The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason by Sam Harris
40 Ibid., 140.
41 Ibid., 114. The Reformation, by undermining belief in the doctrine of transubstantiation, seems to have rendered host desecration less of a concern. Thus, it was during the schismatic sixteenth century that the persecution of Jews as "sorcerers" came into its own.
42 The Egyptian paper Al Akhbar and the Saudi paper Al Riyadh have both published articles purporting to verify the blood libel. The Syrian defense minister Mustafa Tlas has written a book, The Matzoh of Zion, charging the Jews with ritual murder. Nazi propaganda on the subject, dating from the 1930s, now appears on Islamist websites. See Kertzer, "Modern Use."
43 Cited in J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999)/ 328.
44 Ibid., 360-61.
45 D. J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 28-48.
46 Kertzer, "Modern Use."
47 It has grown fashionable to assert that the true horror of the Holocaust, apart from its scale, was that it was an expression of reason, and that it therefore demonstrates a pathology inherent to the Western Enlightenment tradition. The truth of this assertion is held by many scholars to be self-evident-for no one can deny that technology, bureaucracy, and systematic managerial thinking made the genocidal ambitions of the Third Reich possible. The romantic thesis lurking here is that reason itself has a "shadow side" and is therefore no place to turn for the safeguarding of human happiness. This is a terrible misunderstanding of the situation, however. The Holocaust marked the culmination of German tribalism and two thousand years of Christian fulminating against the Jews. Reason had nothing to do with it. Put a telescope in the hands of a chimpanzee, and if he bashes his neighbor over the head with it, reason's "shadow side" will have been equally revealed. (K. Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality [Boston: Shambhala, 1995], 663-64, makes the same point.)
48 M. Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War (New York: Henry Holt, 1985), 22.
49 Ibid.
50 Quoted in G. Wills, "Before the Holocaust," New York Times Book Review, Sept. 23, 2001.
31 Quoted in Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, 106. Of course, Church-mandated anti-Semitism was not confined to Germany. Consider the statement of the Roman Catholic primate of Poland, August Cardinal Hlond, in a 1936 pastoral letter: "There will be the Jewish problem as long as the Jews remain. It is a fact the Jews are fighting against the Catholic Church, persisting in free thinking, and are the vanguard of godlessness, Bolshevism, and subversion.... It is a fact that the Jews deceive, levy interest, and are pimps. It is a fact that the religious and ethical influence of the Jewish young people on the Polish young people is a negative one." As J. Carroll, "The Silence," New Yorker, April 7, 1997, points out, "Hlond's letter was careful to say that these 'facts' did not justify the murder of Jews, but it is hard to see how such anti-Semitism on the part of the leading Catholic in Poland was unconnected with what followed. Over the decades and centuries of this millennium such sentiments expressed by Christian leaders were not unusual."
G. Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964), 282, quoted in Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, no. Cited in L. George, Crimes of Perception: An Encyclopedia of Heresies and Heretics (New York: Paragon House, 1995), 211. Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994), 10. This book really is a breathtaking piece of sophistry, evasion, and narrow-mindedness. It demonstrates my thesis in almost every line, erudite references to Wittgenstein, Feuerbach, and Ricoeur notwithstanding.
M. Aarons and J. Loftus, Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss Banks, rev. ed. (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998); G. Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New York: Vintage, 1974). See Sereny, Into That Darkness, 318. See, e.g., Glover, Humanity, chap. 40.
Chapter 4 The Problem with Islam
1 As we saw in chapter 2, this is a direct consequence of what it means-logically, psychologically, and behaviorally-to believe that our beliefs actually represent the way the world is. The moment you believe that religious (or spiritual, or ethical) propositions say anything at all of substance, you will be obliged to admit that they can be more or less accurate, comprehensive, or useful. Hierarchies of this sort are built into the very structure the world. We will take a closer look at ethics in chapter 6.
2 R. A. Pape, "The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism," American Political Science Review 97, no. 3 (2003): 20-32, has argued that suicidal terrorism is best understood as a strategic means to achieve certain well-defined nationalist goals and should not be considered a consequence of religious ideology. In support of this thesis, he recounts the manner in which Hamas and Islamic Jihad have systematically used suicide bombings to extract concessions from the Israeli government. Pape argues that had these organizations been merely "irrational" or "fanatic," we would not expect to see such a calculated use of violence. Their motivation must be, therefore, primarily nationalistic. Like most commentators on this infernal wastage of human life, Pape seems unable to imagine what it would be like to actually believe what millions of Muslims profess to believe. The fact that terrorist groups have demonstrable, short-term goals does not in the least suggest that they are not primarily motivated by their religious dogmas. Pape claims that "the most important goal that a community can have is the independence of its homeland (population, property, and way of life) from foreign influence or control." But he overlooks the fact that these communities define themselves in religious terms. Pape's analysis is particularly inapposite with respect to Al Qaeda. To attribute "territorial" and "nationalistic" motives to Osama bin Laden seems almost willfully obscurantist, since Osama's only apparent concerns are the spread of Islam and the sanctity of Muslim holy sites. Suicide bombing, in the Muslim world at least, is an explicitly religious phenomenon that is inextricable from notions of martyrdom and jihad, predictable on their basis, and sanctified by their logic. It is no more secular an activity than prayer is.
