The major flaw in your argument is that Islamic terrorism isn't just confined to western targets. China has suffered attacks up in the north west province where the Uighurs are located. As far as I'm aware China has no recent history of invading, or bombing, any Arab countries, & yet they are seen as a legitimate target.
http://foreignpolicy.com/2017/03/01/the-islamic-state-pledged-to-attack-china-next-heres-why/
I am not saying that terrorism is a
rational response in a long-running west v Islam war. I am saying that when looking for the causes of Muslim violence today, no factor looms as large as the political havoc in ME countries, which is very heavily a result of outside (earlier European, now mostly American) influence, the failure of secular governance to deliver good living standards, and stuff I'm going to file away as etc.
Imagine saying "WW1 happened because someone murdered a prince" - you are ignoring the years of military buildup, pacts, the smaller wars leading up to it. Similarly, it is a fairly mainstream position that the Treaty of Versailles was a major factor in the rise of Hitler. Now, just like China in your Uighurs example, the USSR wasn't involved in Versailles negotiations and had concluded a separate, losing peace with Germany. But the same USSR was a target of Hitler's war. This one fact does not mean that you can ignore the role of the treaty when analysing WW2. Similarly, ignoring western intervention, which, I will repeat again - has been pervasive for
two centuries - will lead to shoddy analysis. It is the kind of analysis that says, let's impose yet another Treaty of Versailles on defeated Germany, since this young German nation has an irrepressible tendency to wage total war and must be crushed again and again until it stops. This analysis believes that the text of the religion is the fuel driving conflict, thus that conflict cannot end until the text is erased from history, which means effectively its followers must be erased from existence.
Now, I don't believe that the Quranic texts are the fundamental cause of violence in the ME today. I believe that political violence is caused by resource conflict and political instability. Let us take Enlightenment Europe as the example. This is all stuff I'm remembering vaguely from 12 years ago, so I might get a few details wrong but: Enlightenment rationality spread across Europe in the 19th century. Yet there were numerous wars throughout the continent. Napolean tried to conquer the whole place. There were repeated attempted revolutions in France. Tsarist Russia tried repeatedly to subdue its western neighbours. Austria-Hungary successfully dominated surrounding populations and territory. The Italians began to unify violently. The Germans likewise, and then were in immediate conflict with France leading to repeated wars. All this while, the same countries were fighting expansionary wars throughout the whole world, looking for new raw materials and markets for their factory commodities. All these countries were dominated politically by Christianity or the new rationalism. Other than Christianity as a pretext for colonial expansion, I don't think the Bible, or most Enlightenment texts, can be seen as the
root source of these conflicts, even if t was used as the pretext for some of them.
These conflicts exploded in 1914 and then 1939, leading to by far the most destructive wars in history. Since 1945, Europe was divided into 2 strong political formations. The moment one of them collapsed, the Balkan states immediately started a massive war on ethnic and religious lines. Again, it was the political instability and resource conflict rather than tribal/ethnic impulse or the religious texts (which always existed!) creating the conditions for war.
Where I think religion matters is the *form* of the war and in the case of the ME, creating a shared idea of siege among Muslims.
I think your example of Shia-Sunni conflict illustrates my point perfectly, actually. You cannot get a clearer example of a war fought over a textual issue. Yet the conflict lay dormant for decades in the 20th c. It exploded into life in the 80s. What happened then? The USSR invaded Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia started spreading its version of Islam, the US supported this as the opposition to communism, and the Iranian revolution replaced the US-backed unpopular autocrat with a Shia theocracy. With the politics having changed, this ostensibly textual war restarted in earnest.
@Mockney @Pogue Mahone
So, this is why I think it's necessary to object to Harris. I am an atheist and I think the world would be (somewhat) better if humans had never invented gods. I think the repression of women and homosexuals in Islam is a travesty.
But Harris' analysis is very inadequate. When Harris talks about the civilised rational west and Muslims who don't value their lives, he is tapping into a discredited strain of thinking. A plurality of the world's population sees the US as the
primary threat to world peace. Outside 9/11 and Israel, there has been no major attack by any organised group or country from the Muslim world on the west, while going the other direction you see multiple coups, indiscriminate aerial bombing, huge weapons supply to autocratic regimes, and multiple wars of aggression --
the supreme international crime. To make Islam the #1 modern threat to world peace means ignoring the massive modern (post-WW2) death tolls from western wars (millions more than the Jihadi groups can claim).
