The dodgy politics of Sam Harris

Arch cultural relativist Madeleine Bunting is attacking something called "new" atheism today. It's the usual weak stuff, but her attack on Sam Harris is, sadly, justified. For a more reasoned explanation of why the best selling "atheist" polemicist is spouting at best dodgy, at worst, vile politics check out this article by Meera Nanda on the Butterflies and Wheels web site. Short quote:

"In his rationalist Jihad on Jihadi theology, Harris’s motto seems to be (with due apologies to Barry Goldwater): “Extremism in the defense of reason is no vice. Moderation in the pursuit of secularism is no virtue.” Harris can barely curb his enthusiasm for George Bush’s disastrous wars, announcing gleefully that “we are at war against Islam” – not at war against violent extremists, mind you, but against the very “vision of life prescribed to all Muslims in the Koran” (p. 109). He finds tortured justifications for torturing suspected terrorists in America’s Gulag. He goes even further:

some propositions are so dangerous that it may even be ethical to kill people for believing them….Certain beliefs place their adherents beyond the reach of every peaceful means of persuasion, while inspiring them to commit acts of extraordinary violence against others. There is, in fact, no talking to some people. If they cannot be captured, and they often cannot, otherwise tolerant people may be justified in killing them in self-defense. We will continue to spill blood in what is, at bottom, a war of ideas.” (p. 53, emphasis added.)

The villains who are beyond the pale of reason and who deserve to die are all Muslims. While he has some harsh things to say about Christians and Jews as well, he spares them the wars and the torture, for unlike the Muslim barbarians, they have had their reformations and their enlightenments."

Comments

[Strappado]

I think it was all too convenient for her to pretend that he did not write "self-defence".
If you have read the whole book, you do not read general warmongering but a rational critique of "pacifism at all costs".
The sentence would, for instance, sound quite self evident in WW2, so this is hardly immoral.

For principled pacifists, this will still no doubt be hard to swallow, but then so should the Sam Harris' example about Gandhi who suggested the Jews to let themselves be killed by the Nazis to gain sympathy for the rest of the world.