Militant Islam Reaches America

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Summary: Militant Islam Reaches America
Review: A cri de guerre in which the noted scholar (Conspiracy, 1997, etc.) again urges that militant Islam is an enemy and must be treated as such. The fundamentalist, ahistorical (but not anachronistic), and uncompromising face of Islam does not have much to do with the faith of Muhammad, writes Pipes. By far the great majority of Muslims reject the "Islamicist" program, which resembles fascism and communism more than any flavor of religion, and which, though cloaked in populist garb, is the ideological offspring of "money, education, and privilege"; though it rejects westernizing cultural tendencies, what Pipes brands "Islamicism" in fact is oddly reliant on the West, if only because the West provides a convenient bogeyman. Islamicist regimes, Pipes writes, are far more dangerous than are the "odd shipwrecks" of leftist regimes in the Arab world and, for this reason, must be combated at every turn. Pipes urges that the overarching goal of US foreign policy in the Islamic world be to prevent Islamicist parties such as Hezbollah and, for that matter, the Taliban from coming to power. Echoing Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, Pipes also urges that the West simply refuse to engage in dialogue, private or public, with any militant Islamic group, and that it shun any action that might be construed as giving in to or appeasing any Islamicist power or party. Although not all Muslims hate the West, Pipes allows, and although militant Muslims constitute perhaps only 10% of the Muslim population worldwide, he suggests that the US government keep a watchful eye on immigrant Muslims-for, though "American politicians from George W. Bush on down have tripped over themselves to affirm that the vast majority of Muslims living in the United States are just ordinary folks," that population still harbors a significant body of people who despise America and intend it harm. Highly controversial, at times inflammatory-but worthy of attention and debate in a time of crisis.

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Summary: Pipes never ceases to amaze...
Review: After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2003, there have been a number of questions that keep coming up. For example here are some: Just who attacked the United States? Will they attack again? What do they want? How do we need to respond?
In "Militant Islam Reaches America" Daniel Pipes tries to answer some of these questions. Daniel Pipes has about a dozen books on various facets of the Middle East. He makes the distinction between "Islam" and "Militant Islam." He believes that "Islam" is not a threat to America or any Western Civilization, but that "Militant Islam" is a very, very serious threat.
The author traces Islam through history and mentions how for a long time that the religion of Islam was practiced by members of powerful civilizations, but that over the last couple hundred years most of the countries which practice Islam have fallen behind the Western World economically and politically. Part of the Militant Islam response is from people who want to make their contries powerful again. They are trying to use Islam to impose their will on their countries, and on other countries.
In many ways Militant Islam is more like Socialism or Communism. Those behind it are more concerned with power and trying to make other people follow them. The author points out that while we did lose several thousand people in the terrorist attacks on September 11th, Militant Islams are killing dozens and hundreds of Moderate and Traditional Islams each week.
Daniel Pipes mentions case after case where Militant Islams will not tolerate differences of opinions. They expect to win arguements more from their willingness to inflict violence than to show the rightness of their beliefs. For example there is evidence that the records written a hundred years after Muhammad may not be an accurate statement of what the Prophet Muhammad taught. But when scholars or priests try to explore the evedience, the Militant Islam response is to threaten violence.
Daniel Pipes says one of the best things the United States can do to effectively fight Militant Islam is to support the Moderate and Traditional Islams, and help them to defend themselves.
In his research the author has come to the conclusion that there are only a few tens of thousands of extremists who want to kill Americans, and are willing to die doing so, but that there are tens of millions of Militant Islams who do want to force other Islams, and the rest of the world, to follow their version of Islam.
The author spends the second half of the book talking about Islam and Militant Islam in America. Most Moderate and Traditional Islams are happy to be in America, and are useful productive members of our society. Militant Islams have said time and again that they want to change America to become Islam. The author mentions how many times when the police arrest someone who has broken the law, that if the person is a member of Militant Islam, the rest of the Militant Islam community rallies around them. Or when the media reports unfavorablly news on Militant Islam, the community of Militant Islam will harass, try to intimidate, or even file law-suits.
The author says America does need to defende itself internally from Militant Islam, but it doesn't really need any new laws or organizations. We just need to enforce the laws, so that when Militant Islam breaks the law, they are put in jail.
From the book the answers to the questions above are: Militant Islam has been attacking America for years. They will continue to try to force America to become more Islam. They want power. We need to be aware of them, and to support Moderate & Traditional Islam.
Overall the book is easy to read. The author writes well. I found it fascinating and informative.

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Summary: Good Book -- An Important Part of the Whole Story
Review: Daniel Pipes has become a sort of expert on the threat Islamism poses to non-believers and the text here is pretty important for all westerners to read. But it is especially VERY important for every person to be aware of the points that Daniel Pipes makes here. Every liberal country's elected representatives (and that includes the USA, which remains one of the world's "liberal" societies in the classical sense of the word) should make this book one of the top 5 on their reading list.

