I thought I would never revive this dKos ID but Sam Harris stirred me to write.
Many of you know him as the guy who wrote "The End of Faith." Today, he publishes a new article in the LA Times titled, Head-in-the-Sand Liberals: Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists.
Sam makes his point quickly:
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.
More below the fold...
This a a rather broad brush statement and I'm sure designed to inflame. For it is in fact possible to be in touch with the realities of some parts of the world and out of touch with Muslim beliefs. I have, however, learned to see through Harris's hyperbole and not allow it to overwhelm my rational self.
While you might read Harris as anti-Muslim, that would be an oversimplification, and in this readers opinion, untrue. He does however have legitimate concern.
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.
On the Liberal's viewpoint of the source of Terrorists:
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.
Here I think Harris is being a bit harsh. As I've followed the discussions here at Daily Kos and find that most acknowledge that the suicide bombers are not poor, disaffected youths seeking glory but well-educated, financially resourceful "agents for change."
Harris worries that we liberals have lost site of the challenges Islam poses because of our focus on GWB and his administration.
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.
While we are all quite focused on GWB and friends, I think Harris loses sight of the fact that out-of-power liberals can do little to address the current and emerging global problems. We must get back into power in order to address these other issues hence the intense focus on the Bush administration.
While his hyperbolic language makes me seethe, after ratcheting down my emotions, I do think Harris's criticisms of Liberalism are accurate. We must be careful of our ability to tolerate.
Here is Harris's close:
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.