Chin-scratching about the lack of moderates in the Mooooooslim world tends to produce a lot of dopey analysis, so the bar to come across as really stupid is quite high, but Nina Burleigh has cleared it. Here’s a paragraph that a seemingly literate adult wrote:
There is truth to the collateral damage accusation. But let’s remember why the drones went over to Afghanistan in the first place: thugs took over, settled in with civilians and plotted and carried out global mayhem.
Ah, yes. Afghanistan. That’s a great example of a place where Muslim extremism just sort of happened! Out of nowhere! With no influence from imperial powers! All the kalashnikovs and American body armor and such just kind of fell out of the sky, and then suddenly there was Muslim extremism. Funny about that.
Using Afghanistan as an example against the collateral damage argument! Afghanistan!
So, to be clear here, more than a century of Western violence, resource theft, destabilization, support for dictators, and out-and-out invasion merits a parenthetical “to be sure.” And this is the central, existential failing of these people and these arguments. If you actually care about making the world a more stable, more moral place, you undertake the difficult emotional and political work of reckoning with your own country’s nonstop campaign of aggression and murder. Real, meaningful political engagement should hurt, you more than anyone else. Or you can engage in the pleasant, destructive business of turning literally no critical attention to your own problems and spending all of your time looking for problems in somebody else’s house.
Oh, by the way: “Reza Aslan and his ilk contort themselves to avoid the fact that muezzins the world over have raised the planetary threat level thanks to the Wahhabi takeover of Islam.” Ah. The “Wahhabi takeover.” There are well over a billion Muslims in the world; there are, by the most generous estimates, maybe 10 million Wahhabis. I know math is hard…. Incidentally, the Wahhabi influence on global Islam would never have been made possible without the House of Saud’s control of Arabia, and the House of Saud would not be in control, cutting off people’s heads and smashing political dissidents, without the constant, loving embrace of the United States. I can’t find the part where Burleigh goes after the United States for so vigorously supporting that corrupt government.
If Nina Burleigh, or Sam Harris, or Bill Maher, or any of the rest of them were remotely interested in actually slowing Muslim extremism, when it comes to foreign policy they would sound– well, just like me. If there is a cancer within the Muslim world, the United States is the carcinogen. And the most basic principles of morality and democracy insist that we in the United States have a responsibility to stop our own bad behavior first. You want to slow religious fundamentalism? Disband the CIA. Remake American foreign policy. Root out the deep state influences that compel us to constantly kill innocent Muslims. Stop pouring gas on the fire.
But people like Burleigh will never, ever take that step, because their intent is not to stop religious extremism. Their intent is to self-aggrandize. They love to think of themselves as iconoclasts, even though in attacking Muslims they join the large majority of Americans. The posture that these people are lonely voices for reason in a harsh world is an utter fiction; this country is absolutely filled with anti-Muslim animus. There’s nothing remotely dangerous about being anti-Islam these days, but they love to maintain the fiction that there is, and they are only interested in the question as long as their analysis results in the further glorification of the great white world and their own personal glorification as martyrs against “political correctness.” Any other outcome, such as actually identifying the root cause of religious fundamentalism, does not interest them in the least.
It’s a funny kind of arch-rationality, when it always invariably leads to the same conclusion, no matter what the question is. Funny.