Junto Boys

A LIBERAL ON LIBERALS

We are missing the point on the whole war-on-terror debate. The war is a battle of incompatible theologies, and to frame it in any other context makes the core issues unanswerable. Yet we no longer as a nation stand for the one theology that opposes the other, which muddles and complicates foreign policy because it precludes all substantive debate. Which is not to say we *should* endorse the one and oppose the other, we shouldn't, I merely state a fact.

Liberals and conservatives respond very differently to the notion that religion can be a direct cause of human conflict.

This difference does not bode well for the future of liberalism. 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.

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.

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.

Liberals do not understand religion, and fail to persuade when they pretend to, so they mostly ignore the subject entirely or marginalize its significance. (Unlike The Fox Corporation, which just announced a formal division to make films targeting the ignored and lucrative evangelical Christian market, because it is ignored and lucrative.) They do not know what to make of the fact that even educated and otherwise sophisticated people can be swayed by something as bourgeois as religion.

So questions of right and wrong, so clear and so important to Bush and much of the conservative voter base, rarely enter the debate in a meaningful way, even as they serve as the bright dividing line on so many issues. In fact, Bush's notion of moral black and whites are a main reason why his opponents call him stupid, simple and inept. Indeed,

In their analyses of U.S. and Israeli foreign policy, liberals can be relied on to overlook the most basic moral distinctions.

As does the writer. Liberals don't understand religious faith in whatever form. It's not so much that they "overlook" it but that they just don't get it. It does not compute. Like any good liberal, the writer thinks the dogmatic Christian right is as dangerous to civilization as Muslim terrorism, as if Jerry Falwell or Pat Robertson actually threatens his life and property. Any casual Muslim OR Christian knows that that is a silly proposition, unless one's definition of civilization centers on the right to self-indulgence, which both religions find inconsistent with faith and which liberals won't admit they support.

Those who assert a faith, who have adopted the faith as a matter of head and heart, are inspired and motivated to do (to whatever failing degree) what the tenets of their faith require. A Muslim's faith ("radical" or "true," depending on your own interpretation) may motivate him to violence for reasons you can't quite understand unless you understand his faith (which I don't). A Christian, motivated by notions of love and justice, may favor the precise horror of selective war (as I do) as the instrument of broader human liberty and dignity. To equate the two motivations reveal a profound misunderstanding, or rather non-understanding, of both, a non-understanding which makes constructive public debate impossible.