OTHER VIEWS
How The West Could Lose
Philadelphia
A
fter defeating fascists
and communists, can
the West now defeat the
Islamists?
On the face of it, its military pre-
ponderance makes victory seem
inevitable. Even if Tehran acquires
a nuclear weapon, Islamists have
nothing like the military machine
the Axis deployed in World War II
nor the Soviet Union during the
cold war.
What do the Islamists have to
compare with the Wehrmacht or
the Red Army? The SS or Spetznaz?
The Gestapo or the KGB? Or, for
that matter, to Auschwitz or the
gulag? Yet more than a few ana-
lysts, including me, worry that it's
not so simple. Islamists (defined
as persons who demand to live by
the sacred law of Islam, the Sharia)
might in fact do better than the
earlier totalitarians. They could
even win. That's because, however
strong the Western hardware, its
software contains some potentially
fatal bugs. Three of them deserve
attention.
effective response with
• Pacifism: Among
appeasement, including a
the educated, the
readiness to give up tradi-
tions and achievements.
conviction has widely
Self-hating Westerners
taken hold that
"there is no military
have an outsized impor-
solution" to current
tance due to their promi-
problems, a mantra
nent role as shapers of
applied to every
opinion in universities,
Daniel Pipes
Middle East problem
the news media, religious
Special
— Lebanon, Iraq,
institutions and the arts.
Commentary
They serve as the Islamists'
Iran, Afghanistan, the
Kurds, terrorism and
auxiliary mujahideen.
the Arab-Israeli conflict. But this
• Complacency. The absence
pragmatic pacifism overlooks the
of an impressive Islamist military
fact that modern history abounds
machine imbues many Westerners,
with military solutions. What were
especially on the left, with a feeling
the defeats of the Axis, the United
of disdain. Whereas conventional
war — with its men in uniform,
States in Vietnam or the Soviet
Union in Afghanistan, if not mili-
its ships, tanks, and planes, and
its bloody battles for land and
tary solutions?
resources — is simple to compre-
• Self-hatred: Significant ele-
ments in several Western countries hend, the asymmetric war with
— especially the United States,
radical Islam is elusive. Box cutters
and suicide belts make it difficult
Great Britain and Israel — believe
their own governments to be
to perceive this enemy as a worthy
repositories of evil and see terror-
opponent.
Islamists deploy formidable
ism as just punishment for past
capabilities, however, that go far
sins. This "we have met the enemy
and he is us" attitude replaces an
beyond small-scale terrorism:
•A potential access to weapons
of mass destruction that could
devastate Western life.
•A religious appeal that provides
deeper resonance and greater stay-
ing power than the artificial ideolo-
gies of fascism or communism.
•An impressively conceptual-
ized, funded and organized institu-
tional machinery that successfully
builds credibility, good will and
electoral success.
•An ideology capable of appeal-
ing to Muslims of every size and
shape, from Lumpenproletariat
to privileged, from illiterates to
Ph.D.s, from the well adjusted to
psychopaths, from Yemenis to
Canadians. The movement almost
defies sociological definition.
•A non-violent approach
— what I call "lawful Islamism"
— that pursues Islamification
through educational, political and
religious means, without recourse
to illegality or terrorism. Lawful
Islamism is proving successful in
Muslim-majority countries like
Algeria and Muslim-minority ones
like the United Kingdom.
•A huge number of commit-
ted cadres. If Islamists constitute
10 percent to 15 percent of the
Muslim population worldwide,
they number some 125 to 200 mil-
lion persons, or a far greater total
than all the fascists and commu-
nists, combined, who ever lived.
Pacifism, self-hatred and com-
placency are lengthening the war
against radical Islam and caus-
ing undue casualties. Only after
absorbing catastrophic human and
property losses will left-leaning
Westerners likely overcome this
triple affliction and confront the
true scope of the threat. The civi-
lized world will likely then prevail,
but belatedly and at a higher cost
than need have been.
