Sam harris exposes Salon for being Underhanded

I consider Salon to be among the worst offenders of the new pseudo-journalism, and I have long maintained a personal boycott of the website. I ask my publishers to ignore any requests from its editors for interviews or for review copies of my books. And on the rare occasions that Salon publishes good work—the articles of Jeffrey Tayler stand out—I decline to forward the links on social media. My reason is simple: Despite the work of a few blameless writers, Salon has become a cesspool of lies and moral confusion.

However, in response to the repeated requests of one Salon writer, Sean Illing, I decided to make an exception. I agreed to do an interview with Illing under two conditions: 1) I would get final approval of all the words attributed to me; 2) I could say whatever I wanted about Salon. These conditions were agreed to, and I spent several hours producing the following exchange by phone and email.

In the end, Salon published a bowdlerized version of my interview, cutting out the parts that were critical of the website. I don’t blame Illing for this. He was a pleasure to correspond with and appears to have made his best effort to get the whole text of our conversation published. And I’m actually happy that his editors decided to help make my case for me by further demonstrating their lack of integrity. Salon is irredeemable. I urge the few talented writers left there to flee a sinking ship.
Salon would have its readers believe the following:

[Harris’s] remarks were edited merely for clarity and length. No substantive changes were made to the text beyond those considerations.

I’ve published my full remarks below. The section that Salon deleted is highlighted in blue.




