too attached to it: US security interests and the advancement of western democratic capitalism are the intrinsic value.
As for ISIS keep the pressure up. Recognize that there are no good options, only less bad options. And there are a lot of counterproductive things that can be done, suich as alienating the great majority of US Muslims who have given us assistance and information about our enemies. Christie, who used to be an attorney, understood that as well. While ISIS has no friends, they also don’t have any enemies who make them their security priority. (Except for the Yazadis, who have no military to speak of). The Turks want to step on the Kurds. The Kurds will attack ISIS - but only within (I think) about 100 miles of their border. The Saudi government doesn’t like ISIS, but they’re really concerned with the Iranians. They would be happy to have the US do their work for them though. The Soviets want to prop Assad and are mostly bombing anti-ISIS rebels. And so on. You might say our allies are feckless, but that’s wrong: they just have their own interests to manage.
ISIS needs to be squeezed. ISIS has been squeezed - by the US. Their turn to European terrorism is a reflection of their losses on the battlefield.
Fun fact: a lot of their military leaders are old hands of Saddam Hussein. Without the Iraq war there would be no ISIS.
- That’s an approximation to an ideology: “Independent” doesn’t tell us much though it may be more accurate.
First of all, you are mixing up two related issues here. Reasons for Muslims rejection of Western values, and reasons why Muslims join extremists groups.
But there are far far more who reject Western values than there are who join with violent extremists. Of course there is some overlap in terms of individuals, and contributing factors. But also a huge divergence.
Rejection of Western values has very little to do with modern foreign policy, in the big picture.
As far as those driven to terrorism, consider this: Hindus, Sikhs, Muslims, Jains, and Buddhists all suffered under the British colonization of South Asia. But only Islamists attack Britain as part of a global campaign of terrorism. In Iraq, Yazidis and Christians haven’t gone on to form groups trying to attack the US for invading and leading to chaos in which entire communities were wiped out. Nor did the Kurds, who suffered greatly due to our blunders in the 90’s.
Yes, in many cases military aggression, conflict ect, between the West and Muslims has been the trigger, but the foundation was there, laid by a narrative of Islam which emphasizes what Tarek Fatah called “the tragic illusion of the Islamic state”. The same Islamists who tell us they were triggered by Western Imperialism also tell us this.
Hindus, Sikhs, Jains, and Buddhists are NOT and have not been bombed by western allied forces in the last 50 years. 50 years ago, before Indian independence, terrorism by Hindu radicals against the British government in India was common. Then they got independence and it stopped. These people are radicalised by what has happened in the last 20 years, not by what the colonial powers did. Do you honestly believe this stuff you are parroting or is it just your attempt to “spin the narrative”?
I agree with you nearly completely in terms of my opinion on level of military engagement. Obama’s strategy seems to be a very carefully chosen middle ground between two unacceptable courses of action: 1. getting drawn into a war without having at least a decent shot at obtaining results worth the costs. 2. abandoning the situation, allowing it to grow and strengthen unchecked, and greatly reducing our ability to ramp up the effort in an intelligent and informed manner in the future.
I mean, the situation is so fucked up that it’s hard not to wish that he could have done a better job somehow, but any disappointment there is outweighed dozens of times over by relief that he didn’t do worse. He may not have saved the world, but I think he deftly handled a very difficult situation.
In terms of the rhetorical fight, out of principle I have to take the side of these women over Obama:
Obama’s not listening to the right Muslims by Tarek Fatah.
But I give the President the benefit of the doubt, and assume that he has chosen to ignore progressive Muslims domestically, as a PR tactic, in order to have better influence among generally conservative Muslims, in the interest of Americans, and for humanitarian and national security reasons internationally. Ultimately our leadership will have to evolve on this issue, but Obama may have decided taking that stand wasn’t worth the costs during his presidency.Jimmy Carter just got around to it in 2009.
I don’t say “that” with a straight face, because I don’t accept your premise. Sam Harris has regularly exploded this canard that Muslim extremists are primarily motivated by a desire for revenge for being bombed. Hank, you seem to be nimble at finding cites: I tend to absorb a lot via podcasts, but that’s difficult to reference on a forum like this. Can you cite his refutations of this sort of masochistic notion? If not, I will try harder to dig up a cite tomorrow.
