The End of Faith (32 page)

Press, 1997), 95. 26 Mackay, Delusions, 525-26. 27 “Anti-Semitism,” like the term “Aryan,” is a misnomer of nineteenth-

century German pseudo-science. Semitic (derived from Shem, one of Noah's three sons) “designated a group of cognate languages that included Hebrew,
Arabic, Aramaic, Babylonian, Assyrian and Ethiopic, not an ethnic or racial group.” See R.
S. Wistrich, Anti-Semitism: The Longest Hatred (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), xvi. “Anti-Semitism” should therefore denote a hatred of
Arabs as well, which it does not. Despite its mistaken roots, “anti-Semitism” has become
the only accept- able term for the hatred of Jews.

28 D. J. Wakin, “Anti-Semitic 'Elders of Zion' Gets New Life on Egypt TV,” New York Times, Oct. 26, 2002. This spurious document is actually cited in the founding covenant of Hamas.
See J. I. Kertzer, “The Modern Use of Ancient Lies,” New York Times, May 9, 2002.

29 E. Goldberg, The Executive Brain: Frontal Lobes and the Civilized Mind (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2001).

30 This said, Judaism is a far less fertile source of militant extremism. Jews tend not to
draw their identity as Jews exclusively from the contents of their beliefs about God. It
is possible, for instance, to be a practicing Jew who does not believe in God. The same cannot be said for Christianity and Islam.

31 See B. M. Metzger and M. D. Coogan, eds., The Oxford Companion to the Bible (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 789-90, and A. N. Wilson, Jesus: A Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 79. Many other uncouth pairings have been pointed out:
Matt. 2:3-5 and Micah 5:2; Matt. 2:16-18 and Jer. 31:15/Gen. 35:19; Matt. 8:18 and Isa.
53:4; Matt. 12:18 and Isa. 42:1-4; Matt. 13:35 and Ps. 78:2; Matt. 21:5k and Zech.
9:9/Isa. 62:11.

NOTES TO PAGES 95-97 257

Matt. 27:9-10 claims to fulfill a saying that it erroneously attributes to Jeremiah, which
actually appears in Zech. 11:12providing further evi- dence of the text's “inerrancy.”

32 The stigma attached to illegitimacy among Jews in the first century CE was considerable.
See S. Mitchell, The Gospel According to Jesus (New York: HarperCollins, 1991).

33 See ibid., 78, and J. Pelikan, Jesus through the Centuries (New York: Harper and Row, 1987), 80.

34 B. Pascal, PensŽes, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (Baltimore: Penguin Books, 1966), sec. 189.

35 Nietzsche had it right when he wrote, “The most pitiful example: the corruption of Pascal,
who believed in the corruption of his reason through original sin when it had in fact been
corrupted only by his Christianity” (The Portable Nietzsche, trans. W. Kaufmann [New York: Viking, 1954], 572). It is true that Pascal had what was for
him an aston- ishing contemplative experience on the night of Nov. 23,1654one that
converted him entirely to Jesus Christ. I do not doubt the power of such experiences, but
it seems to me self-evident that they are no more the exclusive property of devout
Christians than are tears shed in joy. Hin- dus, Buddhists, Muslims, Jews, along with
animists of every description have had these experiences throughout history. Pascal, being
highly intelligent and greatly learned, should have known this; that he did not (or chose
to disregard it) testifies to the stultifying effect of orthodoxy.

36 They also avenged themselves against their Roman persecutors: “The Christians threw
Maximian's wife into the Orontes, and put to death all his relatives. In Egypt and
Palestine they massacred the magistrates who had most strongly opposed Christianity. The
widow and daughter of Dio- cletian, having taken refuge in Thessalonica, were recognized,
and their bodies were thrown into the sea.” Voltaire, “Christianity,” Philosophical Dictionary, 137.

37 Wistrich, Anti-Semitism, 19-20. 38 Augustine (The City of God, XVIII, 46):

Therefore, when they do not believe our Scriptures, their own, which they blindly read,
are fulfilled in them, lest perchance any one should say that the Christians have forged
these prophecies about Christ which are quoted under the name of the sibyl, or of others,
if such there be, who do not belong to the Jewish people. For us, indeed, those suffice
which are quoted from the books of our enemies, to whom we

make our acknowledgment, on account of this testimony which, in spite of themselves, they
contribute by their possession of these books, while they themselves are dispersed among
all nations, wher- ever the Church of Christ is spread abroad. For a prophecy about this
thing was sent before in the Psalms, which they also read, where it is written, “My God,
His mercy shall prevent me. My God hath shown me concerning mine enemies, that Thou shalt
not slay them, lest they should at last forget Thy law: disperse them in Thy might” [Ps.
69:10-11]. Therefore God has shown the Church in her enemies the Jews the grace of His
compassion, since, as saith the apostle, “their offense is the salvation of the Gentiles”
[Rom. 11:11]. And therefore He has not slain them, that is, He has not let the knowledge
that they are Jews be lost in them, although they have been conquered by the Romans, lest
they should forget the law of God, and their testimony should be of no avail in this
matter of which we treat. But it was not enough that he should say, “Slay them not, lest
they should at last forget Thy law,” unless he has also added, “Disperse them”; because if
they had only been in their own land with that testimony of the Scriptures, and
everywhere, certainly the Church which is every- where could not have had them as
witnesses among all nations to the prophecies which were sent before concerning Christ.

