New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof twisted numbers and lowered the moral bar while trying to prove "The Diversity of Islam ," the title of his Thursday column.
Kristof had a bit part in the now-famous religious rumble between actor Ben Affleck and the liberal atheist host Bill Maher on Maher's HBO show Real Time , with Affleck accusing Maher of racism for his hard criticism of Islam's intolerance and violence, and Kristof predictably taking Affleck's side against Maher and atheist author Sam Harris.
Whether or not Islam itself inspires conflict, debates about it certainly do. Our conversation degenerated into something close to a shouting match and went viral on the web. Maher and a guest, Sam Harris, argued that Islam is dangerous yet gets a pass from politically correct liberals, while the actor Ben Affleck denounced their comments as “gross” and “racist.” I sided with Affleck.
Kristof went back to the dawn of Islam to defend it as "not particularly intolerant," which isn't exactly full-throated praise, before issuing some criticism. But then Kristof really lowered the moral bar, citing a poll showing "only" 16 percent of Muslims in Indonesia (that's still about 30 million people) favor the death penalty as punishment for leaving the faith as somehow proving his point on the "diverse" and moderate nature of broader Islam.
First, historically, Islam was not particularly intolerant , and it initially elevated the status of women. Anybody looking at the history even of the 20th century would not single out Islam as the bloodthirsty religion; it was Christian/Nazi/Communist Europe and Buddhist/Taoist/Hindu/atheist Asia that set records for mass slaughter.
Likewise, it is true that the Quran has passages hailing violence, but so does the Bible, which recounts God ordering genocides, such as the one against the Amalekites.
Second, today the Islamic world includes a strain that truly is disproportionately intolerant and oppressive. Barbarians in the Islamic State cite their faith as the reason for their monstrous behavior -- most recently beheading a British aid worker devoted to saving Muslim lives -- and give all Islam a bad name. Moreover, of the 10 bottom-ranking countries in the World Economic Forum’s report on women’s rights, nine are majority Muslim. In Afghanistan, Jordan and Egypt, more than three-quarters of Muslims favor the death penalty for Muslims who renounce their faith, according to a Pew survey.
The persecution of Christians, Ahmadis, Yazidis, Bahai -- and Shiites -- is far too common in the Islamic world. We should speak up about it.
Third, the Islamic world contains multitudes: It is vast and varied. Yes, almost four out of five Afghans favor the death penalty for apostasy, but most Muslims say that that is nuts. In Indonesia, the most populous Muslim country in the world, only 16 percent of Muslims favor such a penalty . In Albania, Azerbaijan, and Kazakhstan, only 2 percent or fewer Muslims favor it, according to the Pew survey.
Numbers often fail the gullible Kristof, who uses them in bizarre fashion to minimize atrocities committed by groups criticized by conservatives:
He wrote a notorious book review in October 2005 of a biography of Chairman Mao, whose "Great Leap Forward" killed over 40 million: "...my own sense is that Mao, however monstrous, also brought useful changes to China. And at times the authors seem so eager to destroy him that I wonder if they exclude exculpatory evidence....But Mao's legacy is not all bad ."
In July 2003 , Kristof defended his opposition to invading Iraq by suggesting Saddam Hussein wasn't that bad for a bad guy, at least when you ran the numbers: "...Saddam slaughtered at most 1 percent of his population over the last 14 years...." In Kristof's warped mindset, a quarter-million body death toll for Saddam was shrugged off with an "at most."
In his Thursday column, Kristof found "The caricature of Islam as a violent and intolerant religion" to be "horrendously incomplete," pointing out that "those standing up to Muslim fanatics are mostly Muslims" and citing the story of the brave school girl Malala Yousafzai, shot by the Taliban for advocating education for girls in Pakistan.
Yet Kristof strangely omitted another prominent and credible critic of Islam: Ayaan Hirsi Ali, a feminist intellectual born Muslim in Somalia, raised in Saudi Arabia, who escaped an arranged marriage, fled to the Netherlands and came under fear for her life for speaking out against Islam's treatment of women. Perhaps because Hirsi Ali no longer identifies as Muslim but as atheist, Kristof doesn't feel obligated to include her voice among freedom-fighting Muslims.
Or perhaps he still doesn't approve of her.
Kristof alternately attacked and condescended to Hirsi Ali in a May 30, 2010 column , making it sound as if Hirsi Ali shared the blame for the threats on her life because "She has managed to outrage more people -- in some cases to the point that they want to assassinate her -- in more languages in more countries on more continents than almost any writer in the world today. Now Hirsi Ali is working on antagonizing even more people in yet another memoir ."
In his Thursday column, Kristof went on to plead:
Let’s not feed Islamophobic bigotry by highlighting only the horrors while neglecting the diversity of a religion with 1.6 billion adherents -- including many who are champions of tolerance, modernity and human rights. The great divide is not between faiths, but one between intolerant zealots of any tradition and the large numbers of decent, peaceful believers likewise found in each tradition.
If more of those moderate Muslim voices would speak up in criticism of the "intolerant zealots," it might mitigate the problem of terrorism.
