Head-in-the-Sand Liberals
"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.
The quote from the above article was written by Sam Harris, a self-described liberal atheist and contributor to The Huffington Post -- not by some liberal fantasy of a hate-filled, lockstep, right-wing, religious nut, ditto-head goon (as if such a thing actually exists outside the paranoiac ravings of DNC Chairman Howard Dean).
One of the most ridiculous arguments I keep hearing from the left side of the political spectrum is that the Bush Administration and all its bobble-headed yes-men are using the struggle against Islamic terrorism as a way to keep the U.S. population in fear and under control, yet the past five years has seen the Democrats portray the Bush Administration as blood-thirsty, power-mad, corporate toadying fascists who will plunge the United States into ruin . . . gee, I guess the politics of fear cut both ways, donnit?
But given the latest example of Muslim "tolerance" in response to the Catholic Pope's attempt to introduce a discourse on how religious faith comes unmoored from what should be its spirit of cooperation and compassion without the power of reason to anchor it, we honestly do have something to fear -- and it isn't George Bush.
Between the violent Koran In The Toilet riots, the violent Danish Cartoon riots, and now the good, faithful Muslims who are firebombing Christian churches, calling for beheadings and shooting nuns to death over a speech which mentioned that perhaps a "convert or die" theology was not the best hand to bring to the world-wide peace table, it's becoming evident that our hopes for an international laissez-faire civilization are under increasing attack from an apoplectic Islamic population that would sooner launch nuclear missiles at the next Miss Universe competition than throw-off the Dark Ages mentality so fatally opposed to free sexual expression (or any kind of free expression at all, really, unless you're piously banging your forehead on the ground in the process).
*sigh* . . . just blogging about the backward nature of Islam anymore makes me want to bang my forehead on something else.
Sam Harris' exhortation to his fellow liberals is a plea to rouse themselves from their hatred of George Bush and direct that hatred towards something else more pertinent -- namely, an unreasonable and unrelenting foe gussied up in the robes of a holy prophet.
The BF has been telling me for the past six months that if our politicians don't stop playing chess with all our lives and get down to the business of actually ridding ourselves of our sworn and stated enemies, we're going to see the rise of a real fascism in this country that'll make the dKos crowd long for the fake, bogeyman fascism they cry wolf about in all their forums.
Should the United States suffer another attack on our home soil, and our leaders' best response is a round of God Bless America on Capitol Hill followed by years of bitter squabbling over whose fault it is, I guarantee there will be more than enough voters eager to elect an independent party that runs on a campaign of pest control through nuclear extermination (the BF speculates that it will be Pat Buchanan, to which I shudder).
This is Mr. Harris' fear, as well: "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 . . . Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren't."
Liberals have a lousy habit of dressing the real threat from Islamic religious literalism in the wardrobe of a straw man, then run around accusing their political opponents of trying to scare everyone with a straw man -- "See, it's a straw man! What do you mean it tried to blow up your airplane? How could a straw man blow up an airplane? The Republicans drink the blood of babies!" As the Islamic response to Pope Benedict's call for a more reasonable Islam boils over into murderous utterances and violent repercussions, it becomes an exercise in abject stupidity for any liberal at all to continue to explain away Islamic fundamentalism as a mere result of economic deprivation and/or an imperialistic U.S. foreign policy.
Islamic fundamentalism has nothing to do with either, and is, instead, a reality of choice, just as Christianity is a reality of choice for those who believe in it. Fortunately for Western civilization, the elevation of Jesus into godhood softened most of the hard edges of ancient Judaism into a more compassionate and forgiving message, which is why you don't see Christians charging through Manhattan and throwing firebombs into the New York Times' office building whenever they publish a critical op-ed about their messiah (and which is how we are afforded the spectacle of Rosie O'Donnell openly braying on national television about the violent and dangerous oppression of the religious right, even going so far as to say that it's just as bad as radical Islam, without so much as suffering a paper cut in return -- an irony which is sadly lost on what must be her one remaining brain cell, especially when you consider that Islamic protesters, as I write this, are calling for the Pope to be arrested, assassinated and/or imprisoned for merely criticizing the violence at the core of their religious philosophy.
But the Pope is correct (though I never thought I'd see myself write such a thing), for it is Islam, more so than any economic privation or meddling foreign policy, that makes the Middle East what it is today -- a region which equates the mere existence of a free, prosperous and especially Christian West as an intrinsic attack.
We, all of us, need to get serious about the utter contempt with which Islam views our Western freedoms -- the freedom to choose our own course in life; the freedom to bow down to any god we wish (or no god at all); the freedom to select our own partners and our own politics; the freedom to criticize whatever and whomever we feel deserves criticism; the freedom from imposed gender roles; and, lastly, the freedom to be an individual, to adopt our own styles, attitudes and modes of expression. All of these freedoms, which we take for granted in the United States as being self-evident, are an affront to Islam as it is practiced in the Middle East today, and yet it is this same Islam that our political and social liberals, who fancy themselves the champions of all the freedoms I listed above, casually dismiss as unworthy of repudiation, focusing instead on Christianity as the grave threat to us all.
I live my life in utter safety as an openly gay man among an American population largely consisting of these so-called dangerous, right-wing radical Christians, so I'm quite sure the people who have been, and are continuing to be, imprisoned, stoned, hung and beheaded in Islamic societies for the crime of being a homosexual would envy the oppression Rosie O'Donnell insists I live under.
When you face the fact that Middle Eastern Islam, the Islam which continues to make noises about dominating the Western world, is a religion that condemns all non-believers to servitude and/or death; kills its homosexuals; beheads its critics; shoots nuns; dives airplanes into skyscrapers; sets off bombs in subways, train stations, nightclubs and churches; blatantly oppresses women and looks the other way when a father murders his daughter for refusing to marry the man he's selected for her -- then Head-in-the-Sand Liberals doesn't even begin to describe a political party that includes the likes of Rosie O'Donnell, Jimmy Carter, Michael Moore and Jack Murtha, and I desperately wish they'd get their politics out of my civilization.
ADDENDUM:
Email of the day: "My nightmare is that we finally convince the left that radical Islam is a threat about 30 minutes before we and the left all get murdered."
UPDATE:
Related articles:
1. The West Should Be Free To Criticize Islam
2. When Atheists and Secularists Quote Scripture
3. Dean Esmay's Unbelievably Pretentious And Tedious Nonsense
