Pipe Dream

I see Daniel Pipes is at it again. Sheesh. He is flogging the "moderate Islam" meme, going so far as to claim that Muhammad was a plain Muslim, not an "Islamist." Tell that to the Qurayzah tribe, the Jews of Khybar and the oceans of blood in Moe's wake.

It was in Medina that Muhammad, the prophet of Islam, became for the
first time a political and military leader as well as a spiritual one. That’s
when he started waging war against non-Muslims, and he explained to his
followers that they should offer those non-Muslims three choices:

Fight in the name of Allah and in the way of Allah.
Fight against those who disbelieve in Allah. Make a holy war.…When you meet
your enemies who are polytheists, invite them to three courses of action. If
they respond to any one of these, you also accept it and withhold yourself from
doing them any harm. Invite them to accept Islam; if they respond to you,
accept it from them and desist from fighting against them…. If they refuse to
accept Islam, demand from them the Jizya [poll-tax on non-Muslims]. If they
agree to pay, accept it from them and hold off your hands. If they refuse to
pay the tax, seek Allah’s help and fight them.

Story continues below advertisement

The choices for unbelievers are thus to convert to Islam; or submit as
inferiors to Islamic rule, paying the tax and accepting the discrimination that
Islamic law mandates for non-Muslims in the Islamic state; or die. Those are
the only choices offered. Islamic law doesn’t envision a situation in which
Muslims live together as equals with non-Muslims without any plan to impose
Sharia upon them now or in the future.

Bill Warner of Political Islam:

Start with Mohammed. We know an enormous amount about Mohammed as a
neighbor to Kafirs (non-Muslims), pagans, Jews and Christians.
When Mohammed was in Mecca before he became a Muslim, he was a good
neighbor who was prosperous and helped to settle disputes. But, that all
changed when he became the prophet of Allah. Once he became a public
preacher of Islam, he became an irritant to his neighbors. You see, not
only did Mohammed know what was right, he demanded that everybody do
everything his way, Allah’s way. He was a neighbor who was always right
and you were always wrong. Not only were you wrong, but your parents and
grandparents were wrong. Mohammed no longer settled arguments; he
created arguments. After 13 years of this, the Meccans told Mohammed to
leave Mecca.

So he went to the town of Medina, which was half Jewish. And what
kind of neighbor was Mohammed to the Jews? Put briefly, two years later,
Medina was Judenrein (cleansed of Jews). When he arrived, there were
three tribes of Jews. In rapid order, the first tribe was driven out of
town, bereft of their goods. Then the second tribe of Jews was exiled.
They were lucky. The last of the Jewish tribes suffered the most. The
women were enslaved and sold wholesale for money to purchase horses and
arms for jihad. For the rest of his life, Mohammed used slavery to help
finance his jihad. The children were kidnapped and adopted into Muslim
families to be raised as Muslims. Then the 800 male Jews were all
beheaded.

But wait. Mohammed was not through coexisting with the Jews. Later he
left Medina and went to Khaybar and attacked them. Mohammed crushed
them, took their wealth and put them to work under the Sharia to work as
dhimmis and give him half of what they earned.
That was how Mohammed coexisted with the Jews.

But Mohammed was not through with coexisting with the Arabians. He
attacked the Meccan caravans. His jihadists killed, kidnapped, stole,
assassinated and fought the pagan Arabs at every turn. Mohammed’s
coexistence policy with the Arabs was jihad. This went on until every
Arab became a Muslim.

After Mohammed has made every soul in Arabia convert to Islam, he
turned his coexistence policy to the Christians north of Arabia in
Syria. He attacked the Christians the losers became dhimmis just like
the Jews.

And Pipes tells us Muhammad was a "plain Muslim." Well, yes, he was a jihadist.

Would we all like to believe in unicorns and moonbeams, but this fantasy is dangerous and Pipes has wasted too much time and money on a fallacy. Pipes asks, "How do you propose to defeat Islamism?" (a silly word — correct term is  jihad):

Those who make all Islam their
enemy not only succumb to a simplistic and essentialist illusion but
they lack any mechanism to defeat it. We who focus on Islamism see World
War II and the Cold War as models for subduing the third
totalitarianism. We understand that radical Islam is the problem and
moderate Islam is the solution. We work with anti-Islamist Muslims to
vanquish a common scourge. We will triumph over this new variant of
barbarism so that a modern form of Islam can emerge.