I don’t the allies have bombed Belgium for the last 50 years.
In the last 20 years Hindus, Christians, Hazaras, Ahmadis, and Sufis have all been repeatedly slaughtered in South Asia. Yet it is the Salafi and Deobandi strains of Islam that are the common factor involved when we examine the ideology that drives teams of people to do what they did in Mumbai, Paris, Nairobi, and San Bernadino. Yes, our interventions trigger them. It’s just that everywhere they go, they manage to find something that triggers them, regardless.
Not Sam Harris, but from a Pakistani perspective instead:
The Hindus, Christians, Hazaras, Ahmadis, and Sufis are being attacked by who? By islamic extremists right, and guess what they fight back against those extremists because those are the people that attack them. So who attacked and occupied Iraq and Afghanistan? Thats right it was us… so we are the ones they attack. Make sense?
Whether it is the “primary” cause or not is irrelevant. You cannot deny that the invasion of Iraq and Afghanistan and the photos released from Abu Ghairab, and the abuses of Guatamno bay, and the leaked footage of Blackwater shooting civilians from an Apache have all provided recruitment propaganda for ISIS and Al Qaeda to use. Without all those things they’d still get some recruits of course, but much lower numbers.
Yes, those provided recruitment propaganda. On that we can agree. But there would still be plenty of jihadists without those things. How do you explain the Paris attacks, for instance? Either the most recent ones, or the Charlie Hebdo shootings.
There is two different issues here.
- what motivation did ISIS have to carry out the paris attacks?
- what motivations do young muslims have to travel to syria and join the islamic state?
I agree we can’t do much about number 1, ISIS is going to hate the western allies no matter what we do. We can however reduce the number of people tempted by number 2. Stop them before they are radicalised. Ultimately thats the only way to reduce / end the never ending conflict. We cannot defeat islamic extremism with bombs, because more bombs only creates more radicalised people.
I think we need to do both, as we can’t just leave enemies on the ground with completes impunity.
I agree, but we’re already doing plenty about number 1, killing those who are already radicalised. What are we doing about number 2? What are doing to give young muslims less reason to feel there are genuine reasons to go join the IS?
Killing them all alone doesn’t work, we know that and making progress on number 2 is where Bernie would have a different approach. Yes contain ISIS and erode their territory, second also address some of the conditions that lead people to become radicalised.
Well, if you listen to what they actually complain about rather than filtering their ‘grievances’ through our prejudices, we could try forcing women to be more modest, make homosexuality illegal, criminalize apostasy and blasphemy…
What would you say if it turned out that one of the prime motivating factors for the rise of radical Islam turned out to be the increasing liberalization of our attitudes towards women and homosexuals? What accommodations would you suggest then to appease them and make them hate us less?
We know the problem isn’t poverty. That doesn’t explain the jihadists going to the middle east from middle and upper class European homes. The 9/11 attackers were wealthy and college educated. And obviously 9/11 happened before the Iraq invasion, and al-Qaida was already a big deal and the Taliban had been controlling Afghanistan and subjugating women and persecuting gays for a long time before. Then there was the first World Trade Center bombing, the U.S.S. Cole, Khobar Towers, the Beirut bombing, yada yada…
Don’t forget a lot of these attacks happened just after the U.S. had been one of the biggest benefactors of the Mujahadeen and had supplied the missiles they used to push the Soviets out of Afghanistan. So why did they hate us then?
If you actually read Bin Laden’s manifesto and those of other terrorists, THEY say it has a lot to do with our ‘decadence’, which includes free speech, equal rights for women and homosexuals, blasphemy, our secular lifestyles, etc. The rise of the internet and global communications causes all this to infiltrate their own culture and is seen as a pernicious influence against their own societies and religion.
If we take them at their word, what would you suggest we do?
Hear, hear, Sam Stone! Looks like there are a few of us Sam Harris fans about.
I am curious about what the future will be like a century or more from now for a plethora of reasons. But a not insignificant one is to see what the history books say about this whole debate between the “regressive left” and the New Atheists like Harris. Our ideological camp is a pretty small one now, but I have to believe it will be vindicated by history.