freedom and reason

“If we have to use force, it is because we are America. We are the indispensable nation. West and tall. We see further into the future.” —Madeleine Albright, Secretary of State (1998)

This is the same person who said at a Clinton campaign event, “There’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other.” She later apologized for the remark.

Actually, she did not apologize for the remark, which she admits to having “uttered a thousand times to applause,” but instead apologized for using it in the context of a Clinton campaign event. “I absolutely believe what I said, that women should help one another,” she explained in an op-ed for the NYTimes.

But this retraction raises a very serious question, namely why she has not apologized for her role in causing the deaths of half a million women and children in Iraq. Does she still believe, as she told Lesley Stahl on 60 minutes (in 2001), that “the price was worth it”?

That’s the trouble with liberals. Noam Chomsky crystalized it well in his notorious debate (on Firing Line in 1969) with William F. Buckley:

“A very, in a sense, terrifying aspect of our society, and other societies, is the equanimity and the detachment with which sane, reasonable, sensible people can observe such events. I think that’s more terrifying than the occasional Hitler or LeMay or other that crops up. These people would not be able to operate were it not for this apathy and equanimity. And therefore I think that it’s, in some sense, the sane and reasonable and tolerant people who share a very serious burden of guilt that they very easily throw on the shoulders of others who seem more extreme and violent.”

Chomsky’s point is essentially a restatement of C. Wright Mills observation in The Causes of World War Three (1959):

“The atrocities of The Fourth Epoch are committed by men as “functions” of a rational social machinery – men possessed by an abstracted view that hides from them the humanity of their victims and as well their own humanity. The moral insensibility of our times was made dramatic by the Nazis, but is not the same lack of human morality revealed by the atomic bombing of the peoples of Hiroshima and Nagasaki? And did it not prevail, too, among fighter pilots in Korea, with their petroleum-jelly broiling of children and women and men? Auschwitz and Hiroshima – are they not equally features of the highly rational moral-insensibility of The Fourth Epoch? And is not this lack of moral sensibility raised to a higher and technically more adequate level among the brisk generals and gentle scientists who are now rationally – and absurdly – planning the weapons and the strategy of the third world war? These actions are not necessarily sadistic; they are merely businesslike; they are not emotional at all; they are efficient, rational, technically clean-cut. They are inhuman acts because they are impersonal.”

Update: May 21, 2024. I wrote this essay on the cusp of my awakening. The spirit is correct here but the language used reflects socialization in the woke factory of higher education. I am going to critique this essay from my present state of mind.

We are born without any labels. Depending on when and where a person is born, a number of labels are assigned. I did not choose to be white. I did not choose to be a boy (and, now, a man). I did not choose to be heterosexual. I did not choose to be an American. All of these labels represent historically-variable and socially-constructed things that, taken together, comprise identity. The identity is imposed and learned. There is nothing essential about these categories. They are, nonetheless, social facts.

I could emphasize the labels assigned to me and embrace an identity that I did not choose. If I embrace my white heterosexual male identity, and pursue this as a politics, then I become racist, sexist, and heterosexist person. Yet, as a person who is forced to wear the white heterosexual man label whether I embrace it or not, I am still marked as an oppressor. I must take the blame for something I did not choose to be. If I attempt to refuse to wear the label, then I am denying my privilege. Thus, I am not even allowed to complain about this situation, because to do so is an expression of privilege. 

However, I am not stuck on the horns of a dilemma. I can choose to be an person who criticizes and struggles against the oppressive structures that have made me a white heterosexual man. This is morally compelling because these are the same structures that make a person a black homosexual woman, with all the forms of oppression that come with those labels. I can recognize, to take one of those labels, that we do not live in a colorblind society while, at same time, believe that it would be desirable to live in a society where color labels are no longer applied and carry no meaning except as facts in history books.

I have come to wonder whether those who are oppressed by the imposed categories of a multilayered system of oppression are actually pursuing radical politics by embracing the labels assigned to them and retreating into groups based on them. I understand why Martin Luther King, Jr., in combating the psychological trauma of white supremacy, told children that their skin was beautiful. But was King seeking to reify the prevailing racial categories and build a new society based on the color differences the oppressor originally developed to maintain the capitalist order? No. Clearly he wasn’t. So why are others?

Am I allowed the observation that none of these labels are essential and to express a desire for a world in which there are no labels? Or am I making an error in thinking this is, or for wanting it to be possible? If the latter, what is my error?

Socialists, feminists, and civil rights activists challenged class, gender, and race oppression in the 20th century. Engagement with these radical forces by the defenders of the status quo nonetheless led to substantial gains for members of historically exploited and oppressed groups. Millions escaped poverty. Workplaces and commodities were made safer. Black Americans ate and voted alongside white Americans. And women controlled their bodies.

By the 1970s, capitalist elites had moved determinatively to stop this progress. Harvard professor Samuel Huntington typified ruling class concerns when, in his contribution to The Crisis of Democracy, a collection of essays organized by David Rockefeller’s Trilateral Commission, he decried the “democratic challenge to authority.”