But I am distressed that Pipes misses the origins of the revitalized Islamist movement. Sure, when Napoleon conquered Egypt, it was a great slap to the Muslim world, but nearly concurrently, in a corner of Arabia, a Sheik by the name of Muhammad ibn Abdil Wahhab created a theology that condemned the Western colonists as kafir. This preacher, who was a far-off contemporary to Benjamin Franklin, George Washington and Napoleon may have a greater impact on the global situation of the next two centuries than Franklin, Washington or Napoleon. It is disappointing that Pipes missed covering the life-story and mission of Muhammad ibn Abdil Wahhab as his anti-colonial movement, rhetoric, and his Tawheed is very influential among today's salafists and islamists.

Also, minimal coverage has been given to the writings of Al-Ghazali and Sayed Q'tub. These are names that westerners should understand more than those of terrorists, because they are the Marx and Engels of today's extreme islamist fundamentalists, and in their own way, their messages are creative and appealing to a particular audience.

Finally, there is no real coverage of the later 20th century's population explosion in the islamic world. There, a population that had been less than 350 million in 1950 has grown to over 1.4 billion by 2000. Is it any wonder that there is a surge in militancy when one's population is growing so rapidly and when the financiers of mass education in this world are Salafists extremists who see the ascendancy of their version (Q'tub's, Wahhab's, and Al-Ghazili's) of Islam as pre-ordained destiny?

Finally, too much is made of the Shiite influences on Islam. While the Shiites are a dominant sect in Iran, and parts of Iraq, and while the Shiite fundamentalists of Iran were the first to point the way to rebellion against the so-called "evil" West when they invaded the U.S. embassy in Tehran, the most populous version of islamism remains the Saudi dominated Salafists (or Wahhabis) of the Sunni majority. This group accounts for perhaps 90% of the imans in today's non-Muslim world, and about 60% of the adherents in the traditional Muslim world.


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Summary: "Slay the disbelievers wherever you find them"
Review: Daniel Pipes is to Islamic Studies what Robert Conquest was to Sovietology: a lone voice of caution in a wilderness of apologetics. Over the years Pipes has fearlessly documented and theorized about the rise of militant Islam, or Islamicism, as it is sometimes rather confusingly called.

Pipes kicks off by asserting that Islam itself is not a danger, only the militant, aggrieved strain of it. But, most every Islamic organization and activist treated in the book turns out to be militant and aggrieved, so one does have to be careful to try to keep perspective.

The chapters are individual essays, written over a number of years, with linking material composed for this book. With the exception of a chapter on the homegrown Nation of Islam, the pieces focus on Arab Islamicists. We get examples of how American Muslim organizations wield considerable clout, successfully playing the victimology fiddle despite being almost totally spared anything that could plausibly be called oppression. We also see how simple criminals from Lebanon are turned to the service of Islamic terrorism, and how chary American media are of giving offense by reporting anything negative about American Muslims as a group.

It turns out that some Muslims charities fund terrorism, and this is because Islam's understanding of charity is significantly different from the West's. Charity, or _zakat_, means helping the poor, helping travelers, funding bureaucracies to administer the largesse, but also to "change hearts", which is bribery, and "the service of Allah", which is jihad. So it is not inconsistent for a Muslim charity to send money to Hamas or Hezbollah or Islamic Jihad, should it find their calls to holy war authoritative.

Pipes has been criticized for writing outside his specialty, which is medieval Islam. But he convincingly counters that the contemporary field has been paralyzed by Edward Said's influential denunciation of "Orientalism". Pipes maintains that current scholarship is dominated by Western scholars who have been intimidated into abandoning skepticism, or are Middle Eastern immigrants who are busily spinning perceptions of their faith and homelands.

When professors get arrested for fomenting and funding terrorism but remain posters boys for academic freedom, when an emotionally conflicted American Muslim soldier commits battlefield fratricide and his motives are dismissed as "attitude problems", when 3,000 Americans are murdered live on TV, and political correctness forbids discussing the enemy outside the leftist trinity of race, sex, and class, then you know we haven't taken scholars like Daniel Pipes seriously enough. It's way past time to start.

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Summary: Extrodinary book
Review: Daniel Pipes presents an incredible story of militant Islam and how it is infecting America. The book is very well written and well documented. Pipes did a great deal of research prior to writing this book. He provides a look at the reality of Islam and the hate that can hide behind it. Pipes is NOT anti-Islam but rather sounding a warning that our political correctness is going to be our undoing.

I have read several other books on terrorism and the Middle East since finishing Pipes' book. Many of the books, including ones written by current and former government intelligence officers, reference Mr. Pipes' book as well as confirm many of his facts.

