Bill's Notes

Sam Harris, the liberal author of The End of Faith, a book describing how we all need to get past religion (or at least become Buddhists) in order to bring about a peaceful global community, writes here that liberals are out of touch with the dangers of Islam.

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.

Such an astonishing eruption of masochistic unreason could well mark the decline of liberalism, if not the decline of Western civilization. There are books, films and conferences organized around this phantasmagoria, and they offer an unusually clear view of the debilitating dogma that lurks at the heart of liberalism: Western power is utterly malevolent, while the powerless people of the Earth can be counted on to embrace reason and tolerance, if only given sufficient economic opportunities.

I don't know how many more engineers and architects need to blow themselves up, fly planes into buildings or saw the heads off of journalists before this fantasy will dissipate. The truth is that there is every reason to believe that a terrifying number of the world's Muslims now view all political and moral questions in terms of their affiliation with Islam. This leads them to rally to the cause of other Muslims no matter how sociopathic their behavior. This benighted religious solidarity may be the greatest problem facing civilization and yet it is regularly misconstrued, ignored or obfuscated by liberals.

Meanwhile, back in the blogosphere, highly popular blogger Dean Esmay once again goes through his apologetics for Islam. This time, he is simply making shit up. Dean says Mohammed was a defensive warrior almost exclusively and well, it just more nonsense after that.

One note: Dean is a friend of Aziz Poonawalla, who takes a method of interpreting the Koran that's ... well, let's just say that if Aziz were Christian, he'd be a liberal Episcopalian. Were all Muslims Aziz, we wouldn't have a problem. Alas, though many are like Aziz, not enough are. See Sam Harris's article.

Fortunately, Dean gets a well-deserved spanking from Bryan Preston and Robert Spencer, both of whom actually know what they're talking about.

Denial. Ain't just a river in Egypt.