Daniel Pipes debates London Mayor Ken “Red” “Livingstone
The NYSun has a recap today of last Saturday’s London debate between anti-Islamofascist warrior Daniel Pipes and notorious pro-Islamofascism Mayor of London Ken “Red” Livingstone. Here are some highlights:
Mr. Livingstone’s world is one gigantic conspiracy, with American neoconservatives pulling the strings. The Cold War was, he said, a conspiracy cooked up in Washington in 1943, just as the war on terror was devised by a “nexus around the White House and Wall Street.” He stopped short of claiming that the CIA had ordered the September 11 attacks, but they had certainly created Al Qaeda. The state of Israel was an American conspiracy too: It “should never have been created” but the Americans, who of course control the United Nations, set it up on Arab land because they and the British were too anti-Semitic to accept Jewish refugees in their own countries. This is pretty rich coming from Mr. Livingstone — the mayor who was censured by his own party for abusing a Jewish reporter as a Nazi concentration camp guard.
Such fantasies are as commonplace as his assertions of moral equivalence between the “crude Islamophobia” of American neoconservatives and Islamist terrorists. But when Mr. Pipes pointed out that the Americans would have been mad to invade Iraq for the sake of oil, since the predictable effect had been to raise oil prices, the mayor replied that “the people in the White House were mad” and went on to make the apocalyptic prediction that if the war on terror continued, there would be “casualties in the tens of millions.” The audience did not know what to make of this, and gave the mayor a distinctly muted response.
Mr. Pipes, however, was rewarded for his sweet reasonableness — which contrasted sharply with the malevolent extremism of Mr. Livingstone and Ms. Yaqoob — with hearty rounds of applause. He got a few laughs, too, as when he told one of his critics that Hezbollah “did not get to eliminate Israel this time round — I give you my condolences.” Much of the audience having never seen a real, live American neoconservative in the flesh before and doubtless surprised that he had neither horns nor a tail, listened with rapt attention to what he had to say.
In essence, Mr. Pipes had a warning for Londoners: Thanks to the multicultural policies of politicians like Mayor Livingstone, “your city is a threat to the rest of the world.” He listed 15 countries in which Islamists from Britain had carried out terrorist attacks, ranging from Pakistan to America. Since last weekend he could have added a 16th — Somalia. Britain, he said, was now regarded by some experts as the biggest threat to American security.
British audiences aren’t usually told this. They aren’t told that “the Islamists have declared war on us,” let alone have the war aim stated clearly: victory. They need to hear the likes of Daniel Pipes much more often. If the State Department won’t send them over, let the think tanks do it. We want to hear them echo George Cohan’s 1917 song, “Over There”: “The Yanks are coming/ … We’ll be over, we’re coming over/ And we won’t come back till it’s over/ Over there.”
Read the rest here.
Pipes shares his thoughts on the debate here.
Pipes is right about Livingstone and other appeasers like him because those who choose to act as moral relativists over the issue of Islamofascism, who essentially take the attitude of ‘we deserve what we get’ and who also take a sympathetic view of Islamofascists only embolden the radical extremist Islamists all over the world hell bent on the destruction and domination of the west. Not only that, but their attitude influences public opinion at home, too, and it’s not difficult for opinions like that to firmly take root in places like the UK where you already have more ‘tolerant’ attitudes towards different cultures than we do here.