by Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com
February 1, 2007
http://www.danielpipes.org/article/4254
Text of a talk presented by Daniel Pipes on January 20, 2007, in London in
a debate with the mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, as transcribed by the
910 Group with the help of others. The original posting of the video can
be seen at YouTube; for a single clip version, see the posting at the
Global Defense Group. For accounts of the debate, see the bibliography at
"My Debate with London Mayor Ken Livingstone."
Thank you so much. I'd like to begin by thanking Mayor Livingstone for his
kind invitation to join you today and I thank the Greater London Authority
for the hard work it put into what is obviously a successful event. I am
delighted by the interest that you, the audience, has shown. And I'm
grateful to my supporters who have come from four different countries to
be with me today.
The Mayor is an optimistic man. I'm generally invited to bring along some
gloom, and I will, true to form, provide some for you. [audience
laughter]
Let me start with my position on the question of world civilization or
clash of civilizations. One: I am for world civilization, and I reject
the 'clash of civilization' argument. Two: The problem is not so much a
clash of civilizations, but a clash of civilization and barbarism.
I'd like to begin by looking at Samuel Huntington's idea. He argued that
cultural differences, in his 1993 article, are paramount. "The
fundamental source of conflict … will not be primarily ideological or
primarily economic. The great divisions among humankind and the
dominating source of conflict will be cultural." And in all he finds
seven or eight set civilizations, namely, "Western, Confucian, Japanese,
Islamic, Hindu, Slavic-Orthodox, Latin American and possibly African."
My response is that civilization is useful as a cultural concept but not
as a political one. There are three problems with seeing civilizations as
actors in the way that Huntington suggests. It can't account for tensions
within a single civilization, it can't account for agreement across
civilizations, and it doesn't account for change over time. Let me give
you three quick examples. I'll take them from the area that I have
studied, which is the Muslim world.
First, it cannot account for Muslim-on-Muslim violence, of which there is
a great deal: We have the civil war in Lebanon, the Iraq-Iran war, the
Islamist insurgency in Algeria, the Sunnis vs. Shi'is in Iraq at present,
the near civil war in the Palestinian Authority, the Sudanese government
against the people of Darfur. This cannot be accounted for in
civilizational terms.
Second, it ignores the agreement across civilizations. I'd like to take a
UK-based example, namely the edict of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 against
Salman Rushdie, who at that time was living in London. It appeared, at
first glance, to be a question of Muslims on one side and Westerners on
the other. Muslims were burning The Satanic Verses novel, there was
violence in India, etc. But a closer look showed that in fact it was
quite something different, it was far more complex. There were plenty of
Westerners who were against Rushdie and plenty of Muslims who supported
him.
Let me give you just a couple of quotes,. The foreign secretary of Britain
at that time, Sir Geoffrey Howe, said "the British government, the British
people do not have any affection for Rushdie's book." On the other hand,
the Egyptian foreign minister said "Khomeini had no right to sentence
Rushdie to death." And another Egyptian minister said "Khomeini is a dog,
no, that is too good for him, he is a pig." [audience laughter]
Third point, Huntington in his analysis can't account for change over
time. And I can best illustrate this by giving you a quote from his 1993
article, He said "The economic issues between the United States and
Europe are no less serious than those between the United States and
Japan, but they do not have the same political salience and emotional
intensity because the differences between American culture and European
culture are so much less than those between American civilization and
Japanese civilization."
Well that was true enough in 1993, but it sounds pretty silly in 2007
where there are virtually no tensions between the United States and Japan
and I'm sure you are aware there are tensions between the United States
and Europe. The vituperation is far more severe across the Atlantic than
the Pacific.
What Huntington did was to take an incident of the moment and turn them
into something civilizational and it didn't work. In short the clash of
civilization idea fails, it does not fit the facts, it is not a good way
to understand the world.
What about then a world civilization? Can it exist? If one defines it as
Huntington does, as a culture, basically then, no, it can't. As he puts
it, correctly, "for the relevant future there will be no universal
civilization but instead a world of different civilizations, each of
which will have to learn to coexist with the others." I don't think there
is anyone who would dispute that.
But yes, there can be a world civilization if one defines it differently.
Civilization can be the opposite of barbarism. And civilization in this
sense has a long history. In the Bible, there is a passage, "And ye
shall… proclaim liberty throughout all the lands and unto all the
inhabitants thereof." In the Koran, "you are the best community ever
raised among mankind, you advocate righteousness and forbid evil, and
believe in God." The American byword is 'the pursuit of happiness', the
French is "Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité " Winston Churchill in 1898,
writing about the Sudan, said that civilization is "sympathetic,
merciful, tolerant, ready to discuss or argue, eager to avoid violence,
to submit to law, to effect compromise."
So the question is, can this state of being, of being civilized, can it
exist on a world level?
It can, in so far as those who are civilized confront those who are not
civilized. The world civilization exists of civilized elements in every
culture banding together to protect ethics, liberty and mutual respect.
