A coordinated attack on Sam Harris?

Hemant Mehta reports a flurry of efforts to brand Sam Harris, specifically, an “Islamophobe,” and rejects them.

HM on criticism of Islam

I missed Greenwald’s blasts at Harris, to which HM links.

HM, by the way, while he does not condemn airport security profiling, personally smears the variety of possible positions re Muslim immigration and sojourning with the broad brush of “Islamophobia,” himself.

Did he somehow miss Harris's views on that?

Anyway, just a few sentences later he incoherently writes with approval (his emphasis),

Jerry Coyne adds another important point to the discussion:

"In truth, those who hurl charges of 'Islamophobia' never define it.

"That’s because it is, at bottom, only 'criticism of the tenets of Islam,' and that doesn’t sound so bad."

So HM's own alleged examples of Islamophobia are only criticisms of the tenets of Islam?

Well, no.

But it's not really all that mysterious what "Islamophobia" is all about, and JC has it wrong, anyway.

“Islamophobia” is a liberal taboo-word coined to do the same propaganda work as their other creation, “homophobia.”

Each does a kind of Orwellian double duty.

The latter term serves to indiscriminately damn any and all negative beliefs about or attitudes toward either gays or homosexuality, and public expressions of them.

The former does the same to negative beliefs about or attitudes toward Muslims or Islam, and their public expression.

Both are modeled on the equally taboo-laden terms, “racism” and “anti-Semitism.”

And all are trotted out to support liberal political, cultural, or other positions or goals by licensing even the most vicious efforts to silence and punish any who utter such thoughts or manifest such attitudes by, for example, getting them fired (in America) or legally punished (in Europe).

Meanwhile, the unmistakable hate speech of their client identity groups in America, Europe, or even elsewhere goes un-condemned and sometimes encouraged, defended, and legitimated.

And sometimes even mainstreamed, as in the relentless liberal attacks on Christians, whites, males, and especially Christian white males, through the most public of mass media.

Heck, liberals even condone actual violence by their clients against those they hate.

Including Muslim violence.

Was this part just a fake?

Dear Fellow Liberal

Not just predictable.

Mechanical and rote.

Did Sam just need some publicity, so intentionally took advantage of GG’s by now banal and routine paling around with terrorists?

GG is faking or brain-damaged, too.

Sam Harris, the New Atheists, and anti-Muslim animus

To prove the New Atheists have become bad guys it is finally time to dress down he quotes texts as old as The End of Faith (2005).

This is all such warmed-over gruel.

GG says SH’s atheism is just a handy tool to bash Muslims with, and that’s stupid and absurd.

His justification for dedicating his own work almost exclusively to denunciations of the United States (he quotes Chomsky) and justifications for Muslim hatred of America, the West, and Israel is equally so.

SH has more than once said the only solution to the problem of religious violence is for all mankind to turn atheist, a prescription so stupid as to leave one speechless.

GG says of a clip of Chomsky, “[H]ere is Noam Chomsky in late 2011 - in the first two minutes of the video - explaining how Harris and Hitchens exploit atheism to justify US militarism and convert it into little more than another religion.”

Actually it’s mostly somebody in the audience making the claim the gnus use atheism to justify US foreign policy, something he obviously finds very wicked.

Then Chomsky babbles inanely in return about something he calls “the state religion” and “the religion that markets know best,” calling these “fundamentalisms” and otherwise blowing useless left-wing smoke.

The Guardian hired GG to write this sort of junk.

Why does Harris think he and GG, so different from each other, are liberals?

GG has long gone over to the radicals and I have never read a word of Harris' that looked like something a liberal would say.

Ah, wait.

His denunciations of Muslim oppression of women, of honor killings, and of its persecution of homosexuals must be displays of his liberalism.

But for all that he could just be a libertarian or a sociolib conservative, much like Andrew Sullivan.

Hitchens was on board for all of that, too.

As is Bruce Bawer, who has been writing for some time now for David Horowitz's FrontPage Magazine.