Pipes on Lewis's Madness

A while ago, I wrote on Bernard Lewis's deadly doctrines that pave the way for imperialism and contaminate already fascist politics with racism by pitting the West against the rest in a civilizational conflict. I just gave you the title of his lecture: "Bring Them Freedom or They Destroy Us".

The great American protest singer-songwriter David Rovics sums it up in the last stanza of his song "Evening News" which severely mocks corporate media for indoctrinating the populace:

Evil men are plotting
To blow up Washington, DC
'Cause they don't like freedom
And democracy
They're fans of the Dark Ages
They are all around

They're marching from the desert sand
And coming to your town

Unfortunately, this is how many people view Arabs and Muslims -- propaganda heated up by Lewis, Pipes, Spencer and Kramer etc. The question is where do we move from here, a positive attempt, and not be drowned by hate literature like The Roots of Western Rage, The American Mind and The Crisis of Judaism and Christianity. Actually, I forgot to mention -- none of these book exist. The correct list is The Roots of Muslim Rage, The Arab Mind and The Crisis of Islam. My point is that hate and racist literature by the likes of Lewis and Raphael Patai when cloaked in sophisticated Western authorship is worthy of bestselling material. How do we change this trend? Not by falsifying information against our non-Muslim brothers and sisters, but by challenging this portrayal by those select few.

Not suprisingly, Daniel Pipes, the man in question, is in full agreement with Lewis. On the same subject, allow me to inform you in case you aren't aware of an upcoming showdown between the London Mayor Ken Livingstone and Daniel Pipes scheduled for January 20th concerning the so-called clash of civilizations. Hopefully, we'll have the video up on youtube. Watch out for it.

Pipes is even behind Lewis on this Hitlerian concept. While Lewis contents himself with the war-mongering power-thumping phrase "the clash of civilizations", Pipes does a back somersault to fall flat with his nut stuck in the Orientalism sewer, and pietistically declares into the filthy foam: "not a clash of civilizations, but a clash between civilization and barbarism." While Lewis is bad, Pipes is worse. He disagrees with the atom of supposed goodness in Lewis's theory, after propagating Lewis's theory offshore and then turning it inwards he bares the fangs at Western Muslims:

There are plenty of born-free Muslims in the West who are Islamists. Take, for example, the four 7/7 bombers in London. Freedom did nothing for them.

And in his classic, insensitive tone toward the people of Iraq, Pipes delivers a terrible judgement:

The goal in war has to be to defeat one's enemies, not liberate them. The invasion of Iraq, dubbed "Operation Iraqi Freedom," suffered from this mistake. The same applies to the war on radical Islam, where we must cause our enemies to feel a sense of defeat. We must crush their will. After that bitter phase has been experienced, they are then eligible for freedom.

The only positive thing about Daniel Pipes is that he may be more truthful about American-Israeli policies and objectives than other policy-makers and propagandists. It is indeed better to say "we came to crush them" than "we came to liberate them". This, however, doesn't discount Pipes's obliqueness.