![liberas be like liberas be like](https://images.contentstack.io/v3/assets/bltf04078f3cf7a9c30/blteeba2ff3fd609b47/5e39961f17817e302f4438f8/Screen-Shot-2015-03-31-at-11.33.27.png)
In October and November 2015, Sam Harris frequently used the term in his exchanges with the media, saying the greatest danger is that the "regressive left" is willing to give up freedom of speech "out of fear of offending minorities", which will lead to censorship imposed by those minorities, citing American journalist Glenn Greenwald's comments on the Charlie Hebdo shooting as an example.
LIBERAS BE LIKE FREE
Referring to student initiatives to disinvite ex-Muslim speakers on campus, Dawkins saw this as "a betrayal of the Free Speech Movement of the 1960s". Maher noted a willingness to criticise anything except Islam, excusing it as "their culture", to which Dawkins responded: "Well, to hell with their culture". In October 2015, The Washington Times reported that American comedian and show host Bill Maher and British biologist and New Atheist author Richard Dawkins "lamented regressive leftists who fail to understand they are anything but liberal when it comes to Islam". Nawaz and Harris have denounced what they describe as the paradoxically illiberal, isolationist, and censuring attitude towards any criticism of this phenomenon, which they contend betrays universal liberal values and also abandons supporting and defending the most vulnerable liberal members living within the Muslim community such as women, homosexuals, and apostates. In a review of the book in the magazine National Review Online, political writer Brian Stewart noted that according to both Nawaz and Harris, "regressive leftists" in the West are "willfully blind" to the fact that jihadists and Islamists make up a significant portion (20% in Harris's estimate) of the global Muslim community and the minority Muslim communities within the West, even though these factions are opposed to liberal values such as individual autonomy, freedom of expression, democracy, women's rights, gay rights, etc. In September 2015, Sam Harris and Maajid Nawaz participated in a public forum hosted by Harvard University's Institute of Politics, which was later published in a short book, titled Islam and the Future of Tolerance (2015).
![liberas be like liberas be like](https://www.ctvnews.ca/polopoly_fs/1.4601337.1568925998!/httpImage/image.jpeg)
In Nawaz's opinion, it is possible to denounce both neoconservative foreign policies such as the Iraq War (which he had opposed) and theocratic extremism, but those that he labels "regressive leftists" fail to do so. He opposes this on the grounds that "any desire to impose any version of Islam over anyone anywhere, ever, is a fundamental violation of our basic civil liberties". In 2007, Maajid Nawaz, a former Islamist who had renounced his association with the radical Islamist group Hizb ut-Tahrir in favour of secular Islam, used the phrase regressive left to describe left-leaning people who-in his opinion-pander to Islamism, which he defines as a "global totalitarian theo-political project" with a "desire to impose any given interpretation of Islam over society as law".