"Ultimately, there is no compromise. Westerners will either retain their civilization, including the right to insult and blaspheme, or not." -- Daniel Pipes
Daniel Pipes (born September 9, 1949) is an American writer, and political blogger who focuses on criticism of Islam and Islamism. Pipes is the founder and director of the Middle East Forum, a conservative think tank, as well as the founder of Campus Watch, a controversial organization which states its mission to be critiquing poor scholarship concerning the Middle East, but which has been characterized by some critics as a vehicle for harassing scholars critical of Israel.
Pipes has often been characterized as a conservative or neo-conservative, and less often as an Orientalist or neo-Orientalist,. His 2003 nomination by U.S. President George W. Bush to the board of directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace was protested by Democratic leaders, Arab-American groups, and civil rights activists, who cited his allegedly rightist views and oft-stated belief that "force was the most effective remedy to conflict." The Washington Post editorialized his selection as a "cruel joke"; the Bush administration sidestepped the opposition with a recess appointment.
Pipes has written or co-written more than a dozen books, and has written columns for, or submitted opinion pieces to, many newspapers across North America. He frequently participates in discussion panels on television, and has lectured prolifically in the U.S. and abroad. He served as an adviser to Rudolph Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign. According to The New York Times: "Among his supporters, Mr. Pipes enjoys a heroic status; among his detractors, he is reviled."
Pipes was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of Harvard historian Richard Pipes and his wife Irene (née Roth), and grew up in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Both his parents were from assimilated Polish Jewish families that fled from Poland in 1939. The couple met in the United States in 1944, and married two years later. Daniel was their first child.
Education
Pipes attended the Harvard pre-school, then received a private school education, partly abroad. He enrolled in Harvard University, where his father was then still a professor, in the fall of 1967; for his first two years he studied mathematics, but has said: "I wasn't smart enough. So I chose to become a historian." He said he "found the material too abstract." He credits visits to the Sahara Desert in 1968 and the Sinai Desert in 1969 for piquing his interest in the Arabic language, and visits to Niger and Tunisia for piquing his interest in the Islamic world, and he changed his major to Middle East history. For the next two years Pipes studied Arabic and the Middle East, obtaining a B.A. in history in 1971; his senior thesis was titled A Medieval Islamic Debate: The World Created in Eternity, a study of Al-Ghazali. After graduating in 1971, Pipes spent nearly two years in Cairo. He learned Arabic and studied the Quran, which he states gave him an appreciation for Islam.
Career in academia
Pipes returned to Harvard in 1973 and obtained a Ph.D. in medieval Islamic history in 1978. His Ph.D. dissertation eventually became his first book, Slave Soldiers and Islam, in 1981. He studied abroad for six years, three of which were spent in Egypt, where he wrote a book on colloquial Egyptian Arabic which was published in 1983. He switched his academic interest from medieval Islamic studies to modern Islam in the late 1970s.
He taught world history at the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1982, history at Harvard from 1983 to 1984, and policy and strategy at the Naval War College from 1984 to 1986. In 1983, Pipes served on the policy-planning staff at the State Department.
Post-academia
Pipes largely retired from academia after 1986, though in 2007 he taught a course titled "International Relations: Islam and Politics" as a visiting professor at Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy. Pipes told an interviewer from Harvard Magazine that he has "the simple politics of a truck driver, not the complex ones of an academic. My viewpoint is not congenial with institutions of higher learning.". His articles have been translated into numerous languages, including Latin.
From 1986 on, Pipes worked for various think tanks. From 1986 to 1993 he was director of the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) and editor of its journal, Orbis. In 1990 he organized the Middle East Forum as a unit of FPRI; it became an independent organization with himself as head. Pipes edits its journal, the Middle East Quarterly. In 2002, he established Campus Watch as a project of the Middle East Forum.
