In the HuffPost: Even if it was a Muslim, so what?
I was really upset this morning reading in the New Yorker what happened to the 20 year old Saudi student who was reported as a suspect. It’s depressing stuff so, partly inspired by that and our great guest post this morning, I decided to write about why it wouldn’t matter if the Saudi or any other Muslim was behind the attack. I end up writing about why I’m not a New Atheist, why I think Sam Harris and Pamela Geller both get Islam wrong, and why it’s a problem that we treat Islam so differently.
The New York Post has been receiving serious and justifiable criticism for their reporting on the Boston Marathon. Citing police sources, the paper reported that 12 people had died in the attacks and that a “Saudi national” had been taken into custody. Of course, the death toll was thankfully a (still horrifying) quarter of that, and the police later disconfirmed that the “Saudi national” was a suspect — he was a student tackled by a concerned citizen and taken to the hospital. He was fully cooperative, denied all involvement, and isn’t a suspect. The New Yorker has released an important and harrowing story of the way this young man, barely out of his teens, was treated.
Just as conspiracy-nut Alex Jones was quick to blame the government and the Westboro Baptist Church was quick to blame the gays, many were quick to accept the New York Post‘s shoddy reporting and rumor-mongering — it was easy to believe the perpetrator was a Muslim.
What would have happened, though, if the perpetrator was this 20-year-old Saudi, who was just in the wrong place at the wrong time looking the wrong color and maybe calling out to the name of the wrong-sounding God? What if it was some other Muslim, instead? Why should that even matter?
It seems like the anti-Muslim voices on the far right, like Pamela Geller, and the atheist left, like Sam Harris, act as if moderates, like myself, simply aren’t aware that Muslim terrorism exists. They use extraordinary examples as an excuse to rub in our faces how violent and harmful a religion Islam is.
But what about the Gallup poll that shows that 93 percent of Muslims in the world aren’t radical, and that the radicals give political, not religious, justifications for their violence? What about the study out of Duke and UNC Chapel Hill showing that only 6 percent of terrorist attacks in the U.S. have been by Muslims? What about the studies by Robert Pape showing that nearly all suicide bombings have the secular goal of resisting Western occupation, rather than any religious aim? What about the secular and nationalist group, the Tamil Tigers, which pioneered the modern suicide attack, accounting for the majority in the latter end of the 20th century?
Read the rest of it at the Huffington Post.
Vlad Chituc is a lab manager and research assistant in a social neuroscience lab at Duke University. As an undergraduate at Yale, he was the president of the campus branch of the Secular Student Alliance, where he tried to be smarter about religion and drink PBR, only occasionally at the same time. He cares about morality and thinks philosophy is important. He is also someone that you can follow on twitter.
