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Bekijk Volledige Versie : Atheïsten demoniseren moslims terwijl moslims slachtoffer zijn van Westerse horrormisdaden



Revisor
04-08-13, 19:25
By Alan MacLeod

“The new atheists have gone from criticizing religion to demonizing one particular religion without studying the evidence, pushing them perilously close to fundamentalism. In fact, it is often difficult to tell whether we are reading “rational scientific” atheism or ramblings from the neo-fascist terrorist Anders Breivik.”

I will just come out and say it. I really like Richard Dawkins. I like his witty, middle-class, cricket on the lawn, more tea vicar personality. He and David Hume were the first authors that got me to critically think about the existence of God. I was convinced by The God Delusion. I also have no love for Islam, let alone radical Islam, but I was always faintly uneasy about some of the company he kept, who seemed to be more interested in attacking Muslims than helping people think critically. Furthermore, as a historian by training, I always felt there were long-term historical and political factors that best explained the animosity between East and West.

I was, therefore, dismayed with his recent comments. After a lively discussion with the Huffington Post editor, Mehdi Hassan, a practising Muslim, Dawkins insinuated that Muslims were unfit to be journalists. A storm of protest erupted, with more than one commentator wondering whether Dawkins believes Jewish people should be fired from their jobs, too. Searching for Dawkins’ well-reasoned and erudite response, I instead found this tweet: “Haven’t read Koran so couldn’t quote chapter & verse like I can for Bible. But often say Islam greatest force for evil today”. I was astonished. Dawkins, the Oxford professor and best-selling writer on religion had not done even the most basic research on Islam? Did he literally not know the first thing about the topic? I freely admit that I have not read it either, but I do not portray myself as a leading expert on religion. Dawkins is a best-selling biology writer as well. Has he even read On the Origin of Species? We assume a certain intellectual rigour from Oxford professors, hence the widespread shock at his revelation. What would Dawkins think of a tweet from a religious person that said “Haven’t read Darwin, but I know evolution is wrong and science is greatest force for evil today?”

The line taken by Dawkins, quite possibly influenced by more politically-minded atheists like Christopher Hitchens and Sam Harris, appears to be a version of Samuel Huntington’s “Clash of Civilizations” theory; a doctrine that holds that Islam and Judeo-Christian culture are fundamentally opposed. One represents backwardness, violence and superstition, the other democracy, liberalism and enlightenment. After the late Edward Said demolished this notion, few took the theory seriously except those great champions for democracy and enlightenment values, George W. Bush and Tony Blair.

I often notice among scientists a healthy contempt for the humanities. They feel those without scientific training tend to become vague or show their ignorance when they stray too far into the world of science. Dawkins himself is fond of referencing the infamous “Sokol Affair“, where a postmodern journal published a hoax article of garbled, scientific-sounding nonsense. But perhaps the opposite can also be true; that scientists appear to be rather naïve when it comes to political matters. Perhaps Dawkins does not “feel politics in his bones”, as Terry Eagleton suggests.

A History Lesson

But is Dawkins right about Islam? In order to reach conclusions, a look at the history is revealing. Whatever one thinks of him, Noam Chomsky has never been accused of not feeling politics in his bones. Citing National Security Council documents, Chomsky identifies that, as early as the 1950s, the U.S. government sensed there was a “campaign of hatred against us in the Arab world”, not by the governments, but the people. The reason: “there is a perception… that the U.S. supports dictatorships and blocks democracy and development so as to ensure control over the resources of the region. Furthermore, the perception is basically accurate, the NSC concluded”.