In 2003, President George W. Bush nominated Pipes for the board of the United States Institute of Peace. After a controversy including a filibuster by Democratic Senators, Pipes obtained the position by recess appointment.
Pipes' think tank the Middle East Forum established a website in 2002 called Campus Watch, which identified what it saw as five problems in the teaching of Middle Eastern studies at American universities: "analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students." According to the New York Times, Campus Watch is the project for which Pipes is "perhaps best known."
Through Campus Watch, Pipes encouraged students and faculty to submit information on "Middle East-related scholarship, lectures, classes, demonstrations, and other activities relevant to Campus Watch". The project was accused of "McCarthyesque intimidation" of professors who criticized Israel when it published "dossiers" on eight professors it thought "hostile" to America. In protest, more than 100 academics demanded to be added to what some called a "blacklist". In October 2002 Campus Watch removed the dossiers from their website.
For his views on Islam and the Middle East, Pipes has attracted both condemnation and praise.
Support of Pipes' views
Conservative Jewish Columnist Jeff Jacoby writes: "To hear his critics tell it, Pipes is an 'Islamophobe'", but in Jacoby's view, "these are gross and vicious libels."
Nicholas D. Kristof of the New York Times writes that despite the fact that he disagrees with Pipes on the Middle East, he finds him “smart and well-informed.”
Michael Moran of MSNBC described Pipes as one of the best-known "Mideast policy luminaries".
The Ayn Rand Institute has featured him as a speaker at least half a dozen times.
Criticism of Pipes' views
In The Nation, Brooklyn writer Kristine McNeil describes Pipes as an "anti-Arab propagandist" who has built a career out of "distortions... twist[ing] words, quot[ing] people out of context and stretch[ing] the truth to suit his purpose." James Zogby argues that Pipes possesses an "obsessive hatred of all things Muslim", and that "Pipes is to Muslims what David Duke is to African-Americans". Christopher Hitchens, a fellow supporter of the Iraq War and critic of political Islam, has also criticized Pipes, arguing that Pipes pursues an intolerant agenda, "confuses scholarship with propaganda", and "pursues petty vendettas with scant regard for objectivity."
Pipes's views gained widespread public attention when they triggered a filibuster in the United States Senate against his nomination by President George W. Bush to the board of the United States Institute of Peace. Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA) explained that he was "offended" by Pipes's comments on Islam, and that while "some people call [Pipes] a scholar... this is not the kind of person you want on the USIP." While defending Pipes's nomination, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer distanced Bush from Pipes's views, saying that Bush "disagrees with Pipes about whether Islam is a peaceful religion."
In addition, Pipes has sparked local controversies as an invited speaker at college campuses. When Pipes was invited to speak at the University of Toronto in March 2005, a letter from professors, staff and students asserted that Pipes had a "long record of xenophobic, racist and sexist [speeches] that goes back to 1990."University officials said they would not interfere with Pipes's visit.
Professor John L. Esposito of Georgetown University has called Pipes "a bright, well-trained expert with considerable experience", but accuses Pipes of "selectivity and distortion" when asserting that "10 to 15 percent of the worlds Muslims are militants". Esposito writes that Pipes' methodology "is as legitimate as equating all American Jews who have emigrated to Israel with Dr. Baruch Goldstein, the American physician who emigrated to Israel and later slaughtered some 25 Muslims at prayer in the Hebron mosque. Pipes knows much better."
Radical and moderate Islam
Pipes has long expressed concern about what he calls the danger of "radical" or "militant Islam" to the Western world. In 1985, he wrote in Middle East Insight that "[t]he scope of the radical fundamentalist's ambition poses novel problems; and the intensity of his onslaught against the United States makes solutions urgent." In the fall 1995 issue of National Interest, he wrote: "Unnoticed by most Westerners, war has been unilaterally declared on Europe and the United States."
