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http://www.danielpipes.org/article/4326

"Daniel Pipes fights the worldwide threat of Islamism - from Malibu"

by Marc Ballon
Jewish Journal
March 6, 2007

ARTICLE SNIPPET: "The view from Daniel Pipes' front porch in Malibu is "California Dreamin'" perfect. With the Pacific stretching beyond the horizon, the vista induces a Zen-like calm. If the scholar's striped cotton shirt and khakis betray his Boston roots, Pipes' barely audible voice and gentle demeanor suggest that he has gone native just weeks after his arrival as a visiting professor this semester at Pepperdine University.

But Pipes' words are not so laid-back. The 57-year-old Harvard-educated Middle East expert is one of the most prominent scholars to have warned of the growing threat of fundamentalist Muslim terrorism to the West before the Sept. 11 attacks. He has become a lightening rod for some Muslims as well as other critics, in part because he predicts that radical Islam is a far greater threat than most people would like to imagine. The United States, he says, must gird itself for a protracted struggle against an enemy that wants nothing less than to transform this country from a beacon of democracy into a repressive Islamic state.

"You name it, radical Islam is anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, anti-female, anti-moderate Muslim and anti anyone who disagrees with it," said Pipes, who is Jewish. "Anyone in their way is their enemy."

Pipes calls himself a "soldier" in the war against Islamic fundamentalism; he is founder and director of the Middle East Forum -- a Philadelphia think tank that publishes Middle East Quarterly -- and he has written hundreds of newspaper columns, appeared countless times on Fox News and CNN and traveled the globe, including a recent trip to England to debate London Mayor Ken Livingstone with the purpose of warning of the growing danger. He soon plans to unveil Islamist Watch, a Web site which he describes as an attempt to monitor nonviolent radical Islam in the West.

Pipes gets nearly 3 million visits annually to his Web site, making him, if not exactly a household name, then at least one of the most prominent anti-Islamists on the scene.

"It used to be that people would ask him if he was related to me," said Pipes' father, Richard Pipes, professor emeritus of Russian history at Harvard and a former policy adviser to President Ronald Reagan. "Now, it's the other way around."

Like his father, Daniel Pipes has a reputation for bluntness and a willingness to go against conventional wisdom -- both in the academy and elsewhere. Whereas Richard Pipes sounded the alarm against appeasing the Soviets, Daniel Pipes preaches against working with radical Muslims, no matter how law-abiding, scholarly or open-minded they might appear.

Instead, "like David Duke and Louis Farrakhan," Pipes said, "Islamists should be ostracized socially and politically."

He favors the profiling of Muslims at U.S. airports."


567 posted on 03/10/2007 2:43:41 AM PST by Cindy
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