Terror and Liberalism

Paul Berman talked about his book Terror and Liberalism. In this book, Mr. Berman argued for an aggressive liberal response to terrorist attacks. Mr. Berman said that we are not facing a battle of the West against Islam but the same battle that tore apart Europe during most of the twentieth century.It is the clash of liberalism and its enemies. His analysis categorized radical Islamism as a totalitarian reaction against Western liberalism in a class with Nazism and communism. Drawing on the ideas of Lenin and of Camus in The Rebel, Berman delineated how all three movements descended from utopian visions into irrational cults of death. He illustrated this progression through an analysis of the writings of a leading Islamist philosopher, Sayyid Qutb. Mr. Berman condemned the foreign policy “realism” of the political right and the naïveté of the political left. He called for a “new radicalism” and a “liberal American interventionism” to promote democratic values throughout the world. close