Daniel Pipes: Boycotts of the West will put Muslims further behind

Manchester Union Leader ^ | February 14, 2006 | Daniel Pipes

[billorites]

WHAT ARE the long-term consequences of the Muhammad cartoon furor? I predict it is helping bring on not a clash of civilizations, but their mutual pulling apart. This separation, which has been building for years, has dreadful implications.

Signs of disengagement are all around.

• Trade: Boycotts now exist in both directions. Even as the U.S. government sanctions Iranian products, Iran's president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad says his government will "revise and cancel economic contracts" with countries where newspapers published the cartoons. Several Muslim countries have suspended trade with Denmark, while Muslim-owned stores in Canada have removed Danish products. The Pakistani medical association even announced a boycott of medicines from five European countries.

• Consumer items: Muslims are increasingly replacing Western consumer items with their own. They purchase the extremely modest Fulla and Razanne dolls rather than the busty Barbie. In France, Beurger King provides halal food, competing with Burger King, just as Mecca Cola takes the place of Coke and Pepsi. Al-Jazeera is starting an English-language channel to go up against CNN and the BBC.

• Financial investments: As a result of freezes on funds and the designation of terrorist entities, Muslims have moved large amounts of capital out of the West and invested these either in their own countries or in other places around the world, such as East Asia. Middle Eastern oil exporters before 9/11 annually put as much as $25 billion into American investments; since then, the amount is about $1 billion a year.

• Emigration: 9/11 caused a significant increase in obstacles to Muslims traveling to the West, so fewer Muslim business executives, students, hospital patients, conference goers and workers are reaching there.

• Tourism: Islamist atrocities such as the murder of 60 Japanese, German and Swiss tourists in Luxor in 1997 or the abduction of 32 German and other travelers in the Sahara in 2003 had already led some Westerners to avoid discretionary travel in the Muslim world. Cartoon-related violence has prompted a Danish advisory warning citizens against travel to fourteen Muslim countries. Scandinavian tourist companies have canceled many tours to North Africa.

• Foreign aid: Muslim aggression against aid workers in Indonesia, Lebanon, Pakistan and the Palestinian Authority have led to the partial or complete withdrawal of European missions. In Chechnya, the Danish aid mission was expelled and the Iraqi transport ministry has rejected any future offers of Danish reconstruction money.

• Embassies: From the seizure of the U.S. embassy in Tehran in 1978 to the multiple attacks on Danish and other European embassies this month, the assault on Western diplomatic missions in Muslim countries is causing them to take on the features of armed fortresses, to be removed from the center of towns to the peripheries, and in some cases to be closed down.

• Westerners providing services: Zayed University in Dubai fired an American professor, Claudi Keppoz, for distributing the Muhammad cartoons to her students. Rampaging Palestinians caused the foreign observers staffing the Temporary International Presence in Hebron, or TIPH, to flee Hebron.

These developments suggest what the prime minister of Malaysia, Abdullah Ahmad Badawi, has called a "huge chasm" between the Muslim world and the West. Or, in the more bellicose wording of the influential Sunni imam Youssef al-Qaradawi, "We must tell Europeans, we can live without you. But you cannot live without us."

Should the chasm widen, with its concomitant lessening of human interaction, commercial relations, and diplomatic engagement, the Muslim world will likely fall further behind than it already has. As I wrote in 2000, "Whatever index one employs, Muslims can be found clustering toward the bottom — whether measured in terms of their military prowess, political stability, economic development, corruption, human rights, health, longevity, or literacy."

Disengagement will only worsen the Muslim predicament. Reduced contact with the world's most modern, powerful and advanced countries would likely cause Muslims to do even worse in those indices and lapse deeper into a condition characterized by self-pity, jealousy, resentment, anger and aggression.

Especially when contrasted with Muslim successes in premodern times, these traumatic circumstances help explain the crisis in identity that often causes Muslims to seek solace in radical Islam. For everyone's sake, it is important that Muslims begin more successfully to negotiate their path to modernity, not to isolation.

Daniel Pipes is the director of the Middle East Forum and author of "Miniatures." His Web site iswww.DanielPipes.org.

[mtbopfuyn]

Fine by me. They can also keep their youth out of our universities so our own will have desks.

Buy Danish!

[PeteB570]

There are a lot of things I could say but I'll just say:

There will be no problem once Islam Takes over the world.

[son of caesar]

all the points he brings up refer to bettering ones quality of life. note to him, muslims dont seem to care that they are living in a prehistoric manner. in fact, they enjoy it supremely. sheesh.

[davisfh]

"I predict it is helping bring on not a clash of civilizations, but their mutual pulling apart."

I realize that there are economic considerations here but in reality, who would want to embrace a closeness with these people.

I keep hearing remarks about "mainstream Islam." I happen not to believe that there is anything to that. When radical Islam manages to take over the west, country by country, you can bet that mainstream Islam will be right there with the radicals, if for no other reason, they don't want their heads lopped off.

[Rapscallion]

Muslims remind me of the man who sat on a chair trying to cure a case of the crabs by stabbing them with an ice pick.

