commonsensanity

OK, this guy's an atheist not a Rethuglican Wingnut, but he's still wrong:


[side note: I believe that far more people in this country are atheist than will admit it, simply because it's such a hot-button issue. Even BEFORE 2001, telling someone casually that you don't believe in anything was to invite the scorn of all except the MOST open-minded. Nowadays? Sheeeeeeeeiiiiiiiiiiiiittt....
I'm not an atheist--hell I'm a Jew who's been adopted non-wingnut Christianity, I've gone to the other side -- but it's no crime to admit that atheists have logic on their side. So Harris gets props for his willingess to wear the scarlet A in this day and age. ]


Head-in-the-Sand Liberals
Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists.

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.

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.

Um, No. Maybe it seems like we are compared to the "NUKE EM" sentiment shared by the religious right -- most of whom aren't crazy about Jews, Sikhs, or Rosicrucians -- but you can't blame us just because we don't chew barbed wire instead of chewing gum.

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.

Really? ALL Muslims? Considering all the muslims currently living in the US and Europe then, shouldn't we be dead already??

This is not to say that we are at war with all Muslims.

Oh, Ok. Good to know that.

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.

No we don't. Maybe we did in those absent-minded days right after 9/11, and while those facts still hold true for many muslims, including Palestinians.

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.

A third of Americans? I find that a bit hard to believe. But let's be real here, Harris is comparing apples and oranges. Even if you do believe in a conspiracy, you'd have to be a full lunatic to believe there is no threat at all from certain Muslim factions.

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 makes the mistake that the Wingnuts always do. Try to paint "liberalism" with this big, broad paintbrush as if we are some huge, monolithic, rigid ideology, when in fact it is exactly the opposite.

Harris might want to note that in New York, a city which, uh,was actually attacked on 9/11, they voted 3 years later, overwhelmingly, to kick Bush out of office in favor of John Kerry. Does Harris believe everyone in New York is a conspiracy theorist??

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.

Again, he's just plain wrong.

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.

Well, yes maybe some people went overboard, taking delight in throwing any jabs at Bush that they could find, but not EVERYBODY. Besides it was propaganda of the time-honored political type.

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.

We've seen people beheaded on video cameras. No one's disputing the violent nature of the terrorists. Nor does anyone doubt that many nations still advocate the destruction of Israel.

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.

The consensus (as much as their can be here) is that there were no winners in the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict as far as the US is concerned. Hezbollah came out intact, and may have people clinging to them even more tightly, creating more terrorists and terrorist sympathizers; Israeli bombed all the wrong people, few of the right ones, and got few concessions. So both sides are viewed with the correct opprobation.

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.

Here is Harris' problem: Despite being an atheist, he has been drinking the NeoCons Kool-Aid. He too mistakes caution for complacency; he mistakes wanting to fight a Smarter War on Terror with cowardice; He mistakes understanding the difference between good and evil with uncertainty.

He reminds me of nothing so much as the people who put Ozzy and Judas Priest on trial in the 80s claiming they put messages in their music to compel listeners to suicide. I mean, assuming you're right, considering that Priest and Ozzy sold millions of records, (this is pre-Napster, young-ins!) shouldn't their musical chicanery have resulted in oh, I don't know, at least a few thousand deaths?

Likewise, his claim about "Tens of Millions -- note not 10 million, but tens of millions? He's Barry Bonds swinging with a blindfold on. If there were even 1 million people in the country committed to doing ANYTHING -- believe me they would have been able to do it no problem.

Harris is dealing in generalities up the wazoo, taking his cue from O'Reilly and his ilk. We KNOW there's a War on Terror to be fought. We just want someone else fighting it. We don't want to spend untold billions invading countries with no definite plans or goals. We especially don't want to do that with countries that DON'T HARBOR TERRORISTS. As people far smarter than me have pointed out, Iraq was a secular country, and perhaps --perhaps-- was more hostile to terrorists than any other Arab nation. Al-Qaeda wasn't in Iraq before 2003. Now they are.

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.

He has a point here. European nations like Sweden and Holland may very well have to make some cold choices regarding their immigration policies.

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

*************************************

Here we go: when WWIII breaks out it will be the fault of...who? LIBERALS!!

Mr. Harris, is dealing in some of the worst histronics and shows it's not exclusive to the wingnuts. First of all The vast majority of muslim immigrants to the US and Western Europe are coming for economic reasons and freedom from oppression. The problems that often spring up are not among the first generation of US/British muslims, but among the second and third generations. We have become pretty well educated and we realize this now, where we may not have before. Those who settled in London, Detroit, Paris, et al. did not come lobbing molotov cocktails and burning American flags in the streets. Their children have grown up, in many cases, not sure where they belong, dissaffected and alienated. They've got muslim families and friends, but live in a Western world. They often lash out, and the civil unrest that may pop up from time to time is a consequence of that.

Meanwhile those native born terrrorists are the result of, yes Harris, US/Israeli oppression, whether directly or indirectly and indoctrination by certain fanatical parents, teachers and Imams.

But the blatant stereotyping that Harris indulges in is hardly helpful to anyone, except the right. Under Harris' logic, all black people are crooks, can dance and play basketball and are aspiring rappers; all Orientals get good grades and know Karate; and all jews are rich doctors, lawyers and accountants. (Much to the chagrin of my parents, I'm exhibit A that this one ain't true)

Part of being a liberal is that, no, we don't deal in absolutes. Only Siths do that.
There are good people, there are bad ones. FDR's tactics during WWII punished the good along with any possible spies, if any. In that same way, Bush's tactics during this war are also indiscriminatory. We've freed dozens of people from jails after finding them innocent of participating in terrorist activities.

One thing that's missing from Harris' diatribe is any sense of what tactics towards terrorism he does suppport, and what oppositions that we liberals specifically hold that anger him. All he comes up with the tinfoil arguments of a few that believe 9/11 was a conspiracy. Doesn't he realize by citing that, (and making that his sole argument) that he makes himself sound as daffy as he believes the conspirasts to be?
Does he advocate a war against all Muslims? Who does he think is going to fight this war? Chimpy?

This guy is a real part of the problem and people like him need their theories knocked down whenever, wherever they should appear.

posted by Seth Janklowicz @ 12:15 PM