Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Daniel Pipes - 8

Jihad Khazen Al-Hayat - 04/07/06


The authors James Petras and Robin Eastman-Abaya wrote an article claiming that Flemming Rose - the cultural editor of Jyllands-Posten who commissioned the Danish cartoons - is a Ukrainian-born Jew who is working with Mossad. The writer Christopher Bollyn wrote: “If this is true this confirms my suspicions and would prove that Rose has lied to me about his ethnic origin. It would also confirm my description of Rose as having a foreign agenda which has done immense damage to Danish prestige in the world.” Rose denied in an e-mail to Bollyn that he was Jewish.
Rose may not be Jewish but in an article he wrote for the New York Times on May 31 headlined “Why I Published the Mohammed Cartoons” there are hints at his origin. He says: “I was raised on the ideals of the 1960s, in the midst of the Cold War. I saw life through the lens of the countercultural turmoil, adopting both the hippie pose and the political superiority complex of my generation. I and my high school peers believed that the West was imperialistic and racist. We analyzed decaying Western civilization through the texts of Marx and Engels and lionized John Lennon's beautiful but stupid tune about an ideal world without private property: Imagine no possessions/ I wonder if you can/ No need for greed or hunger/ A brotherhood of man/ Imagine all the people/ Sharing all the world.
“It took me only 10 months as a young student in the Soviet Union in 1980-81 to realize what a world without private property looks like, although many years had to pass until the full implications of the central Marxist dogma became clear to me.”

He is describing a student in a country in the former Socialist camp reading Marx and being sent to study in Moscow, a country like the Ukraine.

Whatever may be the case he ended up working for Jyllands-Posten, a newspaper with a controversial past due to its support of right wing causes and politicians. Founded in 1871, it is Denmarks’s largest-selling daily newspaper. It was a supporter of fascism in the interwar years. In 1922 it expressed admiration for Mussolini, and in 1933 it called for the imposition of a dictatorship as in Germany. It has been described as “one of the main organs in an increasingly irrational Denmark for the dissemination of Islamophobia.” It has been criticised by various organizations for its stance against minorities and immigration.

In an article by him, published in the Washington Post on February 19 2006, Rose said he had commissioned the cartoons “in response to several incidents of self-censorship in Europe caused by widening fears and feelings of intimidation in dealing with issues related to Islam.” He said: “Our goal was simply to push back self-imposed limits on expression that seemed to be closing in tighter.” He claimed that in the wake of the publication of the cartoons the previous September, never before had so many Danish Muslims participated in a public dialogue. “The radical imams who misinformed their counterparts in the Middle East about the situation for Muslims in Denmark have been marginalized. They no longer speak for the Muslim community in Denmark because moderate Muslims have had the courage to speak out against them.”

Many saw the cartoons as a calculated offence.

But on May 31 in the New York Times Rose almost claimed that he did Muslims a favor by publishing the cartoons. He said: “An act of inclusion. Equal treatment is the democratic way to overcome traditional barriers of blood and soil for newcomers. To me, that means treating immigrants just as I would any other Danes. And that's what I felt I was doing in publishing the 12 cartoons of Muhammad last year. Those images in no way exceeded the bounds of taste, satire and humor to which I would subject any other Dane, whether the queen, the head of the church or the prime minister. By treating a Muslim figure the same way I would a Christian or Jewish icon, I was sending an important message: You are not strangers, you are here to stay, and we accept you as an integrated part of our life. And we will satirize you, too. It was an act of inclusion, not exclusion; an act of respect and recognition.”
If the reader believes this I have a tramway (not the Brooklyn Bridge) to sell him. Pipes took another angle. On CNN on February 6 2006, he blamed radical clerics for circulating the cartoons. “It is a vehicle for some extremists to rally their people and become more agitatedly anti-Western.”
Pipes was quick to take advantage of cartoons row and to use it in his long-standing campaign against Islamism. In an article in the New York Sun on February 7, entitled “Cartoons and Islamic Imperialism”, Pipes declared that the battle over the cartoons was this: “Will the West stand up for its customs and mores, including freedom of speech, or will Muslims impose their way of life on the West? Ultimately there is no compromise: Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not.”

He raised the temperature, wondering whether Westerners will “accede to a double standard by which Muslims are free to insult Judaism, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, while Muhammad, Islam and Muslims enjoy immunity from insults? Muslims routinely publish cartoons far more offensive than the Danish ones. Are they entitled to dish it out while being insulated from similar indignities?”

In an article in FrontPageMagazine on February 14, headlined “How the Cartoon Protests Harm Muslims”, Pipes warned that the long-term consequences of the Muhammad cartoon furore (which many think he helped stir up) would help to bring about “not a clash of civilizations, but their mutual pulling apart. This separation, which has been building for years, has dreadful implications.” Should the chasm widen, the Muslim world will fall further behind than it already has. Disengagement will only worsen the Muslim predicament. “Reduced contact with the world’s most modern, powerful, and advanced countries would likely cause Muslims to do even worse in those indices and lapse deeper into a condition characterized by self-pity, jealousy, resentment, anger, and aggression.”

On February 21 Pipes wrote “Those Danish Cartoons and Me” in the New York Sun. The article was also published in the Jerusalem Post. He began: “Did you know that I had a hand in the Danish cartoons of Muhammad? No? Well neither did I until I found this out in early February on a conspiracist website.”

He said Rose had sent him an e-mail on September 29 2004 introducing himself and requesting an interview. He said he had had no contact with Flemming Rose since the interview with him published on October 29 2005. He accused Christopher Bollyn of being a “fringe anti-Semitic writer”, alleging that Rose travelled to Philadelphia penned a positive article about Pipes, and then developing this into “an elaborate conspiracy theory.” He described as “wild assumptions” by Bollyn that Rose was Pipes’ “colleague and fellow” that Rose and Pipes deliberately provoked Muslims and that they were part of a wider conspiracy to worsen Christian-Muslim relations

Pipes warned that the deeper issue “is not Muslim hypocrisy but Islamic supremacism” He fully agreed with Flemming Rose saying that if Muslims insist “that I, as a non-Muslim, should submit to their taboos…they’re asking for my submission.”

I can go on. I still have over 12 pages in English and I would have liked to talk about other friends of Pipes, i.e. other racists and extremists but I want to take, and give the reader, a respite from the subject. But I hope to return to other extremists and warmongers in few days.

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