Making Sense with Sam Harris - #5 — After Charlie Hebdo and Other Thoughts

Episode Date: January 22, 2015

Sam Harris answers reader questions in the wake of the terrorist attacks in Paris. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Thank you. of the Making Sense podcast, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. There you'll find our private RSS feed to add to your favorite podcatcher, along with other subscriber-only content. We don't run ads on the podcast, and therefore it's made possible entirely through the support of our subscribers. So if you enjoy what we're doing here, please consider becoming Well, this is an Ask Me Anything podcast. I've now received hundreds of questions on Twitter and in other formats, and I'll try to get through several of them, but many have converged on a single topic, which will come as no surprise, the recent atrocities in Paris,

the murders of the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists, and the murders in the Jewish market. And also many of you are concerned about the subsequent self-censorship, which has really been quite amazing to witness. It's just astonishing that the media cannot do the one thing that it could do to keep it and everyone else safe. And it can't do the one thing that would have kept the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists safe, which is publish en masse all of these cartoons and present a united front against this creeping theocracy. So I'll try to say a few things on this topic. I haven't commented on it publicly yet, and while I've been circulating the

interviews done by friends and colleagues like Majid Nawaz and Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Douglas Murray, all of whom have been excellent. I've been declining interviews myself, and I'm not quite sure why I've been doing that. I think the main reason is that it's just become toxic for me to say over and over again that which should really go without saying and to then be vilified for it. It really is no fun dealing with this topic. Although I am writing a short book with Majid Nawaz, the working title of which is Islam and the Future of Tolerance. And I'm very happy about that.

Majid is doing amazing work, and he's really just indispensable. And we're having a very good conversation. And that will be published in June at the latest, I hope, by Harvard University Press. And beyond everything we may or may not agree about, I think we've produced an example of a fundamentally different conversation on this problem of Islam at this moment. And if you don't know who Majid is, you should Google him. He's a former Islamist who obviously knows exactly why Islamists do what they do.

But now he's a reformer, and he's quite articulate on the topic of how to move Islam forward. And while I'm skeptical of that project and increasingly worried that it might be hopeless, he and I managed to have a very good conversation. So I will alert you all to the birth of that book when it occurs. But perhaps I can say a few things about recent events in the meantime. The first thing to say is that the response of liberals, and again it is so depressing to have to use the term liberal in a pejorative way in this context, but liberalism has completely lost its moorings on the topic of Islam. Needless to say, we have all the usual suspects,

Glenn Greenwald and Reza Aslan and Chris Hedges and Karen Armstrong, and as unreadable as these people have become, you can't help but notice the stupid things they say about Islam, even in the immediate aftermath of an atrocity like this. And as will come as no surprise, they will tell you that this has nothing to do with Islam. It has nothing to do with heartfelt religious convictions. No, it has everything to do with capitalism and the oppression of minorities and the racism of white people in Europe and the racism of cartoonists at a magazine like Charlie Hebdo. That is the cause of this

behavior. That's what causes someone to grab an AK-47 and murder 12 cartoonists and then scream Allahu Akbar in the streets. It is a completely insane analysis. Even if you grant everything that's wrong with capitalism and the history of colonialism, you should not be able to deny that these religious maniacs are motivated by concerns about blasphemy and the depiction of the Prophet Muhammad, and consider their behavior entirely ethical in light of specific religious doctrines. And it's a kind of masochism and moral cowardice and lack of intelligence, frankly, at this point, that is allowing people to deny this fact. And then we have the practice of self-censorship, which is completely understandable and entirely based on fear. And the reason why it's understandable is that this fear

is actually quite rational if you were the only person or news organization printing pictures of the Prophet Muhammad. And that's why every newspaper and magazine and news outlet on earth should have agreed to print the latest Charlie Hebdo cover immediately on the same day and spread the risk. We hear everywhere about this false trade-off between freedom of speech and freedom of religion, as though there was some kind of balance to be struck here. There is no balance to be struck. Freedom of speech never infringes on freedom of religion.

