# NYT report on Benghazi should be a wakeup call to liberals too **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [January 7, 2014, 4:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141 "2014-01-07T16:20:30Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2014, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/61 "2014-01-08T21:56:16Z")
> [@SlackerInc](#): > > Surely you are not asserting that Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Richard Dawkins are “lockstep FOX News talking points conservatives”? Did I mention any of those people? No? You know why? 'Cause I ain’t talking about them. > [@](#): > > –Throughout all the hearings and calls for heads to roll ad nauseam, I have been on Rice’s side, on Hillary Clinton’s side, on Obama’s side. Nothing I posted here has contradicted that. Therefore people claiming I am spouting the FOX line are full of shit and should be ashamed of themselves. Unfortunately some people simply have no shame. Fox has multiple simultaneous lines of bullshit. What you presented in your OP is a standard right-wing strawman of liberal attitudes towards Muslims, with a healthy dollop of the xenophobia that is right-wing media’s stock-in-trade. That you prefaced your OP with “I don’t buy that Benghazi stuff…” is about as convincing as someone starting an argument with, “I’m not racist, but…” If you’ve been Super Duper Liberal Guy in other threads, well, great. But people are reacting to what you’ve written in _this_ thread, and no one is particularly interested in doing a bibliography of your posts before they reply to it. ---
**Author:** ![Count\_Blucher](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/c5a1d2/32.png) [@Count\_Blucher](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Count_Blucher)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2014, 9:56pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/62 "2014-01-08T21:56:46Z")
The only people spouting “Benghazi, Benghazi, Benghazi” are people whom I have no interest in holding a conversation with. Good Day. ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2014, 10:27pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/63 "2014-01-08T22:27:27Z")
More doublespeak as **Bloucher** beats a retreat. What fundamentally bugs, **Miller** , is the knee-jerk assumption that anti-Muslim sentiment is inherently right wing–that there is no progressive case to be made against Islam. **Der Trihs** , [here is an example](http://www.npr.org/blogs/thesalt/2014/01/07/260555381/thousands-of-whales-dolphins-killed-to-satisfy-our-seafood-appetite) I just now heard on the radio for why 21st century progressives need to retire the old trope about the U.S. being the world’s preeminent bad actor: > [@](#): > > Smith says under federal law — the Marine Mammal Protection Act — fish imported into the U.S. must meet the same high standards for protecting these animals as is required of local fishermen. It’s a black and white requirement, and he says it’s not simply enough for a country to have laws on the books. > > “You have to prove it, and the only way you can prove it, like we prove it in the United States, is you have an observer program that goes out on the fishing vessels and does a sample and looks at how many marine mammals are being captured,” Smith says. > > That not common practice elsewhere in the world. And it’s not cheap. But there’s a lot at stake. > > “I think for certain species in certain regions, it’s a threat that can lead to extinction,” says Rebecca Lent, executive director of the federal Marine Mammal Commission. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [January 8, 2014, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/64 "2014-01-08T22:48:19Z")
> [@SlackerInc](#): > > More doublespeak as **Bloucher** beats a retreat. What fundamentally bugs, **Miller** , is the knee-jerk assumption that anti-Muslim sentiment is inherently right wing–that there is no progressive case to be made against Islam. As a progressive, I’m entirely comfortable with the perception that anti-Islamic prejudice is purely an artifact of the right wing. Does that bug you? Who gives a shit. ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2014, 5:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/65 "2014-01-09T05:06:42Z")
And yet how many Western progressives would be okay with a family or kinship group that operated on the retrograde, patriarchal, anti-Enlightenment basis that most Muslims do, if it were not under the cover of this particular sanctified religious label? From where this atheist sits, it doesn’t look a lot different from those Mormon sects that pop up in the news from time to time, that we rightly decry and send cops in to rescue the women and girls from. Yet due to an overly rigid doctrine of multiculturalism, Muslims are given a pass for no other reason that I can see than that they are not culturally Western, and perhaps because they are (almost always) not Caucasian. (If you have another reason for making this distinction, please enlighten me.) ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2014, 6:08am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/66 "2014-01-09T06:08:24Z")