A conscious strategy of suppressing worker rights and globalizing production and markets weakened the organizations of labor. Conservative cultural and religious identity soothed and substituted for the loss of political power and and cultural prestige. Meanwhile, multiculturalism, promoting diversity and tolerance in place of equality and liberty, fractured the struggle for gender and racial justice among the younger generation.

As a consequence, radical politics, which could, on the basis of an analysis of social structure, organize workers across gender and racial lines, has seen its replacement by an identity politics premised on the notion that historical antagonisms are organic and essential to humanity, that there is, moreover, a group-based consciousness inaccessible to those who are not authentically members of that group (group membership to be determined by cultural signs and gatekeepers), and that, therefore, rights are to be in part determined on the basis of group association and identification. The result of these developments is a mode of politics that, while appearing progressive, undermines the politics of class struggle that is the right of labor.

At the core of multiculturalism lies a confusion about democracy, freedom, and human rights. Educated in a milieu of moral relativism, a generation has come to believe that freedom and equality are based not on one’s objective social position and right to personal freedom, but rather determined by the degree to which a person is permitted to express their ethnic, racial, or religious identity in an uncritical way. In this view, identity functions to efface its socially-constructed character. As ideology, it dissimulates the forms of exploitation and oppression that exist within its traditions.

For example, religious-based oppression, such as the Islamic veil, representing the imposition of modesty and gender roles in Islam, is redefined not only as a right women born under Islam are free to embrace, but as a symbol of gender empowerment. This redefinition of the situation of women under Islam finds young American women expressing solidarity with Muslim women in the standard cultural appreciation format of taking a day to experience the exotic. “World Hijab Day” stands as a protest against “Islamophobia.” In this view of things, tolerance of an unreasonable tradition becomes required to be a reasonable person. In Europe, where the situation is worse, women are warned by their governments to avoid arousing Muslim men if they wish to remain unmolested.

This situation has produced a popular understanding of political struggle as polarized between, on the one side, younger workers and students, devoted to diversity, globalism, and tolerance as hallmarks of freedom and equality and, on the other side, older workers, disproportionately white, who, screwed by globalization and the neoliberal restructuring of their republics, express an economic nationalism that is sometimes accompanied by white racial, super-patriotic, and conservative Christian sentiments. Their desire for democratic control over their life chances thus becomes associated with racism and xenophobia. It is said that it is better to let the technocrats handle such matters as politics and economics. The disempowering of the working class is thus reinforced. 

The result of this spectacular ideological achievement is that the democratic spirit that desires emancipation from economic exploitation, and from racial and religious group determination, is not merely marginalized, but conflated with the falsely-conscious politics of white working class conservatism. What is more, by effectively neutralizing class struggle and consciousness through the strategy of multicultural programming, the globalists have enlisted young Americans and Europeans in the neoliberal project that is deepening economic insecurity and entrenching oppressive and divisive cultural and religious systems of control.

Thus the natural allies to a renewal of the socialist project, or even to return to social democracy, side with unelected global elites. They take their side while characterizing working class anxieties as expressions of bigotry, leaving the political ordering of the latter to charismatic reactionary who misdirects the fractured masses.

Does it ever occur to folks that Noam Chomsky’s vote-for-the-Democrat-in-states-that-matter-because-the-Republican-is-worse advice means that the professor is telling us to vote for Democrats who are worse than the Republicans that he told us we had to vote against in a previous election cycle? If one were to consistently follow Chomsky’s logic, then it’s conceivable that Trump would be a reasonable choice as long as a candidate could be found who can be portrayed as worse than Trump—a death spiral not inconceivable given the road we’re on.

Worried about the popular state of the lesser-of-two-evils rhetoric, John Halle (through an email conversation with Noam Chomsky, it seems) has enlisted the professor in an attempt on Halle’s blog to explain the lesser-of-two-evils argument to the ignorant masses who still don’t get it: An Eight Point Brief for LEV (Lesser Evil Voting) Because so much is at stake, and because Chomsky has enchanted so many people, I wade into this mess of an argument. (Note: “Professor Chomsky requests that he not be contacted with responses to this piece.”)

“1) Voting should not be viewed as a form of personal self-expression or moral judgement directed in retaliation towards major party candidates who fail to reflect our values, or of a corrupt system designed to limit choices to those acceptable to corporate elites.”

Note the negative construction of the function of voting. It is constructed in this way because the authors are defending a position that is rapidly losing its currency. Let’s make voting a positive action: Voting is an expression of moral judgment and political action concerning policies and legislation that reflect our aspirations, interests, and values. That includes reforming the corrupt system designed to limit choices to those primarily beneficial to corporate elites. In order to reform the system, votes should be cast for politicians other than establishment figure who have an interest in maintaining the status quo. One-person-one-vote is by definition an act of personal self-expression, but it also an expression of solidarity with ideas and with people who share those ideas. Thus Halle and Chomsky’s first point fails as soon as the character and purpose of voting is clarified. 

