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Reader comment on item: Paul Goodman, MP, Analyses Radical Islam

Submitted by rw (Australia), Nov 26, 2006 at 04:34

I have been reading Dr Pipes materials for some years, and will probably continue to do so for information. However the position he seems to be taking seems to me increasingly to be fraught with problems, which this article and that about the book America Alone have highlighted for me.

The conservative MP, in a view Dr Pipes seems to endorse, suggests that Islamism and Islam can be seperated. They can't; Islamism is part and parcel and Islam. An analysis that doesn't see this is fundamentally flawed. Islamism is part of the world problem of Islam.

The view, as Dr Pipes states it, of America Alone, which again seems to be endorsed, seems also to me remote from the facts - a look at recent European history would quickly knock quite a lot of it on the head. I think it is closer to the truth to say something like the following - that the whole world is shrinking, that increasingly there is one common culture, and the problems of the west are universal. The idea that europe is dying and the US isn't is daft - there is one culture under the same threats. Both areas have the same politically secularist outlook, and similar demographic problems. The US has two substantial advantages. Firstly, the secularist outlook still has not completely masked the Christian roots of the society. Secondly, the 'invasion' of foreign workers into the US is much more positive, since, being Hispanic, it has the same roots.

In the great global culture there are, one might say, two competing ideals, that of the open culture and that of the closed. Open culture, finally, depends on individuals voluntarily working together, on personal freedom, on acceptance of others. Among the many forces fundamentally opposed to that sort of ideal one of the outstanding ones is Islam, which, notably in its extreme form of Islamism, is committed to the closed society. Hedonistic America, the land of Hollywood, coca cola and the gay marriage has no more claim to being capable of the moral defence of the open society than does Europe, though it still seems to be the case that there are more responsible inidividuals, and more hope of leadership from your country.

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