http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,23539446-7583,00.html

My take on the debate can be seen here …

http://www.crikey.com.au/Politics/20080415-Intelligence-Squared-debate.html

Pipes has also verballed an Australian human rights commissioner about guide dogs and taxi drivers in Sydney …

http://planetirf.blogspot.com/2008/02/more-on-guide-dogs-and-cabbies.html

http://planetirf.blogspot.com/2008/02/daniel-pipes-caught-out-attributing.html

The fact that most Muslims are peaceful when they are tiny minority or an overwhelming majority does not lessen the tendency for Muslims to not assimilate, which, when combined with the violence in the Quran and the example of the life of their prophet, eventually leads to balkanization.

The average American has no problem with an Islamic organization opening a commercial enterprise that serves Muslims. However, when a tiny Muslim minority uses the legal system to foist their religion/culture/political ideology on the majority, hackles raise, especially if tax dollars are involved.

The liberal, secular, left in America worked long and hard to scrub all traces of Christianity from government, public schoools, and public areas in general, so concessions to Islam in the name of multiculturalism are often viewed as a preference of Islam over Christianity.

The other problem, in general and at this school in particular, is that often ‘Arabic studies’ or ‘Middle East studies’ involve faculty and textbooks that are drenched with Islamicism. It seems to be difficult, if not impossible, for Arabic and the Middle East studies to disentangle themselves from Quranic and Islamic studies, even though both the language and the region have thousands of years of pre-Islamic history that have essentially been erased from the consciousness of Islam.

THe NY Jewish federation, for example, is in full-scale retreat from dealing with any of these issues. It signed on last yr as sponsor of The Other Israel film festival devoted to Israeli Arab cinema; and then demanded its logo be removed fr. promotional brochures after the Israeli consulate objected to the festival on the grounds that it singled out only one ethnic group rather than all of Israel. One of the federation’s rabbis signed on to Debbie Almontaser’s support committee and then mysteriously abandoned it. The same rabbi was scheduled as a keynote speaker at a Muslim-Jewish conference in NYC. He cancelled his appearance. I suspect that pressure from both the senior staff leadership & lay leadership was behind this retreat.

Our Jewish leadership is abandoning its responsibility to lead in a constructive way. That leaves the Pipeses, Horowitzes, (Marty) Peretzes & Dershowitzes, and (Mort) Kleins of the Jewish world to fill the vacuum.

But yr paragraph above about Islamism as political ideology brilliantly critiques Pipes’ philosophy. Thanks for that.

It’s the same sort of demented logic that leads people to believe that “the Jews” are taking over the world: they list all the jewish CEOs in the entertainment industry and then conclude that it must be a grand jewish conspiracy to control the media.

Whether one agrees or dissagrees that Harvard should have female only pool hours to satisfy their muslim students, it is simply paranoid stupidity to interpret it as part of a clandestine operation to impose islamic law on America.