Here's the problem, Dan: "anti-Islamist Muslims" don't have a theological leg to stand on, which is why they have been trampled time and again throughout 1400 years of Islamic history. Even "benevolent" Muslim dictators have been overthrown by the ummah.  And this "new variant barbarism" Pipes refers to is as old as Islam.

Pipes dismissing Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali exposes his intellectual hubris to scorn and derision. These bright and brave Muslim women (former albeit) were born into it, lived it, and bear the brutal scars. Maybe Pipes needs this fairy tale, but freedom-loving peoples surely don't. Everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts and the stakes couldn't be higher.

Dr. Andrew Bostom has a good deal more on this here. Below is an excerpt:

Daniel Pipes, Edward Said, and Islamic “Essentialism” By Andrew Bostom

Has there been a bizarre “harmonic convergence” on Islam
between Daniel Pipes, the historian, and unabashed Zionist, and the late
Israel-negating, Palestinian polemicist, Edward Said?

Daniel Pipes’ 5/13/13 essay in The Washington Times derides “those who
focus on Islam itself as the problem”—identifying Ayaan
Hirsi Ali, Wafa
Sultan, and Dutch Parliamentarian Geert Wilders
by name.

Most of his essay re-affirms
(but never establishes by dint of hard doctrinal
and historical
facts)
the same glib, tired arguments Pipes has discussed before: Islam’s prophet
Muhammad was not an “Islamist,” and was not responsible for “Islamism,” which
is a “modern extremist variant” of Islam; an “unbearable” discordance between
“pre-modern accomplishment and modern failure” caused the (mass?) “psychic
trauma” which engendered “Islamism” in the 1920s; and a mere 10-15% of Muslims
support what Pipes terms “Islamism.”

Pipes concludes his latest iteration of “Islam Versus Islamism”
by attacking those (such as Ali,
Sultan,
and Wilders)
who reject its shoddy premises for their ostensibly uninformed “succumbing” to
what he terms “a simplistic and essentialist illusion” of the Muslim
creed. Ironically, Pipes’ latter claim of “essentialism” re-packages the
post-modern incoherence of Edward
Said, as demonstrated
brilliantly by Philosophy Professor Irfan Khawaja. As Khawaja observed in 2007: 

If
Said thinks that Islam is different from other abstract nouns, he needs to tell
us why… And yet, as we have seen, he often treats abstract nouns in an
essentialist fashion. So it should follow that Islam can be treated the same
way. And yet that is precisely what he takes to be the cardinal sin.

 Adding insult to irony, Said (a Pipes nemesis, as Said’s comments,
extracted here, reveal)
accused Pipes himself of “essentialism,” largely, one assumes, for frank
comments by the latter on Islam—not “Islamism”—as an inherently, even
“immutably” political ideology!  

 Circa 1983, in his In the Path
of God: Islam and Political Power, Pipes noted, “[T]he press and
scholarship too often…ignore Islam’s role in politics.” He warned,

Approaching Islam in politics with the Christian experience in mind is misleading.
Because the community of Christians shares almost no political traits, there is
a mistaken predisposition to assume Muslims do not. 

Elaborating on this yawning gap between Islam and
Christianity, Pipes highlights,
appropriately, the unique impact of 
Islam’s religio-political “law, ” the Sharia:

Islam, unlike Christianity, contains a complete program for ordering
society…Islam specifies exact goals for all
Muslims to follow as well as the rules by which to enforce them…Along with
faith in Allah comes a sacred law to guide Muslims, in all times and places.
That law, called the Sharia, establishes the context of Islam as a political
force…Adjusting realities to the Sharia is the key to Islam’s role in human
relations…Mainstream Muslims (that is, Muslims whose faith is acknowledged as
valid by a majority of other Muslims) follow legal tenets so similar to each
other that their differences can be ignored

