Pipes’s assertions without facts

While I have said many times that Daniel Pipes is incoherent on Islam (and I remain the only writer who has pointed out his ceaseless contradictions on that subject), I’ve also said that he is useful as a gatherer and presenter of facts about radical Muslims. In his latest article he surprisingly falls down even in that task.

Writing about Bridges TV, founded by wife-beheader Muzzammil Hassan, Pipes declares that from the start, Bridges TV, with its claim to be promoting understanding and tolerance, “amounted to a lie.”

On the political level, its raison d’être was based on the canard that Muslims in the United States suffer from bias and are victimized. That an idea took formal expression in 2000, when the Senate passed a resolution inveighing against the “discrimination” and “backlash” suffered by the American Muslim community, an insulting falsehood then and now.

Pipes doesn’t offer a single fact supporting his statement that the station complained about Muslim victimization, let alone that such complaints were its raison d’etre. The fact that the U.S. Senate endorsed a resolution denouncing discrimination against Muslims is irrelevant to the question of whether Bridges TV made a career out of Muslim victimology; it’s astonishing that Pipes seems to think that the former proves the latter. I have no particular reason to doubt that Bridges TV was doing what Pipes says it was doing. But should he at least present us with some evidence?

Pipes continues:

On the ideological level, Bridges TV was a fraud, pretending to be moderate when it was just another member of the “Wahhabi lobby.” Endorsed by some of the worst Islamist functionaries in the country (Nihad Awad, Ibrahim Hooper, Iqbal Yunus, Louay Safi), it was an extremist wolf disguised in moderate sheep’s clothing.

Pipes doesn’t provide his readers with a single fact showing that Bridges TV was a member of the extremist Muslim lobby. The fact that various radical Muslims endorsed this prominent Muslim TV station doesn’t prove that the station itself was extremist.

The rest of the article is about the stormy relationship between Muzzammil and his wife, Aasiya, culminating in her murder, and makes more interesting reading. But I’ve never before seen a Pipes article in which he stated that a Muslim organization was radical and totally failed to back up the statement.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 27, 2009 08:02 AM | Send