“2) The exclusive consequence of the act of voting in 2016 will be (if in a contested ‘swing state’) to marginally increase or decrease the chance of one of the major party candidates winning.”

False dilemma. Halle and Chomsky are seeking a self-seal prophecy by attempting to convince voters that there are only two choices: vote for Clinton or vote for Trump by not voting for Clinton. There are other consequences to the act of voting in 2016. The act of withdrawing consent from the two-party corporate-run electoral system can have an effect if enough people choose that action. Failure to pursue alternative action means that you have participated in a way that you hope will result in a Clinton presidency. And while the character of a Trump presidency is uncertain—as of right now we have the bluster of a publicity-seeking entertainer with a history of support for liberal policies trying to appeal to conservatives (or trying to throw the election for Hillary)—the character of a Clinton presidency is much less uncertain. We’ve heard the rhetoric that this election is about life and death. Indeed. Ask the survivors in Libya and Syria.

“3) One of these candidates, Trump… [a bunch of stuff Trump has said that sounds scary to liberals and progressives].” 

I could write a paragraph that would make Hillary Clinton much more of a monster than Trump and all I would need to do is present the facts of her speech and her record. For example, we are told, on the basis of his current rhetoric, that Trump is a racist so we must vote for Hillary. But arguing that black youth are “super predators” with “no conscience, no empathy” who society needs to “bring to heel” is racist speech with no equal. Moreover, it is racist speech made in support of a draconian crime bill that expanded the circular state and damaged the lives of millions of people. Black men represent less than 6 percent of the US population. By the end of Clinton’s first term as president, more than 50 percent of prison inmates were black men. Now multiply that example several times and spread it around the world. Hillary Clinton is the choice of Wall Street, the carceral-surveillance state, and the military-industrial complex.

“4) The suffering which these and other similarly extremist policies and attitudes will impose on marginalized and already oppressed populations has a high probability of being significantly greater than that which will result from a Clinton presidency.”

What evidence is there that indicates even a marginal probability that suffering under Trump will be significantly greater than under Clinton? It’s not there. What is more, not only will suffering be great under Clinton, but she will have the support of liberals in the New Democrat project to entrench and expand the neoliberal agenda. Social Security and Medicare are at stake here. More war and surveillance will be the consequence of choosing Clinton. Mid-term elections under Clinton will likely increase conservative Republican presence in the House and Senate. If a President Trump were to attempt the things Clinton is almost certain to pursue if president, liberals will rebel. The mid-term elections would like not be kind to Republicans. It is possible that suffering under a Clinton presidency will not be as acute as it might be under a Trump presidency, but the harm done in a Clinton presidency will be deeper and longer lasting than that under a Trump presidency. Halle and Chomsky are pleading with people to add to the momentum of the evil spiral.

“5) 4) should constitute sufficient basis to voting for Clinton where a vote is potentially consequential-namely, in a contested, ‘swing’ state.”  

But, as we have seen, 4) is problematic. Therefore 5) is problematic. Moreover, 5), even if 4) were accepted, does not constitute a sufficient basis to vote for Clinton under these circumstances because of what I pointed on in my response to 1). 

“6) However, the left should also recognize that, should Trump win based on its failure to support Clinton, it will repeatedly face the accusation (based in fact), that it lacks concern for those sure to be most victimized by a Trump administration.”

Who will repeatedly make this accusation? Halle and Chomsky, among others. These are the people who want to see Democrats remain in power. We’re being told that if Trump wins because we voted on the basis of my statement concerning the reason for voting, then it’s our fault if people suffer. But if a Trump presidency is as bad as Halle and Chomsky think it will be, then it will be Trump’s fault along all the people who voted for him. However, those who choose the right-wing Democratic candidate (Clinton) instead of the progressive Green Party nominee (Jill Stein) will have used their political agency to perpetuate the status quo.  The continuation of the right-wing populism that is plaguing our nation will be the consequence of voting for Clinton.

“7) Often this charge will emanate from establishment operatives who will use it as a bad faith justification for defeating challenges to corporate hegemony either in the Democratic Party or outside of it. They will ensure that it will be widely circulated in mainstream media channels with the result that many of those who would otherwise be sympathetic to a left challenge will find it a convincing reason to maintain their ties with the political establishment rather than breaking with it, as they must.”

This expectation is contradicted by recent history, where the attempt to saddle the candidacy of Ralph Nader with horrors of the Bush presidency was followed by the highly-successful campaign of an insurgent progressive candidate (Bernie Sanders) and millions of voters who are now vowing to vote against the establishment candidate of the Democratic Party.

“8) Conclusion: by dismissing a ‘lesser evil’ electoral logic and thereby increasing the potential for Clinton’s defeat the left will undermine what should be at the core of what it claims to be attempting to achieve.”

This does not follow. Not seeing Trump elected is not the core of what the left is attempting to achieve by refusing to vote for Clinton. That would constitute a miserable political core. At its core, the movement to withdraw consent from the New Democrat direction is about changing the character of the game the ruling class has been playing with mass action. In practical terms, increasing the potential for Clinton’s defeat erodes confidence in the two-party system and thus represent an investment in the future of progressive politics. Failure to withdraw consent is an act continuing the neoliberal dismantling of democracy. 