Should Islamists get smart and
avoid mass destruction, but instead
stick to the lawful, political, non-
violent route, and should their
movement remain vital, it is diffi-
cult to see what will stop them.
study showed 60 percent of inter-
married families in that city are
raising children Jewishly, and
states that intermarriage "is con-
tributing to a net increase in the
number of Jews" in the Boston
Jewish community.
This position is made more
powerful when combined with
the 2005 San Francisco Jewish
demographic study that also iden-
tified higher-than-average rates of
intermarried households raising
children Jewishly.
What do San Francisco and
Boston have in common? A Jewish
community that, for the most part,
welcomes intermarried families
to participate as they are. Also,
both cities have a tightknit group
of interfaith outreach special-
ists. There is now talk that other
Jewish federations should consider
similar expenditures on interfaith
outreach.
A tipping-point moment on
halachic issues came earlier
this year, when Ismar Schorsch
— outgoing chancellor of the
Conservative Movement's Jewish
Theological Seminary — pro-
posed that the movement's Ramah
camps allow children of Jewish
fathers and non-Jewish mothers
to attend their camps until age 13,
when they would then be asked
to convert. The fact that this had
not previously been allowed is all
about culture, not Halachah.
Institutional admonishment
against intermarriage doesn't stop
intermarriage in America. It only
serves to push away the intermar-
ried. Our sole mission should
focus on helping all existing Jewish
households engage more deeply in
Jewish activities.
We know the outreach corps in
Boston will keep working to draw
in even more interfaith families.
We will be a better people for try-
ing rather than telling ourselves
that those on the periphery of our
community are not worth our time
or money and should therefore be
let go.
Daniel Pipes (www.DanielPipes.org) is
director of the Middle East Forum.
Intermarriage Battle Over
New York/JTA
F
ew Jewish communal
leaders have openly
declared that the battle
against Jewish intermarriage is
over and we should instead focus
solely on outreach. But the battle is
over and has been for a generation.
What's more, Jewish outreach
works; and it works best when not
hampered by mixed messages that
tell intermarried families we want
them, but they're still second-class
citizens. That's the message we
still hear from segments of the
community, even as many other
institutions move toward a more
welcoming approach to intermar-
ried families. Recent events sug-
gest we may finally be able to put
the debate behind us.
Anyone who has read Malcolm
Gladwell's groundbreaking book
The Tipping Point forever there-
after seeks out the little things that
portend big changes at exponential
speeds. We've long since reached
the demographic tipping point on
Jewish intermarriage; but most of
our institutions have yet
to change direction in
terms of their program-
ming, posturing and
professional training.
After maintaining
single-digit intermar-
riage rates for the first 60
years of the last century,
we saw a rapid rise in
intermarriage. A 13
percent intermarriage
rate for those married
before 1970 leapt to 47 percent in
25 years.
By 2001, there were about as
many intermarried households in
America as inmarried households,
according to the National Jewish
Population Study. More impor-
tantly, those intermarried house-
holds are younger and produce
more children. Forty-five percent
of college students who identified
themselves as Jewish came from
households with one Jewish-born
parent. Yet there is still an effort in
the organized Jewish community
to discredit those Jews. So they
hire researchers, who find that
intermarried Jews
are less Jewishly edu-
cated, less Jewishly
involved, even
though the same
could be said for
many other Jewish
sub-groups.
The resulting
policy recommenda-
tions are always the
same: Don't spend
money on the inter-
married. We have a demographic
and a moral imperative to reach
out to intermarried families and
welcome them into the Jewish
community.
Intermarriage is not the end
of Jewish continuity; not rais-
ing Jewish children is the end of
Jewish continuity. Recognizing this
will lead the organized community
to welcome all who would cast
their lot with the Jewish people.
And when our population
begins to grow, we will likely look
back upon the recent release of the
2005 Boston Jewish Community
Survey as a tipping point. That
Paul Golin is associate executive
director of the Jewish Outreach
Institute.
January 4 2007
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