Possibility of Internal Reform in Islam

Submitted by Mark Leo (United States), Oct 3, 2002 at 10:42

Dr Pipes:

I singularly enjoy your candor within the usually mealy-mouthed media. I look to you for truth in the matter of the Islamic threat facing us.

I have come to the conclusion that the one of the most disturbing absences in the media coverage of Islam is that of emerging dissenters from regressive fanatic Islam; I refer specificaly to the intellectuals who contribute to the Society for the Secularization of Islam website and to others like it.

Why don't we see these people on the news? It reminds me of how, durign the building Tianneman Square disaster, on MacNeill Lehrer, an American "expert" on China named Marshall Shulman I believe spoke reassuringly how the People's Liberation Army would never fire on the gathered students. He was rebuffed fiercely by a Chinese student in attendance at an American university who stated frankly that the Chinese leadership was full of bloody-minded men with no inhibitions like Mr Shulman thought they had.

Similar mis-assessments, I think, are everywhere today; why is there no air time for the many young educated Arabs who would very much like to see contemporary Islam reformed? Are there no humanistically minded young Islamic thinkers who could put the lie to the assertion that we in the West are faced with a phalanx of extremists only? That there are no Solzenhitsyns to rebut the polically correct appeasers? Why is the media so afraid to display dissent in the Islamic world but so ready to display our own dissensions?

Frankly I am bored to death by the antics of terminally naive American professors. I want to hear the survivors and the heroes speak.

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