Never invoking
“Islamism,” Pipes concludes,
with this pellucid assessment of how Islam,
since its advent, has been a creed imbued, singularly, with politics: 

[I]n Islam, where, in Max Weber’s view, “an essentially political
character marked all the chief ordinances,”…[the] connection to politics has
been immutably deep from the very inception of the religion

Great Western Orientalist scholarship, dating from the late
19^th and early 20^th centuries, supports Pipes’ 1983
understandings of Islam as indissolubly linking religion and politics. Moreover,
these seminal analyses and contemporary polling data debunk his now oft
repeated, glib formulations. As elaborated in detail elsewhere:

• Muhammad
  really was a jihadist—or in Pipes’ current terminology, an “Islamist”
• Great
  Western Orientalist scholars long ago established the inherently political
  nature of Islam, and also made plain that the modern era Islamic “revival”
  was evident at least four decades before “the 1920s” advent claimed by Pipes.
• The
  religio-political totalitarianism of the Sharia is well-characterized
• Contemporary
  polling data demonstrate the overwhelming appeal of Sharia supremacist
  states to ordinary Muslims debunking Pipes glib assertion that only
  “10-15%” of Muslims are “Islamists”

One must ask, “What Went Wrong” with Daniel Pipes who now sprays
(Edward)
Saidian charges of “essentialism” at brave Muslim freethinkers like Ayaan
Hirsi Ali and Wafa Sultan, as well as the stalwart Dutch politician Geert
Wilders, for simply rejecting his incoherent, self-contradictory mantras on
“Islamism”.

UPDATE: Robert Spencer explains: Islam vs. Islamism, again.

I've long rejected the term "Islamist" for reasons I explained in
that piece: "…the distinction is artificial and imposed from without.
There are not, in other words, Islamist mosques and non-Islamist
mosques, distinguishable from one another by the sign outside each, like
Baptist and Methodist churches. On the contrary, 'Islamists' move among
non-political, non-supremacist Muslims with no difficulty; no Islamic
authorities are putting them out of mosques, or setting up separate
institutions to distinguish themselves from the 'Islamists.' Mevlid
Jasarevic [a jihadist in Sarajevo] could and did visit mosques in
Austria, Serbia, and Bosnia without impediment before he started
shooting on Friday; no one stopped him from entering because he was an
'Islamist.'"

And so to say we must work with ordinary Muslims while eschewing
collaboration with Islamists is not precisely a distinction without a
difference, but a distinction that is practically imperceptible and, in
many cases, in fact not there at all.

This is not to say that Islam can never be reformed. Many
strange things have happened in history: events that no one 100 or 50 or
sometimes even 10 years before they happened would have or could have
predicted. The Berlin Wall came down in 1989, but in 1986 and 1987 there
were still plenty of learned analysts all over the airwaves and in the
corridors of power in Washington talking about how we were going to have
to deal with the Soviet Bloc for generations to come. So I will never
say that something can never happen. But we have to recognize fully and
honestly the obstacles in the way of it happening so as to make a truly
realistic assessment of the situation we're in, and apply remedies that
are most likely to work, as well as to accord with our own fundamental
principles.

This piece by Daniel Pipes has stirred up some controversy already; Pamela Geller comments here; Andrew Bostom weighs in here; and Walid Shoebat here.

"Islam and its infidels," by Daniel Pipes in the Washington Times, May 13:

What motives lay behind last month’s Boston Marathon bombing and the would-be attack on a Via Rail Canada train?

Leftists and establishmentarians variously offer imprecise and tired
replies — such as “violent extremism” or anger at Western imperialism —
unworthy of serious discussion. Conservatives, in contrast, engage in a
lively and serious debate among themselves: some say Islam the religion
provides motive; others say it’s a modern extremist variant of the
religion, known as radical Islam or Islamism.

As a participant in the latter debate, here’s my argument for focusing on Islamism.

