The Left Wing's Moral Black Hole
The truth is, it’s the liberals rushing to defend Islamists who fail to demonstrate real empathy.
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This is a guest essay written by Samuel J. Hyde, a Fellow at the Jewish People Policy Institute.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
I have long struggled to understand how intelligent, well-educated liberals fail to recognize the unique dangers posed by Islamism.
Elsewhere, I’ve argued that such people often don’t grasp what it means to genuinely believe in God or Paradise — and therefore assume that no one else truly does. At best, they believe such convictions couldn’t possibly be the primary motivation behind the kinds of violent actions we’ve seen from Islamist movements in recent decades.
For instance, I stumbled upon the anthropologist Scott Atran delivering an online lecture from 2013 on the origins of jihadist terrorism. According to Atran, those who decapitate journalists, filmmakers, and aid workers to cries of “Allahu Akbar!” or detonate themselves in crowds of innocents are not driven by deeply held beliefs about jihad or martyrdom.
Instead, Atran argued, these behaviors arise from toxic male bonding in soccer clubs and barbershops within the broader Arab-Muslim world. When asked by an attendee, “Are you saying that no Muslim suicide bomber has ever blown himself up expecting to get into Paradise?” Atran replied, “Yes, that’s what I’m saying. No one believes in Paradise.”
It’s worth noting that Atran is no fringe figure. He’s a respected cultural anthropologist, the Emeritus Director of Research in Anthropology at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique in Paris, and the author of several well-regarded books.
Yet his assertion — that no one believes in Paradise — is so detached from what can be reasonably inferred from the statements and actions of jihadists that it borders on the absurd. In fact, the idea that no one believes in Paradise is far more irrational than any belief in Paradise itself.
There’s an irony here, one that the events of October 7th and the delusional responses from elite thinkers have made all too clear. Rarely have I addressed the following, but whenever I criticize Islamism, I’m accused of lacking empathy for Muslims worldwide — both for the peaceful billions who are blameless and for the radicals whose actions are often excused as responses to legitimate grievances or social pressures.
But the truth is, it’s the liberals rushing to defend Islamists who fail to demonstrate real empathy. They ignore the primary victims of Islamism: the millions of Muslim women, freethinkers, homosexuals, and apostates who suffer most under its taboos and delusions.
Consider Afghanistan. After 20 years of war, trillions of dollars spent, and thousands of lives lost, America abandoned the country — and those who had supported its efforts — to the Taliban. It was one of the most disgraceful retreats in U.S. history, thinly veiled by political expediency.
Politicians and so-called empathetic intellectuals looked away as Afghan women and minorities were plunged back into a medieval darkness. Few of the critics calling for empathy have bothered to address this — or the fact that over the past 40 years, there have been nearly 50,000 acts of Islamic terrorism, a figure widely considered an undercount. Ninety percent of these attacks have occurred in Muslim countries, targeting local Muslim populations.
And yet, secular liberals are more concerned with “Islamophobia” than with the content of Islamist doctrine. It is they who are guilty of a profound failure of empathy. They fail not only to empathize with the millions of less devout Muslims treated as criminals by their own religion’s theocracies and regimes but also to comprehend the mindset of devout fanatics willing to die for their beliefs.
Most secular people cannot fathom what it feels like to say, “I will happily die for this.” Unless you’ve experienced religious ecstasy — personally or up close, as living in the Middle East surely allows — you cannot grasp the danger of it being directed toward violence and destruction.
You see, I live in a country that is over 20-percent Arab, most of whom are Muslim, and almost none of whom are seeking to wage a holy war on their Jewish neighbors. To notice that this desire exists among other populations — let’s say in Gaza, Lebanon, or Yemen — is neither a lack of empathy nor an expression of a “phobia,” which implies irrational fear.
There is nothing irrational about recognizing the unique danger posed by religious militants on the other side of one’s border. Islamism combines religious ecstasy, sectarian hatred, and a triumphalist vision of world conquest in a way that few ideologies ever have.
And so, for the moment at least, we find ourselves at an impasse. More than 20 years after 9/11, and 16 months after October 7th, many are still refusing to face the facts. The irony is that not everyone struggles as in the West.
Consider Saudi Arabia, Islam’s foundational home and the protector of Mecca and Medina, which has nonetheless banned the Muslim Brotherhood. A host of other Muslim countries have managed something similar: Jordan, the United Arab Emirates, and Egypt.
This has been a startling transformation. Back in the last century, the Saudis welcomed the Brotherhood, put them in charge of schools and mosques, and funded the Islamists to spread their ideology across the region and beyond.
At first, the Saudis thought they were ideologically aligned with the Brotherhood. But the Brotherhood eventually turned against them, attempting to overthrow their regime. At that point, the Saudi princes — capable of ruthlessness as well as generosity — rounded them up and expelled them from their schools, mosques, newspapers, and their soil.
What all this reveals is that the brilliant minds of the West have failed to distinguish between Islam and Islamism — between Muslims as individuals and the ideological machinery of groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. This confusion has birthed a series of delusions: a lack of empathy for the true victims of Islamist ideology, and the direct or indirect shielding of fanatics willing to kill in its name.
The consequence has been a moral inversion within progressive circles. Over the past year, activist movements have plunged the Left into a moral black hole, where the principles of liberalism — once the foundation of progressivism — have been sacrificed at the altar of a grotesque “tolerance.” Those of us unwilling to make that trade are left searching for a way back, or at least a way out of the wreckage.
I don’t know how strongly I can state this, but progressivism in its current form is dead. It’s just that most within the movement haven’t realized it yet.
Thirty years ago, no one would have predicted Islamist hijabis will one day head the most massive women’s liberation rights movement. I have no doubt as much as there is a calibration of values, there is also clear Islamist predatory tactic. Claiming a hijab and a vagina hat are both symbols of female empowerment entails some very clear deception and confusion.
What remains is not a coherent ideology, nor a system of ethics and beliefs, but a patchwork of contradictions, held together by fear of criticism, cancellation and a hollow sense of virtue.
As long as Arabs value death more than life Jihad means that we will see more attacks and not fewer that were the products of that warped philosophy
I haven't examined Scott Atran's writings on the topic although after 9/11 when I was writing about the psychology of terrorism, I did come across some of his work and recall the "coffee shop bonding" point you raised. This is symptomatic of a wider trend in social psychology and related disciplines to promote the "banality of evil" theory which was first coined by Hannah Arendt in her trial report on Eichmann in Jerusalem. However, in the social sciences, it was most effectively popularized by Stanley Milgram who extrapolated from his obedience studies to the Holocaust and other acts of collective violence and, subsequently, by Phil Zimbardo who conducted the so-called Stanford Prison Experiment. The "lesson" these psychologists wished to convey is that people are good but they do bad things when they find themselves in bad situations, an instance of the central theme of social psychology: the power of the situation relative to one's personality. [More on this perhaps later, but a day of work first.]