Head in the sand liberals...but this guy gets it...

[6SpeedTA95]

Head-in-the-Sand Liberals - Los Angeles Times

Originally Posted by article

Head-in-the-Sand Liberals
Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists.
By Sam Harris, SAM HARRIS is the author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason." His next book, "Letter to a Christian Nation," will be published this week by Knopf. samharris.org.
September 18, 2006


TWO YEARS AGO I published a book highly critical of religion, "The End of Faith." In it, I argued that the world's major religions are genuinely incompatible, inevitably cause conflict and now prevent the emergence of a viable, global civilization. In response, I have received many thousands of letters and e-mails from priests, journalists, scientists, politicians, soldiers, rabbis, actors, aid workers, students — from people young and old who occupy every point on the spectrum of belief and nonbelief.

This has offered me a special opportunity to see how people of all creeds and political persuasions react when religion is criticized. I am here to report that liberals and conservatives respond very differently to the notion that religion can be a direct cause of human conflict.

This difference does not bode well for the future of liberalism.

Perhaps I should establish my liberal bone fides at the outset. I'd like to see taxes raised on the wealthy, drugs decriminalized and homosexuals free to marry. I also think that the Bush administration deserves most of the criticism it has received in the last six years — especially with respect to its waging of the war in Iraq, its scuttling of science and its fiscal irresponsibility.

But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.

On questions of national security, I am now as wary of my fellow liberals as I am of the religious demagogues on the Christian right.
This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism." It is, and they are.

A cult of death is forming in the Muslim world — for reasons that are perfectly explicable in terms of the Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad. The truth is that we are not fighting a "war on terror." We are fighting a pestilential theology and a longing for paradise.

This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims. But we are absolutely at war with those who believe that death in defense of the faith is the highest possible good, that cartoonists should be killed for caricaturing the prophet and that any Muslim who loses his faith should be butchered for apostasy.

Unfortunately, such religious extremism is not as fringe a phenomenon as we might hope. Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities.

Given the degree to which religious ideas are still sheltered from criticism in every society, it is actually possible for a person to have the economic and intellectual resources to build a nuclear bomb — and to believe that he will get 72 virgins in paradise. And yet, despite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism.

At its most extreme, liberal denial has found expression in a growing subculture of conspiracy theorists who believe that the atrocities of 9/11 were orchestrated by our own government. A nationwide poll conducted by the Scripps Survey Research Center at Ohio University found that more than a third of Americans suspect that the federal government "assisted in the 9/11 terrorist attacks or took no action to stop them so the United States could go to war in the Middle East;" 16% believe that the twin towers collapsed not because fully-fueled passenger jets smashed into them but because agents of the Bush administration had secretly rigged them to explode.

Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria, and they offer an unusually clear view of the debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities.

I don't know how many more engineers and architects need to blow themselves up, fly planes into buildings or saw the heads off of journalists before this fantasy will dissipate. The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world's Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals.

Given the mendacity and shocking incompetence of the Bush administration — especially its mishandling of the war in Iraq — liberals can find much to lament in the conservative approach to fighting the war on terror. Unfortunately, liberals hate the current administration with such fury that they regularly fail to acknowledge just how dangerous and depraved our enemies in the Muslim world are.

Recent condemnations of the Bush administration's use of the phrase "Islamic fascism" are a case in point. There is no question that the phrase is imprecise — Islamists are not technically fascists, and the term ignores a variety of schisms that exist even among Islamists — but it is by no means an example of wartime propaganda, as has been repeatedly alleged by liberals.

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions. For instance, they ignore the fact that Muslims intentionally murder noncombatants, while we and the Israelis (as a rule) seek to avoid doing so. Muslims routinely use human shields, and this accounts for much of the collateral damage we and the Israelis cause; the political discourse throughout much of the Muslim world, especially with respect to Jews, is explicitly and unabashedly genocidal.

Given these distinctions, there is no question that the Israelis now hold the moral high ground in their conflict with Hamas and Hezbollah. And yet liberals in the United States and Europe often speak as though the truth were otherwise.
We are entering an age of unchecked nuclear proliferation and, it seems likely, nuclear terrorism. There is, therefore, no future in which aspiring martyrs will make good neighbors for us. Unless liberals realize that there are tens of millions of people in the Muslim world who are far scarier than Dick Cheney, they will be unable to protect civilization from its genuine enemies.

Increasingly, Americans will come to believe that the only people hard-headed enough to fight the religious lunatics of the Muslim world are the religious lunatics of the West. Indeed, it is telling that the people who speak with the greatest moral clarity about the current wars in the Middle East are members of the Christian right, whose infatuation with biblical prophecy is nearly as troubling as the ideology of our enemies. Religious dogmatism is now playing both sides of the board in a very dangerous game.

While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren't.
The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.

To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.

I thought this was a great article, while I disagree with a couple of economic points as many would suspect I would. This overall was a good article and something that I hope the democrats, specifically the far left that currently controls the party would consider.

We need a strong stance against muslim extremist, perhaps the war on terror isn't being waged appropriately but the left has not offered a solution or another way of fighting it. They simply criticize the bush administration as stated in this article.

