Sam Harris: ‘Head in the Sand Liberals’

http://www.truthdig.com/eartotheground/item/20060918_sam_harris_sand_liberals/

Posted on Sep 18, 2006

Truthdig contributor and “The End of Faith” author Sam Harris writes in an L.A. Times Op-Ed piece that liberals’ fury with the Bush administration has blinded them to the danger of our enemies in the Muslim world. “This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that ‘liberals are soft on terrorism.’ It is, and they are.”

Another particularly powerful line:

While liberals should be the ones pointing the way beyond this Iron Age madness, they are rendering themselves increasingly irrelevant. Being generally reasonable and tolerant of diversity, liberals should be especially sensitive to the dangers of religious literalism. But they aren’t.

It reminded us of one of Bill Maher’s classics: “Don’t be so tolerant that you tolerate intolerance.”

Sam Harris in the L.A. 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.

... 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.

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.

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