Those arguing for Islam itself as the problem (such as Wafa Sultan
and Ayaan Hirsi Ali) point to the consistency from Muhammad’s life and
the contents of the Koran and Hadith to current Muslim practice.
Agreeing with Geert Wilders’ film “Fitna,” they point to striking
continuities between Koranic verses and jihad actions. They quote
Islamic scriptures to establish the centrality of Muslim supremacism,
jihad and misogyny, concluding that a moderate form of Islam is
impossible. They point to Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s
deriding the very idea of a moderate Islam. Their killer question is
“Was Muhammad a Muslim or an Islamist?” They contend that we who blame
Islamism do so out of political correctness or cowardliness.

To which, we reply: Yes, certain continuities do exist, and Islamists
definitely follow the Koran and Hadith literally. Moderate Muslims
exist, but lack Islamists’ near-hegemonic power. Mr. Erdogan’s denial of
moderate Islam points to a curious overlap between Islamism and the
anti-Islam viewpoint. Muhammad was a plain Muslim, not an Islamist, for
the latter concept dates back only to the 1920s. And no, we are not
cowardly but offer our true analysis.

Not only do moderate Muslims "lack Islamists’ near-hegemonic power";
they also lack the justification in the Qur'an and Hadith that Islamic
jihadists always point to in order to gain recruits among peaceful
Muslims, as well as to justify their actions. And this is a key point:
if Wafa Sultan and Ayaan Hirsi Ali (both, not incidentally, ex-Muslims)
are right that there is a "consistency from Muhammad’s life and the
contents of the Koran and Hadith to current Muslim practice," and they
most certainly are, as Daniel Pipes apparently acknowledges when he says
that "certain continuities do exist, and Islamists definitely follow
the Koran and Hadith literally," then attempts to prescind from Qur'anic
literalism in order to reform Islam and create a more peaceful version
of the faith will always be challenged by the literalists (who are and
have always been the mainstream in Islam) as heretics and apostates.

And the punishment for heresy and apostasy is death. That's why
Mahmoud Muhammad Taha was murdered in the Sudan in the 1980s for daring
to suggest that the Qur'an's peaceful verses (which are slight and
scanty in any case) should supersede its violent ones, instead of the
other way around, as is the traditional understanding in Islamic
theology and law. (Islam's doctrine of abrogation holds that the verses
revealed later chronologically supersede those revealed earlier, if
there is any contradiction — and the violent verses came later.) That's
why the Moroccan cleric Ahmed Assid, who just recently condemned violence in Islam's name, was declared an apostate and an enemy of Allah by other clerics, and threatened with death. That's why the Iraqi Shi'ite scholar Sayyed Ahmad Al-Qabbanji called for reason in Islamic discourse and jurisprudence, and was promptly arrested.

It's hard to see how a mass reform movement can ever grow when those
who make even a peep calling for reform are promptly condemned and
arrested, but the larger point is that the claim of Qur'anic and Islamic
authenticity by the jihadists and Islamic supremacists is extremely
powerful, has never been successfully challenged on any large scale, and
will continue into the foreseeable future to stifle genuine attempts at
reform. It would be unwise to wave it away lightly.

And that analysis goes like this:

Islam is the 14-century-old faith of a billion-plus believers that
includes everyone from quietist Sufis to violent jihadis. Muslims
achieved remarkable military, economic and cultural success between
roughly 600 and 1200 A.D. Being a Muslim then meant belonging to a
winning team, a fact that broadly inspired Muslims to associate their
faith with mundane success. Those memories of medieval glory remain not
just alive, but central to believers’ confidence in Islam and in
themselves as Muslims.

Sufis haven't always been all that quietist. They have long been
involved with the Chechen jihad; Hasan Al-Banna of the Muslim
Brotherhood was strongly influenced by them; and some of their most
revered figures, including Al-Ghazali himself, were quite clear in their
espousal of violent jihad and dhimmitude for non-Muslims. Islam
"includes everyone from quietist Sufis to violent jihadis," and yet one
aspect of this glorious diversity that we would want to see most is
unfortunately missing: an Islamic sect that actually rejects the concept
of jihad warfare against and subjugation of unbelievers under Sharia.
The Ahmadiyya reject violent jihad, although they energetically pursue
dawah for the imposition of Sharia, and are violently persecuted as
heretics.