Let’s start with your views on Islam. You’ve acknowledged that Islamic extremism is a hydra-headed problem that can’t be reduced to single variable – certainly I agree with that. Given that the Islamic world has not always been what it is today, and has at times been more civilized than the Christian world, how much weight can we give to factors like history, geopolitics, foreign policy, or Western interventionism? And if these non-religious variables are significant, does it undermine the argument that Islam is a uniquely problematic religion?
The short answer is that I think the problems we are seeing throughout the Muslim world—jihadism, sectarian conflict, and all the attendant talk of Muslim “humiliation”—are almost entirely religious. And wherever rational grievances do exist, they are invariably viewed, and become magnified, through a religious lens. The truth is that a belief in specific religious doctrines is sufficient to produce all the violence, intolerance, and backwardness we see in the Muslim world. The abysmal treatment of women, the hostility to free speech, the daily bloodletting between Sunni and Shia—these things have absolutely nothing to do with U.S. foreign policy or the founding of Israel. And, contrary to the assertions of many regressive Leftists and Islamist apologists, violent jihad is not a product of colonialism or the 20th century. The tactic of suicide bombing is relatively new, of course, as is the spread of jihadist ideology on social media, but if you had stood at the gates of Vienna in 1683, you could have not helped but notice the civilizational problem of jihad.
Yes, politics and ordinary grievances enter into many of these recent conflicts. It isn’t difficult to see why a person who has lost his or her family in an errant drone strike might hate America, and there is no question that a desire for revenge transcends religion or culture. But the truth is that a sincere belief in the metaphysics of martyrdom can turn an ordinary person into a dangerous religious maniac. And only Islam preaches this doctrine as one of its central tenets.
There are obviously regressive tendencies in all religions, particularly Christianity, which is not to say Christianity and Islam are equivalent. But the question is: If there are external, non-doctrinal factors that have shaped Islam and the Muslim world, how should Western critics incorporate that into their critiques of Islam as such?
Well, the developed world has a responsibility to act with the welfare of humanity in mind. So, to the degree that the liberal critique of American power holds any truth, we should address these injustices and do our best not to manufacture new ones. We are living in a global civilization, with economic, environmental, and political concerns that transcend national boundaries. I’m not saying that we’ll have a world government anytime soon, but we need to do our best to rectify the worst disparities of wealth, health, and education globally, so that everyone can enjoy a minimum standard of well-being. 
So, I agree that the West bears a disproportionate responsibility to help the world, given our relative wealth and power. And I certainly can’t argue that we’ve done the best job of this. But that doesn’t mean we are responsible for the global death cult of jihadism. We are confronting people, in dozens of countries, who despise more or less everything that we value, and are right to value—including free speech, open societies, gender equality, scientific rationality, and more or less everything else about civilization that is worth preserving. And the reasons why they hate these things are almost entirely religious.
You can make the list of U.S. crimes and missteps as long as you want, but it still doesn’t explain ISIS. The fact that we invaded Iraq is merely a background condition for a local explosion of jihadist triumphalism and horror—one that is fully explained by a commitment to a specific interpretation of Islamic scripture. Unfortunately, these same ideas are currently addling the brains of people throughout the world who have no terrestrial grievances whatsoever. Medical students and engineers, who are second- and third-generation British citizens, have joined ISIS. There is nothing about Western foreign policy, global capitalism, or white privilege that explains this.
Many would push back and say much of that is true but there’s also the problem of antecedent causes. After World War I, for example, countries like Britain and France and Russia constructed the modern Middle East, for reasons of self-interest and without concerns for sectarian rivalries. These agreements prepared the way for much of the political chaos we’ve seen since. In Iraq, for instance, where ISIS was born, the British imposed a Hashimite monarchy which marked the boundaries of the country irrespective of ethnic and religious tensions. We can’t sidestep this history when talking about these problems today; it’s only part of the story but it absolutely matters. Do you agree?
But the religious lunacy and tribalism was already in place—and that is why the West’s careless partitioning of the region was so problematic. I agree that the history of colonialism isn’t pretty. But the example you raise just proves my point. In fact, this practically became a science experiment that dissected out the crucial variable of religion. There are (or were) Christians living in all these beleaguered countries. How many Christian suicide bombers have there been? Where are the Pakistani, Iraqi, Syrian, Egyptian, and Palestinian Christians who are blowing themselves up in crowds of noncombatants? Have there been any? I’m guessing there must have been a few, but the Muslim supply of such people is apparently inexhaustible. In every case, we’re talking about the same people, speaking same language, living in the same places, enduring the same material deprivation. In fact, the Christians of the Middle East have it worse. They’ve not only suffered the legacy of colonialism, they’ve been hounded out of their countries and often killed outright by their Muslim neighbors—and they still haven’t organized themselves into a death cult. What’s the difference that makes the difference? Religion.
We can also look outside the Muslim world to see that mere injustice and inequality rarely produce such destructive behavior. Many countries in Latin America have legitimate grievances against the U.S. Where are the Guatemalan suicide bombers? Where are the Cherokee suicide bombers, for that matter? If oppression were enough, the Tibetans should have been practicing suicidal terrorism against the Chinese for decades. Instead, they practice self-immolation, for reasons that are totally understandable within the context of their own religious beliefs. Again, specific beliefs matter, and we deny this at our peril. If the behavior of Muslim suicide bombers should tell us anything, it’s that certain people really do believe in martyrdom. Let me be very clear about this: I’m not talking about all (or even most) Muslims—I’m talking about jihadists. But all jihadists are Muslim. If even 1 percent of the world’s Muslims are potential jihadists, we have a terrible problem on our hands. I’m not sure how we deal with 16 million aspiring martyrs—but lying to ourselves about the nature of the problem doesn’t seem like the best strategy.
A key difference I see is that Islam is bound up with a civilization and a culture in way that Christianity isn’t, or isn’t any longer. The enlightenment project, the modern scientific revolution – these things prepared the way for secular politics in the West; they made possible Jefferson’s wall. And I don’t think there’s a “render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s” equivalent in Islam – though perhaps I am mistaken.  How significant is this difference and do you think it matters in terms of our expectations and our approach to dealing with the Muslim world?
Yes, these are points I’ve often made. Islam hasn’t suffered the same collisions with secularism and science that Christianity has. And there are also doctrinal differences that make it more impervious to these collisions than Christianity and Judaism were. Unfortunately, the Qur’an doesn’t contain anything like that line from Matthew, “Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s and unto God that which is God’s.” To the contrary, it is difficult to find an Islamic rationale for truly separating religion and politics. Finding a durable basis for such a separation is one of the great challenges of our age, and that’s why I support reformers like Maajid Nawaz, who is attempting to do just that. As you know, he and I have written a book together, Islam and the Future of Tolerance: A Dialogue. The whole point of the book is to find a path forward, toward Islamic secularism and liberal reform. But the thing that has to be admitted up front, is that Islam presents some unique challenges in this regard. 
You’ve been critical of liberal commentators like Glenn Greenwald, Reza Aslan and Nicholas Kristof. Do you not take any of their points, especially as it relates to blanket condemnations of Islam?
Unfortunately, these people are consistently on the wrong side of the issues. For instance, each of these men, with varying degrees of malice and stupidity, has publicly attacked Ayaan Hirsi Ali as a bigot. And yet Ayaan is a pure victim of Islamic theocracy. She is also a humanist hero who fully recapitulated the Enlightenment project, having been given almost no intellectual tools with which to do it.
Just think of it: Here is a woman who was raised in a condition of medieval theocracy in Somalia and subjected to FGM. Sensing that there was more to life than this, she fled an arranged marriage, emigrated to Holland, learned Dutch, got an education, and became a member of Parliament—only to see her colleague Theo Van Gogh killed in the street by a jihadist. To this day, these barbarians threaten her wherever she goes. And people like Greenwald, Aslan, and Kristof attack her for the stridency with which she criticizes the misogyny and intolerance of free thought that are endemic to Islam. Not only do they get the ethics of the situation absolutely wrong, they make her life more dangerous in the process. It is an absolute scandal.

