OK, I admit it. I know Dan Pipes. I used to be a friend of Dan Pipes. True, he did once threaten to make my life difficult. My sin? Disrespecting Dan Pipes in print. I called him “an independent scholar.” Worse, I claimed that his dire warnings that many American Muslims want to turn the U.S. into an Islamic state (“It means that the existing order–religious
freedom, secularism, women’s rights–can no longer be taken for granted.
It now needs to be fought for.”) harked back to 19th-century fears the Roman Catholic immigrants were hell-bent on turning America over to the pope. Well, American history was never Dan’s forte.

But he is, or used to be, a serious student of medieval and early modern Islam. And so, delighted as he is that he’s finally got Islamism on the run in the U.S., he is distressed that some of his allies are now coming out of the closet as blatant Islamophobes.

Misled by the Islamists’ insistence
that there can be no such thing as “moderate Islam,” my allies often fail to
distinguish between Islam (a faith) and Islamism (a radical utopian ideology
aiming to implement Islamic laws in their totality). This amounts not just to an
intellectual error but a policy dead-end. Targeting all Muslims conflicts with
basic Western notions, lumps friends with foes, and ignores the inescapable fact
that Muslims alone can offer an antidote to Islamism. As I often note, radical
Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the solution.

Pipes’ allies include not just the odd Koran-burner or taxi driver stabber, but the likes of Pastor Robert Jeffress of Dallas’ First Baptist Church (Billy Graham’s church), who sermonizes that Islam promotes pedophilia, and long-time New Republic editor and publisher Martin Peretz, who contends that Muslims are not worthy of First Amendment protection.

It’s all very well to draw a nice distinction between a supposed Islamist threat to American freedoms and the moderate Islam embraced by, for example, the imam behind the proposed community center in lower Manhattan–now to include worship spaces for Christians and Jews as well as Muslims (cf. his op-ed in the New York Times today). At the moment, the threat to those freedoms is not coming from the Islamists. It’s coming from the allies of Dan Pipes. And he knows it.