Distinction without a Difference

Submitted by Jim Ryan (United States), Apr 26, 2007 at 09:46

Dr. Pipes,

Lewis is right. What you offer is a distinction without a difference. The Lewis stance can easily allow that the enemy's will must be crushed by decisive defeat. But in the long term there will be more terrorist attacks on U.S. soil after the enemy licks his wounds and nurses his resentments. From the West's perspective, Islamism is the long-term problem, lack of its decisive defeat only the short-term problem. The only hope of eradicating Islamism is scrutiny and debate over its merits, as well as the wealth freedom creates and the various distracting interests wealth brings to a society that has it. This is not to promise that freedom will eventually cause the eradication of Islamism. It is merely to point out that freedom is the only viable path to its eradication. Decisive defeat alone will more likely feed the resentment than cause Muslims to become disenchanted with Islamism.

As for your point about Islamist cells living in free societies, this is no counterexample to the point that over the long term free societies will not prefer a dysfunctional ideology to its functional alternatives. There will always be cells of Islamism. The Lewis theory may easily predict this; it doesn't guarantee that everyone in a free society will embrace sanity. It only points out that free societies are the only kind that can marginalize and effectively police the cells inside them.

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