Pipes and the anti-jihad conference

(See update below: Ha’aretz reports on Pipes speech.)

Is Daniel Pipes, who was a featured speaker at the “Facing Jihad” conference in Jerusalem yesterday, in agreement with the conference theme that “Islam today [emphasis added] poses a serious threat to Western civilization”? If so, that is big news, because as recently as his much touted February 2007 debate with London Mayor Ken Livingston, Pipes very explicitly denied that Islam is a threat:

This is the problem, the problem is radical Islam, also known as fundamentalist Islam, political Islam, Islamism. It is not, again, Islam the religion, it is radical Islam, the ideology.

Let us focus on three aspects of it. The essence of radical Islam is the complete adherence to the Shari’a, to the law of Islam.

To which I commented:

So, Pipes says that Islamism is not Islam, then he says that the essence of this Islamism is complete adherence to … the law of Islam. And this doesn’t bring him up short, or anyone up short (except me). Reading this, and reading how Pipes’s speech has been praised to the skies by “conservatives,” I realize that we live in a culture that has become incapable of noticing and objecting to even the most blatantly contradictory statements.

Pipes also said in the London debate:

The third feature is that this is totalitarian in nature. It turns Islam from a personal faith into an ideology, into an ism. It is the transformation of a personal faith into a system for ordering power and wealth. Radical Islam derives from Islam but is an anti-modern, millenarian, misanthropic, misogynist, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic, triumphalist, jihadistic, terroristic, and suicidal version of it. It is Islamic-flavored totalitarianism. [Emphasis added.]

I commented:

But of course Islam is from the beginning a collective faith, a single nation, a single umma, commanded by God to dominate the world. To say that Islam is nothing but a personal faith would be like saying that Communism is nothing but a personal faith.

However, just four months before saying that Islam is not the problem, Pipes wrote, September 19, 2006, at the time of Muslim uproar over the Pope’s Regensburg lecture:

The Muslim uproar has a goal—to prohibit criticism of Islam by Christians and thereby impose Shariah norms in the West. Should Westerners accept this central tenet of Islamic law, others will surely follow. Retaining free speech about Islam, therefore, represents a critical defense against the imposition of an Islamic order.

About which I commented on December 29, 2006:

Thus, a few months ago, Pipes for the first time said the problem was Islam, not “Islamism,” and expressed his fear of “the imposition of an Islamic order” in the West. Yet in a November 29 blog entry, as I discussed earlier this week, Pipes said the “trauma” of Islam that has led to Islamic radicalism was the loss of Islam’s historic power and confidence, implying that the way to end Islam’s trauma and thus cure Islamic radicalism is to help Islam regain its historic power and confidence. He approvingly quoted Wilfred C. Smith that the challenge for modern Muslims is to “rehabilitate” their past history, “to set it going again in full vigour, so that Islamic society may once again flourish as a divinely guided society should and must.”

So, on September 19 Pipes said we must fight against the imposition of an Islamic order.

But on November 29 he called for Islam to rehabilitate its past power and glory as a divinely guided society.

Does Pipes want an increase of Islamic power, as the way to heal the trauma that leads to Islamic radicalism, or does he oppose an increase of Islamic power, as necessary to prevent us from coming under the power of Islam?

Pipes himself hasn’t the foggiest. It is all too evident that he does not think beyond the boundaries of each bite-sized column he writes. He never looks at his various columns together and notices their contradictions, let alone try to reconcile them….

So, if Pipes in his speech yesterday at the Jerusalem conference agreed with the theme of the conference, that would indicate a return to his September 19, 2006 position that Islam is seeking to impose an Islamic order on the West. However, if he did return to his September 2006 position that Islam is the threat, would that not also suggest a forthcoming return to his November 2006 position that we should welcome a restoration of Islam’s historic power and confidence? And would that not further imply that soon thereafter he will return to his February 2007 position that Islamism is the problem, not Islam?

Of course, we can’t know exactly what the future will bring. But if the Ghost of Daniel Pipes Past tells us anything about the Ghost of Daniel Pipes Future, we can safely predict that whatever he said yesterday he will very soon say just the opposite.

If it turns out over the course of time that I’m wrong, and that Pipes has now arrived at the firm and unchanging position that Islam itself is a threat to the West, no one will applaud louder than I.

* * *

Update: As reported in Ha’aretz:

But American scholar and activist Daniel Pipes disagreed [with Wilders and Eldad]. Quoting Egyptian philosopher Hassan Hanafi, Pipes said the Koran “is like a supermarket where one takes what one wants and leaves the rest.” This freedom of selection, he argued, provides a means for reshaping Islam.

Pipes opined that those who regard Islam rather than jihad as the enemy fail to realize that a change has occurred over the past few years: Although moderate Muslims are still a small force, they are stronger than they were two years ago.

