After a heated debate with Ben Affleck last week about the anti-liberal beliefs of Islam on Real Time with Bill Maher, Sam Harris, author of Waking Up: A Guide to Spirituality Without Religion, appeared on CNN Monday to explain his assertion that “Islam is the mother lode of bad ideas” and the left holds a "double standard" when it comes to Islam.  

CNN’s Don Lemon first played some clips of the hostile exchange between Affleck and Harris, in which Harris attempted to argue that criticism of Islam should not be dismissed by the left as “Islamophobia” while Affleck blasted his arguments as “racist” and “gross.” Lemon then asked Harris to explain his condemnation of Islam.     

Harris started by walking back his statement somewhat and working in a dig on Affleck, saying to be fair it was difficult to explain himself with a celebrity "shouting over" him. Regardless, he said, he could defend the statement:

Harris: I can defend that claim. I think that we have an idea here that all of our religions are the same, that they’re all equally wise or equally empty or equally irrelevant. Obviously devout believers of the different religions don’t believe this, but secular liberals tend to believe this. And it’s just not true. Our religions are quite different.

And there are many cases in which Christianity is worse than Islam—if you’re going to talk about something like opposition to embryonic stem cell research because Muslims believe that the soul enters the fetus at day 180 or 120, depending which on which Hadith you believe. So I would never dream of criticizing Islam on that point.

But we have to acknowledge that Islam has doctrines like jihad and martyrdom and death to apostates, which are central to the faith in the way that they aren’t in other faiths. And we just have to grapple with that. And Muslims have to grapple with that.

Lemon then moved to one of the central points Harris had been making in the debate, that for the American left it is perfectly legitimate to criticize Christianity, but those who dare criticize Islam are immediately labeled “Islamophobic.” To expand on the point, Lemon read a passage from Harris’ recent article “Sleepwalking toward Armegeddon”:

Lemon: (reading) “In drawing a connection between the doctrine of Islam and jihadist violence, I am talking about the ideas and their consequences, not about the 1.5 billion nominal Muslims, many of whom do not take their religion very seriously. Why don’t people hear that instead of being racist or Islamophobic?” 

Harris: Yes, well, we have a kind of dogma of political correctness here which is stifling conversation. Many liberals want to grade Islam on a curve. You know, that just – they’re not expecting the same kind of civility and openness to free speech and other liberties that we hold dear, and are right to hold dear, from Muslims throughout the world. 

And so when cartoonists draw the wrong cartoon, and embassies start burning, we criticize the cartoonist, and we criticize the newspapers that printed the cartoons, and we practice self-censorship. We have – there was an academic book at Yale University Press on the cartoon controversy that wouldn’t publish the cartoons. This is just madness. 

And yet, it’s a double standard that, if you actually want to look for racism and bigotry, this is the bigotry of low expectations. This is – this is a kind of racism. And this point doesn’t originate with me. My friend, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, has made this point many times. And so what we need is the same standard of reasonableness and tolerance applied across the board. 

Video, partial transcript via RCP.