And there’s the Fox-speak again. ---
**Author:** ![Grumman](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/43a26b/32.png) [@Grumman](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Grumman)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2014, 6:11am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/67 "2014-01-09T06:11:08Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > As a progressive, I’m entirely comfortable with the perception that anti-Islamic prejudice is purely an artifact of the right wing. > > Does that bug you? Who gives a shit. The Straight Dope Fighting Ignorance Since 1973 ---
**Author:** ![Rick\_Kitchen](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/rick_kitchen/32/522_2.png) [@Rick\_Kitchen](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rick_Kitchen)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2014, 6:42am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/68 "2014-01-09T06:42:56Z")
> [@](#): > > the U.S. intervened militarily to oust a widely hated dictator It did? I must have missed that. ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2014, 7:04am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/69 "2014-01-09T07:04:31Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > And there’s the Fox-speak again. Your saying it is doesn’t make it so. It’s just really not. You need to learn how to perceive and appreciate nuance, it would appear. (Hint: FOX blowhards are primarily concerned with Islam as a perceived threat to traditional, Judeo-Christian patriarchal family values, while I am concerned with it as a threat to feminism, gay rights, secular modernity, freedom of belief and of artistic expression, etc.) ---
**Author:** ![Magiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4491bb/32.png) [@Magiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Magiver)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2014, 7:16am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/70 "2014-01-09T07:16:16Z")
> [@Miller](#): > > As a progressive, I’m entirely comfortable with the perception that anti-Islamic prejudice is purely an artifact of the right wing. > > Does that bug you? Who gives a shit. What was the political breakdown of the people killed at: Boston Marathon Fort Hood World Trade Center Pentagon building the aircraft used to attack the WTC and Pentagon and the one in PA The US Embassy in Beirut That’s just off the top of my head. If I listed even a fraction of the modern suicide attacks it would fill pages in this thread. Do you give a shit that the people who committed these atrocities aren’t impressed with your credentials? I’d think it would bug you if they slaughtered your family. It would bug me. It’s virtually impossible to discuss the subject without mentioning the demographic elephant in the room and that would be the subset of Muslims who hold a rather strong opinion on your way of life. And the funny thing is it doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Agnostic or Muslim. There’s a group of dedicated Muslims who want your proudly progressive self dead. ---
**Author:** ![Gyrate](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/gyrate/32/3588_2.png) [@Gyrate](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gyrate)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2014, 10:20am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/71 "2014-01-09T10:20:19Z")
> [@Magiver](#): > > What was the political breakdown of the people killed at: > > Boston Marathon > Fort Hood > World Trade Center > Pentagon building > the aircraft used to attack the WTC and Pentagon and the one in PA > The US Embassy in Beirut > > That’s just off the top of my head. If I listed even a fraction of the modern suicide attacks it would fill pages in this thread. Do you give a shit that the people who committed these atrocities aren’t impressed with your credentials? I’d think it would bug you if they slaughtered your family. It would bug me. > > It’s virtually impossible to discuss the subject without mentioning the demographic elephant in the room and that would be the subset of Muslims who hold a rather strong opinion on your way of life. And the funny thing is it doesn’t matter if you’re Christian, Agnostic or Muslim. There’s a group of dedicated Muslims who want your proudly progressive self dead. If you listed all the suicide attacks since the attack on Beirut and weren’t cherry-picking incidents I think you’d find that far more Muslims have been killed than non-Muslims, and also that there were a significant number of non-Muslim suicide bombers. I think **Little Nemo** nailed it with this: > [@](#): > > Secular progressives are way ahead of the curve in recognizing the dangers presented by religious fanatics. No one is excusing terrorist acts nor religious fanaticism. Where you persistently go wrong is in tarring the non-fanatics with the same brush. The vast majority of Muslims would like to go about their business in peace, just like the vast majority of non-Muslims. That their cray-cray contingent is dangerous is not in dispute; that their cray-cray contingent is representative of the whole religion is. ---