“Millions took to the streets to protest Turkey’s Islamist ruling party, the AKP,” he said when asked to name examples. And “hundreds of thousands demonstrated in Pakistan” following the murder of prime ministerial candidate (and former premier) Benazir Bhutto last year.

Nonetheless, Pipes said he supported more determined Western military action against radical Islam as a means of fostering this change. He also advocated “crushing the Palestinians’ hope for eliminating Israel” and opposed the creation of a Palestinian state and the ongoing peace talks.

Ok, now I get the lay of the land. Pipes is and remains of no help to those seeking to protect the West from Islam, because he will keep pushing his “moderate Islam is the solution” idiocy. What then was the value of his appearance at the Jerusalem conference, the theme of which is that Islam itself is the threat? It was this: He provides Eldad, Wilders, and the others with respectable cover. He doesn’t agree with them on the all-important question of the nature of Islam, but, by joining them at the conference, he sends the message that they’re ok.

- end of initial entry -

Richard H. writes:

Dr. Jerry Pournelle had a saying, “Liberalism is a philosophy of consolation while the West commits suicide.” Alas, Pipes has drunk the Kool-Aid. Like so many faux Conservatives, he can’t bring himself to see what is six inches from his nose. He’s willing to listen to deceitful people telling us all about a cafeteria Islam that simply does not exist among the overwhelming majority who adhere to Islam.

“Islam’s historic power and confidence” was established under the Caliphate by people living according to the Koran, and they did not have a cafeteria approach to the book.

Golda Meir said it well, “When the love their children more than they hate us, we will have peace.” Islam, in actuality, is naught but a form of insanity that devours people, and eventually, their children. Islam, like every form of tyranny, devours its adherents first, then turns outward for more prey. Islam itself is the danger.

I hope Pipes wakes up, but I’m not going to hold my breath.

John D. writes:

The best argument I’ve heard to refute the “moderate Islam is the solution,” or any such reference to moderate Muslims in general is a statement that you made a while back in a post. You asked something similar to:

“Do liberals think that peaceful (moderate) Muslims will ever be the dominant power in Islam?”

This should answer any question as to what is not a viable solution to the Islam problem.

LA replies:

It’s a good question. Unfortunately, I have no doubt that Pipes would answer that he has every hope that moderate Islam will succeed in becoming some day the dominant power in Islam.

December 16

Gilbert B., who is a Flamand (a Fleming) living in Belgium, writes:

You wrote: “Pipes very explicitly denied that Islam is a threat…”

Pipes said: “The problem is radical Islam… The essence of radical Islam is the complete adherence to the Shari’a, to the law of Islam.”

This is remarkable. A Muslim is any person who adheres to Islam. Since when does “adherence to Islam” not imply support of Shari’a or the furtherance of the imposition of Shari’a?

LA replies:

It’s a disgraceful playing with words, which he feels he has a right to do because, as he’s said, Islam is whatever Muslims say it is (or, rather, it’s whatever anybody, including Daniel Pipes, says it is). So, if certain Muslims want (or if Pipes wants) to say that moderate, non-sharia Islam is Islam, then that’s Islam. In which case sharia followers are radical Muslims, i.e., not real Muslims, while non-sharia followers are true Muslims.

As I’ve been saying for years, Pipes is a liberal. And central to and virtually synonymous with liberalism is nominalism. Nominalism is the belief that there are no categories with essences (such as Islam, Jew, American, man, woman, marriage, etc.), there are just groups of things which have names that we happen to assign to those groups of things, and we are free to assign whatever names we want to whatever group of things we want. So, if Pipes wants to change 1,200 years of history in order to declare that a “Muslim” (i.e. a true Muslim) is a person who does not adhere to the sharia law, while only a “radical Muslim” (i.e., a false Muslim) does adhere to the sharia law, then he has the right to say that, and no one has the right to gainsay him.

The defining thing about liberals is that they deny the objective structure of existence, because such objective structure would mean that there is something outside of and higher than the human self, while liberals believe that the human self (along with its right to define the very nature of existence, see the U.S. Supreme Court decision in Planned Parenthood v. Casey) is the highest thing there is.

A reader from northwestern Europe writes:

You wrote:

“So, if certain Muslims want (or if Pipes wants) to say that moderate, non-sharia Islam is Islam, then that’s Islam. In which case sharia followers are radical Muslims, i.e., not real Muslims, while non-sharia followers are true Muslims.”

Indeed, which is why some liberal politicians prefer to call Islamic terrorism “anti-Islamic activity”.

LA replies:

Calling Islamic terrorism “anti-Islamic activity” is obviously more outrageous and dishonest than calling non-sharia Islam the true Islam. But the two fraudulent statements are nevertheless on the same continuum. They both involve the conscious replacement of objective reality with one’s own reality, justified by the view that people have the right to define X however they want.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 15, 2008 04:19 PM | Send