The argument Halle and Chomsky are pushing is the type of rationalization generated within the narrow parameters of the rational choice model that their utilitarianism suggests. It is not an argument for a pragmatic political strategy of dismantling the two-party ideology that currently benefits the interests of the ruling class in order to build a mass-based political party representing the interests of working families. 

The majority of voters are neither Democrat or Republican. Tens of millions of voters stay home because neither of the major party candidates represent their aspirations, interests, and values, and they have been persuaded by the public education system and corporate media, buttressed by the LEV crowd, that there are only two parties to vote for. Until the left starts raising the profile of third party candidates, these tens of millions of people will continue to sit home on election day, and a minority of highly motivated voters will cast their votes to continue the status quo. 

“Although the logic behind lesser evilism is impeccable, the principle seldom applies directly in real world circumstances. In political contexts especially, there are too many complicating factors, and there is too much indeterminacy.” The Logic of Lesser Evilism

Moreover, however impeccable we regard the logic in abstract form, the lesser evils argument restricts the argument to one presidential cycle. It does not consider, as I did above, the long-term consequences of the vote. It is only concerned with making sure that Trump is not elected. And this is a concern for the Democratic Party, not for working class voters.

The following account is fictional.

A devoted Christian man, Bobby Blarns, pledging allegiance to the Ku Klux Klan, a Protestant sect determined to restore traditional Christian values to American society, perpetrated a mass murder at an black community center. Forty-nine black people are dead.

You might suppose that his allegiance to the KKK tells us something about the motive behind the shooting or that, at least, we might consider the possibility. But we are told by politicians and pundits that, on the contrary, we must resist wondering whether belief and association had anything to do with the shootings. The media decries “Christophobia” at the suggestion that the shooter’s ideological commitments had anything to do with his crime. There is nothing in the Judeo-Christian tradition, the politicians tell us, that would cause anybody to kill members of another group. Indeed, Christianity is a “religion of peace.” And, although the KKK claimed responsibility for the attack, it’s unclear whether Blarns was really associated with that organization.

Make nothing of the shooting of blacks at an office party last year by a devoted Christian couple. Or that time when Christians knocked down those skyscrapers killing nearly 3,000 people. Or that time a Christian shot up military recruitment facility killing four recruiters. Or that time a Christian soldier killed 13 people and wounded 30 others at an Army base while shouting: “Jesus is the way and the truth and the light!” Or all the abortion clinic bombings and shootings at the hands of Christians. Only to Christophobes do these events suggest pattern and cause. Tolerant and reasonable people know better.

Back to the real world.

We should be thankful that Christians in the United States are not shooting up gay bars and knocking down skyscrapers. At the same time, we should acknowledge what lies behind abortion clinic bombings: religious zealotry. We must recognize that Christian terrorism does exist. But we also must recognize that it pales in comparison to Islamic terrorism.

But I have to wonder: if Christian terrorism were on the scale of Islamic terrorism, would anyone doubt for a moment that progressives would be out in force calling it what it is and rightly condemning it?

Since 1990, there have been eleven fatalities in attacks on abortion clinics or abortion doctors, attacks clearly motivated by the Christian teaching that abortion is murder. Progressives had no problem identifying the problem: Christian zealotry. Muslims Syed Farook and Tashfeed Malik killed fourteen people at an office party last year. Muslim Omar Mateen killed 49 people at a gay bar this year. Both attacks were motivated by Islamist teachings. Yet we are told to avoid blaming their belief system for these attacks.

When I was out there naming Christian doctrine as a motive in the abortion clinic attacks, nobody complained. Nobody around me was going on about my “Christophobia.” I didn’t once hear that accusation. But when Muslims motivated by Islam six times more people in just the last two years (and since 1990, the toll from Muslim terrorism exceeds 3000 persons—and that’s just in the United States) those who identify a motive are accused of “Islamophobia” for suggesting that an ideology is playing a role in terrorist violence.

These are the same people who believe a New York Businessman taking about restricting immigration from countries with a history of terrorism is “fascism,” but bombing the actual fuck out of Muslim countries in Yemen, Libya, and Syria represents the work of a “successful and scandal-free president.” The same people who claim to stand up for women, homosexuals, and other oppressed groups, but who then wear the symbol of oppressive modesty in solidarity with a totalitarian culture.

I am a person of the left, a socialist who believes in gender and racial equality and who opposes religious oppression. It’s a lonely place to be these days.

I don’t know anybody who was killed in Orlando, but they were fellow Americans, most of them were gay, and they were systematically murdered by a Muslim man professing jihad and allegiance to a terrorist organization that orders itself in a strictly Koranic fashion, which took credit for the massacre. I don’t know any of the people who were killed by Muslims in San Bernardino, either, but they were fellow human beings, and they deserve to have the cause of their deaths honestly identified without the truth-tellers suffering charges of scapegoating and bigotry. And New York City. I count as a personal friend not a single one of the nearly 3,000 persons who died because of Muslim terrorists hijacked plans and flew them into buildings on 9-11. I did not know them. But I know they had friends. Because humans do. And they had family. Children. Dreams unfulfilled.

