{"id":12252,"date":"2009-11-06T12:54:30","date_gmt":"2009-11-06T12:54:30","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2009\/11\/06\/the-lefts-death-wish\/"},"modified":"2009-11-06T12:54:30","modified_gmt":"2009-11-06T12:54:30","slug":"the-lefts-death-wish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2009\/11\/06\/the-lefts-death-wish\/","title":{"rendered":"The Left&#8217;s Death Wish"},"content":{"rendered":"<p align=\"justify\" class=\"firstinpost\"><font face=\"Georgia\">Something that has long puzzled me also puzzles Michael Liccione. Mike <\/font><a href=\"http:\/\/mliccione.blogspot.com\/2007\/02\/just-when-i-thought-we-were.html\"><font color=\"#810081\" face=\"Georgia\">puts it like this<\/font><\/a><font face=\"Georgia\">:<\/font><\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN: justify\"><font face=\"Georgia\">Shouldn&#39;t liberals be the most concerned about Islamic fundamentalism, given that the things they profess to value are the first things they would lose under Islamist pressure? It&#39;s hard to avoid the conclusion that this sort of liberal hates political conservatives and orthodox Christians more than he loves his own liberty. And he wishes to cling desperately to his own self-image as a defender of the poor, oppressed minorities, even when some of those poor, oppressed minorities would just as soon see him and his kind <\/font><a href=\"http:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Mahmoud_Asgari_and_Ayaz_Marhoni\"><font color=\"#810081\" face=\"Georgia\">swinging from the gallows.<\/font><\/a><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN: justify\"><font face=\"Georgia\">Substantially correct. But if I may quibble, &#39;Islamic fundamentalism&#39; may not be the right term. Better would be &#39;militant Islam&#39; or &#39;radical Islam&#39; or &#39;Islamism.&#39; A fundamentalist, as I understand the word, is one who interprets the scriptures of his religion literally, as God&#39;s own inerrant word. Thus Islam, if I am not mistaken, holds that the Koran was literally dictated by God to Muhammad in Arabic. Whatever one thinks of fundamentalists in this sense, it seems obvious that they should not be confused with militants or terrorists. Although fundamentalists and terrorists are sets with a non-null intersection, there are fundamentalists who are not terrorists and terrorists who are not fundamentalists.<\/font><\/p>\n<p style=\"TEXT-ALIGN: justify\"><font face=\"Georgia\">It is important to try to think as clearly and precisely as one can about these issues, distinguishing the different, and forging one&#39;s terminology in the the teeth of these differences.&#0160; &#0160;And the more &#39;hot-button&#39; the issue, the more necessary is clear and precise thinking.<\/font><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Something that has long puzzled me also puzzles Michael Liccione. Mike puts it like this: Shouldn&#39;t liberals be the most concerned about Islamic fundamentalism, given that the things they profess to value are the first things they would lose under Islamist pressure? It&#39;s hard to avoid the conclusion that this sort of liberal hates political &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2009\/11\/06\/the-lefts-death-wish\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The Left&#8217;s Death Wish&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[775,163],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12252","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-fundamentalism","category-leftism-and-political-correctness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12252","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12252"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12252\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12252"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12252"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12252"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}