In addition to recent books on terrorism, I have also read numerous historical books on the Middle East both by Western authors as well as Muslim authors. Pipes' views and information are consistent with historical texts as well as current intelligence.

I noticed that another reviewer denigrates Pipes saying that his information is false and undocumented. This is absolutely not true. That reviewer should provide his/her own references prior to attacking Mr. Pipes.

This is an excellent first text for anyone interested in gaining an understanding of the conflict in the Middle East. Mr. Pipes covers many different radical groups as well as the many "charitable organizations" that fund terrorism as well as provide a cover for terrorist's movements. This was probably one of the more disturbing sections as it shows how even truly concerned American citizens can, unwittingly, support global terrorism by giving money to a seemingly legitimate charity.

This was worth reading and is an excellent addition to any library. I would strongly recommend owning this rather than borrowing it from a library.

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Summary: Assesses militant Islam
Review: Militant Islam has been responsible for plenty of violence recently? But why? Pipes begins by showing that while Islamic militants may comprise only ten per cent or so of the Islamic world, their effect is enormous. When they take control of a nation, they create a rogue state, causing misery both at home and abroad. They repress moderate Muslims and treat non-Muslims as inferior creatures.

Pipes points out that Muslim demographics is not the issue: Muslim moderation is. If Islamists win, we'll see much more violence and many more threats. One recommendation is to allow Turkey, a moderate nation, to join the European Union. And Pipes also explains that poverty and militant Islam are pretty much unrelated: improving the economic situation in a nation does not make it more moderate.

The author discusses Islamist goals in the United States. One key is going beyond acceptance of Islam and Muslim practices to restrict or disallow non-Muslim worship or customs. Such goals distinguish militants from moderates. And here is where Pipes suggests that our media could help, by distinguishing between the two. Instead much of our media are reluctant to criticize the militants, fearing accusations of political incorrectness, bias, defamation, and Islamophobia. Pipes points out that the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) is a leader in the Islamist campaign to intimidate those who oppose the militants. CAIR supports Hamas, so one of its biggest goals is to reduce the criticism of Hamas terror against Israel. That raises the issue of the threat groups such as CAIR pose to American society by urging antisemitic violence.

Pipes has some advice for us: avoid working with militant Islamic groups, don't appease or help Islamists, support those who confront the militants, press militant states to reduce their aggression, and urge gradual democritization.

This is a useful and informative book.

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Summary: You can't just dismiss this, it's too important
Review: Militant Islam is currently in America, not to mention many other places throughout the world where decent people would prefer it remain away. This is the fundamental, but not exclusive premise of Militant Islam Reaches America. Written by a noted and forthright historical expert, Daniel Pipes, the book will show not only that the threat of militant Islam is real and immediate, but also what it actually is or is not, what does or does not cause it, and what steps we should or should not consider taking to deal with it.

Like most books of this sort, Pipes approaches it from his own particular perspective - some writers are overly Christian, some are former Muslims, some secular, and so forth. It is not entirely straightforward to pin Pipes down, as most chapters were originally published elsewhere, going back ten years. Pipes makes it clear that this is not a new phenomena, and those people who were genuinely surprised on September eleventh (about Islamists' desires, not their skill and luck in pulling it off) were uninformed or willingly blind to the threat. The chapters can appear dated for this reason - witness descriptions of Afghanistan written pre-Taliban or speculation about whether Apartheidists will become the new enemy now that the Soviet Union is gone. Perhaps these things appear jarring because so much sounds like it could have been written last week. Pipes has been aware of the problem for some time, so perhaps he's entitled to a mild "I told you so". Nonetheless, getting back to personal perspectives, Pipes does have one, and it's a common enough one. Namely, he is ardently politically conservative. This is explicit in several chapters. Particularly bizarre is chapter 8, Echoes of the Cold War Debate in which Pipes so casually points out that liberals would never dream of confronting communism. "Liberals say co-opt the radicals. Conservatives say confront them. As usual, the conservatives are right." And since Pipes has brought up the Cold War; Truman intervened in Korea to fight the communists, Eisenhower ended it and solved the North Korea problem for all time. Kennedy faced down Khrushchev in the Cuban Missile crisis. Johnson intervened in Vietnam to stop the Communists, but Nixon pulled out and made Vietnam the world's most prosperous and happy country. Carter, the most pacifist president in my lifetime, still unleashed the CIA to fight the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. Reagan sold arms to the Ayatollah Khomeini (and Pipes admits Clinton took a better approach. But Clinton never challenged the Soviet Union, the darn commie). As is quite common, Pipes does not realize how many liberals consider Islam to be the most frighteningly conservative mindset ever devised by mankind.