So you have not been directly affected by a Muslim (that you are aware of). No Muslim ever called you faggot (I have heard this rationalization). But you can no longer be safe because you don’t live in a Muslim country where you would face the death penalty for being gay. Muslim attacks on US soil mean that you can no longer count on a vast ocean to protect you from Islam in action. It’s here now. The barbarians are inside the gates.

I had somebody ask me, “Are you this passionate about the queer people who get killed by white people every day?” White people? How did race get into the conversation? “White Christians have tried to pass over 200 anti-gay/trans laws in my country.” Homophobia is a real problem in the black Christian community, too, pushed by the black Churches. But not just black Christians. Black Muslims push homophobia, as well.  That a discussion concerning the religious oppression of and violence towards homosexuals gets turned to a discussion about race tells us that there is an ideological barrier to having honest and rational discussions about the problem of hateful and divisive ideology. Why say “white Christians”? Why not just say Christians have tried to pass anti-gay/trans laws? And you do know that the majority of Muslims in the United States are white? 

Please tell me about the time a Christian man walked into a gay bar in the United States and killed 49 people while shouting “God is great!” When did Christians for religious reasons hurl gay men from towers on a regular basis in the United States? That hasn’t happened in my life time. The notion that there is a reasonable equivalency at present is strained. I grew up in the South. In the Church of Christ. My atheism was difficult for those around me to process. That made life somewhat uncomfortable. My father and mother’s work in the civil rights struggle did not sit right with the white Christian nationalists at all (and here whiteness is relevant). So we were kicked out of the church. And out of the preacher’s house. Into a rain storm.

The horror of 9-11 is incomparable to those experiences. I would think myself far too important if I believed that my suffering – the childhood trauma of being ejected from the only home I had ever known by a gang of angry Christian men with crewcuts and ax handles – could compare to knowing that one’s escape from death was blocked by the fiery wreckage of a passenger plane flown by men who, as they made their heroic contribution to jihad, shouted, in Islam’s sacred tongue, “God is great!” Your only options to burn to death or jump to your demise. Maybe somebody would hold your hand on the way down.

Christians have bombed abortion clinics and shot doctors and others. It’s true. It’s also true that their motives came from Christian teachings about the “horrors” of abortion. But adding up all the victims of Christianism over the last two decades only gets us one-fifth of the way to the total number slain by Omar Mateen in a single night. In a single gay bar in Orlando. Does Christian homophobia excuse Islamic homophobia? I condemn laws spawned by Judeo-Christian ideology. But we are talking about Islam, an ideology that criminalizes homosexuality and prescribes the death penalty for it. Not in ancient times. Now.

If you are not prepared to identify Islam’s contribution to homophobia among its followers, how will you be able to identify the source of homophobia among Christians who kill gays? This double standard is not merely annoying. It’s deadly. Where is the sense of proportion? The awareness of world and history? Despite the large percentage of Christians in the United States, the country still managed to win gay marriage in all 50 states. I have friends and relatives and colleagues who can get married now – and many of them have! Were the United States governed by sharia, even partly influenced by it, does anybody seriously believe gay marriage could happen? Do readers know the percentage of Muslims in Islamic countries who believe homosexuality is moral? At best 1-2 percent. How about Muslims living in Britain? A scientific poll could not find a single British Muslim who believes homosexuality is moral. Religious belief is something one carries around with him. In contrast, more than half of Christians in the US believe homosexuality is morally acceptable.

Christianity has progressed on this issue. Islam hasn’t. Islam abhors homosexuality. Islamic law recommends death for gays. Islam is the source of homophobia in the Muslim world and Muslim communities across the West. Islamic belief licenses ISIS to throw gay men from towers.

I don’t know any of ISIS’s gay victims. But they’re human beings and I mourn for them. I must tell the truth about what and who murdered them.

Mohammed A. Malik, who attended the same mosque with Omar Mateen, reported him to the FBI. The FBI dropped the ball. Malik met Mateen at a Iftar dinner. He watched Mateen break his Ramadan fast with a protein shake. They became friends.

In 2014, a man from their Mosque, Moner Mohammad Abu-Salha, became the first American-born suicide bomber, driving a truck full of explosives into a government office in Syria. Abu-Salsa was a happy person, so nobody thought he would be a terrorist. Mateen had the dark outlook, but Malik still didn’t believe he was capable of violence.

Abu-Salsa was a fan of the lectures of Anwar al-Awlaki, the same Yemen-based imam who influenced the Fort Hood shooter. In 2009, Nidal Hasan perpetrated what apologists describe as a case of “work place violence.”

Mateen also watched the video lectures and told Malik that they were “powerful.” This was why Malik turned him in to the FBI.

In an op-ed for The Washington Post, Malik wants people to know that his community abhors hate. The imam at the mosque where he, Mateen, and Abu-Salsa studied Islam did not preach violence or hatred, he assures his readers.

