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A manifesto for an aggressive liberal response to terrorist attacks.

Paul Berman is one of our most brilliant writers on the impassioned and unpredictable life of ideas especially the doctrines that lead masses of people to try to change the world. The Terror War is nothing new or unprecedented. It is the same battle that tore apart Europe during most of the twentieth century—the battle between liberalism and its totalitarian enemies. Islam is not the cause of this war. Islam is the arena in which the war is presently being fought.

Berman shows how a genuine spiritual inspiration can be twisted into a fanatical demand for murder. He offers remarkable insights into the trends and conflicts influencing Islamic radicalism. He illuminates the surprising connections between very different political movements, and he reveals the several ways in which Islamic extremism resembles some all-too-familiar episodes in American and European experience. He is the historian of good intentions gone awry.

Berman draws on sources that range from Albert Camus's The Rebel to the Book of Revelations; from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to the Islamist scholar Sayyid Qutb's magisterial In the Shade of the Koran. Berman condemns the foreign policy "realism" of the political right, and he diagnoses the naïveté of the political left. He calls for a "new radicalism" and a "liberal American interventionism" to promote democratic values throughout the world—a vigorous new politics of American liberalism. Berman's ability to shine a spotlight of history and philosophy on the present era makes him a peerless interpreter of today's events. This short book of original argument and dazzling prose will remain a guidepost for discussion for years to come.