39 See J. Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and Its Relation to Modern
Anti-Semitism (1943; reprint, Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society, 1983), 153.

40 Ibid., 140. 41 Ibid., 114. The Reformation, by undermining belief in the doctrine of

transubstantiation, seems to have rendered host desecration less of a con- cern. Thus, it
was during the schismatic sixteenth century that the perse- cution of Jews as “sorcerers”
came into its own.

42 The Egyptian paper Al Akhbar and the Saudi paper Al Riyadh have both published articles purporting to verify the blood libel. The Syrian defense
minister Mustafa Tlas has written a book, The Matzoh of Zion, charging the Jews with ritual murder. Nazi propaganda on the subject, dating from the
1930s, now appears on Islamist websites. See Kertzer, “Modern Use.”

43 Cited in J. Glover, Humanity: A Moral History of the Twentieth Century (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1999), 328.

44 Ibid., 360-61.

NOTES TO PAGES 101-103 259

45 D. J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996), 28-48.

46 Kertzer, “Modern Use.” 47 It has grown fashionable to assert that the true horror of the Holo-

caust, apart from its scale, was that it was an expression of reason, and that it therefore demonstrates a pathology inherent to the Western Enlightenment
tradition. The truth of this assertion is held by many scholars to be self-evidentfor no
one can deny that technology, bureaucracy, and systematic managerial thinking made the
genocidal ambitions of the Third Reich possible. The romantic thesis lurking here is that
reason itself has a “shadow side” and is therefore no place to turn for the safeguarding
of human happiness. This is a terrible misun- derstanding of the situation, however. The
Holocaust marked the cul- mination of German tribalism and two thousand years of Christian
fulminating against the Jews. Reason had nothing to do with it. Put a telescope in the
hands of a chimpanzee, and if he bashes his neighbor over the head with it, reason's
“shadow side” will have been equally revealed. (K. Wilber, Sex, Ecology, Spirituality [Boston: Shambhala, 1995], 663-64, makes the same point.)

48 M. Gilbert, The Holocaust: A History of the Jews of Europe during the Second World War (New York: Henry Holt, 1985), 22.

49 Ibid. 50 Quoted in G. Wills, “Before the Holocaust,” New York Times Book

Review, Sept. 23, 2001. 51 Quoted in Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, 106. Of course,

Church-mandated anti-Semitism was not confined to Germany. Con- sider the statement of the
Roman Catholic primate of Poland, August Cardinal Hlond, in a 1936 pastoral letter: “There
will be the Jewish prob- lem as long as the Jews remain. It is a fact the Jews are
fighting against the Catholic Church, persisting in free thinking, and are the vanguard of
godlessness, Bolshevism, and subversion. . . . It is a fact that the Jews deceive, levy
interest, and are pimps. It is a fact that the religious and eth- ical influence of the
Jewish young people on the Polish young people is a negative one.” As J. Carroll, “The
Silence,” New Yorker, April 7, 1997, points out, “Hlond's letter was careful to say that these 'facts' did not
jus- tify the murder of Jews, but it is hard to see how such anti-Semitism on the part of
the leading Catholic in Poland was unconnected with what fol- lowed. Over the decades and
centuries of this millennium such senti- ments expressed by Christian leaders were not
unusual.”

52 G. Lewy, The Catholic Church and Nazi Germany (New York: McGraw- Hill, 1964), 282, quoted in Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners, n o . 53 Cited in L. George, Crimes of Perception: An Encyclopedia of Heresies

and Heretics (New York: Paragon House, 1995), 211. 54 Pope John Paul II, Crossing the Threshold of Hope (New York: Alfred A.

Knopf, 1994), 10. This book really is a breathtaking piece of sophistry, evasion, and
narrow-mindedness. It demonstrates my thesis in almost every line, erudite references to
Wittgenstein, Feuerbach, and Ricoeur notwithstanding.

55 M. Aarons and J. Loftus, Unholy Trinity: The Vatican, the Nazis, and the Swiss Banks, rev. ed. (New York: St. Martin's Griffin, 1998); G. Sereny, Into That Darkness: An Examination of Conscience (New York: Vintage, 1974).

