{"id":66,"date":"2010-09-08T09:56:07","date_gmt":"2010-09-08T09:56:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.beliefnet.com\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/daniel-pipes-gets-scared.html"},"modified":"2010-09-08T09:56:07","modified_gmt":"2010-09-08T09:56:07","slug":"daniel-pipes-gets-scared","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/religionandpubliclife\/2010\/09\/daniel-pipes-gets-scared.html","title":{"rendered":"Daniel Pipes: anti- Islamism v. Islamophobia"},"content":{"rendered":"

OK, I admit it. I know Dan Pipes. I used to be a friend of Dan Pipes. True, he did once threaten to make my life difficult. My sin? Disrespecting Dan Pipes in print<\/a>. I called him “an independent scholar.” Worse, I claimed that his dire warnings that many American Muslims want to turn the U.S. into an Islamic state (“It means that the existing order–religious
\nfreedom, secularism, women’s rights–can no longer be taken for granted.
\nIt now needs to be fought for.”) harked back to 19th-century fears the Roman Catholic immigrants were hell-bent on turning America over to the pope. Well, American history was never Dan’s forte.<\/p>\n

But he is, or used to be, a serious student of medieval and early modern Islam. And so, delighted as he is that he’s finally got Islamism on the run in the U.S., he is distressed that some of his allies are now coming out of the closet as blatant Islamophobes. <\/p>\n

Misled by the Islamists’ insistence<\/a>
\nthat there can be no such thing as “moderate Islam,” my allies often fail to
\ndistinguish between Islam (a faith) and Islamism (a radical utopian ideology
\naiming to implement Islamic laws in their totality). This amounts not just to an
\nintellectual error but a policy dead-end. Targeting all Muslims conflicts with
\nbasic Western notions, lumps friends with foes, and ignores the inescapable fact
\nthat Muslims alone can offer an antidote to Islamism. As I often note, radical
\nIslam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Pipes’ allies include not just the odd Koran-burner or taxi driver stabber, but the likes of Pastor Robert Jeffress of Dallas’ First Baptist Church (Billy Graham’s church), who sermonizes<\/a> that Islam promotes pedophilia, and long-time New Republic<\/i> editor and publisher Martin Peretz, who contends<\/a> that Muslims are not worthy of First Amendment protection.<\/p>\n

It’s all very well to draw a nice distinction between a supposed Islamist threat to American freedoms and the moderate Islam embraced by, for example, the imam behind the proposed community center in lower Manhattan–now to include worship spaces for Christians and Jews as well as Muslims (cf. his op-ed<\/a> in the New York Times <\/i>today). At the moment, the threat to those freedoms is not coming from the Islamists. It’s coming from the allies of Dan Pipes. And he knows it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

OK, I admit it. I know Dan Pipes. I used to be a friend of Dan Pipes. True, he did once threaten to make my life difficult. My sin? Disrespecting Dan Pipes in print. I called him “an independent scholar.” Worse, I claimed that his dire warnings that many American Muslims want to turn the…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":222,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-66","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\nDaniel Pipes: anti- Islamism v. 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After teaching at Harvard in the Department of History and Literature for three years, he became editor of the Boston Review. In 1987 he joined the staff of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, where he worked variously as a reporter, editorial writer and columnist. In 1996 he became the founding director of the Leonard E. Greenberg Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College and in 1998 founding editor of Religion in the News, a magazine published by the Center that examines how the news media handle religious subject matter. In 2005, he was named director of the Trinity College Program on Public Values, comprising both the Greenberg Center and a new Institute for the Study of Secularism in Society and Culture directed by Barry Kosmin. In 2007, he became Professor of Religion in Public Life at the College. Professor Silk is the author of Spiritual Politics: Religion and America Since World War II and Unsecular Media: Making News of Religion in America. He is co-editor of Religion by Region, an eight-volume series on religion and public life in the United States, and co-author of The American Establishment, Making Capitalism Work, and One Nation Divisible: How Regional Religious Differences Shape American Politics. 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