These people are part of what Maajid Nawaz has termed the “regressive Left”—pseudo-liberals who are so blinded by identity politics that they reliably take the side of a backward mob over one of its victims. Rather than protect individual women, apostates, intellectuals, cartoonists, novelists, and true liberals from the intolerance of religious imbeciles, they protect these theocrats from criticism.
The profundity of this moral blindness seems to have achieved an almost crystalline form in the person of Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald is a gay, Jewish atheist who would be murdered three times over in scores of Muslim communities for reasons that are unambiguously religious. And yet, he considers any focus on this particular brand of theocracy—even by someone who has suffered under its shadow as much as Ayaan has—to be a sign of malice toward innocent people. When cartoonists get butchered in Paris to shouts of “We have avenged the Prophet!” Greenwald races to his keyboard to castigate the dead, liberal cartoonists for their (nonexistent) bigotry. He allies himself with a group like the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which has ties to the Muslim Brotherhood and works tirelessly to blur the line between legitimate civil rights concerns and theocratic bullying. These are the people who get Ayaan blacklisted from speaking at universities, and Greenwald has publicly stated that there is no group he is prouder to have collaborated with.
According to Greenwald and the rest of the regressive Left, one can criticize religion in general, but any special focus on Islam must be motivated by bigotry or “Islamophobia.” And on that assumption, many of these people think it’s fair to slander and demonize anyone who does focus on Islam—even a true Muslim reformer like Maajid Nawaz. Maajid is a former Islamist, who now runs a counter-extremist think tank in the UK. And yet for merely entering into a dialogue with me about the prospects of spreading secular, liberal values in the Muslim world, he was branded a “native informant” and a “porch monkey” by Greenwald’s colleague at The Intercept, Murtaza Hussain, and a “lapdog” by Reza Aslan’s employee, Nathan Lean. These people are simply desperate to shut down dialogue on what is fast becoming the most important political and moral question of our time. Everything they do in this area is dishonest and destructive.
So, no, I don’t take any of their points to heart. And contrary to what you imply in your question, I don’t offer any “blanket condemnations” of anything or anyone. I speak about the specific consequences of specific ideas, in so far as they are believed. If 68 percent of British Muslims believe that anyone who “insults Islam” should be prosecuted and punished—then when criticizing the disastrous consequences of that idea for the U.K., I’m talking about those 68 percent. If 30 percent want to live under shari’ah, then I’m talking about precisely those people in that context. These are real poll numbers, by the way, and they’re very troubling.
When talking about America’s role in the world, you’ve used the phrase “well-intentioned giant.” Did you coin that or were you borrowing it? And do you really believe that America’s intentions in the world are especially noble? 
No, I was simply commenting on the work of Arundhati Roy, who coined that phrase to disparage U.S. foreign policy. In certain respects, I believe we are a well-intentioned giant—guilty of all the lumbering ineptitude that the image implies.
Do you think that’s true because there’s a difference in terms of the intentions and goals that America pursues in the world, relative to other nation-states? And how might our intentions and goals look to people on the receiving end of our foreign policies?
I’m glad you asked, because many people appear totally confused about this, especially on the Left. Intentions are hugely important. In many cases, intention is the only thing that differentiates a truly evil person (or regime) from one who is a mere victim of circumstance. A surgeon performing an appendectomy is not the same as Jack the Ripper just because he’s cutting another person with a knife—and this remains true even if the patient dies. Needless to say, we make such distinctions in our criminal justice system all the time. The difference between first-degree murder, manslaughter, and a tragic accident is largely a matter of what the defendant intended to do and why.
I understand the importance of intention in that context, but it’s more complicated when you apply that logic to something like the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which I know you’ve written about. You’ve argued that there’s a discernible difference in intentions here. But this conflict, like many others in the world, is asymmetrical. One side has more refined and advanced methods of killing and certain luxuries that the other side doesn’t, and you might say that one side is extreme by virtue of their circumstances. I’m not interested in drawing a moral equivalence. But I am asking if you think these distinctions matter when you’re talking about intentions and goals and tactics in a geopolitical context?

