I don’t usually say these sorts of things about Republicans, but good for New Jersey Governor Chris Christie:
New Jersey Governor Chris Christie is defending his pick of a Muslim for a state judgeship, saying critics of a lawyer who represented suspects after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks are “ignorant” and “crazies”.
…”This Shariah law business is crap,” said Christie, 48. “It’s just crazy and I’m tired of dealing with the crazies.”
Gov. Christie appointed Sohail Mohammed, who represented Muslims swept up in indiscriminate FBI dragnets after 9/11, to a seat on the Superior Court of Passaic County. Many of Mohammed’s clients were American citizens, and none of them were convicted or even charged with terrorism, but that naturally doesn’t matter to the raving, insane Christianist right:
Some political columnists and bloggers have accused Mohammed of having links to terrorism and said he’ll be more likely to follow Shariah law, religious standards based on the Koran, instead of state or federal statutes….
Mohammed was nominated by Christie in January. That month, Debbie Schlussel, a columnist for publications including the New York Post and Jerusalem Post, wrote: “Chris Christie rewarded those Muslim mobs who cheered on U.S. soil for the mass murder of 3,000 Americans with a judgeship.”
I wanted to mention this because, especially in the aftermath of the horrifying rampage in Norway last month, “Islamophobia” is a word that too often gets applied to every critic of Islam. I want to make the difference clear – if there’s such a thing as Islamophobia, this is it: treating all Muslims as collectively guilty of the 9/11 attacks or other crimes of terrorism, making no distinction between those who supported those acts and those who didn’t. To right-wing crazies like Schlussel, Muslims are an undifferentiated mob who all think and believe exactly the same things and who are all equally evil (see also this article, with some equally demented quotes from other right-wingers). It shouldn’t escape notice that this is exactly the same way the Jewish people were often caricatured by anti-Semites.
The atheist critique of Islam, however, should be better aimed than this clumsy and belligerent racism. (Yes, Islam is a religion, not a race, but let’s not pretend that Sohail Mohammed’s being a brown person – he’s actually Indian – isn’t a factor in this.) We can and should point out the the violent, disturbing or otherwise immoral verses in the Qur’an without thereby accusing every Muslim of complicity in those deeds, just as we can point out the huge number of atrocious and violent verses in the Bible without calling every Christian or Jew a supporter of genocide. And we can and should criticize the evils that have been committed in the name of Islam, not to imply that every Muslim is guilty of them – in fact, other Muslims are more often the victims of these crimes than Westerners – but to encourage people of good will to see the harm done by religion and take a stand against it.
As Sam Harris has said, all major religious texts are “engines of extremism”: they all teach primitive, irrational and long-outdated moral standards, and they all condone acts of evil and bloodshed against those who are declared to be enemies of God. When people believe in these texts and take them literally, then we know the result: acid attacks, honor killings, forced veilings of women, mutilation and stoning as punishments, censorship of free speech, oppression of religious minorities, all of which are endemic in Islamic theocracies. The fact that some Western fundamentalists respond with crazed violence of their own doesn’t mean that the original acts should escape condemnation. There’s a difference between irrational, unjustified fear of all the 1.5 billion people in the world who practice a particular religion, and rational, justified fear of the subset of that larger group who use their faith as an excuse to commit violence and attempt to force medieval moral norms on all of us.