These “dictatorships” are often the root of radical Islam. In his book, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Secret Collusion with Radical Islam, Mark Curtis goes through the history of the region in meticulous detail. Curtis found that, far from being enemies, virtually every major radical Islamist group has been nurtured, trained and funded by Britain for five reasons:

1. “As a global counterforce to the ideologies of secular nationalism and Soviet communism” 2. “As “conservative muscle” within countries to undermine secular nationalists and bolster pro-Western regimes”
3. “As “shock troops” to destabilise or overthrow governments”
4. “As proxy military forces to fight wars”
5. “As political tools to leverage change from governments”. [1]

The two British objectives in installing or maintaining radical Islamists in power are:

1. “Influence and control of key energy resources, always recognised in the British planning documents as the number one priority in the Middle East.”
2. “Maintaining Britain’s place within a pro-Western global financial order.” [2]

Britain funded and promoted the Islamist Muslim League in India as a counterweight to the secular Congress party of Gandhi and Nehru. Likewise, in Egypt, the West has been supporting the Muslim Brotherhood since the 1960s, originally as a bulwark against the secular, nationalist regime of President Nasser. In Afghanistan, the West funded the extremist Mujahedeen against the Soviets. Margaret Thatcher called the organization, of which Osama bin Laden was a notable member, “genuine freedom fighters”. [3]

But it is the most radical of all Islamist regimes, the Saudi autocracy, which is the West’s key ally in the region, which rather damages the idea of a “clash of civilizations”. British officials considered King Faisal “very moderate” [4] – one who “deployed his immense oil wealth in a benign and thoughtful way.” [5] The benign and thoughtful Faisal tortured and killed thousands, while funding Jihadists and Islamising the Middle East.

The regime, despised and feared by the Arabian people in equal measure, has been propped up and used as a regional policeman, stamping out nationalist movements like the 1965 uprising against the British-backed Sultan of Oman. This was one of the most repressive regimes in history, in which the wearing of glasses and talking to others for longer than 15 minutes were banned. The British turned a blind eye to these crimes because the Sultan agreed to keep the oil of the country in British hands. By the 1970s, secular Arab nationalism was largely defeated. Into the vacuum stepped Islamist parties, paving the way for what we see today.

Science Flies you to the Moon, Religion Flies you into Buildings

All of this is relevant to the debate, but does not answer the question of whether Islam is the greatest force for evil today. Dawkins often states that religion is the motivating factor in wars. His two favourite examples are the Christian Crusaders and the Muslim 9/11 bombers. “Science flies you to the moon, religion flies you into buildings” is a slogan of the Richard Dawkins Foundation. But is it true? Only one of Osama bin Laden’s stated reasons for the 9/11 attacks can be construed as religious, not that it has to be taken as such. There is little reason to doubt his sincerity when he outlines his three motives for the attacks:

• The U.S.- backed sanctions against Iraq.
• The U.S. support of the Israeli occupation of Palestine.
• The continued presence of U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia (Mecca being the holiest place in Islam).

The Iraq sanctions were declared “genocidal” by successive U.N. humanitarian co-ordinators of the country, and killed at least one million civilians, half of them children. Israel’s occupation has created 3.8 million refugees. The U.S., contrary to the media’s reporting, is actively blocking a peaceful settlement by vetoing and voting against literally dozens of U.N. resolutions. It is also quite possible to object to foreign troops stationed in a country on non-religious grounds, particularly if they are being used to attack neighbouring states. If we put ourselves in their shoes, is it because of their religion or the horrors they see daily that Arabs are drawn to violence and hatred? Farea al-Muslimi, a Yemeni activist, recently testified to the Senate Judiciary Committee,

Instead of first experiencing America through a school or a hospital, most people… first experienced America through the terror of a drone strike. What radicals had previously failed to achieve in my village, one drone strike accomplished in an instant: there is now an intense anger and growing hatred of America.

Likewise, there are serious drawbacks with the idea that the Crusades were entirely religious conflicts. If the Crusaders’ aim was to spread Christianity, why did they start by sacking Constantinople, one of the largest Christian cities in the world? The Crusades were unmistakably about wealth, power and empire as much as religion.

