Pipes: “Do I contradict myself? Very well, I contradict myself.”

I don’t mean to be harping on poor Mr. Pipes, but today I received from him further evidence of his penchant for unabashed self-contradiction that I first exposed in my article, “The Search for Moderate Islam.” It is a catalog of demands that have been made by Muslims in the West against the historic Christian culture of their host societies. For example, a pro-Muslim group in Britain has called for the replacement of the national flag because it features St. George’s Cross, and an Islamic group in Australia wants to banish the word Christmas. Pipes introduces the article by saying, “As the Muslim presence in the West grows, so do the calls to do away with long-standing insignia that retain their Christian origins. This weblog entry keeps tab on some of the more colorful demands.”

Hmm … well … then … the problem is not “Islamism,” after all, is it? The problem is the Muslim presence in the West, period. The more Muslims there are among us, the stronger grows their attack on our culture. So, apart from the sheer falsity of Pipes’s slogan, “The problem is not Islam, it’s Islamism,” what is its practical utility from the point of view of protecting our society against Muhammadan incursions? Let us stop this absurd breakdown of Islam into its “bad” and “good” sides, and focus on the threat posed to us by Islam in toto, in all its dimensions, including the terror-supporting extremists and the “moderates” who only want the Western nations to eliminate Christian and other traditional symbols from their national flags and their public life.

Now some readers will ask, “It looks as if Pipes is coming around to the truth, why criticize him”? The answer is that he is not coming around to the truth, but continuing the same wandering, Whitmanesque pattern referenced above. As I summed it up last 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.

So, I guarantee you that within a week or two of penning this latest item (in which he warned that the more Muslims there are in the West, the more they seek to dismantle our culture), Pipes will go back to assuring us that the problem not Islam, but Islamism.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 15, 2005 06:44 PM | Send