DR.ANDREW BOSTOM: EDUCATING DANIEL PIPES ON ISLAMIC ANTISEMITISM…….

It is common knowledge to every schoolboy and even every Bachelor of Arts,
That all sin is divided into two parts.
One kind of sin is called a sin of commission, and that is very important,
And it is what you are doing when you are doing something you ortant,
And the other kind of sin is just the opposite and is called a sin of omission

and is equally bad in the eyes of all right-thinking people, from
Billy Sunday to Buddha,
And it consists of not having done something you shuddha

—Ogden Nash

**

Writing in the Toronto Sun (published 5/16/13)  Farzana Hassan claimed Daniel Pipes’ most recent pronouncement on the subject, ostensibly, of “Islamic Antisemitism,” was as follows:

He said the religion of Islam itself is not inherently hostile to Jews, and Muslim Antisemitism scarcely existed before the establishment of the state of Israel. 

Pipes, however, subsequently claimed Hassan’s account of his talk to the “Muslim Committee Against Antisemitism,” was “sympathetic, but inaccurate.”

Daniel Pipes doth protest Ms. Hassan’s characterization  far too much.

Never denying that he spoke the actual words Hassan claimed, Pipes insteadprovided this purely casuistic response that avoids the logical implication of his alleged words—and in fact reinforces Hassan’s interpretation of their meaning!

He said “the religion of Islam itself is not inherently hostile to Jews,” Not true. A sense of Muslim superiority over Jews goes back 1,400 years, to the very origins of Islam. “and Muslim anti-Semitism scarcely existed before the establishment of the state of Israel.” True in the technical sense that the tropes of Christian antisemitism, including the obsessive fear of and hostility toward Jews, goes back only two centuries and only came fully into its own after 1948.

Fortunately, Pipes’ own albeit quite limited and superficial writings putatively addressing the subject of “Islamic Antisemitism,” date back just over 30-years. As can be gleaned, objectively, from this “oeuvre,” Ms. Hassan’s encapsulation of Pipes’ views is consistent with what he has actually written, and argued. Indeed, as I will demonstrate, Pipes negates the very existence of Muslim Antisemitism—Muslim conspiratorial hatred of Jews, not mere (and benign) feelings of “superiority”—as an indigenous phenomenon rooted in sacralized Islamic doctrine, and manifested in Islamic history, across a continuum of almost 14 centuries.

The most striking, repeated public examples of Pipes’ willful negation of the doctrinal Islam in Islamic Antisemitism  were evident when the same very distinct, Jew-hating Koranic motif received broad media attention, on two occasions, 10-years apart.

Read it all here at Andy’s blog