Revisor
04-08-13, 19:26
I always felt Dawkins was different to the other “celebrity atheists,” but his recent (since deleted) tweets linking to ultra-right wing racist conspiracy websites unsettled me greatly. But Dawkins does represent a wave of growing distrust of Islam in the 21st century, according to polls. How to explain this? For Terry Eagleton it can be summed up in two words, or rather, two numbers: 9/11. Christopher Hitchens turned his pen to Islam around the same time that his new friends in the Pentagon were orchestrating two major wars against Muslim countries. Sam Harris was criticized for advocating a nuclear strike against the Islamic world. Harris defended himself by stating that if an Islamic state got hold of nuclear weapons, it would be the only course of action available.

Missing in Harris’ analysis is the fact that there already is a radical Islamist state with huge stockpiles of nuclear weapons: Pakistan. A key ally of the West, the U.S. provided General Zia ul-Haq with the technology for nuclear weaponry. “General Zia is a wise man”, Margaret Thatcher told Parliament, as ul-Haq pronounced a death sentence on his political opponent, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, while doing more than anyone to Islamize his country. [6] Harris is not calling for war against any of the U.S. allies. Strange.

Harris, an arch-Zionist, who has argued for racial profiling against Muslims, seems to regurgitate the basest Israeli Defence Force Propaganda, disproved by even a cursory glance at an Amnesty International Report. In this atmosphere, it is therefore not surprising that some claim Muslims have a genetic aversion against democracy. These Islamophobic diatribes are prime examples of Orientalism, the derogatory set of Western assumptions about the Orient, detailed in Edward Said’s bestselling work. I would have assumed that, as an academic, Dawkins had read it, but I shall simply recommend it to him.

And yet, the events of the Arab Spring, where hundreds of thousands of Muslims risked their lives to fight for democracy, should have buried the idea forever. Furthermore, public opinion shows that Muslims are hardly irrational, anti-science terrorists. Belief in evolution topped 78% and 67% in Lebanon and Palestine. In the U.S., the figure is only 40%. Likewise, only 15% of Iraqis and Jordanians saw any conflict between Islam and science. Meanwhile, the overwhelming majorities of Muslims in every country condemn attacks on U.S. civilians.

Faith is defined as belief in something without evidence. Dawkins defines fundamentalism as strident beliefs that cannot be changed. But the new atheists have gone from criticizing religion to demonizing one particular religion without studying the evidence, pushing them perilously close to fundamentalism. In fact, when it comes to Islam, it is often difficult to tell whether we are reading “rational scientific” atheism or ramblings from the neo-fascist terrorist Anders Breivik. After all, Harris did claim that “the people who speak most sensibly” on Islam are “the fascists”.

Islam, more than any other religion human beings have devised, has all the makings of a thoroughgoing cult of death.

The [Iraq] death toll is not nearly high enough… too many [Muslim jihadists] have escaped. Both quotes are from New Atheists.

Could it be that some of the crudest, anti-Islamic racism is being dressed up under a guise of secularism and rational thought? Is Dawkins a fundamentalist? I invite him to read Curtis’ and Said’s books to see if the evidence changes his mind, because the shallow, poorly-researched Islamophobic position he is taking does not befit a man of his intellectual standing.

Endnotes
1. Mark Curtis, Secret Affairs: Britain’s Secret Collusion with Radical Islam (2012), p. 16.
2. Curtis, Secret Affairs.
3. Curtis, Secret Affairs, p. 137.
4. Curtis, Secret Affairs.
5. Curtis, Secret Affairs, p. 175.
6. Curtis, Secret Affairs, p. 153.

Alan MacLeod is a sociology PhD student at Glasgow University. He is also a journalist and blogger who writes about contemporary British and Latin American issues at Great Britain Matters (http://www.gbmatters.blogspot.com) and Latin America Matters (http://www.lamatters.blogspot.com).

http://www.stateofnature.org/?p=7227

Bofko
04-08-13, 23:22
"Atheïsten demoniseren moslims terwijl moslims slachtoffer zijn van Westerse horrormisdaden"

:chef: