Public Challenge for Dr.Pipes

Submitted by Ianus (Poland), May 4, 2007 at 17:35

Dear Noah ,

You've asked Dr. Pipes :

> Why even here in America can the Muslim community not mobilize even one ten-thousanth of one percent of their members to reform Islam?

> Can you answer this?

To which Dr. Pipes answers :

> If you want significant numbers of moderate Muslims, look at Pakistan and Turkey in recent days, where 100,000s of Muslims demonstrated on the streets against Islamism.

The numbers sound too good to be true. As a rule we find hardly a few moderate Moslems in free countries of the West. But suddenly hundreds of thousands of "moderates" turn up under Oriental militarist regimes ... like a deus ex machina at the end of a Greek tragedy ! Amazing !

I infer that if the US or the EU changes one day into a fully-fledged police state - similar to Turkey and Pakistan with respectively 98% and 97% Moslem majority - then organizing any mass demonstration to prove Moslem America or Europe has 100 000s of moderate , even secular , Moslems will be relatively easy. As long as it is a free country , it's hard to find them in sizeable numbers though, if Noah's and others' observations can be relied upon .

To my humble mind , the demonstrations in Turkey or Pakistan say very little about Islam's moderacy there , as they are all staged by the police and the militarists and so say more about the latter. Those things never happen spontaneously either in Turkey or Pakistan. In Europe or the US they might , but they somehow don't.

Under communism pro-communist demonstrations with thousands of demonstrators were common. They were engineered by administrative and compulsory measures . The slogans and flags were ready to use when the "demonstrators" arrived . No one asked them what they really thought about them . If they had been ordered to demonstrate next week against what they demonstrated this week , they wouldn't have protested . Under duresse people had to play their roles. But not all spectators like playing the role ascribed to them by the hidden organizers of the demonstrations.

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