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Head-in-the-Sand Liberals

Western civilization really is at risk from Muslim extremists.
By Sam Harris

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.

Copyright 2006 Los Angeles Times

It's a sad, sad world

i.e. it's a sad world due to the reasons outlined in the article, or it's a sad world because of the article??

Due to the reasones outlined in the article, as I agree with the majority of the article.

Just read this elsewhere and was about to post. Really a solid piece.

It blows my mind how fucking awesome sam harris is.

His "the end of faith" is a hell of a read.

While I certainly respect his opinion and analysis, I disagree with the basis of his argument. He is assuming that the root cause of conflict here is idealogical differences between religions. But that's a farce. Religious conflict, often dubbed as one of the largest causes of conflict around the world, is just a mask for a much simpler explination. Power, resources & oppertunity.
If it were possible to magically, and instantly remove all religion from humanity, you would not find that everyone would stop fighting. People would continue fighting because there is still the same driving forces backing their conflict; The need for power, resources & oppertunity (or any combination therin).
People certainly seperate themselves out into groups, and wish their group to succeed and prosper. And to do that, what do you need? Power, resources & oppertunity. It's not limited to religious groups. Think of ANY kind of group. Even sports teams. You need these things to succeed and win, and they all fight for it.

So, I understand the analysis this guy is trying to do, and he does a good job within his scope of thinking, however his thinking is too limited....too small a scope. The picture is much bigger, and consequently, much simpler to comprehend once you see it.

...except conflicts regarding power, resources and opportunity (sans religion) do not include magical stories about the afterlife. It all falls back onto what you believe will happen after death.
And do you think that sports teams will kill the other team because of their belief in the afterlife??! Sorry to say, but I think your assessment is quite limited.

True, but religion is the impetus that is used against the majority to garner the power and resources that enables the oligarchy to gain and remain in power.

The sports team example was a simplified example of conflict. I never said all conflicts were due to religion, and had religious implications. You can still be religious, and have a conflict, and NOT be fighting about religion.

The mechanism is only important in that it is a means. What you call the mechanism is unimportant. There are other mechanisms, beyond religion, that also play large roles a means to achieve power, resources and oppertunity. Science, in fact, often seen as an opposite of sorts to religion, is another mechanism. You could almost simplify power, resources and oppertunity into one term..."survival".

This is like an echo in all your posts about war.

Absolutely, I agree. But it's a point I feel strongly about, that should be weighed. Honestly, people tend to overcomplicate things. Maybe it's just my experiance working to diagnose technical problems, but you've always got to strip out the unneccesary information to get to the simple root of the problem, otherwise, you only address symptoms and not the cause.

Well, it's not a point I really disagree with. I think power more than anything else has fueled the wars of the past and current century. This just makes me despise war even more, as this is a pretty baseless reason to go fighting over.

Power may have fueled the fire, but what do you think the fire is? It's religion.

I haven't read any of the studies referenced, but the evidence cited would appear to very much run contrary to your argument.

In any event, the main point of the article to me is that liberals are so lost in a sea of political correctness, diversity, and multiculturalism that they are utterly incapable of recognizing the problem for what it is, and in turn developing strategies for dealing with it effectively.

I see it as the exact opposite.

I refuse to read this article just because of the asinine title.

I have no doubt that there are radicals that are well educated and have lots of money. That doesnt mean they dont seek what I've talked about before. Either for them, or perhaps their families, children and group as a whole. Money and education and just another means to further goals. You can never have enough money, resources and power. Just look at any billionaire who cheats on his taxes.