But to back off my soapbox for now, Pipes does state that the genuine danger to life and limb comes from a particular mindset within Islam that he refers to as Islamism, or militant Islam. Thus, the reader will not find extended discussions of what is or is not in the Koran or the Hadiths. His concern is what is in the mind of those Muslims that hate the West with such blinding fury that they will do whatever they can to kill as many of us as possible. He argues that many of them have non-standard or even bizarre understanding of Islamic theology. Among many groups mentioned is the Nation of Islam. We've all heard of Louis Farrakhan and the Million Man March and all that. But I never realized what went into the founding of that movement. I had no idea that blacks were put on the Earth seventy eight trillion years ago and lived in peace until the renegade "Mr. Yakub" created whites six thousand years ago to destroy them. Though not the most dangerous version of Islam I've heard, it certainly is the funniest.

But the dangerous versions are what Pipes spends most of these pages on - not only the actual terrorists themselves, but also the deeply entrenched apologists who present a unified danger front to our free society. These apologists range from the various Islamic public advocacy groups to certain intellectuals. Among the interest groups, Pipes pays particular attention to the Council on American-Islamic Relations and their frenzied efforts to shout down, intimidate, and legally threaten anyone who publicly says anything bad, or even not good, about any aspect of Islam at any point in time or space. He points out correctly how they use a social sense of political correctness to advance their agendas, having realized that many people, accustomed to trying to understand our neighbors whether they be next door or in the next country over, have forgotten that sometimes people defy any real understanding, and sometimes they want to do us real harm. The other group of apologists, though harder to pin down so precisely, is certain academics. Here one must realize that there is a sub-grouping in the professorial world that is commonly referred to as the "academic left". Though they probably do vote democrat more than republican, they have a deconstructive, post-modernist agenda that fits well with blinding themselves to the realities on the ground (and this does not include those blatant charlatans that instinctively scream out anti-American polemics with every breath). We would all do well, no matter how much we try to learn about other populations, to take them seriously when they blatantly and explicitly threaten harm (and carry through often enough). Pipes estimates that as many as one hundred fifty million Muslims clearly believe in the Islamist viewpoint. A half billion, he estimates (which is half the total), are receptive enough to its goals not to care much if the Western world is attacked, and to take some pleasure when it happens (if you watched any coverage after September eleventh, you may recall some of this). These are not numbers to ignore. This is a real issue that should be confronted head on, and now.

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Summary: Pipes is a genius!
Review: Militant Islam Reaches America is required reading for any American that want to live and not be a victim of militant Islam murder.

The author writes, in detail, in a marvelously researched manner. The mistake that many people make is that Islam is only anti-Israel and anti-Jewish. For from it. Islam is anti-American, anti-Christian, anti-Protestant, anti-Catholic, and anti-Buddhist, anti just about everything.

Even if there was no Israel, or the US was not an ally of Israel, radical Islam would still despise the USA.

When Islam despises you, your live is in danger.

This is a horrifying book. What is most horrifying is that it is non-fiction.

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Summary: An appaling piece of the "Right Wing" corporate media...
Review: Most American's think that Muslim's hate America due to its support of Israel. That could not be farther from the truth. Even if America were not pro-Israel, they still would have the USA.

American's are non-believers and for that, they are infidels. Being an infidel is one of the worst things in Islam.

This is a horrifying book since it is so close to home.
The facts are real.
The Arabs don't deny it.
15 of the 19 hijackers of 9/11 were from Saudi Arabia, and they don't even apologize.

Every American should read this book, and then write their congressman to take action against the dangers of Islam.

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Summary: Stimulating Essays That Help Clarify This Vital Issue
Review: This book is a collection of informative and thought clarifying essays about the real issues facing America in our struggle with Islamism. Dr. Pipes makes the very helpful point that Islamism is NOT Islam. It is a political movement, totalitarian and utopian in nature, that drapes itself with Islam. However, he also points out the real danger facing the United States from this movement.

The Author also helps us understand the magnitude of the problem. There are a billion Muslims in the world. A few tens of thousands are members of active groups working against the West. But there are another hundred million or so who actively support their goals with up to a half a billion sympathetic to their views. This is a serious issue and Dr. Pipes carefully takes us through a wide range of issues helping us understand this urgent reality.

While Dr. Pipes is often attacked personally by critics sympathetic to the Islamist movements, when you take the time to read these essays you will see that he takes Islam seriously and analyzes carefully. Yes, Dr. Pipes supports the west and the United States. Yes, he is advocating political positions and actions that he believes will be best for America to protect its interests. But along with this he is a serious scholar and I believe he has done us a great service by putting out this book.

You will know more about the situation we face and its constituent parts after reading this book. And that is a lot. It is certainly more than you get from many books on the middle east that generate a lot more heat than light.