Article in The Philosophers' Magazine: An Air of Unreality

Back in October, I published this article in The Philosophers' Magazine. It begins as follows:

On 7 October 2023, the terrorist organization Hamas and allied groups attacked multiple Israeli communities, including a music festival held near the kibbutz Re’im in the north-western Negev desert. The terrorists murdered almost 1,200 people and kidnapped another 250 people to serve as hostages. There have been credible reports of torture, rape, and other forms of cruelty inflicted during these events, which I’ll refer to as the October 7 massacres.

These attacks on Israel attracted widespread international condemnation. More surprisingly, however, many people excused them or even glorified the perpetrators. The excuses and glorification came not only from Islamists in the Middle East but from secular opponents of Israel living in Western democracies. It became clear that many politically focused individuals in the West are not merely critical of the Jewish state and certain of its actions and policies; they regard Israel as a white colonial enclave that lacks any legitimacy, should not have been established in the 1940s, and ought to be destroyed.

Over the last two years, such criticisms have been amplified many times over, as we’ve followed events in a desperate urban war carried out on terms dictated by Hamas. Like many such organizations, Hamas benefits by maximizing the number of deaths and injuries within its own civilian population. These can be leveraged for a global information war, and indeed Hamas has achieved remarkable successes at that level of its struggle against Israel. This is a well-known approach to asymmetrical warfare. It has often been used in the past to gain international support and to triumph politically against militarily stronger enemies.

You'll want to read the entire article if you're troubled by current events in Australia and elsewhere involving antisemitism and jihadism. I don't attempt to excuse Israel of all wrongdoing, but I argue forthrightly - and I'll repeat here - that Israel is not committing genocide and that the genocide narrative is propaganda from a terrorist organization seeking Israel's destruction. It is all too easily believed by many Westerners who come to the debate already in the grip of an anti-Israel and anti-Western ideology. I conclude:

The false Gazan genocide narrative sidelines the challenges of fighting a terrorist organization embedded within a civilian population. It inflames global tensions, fosters antisemitism, and distracts from efforts to understand the genuine rights and wrongs of the war.

There is no such thing as Islamophobia ...

I'm reposting the following comment that I made earlier today on my Twitter (now X) account...

Your occasional reminder that there is no such thing as Islamophobia. A phobia is an irrational and pathological fear, but a certain level of fear of Islam is perfectly rational. Islam has always been a religion of war and conquest, and it has always sought to establish its own political order - subordinating everyone to its authority. This has been the case ever since the seventh century. It is fundamental to the religion.

And before someone starts telling me about how bad Christianity is, let me assure you that I am well aware that the logic of Christianity historically caused it to be a more persecutorial religion than Islam ever was. It's perfectly rational to feel a certain fear of Christianity as well. All religions have their faults, and it is never irrational to be afraid of them to some appropriately calibrated extent. Christianity is certainly not an exception. In some ways it has been the worst religion of them all. But to some extent it was tamed by reaction against the catastrophic wars of religion in the 16th and 17th centuries, and then by the 18-century Enlightenment. I have a lot to say about the record of Christianity and Islam, among other religions, in my most recent book, How We Became Post-Liberal. The bottom line is that we should not be persecuting people for their religious beliefs and practices. We should practice religious toleration, and in that sense, people should have religious freedom. No one should have to fear persecutions, pogroms, inquisitions, witch hunts, etc. But it is absolutely fine, and indeed necessary, to study religions and the dangers that they bring to our secular liberal societies - and to be wary of them to the different levels that are appropriate to our historical circumstances. It's also worth noting that this appropriate wariness of various religions has nothing to do with racism. It is not a suggestion that people are somehow an inferior biological sub-species because they adhere to certain religious beliefs and practices. It's a rational recognition that religions motivate people and that the motivation is not always good even though we like to sentimentalize religions and pretend that they are always forces for kindness and toleration.

As a final point, it's difficult to talk about these topics openly and honestly in Australia without the risk of being accused of "hate speech", with the possibility of being dragged into court proceedings that will destroy our life savings (or worse). But we need to be able to talk about these things - so one of the first actions that I recommend we take in Australia is to repeal section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act. We need to be allowed to talk! We can still have laws against genuine hate speech, narrowly understood, such as preaching that Jews should be murdered. If we need to strengthen some laws to crack down on that kind of speech, so be it, though we need to be very careful. We have to tread cautiously and consider the downside and possible abuses whenever we restrict speech.

But in any event, we currently have a law that requires that we can't say anything that even offends people if it can be connected, however tenuously or imaginatively, with race, ethnicity, etc. Although the concept of offence is supposed to be narrow, that is not how it is being treated in practice. The courts have failed us by interpreting s.18C expansively and interpreting its defences in s.18D so narrowly that s.18D is almost a dead letter. The existence of such a provision, together with the failure of the Federal Court to interpret it in a way that protects free speech, chills important conversations on urgent social issues. Repeal of section 18C should be a political priority.