{"id":7743,"date":"2014-08-25T13:29:29","date_gmt":"2014-08-25T13:29:29","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/08\/25\/juan-cole-terrorism-and-leftist-moral-equivalency\/"},"modified":"2014-08-25T13:29:29","modified_gmt":"2014-08-25T13:29:29","slug":"juan-cole-terrorism-and-leftist-moral-equivalency","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2014\/08\/25\/juan-cole-terrorism-and-leftist-moral-equivalency\/","title":{"rendered":"Juan Cole, Terrorism, and Leftist Moral Equivalency"},"content":{"rendered":"

In Terrorism and Other Religions<\/a>, Cole argues that "Contrary to what is alleged by bigots like Bill Maher, Muslims are not more violent than people of other religions."  Although we conservatives don't think all that highly of Bill Maher, we cheered when he pointed out the obvious, namely, that Islam, and Islam alone at the present time, is the faith whose doctrines drive most of the world's terrorism, and that the Left's moral equivalency 'argument' is "bullshit" to employ Maher's terminus technicus<\/em>.  Why should pointing out what is plainly true<\/em> get Maher labeled a bigot by Cole?<\/span><\/p>\n

So I thought I must be missing something and that I needed to be set straight by Professor Cole.  So I read his piece carefully numerous times.  Cole's main argument is that, while people of "European Christian heritage" killed  over 100 million people in the 20th century, Muslims have killed only about two million during that same period.  But what does this show?  Does it show that Islamic doctrine does not<\/em> drive most of the world's terrorism at the present time?  Of course not.<\/span><\/p>\n

That is precisely the issue given that Cole is contesting what "the bigot" Maher claimed.  What Cole has given us is a text-book example of ignoratio elenchi<\/em>.  This is an informal fallacy of reasoning committed by a person who launches into the refutation of some thesis that is  other than the one being forwarded by the dialectical opponent.  If the thesis is that Muslims who take Islam seriously are the cause of most of the world's terrorism at the present time, this thesis cannot be refuted by pointing out that people of "European Christian heritage" have killed more people than Muslims.  For this is simply irrelevant to the issue in dispute.  (I note en passant<\/em> that this is why ignoratio elenchi<\/em> is classifed as a fallacy of relevance<\/em>.)<\/span><\/p>\n

Someone born and raised in a Christian land can be called a Christian.  But it doesn't follow that such a person is a Christian in anything more than a sociological sense.  In this loose and external sense the author of The Anti-Christ<\/em> was a Christian.  Nietzsche was raised in a Christian home in a Christian land by a father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche, who was a Lutheran pastor. Similarly, Hitler was a Christian.  And  Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of the Republic of Turkey,  was a Muslim.  But were Ataturk's actions guided and inspired by Islamic doctrine?  As little as Hitler's actions were guided and inspired by the Sermon on the Mount<\/a>. Here<\/a> is a list of some of Ataturk's anti-Islamic actions.<\/span><\/p>\n

Having exposed the fundamental fallacy in Cole's article, there is no need to go through the rest of his distortions such as the one about the Zionist terrorists during the time of the British Mandate.<\/span><\/p>\n

Why do leftists deny reality?<\/strong>  A good part of the answer is that they deny it because reality does not fit their scheme.  Leftists confuse the world with their view of the world. In their view of the world, people are all equal and religions are all equal –  equally good or equally bad depending on the stripe of the leftist.  They want it to be that way and so they fool themselves into thinking that it is that way.  Moral equivalency reigns.  If you point out that Muhammad Atta was an Islamic terrorist, they shoot back that Timothy McVeigh was a Christian terrorist — willfully  ignoring the crucial difference that the murderous actions of the former derive from Islamic\/Islamist doctrine whereas the actions of the latter do not derive from Christian doctrine.<\/span><\/p>\n

And then these leftists like Cole compound their willful ignorance of reality by denouncing those who speak the truth as 'Islamophobes.' <\/span><\/p>\n

That would have been like hurling the epithet 'Nazi-phobe' at a person who, in 1938, warned of the National Socialist threat to civilized values.<\/span><\/p>\n

\nRelated articles<\/legend>\n
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\"\"<\/a>The Lessons of Boston<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Islam, Radical Islam, and the the Left's Denial of the Threat<\/a><\/div>\n
\"\"<\/a>Psychological Projection and its Dangers<\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/fieldset>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In Terrorism and Other Religions, Cole argues that "Contrary to what is alleged by bigots like Bill Maher, Muslims are not more violent than people of other religions."  Although we conservatives don't think all that highly of Bill Maher, we cheered when he pointed out the obvious, namely, that Islam, and Islam alone at the … Continue reading “Juan Cole, Terrorism, and Leftist Moral Equivalency”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[119,375],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-7743","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-islamism","category-terrorism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7743","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7743"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7743\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7743"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7743"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7743"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}