Daniel Pipes likes to demonize Muslims but he doesn’t like to draw responsible conclusions. For example, the Times Square bomber explained his actions:
The judge asked Shahzad after he announced an intent to plead guilty to all 10 counts of his indictment: “Why do you want to plead guilty?” A reasonable question given the near certainty that guilty pleas will keep him in jail for long years. He replied forthrightly: I want to plead guilty and I’m going to plead guilty 100 times forward because – until the hour the US pulls it forces from Iraq and Afghanistan and stops the drone strikes in Somalia and Yemen and in Pakistan and stops the occupation of Muslim lands and stops killing Muslims and stops reporting the Muslims to its government – we will be attacking [the] US, and I plead guilty to that.”
Shahzad insisted on portraying himself as replying to American actions: “I am part of the answer to the US terrorizing [of] the Muslim nations and the Muslim people, and on behalf of that, I’m avenging the attacks,” adding that “we Muslims are one community.”
Nor was that all; he flatly asserted that his goal had been to damage buildings and “injure people or kill people” because “one has to understand where I’m coming from, because… I consider myself a mujahid, a Muslim soldier.”
WHEN CEDARBAUM pointed out that pedestrians in Times Square during the early evening of May 1 were not attacking Muslims, Shahzad replied: “Well, the [American] people select the government. We consider them all the same.”
The responsible conclusion is not that all Muslims feel the same way about America and America’s foreign policies as Shahzad does. But a not insignificant minority of Muslims do feel that way and we can expect the threat of terrorism to remain with us for as long as we wage this War on Terrorism. We can’t shut down the threat by bombing and occupying Muslim lands.
That is why it is safer to remove our troops from Iraq and Afghanistan than it is to keep them there. It’s understandable that we’d like to leave those nations more democratic and stable than we found them, but we shouldn’t confuse ourselves by thinking that we get a straight-up benefit in domestic security by continuing to have a military presence there. It should be possible to prevent safe havens from reconstituting themselves in Afghanistan without a military presence on the ground.
I think Joe Biden’s position is the closest to being correct because it does the best job of making a cost/benefit analysis.
One needs to ask who is killing more Muslims? The US or Muslims themselves? Why is the rage to only the US and not to those who bomb mosques and markets and funerals or weddings? The view that the US is solely killing Muslims is myopic.
WTF does that mean? WTF are you trying to say?
There’s plenty of rage directed at people who bomb funerals and mosques. I can’t think of anyone who isn’t a terrorist who would say “you know, those guys who bomb mosques? They’re great – I love those guys.” And you know what? If they were the only ones killing people over there then ALL of the rage could be directed at them, instead of people having to split their rage between the people bombing mosques and markets with suicide bombs and the people bombing wedding parties with drone aircraft.
You’ve constructed a strange straw man, and about the only way I can read it is “well they’re just savages who are going to kill each other anyway, so why are people getting so fucking upset if we kill a few more”. I hope that’s not your intent, but damn it sure reads like it.
You’re totally misreading it, then. They’re not all savages, but tribalism and nationalism is just as bad, if not worse, in those regions than it is here. Pakistan might as well ban the entire internet at the rate it’s going.
http://cafepyala.blogspot.com/2010/06/point-blank.html
I think this is a good article on the subject:
http://pakteahouse.wordpress.com/2010/06/17/the-need-for-liberal-elite-to-up-responsibility
I’m not signing off to the person’s comment, but if anyone is strawmanning, I’d say it’s you.
Right. That part of the world is fucked up. And there are a lot of reasons that that part of the world is fucked up and many of those reasons have absolutely nothing to do with the West at all. Anyone with any understanding of history and world events knows this.
But when someone says this:
WTF does that mean? Does it mean I’m not allowed to criticize US foreign policy in the region until all the people who bomb mosques stop bombing them? Does it mean that US action is okay as long as there are others in the region who are doing things that are worse? As long as there are people there who are doing things that are just as bad? As long as there is one evil person somewhere in the world any action we take is justified? WTF is the argument here?
There isn’t one. It’s nonsense words strung together with some racist undertones to suggest that it’s okay for the US to fly over there and kill people as long as there are people on the ground who are killing each other anyway. He might as well have asked “why do you hate freedom” at the end of it.
I see what you’re saying. I think it’s both sides of the tu quoque fallacy. My thinking is that the commenter is just frustrated that no one on the left discusses the internal calculus on this, and always leaves it at the feet of the US, not that “they do it, too!!!”
It’s kind of how everyone talks the big game against Israel while completely ignoring Lebanon’s own acts of intolerance and bigotry against the Palestinians.
At least I’m hoping that this was the misunderstanding, and that this person doesn’t really see it as a tu quoque…because that would be disgusting.