They cannot make the "correct" decision because they have never been able to separate their religion from their governance, foreign relations, law, technology, business, finance, education, media, or gender matters.

[John Valentine]

Pipes is probably right. I sure see evidence of this and it has been continuous over at least the past 30 years that I have personally observed it.

More to the point, what would he have us do?

This is a problem that we did NOT create, or even have much of a role in.

This situation arises from the medaeval mindset inculcated by Islam, and its inability to come to terms with modernism. Islam is inimical to industrialism, to science, to art, to literature, and to true philosophy.

Unless THEY are willing to change, their flirtation with modernism will fail, and is failing now, in spectacular fashion.

Frankly, I beleive that Pipes worst scenario is coming to pass in front of our eyes, and no one, inside or out of the Muslim world has the ability to stop it.

Ultimately, we will have to impose a ruinous war on the entire Muslim world. It is either them or us.

Or rather a continuation of the post-enlightenment world, or a return to ignorance and peonage in a world worse than any nightmare a western liberal is likely to have endured.

[Restorer]

Or, in the more bellicose wording of the influential Sunni imam Youssef al-Qaradawi, "We must tell Europeans, we can live without you. But you cannot live without us."

He's got that backwards.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

We need to set aside an area of the world, yes deserts are fine, as a sort of wild life park/anthropological museum for the Muslims. It could be a tourist attraction. Actually they have pretty well done it for themselves but now they are escaping over the fence. Time for a roundup.

[Mind-numbed Robot]

He's got that backwards.

Another example that the Muslims and Democrats have a lot in common. We had to learn how to parse the language they speak when dealing with Clinton.

[Kenton]

Or, in the more bellicose wording of the influential Sunni imam Youssef al-Qaradawi, "We must tell Europeans, we can live without you. But you cannot live without us."

Point 1. The west needs your oil to fuel their economies, but you need the wests' money to fuel yours. And to be clear, the west needs oil, but that doesn't mean we need you.

For years, the bother of having to coexist with you was a tradeoff, but now that we've gotten to know you, we've finally decided to get serious about alternative non-fossil fuels.

Do you know how much corn we can grow, year after year? Do you know how much motivation Muslim extremists have given us to develop new technology that will make your oil obsolete?

Point 2. If Muslims are isolated from Christians and Jews, and kept with other Muslims, your innate homicidal tendencies will have to be turned inward. When your young men get bored and want to kill somebody, Sunnis can slaughter Shias and vice-versa. In a hundred years, you'll all be living as bedouins again. Perhaps you can use your oil to light the lamps in your tents.

[Rummyfan]

Tyring to see the downside to this for us in the West.... can anyone? So the Middle East and the Muslim world in general further descend into a backwater. What can we do and why should we care? It is their decision (of course they will blame 'us' for it however).

[I still care]

Maybe the isolation of the Muslim world is the goal.

Remember the Soviet Union locking everyone behind the iron curtain? Here the religion itself cuts people off, where the fundamentalists can control them for their own fanatical power lusts.

I have a feeling the separation is desired by those in power. Our priests renounce worldly power. Theirs do not.

[Steely Tom]

This is all just pre-game shenanigans. Just trash talk at the weigh-in.

When the first Islamic A-bomb goes off, the curtain rises on the main event; the result will be that Islam will be removed from the skin of this earth in a matter of days. And the great pools of oil far underneath the blackened surface of the middle east will still be there.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Tyrng to see the downside to this for us in the West.... can anyone?

You can't be serious. Hundreds of billions of dollars and euros flowing to despotic, tyrannical regimes that would take pleasure in destroying Western and Christian civilizations, even if it means taking their own down at the same time? Regimes that are importing nuclear technology from North Korea and Pakistan and will have nuclear weapons, and the will to use them, in a few short years? Isolated regimes that are disengaged from the rest of the world and have made public their intentions to wipe Israel off the map?

Engagement with the world and a reformation of Islam is our only hope. Failing that, they will launch attacks against the West that will result in devasting counterattacks. If they succeed in wiping out NY, London, and Paris, the Western world will probably quickly sink into a decades-long depression and chaos.

Yes, there are a few downsides.

[untenured]

"We must tell Europeans, we can live without you. But you cannot live without us."

How long can you live without Europe taking your migrants?

[claudiustg]

---"Whatever index one employs, Muslims can be found clustering toward the bottom — whether measured in terms of their military prowess, political stability, economic development, corruption, human rights, health, longevity, or literacy."---

And that ain't no cartoon!

[GeorgefromGeorgia]

Remember the old saying about if Muhammad doesn't come to the mountain, then the mountain comes to Muhammad.

Muslims may think that the Mountain (prosperity, trade, development, FDI) will come to them in any event, but as Pipes points out, that is not necessarily the case.

[Publius6961]

I wrote in 2000, "Whatever index one employs, Muslims can be found clustering toward the bottom — whether measured in terms of their military prowess, political stability, economic development, corruption, human rights, health, longevity, or literacy."

LOL!

Other than that, muslims are superior!

Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha ha!

[Emmet Fitzhume]

I know.

I am interested in working my way into a PhD program.

Hopefully I will get in.