3 B. Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 32.
4 M. Ruthven, Islam in the World, zc ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 7.
5 Some of these hadiths are cited in Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 32. Others are drawn from an Internet database: www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/reference/ searchhadith.html.
6 Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 55.
7 "Idolatry is worse than carnage" (Koran 2:190). The rule of the Mogul emperor Akbar (1556-1605) offers an exception here, but it is merely that Akbar's tolerance of Hinduism was a frank violation of Islamic law.
8 F. Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 126.
9 See A. Dershowitz, The Case for Israel (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2003), 61.
10 These facts and dates are drawn from R. S. Wistrich, Anti-Semitism: The Longest Hatred (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), and Dershowitz, Case for Israel.
11 L. Binder, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), 139.
12 A. Cowell, "Zeal for Suicide Bombing Reaches British Midland," New York Times, May 2, 2003. Consider the case of England: British Muslims have been found fighting with the Taliban, plotting terror attacks in Yemen, attempting to blow up airplanes, and kidnapping and killing Western journalists in Pakistan. Recently, two British citizens volunteered for suicide missions in Israel (one succeeded, one failed).
Terrorist Hunter (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), whose anonymous author has gone undercover to tape the proceedings at Muslim conferences in the United States, depicts a shocking level of intolerance among Muslims living in the West. The author reports that at one conference, held at the Ramada Plaza hotel in suburban Chicago, Arab American children performed skits in which they killed Jews and became martyrs. Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and Palesti
13 Lewis, Crisis of Islam, xxviii.
14 Ruthven, Islam in the World, 137.
15 Yosuf Islam, in his wisdom, had this to say in a written response to those who were shocked by his apparent endorsement of Khomeini's fatwa:
Under Islamic Law, the ruling regarding blasphemy is quite clear; the person found guilty of it must be put to death. Only under certain circumstances can repentance be accepted ... The fact is that as far as the application of Islamic Law and the implementation of full Islamic way of life in Britain is concerned, Muslims realize that there is very little chance of that happening in the near future. But that shouldn't stop us from trying to improve the situation and presenting the Islamic viewpoint wherever and whenever possible. That is the duty of every Muslim and that is what I did.
(See catstevens.com/articles/00013). If even a Western educated ex-hippie was talking this way, what do you think the sentiments were on the streets of Tehran?
16 K. H. Pollack, "The Crisis of Islam': Faith and Terrorism in the Muslim World," New York Times Book Review, April 6, 2003.
17 As Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) wrote, "I must say, it is as toilsome reading as I ever undertook. A wearisome confused jumble, crude, incondite; endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement ... insupportable stupidity, in short! Nothing but a sense of duty could carry any European through the Koran!" Cited in Ruthven, Islam in the World, 81-82.
18 Cited in P. Berman, Terror and Liberalism (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 68.
19 www.people-press.org.
20 Christopher Luxenherg (this is a pseudonym), a scholar of ancient Semitic languages, has recently argued that a mistranslation is responsible for furnishing the Muslim paradise with "virgins" (Arabic hur, transliterated as "houris"-literally "white ones"). It seems that the passages describing paradise in the Koran were drawn from earlier Christian texts that make frequent use of the Aramaic word hur, meaning "white raisins." White raisins, it seems, were a great delicacy in the ancient world. Imagine the look on a young martyr's face when, finding himself in a paradise teeming with his fellow thugs, his seventy houris arrive as a fistful of raisins. See A. Stille, "Scholars Are Quietly Offering New Theories of the Koran," New York Times, March 2, 2002.
21 S. P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996).
22 E. W. Said, "The Clash of Ignorance," Nation, Oct. 4, 2001.
23 E. W. Said, "Suicidal Ignorance," CounterPunch, Nov. 18, 2001.
24 For an alarming look at the rising political influence of Christianity in the developing world, see P. Jenkins, "The Next Christianity," Atlantic Monthly, Oct. 2002, pp. 53-68.
25 From the United Nations' Arab Human Development Report 2002, cited in Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 115-17.
26 See R. D. Kaplan, "The Lawless Frontier," Atlantic Monthly, March 2000, pp. 66-80.
27 S. Atran, "Opinion: Who Wants to Be a Martyr?" New York Times, May 5, 2003. Atran also reports that a Pakistani relief worker interviewed nearly 250 aspiring Palestinian suicide bombers and their recruiters and concluded, "None were uneducated, desperately poor, simple-minded or depressed.... They all seemed to be entirely normal members of their families." He also cites a 2001 poll conducted by the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research indicating "that Palestinian adults with 12 years or more of education are far more likely to support bomb attacks than those who cannot read."
28 B. Hoffman, "The Logic of Suicide Terrorism," Atlantic Monthly, June 2003, pp. 40-47.
29 Indeed, this may be happening in Iran. Having truly achieved a Muslim theocracy, the Iranian people now have few illusions that their problems are the result of their insufficient conformity to Islam.