You can read the rest of the interview on the link, which Salon disgustingly tried to decieve its readers by omitting parts.
Typical derisive leftist scum



http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sam-harris-the-salon-interview

Editing someones work to create a the wrong impression isn't right. But as PMW and Camera have done exactly the same thing and have been judged to do so, do you describe them as scum and refuse use them anymore?

Or perhaps your right-wing double-speak underhand double standards prevent you from doing so lol

Smelly's waiting with open arms to welcome his new recruit.

Oh dear more poor excuses and trying to divert from the topic at hand and making further unfounded accusations


Quelle surprise

But no answer.

Hey Smelly, he's on his way, you're in luck!




Make him right at home.

No evidence to back up the unfounded accusations

Quelle surprise.

I've never heard of any news organization or magazine that gives a person being interviewed absolute control over what ends up being published. If Sam wanted that he should just post it on his blog.

Didge wrote:No evidence to back up the unfounded accusations

Quelle surprise.

What evidence do you want?

Judge dismisses credibility of Palestinian Media Watch testimony

An Israeli district court judge metes out scathing criticism of Palestinian Media Watch director Itamar Marcus’s expert witness testimony on incitement in Palestinian media, in a civil case against the PA and its leaders. Marcus’s testimony, Judge Dalia Gano wrote, was incomplete, biased and unworthy of the title “expert witness testimony.”

http://972mag.com/judge-dismisses-credibility-of-palestinian-media-watch-testimony/78900/

EI exclusive: a pro-Israel group’s plan to rewrite history on Wikipedia

A pro-Israel pressure group is orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged.

A series of emails by members and associates of the pro-Israel group CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), provided to The Electronic Intifada (EI), indicate the group is engaged in what one activist termed a “war” on Wikipedia.

https://electronicintifada.net/content/ei-exclusive-pro-israel-groups-plan-rewrite-history-wikipedia/7472

Scum right? Both of them.

Irn Bru wrote:

Didge wrote:No evidence to back up the unfounded accusations

Quelle surprise.

What evidence do you want?

