Sam Harris, who confesses to being a liberal, has an excellent critique of the failure of liberals to understand the nature, and extent, of the Islamofascist threat not only to our own national security but to western civilization itself. (HatTip to RealClearPolitics)
It’s excellent, and I encourage everyone to read it. That’s not to say it’s perfect, but I found only two flaws worth mentioning. The apparently necessary condemnation of “the mendacity and shocking incompetence of the Bush administration” struck me as now almost formulaic, and thus gratuitous. There was also a more troubling suggestion of a moral and threat-level equivalence between radical Islam and radical Christianity —
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
— and at least an implication that right-wing and religious lunatic are synonymous —
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.
One does not have to ignore Timothy McVeigh in order to believe that “religious demagogues of the Christian right” do not pose a threat to our national security that deserves to be mentioned in the same sentence, paragraph, lifetime with the threat posed by the failure of the liberals Harris justly skewers who fail to recognize the threat we actually do face.
Nor do I believe it’s true that “the religious lunatics of the West” (whoever they are) are, or will be seen to be, the only people hard-headed enough to deal with the threats we face or that “members of the Christian right” speak with the greatest moral clarity about the Middle East.
But these are relatively minor blemishes on an otherwise excellent and much-needed analysis. After all, how bad can an article by a liberal be that asserts that his analysis
may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that “liberals are soft on terrorism.” It is, and they are.
