Liberals Are Soft on Terrorism!

Sam Harris has a revealing commentary over at the Los Angeles Times today. Harris is the author of The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (2004) , and according to his commentary piece he's received a large volume of mail from readers of all religious persuasions reacting to his criticism of religion. Harris notes that this experience has helped him form some conslusions about contemporary liberalism's head-in-the-sand mentality on the terror threat.

Harris indicates, by the way, that he's a liberal on many issues himself (higher taxes on wealth, the right to gay marriage) and he's critical of the Bush administration's handling of the Iraq war:

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.

Harris goes on the suggest how deep is the liberal denial of the Islamist threat:

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.

Harris goes on to note that the Bush administration's difficulities in Iraq bolster the liberal case against the war on terror, although the left's supreme hatred of Bush overrides the basic coherence of acknowledging the world's true source of danger today.

Note also that Betsy Newmark, in a post yesterday, asked why liberals don't support the war on terror. Noting that Islamists stand against the rights of women, secularism, and gays, Betsy says:

I would like to see leftists who oppose every action we've been taking on the war on terror to say more to examine how they seem to be allying themselves with those who would oppose everything they themselves stand for.

So would I.