A new fear stalks the land: militant Islam (GREAT READ!)

The West needs to boost moderate Muslim nations to defeat their totalitarian enemies, writes Miranda Devine.

Late on Tuesday night, a group of Australian conservative intellectuals and journalists left the final Sydney lecture of the American Islamic scholar Daniel Pipes and walked through Martin Place in search of a drink.

There they found a tent embassy manned by a group of friendly former Iraqis. There was a small Communist Party sign and banners calling on Saddam Hussein to leave Iraq and another, paradoxically, denouncing US "barbarism" and opposing American intervention in Iraq.

The Iraqi men and one woman were in their 30s, had lived through the Gulf War, hated Saddam and felt betrayed by the United States, which had left them to his mercies. They were not persuaded by the conservative passers-by to accept the argument that "my enemy's enemy is my friend", that the only way Saddam could be toppled was with American military might.

This snapshot of Martin Place, August 2002, tells a lot about the contradictions and sometimes incomprehensible complexities of the global war in which Australia finds itself reluctantly engaged. Explaining the war is what Pipes has been doing in the eastern states for the past week as a guest of the Sydney-based think tank the Centre for Independent Studies.

Pipes, 53, heads a US think tank, the Middle East Forum, in Philadelphia. Before September 11 he was marginalised as an anti-Islamic conservative. Today he is feted as a prophet, has the ear of the American President, and his Web site, danielpipes.org, receives 100,000 hits a day.

Pipes's premise is that "War on Terror" is a euphemism, that the real enemy is militant Islam, which comprises about 10 to 15 per cent of the Muslim world, or between 100 million and 150 million people.

He says this war is not the catastrophic "Clash of Civilisations" predicted in the 1996 book by Samuel Huntington. It is not a war between Islam and the West but a problem within the Muslim world, between militants and moderates. "Muslims are the victims of militant Islam no less than non-Muslims," he told his Sydney audience.

What the West should be doing is helping the moderates defeat the militants, he says.

As for identifying militant Islam in Australia, Pipes says each incident will be small but it gradually builds up to a reworking of Western secular society along Islamic lines.

"When there's a difference between their approach and the Australian approach, they want Australia to become like them and not vice versa," he said.

Militant Islamists believe that the ideology is not just an alternative to Western liberal democracy but a superior one, "and they would like to move the country in that direction so there are special privileges accorded to Islam".

One example in Florida, he says, was American Muslim groups trying to have the law changed so a woman could wear a traditional head covering in her driver's licence photo which showed just her eyes. Pipes says this is unacceptable, because it is "preparing the ground for Islamic law".

It will take an effort to rebuff militant Islam in Australia, he says. But "if there are two ways which are reconcilable - the militant Islam way and the Australian way, you will need to assert the Australian way".

Pipes, who reads Arabic and lived in Egypt in the 1980s, says militant Islam is a radical utopian ideology, like the other totalitarian ideologies of the 20th century, fascism and Marxism-Leninism.

It is "primarily an urban middle-class phenomenon devised by intellectuals alienated from their societies".

Like the other 20th-century totalitarianisms, "it seeks to control states, values society over the individual, does not tolerate dissidents, is deeply anti-Western, and inspires the loyalty of committed, capable cadres".

It began in Egypt in the late 1920s but did not take over any government until the Iranian revolution in 1979. "That was when militant Islam declared war on the West."

From the 1983 and 1984 bombings of the US Embassy in Beirut, through hijackings, bombings, assassinations, the first World Trade Centre bombing of 1993, the bombings of two US embassies in East Africa in 1998 and the USS Cole in Yemen in 2000, 600 Americans have been killed, with no change in US policy, he says.

Pipes says the goal for the West now is to destroy militant Islam just as we destroyed the other totalitarian ideologies. "And then we must invite moderate Islam to enjoy the benefits." He cites Afghanistan as the model, where the West attacked al-Qaeda, drove out the Taliban and left the Northern Alliance in charge.

But one of the difficulties is that the West is divided as it wasn't 20 years ago. He cites an article by Robert Kagan in the American Hoover Institute magazine Policy Review, summing up the divide as "Americans are from Mars and Europeans are from Venus". Like the best-selling book about the gulf between men and women, Mars and Venus find conversation difficult, have different goals and different ideologies. The European Union, a welfare state with a tiny military, and lone superpower US "agree on little and understand one another less and less".

Pipes, on his third visit here, says he thinks Australia is Martian (meaning more American than European in its outlook), along with Turkey, Israel and India, while New Zealand (definitely) and Canada (maybe) are Venusian. But he was surprised last week, when he spoke at a lunch in Canberra at the Australian Defence College, that some officers seemed most concerned about the "morality and legality of invading Iraq" and were "vigorous in their protests". One New Zealand officer described any such attack as "savagery".

Iraq, says Pipes, has nothing to do with militant Islam but is still an urgent problem because of the imminent prospect of Saddam Hussein unleashing weapons of mass destruction.

When asked on Tuesday night why Australia should join the US in its promised attack on Iraq, Pipes said: "It is self-evident you should be afraid of the prospect of Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons. But if you want to be a freeloader, be a freeloader."

Iraq may have little to do with militant Islam, but Australian reaction to an attack there will determine whether we really are Martians.

"It is self-evident you should be afraid of the prospect of Saddam Hussein with nuclear weapons. But if you want to be a freeloader, be a freeloader."

We got plenty of those around the globe. Australia will not be one of them.

I've been a subscriber to Pipe's cite for over a year. He is in the N.Y. Post often... but his cite sends you all his articles free, some of which don't appear in the Post.

I read all his articles in the NY Post (paper version). I'll have to check out his website.

Didn't he also have a feud going with Justin Raimondo for a while? I think the fight just petered out as Justin sank further and further into irrelevancy.

What the West should be doing is helping the moderates defeat the militants, he says.

All two hundred and fifty two of them?

The problem is that while the militants are behaving as militants do to non-militants - that poor woman in the burqa being executed in the soccer stadium is a case in point - even while this is happening the non-militants still are convinced that they are more akin to, and sympathetic with, the guy with the AK-47 than the U.S. soldier who is fighting him. We saw this same phenomenon in Vietnam. It is not a stranglehold that we are going to break with aid payments and propaganda. The sad fact is that the only real way for a people to rid itself of this sort of oppressor is with internal violence.

That may happen - we're seeing that sort of development in Iran right now. But it's a lot more difficult and a lot bloodier when the militants are the government and have all of the guns to themselves.

What the West should be doing is helping the moderates defeat the militants, he says.

At times I have serious doubts about Daniel Pipes.
Not about his scholarship, but about his conclusions.

He says militant islam is 10-15%.
He also says that there are over 100 million of them total.

Why should they need our help?

at best his figures are wrong... at worst his assessment of attitude is wrong.

i agree with your sentiment. when we fight wars for others, then we get the shaft for not 'helping us out' after the war. talk about whiners!

if the moderates believe freedom is worth fighting for, they they should fight for it. if it is in our best interests to involve ourselves, so be it -- but let's not fight a war for the sake of the moderates.

our goals is to rid the world of the terrorist evil, not to give moderates the ability to govern themselves.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.