There's nothing I could say in this podcast about religion generally, or about Islam in particular, that would infringe upon someone else's freedom to practice his or her religion. If your freedom of religion entails that you force those who do not share it to conform to it, well then that's not freedom of religion. We have a word for that. That's theocracy. This respect that we are all urged to show for quote religious sensitivity is actually a demand that the blasphemy laws of Islam be followed by non-Muslims.

And secular liberals in the West are defending this thuggish ultimatum and putting the lives of cartoonists and journalists and freethinkers and public intellectuals in jeopardy day after day. So we're harming ourselves when we practice censorship on this point. The Muslim world simply has to get used to free speech winning. And we should make no apologies for this. But there are several double standards that are quite harmful on this point. For instance, it is illegal in France and Germany

and a few other countries in Western Europe to deny the Holocaust. That's a bad law. A person should be absolutely free to deny the Holocaust, which is to say he should be free to destroy his reputation, and others should be free to ridicule him and to boycott his business. There shouldn't be a law against this kind of idiocy. And making this category of speech illegal is a terrible mistake. And Islamists and liberals are using this mistake as a basis to condemn the so-called hypocrisy of all the people who are defending Charlie Hebdo at this moment. Whatever you think about the content of the Charlie Hebdo cartoons, and as many people have pointed out, this content has been misunderstood outside of France. Cartoons that appear racist to a non-French speaker, to someone who's ignorant of French politics, are anything but racist when you understand the context.

But even if you granted that most of these cartoons were racist and therefore offensive, you have to concede that protecting this speech becomes important when you have one group of people, quote, radical Muslims, who are responding to this offense with credible threats of murder in every country on earth. We can't give in to this. So here's one sign that a person, whether he's on the left or the right politically, has completely lost the plot here. The moment he begins to ask, what was in those cartoons? Were those cartoons racist? Was that a negative portrayal of Muhammad? To ask such questions is obscene. People have been murdered over cartoons. End of moral analysis. And we are seeing a total capitulation on the part of news organizations in the face of this terror.

The fact that the New York Times will not print the current cover of Charlie Hebdo, even though it is absolutely newsworthy, and even though they are writing articles about it, is shocking. And we should notice how euphemism is preventing honest conversation on this topic. We use words like extremist and extremism. What do these words mean? Well, extremism generally suggests that an expression of a certain set of ideas has become an exaggeration or distortion of those ideas. But when we're talking about Muslim extremists, have they really exaggerated or distorted the

core teachings of Islam? No, Muslim extremists are motivated by the most literal and straightforward and comprehensive resort to the ideas expressed in the Quran and the Hadith. What is ISIS doing that Muhammad didn't do or didn't advocate somewhere in scripture? Good luck finding something important. And that's a fact that we just have to absorb. That is a body blow to political correctness that just has to land and land hard. Happily, someone like Majid Nawaz is prepared to talk about this. He's prepared to take the other side in a conversation, with me in this case, and he can do it without lying about the connection between what people believe and their behavior in the world. And he should be distinguished in your mind from someone like Reza Aslan,

who is a fount of lies and misdirection on this topic. Reza is one of these people who has said in recent days that the murder of cartoonists and Jews in Paris was due to the failure of integration of Muslims in France and the racism that has been directed at them. This is leveraging a very common intuition. There must be two sides to every conflict, right? So there's two sides to this story.

