Romania had Vlad, the Impaler. We have Parvez, the Plagiarizer

Submitted by DrRJP (United States), Nov 28, 2007 at 19:51

I do believe that I have figured out why Parvez plagiarized Eric Gorski for his November "Letter to the Editor" /blog post. When Parvez interjects his own thoughts, they are so off-the-wall that even he cannot believe that he wrote them. I also think that's why he issued a denial when I quoted him!

His article,'WAR ON TERROR' RHETORIC SOUNDS LIKE WAR ON ISLAM, is just like a Thanksgiving turkey -- there's still a lot of juicy meat to pick at!

It seems that pedantic Parvez was not satisfied with a post to his blog and a few letters to the editor -- he also sent a copy of his blog post, verbatim, to the SOP Newswire. I learned that the SOP Newswire (SOP being "Student Operated Press") run a website where [quote] "aspiring students and writers the opportunity to have their work published, no matter their lack of prior experience."

Seems a fitting place for a university professor who has a lack of experience... with reality, that is.

Besides doing a hatchet-job on opponents of Islamic terrorism, Parvez decides that he's going to use his "Rhetoric" rant to show the world just how stupid and ignorant we Americans are when it comes to Islam. In fact, he makes being an American, a perjorative to being Islamophobic and Islamically-challenged. I love how he presents his thesis on our use of the concept, "Islamic terrorism." Check out this quote of his:

People like Giuliani, who insist on conflating Islam with terrorism and fascism, care not about the linguistic absurdity of such combinations. "Islam" is an Arabic word while "terrorism" and "fascism" are English words rooted in the European, not Islamic, experience.

In other words, there is no such thing as Islamic terrorism because terrorism is an English word, and since Europeans originated English words, they therefore originated terrorism. When a Muslim walks into a daycare center and explodes a bomb filled with nails, razor blades, and rat poison, that has nothing to do with terrorism. When the Koran says, "Strike fear into the heart of the infidel," that has nothing to do with terrorism. When the tribe of Banu Qurayzah surrendered and 700 of its adult and pubescent males were beheaded in a single day, that had nothing to do with terrorism, either.

Whatever Islam chooses to call terrorism is irrelevant to its victims. Parvez presses on:

Politics has always been a theatre of the absurd. However, the injection of Islamophobic rhetoric into presidential campaigns is not mere rhetoric, as it solidifies the specter of a self-defeating clash between civilizations.

Talk about absurd allegories. "Solidifies the specter [like a ghost?] of a self-defeating clash between civilizations [like the "war on terror" is "self-defeating," or that all clashes between civilizations should be won by Islam]. Now, there's a guy who loves the sound of his own voice. He has to, with bon-mots like this:

Along with the sheer naiveté of such views, a more fundamental question is -what do Arabic words like "jihad" or "Islam" mean when combined with English suffixes like '-ist' or '-ism'?

Actually, the "fundamental question" is why does a fundamental Muslim use the Arabic-Latin word "Islamophobia" more times than a rapper uses the "F" word? If Professor Plagiarizer had his way, he would claim that he invented the word, and sue anyone else who uses it.

Note: Opinions expressed in comments are those of the authors alone and not necessarily those of Daniel Pipes. Original writing only, please. Comments are screened and in some cases edited before posting. Reasoned disagreement is welcome but not comments that are scurrilous, off-topic, commercial, disparaging religions, or otherwise inappropriate. For complete regulations, see the "Guidelines for Reader Comments".