September 18, 2006

The End of Us

Sam Harris, self-proclaimed liberal and author of The End of Faith and the upcoming Letter to a Christian Nation, has a good opinion piece in the LA Times:

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.

In a misguided quest to loathe Bush at every turn, a number of liberals are missing the broader point: there's a war on, and it's not about oil or Halliburton (although self-indulgent crooks will always appear when easy money is present) - it's about civilization itself.

As Harris says, we're not at war with all Muslims, but with a significant and dangerous subset of that community. If you believe this is about our troops in Saudi Arabia or the invasion of Iraq or the Russians in Chechnya or that if we just all came home and decided that good fences made good neighbors, well, you're wrong. We'd still find our pissy Islamofascist neighbors throwing eggs over that fence and showing up on our doorstep with Allah-praising pamphlets and swords in hand.

The conservatives might be going about the war in the wrong way, but plenty of liberals need to realize, at the very least, that there is a war at all. Putting your head in the sand just gets you kicked in the ass.