I came across a YouTube the other day. Usually I stop
watching things like this when they say “politically correct” then a minute
later say terrorists are coming disguised as refugees, but someone I know
wanted my comments on it, so here goes.
It starts out with statements from major politicians saying
Muslims are peaceful and we are not at war with Muslims as a group. This
culminates in Obama saying 99.9% of Muslims are “looking for the same thing
we’re looking for”. This is put in quotes on the screen in case, I don’t know,
you are deaf or something. The narrator then asks, “is this true?” So that’s
the theme. I don’t expect much from this since “99.9%” is a colloquial phrase,
not a statistic. Asking if it’s true is like your mother asking if it’s true
that “everyone” at school is doing whatever it is you want her to let you do. The
narrator then asks, “what would you say if scientific polls by major
organizations have repeatedly shown a very different picture?”. I knew right
then that picture was going to be blurry. Different than what? It’s going to
take 10 minutes to get to those numbers, so get comfortable.
She identifies the problem as “violent, radical, extremists
Islamism”. Okay, “violent, radical, extremist” anything is a problem. It
shouldn’t be too hard to make a case. In fact, there’s no need to make that
case at all. And she doesn’t. What she goes on to do is equate “Islamism” with
violence, radicalism and extremism. And, in my opinion, she only equates them.
She makes almost no real case for it. I’m not disputing the correlation, but
this video doesn’t make any case for any actual causes or help us to find
solutions to the problem.
She starts off saying most of the terrorism is committed by
Muslims, so we need an open and honest conversation. Why that fact about
Muslims leads to us needing to be open and honest, I don’t know. Shouldn’t it
be a given that we need that for any conversation?
Although she will go on to say that political correctness is
a problem, she stops and clarifies that “this is not a conversation about
Islam”. She has some other news broadcaster say “there is a cancer WITHIN
Islam”. It’s hard to tell what her theme is here, but what this video becomes
for me is one long statement of “I’m a Muslim, but I’m not one of those types of Muslims.” When she gets
to the circles of influence, the one she leaves off is herself, the moderate
religious person. Moderates can’t talk about how any irrational, superstitious
thinking is dangerous and leaves the door open to radicalism. That’s a much
larger conversation that I’ve covered elsewhere, for now, just notice that she
never touches on it. She doesn’t explain how a Jihadist becomes radicalized and
she doesn’t explain how her version of Islam would keep someone from becoming
radicalized.
Actually I’m fine with this delineation of “Islamism” or
“Radical Islam”, distinct from the larger Islamic culture and historical Islam,
but she doesn’t stick to that or at least she doesn’t further define it or the
causes of it. She just asserts it and wants you to know she’s not in it. Finally
at one-minute and 45 seconds, after priming you with ideas about how everyone
else is wrong, she says, let’s begin.
The next bit of sophisticated fear mongering is to introduce
the idea that Rajid Nawaz calls “regressive liberalism”, or as a Bill Maher
clip says in the video, fear of being called a racist. It’s sophisticated
because that part is true, people are afraid of that. Really you should
be afraid of being called a racist if you make a racist remark. Maybe what you
should work on is how words come out of your mouth, and how to explain the
difference between a racist remark and a fact about a culture (like not abusing
poll data as we’ll see later). What makes it fear mongering is they cut to
images from the San Bernadino shooting. Then they cut to neighbors who
“apparently noticed suspicious activity, but didn’t call the police.” And they
said they didn’t because they didn’t want to appear racist.
Really? What’s the usual story? Usually it’s “oh they seemed
like a nice couple, I never would have guessed”. Or, it’s a story of mental illness that was
known by professionals who are barred by ethics from talking about private
medical issues. But for this one shooting, out of the 400 shootings in 2015,
it’s, “hmmm, I thought they looked suspicious.” Next cut to the ugly display by
Ben Affleck, shouting at Sam Harris on the Bill Maher show. You can google that,
there was a lot of internet discussion about it. Ben called Sam racist. That’s
all we need to know for now.
Again, the sophisticated Raheel Raza says, that’s nice of
Ben to defend her, but what she REALLY needs defending from is the radicals in
her own religion who want her dead. This is that ironic moment where she is
both defending Islam but agreeing with the atheist that it’s dangerous. Let’s
see how she climbs out of that, or if she does. To put a fine point on it, she
lists some atrocities, with images, and says THOSE Muslims are… “murdering
people in the name of MY God.” Then she shows a few leaders of the extremists
saying they want to take over the world. Was that necessary? Was this build up necessary? We could have
just started there.
