Pipes’s penetrating discussion of the meaning of Fitna

In a long blog entry that was first posted last December 29 and then repeatedly updated through March 27, Daniel Pipes has followed the Perils of Pauline tale of Geert Wilders’s efforts to screen Fitna. Pipe’s items are all about the Dutch government’s and the Muslims’ responses to the movie, the threats, the efforts to suppress it, and so on.

Then, at the end of the blog entry, Pipes writes:

I disagree with the one-to-one correlation of the Koran with Islamist behavior, as though 1,400 years had not passed in between, but I concede the film’s simple, powerful argument.

How many times have I pointed out that Pipes is incapable of logical, non-contradictory thinking? This is an example of it. What he’s actually saying here is:

I disagree with the film’s argument, but I concede the film’s simple, powerful argument.

He also writes this:

Mar. 27, 2008 update: Fitna appeared today, not on a television station but on the internet, where within hours millions had viewed it. The film shows how aggressive verses of the Koran correlate closely with the actions of Islamists today, implying that Islamists are doing nothing more than being good Muslims. Now that the film is done and out, the question is, how much of a furor will it in fact raise?

Isn’t that a strange and revealing thing to say? The question of interest to defenders of the West is not, “How will Muslims react to the film?,” but rather, “How will Westerners react to the film? What effect with the film have on Western thinking about Islam?”

His question suggests that his main concern is what the Muslim are doing. The Muslim are the actors, we merely observe and adjust to them. He apparently cannot even conceive of a situation in which Westerners gain a new understanding of Islam, and then DO something about it.

At Pipe’s site, I don’t see anything that he has written about Fitna itself. Thus, so far, he has written at some length about the Fitna “phenomenon,” but all that he’s actually said about Fitna is the two sentences quoted at the top of this entry.

- end of initial entry -

A reader writes:

I wonder what he would rather suggest—maybe that the “one-to-one correlation” should be replaced with the “only a tiny minority of Muslim extremists correlate the Koran with such behavior”???

LA replies:

The reader’s suggestion is most likely how Pipes would explain his contradiction. This is the “simple powerful argument” that Pipes is agrees with.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at March 31, 2008 10:34 PM | Send