Smug, Bush-hating, atheist HuffPo contributor: Liberals dangerously soft on terror

posted at 12:14 pm on September 18, 2006 by Allahpundit
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Somehow Mary K and I ended up in a debate about religion last night, and I told her that if you showed me “Loose Change” and “The Greatest Story Ever Told” and asked me which one was more likely to be true, I dare say I’d gots to go with the LC. She took that in good humor, secure in the knowledge that I’d soon be consumed with guilt for having compared, however obliquely, Christians to appalling morons like Dylan Avery. She was right.

In the spirit of reconciliation, I offer this morning’s op-ed in the LA Times by militant atheist Sam Harris. It’s sprinkled with the usual equivalence about religious lunatics over there versus religious “lunatics” over here, but stick with it. Pure gold:

[D]espite abundant evidence to the contrary, liberals continue to imagine that Muslim terrorism springs from economic despair, lack of education and American militarism…

[L]iberal 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’s piece doesn’t mention the Pope. If you’re curious about his take on that, see here. It won’t surprise you. Neither will another hot new post, also at HuffPo, by RJ Eskow that’s charmingly entitled, “Spiritual Niggers: Islam and the West.”

Meanwhile, in Pakistan, fundamentalist Muslim women are out in the streets protesting against reforms to the country’s rape laws that would make it possible to convict rapists on the testimony of fewer than four witnesses. The left is mighty curious as to why conservatives would vote against their economic interests in Kansas, not so curious as to why Muslim women would embrace their own brutalization. Why the difference? Harris knows.

Update: It’s religion day at Hot Air!

Update: Let me link this again for those who missed it a few days ago.

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