**Author:** ![Captain\_Amazing](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/6de8d8/32.png) [@Captain\_Amazing](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Captain_Amazing)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2014, 12:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/72 "2014-01-09T12:20:25Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > That cite goes on to discuss his obsession with the Turner Diaries, a book that’s kind of at the core of the Christian Identity cult. I don’t know that the Turner Diaries are “at the core of the Christian Identity cult” so much as an important novel for racist right-wing extremists generally. Which is to say, while its important to Christian Identity people, it’s also important to a lot of secular racists. As far as I know, the only real link between McVeigh and the Identity movement is that he once claimed to have a friend in Elohim City. But there’s not much evidence that his racism was religious, and he seems to have been pretty secular and not really motivated by religious beliefs at all. ---
**Author:** ![Miller](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/miller/32/481_2.png) [@Miller](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Miller)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2014, 3:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/73 "2014-01-09T15:37:50Z")
> [@Magiver](#): > > What was the political breakdown of the people killed at: I have literally no idea how this relates to my post. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2014, 4:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/74 "2014-01-09T16:32:16Z")
> [@Captain\_Amazing](#): > > But there’s not much evidence that his racism was religious, and he seems to have been pretty secular and not really motivated by religious beliefs at all. You may be right; I was responding specifically to the suggestion that McVeigh wasn’t religious. Honestly, though as a nonreligious person, it’s hard for me to find a relevant moral difference between someone that commits violence because of violent, irrational beliefs rooted in no evidence that involves a deity, and someone that commits violence because of violent, irrational beliefs rooted in no evidence that doesn’t involve a deity. The point is that there are death cultists, and there are Christians, and there are Muslims, and the death cultists are not simply a subgroup of Muslims; the Venn diagram is more complicated than that, similar to the Venn diagram of men, women, and bigots. ---
**Author:** ![Karrius](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/k/71c47a/32.png) [@Karrius](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Karrius)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2014, 5:40pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/75 "2014-01-09T17:40:04Z")
Personally, I for one see no real difference between Muslims and Christians. Except that one of those groups has actually personally threatened the health and safety of myself and my friends, and has real power to do serious harm. Most atheist liberals aren’t thinking muslims are better than christians. They just realize that they’re both pretty much the same, and the christians have more power to do real harm to them. ---
**Author:** ![Folacin](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/folacin/32/3195_2.png) [@Folacin](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Folacin)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2014, 6:17pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/76 "2014-01-09T18:17:46Z")
> [@Count\_Blucher](#): > > If A + B = C, if A is a real number greater than zero (don’t make me pull up Miller’s posts as cites) and if A \> C, then by the properties of addition, doesn’t A - C = B? By the properties of addition (and the power of Greyskull) you don’t need to specify that A\>zero. It doesn’t hurt, but real number addition/subtraction works just fine with negative numbers. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2014, 9:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/77 "2014-01-09T21:46:47Z")
> [@Karrius](#): > > Most atheist liberals aren’t thinking muslims are better than christians. They just realize that they’re both pretty much the same, and the christians have more power to do real harm to them. Yeah–my friends who are most directly impacted by religious fundamentalists are afraid that if one of them dies, the other one’s religious zealot parents will use our state’s theocratic laws to remove the two children from their home. My friends are lesbians, and the birth mother’s parents are rightwing Christians who believe that the lesbian family is an abomination, and my state does not allow the birth mother’s partner to adopt the children. If the birth mother dies, technically the children’s next of kin is the birth mother’s parents, and they’re clear that they’ll never allow the children’s second mother to see them again. Also, the only religious bombing my town has seen was when [Eric Rudolph](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eric_Rudolph) (another Christian Identity death-cultist) bombed an abortion clinic. But that was many years ago. These days I don’t think anyone in my town is in much danger of being bombed by a Christian terrorist–but then, we’re not really in significant danger of being bombed by a Muslim terrorist either. The real danger that my friends face is vicious discrimination from Christian bigots. This isn’t to say that all Christians are bigots, not at all: indeed, the single person doing the best work to stop homophobia in the South, in my opinion, is a Christian reverend. But it is to say that the danger we face here is more from Christians than from Muslims. ---