30 Zakaria, Future of Freedom, cites a CNN poll (Feb. 2002) conducted across nine Muslim countries. Some 61 percent of those polled said they do not believe that Arabs were responsible for the Sept. 11 attacks. No doubt the 39 percent who thought otherwise represent millions who wish the Arab world would take credit for a job well done.
31 It would be impossible to do justice to the richness of the Muslim imagination in the context of this book. To take only one preposterous example: it seems that many Iraqis believe that the widespread looting that occurred after the fall of Saddam's regime was orchestrated by Americans and Israelis, as part of a Zionist plot. The attacks upon American soldiers were carried out by CIA agents "as part of a covert operation to justify prolonging the U.S. military occupation." Wow! See J. L. Anderson, "Iraq's Bloody Summer," New Yorker, Aug. 11, 2003, pp. 43-55.
32 Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 153.
33 Also see M. B. Zuckerman, "Graffiti on History's Walls," U.S. News and World Report, Nov. 3, 2003, for an account of anti-Semitism in the mainstream European press.
34 Dershowitz, Case for Israel, 2.
35 This miraculous ascension (mi'raj) is fully described only in the hadith, though it may be alluded to in the Koran (17:1). The likening of the Israelis to the Nazis is especially egregious, given that the Palestinians distinguished themselves as Nazi collaborators during the war years. Their calculated attacks upon Jews in the 1930s and 1940s led to the deaths of hundreds of the thousands of European Jews who would otherwise have been permitted to immigrate by the British. This result does not appear to have been inadvertent. Hajj Amin al-Husseini, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and the leader of the Palestinians throughout the war years, served as an adviser to the Nazis on the Jewish question, was given a personal tour of Auschwitz by Heinrich Himmler, and aspired to open his own death camp for the Jews in Palestine once the Germans had won the war. These activities were well publicized and merely increased his popularity in the Arab world when, as a war criminal sought by the Allies, he was given asylum in Egypt. As recently as 2002, Yasser Arafat, the head of the Palestinian Authority, referred to Husseini as a "hero." See Dershowitz, Case for Israel, 56.
36 Berman, Terror and Liberalism, 183.
37 Ibid., 206-7.
38 See ibid., 108: "Khomeini whipped up a religious fervor for that kind of mass death-a belief that to die on Khomeini's orders in a human wave attack was to achieve the highest and most beautiful of destinies. All over Iran young men, encouraged by their mothers and their families, yearned to participate in those human wave attacks-actively yearned for martyrdom. It was a mass movement for suicide. The war was one of the most macabre events that has ever occurred...."
39 Ibid.
40 J. Baudrillard, The Spirit of Terrorism, trans. C. Turner (New York: Verso, 2002).
41 It may seem strange to encounter phrases like "our enemies," uttered without apparent self-consciousness, and it is strange for me to write them. But there is no doubt that enemies are what we have (and I leave it for the reader to draw the boundaries of "we" as broadly or narrowly as he or she likes). The liberal fallacy that I will attempt to unravel in the present section is the notion that we made these enemies and that we are, therefore, their "moral equivalent." We are not. An analysis of their religious ideology reveals that we are confronted by people who would have put us to sword, had they had the power, long before the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization were even a gleam in the eye of the first rapacious globalizer.
42 N. Chomsky, g-11 (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2001), 119.
43 P. Unger, Living High & Letting Die: Our Illusion of Innocence (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1996).
44 A. Roy, War Talk (Cambri
45 J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), 58.
46 Ibid., 62.
47 Are intentions really the bottom line? What are we to say, for instance, about those Christian missionaries in the New World who baptized Indian infants only to promptly kill them, thereby sending them to heaven? Their intentions were (apparently) good. Were their actions ethical? Yes, within the confines of a deplorably limited worldview. The medieval apothecary who gave his patients quicksilver really was trying to help. He was just mistaken about the role this element played in the human body. Intentions matter, but they are not all that matters.
48 Zakaria, Tuture of Freedom, 138.
49 Ibid., 143.
50 Ibid., 123.
51 Ibid., 150.
52 Robert Kaplan, "Supremacy by Stealth," Atlantic Monthly, Jan. 2003, pp.
65-83, has made a strong case that interventions of this sort should be almost entirely covert and will, for the foreseeable future, be the responsibility of the United States to carry out.
53 Glover, Humanity, 140.
54 M. Rees, Our Final Hour (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 42.
Chapter 5 West of Eden
1 "At a 1971 dinner, Reagan told California legislator James Mills that 'everything is in place for the battle of Armageddon and the Second Coming of Christ.' The President has permitted Jerry Falwell to attend National Security Council briefings and author and Armageddon-advocate Hal Lindsey to give a talk on nuclear war with Russia to top Pentagon strategists." Cited in E. Johnson, "Grace Halsell's Prophecy and Politics: Militant Evangelists on the Road to Nuclear War," Journal of Historical Review 7, no. 4 (Winter 1986).
2 See G. Gorenberg, The End of Days: Fundamentalism and the Struggle for the Temple Mount (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), for a lengthy analysis.