To a humanity starved for truth, Pipes speaks!

Daniel Pipes has an article with the important sounding title, “The Enemy Has a Name.” Wow, he’s really going to name our Koran-following adversary at last! And what is this name, this name we’ve all been waiting for, this name that no one dare speak, this name that will dispel the conceptual fog that envelopes all contemporary debate about, uh, you know, this true name that will replace all those euphemisms our leaders have been using, such as (and Pipes catalogues them) “terror,” “violent extremism,” “global terror network,” “ideological extremists who do not believe in free societies and who happen to use terror as a weapon to try to shake the conscience of the free world,” “a religious ideology, a strain within the world-wide religion of Islam,” “Islamic radicalism,” “militant Jihadism,” “Islamo-fascism,” “death cult,” “sectarian cult,” and “violent cultists”?

At long last, to a world fed by cowardly euphemism, to a humanity starved for truth, Pipes speaketh.

Drum roll.

And Pipes said:

In fact, that enemy has a precise and concise name: Islamism, a radical utopian version of Islam. Islamists, adherents of this well funded, widespread, totalitarian ideology, are attempting to create a global Islamic order that fully applies the Islamic law (Shari’a).

* * *

In May 2006, Michelle Malkin, not a specialist on Islam but a columnst possessed of common sense, wrote that she had “stopped using the term ‘Islamist.’ Not accurate. Jihadist, yes. Islamist, no.” Yet here we are, in June 2008, and America’s most prestigious writer about radical Islam still thinks that saying “Islamism” is the cutting edge.

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Joseph L. writes:

Pipes is behind the curve. Though he has seen and named the existing threat of Islamism, he hasn’t yet recognized the rising new threat of Islamismism, a radical utopian version of Islamism.

Islamismists, adherents of this well funded, widespread, totalitarian ideology of Islamismism, are attempting to create a global Islamist order that fully applies the underlying tenets of Islamism.

LA replies:

Indeed. And, even though these Islamismists are seeking to create a global Islamist order that fully applies the tenets of Islamism, they are not true Islamists, but are an extreme off-shoot of Islamism. We need to encourage and fund the true, moderate Islamists to resist the Islamismists and so enable the Islamists in building a moderate Islamism. This is entirely possible, because, as Pipes has told us, Islamism is whatever Islamists say it is.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at June 19, 2008 09:41 AM | Send