How Liberals Fight Terrorism

They deny the threat of Muslim Extremism, according to the very liberal Sam Harris, the author of "The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason." :

This may seem like frank acquiescence to the charge that "liberals are soft on terrorism." It is, and they are...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...

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.