What she did in the first 3 minutes is connect the dots from
a random shooting in America to political correctness to radical Islamist
terrorists. No mention at all of the problems of guns in America. A problem
that affects the rest of the world and everyone is aware of. No mention of the
lack of education about Islam and how Imams with an agenda fill that void. No
mention at all of decades of bi-partisan support for war in the Middle East.
Just the particular dots that she wants to connect.
So, we finally get to what she said she was going to do,
look at numbers.
1.6
Billion Muslims in the world.
But wait, we don’t want to confuse you with too much math,
let’s have Sam Harris explain this to us slowly. Sam breaks down what he calls
the “circles of influence”. This part is pretty good. I’ve read Sam’s recent
book with Majid Nawaz (a liberal/moderate Muslim) and Majid agrees with this
analysis. It goes like this:
Jihadists
Islamists
Fundamentalists
But not so fast, Raheel wants to show us some more violent
imagery. And here’s where she starts her numbers magic. There are 40-200,000
“fighting for ISIS across the world”. Just what “fighting for” means is not
clear since ISIS is very geographically isolated. A few random acts of
terrorism have occurred “across the world” and ISIS has claimed responsibility,
but that is a loose connection. But, okay, we can all agree that the numbers
are difficult, so let’s move on to the real obfuscation.
Other groups are
equally difficult to pin down. Al-Qaeda and a group called IRCG might number up
to 100,000, so Raheel says, “the hundreds of thousands fighting for…” these and
other groups. You can look at that chart and see the exaggeration for yourself.
Raheel casually includes the lone wolves in that first group
of the circle, the Jihadists, and lists nice peaceful towns and cities where
they have murdered people, just to make sure you get it that you should be
afraid, replete with images of buildings blowing up and people in business
attire hitting the ground. And the Twin Towers for good measure.
At 6:00 minutes she says another of the great ironies. It
doesn’t matter how big or small those numbers are since “a handful of
terrorists” can cause great disruption. Umm, that’s what terrorism IS. As
George Carlin said (back when it was the Palestinians), what they are doing is,
trying to win. They don’t have infrastructure, or an air force, or bases around
the world like we do, but they think they are right and are willing to die for
their cause, just like any soldier. But Raheel isn’t trying to be funny, or to
explain geopolitics, she just wants to scare you.
I’m not taking sides here. I’m acknowledging terrorism is a
strategy. When the Palestinians hijacked planes back in the 70’s they gained
recognition that they were being oppressed by Israel. The world got involved.
It’s still messy, but their strategy was effective. If you look at the tactics
of George Washington compared to the British Army, you could say those were
terrorist acts. I’m not equivocating or defending the ideology of ISIS or their
desire for world domination, but if you only focus on their tactics, it is
unclear what you are defending. Noam Chomsky is notorious for simply counting
bodies and bombs and calling the US guilty of state supported terrorism.
Regardless of your politics, it’s a matter of perspective. In this case, Raheel
misses the big picture.
Since she’s got you pretty worked up by now, it’s a good
time to show a picture of a horde of refugees streaming across the countryside
and again, connect some random dots. I’ll give her credit that she doesn’t
actually tell you to call your congressman and tell him or her to build a wall,
but I’m not sure what else she wants you to get from that image. She spends
another minute talking about “home grown” terrorists, meaning those born in
Western countries. Perhaps she is trying to say that the problem is not regional,
but she never addresses the vast differences in the regional data. It does
nothing to make a case for why they become terrorists. If anything it
complicates the reasoning. But, at least we can move on from that first circle
now. Back to Sam Harris:
Islamists
– radical thinking, but willing to work within peaceful means, within a
government.
That definition uses the words Sam uses, but compare that to
what Raheel says, “instead of engaging in terror themselves, they use the
political and cultural system to further their aims.” Holy crap. How the hell
does she know what’s going on in these people’s heads? You can remove the
second half of that sentence since anyone who participates in a democracy is “using
the cultural system to further their aims”, that’s what democracy means. But
she implies they’d rather be engaging in terror, but you know, it’s too messy,
so they’ll manipulate your government instead.