Major dissonance began around 1800, when Muslims
unexpectedly lost wars, markets and cultural leadership to Western
Europeans. It continues today, as Muslims bunch toward the bottom of
nearly every index of achievement. This shift has caused massive
confusion and anger. What went wrong? Why did God seemingly abandon His
faithful? The unbearable divergence between premodern accomplishment and
modern failure brought about trauma.

Muslims have responded to this crisis in three main ways. Secularists
want Muslims to ditch the Shariah (Islamic law) and emulate the West.
Apologists also emulate the West, but pretend that in doing so they are
following the Shariah. Islamists reject the West in favor of a
retrograde and full application of the Shariah.

Islamists loathe the West because of its vast influence over Muslims
and its being tantamount to Christendom, the historic archenemy.
Islamism inspires a drive to reject, defeat and subjugate Western
civilization. Despite this urge, Islamists absorb Western influences,
including the concept of ideology. Indeed, Islamism represents the
transformation of Islamic faith into a political ideology. Islamism
accurately indicates an Islamic-flavored version of radical utopianism,
an -ism like other -isms, comparable to fascism and communism. Aping
those two movements, for example, Islamism relies heavily on conspiracy
theories to interpret the world, on the state to advance its ambitions,
and on brutal means to attain its goals.

"Islamism" as a modern construct was by no means the first to
transform the "Islamic faith into a political ideology." Islam was
political from the beginning; Islamic tradition portrays Muhammad as a
political as well as religious leader, and his successors amassed large
Islamic empires based on the proposition that Islam was a political
system. In fact, the most prominent contemporary exponent of "Islamism,"
the Muslim Brotherhood, was founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna as a
direct response to the abolition of the caliphate, the foremost symbol
of political Islam, by the secular Turkish government in 1924. Al-Banna
envisioned the Brotherhood not as some kind of innovation, but as a
revival of traditional and mainstream Islam.

Supported by 10 percent to 15 percent of Muslims, Islamism
draws on devoted and skilled cadres who have an impact far beyond their
limited numbers. It poses a threat to civilized life in Iran and Egypt,
and not just on the streets of Boston, but also in Western schools,
parliaments and courtrooms.

Our killer question is “How do you propose to defeat Islamism?” Those
who make all Islam their enemy not only succumb to a simplistic and
essentialist illusion, but lack any mechanism to defeat it. We who focus
on Islamism see World War II and the Cold War as models for subduing
the third totalitarianism. We understand that radical Islam is the
problem and that moderate Islam is the solution. We work with
anti-Islamist Muslims to vanquish a common scourge. We will triumph over
this new variant of barbarism so that a modern form of Islam can
emerge.

Moderate Islam is a solution that does not exist, and can only be a
solution if it could be successfully invented. Calling upon Muslims to
renounce the aspects of their theology that violate basic human rights
will never be effective if we do not acknowledge that those aspects
exist — and that requires talking about Islam. As I said in that
National Review article: "Andy is wrong in his claim that I have ever
said that any form of Islam is 'the only Islam,' but the fact is that
throughout its history, and in all its theological, legal, and sectarian
manifestations, Islam has always been supremacist and political.
Acknowledging that is simply acknowledging reality. Pro-Western Muslim
reformers have to start there. In Christian history, the Protestant
reformers did not pretend that Church doctrine was other than what it
was. They confronted and refuted portions of that doctrine. But Andy
seems to expect contemporary Islamic reformers to succeed by pretending
that Islam is not what its authoritative texts teach and what it always
has been historically. He says that he does not see 'what purpose is
served' by telling Islamic reformers that 'Islam is incorrigibly
supremacist and political.' But if it is supremacist and political,
whether 'incorrigibly' or not, then sincere reformers have to start
there in order to fix it. Wishful thinking and self-deception are not
reform. Ultimately those doctrines can be combatted only by actually
combatting them."

I stand by that.

