QOTD: Daniel Pipes

Daniel Pipes, Militant Islam Reaches America (2002)

Whatever index one looks at, Muslims can be found clustering toward the bottom, whether in terms of military prowess, political stability, economic development, corruption, lack of human rights, health, longevity, of literacy... Muslims also lag when one looks at the Nobel Prize winners, Olympic medalists, or any other easily gauged international standard. There is a pervasive sense of debilitation... As a Muslim religious leader in Jerusalem put it, "Before we were masters of the world and now we are not even masters of our own mosques."

Professor Paul Eidelberg

This assessment appears to be confirmed by the Syrian army magazine, Jaysh a-Sha’b (The People’s Army), which, on April 25, 1967, published an article referring to Islam as one of the "mummies in the museums of history."[See Bernard Lewis, Islam in History, 2d ed., p. 5] And yet, this mummy, if intellectually dead, is otherwise alive. Sectarian strife, violence, insurrection, and terrorism erupt repeatedly throughout the Islamic world. This turbulence is described in a study of some fifty countries in which Muslims reside; and it matters not whether these Muslims constitute an overwhelming majority or only a tiny minority. The study was published in 1983 by Dr. Pipes.[Daniel Pipes, In the Path of God: Islam and Power, ch. 9] It makes no difference whether the Muslims are Sunni or Shi’ite Muslims, Arabs or non-Arabs, or even whether they are "fundamentalists," "traditionalists," "reformists," or "secularists"--the story is the same.

I do not cite the above authorities to denigrate Islam, but to heighten awareness of the enormous obstacles confronting the United States and more so Israel in their confrontation with what is misleadingly called "militant Islam--misleading because Islam has been militant since its very inception, as can readily be documented.