Like many of us on Twitter whom I would term 'Islamo-realists', I awaited the promised discussion between Sam Harris and Maryam Namazie with great interest.
My Twitter account was still locked when the resulting podcast went live (on the face of it, as innocent as Twitter mistakenly thinking my account had been taken over by a bot), but I listened, and like just about everyone else whose reaction I've noted, found it a pretty trying two hours. So much so that I was moved from my habitual laziness to actually start taking some notes, more or less on the spot, which addressed some of the more transparently stupid among Namazie's comments. Those notes follow below.
Like most far-left idealists, Namazie clearly has a very difficult relationship with reality, and particularly, with the passage from ideas (e.g. I oppose Islam and Islamism) to reality (e.g. but unlimited immigration of Muslims is a moral obligation for the West and presents no major problems or long-term threat to the things that make the West the best place in which to live).
I haven't listened back to the podcast (after all, who would put themselves through that a second time), so if any of the quotes from Namazie which form sub-headings below do not exhibit verbatim accuracy, I trust that they nevertheless remain faithful to the basic thrust of her argument, and feel free to correct me if they do not. Once again, the responses below are basically just a delayed publication of notes which came more or less from the top of my head as I momentarily stopped the podcast to type my thoughts in response to some of the things she said. I'm more or less shooting from the hip, so accept my apology if at times what follows is not quite as coherent as it could be. I may also have neglected the opportunity to address one or two other 'highlights' from Namazie's performance, but these were the ones which most stood out to me. Anyway, here goes...
"What's wrong with young men?"
Which gender is responsible for the vast majority of all crime and violence in every society in the world? And which age bracket of that gender in particular?
Exactly.
Now imagine the consequences of admitting - unvetted - vast swathes of young men, scattered among them covert jihadis intending to carry out atrocities, and with large proportions of the overall mass poorly educated, with limited grasp of the local language(s), limited skills and employability, and, in many cases, attitudes to women, sexuality, individual liberty and freedom of belief which are contemptful of and aggressively at odds with those of Western societies.
That's what's wrong with young men in general, and, sadly, a large proportion of young Muslim men, many of whom are arriving with limited education and employability. And that's without addressing how open the migration policies of nations like Germany are to abuse by jihadis seeking to wage guerrilla war on the non-Muslim world from within, forming sleeper cells and then slaughtering civilians in the hundreds.
"There are liberals in the smallest villages in Iran and Afghanistan and there are bigots and theocrats in the largest cities in America and Europe"
But in what proportions in comparison to one another? This is akin to saying that there are people who have survived skydives despite their parachutes failing to properly deploy, and there are people who have died after falling while attempting to fix the roof of their shed. True, but utterly meaningless and disingenuous.
The level of bigotry and religious supremacism among Muslims is far, far higher than among any group of Westerners, just as the risk of death if one's parachute does not properly deploy during a skydive is far greater than if one falls off the shed roof.
"Among these refugees are our allies"
But again, in what proportion relative to those whose values are antithetical to liberal, secular society? Let's look at Muslims in Britain, one of many Western nations with a large and rapidly growing Muslim population. To the extent that liberal, reformist Muslims in Britain prompt a response from Muslims here as a whole, it is one of almost blanket hatred and suspicion. Maajid Nawaz and the Quilliam Foundation being the obvious example. One need look only at what happened within 48 hours of a "moderate" imam announcing that he had joined Quilliam last month.
This, along with the fact that 78% of Muslims in Britain polled supported prosecution of those who produced cartoons of Muhammad for the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten while 68% supported blanket prosecution of anyone who "insult Islam", the thousands who have repeatedly protested over cartoons of Muhammad while none protested in remotely comparable numbers against jihadi atrocities after 7/7, for example, does not augur at all well for a future in which high birth rate plus high immigration is to projected to see the Muslim percentage of the population continue to at least double decade-on-decade.
What happens as that starts influence society, institutions, and the ballot box accordingly? Events in ghettoised Muslim enclaves to date give us some clue, and it's very ugly. I could use a link here, but to really cover it, I'd need to include about twenty. I imagine most readers will be fully aware of the kind of things I'm talking about (no-go areas like Molenbeek in Brussels and parts of towns and cities across Britain, 'Shari'ah patrols', Lutfur Rahman's election in Tower Hamlets, Trojan Horse etc.)
Ultimately, this is simply a terrible argument from Namazie. It's like insisting that a person drink a solution which is 59% stagnant water and 40% poison because the remaining 1% has medicinal benefits. If there were a way to effectively vet all ex-Muslims/atheist Muslims fleeing the Muslim world, and for that matter all the persecuted Yezidis, Christians and so on, I'd literally be honoured to welcome them into my home and do anything I could to help them establish new, prosperous lives for themselves here in the West, and the government should be bending over backwards to help these people specifically. But letting unvetted masses flood into Europe - the majority among whom it's safe to imagine either dislike or actively despise such people - is the worst possible outcome both for them and for us.
"The borders are so closed. There is such a fortress up there, that for every one person that enters, there are hundreds of thousands who are not able to"
This really isn't too different to saying something like this:
A man has an AK47 and three 30-round magazines of ammunition. Only a third of the 90 rounds are live rounds, the remainder being blanks. The live rounds are distributed randomly through the three magazines. The man fires all 90 rounds at me from a distances of 50 metres, while I am confined to an enclosed space of ten metres by ten metres. I try to evade the bullets by moving constantly in the ten-metre square. Only 15 of the rounds are accurate, and only four of those which are accurate are live rounds which hit me.
Unfortunately, this nevertheless means I have been shot four times. Four live rounds are embedded and fragmented in my flesh and my organs, and I'm gravely wounded.
But hey, no bother, because for every live round that hit the target, there are 86 which missed! It could have been so much worse!
Note: the one-in-three ratio of blank rounds to live rounds is no accident: various polling indicates that a good third or so of Muslim communities in the West are genuinely poisonous in their views. A summer 2015 poll showed 35% of Syrian refugees had a favourable view of Jabhat al-Nusra, Al-Qaeda's Syrian branch, while numerous polls indicate 30-40% of Muslims in Britain would like to see Shari'ah imposed and/or are supportive of the idea of a global Caliphate.
As a final thought, the admission coming out of Germany that around 600,000 or so of the 1.1 million refugees who arrived there last year have now effectively gone 'missing' rather gives the lie to Namazie's claims of a "fortress".
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