Harris is not used to being called out for his bigotry. Good for Ben! Ben actually stands for liberal values of rationality and tolerance. Harris is an anti-Arab bigot. If he really cared about dangerous belief systems he would include neoliberalism, the ideology that has killed vastly more people, stolen land and resource and is now on a nonstop path to destroying the entire world’s environment…not a peep about that from the smug, trust fund, pseudo-scientist.
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Fooled you, probably because you wanted to be fooled. Harris, making bigotry cool again for liberals.
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To me, to claim these statistics are driven by their operative religious beliefs is crazy.
We stipulate that indeed, some may be. General Peter Pace likewise thought Bush sat at the right hand of his perverted idea of God and that he was on a Biblically-ordained mission to kill Muslims.
But when one sees powers out of their control that hold them in contempt, treat them like shit, install despot dictators to play ball with their economic objectives at their expense, they tend to get a little touchy. It’s easy to blame that on their religion, because it gives us comfort to write them off as a bunch of wackos. Nowhere is our complicity ever discussed. I mean, never, ever. It’s blasphemy to do so among the jingoists that dominate America.
Those statistics speak to whether revenge is ever justified, and based on our actions, it should be no surprise that many think it is. So let’s keep giving them more reasons to think that by accusing them of being religious zealots right before we kill a bunch more of them.
I understand from watching Canadian Parliament proceedings that Isikoff reported we’ve lowered the standards for avoiding civilian casualties in the current war, so we’re well on the way to making some new friends whose blowback we can blame on their religion, no problem. After all, we have the survey results.
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Your results don’t match the questions you posted. Sometime, rarely, or never? Then giving percentages for “Ever Justified”. What does that mean?
We here in the U.S. bomb civilians all the time. We call it collateral damage. We probably make a pretty honest effort to avoid it, but we know it will happen and accept it.
Hamas tells the UN it doesn’t have the ability to aim its rockets well enough to hit only military targets, so it accepts causing damage to civilians.
Guess they learned from us.
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Seems you didn’t watch the show. Because Maher expressly stated the exact opposite of what you just accused him of.
“Haris making bigotry cool again for Harris and Maher”!
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Yeah. Right.
You got caught being a “kill em all and let Jehovah sort em out” kinda guy and now it’s Glen Greenwald’s fault?
WTF?
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It would seem that you didn’t watch the show because Maher only said that after getting called out by Ben.
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If Sam Harris thinks Islamic fatwas are bad just wait until he gets it from Greenwald’s cult followers.
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LOL… WIN!
(TPM’s posting filters are sucking big time)
Watched the show, and point still stands.
So does mine. Harris and Maher are completely off.
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Oh, OK. I was speaking about Sam Harris.
But on Maher, frankly, I grow weary of the meme that “Muslims have to condemn such behavior.” First off, some do condemn it, but somehow we never hear about it, ostensibly because that doesn’t fit the narrative. Second, what is it about Muslims in particular that causes us to expect them to apologize for their murderous extremists?
Do we expect white males en masse apologize when one of us bombs a gay bar? Do we expect Christians to apologize when an abortion doctor is slaughtered in his own house of worship in the name of Jesus Christ? Do we expect Jews to apologize for indiscriminate retribution in Gaza that’s killed thousands with weapons furnished by our tax dollars?
And in the absence of those apologies, do we throw it up in their faces every time one of them acts out of their insane obsessions?
To me, that expectation of Muslims is yet another example of how cockeyed we are with respect to this, and perhaps partially why we’re so despised. We as a nation have a built-in bias we can’t even recognize. Yet no Muslim I’ve met has ever expected me to apologize for what we did to the Middle East.
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I have watched them work, many times. They talk out of both sides of their mouths. Harris’ concentric circles analogy is a perfect example of propaganda. If you care to think about it a little bit.
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“Ever justified” refers to those who didn’t say: “never justified.” I didn’t feel like reproducing all of the results. The numbers who said “Often” and “Sometimes” are still scarily high.
Yes, the U.S. had done bad things to people all over the world. Granted. People have been oppressed all over the world. If you can’t see the moral distinction between deliberately killing civilians as both the means and the end vs. the U.S.'s attempts at minimizing civilian casualties targeting military targets, then I don’t know what to say.
Ben Affleck is an actor and he did a fantastic job with his hissy fit on the show, but Harris is correct. Affleck’s over-the-top bloviating was really uncalled for.
Why are there no Tibetan suicide bombers? They have been oppressed on a nightmarish level and you don’t see comparable violent reactions.
I think you need to read the question a little bit closer: appreciate the significance of the juxtaposed phrases “suicide bombing” and “civilian targets.”
Because we have the moral high ground.
This, mind you, is a reduction from the high standards that led to the video of the slaughter of unarmed journalists Chelsea Manning now rots in prison for showing to us.
We killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqis to bring them freedom — that is a definitive lesson in morality for sure.
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Where did anyone advocate killing all Muslims?
Not to mention the juxtapostion of “embedded journalists” and a public numb to the slaughter being conducted in their name.