56 See Sereny, Into That Darkness, 318. 57 See, e.g., Glover, Humanity, chap. 40.

4 The Problem with Islam

1 As we saw in chapter 2, this is a direct consequence of what it means logically,
psychologically, and behaviorallyto believe that our beliefs actually represent the way
the world is. The moment you believe that religious (or spiritual, or ethical)
propositions say anything at all of sub- stance, you will be obliged to admit that they
can be more or less accu- rate, comprehensive, or useful. Hierarchies of this sort are
built into the very structure the world. We will take a closer look at ethics in chapter 6.

2 R. A. Pape, “The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism,” American Politi- cal Science Review 97, no. 3 (2003): 20-32, has argued that suicidal ter- rorism is best understood as a
strategic means to achieve certain well-defined nationalist goals and should not be
considered a conse- quence of religious ideology. In support of this thesis, he recounts
the manner in which Hamas and Islamic Jihad have systematically used sui- cide bombings to
extract concessions from the Israeli government. Pape argues that had these organizations
been merely “irrational” or “fanatic,” we would not expect to see such a calculated use of
violence. Their motivation must be, therefore, primarily nationalistic. Like most
commentators on this infernal wastage of human life, Pape seems unable to imagine what it
would be like to actually believe what millions of Muslims profess to believe. The fact that terrorist groups have demon-
strable, short-term goals does not in the least suggest that they are not

NOTES TO P AGES 111-115 261

primarily motivated by their religious dogmas. Pape claims that “the most important goal
that a community can have is the independence of its homeland (population, property, and
way of life) from foreign influ- ence or control.” But he overlooks the fact that these
communities define themselves in religious terms. Pape's analysis is particularly inapposite with respect to Al Qaeda. To attribute
“territorial” and “nationalistic” motives to Osama bin Laden seems almost willfully
obscurantist, since Osama's only apparent concerns are the spread of Islam and the
sanctity of Muslim holy sites. Suicide bombing, in the Muslim world at least, is an
explicitly religious phenomenon that is inextricable from notions of martyrdom and jihad,
predictable on their basis, and sanctified by their logic. It is no more secular an
activity than prayer is.

3 B. Lewis, The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror (New York: Modern Library, 2003), 32.

4 M. Ruthven, Islam in the World, 2d ed. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 2000), 7.

5 Some of these hadiths are cited in Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 32. Others are drawn from an Internet database: www.usc.edu/dept/MSA/reference/
searchhadith.html.

6 Lewis, Crisis of Islam, 55. 7 “Idolatry is worse than carnage” (Koran 2:190). The rule of the Mogul

emperor Akbar (1556-1605) offers an exception here, but it is merely

that Akbar's tolerance of Hinduism was a frank violation of Islamic law. 8 F. Zakaria, The Future of Freedom: Illiberal Democracy at Home and

Abroad (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), 126. 9 See A. Dershowitz, The Case for Israel (Hoboken, N.J.: John Wiley, 2003),

61. 10 These facts and dates are drawn from R. S. Wistrich, Anti-Semitism: The

Longest Hatred (New York: Schocken Books, 1991), and Dershowitz,

Case for Israel. 11 L. Binder, Islamic Liberalism: A Critique of Development Ideologies

(Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1988), 129. 12 A. Cowell, “Zeal for Suicide Bombing Reaches British Midland,” New

York Times, May 2, 2003. Consider the case of England: British Muslims have been found fighting with
the Taliban, plotting terror attacks in Yemen, attempting to blow up airplanes, and
kidnapping and killing Western journalists in Pakistan. Recently, two British citizens
volun- teered for suicide missions in Israel (one succeeded, one failed).

Terrorist Hunter (New York: HarperCollins, 2003), whose anonymous

author has gone undercover to tape the proceedings at Muslim confer- ences in the United
States, depicts a shocking level of intolerance among Muslims living in the West. The
author reports that at one conference, held at the Ramada Plaza hotel in suburban Chicago,
Arab American chil- dren performed skits in which they killed Jews and became martyrs.
Sheikh Ikrima Sabri, the grand mufti of Jerusalem and Palestine (appointed by Yasir
Arafat), recently announced, “The Jews do not dare to bother me, because they are the most
cowardly creatures Allah has ever created. . . . We tell them: In as much as you love
life, the Muslim loves death and martyrdom” (ibid., 134). Sabri, who regularly calls for
the destruction of America and all infidel nations, and encourages child suicide bombers
(“The younger the martyr, the more I respect him” ibid., 132), spoke these words not in a
mosque on the West Bank but at the Twenty-sixth Annual Convention of the Islamic Circle of
North America, in Cleveland, Ohio.