Pamela Geller, WND Column: Daniel Pipes is Wrong on Islamic Jew-Hatred

My column this week addresses how wrong Daniel Pipes is on Islamic Jew-hatred. Pipes is entitled to his opinion, but he is not entitled to his own facts. It's hard to quantify the damage dissemblers like Pipes have done in disarming so many millions. Andrew Bostom has challenged Pipes to a debate; I look forward to Pipes' response.

DEFENDING THE WEST

Islamic anti-Semitism: 20th century invention?
Exclusive: Pamela Geller exposes fantasists' threat of intellectual dishonesty

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Sugar-coating harsh realities and pretending that unpleasant facts
don’t exist opens doors and gets you accolades – but is it worth it at
the price of the truth?

According to an article about a speech he gave last week in Toronto,
scholar Daniel Pipes “suggested it is Islamism, a political ideology,
that inspires hatred of ‘the other,’ rather than Islam. … He emphasized
that while Islam has existed since the age of the prophet Muhammad,
Islamism is a recent phenomenon and need not be considered an authentic
expression of Islam.”

Need not be considered an authentic expression of Islam by whom? By
Muslims? Yet so many do, all around the world. By non-Muslims? What
would that accomplish, since so many Muslims think it is an authentic expression of Islam, except to render us complacent in the face of the jihad threat?

And anyway, is “Islamism” really not an authentic expression of
Islam? In fact, political Islam and violent Islam go back to Muhammad,
who massacred the Qurayzah tribe and the Jews of Khybar and left oceans
of blood in his wake. In Medina, he started waging war against
non-Muslims, and he explained to his followers that they should offer
those non-Muslims three choices. As Robert Spencer explains, “the
choices for unbelievers ar … 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.”

Spencer
also rejects the Islam/Islamism distinction: “[T]he 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.’”

And Andrew Bostom adds: “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 self-contradictory mantras on
‘Islamism.’”

Even worse, Pipes “said the religion of Islam itself is not
inherently hostile to Jews, and Muslim anti-Semitism scarcely existed
before the establishment of the state of Israel.”

Amazing. Is he unaware of the Quran’s terming the Jews the “worst
enemies” of the Muslims (5:82), or saying that Allah cursed them and
turned them into apes and pigs (2:62-66; 5:59-60; 7:166)? Where is Pipes
on that and so much more Quranic anti-Semitism? Has he never heard of
the genocidal hadith in which Muhammad said that “the last hour would
not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims
would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a
tree and a stone or a tree would say: Muslim, or the servant of Allah,
there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him” (Sahih Muslim 6985)?

Has Pipes never read Bat Ye’or or Andrew Bostom on Islamic
anti-Semitism, or Sir Martin Gilbert’s history of the Jews in Muslim
lands, “In Ishmael’s House”? All of them show that Jew hatred is a
constant of Islamic history. Pipes thinks it started with Israel? What
about the pogroms conducted by Palestinian Muslims against Palestinian
Jews in the early 20th century – the wholesale slaughter of Jews as
prescribed and preached by the Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin
al-Husseini, who lived in Berlin during the war, made broadcasts in
Arabic for the Nazis and raised up an SS division of Bosnian Muslims?

Historian Phillip Hitti states: “The caliph al-Mutawakkil in 850 and
854 decreed that Christians and Jews should affix wooden images of
devils to their houses, level their graves even with the ground, wear
outer garments of honey color, i.e. yellow, put two honey-colored
patches on the clothes of their slaves … and ride only on mules and
asses with wooden saddles marked by two pomegranate-like balls on the
cantle.” Andrew Bostom’s work shows much more. One-thousand years later,
in 1888 a Tunisian Jew lamented a similar situation:

“The Jew is prohibited in this country to wear the same clothes as a
Muslim and may not wear a red tarbush. He can be seen to bow down with
his whole body to a Muslim child and permit him the traditional
privilege of striking him in the face, a gesture that can prove to be of
the gravest consequence. Indeed, the present writer has received such
blows. In such matters the offenders act with complete impunity, for
this has been the custom from time immemorial.”

