I ask this of liberal “conservatives” a lot.
Are we not “anti-communist”?
And weren’t there “good” communists, like Whittaker Chambers?
Hell, Oskar Schindler was a “good Nazi.”
Precisely what is the good/bad ratio that any ideology must achieve in our eyes before we condemn it wholesale?
Anyway, here’s Robert Spencer taking on that widely reposted article by Daniel Pipes:
“Islamism” as a modern construct was by no means the first to transform the “Islamic faith into a political ideology.” Islam was political from the beginning; Islamic tradition portrays Muhammad as a political as well as religious leader, and his successors amassed large Islamic empires based on the proposition that Islam was a political system. In fact, the most prominent contemporary exponent of “Islamism,” the Muslim Brotherhood, was founded in 1928 by Hasan al-Banna as a direct response to the abolition of the caliphate, the foremost symbol of political Islam, by the secular Turkish government in 1924. Al-Banna envisioned the Brotherhood not as some kind of innovation, but as a revival of traditional and mainstream Islam.
Pamela Geller writes:
Would we all like to believe in unicorns and moonbeams but this fantasy is dangerous and Pipes has wasted too much time and money on a fallacy. Pipes asks, “How do you propose to defeat Islamism?” (a silly word — correct term is jihad).
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