But there is a deeper question we need to address. What did Mateen and Abu-Salsa learn in that mosque, in their community, in their culture, that provided the context in which the videos of Anwar al-Awlaki were circulated? What is in the environment that made watching them such a powerful experience that two members of community would go on to commit horrific acts of terrorism? Ideas don’t drop out of the sky. Why don’t al-Awlaki’s videos move me? Why do they scare me instead?

German antisemitism created a context in which Nazism could thrive. Without a fertile ground of Christian conservative-nationalist ideology, with its hateful attitudes towards gays and Jews and women, it would not have been possible for Nazism to take hold of so many people. The same is true for white supremacy and Christianity in the United States.

When people grow up in a culture rooted in warped conceptions of justice, morality, sexuality, gender relations, etc., they are more susceptible to extremist outgrowths of the underlying ideology. It is not only easier to groom them for terrorist operations, but they are at a greater risk of “self-radicalizing,” an unfortunate term for a very real phenomenon.

We saw this with Dylann Roof, who shot several people at a black church in South Carolina. The phenomenon is not exclusive to the Muslim world. Extremism and terrorism are not random or happenstance. They are the result of the availability of extremist directions associated with mainstream religious, conservative, and nationalist ideologies in a person’s environment.

We can draw a least two conclusions from Malik’s testimonial, the release of the transcripts from the night of the shooting (finally released unredacted), and the many other facts in this case. First, we can put to bed the question of whether the shooter was motivated by Islamic belief. Omar Mateen’s motive is clear. He was an Islamic soldier in the project to establish a caliphate. The Islamic State has declared war on the West and Malik answered the call. To be sure, Bush and Obama (and Clinton as Secretary of State) helped create the power vacuum that allowed this poisonous ideology to spread (and maybe that is what they wanted), but getting hung up about the past isn’t going to protect women, homosexuals, atheists, and other despised groups today and tomorrow. The West is going to have to take serious steps to defend its security and its ideals and these steps are going to have to reckon with the ideology of Islam.

Second, we can see the importance of advancing the critique of religion generally and of Islam particularly. Extremist notions do not occur without the support of deeper and more fundamental notions of right and wrong. Islam creates and supports profoundly immoral and unjust system of social relations. Islamic law codes and penalties are barbaric. There is nothing in any religion that necessarily provides the basis for an adequate morality.  Religion exists – like white supremacy – to divide the population and provide justifications or short-circuiting universal moral actions. Islam is the religious ideology that is at present causing the most trouble in the world.

It is not just that we can no longer allow a hateful ideology to hide behind religion. We have to understand that this is what religion is: a system that gives people the motive to divide, hate, and oppress. Religious people who act violently are not appealing to religion to cover for actions spawned by some other cause. Religion causes their actions. It is not just violence that makes religious thought a problem. We can get distracted by extremism. It’s the normal character of the religion itself that is most objectionable.

A lot of opposition to Islam comes from a religious place. For many Christians, Islam is the rival religion. Christians who see it this way don’t really care about the basic moral character of Islam because their beliefs have the same essence: the subordination of women, fear and loathing of homosexuals, the promise of eternal live for slavish devotion to a deity, and the threat of eternal damnation for denying the truth of myth. What they care about is that there is a competitor horning in on their business. They fear sharia not because theocracy is against their beliefs, but because sharia means law based on Islamic value and not on Biblical values.

It is crucial to differentiate between opposition to Islam from religious corners and opposition to Islam from a principled stance against oppressive and divisive ideologies. My opposition to Islam flows not from any religious point of view (I am an atheist), but from my opposition to any ideology with the political and “moral” character of Islam. From the standpoint of secular humanism, a moral person opposes patriarchy, misogyny, homophobia and heterosexism. And reason demands that any ideology that promises eternal life for slavish devotion to a deity or eternal damnation for denying the truth of a lie should be condemned. Any human progress made while wearing the chains of irrational belief can only be accidental. And history proves these shackles retard the development of a just society. Freedom and democracy thrive where these views and views like them have been suppressed.

We need to speak about this matter frankly. Religious ideology does not get a pass because of the appeal to the spiritual and claims about the supernatural. This rationalization obscures the essence of theism and tricks people into supporting truly vile beliefs. Islam falls within the category of ideologies that includes Nazism – and not merely in general form. Indeed, some of the statements about Jews in the Koran foreshadow the antisemitism that would later burn through Europe. For example, passage 4.161 of Koran, “…their taking usury though indeed they were forbidden it and their devouring the property of people falsely, and We have prepared for the unbelievers from among them a painful chastisement” casts Jews as materialists not unlike that characterization of Jews made by Hitler in Mein Kampf. Elsewhere in the Koran, in a fashion similar to the Catholic Church, Jews are condemned for not recognizing the Messiah (Jesus or Isa in the Muslim faith) and the last prophet (Muhammad). And, generally, Islam is like Nazism in the desire to establish a New Order based on idealist notions under which all people shall exist and be of the same mind and spirit.