In 1291, Isaac ben Samuel, a Palestinian Jew, said: “In the eyes of
the Muslims, the children of Israel are as open to abuse as an
unprotected field.” The philosopher Maimonides said: “You know, my
brethren, that on account of our sins G-d has cast us into the midst of
this people, the nation of Ishmael, who persecute us severely, and who
devise ways to harm us and to debase us. … No nation has ever done more
harm to Israel. None has matched it in debasing and humiliating us. None
has been able to reduce us as they have. … We have borne their imposed
degradation, their lies, and absurdities, which are beyond human power
to bear.”

Read the rest.

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Larry S.

10 years ago

I think shruggers should listen to what Pipes has to say before passing judgement. They may do so here:
http://www.danielpipes.org/12902/islam-vs-islamism
If anyone can find a transcript of Pipes’ comments, I’d appreciate it if you would post a link here, as I find the audio leaves something to be desired.
Given my own lack of expertise regarding Islamic history, I would not be too quick to judge who- Spencer/Geller vs. Pipes- has the better of this argument. Given all the venom directed his way on this site, I think he should be invited to respond to his critics here.

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Larry S.

10 years ago

Since Pipes is not here to defend himself, I will do the next best thing, which is to quote him. He feels that his comments have been mis-represented by, among others, Walid Shoebat, whom Pamela has cited.
http://www.danielpipes.org/12847/islam-vs-islamism
May 18, 2013 update: The article above has been misinterpreted, for example by Walid Shoebat who states that “Pipes makes an unsubstantiated claim that a majority of Muslims are moderate and that Islamism is only supported by 10-15 percent of Muslims.” No, I do not claim that 85-90 percent of Muslims are moderate. Let’s use more precise language. I estimate that a very small percentage of Muslims are actively opposed to application of the Shari’a and can be defined as anti-Islamists. That leaves a vast body that includes traditionalists, Sufis, Islamic supremacists, and completely apolitical types. I do not characterize them as moderate. I only call them not Islamist.
I encourage other shruggers to urge Pamela to invite Pipes to respond on this web site. I find rather repugnant the claim that has been made on this site that Pipes has been dishonest. When a significant difference in understanding of history exists between Bernard Lewis and Martin Gilbert, I for one do not presume to think that I have much to add to the argument.

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Carmen

10 years ago

Pipes needs to be schooled. This is too serious a matter to allow him to talk nonsense and get away with it. On with the debate and a serious lesson in history both past and present!

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Carmen

10 years ago

Anyone can post here so why pretend Daniel Pipes is not allowed to respond? That’s very dishonest of you.

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Larry S.

10 years ago

Carmen-
Yours is an inane and hostile comment. It is of the same misleading genre that the Guardian gave Pamela when they trashed her: you have a blog, and you always write a letter to the editor.
No, being able to post in the response section is a very different matter from being given the platform of a web site. If you don’t see that distinction, then you really are quite obtuse.
I consider you to be a very deceptive person.

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Defcon 4

10 years ago

What a load of disingenuous BULLSHIT. Islamist, muslime is a delineation w/o a difference, except to the willing collaborators and tools of islamonazism. FO.

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Defcon 4

10 years ago

And Pipes isn’t a deceitful? All I have to do is look at how the kufr/infidel is treated in ANY islamic state in the 21st century to expose Pipes’ bullshit “islamist” meme.

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Larry S.

10 years ago

Defcon-
You appear incapable of dealing with a nuanced argument such as Pipes makes. For starters, his claim at dispute is that anti-semitism in the Muslim world is largely a modern European import. So, by looking at today’s world, you are looking in the wrong place in the wrong time period.
I notice you can’t be bothered coming to terms with Pipes’ argument in any considered fashion. It is quite apparent that arguments involving historical evidence and trends are beyond your ken.

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