Did you ever play a game called “Marco Polo”? Here’s another one.

I don’t deny for a moment that there are major problems in the Islamic world today, and that a great deal of evil has been and is being committed by Muslims in the name of Islam.

I don’t appreciate being told, as I routinely am in emails and elsewhere, that I’m whitewashing the Islamic world, that I’m defending ISIS, that I see no problem with Muslims beheading Christians, and so forth.

Such statements are either ignorant or they’re lies.  I’ve been denouncing Islamist violence very publicly, for years.

What I do deny is that all Muslims are evil, that every Muslim wishes to kill Christians and establish a theocratic dictatorship, and that Islam, as such, is irredeemably evil and has never contributed anything of value to humanity.  I’ve read a bit about Islam, I’ve actually met several Muslims, and, although I can’t say that I’ve read as many anti-Islamic websites as some of my critics have, I’ve come to understand a few things about the faith, its adherents, and their history.

I find myself between those, mostly on the Left, who either argue that there are no real problems in the world of Islam or that, if there are, they’re all the fault of the West, and those who want claim that Islam is irretrievably evil and that all Muslims are our enemies.

I believe that circulating baseless anti-Islamic propaganda simply inflames things and terrifies people.  It helps neither in understanding the real problems nor — largely for that reason — in thinking about ways to solve them.

Here’s an item about one popular anti-Islamic quotation that’s made the rounds on the internet:

Another fake anti-Islam quote from the far right

One irony is that, while I oppose such malevolent fakery, I myself am on what is commonly called (by some people on the Left) the Far Right.  So please don’t write to me to accuse me of being a typical bleeding-heart academic Leftist.  Such nonsense grew tiresome many years ago.

Which reminds me of a story:

Many years ago, during the first Gulf War, I found myself on a radio call-in show in Salt Lake City.  At the very, very end, one last caller phoned in, asking my opinion of the idea of using nuclear weapons against Baghdad and Basra.

I responded, first of all, by pointing out that there seemed no military reason to do so.  Our troops were advancing against virtually no resistance, like a hot knife through melted butter.  Moreover, I said, neither Basra nor Baghdad was actually involved in the fighting.  To attack them, pointlessly, with nuclear weapons — weapons that hadn’t been used since the end of the Second World War — would be to incinerate several million unarmed civilian noncombatants.  I observed that, in doing so, we would definitely and forever be giving up the moral high ground in the conflict, and I said that I myself would be on the streets demonstrating against any U.S. administration that committed such an act.

“It’s spineless liberals like you that cost us the war in Vietnam!” the man yelled into his phone before slamming it down.

I couldn’t wait to get to my office the next day, to tell my genuinely leftist academic colleagues — who saw me, not entirely inaccurately, as somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun — that I’d been called a “spineless” liberal for not immediately embracing the idea of needlessly murdering roughly ten million defenseless men, women, and children.

I guess I’m just a wimp.

Posted from Amman, Jordan