Ah, but what is the genesis of Lebanon’s intolerance and bigotry toward Palestinians? Why are there so many destitute Palestinians in Lebanon?
You see, it is very convenient to say that Lebanon, and Jordan, who bore the brunt of the ethnic cleansing of Palestine that began in 1948 (1947, actually), should simply have absorbed close to a million suddenly penniless and homeless Palestinians and had done with it. Unfortunately, that ignores the question of those countries’ capacity or lack thereof to accommodate a sudden influx of refugees. Neither country had or has the capacity. Of course, it also ignores the fact that few Palestinians have wished to be absorbed. And there is also no denying that Palestinians in Lebanon have caused a good many problems for the country and its people, so a certain amount of resentment and the resulting discrimination is understandable, if not acceptable.
I don’t intend to defend Lebanon for its treatment of the Palestinian refugees, but there is simply no analogy between Israel’s conduct toward the indigenous peoples in the land they have taken by force (not to mention the land they were given by the UN), and the countries that have borne the burden of the million or so refugees that resulted from Israeli ethnic cleansing.
Could you be more obtuse?
Who is killing more Americans–Americans or Muslims? It’s the Americans themselves. Religious freaks are in all stripes and colors. Let’s not be blind to our Christian murderers (fo’ da Lawd!) who bomb abortion clinics, shoot doctors in church, and have Full Metal Jacket shootouts on the streets of Kentucky. We also have those Israelis killing and “blockading” Palestinians with impunity.
Who said that it’s the US that is solely killing Muslims? You sound like Joe Klein by obstructing the point by fingering Donald Duck crossing the street.
What Muslims might be doing to each other has no weight in the moral equation. They’re doing it so it’s OK for us to do it? That’s your argument? The discussion is whether what we’re doing can be justified by pleading self-defense. It can’t. Everything else is irrelevant.
Is there anyone who is more insufferable on this subject than Daniel Pipes?
No, not really.
No, but there are some who are just about equally insufferable.
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WASHINGTON, Mar 26 (IPS) – A controversial documentary on the threat of radical Islam, promoted by the two most-watched U.S. cable news networks, was marketed and supported in part by self-described “pro-Israel” groups, according to an IPS investigation.
HonestReporting marketed “Obsession” but denies it produced or funded the project.
“Obsession” features interviews with Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz, investigative journalist Steve Emerson, Itimar Marcus of Israel-based Palestinian Media Watch, and Daniel Pipes, a controversial scholar of medieval Islamic history whose website campuswatch.com sparked criticism in 2002 for its alleged McCarthyesque attacks on Middle East studies professors.
Its production credits include the Middle East Media Research Institute, or MEMRI, a translation service founded in 1998 by Col. Yigal Carmon, who spent more than 20 years in Israeli intelligence and later advised two Israeli prime ministers; and the Palestinian Media Watch, an Israeli group founded by Marcus, that monitors Palestinian news organisations for alleged anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic propaganda.
Geert Wilders and Daniel Pipes at the "Facing Jihad" conference in Jerusalem, Dec., 2008"But I will not let myself be reduced to silence."On what basis do we claim to know what a minority or majority of Muslims feels? Certainly our actions are doing everything possible to drive them together despite deep cultural, historical, and geographical divides. OTOH, don’t forget that Sept 11 came not out of some US-oppressed disaster, but from our friend Saudi Arabia. There’s no way to make the situation simple, safe, or easy. The nearest we can get to some kind of clarity is the plain reality that our current warmongering manages to make everything worse for us and for the rest of the the world. It’s heartbreaking to think about what all that money, combined with a tighter rein on Israeli expansionism, could have accomplished. I’m not sure that opportunity is still available.
Well said, BooMan. It is really very simple. Asymmetrical warfare weakens a stronger power by holding them in conflict that not only bleeds its resources but delegitimizes its claims to just intervention.
The response to 9/11 should have been and still should be a law enforcement response. Then, the only remaining irritant would be Israel’s policy regarding the occupied territories of Palestine. And the US is having a “deficit crisis”; I know where to cut. Military foreign aid that is only a subsidy for the US military industrial complex. Economic aid that intends to allow a country to offset the economic effects of bad foreign policy.
“The response to 9/11 should have been and still should be a law enforcement response.“
Absolutely agreed. I said it then, I am still saying it now.
“Then, the only remaining irritant would be Israel’s policy regarding the occupied territories of Palestine.“
Not quite. There is still the brazenly illegal occupation, colonization and completely illegitimate annexation of the Golan Heights, the continued occupation of Sheb`a Farms, and Israel’s multiple-times-weekly terrorizing, and often deadly violations of Lebanese territory both in the air and on the ground.