Posted on 04/21/2003 10:53:00 PM PDT by JohnHuang2
The nomination is a “cruel joke.” The nominee has repeatedly indulged in “racist and bigoted rhetoric,” and his nomination “sends entirely the wrong message.” Al Sharpton to head up the Justice Department? Noam Chomsky to be Ambassador to Israel? No. The President has appointed Daniel Pipes to the board of directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace, and the wolves are out in force.
The Institute of Peace is dedicated to “the prevention, management, and peaceful resolution of international conflicts.” For this work Pipes is an excellent choice. Few can match his knowledge of international Islamic terrorism, and that’s the kind of knowledge that is needed to prevent and manage the ongoing conflict. Even fewer have the courage he has displayed in advocating the hard choices that must be made in order to prevent future terrorist attacks and the peaceful resolution of the war on terror. He will bring a clear-eyed, realistic, and highly informed voice to the Institute.
That’s why Muslim as well as non-Muslim opponents of terror support his nomination. Tashbih Sayyed, editor of the California-based newspaper Pakistan Today, declared that with the Pipes nomination, “President Bush won my heart that he is serious about fighting terror — and fostering a more peaceful world.”
Yet a chorus of lefty media outlets, starting with the Washington Post, would have us believe that American Muslims are up in arms, so to speak, over Pipes’ nomination. It was the Post that labeled the nomination a “cruel joke” and pointed out that the Institute of Peace has been working on a “Special Initiative on the Muslim World, begun after Sept. 11, 2001, as a bridge between cultures. Mr. Pipes has long been regarded by Muslims as a destroyer of such bridges.”
So which is it? Is Pipes a “destroyer of bridges” or a foe of those who would destroy them? The “destroyer of bridges” angle comes from several American Muslim advocacy groups and their allies — notably the Council on American Islamic Relations (CAIR), the Muslim Public Affairs Council (MPAC), the American Muslim Council, the American Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and the Arab American Institute (AAI).
Sarah Eltantawi of MPAC told me, “The U.S. Institute of Peace is supposed to be seeking peaceful solutions. We can think of no more divisive figure who is less committed to peace than Daniel Pipes.” James Zogby of the Arab American Institute smeared Pipes head-on: “Daniel Pipes has a problem — his obsessive hatred of all things Muslim.” Added AAI’s Jean AbiNader: “His confirmation would be the equivalent to American Muslims as that of David Duke would be to American Jews or African Americans.”
The ADC, on the other hand, refreshingly refrains from ad hominem attacks and crude smears. It presents at its website a series of quotes from Pipes’ work, purporting to show that he is “NOT a man of peace.” But there is less here than meets the eye. The ADC charges that in reference to Israel and Palestine, “Pipes opposes President Bush’s vision of two states living side by side in peace.” But the supporting quote from Pipes says only that the President’s call for “a ‘provisional’ Palestinian state” and for an end to Israeli settlements in the occupied territories constituted “very major benefits to the Palestinians; as such, they represent rewards for suicide bombings, sniper attacks, and the other forms of terrorism.” That’s an observation about terrorism and its apparent rewards, not a rejection of “two states living side by side in peace.”
The ADC’s Pipes quotes are selective. It asserts that Pipes “is a bitter opponent of the Oslo peace process,” but the supporting material only establishes that Pipes believes the Oslo accords have failed to bring peace to the Middle East, which should be obvious to everyone, and that the Bush Administration has given up on “the Oslo-era assumption of Palestinian-Israeli comity as the basis for negotiation.” In the article from which this quote is taken, a February 2003 piece in Commentary, Pipes also says that although Oslo failed, “in principle, something along the lines of the Oslo agreement could turn out to be workable.” The ADC doesn’t quote that.
CAIR’s anti-Pipes site is much worse (with MPAC in tow, rehashing at its own site the worst of CAIR’s smears and misrepresentations). CAIR, in fact, has been denouncing Pipes since 1999. One clue as to why may be found in Tashbih Sayyed’s summary of Pipes’s work. He says that Pipes has “warned of the threat posed by militant Muslims in America, noting the many who are already under arrest or being investigated for ties to terror. In doing so, he’s carefully — courageously — documented their backgrounds and their roles in various plots.”
In doing this, Pipes has not hesitated to expose CAIR’s own shadowy ties to terrorist groups. CAIR’s founder and Executive Director, Nihad Awad, has repeatedly declared his support for the terrorist group Hamas. In March 2003, Bassem K. Khafagi, who has been identified in news reports as the community affairs director for CAIR’s national office in Washington, was arrested on charges of bank fraud. An organization he helped found, the Islamic Assembly of North America, is suspected of providing websites for two radical Sheikhs with ties to Osama bin Laden. Siraj Wahaj, who has served as a member of CAIR’s Board of Advisors, in the early 1990s sponsored talks by the blind Sheikh Omar Abdel Rahman in mosques in New York City and New Jersey; Rahman was later convicted in conspiring to blow up the World Trade Center the first time Muslim terrorists attempted it, in 1993.