Judge dismisses credibility of Palestinian Media Watch testimony

An Israeli district court judge metes out scathing criticism of Palestinian Media Watch director Itamar Marcus’s expert witness testimony on incitement in Palestinian media, in a civil case against the PA and its leaders. Marcus’s testimony, Judge Dalia Gano wrote, was incomplete, biased and unworthy of the title “expert witness testimony.”

http://972mag.com/judge-dismisses-credibility-of-palestinian-media-watch-testimony/78900/

EI exclusive: a pro-Israel group’s plan to rewrite history on Wikipedia

A pro-Israel pressure group is orchestrating a secret, long-term campaign to infiltrate the popular online encyclopedia Wikipedia to rewrite Palestinian history, pass off crude propaganda as fact, and take over Wikipedia administrative structures to ensure these changes go either undetected or unchallenged.

A series of emails by members and associates of the pro-Israel group CAMERA (Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America), provided to The Electronic Intifada (EI), indicate the group is engaged in what one activist termed a “war” on Wikipedia.

https://electronicintifada.net/content/ei-exclusive-pro-israel-groups-plan-rewrite-history-wikipedia/7472

Scum right? Both of them.

Electric Biased Bullshit hilarious gibberish

The Judge made a fundemental flaw in her summing up one one case where Israel does take seriously as did Hilary clinto of Palestinian media wath.

The Judge in her error claimed the PA would not use the smaller of the medias to use systematic hate, as they would use the biggest. That is used false logic if you were the PA and did not want many to notice a program of hate. She also acknowledge many things viewed promoted were incitement but in her opinion claimed the witness did not take in to account other Palestinian media sources. I agree he should have, which is why she stated he lacked credabity only as a media expert. She certainly did not say his claims of Palestinian incitement were wrong, but true, but it was to what level and if deliberate, which to me she got utterly wrong.

What was not taken into account is what is taught at schools, within the Mosques which is a systematic program of hate directed at Jews, where again it is taught all Israel is occupied. If anything those making the prosecution failed to prepare bettter and the case was hard to prove based on the PA being clever using smaller audiance based media sources. The judge failed to understand most of hate is spread view world of mouth from imans, to parents, to teachers. The media is the mere icing on the cake

he never claimed what evidende produced was false either, she just stated that it was not massive if taking into comparrison the other media sources. So that is not lying or fabricating, so you are very much wrong, try reading what the judge said.


In her verdict, Judge Ganot determined that, “without any doubt, the existence of incitement against Israel and against Jews in the Palestinian media” has been proven. However, she emphasized, “the plaintiffs argue there is a deliberate policy of incitement by the Palestinian Authority, while the defendants deny it.” The judge ultimately decided that a deliberate incitement policy had not been proven.

So again where is the evidence what is posted is lies? Something not proven just means it lacks enough evidence, that is all.

There is none and this is all you have to hinge onto which is weak and does not refute the many aspects backed and taken by authorities like even the US. Then your views here is fundementally flawed and anything since this case has to be reuted by a court of law, since anything since then has not been refuited in a court of law. Typical terrorist supporting low life scum, who backs a group that denies women, homosexuals and Christians equal rights, where trying to deny countless facts as per usual. Like I say they just could not prove it was the Palestinian authority but based on the recent bullshit they have made over the Mosque, there is no doubt in my mind they are behind all the incitement.
.
Again can you discount the fact the US and Hilary clinton took very seriously the claims made by the PMW?

No

So your pathetic attempts to go off only two things fails flat. So can you refute all the evidence they have produced of incitement?
No even the judge agreed this was proven.

The very fact that antisemitism is rife at 93% within the Palestinian territories shows you are nothing more than an antisemitic, which is where the extreme left have taken over from where the Nazi's once were in their hate of the Jews. You expose your racism everyday and your support for such racism. I suggest you take your head firmly out of the sand, but you are not fooling anyone anymore with the racist tripe you promote.
Normally when such a Quisling has been exposed they are offered suicide, but I fear even if we were to give you a gun to blow out your own brains out, a full magazine fired through the mouth would miss that tiny tiny excuse for a brain you have by a mile. So we will just have to settle for exposing you for the racist little runt that you are.