THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume X, Issue # 325, December 10, 2008
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
WESTERNERS STILL ASLEEP AFTER MUMBAI
By Dr. Daniel Pipes
WHAT FINALLY WILL ROUSE WESTERNERS FROM THEIR STUPOR, TO PROPERLY IDENTIFY THE THE ENEMY (NAMELY,
ISLAMIST TERRORISM) & FIGHT THE GLOBAL WAR TO VICTORY? THE ONE THING THAT IS LIKELY TO DO THIS:
THE ISLAMISTS' EFFECTIVE USE OF WEAPONS OF MASS DESTRUCTION, CAUSING MASSIVE DEATHS IN THE WEST,
SAY 100,000 CASUALTIES IN A SINGLE WMD ATTACK
FULL STORY:
Victims caught in terrorist atrocities perpetrated for Islam typically experience fear, torture, horror and murder, with sirens
screaming, snipers positioning, and carnage in the streets. That was the case recently in Bombay (now called Mumbai),
where some 195 people were murdered and 300 injured. But, for the real target of Islamist terror, the world at large, the
experience has become numbed, with apologetics and justification muting repulsion and shock.
If terrorism ranks among the cruelest and most inhumane forms of warfare, excruciating in its small-bore viciousness and
intentional pain, Islamist terrorism has also become well-rehearsed political theater. Actors fulfill their scripted roles, then
shuffle, soon forgotten, off the stage.
Indeed, as one reflects on the most publicized episodes of Islamist terror against Westerners since 9/11 – the attack on
Australians in Bali, on Spaniards in Madrid, on Russians in Beslan, on Britons in London – a twofold pattern emerges:
Muslim exultation and Western denial. The same tragedy replays itself, with only names changed.
Muslim exaltation: The Mumbai assault inspired occasional condemnations, hushed official regrets, and cornucopias of
unofficial enthusiasm. As the Israel Intelligence Heritage & Commemoration Center notes, the Iranian and Syrian
governments exploited the event "to assail the United States, Israel and the Zionist movement, and to represent them as
responsible for terrorism in India and the world in general." Al-Jazeera's website overflowed with comments such
as "Allah, grant victory to Muslims. Allah, grant victory to jihad" and "The killing of a Jewish rabbi and his wife in the
Jewish center in Mumbai is heartwarming news."
Such supremacism and bigotry can no longer surprise, given the well-documented, world-wide acceptance of terror among
many Muslims. For example, the Pew Research Center for the People & the Press conducted an attitudinal survey in
Spring, 2006, "The Great Divide: How Westerners and Muslims View Each Other." Its polls of about one thousand persons
in each of ten Muslim populations found a perilously high proportion of Muslims who, on occasion, justify suicide
bombing: 13 percent in Germany, 22 percent in Pakistan, 26 percent in Turkey, and 69 percent in Nigeria.
A frightening portion also declared some degree of confidence in Osama bin Laden: 8 percent in Turkey, 48 percent in
Pakistan, 68 percent in Egypt, and 72 percent in Nigeria. As I concluded in a 2006 review of the Pew survey, "These
appalling numbers suggest that terrorism by Muslims has deep roots and will remain a danger for years to come." Obvious
conclusion, no?
Western denial: No. The fact that terrorist fish are swimming in a hospitable Muslim sea nearly disappears amidst Western
political, journalistic, and academic bleatings. Call it political correctness, multiculturalism, or self-loathing; whatever the
name, this mentality produces delusion and dithering.
Nomenclature lays bare this denial. When a sole jihadist strikes, politicians, law enforcement, and media join forces to deny
even the fact of terrorism; and, when all must concede the terrorist nature of an attack, as in Mumbai, a pedantic
establishment twists itself into knots to avoid blaming terrorists.
I documented this avoidance by listing the twenty (!) euphemisms the press unearthed to describe Islamists who attacked
a school in Beslan in 2004: activists, assailants, attackers, bombers, captors, commandos, criminals, extremists, fighters,
group, guerrillas, gunmen, hostage-takers, insurgents, kidnappers, militants, perpetrators, radicals, rebels, and separatists –
anything but terrorists.
And if terrorist is impolite, adjectives such as Islamist, Islamic, and Muslim become unmentionable. My blog titled "Not
Calling Islamism the Enemy" provides copious examples of this avoidance, along with its motives. In short, those who
would replace War on Terror with A Global Struggle for Security and Progress imagine this linguistic gambit will win over
Muslim hearts and minds.
Post-Mumbai, analysts such as Steven Emerson, Don Feder, Lela Gilbert, Caroline Glick, Tom Gross, William Kristol,
Dorothy Rabinowitz, and Mark Steyn again noted various aspects of this futile linguistic behavior, with Emerson bitterly
concluding that "After more than 7 years since 9/11, we can now issue a verdict: Islamic terrorists have won our hearts
and minds."
What finally will rouse Westerners from their stupor, to name the enemy and fight the war to victory? Only one thing
seems likely: massive deaths, say 100,000 casualties in a single WMD attack. Short of that, it appears, much of the West,
contently deploying defensive measures against fancifully-described "activists," will gently slumber on.
© Daniel Pipes 2008
Originally Published in the Jerusalem Post, December 10, 2008
Republished with the Permission of Daniel Pipes
Reprinted from the Daniel Pipes Mailing List, December 10, 2008
Article URL: http://www.danielpipes.org/article/6055
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Asia -- Central & South Asia -- India & Its Neighbors
Islamism & Jihadism -- The Threat of Radical Islam
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
American Foreign Policy -- Political & Psychological Warfare
International Politics & World Disorder:
War, Peace, & Geopolitics in the Real World:
Foreign Affairs & U.S. National Security
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
Counterterrorism & U.S. National Security
U.S. National Security Strategy
Dr. Daniel Pipes, a Ph.D. in Islamic History (Harvard University, 1978), is the Founder and Director of the Middle East Forum,
the Founder of Campus Watch, a signatory of the Project for the New American Century, a former board member of the U.S.
Institute of Peace, a former adjunct scholar at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, a Golden Circle supporter of the
U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon, a former member of the U.S. Department of Defense Special Task Force on Terrorism and
Technology, and a former lecturer at the U.S. Naval War College, Harvard University, the University of Chicago, and the
University of Pennsylvania. Dr. Pipes was the Director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute from 1986 to 1993.
Author or co-author of eighteen books, Dr. Pipes is a regular columnist for Front Page Magazine, the New York
Sun, and the Jerusalem Post. His analyses of world trends and of forces and developments in the Middle East
have appeared in numerous North American newspapers, including the Washington Post, the New York Times,
and the Wall Street Journal. He frequently appears on American network television, as well as at universities and
think tanks, to discuss the Middle East, Islam, and the Islamist threat to the U.S.A. and the West. He also has appeared on
BBC and Al Jazeera, and has lectured in approximately twenty-five countries.
Dr. Pipes is a Polish-American Jew whose parents fled Poland in 1939, immigrated to the U.S.A., and assimilated well into
American society and culture. His father is Richard Pipes, an American historian specializing in Russian and Soviet history
and serving as Professor of History at Harvard University from 1950 until his retirement in 1996. During the Cold War, the
worldview of Richard Pipes was strongly anti-Soviet and anti-Communist.
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Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
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