Pipes on Bush’s speech

Daniel Pipes is naturally delighted with President Bush’s October 6 speech in which he named our enemy as Islamic radicalism and Islamo-fascism rather than as “terror.” For one thing, this now means our security agencies can focus on Muslims, since only Muslims can be Islamic radicals. Pipes, like me, is also unhappy with the speech:

Despite these many advances, Bush’s speech is far from perfect. His quoting the Koran harks back to 2001, when he instructed Muslims about the true nature of their faith; his comment about extremists distorting “the idea of jihad” unfortunately implies that jihad is a good thing.

Most serious, though, is his limiting the “radical Islamic empire” (or caliphate) to just the Spain-to-Indonesia region, for Islamists have a global vision that requires control over non-Muslim countries too – and specifically the United States. Their universal ambitions certainly can be stopped, but first they must be understood and resisted. Only when Americans realize that the Islamists intend to replace the U.S. Constitution with Shari’a will they enter the fourth and final era of this war.

According to a correspondent who follows these issues, this is the first time Pipes has said that Islamists seek to impose sharia on America. If so, that is progress. However, just as Pipes is unhappy with Bush so long as Bush fails to recognize the whole Islamist agenda, I will remain unhappy with Pipes so long as he remains an adamant apologist for Islam, insisting that it’s only Islamism, and not Islam as such, that seeks to impose sharia on America. To keep disseminating that false view is to keep America from recognizing the real threat it faces. As I wrote in August:

Pipes in the course of his many writings drifts from one formulation about Islam to another, contradicting himself with abandon; and yet, in the end, he always returns to his default position, that there was this benign, spiritual Islam that existed for 1,300 years, and then this nasty, terrorist, totalitarian Islam that has come into being in the last 100 years.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at October 11, 2005 09:39 AM | Send