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Pipes says that the West and Islam are separating from each other—and that this is bad
From the moment of the 9/11 attack, I began to say that while we needed in the short term to defeat and destroy the parties who had done this, our long term strategy should be to disengage the West from the world of Islam, and to disengage Muslims from the West. Daniel Pipes, writing in today’s New York Sun, says that such disengagement is already occurring and has been accelerated by the cartoon jihad. Instead of being cheered by this wonderful prospect, however, Pipes is perturbed by it, because he thinks it means that the Muslims will fall even further behind the West. According to Bernard Lewis’s “Left Behind” theory of Islamic radicalism, to which Pipes subscribes on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, it was the Muslims’ falling behind the West during the last three hundred years that made them turn radical in the first place. (On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays Pipes says that Islam has always been radical, that there has never been a moderate Islam, and that it must be created. See what he was saying just a week ago.) Thus a mutual disengagement spells increased Muslim backwardness, increased Muslim radicalism, and increased danger for the rest of us. But even if we accepted Pipes’s view that the worsening of the Islam-West divide resulting from the cartoon jihad is a bad thing, what could we possibly do to solve the problem? If the practice of Western free speech in publishing extremely mild satires of Muhammad is enough to stir up the entire Muslim world against us, it ought to be clear that no peace between Islam and the West is possible, short of the complete surrender of the West to Islam. I celebrate the increased clarity that the cartoon jihad has wrought. Pipes is distraught by it. Clearly there are two very different views of the world at work here. Thus, among the instances of disengagement that Pipes rues is the fact that “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.” Let’s get this straight: Pipes regrets the fact that there are fewer Muslims traveling and immigrating to the West? That means that he wants more Muslims traveling and immigrating to the West, with everything that that implies. Bottom line: Pipes, despite his genuine conservatism in some areas (and I have always given him credit for being more conservative than his fellow neocons), remains at bottom a liberal, or, better, a romanticizer of Islam, whose vision of the good society is a blending of Islam and the West, rather than the preservation of a distinct Western civilization.
Let us also point out that notwithstanding Pipes’s handwringing about the disengagement of Muslims from the West, the Muslims who are already in the West, and particularly in Europe, are more numerous, more in our face, and more threatening than ever, as shown by the fearful response of most Western media and governments to the cartoon jihad. Which means that the real disengagement, the disengagement of Muslims in the West from the West, the disengagement upon which our very civilizational survival depends, has yet to begin. When it does begin, that will really give Pipes something to be upset about. Email entry |