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Islamofacepalm

Mark D Larsen

October 7, 2014

For the past several days a brouhaha has been reverberating around the web over a recent episode of Real Time with Bill Maher. In a nutshell, Maher, Sam Harris, and especially Ben Affleck got into a heated debate about Islam. Normally, I would not post comments about such matters, but in this instance I must make an exception. The reason is that Cenk Uygur of The Young Turks posted an op ed video about the kerfuffle. Because I have always been a fan of Affleck, and an even bigger fan of Uygur, I am very disappointed that they would both misunderstand and misinterpret what Maher and Harris were trying to explain. The debate heated up when Harris made this opening statement:

Harris: Liberals have really failed on the topic of theocracy. They’ll criticize white theocracy. They’ll criticize Christians. They still get agitated about the abortion clinic bombing that happened in 1984. But when you want to talk about the treatment of women and homosexuals and free thinkers and public intellectuals in the Muslim world, I would argue that liberals have failed us...

The conversation immediately started to go downhill with this sarcastic interruption:

Affleck: Thank God you’re here! Harris: ...uh ...and the crucial point of confusion is that we have been sold this meme of ‘Islamophobia,’ where every criticism of the doctrine of Islam gets conflated with bigotry towards Muslims as people. That’s intellectually ridiculous. Affleck: So... hold on! Are you the person who understands the officially codified system of Islam? You’re the interpreter of that...? Harris: I’m actually well educated on that....

At this point, something of a shouting match makes it is difficult to distinguish everything being said, so I’ll let the video speak for itself. After a few moments, however, we hear something along these lines:

Affleck: How about the more than a billion people who aren’t fanatical, who don’t punish women, who just want to go to school, have some sandwiches, pray five times a day, and don't do any of the things that you're saying all Muslims do, you're stereotyping, you’re taking some bad things and painting the whole religion with that same brush. Harris: Wait, wait, wait... I’m not saying all muslims do bad things. Maher: Let’s get down to who has the right answer here. A billion people, you say. All these billion people don’t hold any of these pernicious beliefs? Affleck: No, they don’t. Maher: That’s just not true, Ben.

And here Uygur gives his first misinterpretion, evidently not having listened closely enough to the shouting match. He puts words in Maher’s mouth:

Uygur: All right. Bingo! Right there. That’s the biggest problem in this whole thing. Bill Maher saying: “No, over a billion Muslims. ALL of them. Not a small minority. Not even a significant minority. No, that’s just not true: ALL of them hold those opinions.”

As Uygur himself often says: Ooooooooops! Sorry, Cenk, but that’s not what Maher said! Read it again. Maher posed a question. Affleck’s answer was wrong. The correct answer to the question is: “Yes, some among these billion people do hold some of these pernicious beliefs.”

How Affleck answered Maher’s question is, in fact... Just! Not! TRUE!

To smooth the waters, Sam Harris then tries to “unpackage” the issue for Affleck by describing the jihadists radicals in the center of a circle. Next, he describes a slightly larger circle of islamists who share the jihadists’ doctrinal beliefs and goals, but prefer to impose them by means other than resorting to violence:

Harris: Those two circles are, arguably, 20% of the Muslim world. Affleck: What are you basing this research on? Harris: A bunch of poll results that we can talk about....

At this point Uygur makes an unproven, if not offensive, allegation:

Uygur: Okay. Let’s first acknowledge and establish that that 20% number... is totally made up.

Oooooooooops! Uygur actually accuses Harris of making stuff up...?! Sorry to say this, Cenk, but you are way out of your league here. Never have I known Sam Harris, of all people, to simply “make up” anything. His research is painstakingly thorough and meticulous to a fault. And yes, the poll results Harris says he is happy and willing to talk about are, in fact, legitimate —and numerous:

Muslim Opinion Polls

To further refute Harris’s statement, Uygur then shows a graph of data from one such poll by the Pew Research Center reported in the Washington Post:

Yet Uygur then glosses over the actual data shown, simply pointing out that the range varies greatly by country:

Uygur: So, what you’re seeing there, when you’re overgeneralizing about Muslims, it actually doesn’t make any sense, because there’s an enormous range there, and —by the way— most of the Muslims in the world are not in the higher end of that range. They’re in countries that are either in the middle of that range or toward the bottom of that range. So when you say “all Muslims,” that’s not true.

Oooooooooops! Again: nobody said that “all Muslims” adhere to such beliefs. Nobody! In point of fact, Cenk, have you forgotten that you displayed this graph expressly to refute Harris’s ballpark estimate of 20% according to poll results? How can you now interpret his 20% to mean “all Muslims”?

Moreover, what Uygur himself interprets from the graph is actually false. The graph shows percentages by country, but to determine the overall result one must apply those data to each country’s population —which Uygur failed to do. Shown below on the left is an original graph on the issue of death-for-apostacy from page 55 of the actual Pew poll that matches the above graph. It gives the percentages of those who favor death-for-apostacy among Muslims who want Sharia to be the law of the land. Ergo, we also have to consult the graph from page 15 to first extract those percentages, shown below on the right.

I have taken the corresponding data from the two graphs, researched each country’s population, as well as the total percentage of said population that is Muslim, and calculated the numbers. Here is the result:

We can clearly see, therefore, that Harris was actually being very generous by only postulating a conservative 20%. For this particular poll question, the actual results are nearly double that amount: 36%! I purport that Uygur owes Sam Harris a frank apology.

It was ironic —and very sad for me personally— to see two public figures whom I respect and admire —first Ben Affleck, and then Cenk Uygur— actually prove Harris’ opening statement right!

If I could give them a piece of advice, it would be to take a deep breath, read and ponder Harris’ recent essay “Sleepwalking Toward Armageddon”, as well as the perspectives of ex-muslims like Ali A. Rizvi with his “An Open Letter to Moderate Muslims” and Muhammad Syed and Sarah Haider with their “Reza Aslan is Wrong about Islam and This is Why.”

I would also strongly suggest that everyone read Sam Harris’ own post-kerfuffle post. It is truly excellent.