On the one hand, you have the racism of Charlie Hebdo and its readers. And on the other side, you have the poor immigrants who are struggling to assimilate in a hostile society. That's what causes people to slaughter cartoonists while shouting, we have avenged the prophet. This politically correct analysis is morally insane. And news organizations and readers should lose their patience for it. To focus on the content of the cartoons, as people like Aslan and Greenwald have done, as though it were somehow morally relevant, is a disgrace. And the moment that someone does it,

he has tipped his hand. It is a perfect litmus test. I get the sense that people still don't understand what we're dealing with here. Have you seen any of these recent interviews with captured ISIS fighters? Religion is the whole story. They are totally fixated on getting into paradise. In fact, the Kurds have put female soldiers into the field, and this terrifies members of ISIS because they believe that they won't go to paradise if they get killed by a woman. They literally run away from these female soldiers. It's like a

culture of psychotic and psychopathic children. Just consider the attitude they showed toward real children. Of course they've been murdering Shia and Christian and Yazidi children, burying them alive and crucifying them, but they seem happy to inflict needless horror on their own children. You may have read a story recently about a street magician in Raqqa, Syria, who'd been entertaining children for years. ISIS deemed his activities un-Islamic and cut his head off. Just imagine what it is like to be a child in this context. Imagine the sort of

men and women that such a childhood will produce. The crucial thing to understand is that stories like that do not represent an excessive use of force by a few deranged individuals. All of this butchery, the murder of journalists and aid workers, the torture of women who get caught breastfeeding in public, is as central to the project of jihadism as an opening of a new Starbucks is for us. This is what they think is best about themselves. This is what they use to advertise their project to the rest of the world. Video footage of an aid worker, an aid worker getting his head cut off, is part of their recruiting materials. These horrible stories coming out of Syria and Iraq, this is not their Mylai massacre.

This is what they unabashedly stand for. This is an expression of a worldview, and this worldview is contagious. It doesn't matter if a person's had direct contact with al-Qaeda or ISIS or whether he's, quote, a lone wolf. We're talking about the spread of ideas. Again, ideas about martyrdom and jihad and paradise and the rights of women and blasphemy. The point we cannot ignore,

the point that should never be obfuscated, is that we are at war with a global phenomenon of jihadism and there can be no compromise with this death cult and these fake liberals these fellow travelers with theocracy these people who in the name of liberalism protect only political correctness and masochism they are absolutely part of the problem they are preventing us from demanding that the Muslim community worldwide get its act together and They are absolutely part of the problem. They are preventing us from demanding that the Muslim community worldwide get its act together. And this is why expressions of horror and rejection are insufficient in the Muslim community.

Of course you're horrified by this behavior if you're a decent human being and have even a tenuous connection to civil society in the 21st century. But that's not enough. Muslims have to honestly grapple with the bad doctrines in their faith. They can no longer just say that Islam is a religion of peace. They can no longer lie about the doctrines that relate to martyrdom and jihad and apostasy and the rights of women. Muslims have to fight a civil war of ideas or a civil war against jihadism and Islamism generally.

That's what has to happen. It's not a matter of blaming all Muslims for the actions of a few. It's a matter of demanding a reformation within Islam that only Muslims can accomplish. The civilized world is waiting for this to happen, and people will continue to die until it does. And of course, most of the people dying are Muslims. As I said, the conversation I'm having with Majid Nawaz is directly on this point. And Majid is doing extremely important work with the Quilliam Foundation, and I encourage you all to look

him up if you're not aware of who he is. Well, moving on to a very different topic, about which I've also received several questions. I released a video of a lecture I gave in the fall on the subject of my book, Waking Up, and that's available on my website. But I received complaints from several readers that I was selling it and not offering it for free. Now, I knew this was coming, and this is actually a difficult thing for me to talk about, but I think it's important. We've all begun to expect everything online for free, and I include myself in this. I want to read articles and watch videos, and I don't want to pay anything for them. If someone sends me a link to an article in the Wall Street Journal and I hit their paywall,

I'm not going to read it. I don't want to subscribe to another newspaper or magazine, certainly not for a single article, and money aside, it's just too much of a hassle. But of course, everything can't be free online, or no one will be able to make a living producing quality work. We have yet to find an elegant solution to this problem, but the problem runs deeper than this because people actually make a significant effort to find content for free rather than buy it. I've heard from several people, ostensibly fans, who are just waiting to find my Wikidoc video for free. people, ostensibly fans, who are just waiting to find my Waking Up video for free.

If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs, and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support. And you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org.