Pipes has also spoken out against the “intimidation of patriotic Muslims who disagree with CAIR’s militant agenda: In one case (Sheikh Muhammad Hisham Kabbani), the FBI has looked into charges that he received death threats after renouncing the chauvinists. In another (Khalid Durán), CAIR’s attack on a writer led to a death edict against him — which CAIR has never denounced.”
At the CAIR website is a collection of supposedly damning quotations from Pipes’s writings — which since his nomination has been linked prominently from the site’s front page. This collection displays in full CAIR’s talent for smearing and demonizing its opponents. “Pipes,” goes one charge, “displays a racist’s distaste for Muslim immigrants who ‘wish to import the customs of the Middle East and South Asia.’ (Los Angeles Times, 7/22/99) For Pipes, this sort of raw bigotry is nothing new.”
What did Pipes really say? Muslim “integrationists are delighted to live in a democratic country where the rule of law prevails, whereas chauvinists wish to import the customs of the Middle East and South Asia.” It would seem then that the “customs” to which Pipes was objecting were more on the order of Saddam’s casket prison and tongue amputations for dissenters than of Muslim women wearing headscarves to the supermarket. Evidently for CAIR it is “raw bigotry” to prefer democracy and the rule of law to the tyrannical caprice of Middle Eastern and South Asian autocracies.
After a sheaf of similarly truncated, misused and fabricated quotes, CAIR acknowledges that “Pipes now claims all these quotes were taken out of context.” Gee, I wonder why.
CAIR also reproduces a large number of journalistic attacks on Pipes, including an August 2000 article by Vlae Kershner of the San Francisco Chronicle: “Pipes goes on to write: ‘all Islamists (fundamentalist Muslims) have the same ambition, which is what they call ‘the Islamization of America.’ By this, they mean no less than saving the US through transforming it into a Muslim country.’ Where’d he find that, some pseudo-document called the Protocols of the Elders of Mecca?”
Where did Pipes get the crazy idea that militant Muslims want to transform America into a Muslim country? Maybe from CAIR’s board chairman Omar Ahmed, who said in 1998: “Islam isn’t in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran . . . should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth.”
Pipes never says that all Muslims agree with Omar Ahmed. Tashbih Sayyed correctly observes that Pipes “goes the extra mile to distinguish between Islam, which he respects, and its militant form.” Pipes himself says: “I don’t talk about the religion itself. That’s because Islam is not the problem. Terrorism is not the problem. It’s a terroristic version of Islam that’s the problem.”
Ignoring this distinction, CAIR’s Ibrahim Hooper calls Pipes “the premier Muslim basher. . . . It’s basically his job to smear an entire community and to create fear, apprehension and suspicion toward a religious minority in the United States for his own political, and apparently religious, agenda.” The AAI’s AbiNader charges (citing no supporting evidence) that “Pipes has been a consistent and virulent critic of the Islamic faith and Muslims in general.” The egregious Justin Raimondo piles on at this point, criticizing Pipes’ views on “‘Islamists’ – i.e. American Muslims.” In the same vein, the Post is generous enough to note that “Mr. Pipes denies charges by U.S. Muslim groups that he lumps them all together,” although it finds his denials insufficient.
Pipes “does not bash Muslims,” says Tashbih Sayyed. “What he attacks is a fascist interpretation of Islam.” Why does this distinction elude the Post? Because “Daniel Pipes rattles liberals who value political correctness and tolerance for (likely) terrorists above all else. Pipes is not politically correct.”
Consequently, a tough battle lies ahead. Speaking from a secure undisclosed location in CAIR’s hip pocket, Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) predicted (in a letter to a constituent reprinted at the blogspot Little Green Footballs) that “this is likely to be a contentious nomination.” Sayyed and other moderate Muslims are not intending to let CAIR prevail. “Many moderate American Muslims,” he says, “frustrated by and angry at the extremist policies of militant Islamist organizations in the US and their efforts to portray themselves as the sole voice of Islam, have welcomed the nomination of Daniel Pipes.” Ibrahim Hooper, showing a gentler side than he did when he hung up on me a few weeks ago, did not return repeated calls to CAIR for comment on this article.
Sayyed continues: “Daniel Pipes, to me, is the voice of reason. Only time will tell — and God forbid that time tells — what will happen if we ignore a voice like Daniel Pipes.”
How'ya doin', my friend?;o)
Hope ya' had a great Resurrection Day!
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