 

The Truth Must be Told

Your contribution supports independent journalism

Please take a moment to consider this. Now, more than ever, people are reading Geller Report for news they won't get anywhere else. But advertising revenues have all but disappeared. Google Adsense is the online advertising monopoly and they have banned us. Social media giants like Facebook and Twitter have blocked and shadow-banned our accounts. But we won't put up a paywall. Because never has the free world needed independent journalism more.

Everyone who reads our reporting knows the Geller Report covers the news the media won't. We cannot do our ground-breaking report without your support. We must continue to report on the global jihad and the left's war on freedom. Our readers’ contributions make that possible.

Geller Report's independent, investigative journalism takes a lot of time, money and hard work to produce. But we do it because we believe our work is critical in the fight for freedom and because it is your fight, too.

Please contribute here.

or

Make a monthly commitment to support The Geller Report – choose the option that suits you best.

• $25.00 here
• $50.00 here
• $75.00 here
• $100.00 here
• $250.00 here

0 0 votes

Article Rating

14 Comments

Oldest

Newest Most Voted

Inline Feedbacks

View all comments

ahem

10 years ago

Perhaps Pipes should watch this and be set straight. I ran into it at the Gates of Vienna site this morning:
Nasim Ben Iman, Apostate from Islam in Germany warns the West (10 mins.):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2u9BNpLThqA&feature=player_embedded
“…the Koran is written in the imperative; that is plain for the simplest of men. ‘Go and kill the non-believer!’ No need to philosophise.”

0

Michael Copeland

10 years ago

The “Moderates-to-the-Rescue” claim of Daniel Pipes is, as Christopher Logan of Logan’s Warning points out, a fantasy. Look at its track record – zero. It is, however, more destructive than a fantasy: it acts as a self-administered sedative, an anaesthetic, that engenders an illusory state of well-being while numbing perception of what is really going on. There is no mileage in it. Pamela Geller is right.

0

Theo Prinse

10 years ago

Thanks for your view miss Geller. Here is what I told mr. Pipes on the subject. However apart from your coorect point I support Daniel Pipes, Carla del Ponte, Europe the rest of the world not to interfere in Syria because next will be Jordan and then Israel.
——
The Structure
Anti-Islam struggle comprises three primary issues:
1. The ideology of Islam is indivisible and because Islam is not a religion but a military doctrine, Islam in reality is an indivisible murderous military doctrine
the mass media – since their embedding in the first Iraqi war and Hollywood since Tom Cruise – are now part in this anti-US dictatorship regime within the US.
2. Left wing religious circles of the English church in the latter half of the 19th century at the top in the leadership of the Christian World Council of Churches http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olav_Fykse_Tveit and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_current_Christian_leaders deny claim 1. and recognize falsely precisely the opposite that Islam is a so-called Abrahamite religion … The Christian world churches DENY or better are in denial – through their own left wing Christian liberation theology or from the right wing by reason that the so-called primacy of faith would be compromised towards secularism when Islam where to denied being a faith etc. – that Islam in reality – under the said false pretext of religion – is a murderous military doctrine legitimated by quasi religion as well as 3. vervangingstheologie of substitutietheologie or Supersessionism, fulfillment theology, and replacement theology.
3. In a lesser extent MI6, ISI FSB etc. but to a very great extent the US CIA or better circles within the CIA in connection to segments of the US political elite, representatives of the US arms and military complex and often the White House administration historically and in a complex manipulative way plays along with the Muslim terrorists. The CIA are also geopolitically and on a daily basis operationally at the forefront with intrigue and infiltrators and psy ops methods in Muslim terror against the Christian Jewish, infidel Westerners of the Free World.*
The CIA since half a century is pivot and lead executive especially since Zbigniew Brzezinski in ill advising president Carter during the fall of the free people of Persia into the murderous despots of Khomeini’s Iran which occasion then became current day policies or method for decades to betray western oriented and secular people in Arab and Asiatic countries into the hands of despotic fundamentalist regimes

0

InfidelForLife

10 years ago

Anyone with eyes to see, and ears to hear – plus a modicum of intelligence cannot escape the simple conclusion that these statements by mr. Pipes are nothing else than a Pipe(s)-dream. A (extremely) dangerous fantasy, and by no means reflecting every-day-reality.

