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In what sense is Daniel Pipes a left-liberal?
It may have struck some readers as extreme when I described Daniel Pipes, a well-known conservative, not just as a “right-liberal,” which is of course my standard description of today’s mainstream conservatives, but as an “openness liberal,” which in my terminology is the same as a left-liberal. Nevertheless, I defined what I meant by openness liberal and gave an example: Pipes supports extending equal privileges to Moslems such as the French government’s subsidization of the building of mosques, even though Moslems would deny such privileges to others if they could do so. Similarly, he supports Canada’s extension to Moslems of the ability to have sharia law enforced by private arbitrators, since other groups have access to such arbitrators. Yet he ignores the fact that as sharia (which he casually dismisses as a “medieval” custom rather than as the sacred essence of Islam) gains more and more sway in Canada, it will destroy everyone’s rights.
At the same time, Pipes doesn’t simply support giving Moslems anything they want. He opposes giving Moslems their own prayer rooms in school and university buildings, for example, since other groups do not have such prayer rooms. Pipes, insofar as the present issue is concerned, is therefore to be understood as a moderate left-liberal, since a consistent or extreme left-liberal would support prayer rooms for Moslems even though no one else gets prayer rooms. Consistent left-liberals don’t care about maintaining even the appearance of equal rights; their default position (modified, as always, by the unprincipled exception) is to support any and all accommodations to the Other, period. Email entry |