**Author:** ![Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/left_hand_of_dorkness/32/7156_2.png) [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Left_Hand_of_Dorkness)\ **Post date:** [January 9, 2014, 9:49pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/78 "2014-01-09T21:49:09Z")
> [@Count\_Blucher](#): > > If A + B = C, if A is a real number greater than zero (don’t make me pull up Miller’s posts as cites) and if A \> C, then by the properties of addition, doesn’t A - C = B? Waitaminute: A=5 C=2 so B must equal -3. A+B=C is 5 + (-3)=2. You’re telling me that 5-2=-3? Something’s wrong with your math here, or mine. Edit: I wonder if you meant to write: > [@](#): > > If A + B = C, if C is a real number greater than zero (don’t make me pull up Miller’s posts as cites) and if A \< C, then by the properties of addition, doesn’t C - A = B? ---
**Author:** ![SlackerInc](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/slackerinc/32/275_2.png) [@SlackerInc](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/SlackerInc)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2014, 9:41am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/79 "2014-01-10T09:41:57Z")
> [@Left\_Hand\_of\_Dorkness](#): > > But it is to say that the danger we face here is more from Christians than from Muslims. Because the fundamentalist Christians are more numerous where you are. But this is not generally the case in Europe, and is obviously not the case around the world. Even here, though, Sam Harris has an interesting thought experiment: suppose a Broadway producer wanted to stage the Muslim equivalent of “The Book of Mormon”. What kind of a security nightmare would that be? What would the insurance companies say? It’s basically inconceivable that this could be done, at least in a major venue, which says a lot. Mormons are uptight nimrods with an especially ludicrous mythology and a shady racist background, who infamously helped sponsor Prop 8 in California. But they aren’t rioting over TBOM. I suspect I could go walking around in Utah telling people that I saw the play and thought it was pretty funny, and I might get beat up eventually if I pushed it long enough, but doing the equivalent (praising the Danish cartoonist, or the YouTube video) in most Muslim countries would reduce my lifespan to a matter of seconds. ---
**Author:** ![Magiver](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/4491bb/32.png) [@Magiver](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Magiver)\ **Post date:** [January 10, 2014, 5:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141/80 "2014-01-10T17:31:45Z")
> [@Gyrate](#): > > If you listed all the suicide attacks since the attack on Beirut and weren’t cherry-picking incidents I think you’d find that far more Muslims have been killed than non-Muslims, and also that there were a significant number of non-Muslim suicide bombers. yes and I said it doesn’t matter what your political or religious affiliation is on the receiving end. But the people doing the suicide killings would be Muslims. > [@Gyrate](#): > > I think **Little Nemo** nailed it with this: No one is excusing terrorist acts nor religious fanaticism. Where you persistently go wrong is in tarring the non-fanatics with the same brush. The vast majority of Muslims would like to go about their business in peace, just like the vast majority of non-Muslims. That their cray-cray contingent is dangerous is not in dispute; that their cray-cray contingent is representative of the whole religion is. You can define the vast majority of Muslims any way you’d like but the non-vast majority of Muslims resemble the crazy 15th century bat-shit crazy Christians and ignoring their religious affiliation ignores the problem. The religion itself is not peaceful and never in it’s history has it been so. There was never a Martin Luther event to make the transition. And as it’s been pointed out repeatedly, you can’t even suggest something so meaningless as a Quran book burning without starting a riot 6000 miles away that kills people. To say the vast majority of Muslims don’t feel this way doesn’t change the extremism that endangers everybody. We insult every other religion in comic relief every day and we don’t have problems doing so. So yes, more Muslims are killed by suicide bombers than other religious groups. But they’re killed by the same brand of suicide bombers and for the same reason, Islamic extremism. And there in-lies the problem. It has to be fixed from within. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/nyt-report-on-benghazi-should-be-a-wakeup-call-to-liberals-too/678141.md?page=5)