What the Philadelphia City Paper didn't write
Reader comment on item: Pipes' Dreams

Submitted by Karl Ericson (United States), Jul 26, 2002 at 17:09

Dear Sir:

Daniel Brook in his article "Pipe's Dreams" wrote that Daniel Pipes is in the grips of a conspiracy theory that the Muslims want to take over America. I can't believe Dr. Pipes could be so delusional, why that's almost as crazy as a conspiracy theory that Muslims were planning to fly airplanes into the World Trade Center. Wait a minute, that happened!

Daniel Brook wrote: "Muslim leaders say that Pipes uses the false dichotomy of militant Islam and moderate Islam to eschew charges of racism." Are these Muslim leaders saying there is no such dichotomy? That is very alarming when one considers the words of Ayatollah Khomeini who said: "Islam makes it incumbent on all adult males, provided they are not disabled and incapacitated, to prepare themselves for the conquest of other [countries] so that the writ of Islam is obeyed in every country in the world. But those who study Islamic Holy War will understand why Islam wants to conquer the whole world...Those who know nothing of Islam pretend that Islam counsels against war. Those [who say this] are witless. " I certainly hope Mr. Pipes is right and there is a dichotomy but I have to believe the Muslim leaders on this one.

We don't have to worry though, Ayatollah Khomeini was a special case, right?

In the 1920s the first Islamic missionaries who arrived in America in the 1920s declared: "Our plan is that we are going to conquer America."

So a few crazy Muslim missionaries in the 1920s said that, that doesn't mean all Muslims want to conquer America, right?

The late Ismail Al-Faruqi, a Palestinian immigrant who founded the International Institute of Islamic Thought and taught for many years at Temple University in Philadelphia wrote that: "Nothing could be greater than this youthful, vigorous, and rich continent [of North America] turning away from its past evil and marching forward under the banner of Allahu Akbar [God is great]".

So, a professor at Temple said that. Professors are an odd lot anyway, right?

Siraj Wahaj, a black convert to Islam and the recipient of some of the American Muslim community's highest honors, addressed an audience of New Jersey Muslims in 2002 in which he told his New Jersey listeners, they could take over the United States and replace its constitutional government with a caliphate. He said "If we were united and strong, we'd elect our own emir [leader] and give allegiance to him...Take my word, if 6-8 million Muslims unite in America, the country will come to us."

I'd worry except that Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), says that his group only seeks "justice and accommodation for the Islamic-American community so we can practice our faith in a multiethnic setting."

Wasn't it Mr. Hooper who said in 1993 that: "I wouldn't want to create the impression that I wouldn't like the government of the United States to be Islamic sometime in the future." Wasn't it CAIR Chairman Omar M. Ahmad who told a crowd of California Muslims in July 1998, "Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran . . . should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth."

I think I need a psychiatrist.

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