To make her case, she picks the two worst instances of votes
for terrorists in the history of Islam, when Hamas came to power in Gaza in
2006 and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 2012. The news plays in the clip
that “they” wanted to “limit the rights of women and they were not
pro-American”. Okay, no country is required to be pro-American and plenty of
America politicians are not doing so great on women’s rights either. But let’s
not mention that. She also ignores votes like Tunisia in 2014, against
the ruling conservative party with Islamist roots. (See the Pew data, linked
below)
Next she talks about CAIR. A Muslim group in America. I
don’t know much about them and will save that for another day. I’m interested
in this film Raheel was in and how it got “shut down”. That will have to wait
for another day. Back to our video, and the next circle:
Fundamentalist:
according to Raheel, their values are “very disturbing” but they are “not
working to overthrow governments like the Muslim Brotherhood”.
Wait a minute, didn’t the Muslim Brotherhood participate in
a democratic election a couple paragraphs ago? Anyway, they never received more
than 25% of the support of that country, something Raheel fails to mention. As
we’ll see in a minute, the 25% range is not that different than the numbers she
eventually gets to, so I’m not disputing the numbers at all, they are
problematic. My problem is she manipulates them in a way that distorts their
meaning.
So “let’s do the numbers thing”, we’re finally there. This
is her entire case, but she has spent 10 minutes showing you violent images and
calling you “politically correct”, so it’s going to go by quick, don’t blink.
The poll was a poll of Muslims around the world. Of course, she starts with the
worst, countries like Afghanistan where 79% say apostasy is a crime worthy of
execution. Pause if you want to see that Indonesia comes in at 18%. But she
doesn’t do that, she takes an “average” of all of them. I’d like to see her
math on that one.
BTW, one click to the “next page” from the above gives you a
chart showing “Support of Religious Freedom” within the Muslim community. It is
nearly 100% for most countries. As Raheel keeps asking, do you think that is a
radical belief?
The next bit of math is her biggest error. She converts that
average percentage into a number of people. It’s a lot and I don’t dispute that
it’s problematic. There are two problems of methodology; 1) it doesn’t take
into account the problems of getting good data from Muslims who live in
oppressed situations, 2) she is working toward this case for a “cancer within
Islam”. This is a survey of Muslims, but it does not demonstrate a “cause and effect”,
that being a Muslim leads to these behaviors. From this data, that is purely
correlation, not causation. A survey of people with brown skin in the South
side of Chicago that shows high gang membership does not tell you that brown
skin causes kids to join gangs. I know you understand that last sentence, now
apply that understanding to this video.
At 12:00 minutes she makes another one of those idiotic
statements. That this Pew research paints a picture of an Islamic world that is
increasingly out of step with the modern world. If you didn’t know that Islam
is out of step with the modern world when Khomeini was rising in Iran, you
already missed the boat. The historical factors that led to Khomeini are a
little more obscure, but this blog is already going pretty long. Look up where
the Shah came from for more on that. Islam
was the modern world in the 13th century. They were overrun
by Mongols and then lost the battles of East against West. In 1492 Columbus
sailed the ocean blue, and Christians “reconquered” Spain. The locus of the
modern world has remained shifted in that direction since.
Once again, she picks some extra scary stat about 18-29 year
old Muslims within “modern” countries. I’m getting bored with this now. There
will be some more violent images in a minute, I’ll skip those too. But wait, my
favorite part, 53% of Muslims surveyed want Sharia to be the law of the land.
Raheel is counting on you not knowing what “Sharia” means. Simply, it can mean
a lot of things. This is mentioned in the glossary of the Pew study from which
this video cherry picked its data. Different Muslim countries implement
different aspects of it, aspects that ISIS wouldn’t recognize and openly
denounces. Sharia does not equal “what ISIS wants”. Note also the old circuit
rider preacher trick she uses of repeating, “Do you think that’s a radical
belief?”
You might be thinking that I skipped over the most important
part, the very data that makes the case. My point in writing a 3,500 plus word
blog on this video is that the data doesn’t support the case. First of all,
what’s the case? That ISIS is bad? That Muslims are bad? She’s a Muslim, so it
can’t be that. She never tells us what we should do, other than join her and
support her in having this conversation. What conversation? That ISIS is bad?
