The newly acceptable bigotry

A editorial in the Washington Times that was picked up by the Rocky Mountain News: Washtimes
Debunking political correctness


By Diana West


It may be not be harmonic convergence exactly, but the coincidence is still worth flagging: Last week, just about the time a Senate committee was failing to muster the quorum necessary to vote on Islamic terrorism expert Daniel Pipes' nomination to the U.S. Institute of Peace ?-thrilling the Islamic groups that apologize for such terrorism ?- the Pew Research Center was releasing a new poll finding that 44 percent of Americans now believe that Islam is more likely than other religions to encourage violence among its believers. This number is up sharply from the 22 percent who in March 2002 had begun to notice jihadis in Sudan and Nigeria and Pakistan and Saudi Arabia and the Philippines and the Palestinian Authority and Malaysia (and ? Italy, France and Lackawanna) poking out from behind the smoother ranks of the "Islam is peace" PR professionals.
What does kicking the Pipes nomination under a Senate rug have to do with an eye-opening Pew poll? Mr. Pipes, a scholar and prolific author steeped in the history and languages of Islam, is a knowledgeable and trenchant voice on Middle Eastern affairs ?- one of a handful of experts, incidentally, who, long before September 11, identified the grave threat that militant Islam, or "Islamism," posed to the United States. An advocate of Islamic reform and modernization, Mr. Pipes is nothing like the "Islamaphobe," bigot, or bogeyman his most virulent detractors, led by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), like to depict. In fact, when Mr. Pipes tells us "militant Islam is the problem, and moderate Islam is the solution," I'd say he's being not only reasonable, but also more than generous with the old benefit of the doubt, considering the absence to date of religious movements of moderation within Islam worth writing home about.
But back to the Pew poll, which indicates that more Americans are maybe now wondering why it is that flags flying over Islamic nations carry those wicked-looking scimitars. (And, if they're really paying attention, maybe also why CAIR tries to pass itself off as a mainstream group with, as Daniel Pipes has noted, a chairman, Omar M. Ahmad, who says suicide bombers are not terrorists, an executive director, Nihad Awad, who supports Hamas, and a spokesman, Ibrahim Hooper, who is not at all averse to an Islamic government in the United States.) Just as more Americans are starting to understand that unreformed Islam and, by extension, the law (sharia) that flows from it, are indeed more likely to encourage violence than other religions, a serious scholar who has long applied himself to devising ways to defuse such deadly fanaticism is slowly being undermined and even marginalized in the U.S. Senate.
Based on what? The CAIR-led anti-Pipes blitz would seem to have scored some direct hits. With the words "provocative" "highly controversial" and "decidedly one-sided," Sen. Tom Harkin, Iowa Democrat, dismissed Mr. Pipes, careful scholarship and reasoned analysis, in the end belying the senator's own ignorance of, let's say, the provocative, highly controversial and decidedly one-sided centuries of jihad Mr. Pipes has studied. Sen. Edward Kennedy, Massachusetts Democrat, denounced the nominee because of a 1990 phrase Mr. Pipes has said he wrote about European attitudes toward the massive influx of Muslim immigrants onto the continent?-"brown-skinned people cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene." Whether this is or was a European attitude, it is objectionable to political correctionists not because it isn't true, but because it is indicative of difference, of foreignness?-which, in today's world, is about the only thing left that dares not speak its name.
Are peoples all the same? Are religions all similarly inspired? I hope Messrs. Harkin and Kennedy ?- and their committee colleagues, including, fellow Democrats Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Patty Murray, Christopher Dodd, Independent James Jeffords and Republicans Judd Gregg, Bill Frist, John Ensign, Lindsey Graham, John Warner and Sam Brownback ?- take note of the Pew findings. They indicate that a growing number of Americans may finally be seeing through the political correctness that blinkers so much of the government's perspective on Islamic militancy. This is the same political correctness that searches my 75-year-old mother-in-law or Al Gore as much as it searches young male Arab or Muslim airplane passengers. It is the same political correctness that, as retired FBI special agent Don Lavey recently told WorldnetDaily.com, still inspires "the continued reluctance on the part of the entire FBI to ever use 'Islamic' and 'terrorism' in the same sentence."
And it is the same political correctness that Mr. Pipes, through serious study and forthright truth-telling, has long labored to debunk. Which is all the more reason that Mr. Pipes should be confirmed without further delay once Congress reconvenes in September. Anything less is nothing less than a victory for our deadliest enemies.



My letter to the editors, which I am willing to bet never gets published:

Sirs,
I am writing regarding the column in the Tuesday, 5 August print edition of the RMN entitled, "Scholar Should Be Confirmed", witten by Times writer Diana West. This piece, which sings the praises of Daniel Pipes, the US nominee to the Institute of Peace is one of many examples recently whence I awaken wondering If I have left the real world for some bizarre alternate universe. The theme of the author's piece is the threat posed to "civilization" by Islam. She repeatedly refers to Islam as a violent religion,a and comments, "Are all people the same? Are all religions equally inspired?" In addition, she endorses and excuses Pipes' comments about "...brown skinned people cooking strange foods and not maintaining German standards of hygiene."
To address the first assertion, that Islam is a religion of violence (a frequently heard comment), one should perhaps look into the history of the other triumphalist, proselytizing western faith, Christianity. Christianity has proven itself to not be "a religion of violence" through such endeavors as the pursuit of heretics from roughly the second century C.E. through the late seventeenth century. Examples that stand out include the Iconoclastic incidents in the Byzantine East, The Levantine Crusades of the eleventh through thirteenth centuries, the Albigensian Crusades of the Thirteenth Centuries, the Reconquista in the Iberian Peninsula of the tenth through fifteenth centuries, the mass persecutions of the Jews in Christian Europe from the fifth through the twentieth centuries, the witch persecutions in early modern Europe, the wars between Catholics and Protestants in the early modern period, the Protestant on Protestant violence in sixteenth and seventeenth century Germany, Holland and Belgium, the systems of encomienda in the New World, and the missionary movements in the Far east and Africa. The list goes on and on.
Regarding those "brown skinned people cooking strange foods," what Diana West ignores is that those very people she mentions are the subject of violence and discrimination in Europe today. Far from being the aggressors, Middle Eastern and North African immigrants to Western Europe are often harassed, beaten, and murdered with very little efforts made by the authorities to stop these acts. Perhaps those who leap to place the blame for society's ills on some foreign "other" should first look to their own society and take responsibility, rather than place blame elsewhere. I am struck by the similarity of comments of those like Ms. West and the anti-semitic literature popular in Germany in the 1930s. then, as now, "scholars" and newspaper editorial writers sought to warn the public about the threat from these mysterious "outsiders" whose rituals an religions differed from those of the "Herrenvolk." The acceptance of such overtly racist commentaries in ostensibly mainstream newspapers as the Rocky Mountain News, and Washington Times, should send a chill through the spine of anyone who claims to embrace the commitment of the United States for those final words of the pledge of allegiance: "With liberty and justice for all."

Robert L. Welch