Racism for the mainstream

Hate speech, a category of racial vilification, has been outlawed in Australian and international law for more than three decades. Despite these protections, hate speech remains a powerful source of division and violence throughout the world.

In Rwanda, vilification of the Tutsi minority was instrumental in facilitating the slaughter of many hundreds of thousands of people in just 100 days.

Two years ago the Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmedinehad infamously sponsored a conference on Holocaust denial. Ahmedinejad claimed the conference was an honest reaction to the use of the Holocaust by supporters of Israel. Whether or not it was, the conference was far from honest but undoubtedly insensitive and racist.

Since September 11, 2001 scores of books have been published on Islam. While many seek to encourage understanding of one the world’s major religions, others seek to paint Islam as the greatest threat to contemporary society. The vilification of Islam, particularly in the West, has developed into something of a pseudo-intellectual industry. There is no better spokesperson for that industry than Daniel Pipes.

Pipes plays on the inherent human tendency to elevate mere mortals into something of a myth. If every society has its Emmanuel Goldstein, the ethereal enemy of the State in George Orwell’s 1984, then perhaps every individual in good-conscience has the capacity to stereotype that which it identifies as a threat. In our current climate, Islam is that threat.

With remarkable chutzpah, Pipes manages to massage an intellectual veneer into an essentialist, monolithic portrayal of Islam as the single greatest threat to democracy and the West (for Pipes the two terms are interchangeable).

During a recent public debate in Sydney, Pipes argued that Islam is incompatible with democracy. Two days later, he argued in The Jerusalem Post that it is not. The sudden change of opinion may be explained by the change in audience. In Sydney, speaking before a lay audience, Pipes was free to affirm the generally negative perception of Islam within mainstream Australian society. The Jerusalem Post, an influential Israeli broadsheet read by policymakers worldwide, required a more nuanced approach. What did not waiver between his Sydney performance and his Post article was the fundamental message that Islam is a threat to democracy and the West.

What makes Pipes especially pernicious is the level of mainstream support he receives around the world, particularly in the West. Founder and director of the Middle East Forum in the United States, he spends much of the year lecturing to lay and elite audiences around the world. A columnist for the New York Times Syndicate, Pipes was appointed by President Bush to the United States Institute of Peace and was a Middle East adviser to the Rudolph Giuliani presidential campaign.

Pipes seeks to conceal his racism by claiming to distinguish between “Islamism”, a term he uses to describe militant Islam, and mainstream Islam.

For Pipes “Islamism” represents the worst excesses of Islamic militant orthodoxy. On its surface the distinction between Islam and Islamism appears fairly benign. Pipes has remarked that Islam is not purely a religion of violence and moderate Muslims do exist, but he regrets that “[a]t present … it is hard to recall the positive side, at a moment when backwardness, resentment, extremism and violence prevail in so much of the Muslim world”.

Pipes always associates mainstream Islam with everything that is antithetical to modern society: it is irrational and backwards, looking to past glories rather than seeking to adapt to contemporary challenges.

The tragedy is that Pipes occasionally identifies very real social traumas in predominantly Muslim societies, albeit inadvertently. But where his criticisms could facilitate dialogue between Muslims and the West, Pipes instead seeks to inflame the former and inculcate a supremacist complex among the latter.

Writing in The Australian, Pipes argued Europe was in danger of losing its “distinct cultural” identity as the “global engine of change”. The danger comes from a growing European Muslim population and a lax approach to European heritage. His solution to this perceived danger is for Muslims to be more “Western” and less Muslim. This despite there being no consensus on what it means to be Western or Muslim. Moreover, many Muslims, including myself, have no qualms about being Muslim and Western.

Of course Daniel Pipes is not alone. One need only recall the respected scientist James Watson, who co-discovered DNA, and his belief that people of African origin are less intelligent than other human beings.

Watson revealed these sentiments during an interview published in The Sunday Times of London, where he remarked, “all our social policies [on Africa] are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really … people who have to deal with black employees find this not true”.

His astonishing claims reach new heights when he warns, “there is no firm reason to anticipate that the intellectual capacities of peoples geographically separated in their evolution should prove to have evolved identically. Our wanting to reserve equal powers of reason as some universal heritage of humanity will not be enough to make it so.”

At first glance Watson’s sentiments sound informed, almost respectable. Like Pipes, some valid points are raised. But masked within the euphemisms and indirect speech is a classically racist argument: blacks (or Muslims, or whomsoever is targeted) are not just inferior to us in the West, but inherently so.

As researchers have known for some time, a good education is not always a barrier to racism. However, an educated racist has the capacity to lend credibility and nuance to the fear, latent in every society, of those who do not look or behave quite like “us”. This is not the racism of Pauline Hanson or soccer hooligans. It is far too dishonest for that kind of chauvinism. It is racism for the mainstream.