Did you need a video to know that? Did you need a video to know that support
for terrorism is coming from Afghanistan? This is how videos like this work,
they spend a lot of time telling you what’s coming, and that they will prove
it, then insert lots of violent images and frightening numbers, then they spend
a few seconds of bad logic where it’s unclear what they’re saying, then they
tell you they just told you and make sure the questions they raise have the
obvious answer they want you to repeat.
That’s it. The only thing left is to send you to the
website. At no point did she say what parts of Islam she wants to keep and what
parts are the “corrupted” parts. She never mentioned that the religion she
claims as hers was begun as a military operation and her holy book is full of
instructions on how to conquer. She never talked about how there is no central
authority of Islam and Imams have been arguing about it since the Quran was
completed. (Use the footnotes in the Pew link to see the more violent ideas are
in the hadiths, not the Quran.)
As Sam Harris said in the Bill Maher interview (but not
included in any clips in this video), “it (Islam) is the mother lode of bad
ideas”. What’s very different about Sam is, he has since corrected that and
wishes he had said it is “A mother lode of bad ideas”. He recognizes
that many religions have violent passages and promote the oppression of women,
and are even pro-slavery. They are out of date, historical documents. They have
a few good ideas and those are the ones we still talk about and implement.
Following those documents as if they apply to the modern world leads to half of
your population not participating in anything except making babies and puts the
focus on vague values that don’t lead to progress instead of modern values that
do. Harris also knows his Quran and CAN make a case for how simply reading it
can lead to radicalism. I suspect Raheel avoids doing any of that analysis
because it is a threat to her religious beliefs. Or it could be simply that she
is lazy and does not want to sort out why terrorism is currently a problem in
certain regions and has not been a problem in other regions and other times.
Raheel had 14 minutes, and never covered these basics. She
never mentioned that you create child suicide bombers by teaching them in
complete isolation. If you think you can’t isolate a kid right in the middle of
suburbia, you need to get out and meet some of your neighbors. It is not a
challenge to teach kids simple answers, the hard part is getting them to look
up history themselves and understand that it was only a century ago that women
in America did not have the vote. Luckily they “used the political and cultural
system to further their aims” and changed that. People being born now will have
to be taught that there was a time when gay people were strung up to die on
barbed wire fences, not allowed to shop for matching kitchen sets at Target. We
need to be careful about how arrogant we get about being a “modern” country.
I have only glanced into this Clarion Project that Raheel
works with, but so far I see no reason to look further. She provided no
solutions, and skipped over all of the historical and political factors,
focusing merely on the number of terrorists, the potential damage they can
cause and what she believes is massive support for them. She never asked why
there are many terrorists in the Middle East and very few in the big Muslim
majority countries of Indonesia and India. If it is a simple matter of
averaging out those Pew numbers and applying them across the board, how do you
explain the democratic and capitalist progress in those countries?
Don’t get me wrong, if Raheel is trying to say that her
Islam is a religion of peace, I don’t have a problem with that. Any religion
that has a place of worship in a peaceful country and has people who go to
those places within a pluralistic free society, is a religion of peace. They have become that because the world
demanded it , and I include people of any religion and the non-religious in
that world. People demanded rights and stopped fighting for Kings and Popes and
Caliphates or any other form of despotic leader that thought they had the only
right way. Our despotic leaders have different names now and they have figured
out how to get votes, or we vote for them with our dollars and Euros. We should
be just as worried about them as we are of terrorism.
Just as Raheel doesn’t need Hollywood actors defending her
religion, I don’t need Raheel telling me ISIS is a problem. I know that. I know
it just like a peasant who’s King had gone crazy knew it was wrong. But crazy
is not always so easy to identify and now it has a vote that is equal to mine. There
are complex factors causing the problems of the world today and picking out a
few statistics and claiming the problem is “hundreds of thousands” of Muslims,
tells me nothing. When you have data like that, the next appropriate question
is to ask “why”. Why those particular Muslims? Why Muslims in that area? What
happened in that area 10 years ago? What happened 500 years ago? What happened
in the rest of the world that DIDN’T happen there? Is death for apostasy
directly related to ISIS and a desire for Sharia or it is rooted in other
cultural norms? Is FGM in the Quran or does it come from tribes that preceded
Mohammad? How do you bring education to
an area where girls are shot for advocating for it?
Show me where Raheel looks into those questions, and I might
be interested in what she’s found.
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