Head in the Sand Liberals:
The author is not some wild-eyed neocon fearmonger. Rather he's a liberal who realizes the threat we face. Read the whole thing (excerpts and commentary follow).
More:
Sadly, the Democrat party is hostage to the Bush Derangement wing of the party. The one that shuts its eyes and plugs its ears every September to pretend that nothing every happened and that evil people don't really want to kill us. They have staked so much on hating Bush they are incapable of thinking we ought to succeed in Iraq. This makes anyone other than a militantly anti-war candidate a non-starter. We, as a nation, are weaker for it. We lack the will to see the enemy for what he is and don't think our way of life is worth fighting for. There are a great many liberals who really and truly believe that we are hated only for our militancy and foreign policy. Not for what we are, infidels. I firmly believe that if we never supported Israel or were involved in the Middle East in any way Iran would still be building nuclear bombs, terrorists would still want to kill us and Americans would still be targets the world over.
Enough apologies says Anne Applebaum. I heartily agree. The Pope was making a point about the limits of reason alone as well as faith devoid of reason. He was speaking to secularists and fundamentalists alike and we saw which group began rioting. His point was that faith and reason are inevitably coupled and shedding either one is dangerous. The Pope's point mattered not to Islamic fanatics. Rather, he fell short of falling on a prayer rug prostrate before Allah and that's all that matters. I just hope he goes to Turkey despite the threats.
Lastly, here's some quick fun facts. Most of them are overlooked and worth reading. I'll add one; more people have been killed in the name of which ideology than any other?
The answer is here.
But my correspondence with liberals has convinced me that liberalism has grown dangerously out of touch with the realities of our world — specifically with what devout Muslims actually believe about the West, about paradise and about the ultimate ascendance of their faith.
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.
The author is not some wild-eyed neocon fearmonger. Rather he's a liberal who realizes the threat we face. Read the whole thing (excerpts and commentary follow).
More:
Unfortunately, such religious extremism is not as fringe a phenomenon as we might hope. Numerous studies have found that the most radicalized Muslims tend to have better-than-average educations and economic opportunities... 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.
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.
The same failure of liberalism is evident in Western Europe, where the dogma of multiculturalism has left a secular Europe very slow to address the looming problem of religious extremism among its immigrants. The people who speak most sensibly about the threat that Islam poses to Europe are actually fascists.
To say that this does not bode well for liberalism is an understatement: It does not bode well for the future of civilization.
Sadly, the Democrat party is hostage to the Bush Derangement wing of the party. The one that shuts its eyes and plugs its ears every September to pretend that nothing every happened and that evil people don't really want to kill us. They have staked so much on hating Bush they are incapable of thinking we ought to succeed in Iraq. This makes anyone other than a militantly anti-war candidate a non-starter. We, as a nation, are weaker for it. We lack the will to see the enemy for what he is and don't think our way of life is worth fighting for. There are a great many liberals who really and truly believe that we are hated only for our militancy and foreign policy. Not for what we are, infidels. I firmly believe that if we never supported Israel or were involved in the Middle East in any way Iran would still be building nuclear bombs, terrorists would still want to kill us and Americans would still be targets the world over.
Enough apologies says Anne Applebaum. I heartily agree. The Pope was making a point about the limits of reason alone as well as faith devoid of reason. He was speaking to secularists and fundamentalists alike and we saw which group began rioting. His point was that faith and reason are inevitably coupled and shedding either one is dangerous. The Pope's point mattered not to Islamic fanatics. Rather, he fell short of falling on a prayer rug prostrate before Allah and that's all that matters. I just hope he goes to Turkey despite the threats.
Lastly, here's some quick fun facts. Most of them are overlooked and worth reading. I'll add one; more people have been killed in the name of which ideology than any other?
The answer is here.
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