He wrote this in the aftermath of the Oklahoma City bombing; investigative journalist Steven Emerson had said in the aftermath of the bombing that it bore a "Middle Eastern trait." Pipes agreed with Emerson and told USA Today that the United States was "under attack" and that Islamic fundamentalists "are targeting us." Four months before the September 11, 2001 attacks, Pipes and Emerson wrote in the Wall Street Journal that al Qaeda was "planning new attacks on the U.S." and that Iranian operatives "helped arrange advanced ... training for al Qaeda personnel in Lebanon where they learned, for example, how to destroy large buildings."
Pipes has written, "It’s a mistake to blame Islam, a religion 14 centuries old, for the evil that should be ascribed to militant Islam, a totalitarian ideology less than a century old. Militant Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution." Pipes believes that moderate Muslims "constitute a very small movement", but a "brave" one, which the U.S. government should "give priority to locating, meeting with, funding, forwarding, empowering, and celebrating". He suggests that "radical Islam is the problem and moderate Islam the solution".
Pipes has praised Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey and the Sudanese thinker Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. In a September 2008 interview by Peter Robinson, Pipes stated that Muslims can be divided into three categories: "traditional Islam", which he sees as pragmatic and non-violent, "Islamism", which he sees as dangerous and militant, and "moderate Islam", which he sees as underground and not yet codified into a popular movement. He elaborated that he did not have the "theological background" to determine what group follows the Koran the closest and is truest to its intent.
Muslims in Europe
In 1990, Pipes wrote in the National Review that "Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene...All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most." After these sentences "attracted controversy" Pipes, when reprinting the article on his website, said "my goal in it was to characterize the thinking of Western Europeans, not give my own views. In retrospect, I should either have put the words 'brown-skinned peoples' and 'strange foods' in quotation marks or made it clearer that I was explaining European attitudes rather than my own."
In response to the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy, Pipes wrote that the "key issue at stake" was whether the "West [would] stand up for its customs and mores, including freedom of speech" and the "right to insult and blasphemy". He supported Robert Spencer's call to "stand resolutely with Denmark." He lauded Norway, Germany and France for their stance on the cartoons and freedom of speech, but criticized Poland, Britain, New Zealand and the United States for giving statements he interpreted as "wrongly apologizing."
Muslims in the United States
According to The New York Times, Pipes has "enraged" many American Muslims by advocating that Muslims in government and military positions be given special attention as security risks and by opining that mosques are "breeding grounds for militants."
In October, 2001 Pipes said, before the convention of the American Jewish Congress. "I worry very much, from the Jewish point of view, that the presence, and increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims, because they are so much led by an Islamist leadership, that this will present true dangers to American Jews."
The New York Times cited as Pipes helping to "lead the charge" against Debbie Almontaser, a woman with a "longstanding reputation as a Muslim moderate" whom Pipes viewed as a representative of a new movement of "lawful Islamists." Almontaser resigned "under pressure" as principal of an Arabic-language high school in New York City named after famed Christian Arab-American scholar Khalil Gibran, which Pipes initially described as a "madrassa" which means school in Arabic but, in the West, carries the implication of Islamic teaching, though he later said that his use of the term had been "a bit of a stretch". Pipes explained his opposition: "It is hard to see how violence, how terrorism will lead to the implementation of sharia... It is much easier to see how, working through the system ... the school system, the media, the religious organizations, the government, businesses and the like ... you can promote radical Islam.”
Pipes has criticized the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), which he says is an "apologist" for Hezbollah and Hamas, and has a "roster of employees and board members connected to terrorism". CAIR, in turn, has written of Pipes that his "agenda-driven polemic... only serves to fan the flames of ignorance and prejudice. But perhaps that is his intent."
Tashbih Sayyed, former editor of the Muslim World Today and the Pakistan Times, called Pipes "a Cassandra. He must be listened to. If there is no Daniel Pipes, there is no source for America to learn to recognize the evil which threatens it... Muslims in America that are like Samson; they have come into the temple to pull down the pillars, even if it means destroying themselves." On the other hand, Ahmed Subhy Mansour, a former visiting fellow at Harvard Law School, writes, "We Muslims need a thinker like Dr. Pipes, who can criticize the terrorist culture within Islam."
