The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is one of the foremost scientific universities in the world.  The free inquiry associated with such a mission leads one to be open to any sort of question, and that sometimes leads one to ask silly questions.  One such question was floated by visiting University of Melbourne Professor Ghassan Hage, who delivered a lecture on the question “Is Islamophobia accelerating global warming?”

This is not the first attempt to link global warming to social justice theories, as a huge pool of grant money surely awaits anyone who can find a convincing way to do it.  Still, this one is particularly silly.

Nevertheless, free inquiry is a good thing that should be protected against any sort of attempts to shame, silence, or shut it down — for example, the sort that Islamist groups regularly engage in.  Thus, we report this story to refute the ideas, not to shame MIT for having entertained them.

Here is the lecture description.

This talk examines the relation between Islamophobia as the dominant form of racism today and the ecological crisis. It looks at the three common ways in which the two phenomena are seen to be linked: as an entanglement of two crises, metaphorically related with one being a source of imagery for the other and both originating in colonial forms of capitalist accumulation. The talk proposes a fourth way of linking the two: an argument that they are both emanating from a similar mode of being, or enmeshment, in the world, what is referred to as ‘generalised domestication.’

First of all, “Islamophobia” cannot possibly be a “form of racism” as Islam is not a race.  It is a set of ideas with no necessary connection to any race or ethnic group, as Ayaan Hirsi Ali pointed out in a recent panel discussion at CPAC.  Criticism of a set of ideas is not racism.  Criticism of the effect a set of ideas has had on the world — for example, pointing out that Marxism has resulted in the torture and murder of hundreds of millions of people — is not racism either.

Therefore, the most basic assumption of this talk is false.

Further, the phrase “colonial forms of capitalist accumulation” suggests that it is false in a particularly pernicious way.  The move is to silence critics of Islam while forwarding a Marxist interpretation of the global economy.  It is to silence critics of Marxism, too, by suggesting that their criticism amounts to a source of imagery that would justify conquest and suppression.  The peoples of the developing world are thus being ‘domesticated’ to the masters of this “capitalist accumulation.”

In fact, the peoples of the developing world are willingly engaging in trade and labor in return for pay.  It is this very process that has the World Bank reporting that the part of humanity living in dire poverty will fall below 10 percent for the first time in human history.  There are the wages of your capitalist accumulation.  This has happened over the last quarter century — that is, since the fall of the USSR ought to have put an end to Marxist rhetoric.  Global poverty may be a thing of the past by 2030 if trends continue.

Criticism of Islam is not a form of racism because Islam is not a race.  Global capitalist accumulation is good for everyone, but especially for the poorest people on Earth.  Every one of this talk’s basic assumptions about reality are simply mistaken.  Logic tells us that reasoning from false premises is unlikely to lead to true conclusions.

All the same, it’s good to entertain ideas widely.  Let’s hope MIT students hit him with some hard questions in the Q&A.