I generally disagree with this guy, I disagree with some of this piece, however, this is a great article that offers some insight his friends on the left desperately need.

[ballz2wallz]

ibhesreallyarepublicanlikelieberman

[JaJae]

One of the best reads I've read in a long time. Nice post.

Overall it was nice to read someone who calls themselves a liberal has a head on their shoulders when it comes to the middle east.

[kinggovernor]

liberals are too nice and forgiving to hold national security positions

[JaJae]

Originally Posted by kinggovernor

liberals are too nice and forgiving to terrorists and Islamic fascists to hold national security positions

fixed
Liberals aren't very nice to anyone or anything that has an R- before it

[Stylerod]

Holy crap. It's like this guy has read every one of Thorgrims posts and just commented on each of them. I am speachless

[6SpeedTA95]

Originally Posted by Stylerod

Holy crap. It's like this guy has read every one of Thorgrims posts and just commented on each of them. I am speachless

This thread isn't about thorgrim

[Thorgrim]

You are simply taking one part of the man, he has disdain for christian fundamentalists, jewish orthodox, muslim extremists...etc so you pick up the one group you don't like

[6SpeedTA95]

Originally Posted by Thorgrim

You are simply taking one part of the man, he has disdain for christian fundamentalists, jewish orthodox, muslim extremists...etc so you pick up the one group you don't like

Did you read my first post? I specifically said I disagreed with points in this article.

What group is that? The liberal group? Yeah I dont like the liberal view on things, I made that clear in post one, this guy made some great points with reguards to national security, something that if the democrats would pickup on they'd probably dominate the mid terms.

[SpicyMcVoodoo]

I agree with him that radical muslims cannot be talked or coddled into peace, and to the extent that liberals believe that, they're wrong. However, he's wrong in thinking that's why all liberals object to Bush's and the neocon's strategy. My reasons for disagreeing with Bush's strategy have nothing to do with being nice to terrorists to change their minds...it's pure pragmatics.

I think we should be all about defense and putting space between the West and these maniacs. You're not going to counter the threat of Islam through invasion or bombing. That will only make the problem worse...

Militant islam is a disease, and when the USA starts bombing civilans and occupying muslim countries, we're just creating an easier environment in which that disease can spread. We, however, are not the cause of the disease itself, as some liberals would believe. Also, there's a huge difference between avoiding unnecessarily inflaming them and being super nice in hopes of changing their minds. I don't think we can change a militant muslim's mind, like some liberals believe, but I do think we can turn a moderate muslim militant.

[Thorgrim]

Originally Posted by 6SpeedTA95

Did you read my first post? I specifically said I disagreed with points in this article.

What group is that? The liberal group? Yeah I dont like the liberal view on things, I made that clear in post one, this guy made some great points with reguards to national security, something that if the democrats would pickup on they'd probably dominate the mid terms.

You don't like the muslim extremist groups, and because he picks on them along with every other religious group, you applaud him as something "liberals should take up" when truth my told if we adopted his philosophy we'd lose moderates and liberals...and we wouldn't gain any conservatives

I don't see any "great points" I see a long rant on his personal views, and I since he is no great philosopher (only a minor one) I don't feel the need to go point by point through his article

[6SpeedTA95]

Originally Posted by Thorgrim

You don't like the muslim extremist groups, and because he picks on them along with every other religious group, you applaud him as something "liberals should take up" when truth my told if we adopted his philosophy we'd lose moderates and liberals...and we wouldn't gain any conservatives

I don't see any "great points" I see a long rant on his personal views, and I since he is no great philosopher (only a minor one) I don't feel the need to go point by point through his article

Shit no I dont like muslim extremist groups, do you?

[Thorgrim]

Originally Posted by 6SpeedTA95

Shit no I dont like muslim extremist groups, do you?

Do I like them?

I guess if were at a cafe in Istanbul...I'd rather sit with the moderates, so I guess you could say I dislike them

[SpicyMcVoodoo]

I love this guy's views on religion.

http://www.samharris.org/appearances...h-10282004.mov

[Scrum]

Of course you would agree with him. He is saying what you want to hear. Liberals = weak.

This guy is trying to talk about some people on the far left who don't really have much of a voice or a chance at being elected.

[kinggovernor]

Originally Posted by Scrumtralecent

This guy is trying to talk about some people on the far left who don't really have much of a voice or a chance at being elected.

same can be said for hannity or rush, but the left loves to talk about them

[Scrum]

Originally Posted by kinggovernor

same can be said for hannity or rush, but the left loves to talk about them

Nobody is saying that hannity and rush are running the party.

[kinggovernor]

Originally Posted by Scrumtralecent

Nobody is saying that hannity and rush are running the party.

howard dean is far left and is running the democratic party

[Scrum]

Originally Posted by 6SpeedTA95

We need a strong stance against muslim extremist, perhaps the war on terror isn't being waged appropriately but the left has not offered a solution or another way of fighting it. They simply criticize the bush administration as stated in this article.

I love this bit.

The Democrats have offered another way of fighting it.
It's called getting warrants for wiretaps, not having secret prisons, and sending people out to Iraq who actually know what the fuck they are doing.

I don't have to be an expert cook to know the steak I got tastes bad and gave me the shits.