Each time Harris said something about Islam that created outrage, he had a defense prepared. When he wondered why anybody would want any more "fucking Muslims," he was merely playing "Devil's advocate." When
he said that airport security should profile "Muslims, or anyone who looks like he or she could conceivably be Muslim, and we should be honest about it," he was simply demanding acknowledgment that a 22-year old Syrian man was
objectively more likely to engage in terrorism than a 90-year-old Iowan grandmother. (Harris also said that he wasn't advocating that
only Muslims should be profiled, and that people with his own demographic characteristics should also be given extra scrutiny.) And when he suggested that if an avowedly suicidal Islamist government achieved long-range nuclear weapons capability, "the only thing likely to ensure our survival may be a nuclear first strike of our own," he was simply referring to a
hypothetical situation and not in any way suggesting nuking the cities of actually-existing Muslims.
[6]
It's not necessary to use "Islamophobia" or the r-word in order to conclude that Harris was doing something both disturbing and irrational here. As James Croft of
Patheos noted, Harris would follow a common pattern when talking about Islam: (1) Say something that sounds deeply extreme and bigoted. (2) Carefully build in a qualification that makes it possible to deny that the statement is literally bigoted. (3) When audiences react with predictable horror, point to the qualification in order to insist the audience must be stupid and irrational. How can you be upset with him for
merely playing Devil's Advocate? How can you be upset with him for advocating profiling, when he also said that
he himself should be profiled? How can you object, unless your "tolerance" is downright pathological, to the idea that it would be legitimate to destroy a country that was bent on destroying yours?
In Croft's words, Harris "says things which, if approached with strict analytical rigor and the most generous of minds, can be given a shield of deniability against criticisms of Islamophobia," but "rarely takes sufficient care to ensure that his arguments don't casually reinforce negative attitudes about Muslims, and makes it extremely easy for right wing extremists to laud his remarks and for his right wing supporters to see the Islamophobia they want to see in them."
[7] This is too generous a characterization, though, because it grants that "strict analytical rigor" produces results that favor Harris.