The real clash is between them and the barbarians.
Now what do I mean by barbarians? I do not mean people who are of lower
economic stature. What I mean by barbarians – and I think all of us mean
by barbarians in the past two centuries – are ideological barbarians.
This is what emerged in the French revolution in the late 18[th] century.
And the great examples of ideological barbarism are fascism and Marxist
Leninism – they, in their course of their histories have killed tens of
millions of people.
But today it's a third, a third totalitarian movement, a third barbarian
movement, namely that of radical Islam. It is an extremist utopian
version of Islam. I am not speaking of Islam the religion, I am speaking
of a very unusual and modern reading of Islam. It has inflicted misery
(as I mentioned Algeria and Darfur, before), there is suicide terrorism,
tyrannical and brutal governments, there is the oppression of women, and
non-Muslims.
It threatens the whole world:. Morocco, Turkey, Palestinian Authority,
Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Iran, Pakistan, you name it, Afghanistan,
Tunisia, and not just the traditional Muslim world, but also Russia,
France, Sweden, and I dare say, the United Kingdom.
The great question of our time is how to prevent this movement, akin to
fascism and communism, from growing stronger.
Now, I believe the mayor and I agree on the need to withstand this menace,
but we disagree on the means of how to do it. He looks to
multiculturalism, and I to winning the war. He wants everyone to get
along; I want to defeat a terrible enemy.
The mayor defines multiculturalism as "the right to pursue different
cultural values subject only to the restriction that they should not
interfere with the similar right for others." And he argues, as you just
heard, that it works, that London is a successful city. I won't dispute
his specifics, but I do see the multicultural impulse creating disaster
by ignoring a dangerous and growing presence of radical Islam in London.
One evocative sign of this danger is that citizens in your country have
become a threat for the rest of the world. In 2003, Home Secretary David
Blunkett presented a dossier to a Special Immigration Appeals Commission
in which he "admits that Britain was a safe haven for supporters of
worldwide terrorism" and in which he said Britain remains a "significant
base'" for supporting terrorism.
Indeed, British-based terrorists have carried out operations in at least
fifteen countries. Going from east to west, they include Pakistan,
Afghanistan, Kenya, Tanzania, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Iraq, Jordan, Israel,
Algeria, Morocco, Russia, France, Spain, and the United States. I'll give
you one example, from the United States: it was Richard Reid, the shoe
bomber, who I am primarily thinking of, but there is also the [End of
clip #3; Start of clip #4] British involvement in 9/11 and in the
Millennium Plot that did not take place in Los Angeles.
In frustration, Egypt's President Husni Mubarak publicly denounced the UK
for "protecting killers." After the August 10[th] thwarted Heathrow
airline mega-plot, of a few months ago, two American authors argued in
The New Republic, that from an American point of view, "it can now be
argued that the biggest threat to U.S. security emanates not from Iran or
Iraq or Afghanistan—but rather from Great Britain."
And I believe this is the tip of the iceberg. I believe it refutes Mr.
Livingstone's opposing view.- that there isn't a problem. This is the
problem, the problem is radical Islam, also known as fundamentalist
Islam, political Islam, Islamism. It is not, again, Islam the religion,
it is radical Islam, the ideology.
Let us focus on three aspects of it. The essence of radical Islam is the
complete adherence to the Shari'a, to the law of Islam. And it is
extending the Shari'a into areas that never existed before.
Second, it is based very deeply on a clash of civilizations ideology. It
divides the world into two parts, the moral and the immoral, the good and
the bad. Here is one quote from a British-based Islamist by the name of
Abdullah el-Faisal, who was convicted and is now in jail. "There are two
religions in the world today - the right one and the wrong one. Islam
versus the rest of the world." You don't get a more basic
clash-of-civilization orientation than that. There is a hatred of the
outside world, of the non-Muslim world, and the West in particular. There
is the intent to reject as much as possible of outside influence.
The third feature is that this is totalitarian in nature. It turns Islam
from a personal faith into an ideology, into an ism. It is the
transformation of a personal faith into a system for ordering power and
wealth. Radical Islam derives from Islam but is an anti-modern,
millenarian, misanthropic, misogynist, anti-Christian, anti-Semitic,
triumphalist, jihadistic, terroristic, and suicidal version of it. It is
Islamic-flavored totalitarianism.
Like fascism and communism, radical Islam is a compelling way of seeing
the world in a way that can absorb an intelligent person – to show him or
her a whole new way of seeing life. It is radically utopian and takes the
mundane qualities of everyday life and turns them into something grand
and glistening.
There is an attempt to take over states. There is the use of the state for
coercive purposes, and an attempt to dominate all of life, every aspect of
it. It is an aggression against neighbors, and finally it is a cosmic
confrontation with the West. As Tony Blair put it in August of 2006, "We
are fighting a war, but not just against terrorism but about how the
world should govern itself in the early 21[st] century, about global
values."
