liberalism as denial? Why not used "liberalism as denialism"?

Context:

The Danger of Wishful Thinking

Paul Berman has written a beautiful primer on totalitarianism!af
the left and the right, East and West!aad observed that it invari-
ably contains a genocidal, and even suicidal, dimension. He notes
that the twentieth century was a great incubator of "pathological mass movements"!apoliticl movements that "get drunk on the
idea of slaughter." He also points out that liberal thinkers are often
unable to recognize these terrors for what they are. There is indeed
a great tradition, in Berman's phrase, of "liberalism as denial." The
French Socialists in the 1930s seem to have had a peculiar genius for
this style of self-deception, for despite the billowing clouds of unreason wafting over from the East, they could not bring themselves to
believe that the Nazis posed a problem worth taking seriously. In the
face of the German menace, they simply blamed their own govern-
ment and defense industry for warmongering. As Berman suggests,
the same forces of wishful thinking and self-doubt have been gath-
ering strength in the West in the aftermath of September 11.
Because they assume that people everywhere are animated by the
same desires and fears, many Western liberals now blame their own
governments for the excesses of Muslim terrorists. Many suspect
that we have somehow heaped this evil upon our own heads.
Berman observes, for instance, that much of the world now blames
Israel for the suicidal derangement of the Palestinians. Rather than
being an expression of mere anti-Semitism (though it is surely this
as well), this view is the product of a quaint moral logic: people are
just people, so the thinking goes, and they do not behave that badly
unless they have some very good reasons. The excesses of Pales-
tinian suicide bombers, therefore, must attest to the excesses of the
Israeli occupation. Berman points out that this sort of thinking has
led the Israelis to be frequently likened to the Nazis in the European
press. Needless to say, the comparison is grotesque. The truth is, as
Dershowitz points out, that "no other nation in history faced with
comparable challenges has ever adhered to a higher standard of
human rights, been more sensitive to the safety of innocent civil-
ians, tried harder to operate under the rule of law, or been willing to
take more risks for peace." The Israelis have shown a degree of
restraint in their use of violence that the Nazis never contemplated
and that, more to the point, no Muslim society would contemplate
today. Ask yourself, what are the chances that the Palestinians would
show the same restraint in killing Jews if the Jews were a powerless
minority living under their occupation and disposed to acts of suici-
dal terrorism? It would be no more likely than Muhammad's flying