Pipes and Islam: the continuing psychodrama

Daniel Pipes, FrontPage Magazine, April 8, 2004:

In other words, Bagby’s study of Detroit Muslims [showing, inter alia, that 81 percent support sharia law for Muslim countries] confirms an established pattern of survey research discerning estranged and radical political views among American Muslims. It would be reassuring on many levels were this not the case. But a problem does exists and wishing it away does not address it. It does need to be addressed.

Daniel Pipes, FrontPage Magazine, February 7, 2006:

The deeper issue here, however, is not Muslim hypocrisy but Islamic supremacism. Flemming Rose, the Danish editor who published the cartoons, explains that if Muslims insist “that I, as a non-Muslim, should submit to their taboos, … they’re asking for my submission.”

Daniel Pipes, FrontPage Magazine, February 14, 2006:

What are the long-term consequences of the Muhammad cartoon furor? I predict it is helping bring on not a clash of civilizations but their mutual pulling apart. This separation, which has been building for years, has dreadful implications. [italics added.]

Signs of disengagement are all around …

· Emigration: 9/11 caused a significant increase in obstacles to Muslims traveling to the West, so fewer Muslim business executives, students, hospital patients, conference goers, and workers are reaching there.

I repeat the question that I’ve asked before. If, as Pipes writes, Muslims in the West are radical and estranged, and support sharia, and believe in an ideology of Muslim supremacism, why would Pipes consider it “dreadful” that fewer of them are coming here?

Why aren’t other writers besides myself pointing out these spectacular contradictions that are being emitted almost every day of the week by America’s most prominent commentator on Islam? Why is there such a lack of critical thought on the “right”?

After I posted the above, a sharp-eyed reader pointed out that the contradiction I thought I saw is really not a contradiction at all. He writes:

You wrote, in connection with Daniel Pipes:

“I repeat the question that I’ve asked before: if Muslims in the West are radical and estranged, and support sharia, and believe in an ideology of Muslim supremacism, why would Pipes consider it “dreadful” that fewer of them are coming here?”

This is a question based in logic, with a logical answer.

But, as you know, the question cannot overlook the premises of liberalism. Is it not true that liberalism presupposes not only that all people are alike, but that every person is just like a Western liberal? Thus, from Pipes’s perspective, the fewer Muslims that “come here,” the fewer Muslims will become “like us,” that is, become good liberals.

This has been the premise of our immigration, visa, education programs for 50 years, and Pipes has internalized it. Pipes is hopelessly provincial.

Mark

LA replies:

I’m laughing out loud. You’ve got it. EVEN THOUGH the Muslims are supremacists and intend our harm, it’s STILL DREADFUL if fewer of them come here, because that deprives us of people whom we can assimilate and turn into liberals! This is what Pipes believes. He is a liberal. He’s as inanely liberal as the people who say, “If we fight Muslim terrorists by keeping Muslims out of America, the terrorists will have won.”

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 20, 2006 12:07 PM | Send