Now how does one respond to this?
The mayor is a man of the Left, and I am a classical liberal. We can agree
that neither of us personally wishes to be subjected to the Shari'a. I
will assume, you [looking at Ken Livingstone] will correct me if I am
wrong [short sporadic applause] that neither of us want this as part of
our personal life.
But our views diverge sharply as to how to respond to this phenomenon.
Those of my political outlook are alarmed by Islamism's advances in the
West. Much of the Left approaches the topic in a far more relaxed
fashion.
Why this difference? Why generally is the right alarmed, and the left much
more sanguine? There are many differences, there are many reasons, but I'd
like to focus on two.
One is a sense of shared opponents between the Islamists and those on the
left. George Galloway explained in 2005, "the progressive movement around
the world and the Muslims have the same enemies," which he then went on to
indicate were Israel, the United States, and Great Britain.
And if you listen to the words that are spoken about, say the United
States, you can see that this is in fact the case. Howard Pinter has
described America as "a country run by a bunch of criminal lunatics."
[big applause and shouts] And Osama Bin Laden [stops … ] I'll do what I
can to get an applause line. [laughter] And, get ready for this one:
Osama Bin Laden called the United States, "unjust, criminal, and
tyrannical." [applause]
Noam Chomsky termed America "a leading terrorist state". And Hafiz Hussain
Ahmed, a leading Pakistani political leader, called it the "biggest
terrorist state." [scattered applause]
Such common ground makes it tempting for those on the Left to make common
cause with Islamists, and the symbol of this would be the [huge, anti-war
in Iraq] demonstrations in Hyde Park, on the 16[th] of February 2003,
called by a coalition of leftist and Islamist organizations.
At other times, the Left feels a kinship with Islamist attacks on the
West, forgiving, understanding why these would happen. A couple of
notorious quotes make this point. The German composer, Karlheinz
Stockhausen termed the 9/11 attacks "the greatest work of art for the
whole cosmos," while American novelist Norman Mailer, commented that "the
people who did this were brilliant."
Such attitudes tempt the Left not to take seriously the Islamist threat to
the West. With John Kerry, a former aspirant to the [U.S.] presidency,
they dismiss terrorism as a mere "nuisance."
That is one reason; the bonds between the two camps. The second is that on
the Left one finds a tendency to focus on terrorism – not on Islamism, not
on radical Islam. Terrorism is blamed on such problems as Western
colonialism of the past century, Western "neo-imperialism" of the present
day, Western policies—particularly in places like Iraq and the Palestinian
Authority. Or from unemployment, poverty, desperation.
I would contend that it actually results in an aggressive ideology. I
respect the role of ideas, and I believe that not to respect, to dismiss
them, to pay them no attention, is to patronize, and to possibly even to
be racist. There is no way to appease this ideology. It is serious, there
is no amount of money that can solve it, there is no change of foreign
policy that make it can go away.
I would argue to you, ladies and gentlemen, it must be fought and must be
defeated as in 1945 and 1991, [applause] as the German and the Soviet
threats were defeated. Our goal must be, in this case, the emergence of
Islam that is modern, moderate, democratic, humane, liberal, and good
neighborly. And that it is respectful of women, homosexuals, atheists,
whoever else. One that grants non-Muslims equal rights with Muslims.
In conclusion, Mr. Mayor, whether Muslim or non-Muslim, on the Left or on
the Right, I think you will agree with me on the importance of working
together to attain such an Islam. I suggest that this can be achieved not
via the get-along multiculturalism that you propose, but by standing firm
with our civilized allies around the globe. Especially with liberal
voices in the kingdom of Saudi Arabia, with Iranian dissidents, and with
reformers in Afghanistan.
I also propose standing with their counterparts in the west, with such
individuals as Ayaan Hirsi Ali [applause], … formerly a Dutch legislator
and now in exile in the United States; with Irshad Manji, the Canadian
author; [applause] with Wafa Sultan, the Syrian in exile in the United
States who made her phenomenal appearance on Al-Jazeera. Individuals like
Magdi Allam, an Egyptian who is now a leading Italian journalist; Naser
Khader, a parliamentarian in Denmark; Salim Mansur, a professor and
author in Canada, and Irfan Al-Alawi, here in Britain. [applause]
Conversely, if we do not stand with these individuals, but instead if we
stand with those who would torment them, with the Islamists, with, I
might say, someone like Yusuf al- Qaradawi [applause] we are then
standing with those who justify suicide bombings, who defend the most
oppressive forms of Islamic practice, who espouse the clash of
civilizations [notion that] we ourselves reject.
To the extent that we all work together, against the barbarism of radical
Islam, a world civilization does indeed exist – one that transcends skin
colour, poverty, geography, politics, and religion.
I hope that you and I, Mr. Mayor, can agree here and now to cooperate on
such a program.
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