0

Underzog

10 years ago

Pipes and his…islamism. Perhaps that nasty Turkish Prime Minister Endrogen already answered Mr. Pipes with his famous quote that there is only Islam

0

lcdlover

10 years ago

Hi. Has anyone noticed in the Boston Globe, and I am told, the LA Times the new blanket designation for jihadis, salafists and, evidently, out-and-out terrorists: “conservative Muslims”? That’s right – conservative as in Republican. Conservative, as in Tea Party. Now all bad guys are “conservative”. The good guys? Well check out this Boston Glob (glob as in spit in the face of the people of Boston) piece which ran front page and clocked in at, what, 3000 words? It’s by none other than the Lisa Wangsness, the same Globe “reporter” who bullied a Catholic bishop to cancel Robert Spencer’s appearance for a talk, and who lobbied for Tarek Mehanna a “friend” who is a convicted jihad terrorist and who is currently serving 17½ years in federal prison for aiding Al Qaeda.
Last Sunday’s paper featured (below the fold, but still the most prominent front-page article) smarmy puff-piece about the “imam” of a the largest Boston mosque (where 700 to 1,000 people show up for Friday prayers). The “imam” William Suhaib Webb, looks like a normal guy. Good ol’ Willie. But good ol’ Willie it turns out was raised as a Christian and is undoubtedly severely mentally ill. “Many of Webb’s followers” reports Wangsness” “call him “sheikh,” an honorific for a respected teacher.” Isn’t that special? Didn’t they call Osama Bin Laden “sheik” too? Hey it must be just a coinky-dinky because, according to the intrepid reporter, Webb has been taking a lot of heat since the Marathon bombings “conservative Muslims on the Internet” for being “a sell-out”.
Like I said he’s a good looking guy and his stock-in-trade is apparently, preying on peoples’ weaknesses: “To a sobbing young woman who told him about problems at home: ‘I have someone who can help you, a Muslim counselor. . . . Let’s talk about fixing it.'”
I’d write more from this oily sycophantic bit of hagiography but I’m getting sick. If you need to get by a pay-wall just ask:
http://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/05/11/imam-william-suhaib-webb-emerges-face-boston-muslim-community-time-crisis/Kd8v0O48vkHSZAnOpYCqOI/story.html
And while I have your attention please read my Benghazi bit written one week after the event. If a humble cab driver can figure out the truth back in Sept how come we need congressional hearings?
http://erroneouslyconfident.blogspot.com/2012/09/can-world-be-as-sad-as-it-seems.html

0

Defcon 4

10 years ago

It’s a very useful meme for islamonazis the world over. The filthy kufr need not do anything because the “moderate” muslimes will be riding out of the sunset any day now to save us from islamonoazism. So, just wait a little longer, give up a few more of your freedoms and liberties and don’t worry, be happy.

0

Defcon 4

10 years ago

I wonder if Pipes has been compromised…kinda like the Little Green Footballs blogger obviously was.

0

Carmen

10 years ago

Pipes has lost it to the point he ignores the history of mohammed and islam.

0

KKKK

10 years ago

Pipes has a point that not all Muslims are out to kill us. however, the Quran’s imperatives, as well as those of the Hadith, remain intact. no one can disagree about this. if Muslims are peaceful, it is in spit of islam, not because of it.

0

ApolloSpeaks

10 years ago

Dan Pipes says that the Prophet Mohammed was a “PLAIN MOSLEM.”
Pam says that he was an “ISLAMIST.”
SOLUTION
Mohammed was a PLAIN MOSLEM ISLAMIST.

0

Defcon 4

10 years ago

HOw do you know these “peaceful” scuzzlums don’t have the same ends as their more violent brethren, just different means to achieving them?

0

Defcon 4

10 years ago

It’s too bad we can’t ship the offal in our enemedia to live in any islamofascist state, with the people they seem to have so much respect for, under the fun filled tolerance, freedom and liberty that is Sharia law.

0

Spiritof1776

10 years ago

What does the Gestapo have on Pipes?

0