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Notes -
Not posting in the Gaza/Israel thread since this is more generic, IMO.
In the most recent Sam Harris podcast, he elevates the problem with Hamas to the more general problem of jihadi terrorism. The episode is here and there's also a transcript here.
In this, he paints a picture of Hamas being a jihadi terrorist organization that's beyond reasoning with in terms of any reasoning we'd consider compatible with liberal western civilized order. He reads this quote from a member of a different jihadi group that had just finished slaughtering young children:
He makes the point that atheists have a lot of trouble understanding how utterly fanatical and unreasonable jihadis can be. People of Christian or Jewish faith know, because they know how powerful their own faith is in their lives. But atheists are eager to attribute this kind of proclivity towards sadism and murder as a reflection of terrible conditions that they must be living under. That people living in a utopia would never succumb to such depravity. Sam argues that Muslims of faith are just as destructive outside of Israel and disputed Israeli territories.
For more concrete stats, I found this from Google generative results
The culmination of this episode is Sam practically condemning belief in Islam entirely. Almost bordering on saying that every Palestinian is a mope in the Muslim Matrix who could become inhabited by a jihadi Agent Smith at any time. He argues that unlike Jesus, or Buddha, the central most beloved figure in Islam is Muhammed, and he was not anything like a saint:
What I hear from this is that there are no "good" Muslims, or if they are good it's an aberration, or that they're Muslim in name only.
How does one operationalize such a belief? Is Sam arguing that accepting Muslim refugees is a mistake, full stop, and that the only way to deal with jihadis is the grant them their wish: death, because there's nothing else in the world we could offer them? Is that even enough to cure the problem?
There are two billion Muslims in the world. If bringing them capitalism and the pleasures of modernity (everyone gets Starlink, Steam deck, dirt cheap halal KFC and Chil Fil-A, etc as a poster recently suggested for pacifying the Palestinians) does not innoculate against jihadi mind viruses, what would?
It took Europe about 1000 years for their culture to develop antibodies to dogmatic below-the-sanity-waterline Christian crusader ideology, and Christianity's deck was not nearly as stacked against it (its central figure was still practically a hippie). Will we have to wait this long for Islam to do the same? Sam sounds like he's advocating a form of genocide by another name.
You're right. External change of the type that Sam Harris wants can only be facilitated through genocide. Or atleast soviet style totalitarianism.
However, internal change is entirely possible...... but that needs some cunning politicking.
Islam stays stuck in the 1st millenium because the global islamic idenitity is flows through a small network of highly conservative Arabs. Break the Muslims away from the middle east, and only then can you begin to reverse the rot. Thankfully, South Asia and SEA are ethnically distinct enough that it should be kind of possible with them.
Second, coopt scripturally nonviolent muslims into the global elite and dangle the carrot. Ahmediayyas are mandatorily nonviolent muslims and have a decent track record to back it up. Some sufi and african-animist muslims have stayed decent non violent. At the same time, dilute islam. Saudis are trying the capitalistic approach to dilution, but coopting prediluted muslin subgroups is another approach that works well.
What's most important with internal change, is that the instruments of change need to be onboard. Your muslim global elite needs to put in effort into this sort of conversion. That's the impossinle part. Somehow, the global muslim elite seems to love their conservatives and sympathizes with violent terrorists. Somehow, the more 'westernized' they are the even louder their support for conservatives. Yeah, that's a non starter.
It doesn't get brought up too often, but the history of Islam (although, generally not the letter of the Quran, but in some of the hadith) as I've seen it described by historians has a tint of Arab ethno-supremacy that continues to play out in the present. There are the obvious bits: heavy ties to the geography of Medina and Mecca, or that Shia Islam believes explicitly in divine leadership from the blood line of -- the Arab -- Ali. But the history of slavery in the Islamic world is probably at least as complicated as slavery in the West. Notably, Muslims could not be enslaved, but conversion to Islam didn't liberate existing slaves, so the growing Islamic empires starting in the seventh century looked a lot like Arab slavemasters of non-Arab slaves. To a large extent you still see this playing out with conflicts in the whole MENA region (although plenty of Muslim states don't consider themselves Arab, Turkey and Iran probably most notably). Look at Darfur in Sudan, which was pretty explicitly a Arab-led ethnic cleansing, or how some Arabic versions of the Palestinian "From the river to the sea..." specifies that the land should be Arab rather than free.
This isn't to say that all, or even most, of Islam expresses these values (the text of the Quran is supposed to be pretty even-handed), but to make a claim that, similar to how Christianity is often coded as implicitly White (and much of Europe is historically Christian), Islam often codes as implicitly Arab. Neither claim really applies universally, since there are Christians in India and South America or Muslims in Indonesia that don't really fit the mold.
I remember reading a discussion online once, talking about how a number of Arab cultural elements, while not explicitly part of Islam, seem to have diffused out into the broader Muslim world. (The one of particular focus in that particular discussion was their patterns of cousin marriage.) One factor brought up as a likely major contributor was the Hajj.
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I'm not sure this is on the same level. The only reason for this seems to be "a lot of Christians were white" and "white Christians made religious art portraying holy men and women as white," and that the same people who dislike Christianity also tend to dislike"whiteness" so the two get linked. Meanwhile, in Islam, Arab blood really does seem to have the special status as you described.
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These guys are not considered to be Muslim tm by every substantial group on the planet, including Sunnis that make up the overwhelming majority. You need something else to break into the hardened core.
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