Michael Walzer is a prominent American political philosopher and public intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey and editor emeritus of Disent.
Dissent Magazine has a wonderful effort by its former editor, Michael Walzer, to define a rational basis for liberals to responds to Islamic extremism.
There is too much in the essay to quote piecemeal. The best I can do on TA is offer the summary and a link.
“As I’ve already acknowledged, there is no chance that an international brigade of leftist fighters will join any of today’s military battles. My friends and neighbors are not ready to enlist; many of them won’t acknowledge the dangers posed by Islamist zealotry. But there are dangers and the secular left needs defenders. So here I am, a writer, not a fighter, and the most helpful thing I can do is to join the ideological wars. I can claim comrades in many nations, but not yet anywhere near enough of them. There is an international brigade of left intellectuals still waiting to take shape.”
Related posts on TA: Hayan Ali Hirsi Islamophobia
Mirel
Thanks hugely for suggesting that I post this on The Ave. It is a great essay!
There is palapable pain in Walzer’s voice as he tries to bridge the hypocritical gap created by Islamophobia and Islamoterroris.
I do suggest one thing he misses. He sees the hypocrisy as an issue for the intellectual community, what he calls the left. I think that argument misses because Islamoterorism is more than just another form of rfeligous fervor gone amuck.
I would compare today’s Islamoterrorist actions with the much less malign events that destabilized the world in the city of Sarajevo chain of events that started World War One was set off.
In my opinion, it is best for intellectuals to deal with Islaoterros is as a military threat. “we” are not going to avert a WWII like disaster by evangelizing the Islamic extreme to join the enlightenment.
If anyth8ing we need to work in the West to prevent (or defang) a similar fanatic religious fanaticism based in Christianity or western secularism. We need to remember that even f our military somehow wins the war, the wrong response, as in how the allies defeated Germany in WWI, could lead to something like WWII.