Pipes’s half-realistic, half-naive reply to conversion invitation

Daniel Pipes was among the handful of prominent Islam critics who were singled out by name in Al Qaeda’s latest kind and thoughtful invitation to the West to convert to Islam. Pipes has replied:

I note your offer for me to change sides in the current war. But I am faithful to my own religion, to my own country, and to my civilization. I will do my part to defeat radical, totalitarian Islam and to usher in the emergence of a modern, moderate, and good-neighborly Islam in its place.

As VFR readers know, Pipes’s hope for the emergence of a “modern, moderate, and good-neighborly Islam” is based on his utterly unfounded belief, stated in his reply to me last year, that “Islam can be whatever Muslims wish to make of it,” as though Islam were an ice cream flavor instead of the most absolutist and authoritarian belief system on planet Earth. For all Pipes’s relative degree of realism about the Islamic threat, he remains at bottom a naïve liberal who imagines that there are no essential obstacles to everyone in the world becoming just like us.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 04, 2006 11:09 PM | Send