In yesterday’s OpinionJournal (WSJ), Bret Stephens asks “Why is the left afraid to face up to the threat of radical Islam?”
Here’s a puzzle: Why is it so frequently the case that the people who have the most at stake in the battle against Islamic extremism and the most to lose when Islamism gains–namely, liberals–are typically the most reluctant to fight it?
Although there are no doubt a number of people on the left who fit his question, Polimom suspects Stephens may be blurring a line between reluctance to fight Islamism and anger about the war in Iraq.
However, while I think it’s fair to wonder about the hard-left thinking, I don’t think those liberal values are only threatened by Islamism. Stephens also writes:
“…what Islamism most threatened wasn’t just America generally, but precisely the values that modern liberalism had done so much to promote and protect for the past 40 years: civil rights, gay rights, feminism, privacy rights, reproductive choice, sexual freedom, the right to worship as one chooses, the right not to worship at all.
As long as we’re asking questions about ideological extremes, why is it that the hard-right conservatives don’t seem to recognize the paragraph above as a mirror of themselves?
Update (via memeorandum): Sam Harris has a directly-related article in today’s LA Times titled “Head-in-the-Sand Liberals“. It’s a good read, particularly recommended for those who are not overly concerned about Islamic extremism. Here are a couple paragraphs:
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.
Kevin Drum has an excellent rebuttal here.
Fascinating discussion, all the way around.
Update 2: Amba finds, and discusses, the liberal-denial argument.