Throughout my life, I have been more critical of the Judeo-Christian tradition than I have been of Islam. The imbalance in criticisms of Islam and of Christianity has been the product of my experiences. For most of my life, Islam had no impact on me and I did not really know about the situation of women and homosexuals under Islamic rule. The consequences of religion in my world were exclusively the result of Christian teachings and attitudes. I never hesitated to pin the blame for abortion clinic bombings and the murder of physicians and staff providing abortion services on the Christian teaching that abortion involves the murder of innocent life (still don’t). I recognized that anti-homosexual sentiment in my culture is largely the product of Judeo-Christian teachings that homosexuality is sinful. My desire is to see Christianity ideology chucked onto the same scrapheap as the other defunct religious systems (although the myths are interesting, so we should keep the good stories as we did with Greek and Norse mythology).

In the meantime, I have learned much about the world, and ideas and practices from other parts of the world have been increasingly affecting me and those around me. I have learned about the situation of women and gays in the Islamic world. I am horrified by what I have learned. Islam’s view of gender and sexual relations is seriously warped. And the problem of violence in the name of Islam is now at my doorstep. I was in denial following 9-11, when Islamic terrorists murdered more than 3,000 people, focusing on the behavior of the United States and other Western powers in creating the context in which Islamism could spread and thrive (still true), instead of fully recognizing the proselytizing character of Islam and the political ambitions of Islamists, who represents a significant proportion of the Muslim population. Moreover, whereas most Muslims are not involved in jihadism, I am completely unconvinced that most would resist the Islamization of the political system in which they live. Most Muslim-majority countries adopt various aspects of sharia already, ranging from some to all. Some is intolerable. All is tyranny. Some of these countries even incorporate hudud crimes, where the penalty (stoning, beheading, amputation, flogging) is fixed by Islamic law.

I would be a hypocrite if I did not carry the same capacity for judgment to Islam that I have carried to Christianity. That would make me prejudiced towards Christianity. I would be dishonest if I failed to admit that, at this point in world history, Islam is much worse than Christianity in violating civil and human rights. The progress that, first the Jews, and then the Christians have made over many centuries in appreciating secular values and civil rule (condemned as materialism by idealists and spiritualists) has largely escaped the Muslim world. Indeed, much of the Muslim world has been regressing. To be sure, there is still a long ways to go for Christianity. Too many Christians stubbornly cling to anti-homosexual sentiment and the desire to subordinate of women. But to deny progress in one and regression in the other would be to ignore history. And to fail to say these things out of some misguided notion of tolerance or ecumenical desire would be irresponsible.

At a dinner party several years ago, in a discussion about the Murfreesboro Islamic Culture Center (i.e. mosque), I argued that the appearance of mosques in America is a good thing because it helped break up Christian hegemony. That argument was in error. The appearance of Islam in America has not weakened Christianity but has turned up the ecumenical spirit that contribute to the persistence of religious influence in my life. Rather than tolerating oppressive and divisive ideology, a secular country should strive to diminish and eliminate the sources of religious sentiment, both in marginalizing the institution of religion itself and by ameliorating the conditions that cause people to turn to superstition and the supernatural. But the idea that this critique is an example of religious bigotry is absurd. The critique does not hail from a religious standpoint. Moreover, the notion that criticizing and even condemning hateful, divisive, or oppressive ideology is any form of bigotry would mean that opposition to Nazism would be a form of bigotry. That is obviously preposterous on its face.

Some have been wondering why Dylann Roof was charged with hate crimes instead of terrorism for his action in a black church in South Carolina. While he was motivated by a hateful ideology, he had not pledged allegiance to any terrorist group nor did any terrorist group claim responsibility for his actions (several hate groups did publicly agree with his motive while denouncing his actions). Rather than going to court with a problematic terrorism charge, prosecutors pursued hate crime charges. They went with the slam dunk case.

The Roof case could have gone either way. As a criminologist, I would probably classify it as a case of lone wolf terrorism. In the Anders Breivik case in Norway, with similarities to the Roof case that are missing in the Mateen case, the prosecution settled on terrorism charges (after considering crimes against humanity and treason). Breivik is considered exemplary of lone wolf terrorism. However, many other mass murders by young white men are missing the elements found in the Roof and Breivik cases and are not cases of terrorism and only some of them are hate crimes. 

Throwing up pictures of young white men, some with obvious mental health issues, most unaffiliated with terrorist organizations and instead motivated by idiosyncratic reasons, and then claiming there is a double standard in how the media and law enforcement treat Islamic terrorism over against other forms of mass murder, will not do as an argument against the practice of properly identifying Islamic terrorism. Both Roof and Breivik’s crimes were motivated by a hateful and divisive ideology. Any attempt to reduce the likelihood of future crimes based on these ideologies that do not confront the ideologies themselves are not part of a comprehensive program to responsibly deal with the threat. This is how we must think about Islamic terrorism. 

Governments generally define terrorism as the use of violence and intimidation in the pursuit of political aims by subnational groups (some criminologists include states in that definition). The massacre in Orlando was an act of terrorism because Mateen pledged allegiance to ISIS and ISIS claimed responsibility for Mateen’s action.

