Dr. Daniel Pipes Calls Danish Devotion To Free Speech Bulwark Against Radical Islam
By Beila Rabinowitz
March 19, 2007 - San Francisco, CA - PipeLineNews.org - On March 10th 2007 Dr. Daniel Pipes was awarded the Danish Free Speech prize by the Trykkefrihedsselskabets [Free Press Society]. Before handing him the sculpted glass award, FPS president Lars Hedegaard, sounded a note of warning:
"This glass is as fragile as the free world. It can be easily broken if it is not guarded well. And once it is smashed to pieces, it cannot be put back together."
In his introductory remarks the Danish journalist and academic recounted how on the day of 9/11, "The first thing we did was to send an email to Dr. Daniel Pipes, to ask who he thought could be behind the atrocity. The answer came back almost immediately, that it could be no other then Osama bin-Laden and his al-Qaeda organization...We tried to communicate this likelihood to the Danish media, and they weren't interested."
[This media reluctance to accept that the 9/11 attacks were the result of an Islamist declaration of war against the West demonstrates that having a free press and, nominally free speech does not suffice, if self-censorship is being exercised out of fear of causing offense to Muslims and Islam.]
Professor Hedegaard lauded Dr. Pipes for his "unwavering defense of free speech" pointing out that "where too many others are willing to bend to pressure to take the easy way out...Daniel Pipes has stood firm."
He said that Dr. Pipes book "The Rushdie Affair - The Novel the Ayatollah and West" was the reason for the award adding that "his achievement in writing this book will always stand out."
[The book was published in 1990, one year after the fatwa and analyzed the historical significance of the edict by Ayatollah Khomeini against The Satanic Verses' author Salman Rushdie as the opening gambit for imposing Shari'a on the West an event that came full circle 16 years later with the Danish cartoon jihad.]
The theme of Dr. Pipes' acceptance speech was "The Rushdie Rules" and addressed the question, "Will the West accept Islamic law...is the Enlightenment over or will Western civilization survive?"
Over the course of half an hour [and two standing ovations] he explained the nature of the threat the West was facing, asserting that free speech was the key to establishing the immutability of our core values over Islamism.
Dr. Pipes said that the Ayatollah Khomeini's edict set a precedent because it was "the first time a Muslim religious figure [was] involving himself in Western cultural affairs [where] a head of state [was] calling for the execution of a writer in another country."
Most importantly Pipes stated, "it was an attempt to apply Islamic law to non-Muslims."
Expanding on that thesis, Dr. Pipes presented an overview of Islamic law, citing how it regulates every aspect of a person's life and behavior, "from prayer to warfare, public and private" cautioning that "it is the goal of Islamists everywhere in the world to apply Islamic law everywhere in the world, including the West."
Pipes said that Khomeini's fatwa caused "a massive debate in the West about what constitutes free speech and blasphemy" and reactions varied from "outrage" to "accommodation" concluding that "this statement 18 years ago is part of the climate in which we now live and is the leading threat to free speech."
According to Pipes, "Khomeini saw this as part of a process whereby those who insult Islam, the Prophet and the Qur'an will no longer do so," thereby attaining "internal relevance in the West" which began "a new era of Islamist assertion" and an "oft repeated...pattern" whereby "Westerners say or do something that is critical of Islam' and "Muslims demand that this be retracted."
He said that Khomeini "was successful in that goal" citing examples of incidents between 1997 and 2006 in which Muslims attacked Westerners because of perceived insults to the Muslim religion.
He reiterated what is at stake, explaining that, "this recurrent pattern of Muslim uproar, of threats of violence, has a goal that goes well beyond prohibiting criticism of Islam" that it "implies special privileges for Islam" instead of being subject to "the same discussion, as any other religion."
To illustrate this point Pipes quoted Flemming Rose, the cultural affairs editor of the Jyllands-Posten who made the decision to run the cartoons in his paper and who said that Muslim censorship of the cartoons meant that he as a non-Muslim, was being expected to submit to their taboos, thus "they are seeking my submission."
Dr. Pipes pointed out the paradox, that while demanding the acquiescence of non-believers to their rigid norms, Muslims themselves "routinely say and do things that are far more offensive to Westerners than "what we do to them." To illustrate the point he quoted an Algerian leader who referred to Western civilization as "syphilization" adding that "they murder Jews just for being Jews like Daniel Pearl and Ilan Halimi" [the French Jew tortured to death by Islamists in 2006].
Dr. Pipes then questioned the "one-way street" by which Muslims are "allowed to offend and attack while themselves being protected from any such verbal and cultural indignities."
He went on to state:
"Accepting this imbalance means that Westerners accede to a double standard. [Whereby] Muslims can freely insult and assault others while keeping Islam, Muhammad, and the Qur'an free from insults. Should this position, this imbalance, this double standard continue then we will see the emergence of the ancient Islamic notion of the dhimmi status...a historic phenomenon which lives on in the minds of Islamists...The pressure coming from the Muslim world had taken three forms, threats of violence actual violence in the West and in the Muslim world."
He then posed two of the most urgent questions of our time, "Are Westerners ready to acknowledge Islam as superior" and "are we about to accept second class citizenship in our own countries?"
Amplifying on these points Dr. Pipes stated, "The pressure coming from the Muslim world had taken three forms, threats of violence, actual violence in the West and in the Muslim world."
According to Dr. Pipes the survival of civilization as we know it is not a foregone conclusion and the West has a long struggle ahead:
"The choice is a stark one, will the West stand up for its customs and mores, including freedom of speech about Islam, or will Muslims impose their way of life on the West?...The Islamist pressure which began 18 years ago with the edict against Salman Rushdie is here for the duration. Eighteen years from now, I predict, it will remain an issue. Put differently, we are not yet halfway through this episode."
©1999-2007 Beila Rabinowitz, PipeLineNews.org LLC, all rights reserved.
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