Academics who lie by omission are not dumb. They are pragmatic and greedy.

Submitted by Prashant, Aug 13, 2017 at 17:15

Dear Dr Pipes,

Your reader Joel Scott correctly said that the authors like the one of the book 'Service in a Time of Suspicion' are not scholars. But Joel Scott went on to say that authors like these ideologues and propagandists for the Islamists.

I think it does not take a very high level of intelligence to figure out that what the Islamic countries offer to the non-Muslim world in terms of human rights is much much less than what they want from us in return. It also does not take much to realize that the countries and regions of the world that are Islamic for decades and centuries do not have much to show in terms of what Islam did for them. So before the Islamic world demands more fairness from the rest of us, they need to look inwards very very deeply. But the Islamic apologists do not ever mention these simple facts when they publish books and articles about Islam.

I do not think these people are blinded by ideology or are dumb. I think they are just plain and simple dishonest. They know that it is easy to attract fame and fortune (and get published) if a colored version of truth is presented to the world.

For example, I might write a scholarly essay on how bad Israel is and you might review my essay and recommend it for publishing and we both choose to ignore the fact that there is no democracy any where in the Islamic world. After a few months we can reverse the roles. If someone challenges us, we can write another scholarly paper explaining why lack of democracy can be blamed on poverty and colonialism. By the time we are all done, we might have dozens of published papers none of which tells the truth and get very famous. Then we can both become professors and teach our scholarly theories to young kids.

On the other hand if we write a book proposing that the Islamic world should modernize and act with responsibility, the best we can hope is to become someone like Salman Rushdie, Geert Wilders, Taslima Nasreen, or Ayaan Hirsi Ali and run for our lives.

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