Some have been wondering why Dylann Roof was charged with hate crimes instead of terrorism for his action in a black church in South Carolina. While he was motivated by a hateful ideology, he had not pledged allegiance to any terrorist group nor did any terrorist group claim responsibility for his actions (several hate groups did publicly agree with his motive while denouncing his method). Roof pledged allegiance to an idea not an organization. Rather than going to court with a problematic terrorism charge, prosecutors pursued hate crime charges. They went with the slam dunk case. Now the question is whether Roof will spend his life in prison or be executed. 

The Roof case could have gone either way. As a criminologist, I would probably classify it as a case of lone wolf terrorism. In the Anders Breivik case in Norway, with similarities to the Roof case that are missing in the Mateen case, the prosecution settled on terrorism charges (after considering crimes against humanity and treason). Breivik is considered exemplary of lone wolf terrorism. However, many other mass murders by young white men are missing the elements found in the Roof and Breivik cases and are not cases of terrorism and only some of them are hate crimes. 

Throwing up pictures of young white men, some with obvious mental health issues, most unaffiliated with terrorist organizations and instead motivated by idiosyncratic reasons, and then claiming there is a double standard in how the media and law enforcement treat Islamic terrorism over against other forms of mass murder, will not do as an argument against the practice of properly identifying Islamic terrorism. Both Roof and Breivik’s crimes were motivated by a hateful and divisive ideology. Any attempt to reduce the likelihood of future crimes based on these ideologies that do not confront the ideologies themselves are not part of a comprehensive program to responsibly deal with the threat. This is how we must think about Islamic terrorism. 

Xenophobia (irrational fear and loathing of foreigners/others), homophobia (irrational fear and loathing of gays and lesbians), negrophobia (irrational fear and loathing of blacks), and other analogous psychological-level phenomena are not randomly, naturally, or universally occurring phenomena. They are the result of socialization and indoctrination in systems of beliefs and institutional arrangements with a particular historical and cultural character.

The teacher of negrophobia is the ideology of white supremacy, a system of beliefs and institutional arrangements that sort people into superior and inferior races, with whites on top and blacks on bottom. No child is born negrophobic. The child is taught to fear and loathe black people. Sometimes a child even learns the abstract content of the ideological system and embraces the institutional arrangements that taught him to be negrophobic.

We have been dealing with the problem of negrophobia not by mystifying its causes, but by criticizing and, in some cases, eliminating the ideology and institutions that create and sustain it. We have made a lot of progress in this area by dealing with the problem forthrightly and rationally.

Those who have been socialized to believe that criticism of religion is analogous to racial and other prejudices have tried to deal with the reality of the Orlando massacre by denying its cause. In a textbook example of cognitive dissonance, they desperately seek to disassociate the shooter’s homophobia from its source, namely Islam. The problem, they rationalize, is not Islam, but homophobia. For some it is more than that. Black Lives Matter release a statement: “Despite the media’s framing of this as a terrorist attack, we are very clear that this terror is completely homegrown, born from the anti-Black white supremacy, patriarchy and homophobia of the conservative right and of those who would use religious extremism as a weapon to gain power for the few and take power from the rest.” BLM explained the shooting as “the product of a long history of colonialism, including state and vigilante violence.” Warning that forces were conspiring to “blame Muslim communities,” BLM identified the enemy as “the four threats of white supremacy, patriarchy, capitalism, and militarism.” Everything but religion. 

This rhetoric mystifies the cause. But here is the scientific path to understanding the situation: Ideas people have about the world come from systems of ideas and prevailing institutions they encounter. To explain homophobia, we have to ask ourselves, “What is the ideology and institution that sorts people by sexual orientation and judges some righteous and others wicked?” Islam sorts people by sexual orientation and judges some types of activities and relationships righteous and others wicked.

When it is objected that there are Christian homophobes, this only strengthens the point I am making, as well as exposes political correctness as selective. It also, hopefully, suggests that, with a bit more work, the truth may be within grasp. Indeed, the Judeo-Christian tradition also sorts people by sexual orientation and judges them righteous or wicked. Homophobia has its source in more than one religious tradition. Unfortunately these religious traditions include two of the most widespread in the world.

Just as we have been dealing with the phenomenon of negrophobia by identifying its sources and relentlessly criticizing and condemning them, we should deal with homophobia by identifying its sources and relentlessly criticizing an condemning them. Unlike white supremacy, however, religion is given a special status among ideologies. Religion is a form of ideology that – if accepted as valid – becomes classified with things that are not analogous to it at all, things like race and gender. This leads to a paradox: criticism of an ideology that preaches homophobia is itself a form of prejudice: “Islamophobia.” This is a clever device developed by those spreading hateful ideology to shut down its critics.

Thus we have two hurdles to overcome in seeking justice, freedom, and security for gay people: the ideological-institutional sources of homophobia and the ideology of political correctness that seeks to mask the ideological-institutional sources of homophobia.