Following my recent piece in Crikey about the Jewish community’s regular defamation of Islam, one of my targets, Daniel Pipes, today responds:
Re, “Palestine, Israel and freedom of speech: striking at the heart of liberal democracies” (Monday, item 17). I object to a paragraph written by Anthony Loewenstein and published by Crikey on May 18, The offending parts are in bold:
There have been countless examples of senior Jewish leaders publicly supporting viciously anti-Islam and anti-Arab sentiments and regularly welcoming overseas visitors, such as Daniel Pipes, who routinely defame Muslims in the name of their Zionist jihad. Pipes continually claimed during last year’s US Presidential debate that Barack Obama was Muslim, a transparent attempt to insinuate terrorist-sympathy. I don’t remember the shock-jocks calling for the Jewish establishment to stand up and take a stand against such bigotry (such is demanded of Muslims.)
There are two errors of fact in this statement:
- I attack Islamists and Islamism, not Muslims and Islam… — a very important distinction. Here is one of many examples where I make this distinction, from an article titled “Islamophobia?” from 2005: “Despite writing again and again against radical Islam the ideology, not Islam the religion, I have been made the runner-up for a mock ”˜Islamophobia Award’ in Great Britain, deemed America’s ‘leading Islamophobe,’ and even called an ”˜Islamophobe Incarnate.” (What I really am is an “Islamism-ophobe.”)
I wrote that Obama was a Muslim as a child but is now a Christian… — a critical distinction that your author misrepresents. For documentation of the falsehood of the second point, including a prior retraction by the American ABC News, see “Obama is currently a Muslim?“