On his own website and in articles for The Jerusalem Post, Pipes claimed that Barack Obama was a former Muslim. He alleged that Obama falsely claims that he had never been a Muslim, and that "the campaign appears to be either ignorant or fabricating when it states that Obama never prayed in a mosque." Pipes wrote an article for FrontPage Magazine entitled "Confirmed: Barack Obama Practiced Islam." According to Pipes, "this matters" because Democratic presidential candidate Obama "is now what Islamic law calls a murtadd (apostate), an ex-Muslim converted to another religion who must be executed", and as president this would have "large potential implications for his relationship with the Muslim world." Media Matters for America described Pipes' article as promoting a "falsehood". Ben Smith, in an article on The Politico responded to these accusations claiming that they amounted to a "template for a faux-legitimate assault on Obama's religion" and that Daniel Pipes' work "is pretty stunning in the twists of its logic".
On a program on the Fox News Network, Pipes claimed that scholar Rashid Khalidi was an employee of the Palestinian Liberation Organization, at the time when the United States government designated the PLO as a 'terrorist organization', and that Barack Obama had alleged "financial ties" with Khalidi and that Khalidi hosted a fundraiser for Obama.
Pipes was a firm supporter of the Vietnam War, and when his fellow students occupied the Harvard administration building to protest it in the 1960s, he sided with the administration. Pipes had previously considered himself to be a Democrat, but after anti-war George McGovern gained the 1972 Democratic nomination for President, he switched to the Republican Party. Pipes used to accept being described as a "neoconservative", once saying that "others see me that way, and, you know, maybe I am one of them." However, he explicitly rejected the label in April 2009 due to differences with the neoconservative positions on democracy and Iraq, now considering himself a "plain conservative".
Europe
In July 16, 2002, Pipes wrote in The New York Post that the differences between the United States and Europeans over the coming invasion of Iraq represented a part of a long term shift rather than a temporary event. He argued that differences were "likely to grow with time" and that "Americans need pay it less and less attention" while instead looking "increasingly to countries outside Europe... for meaningful military alliances."
Iraq
In 1987, Pipes encouraged the United States to provide Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein with upgraded weapons and intelligence to counterbalance Iran's successes in the Iran—Iraq War. He wrote that "Iraq has a history of anti-Americanism, anti-Zionism, support for terrorism, and friendliness toward the Soviet Union", but "If our tilt toward Iraq is reciprocated, moreover, it could lay the basis for fruitful relationship in the longer term." After the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Pipes remarked that he still stands by his recommendation, comparing it to the United States' temporary alliance with Stalin during World War II. He has debated this view with Philosophy Professor Irfan Khawaja via the History News Network.
In April 1991, when a debate was raging about the desirability of a U.S. intervention against the Saddam Hussein regime, Pipes wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the prospect of U.S. forces occupying Iraq, "with Schwartzkopf Pasha ruling from Baghdad": "It sounds romantic, but watch out. Like the Israelis in southern Lebanon nine years ago, American troops would find themselves quickly hated, with Shi'as taking up suicide bombing, Kurds resuming their rebellion, and the Syrian and Iranian governments plotting new ways to sabotage American rule. Staying in place would become too painful, leaving too humiliating."
In 2002 and 2003, Pipes was a strong backer of the Iraq War, saying that Saddam Hussein posed an "imminent threat" to the United States. In a New York Post article published April 8, 2003, Pipes expressed his opposition to Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak's concerned prediction that "[the] war [in Iraq] will have horrible consequences...Terrorism will be aggravated...Terrorist organizations will be united...Everything will be insecure." Though this concern was echoed by various other politicians and academics cited by Pipes in his article, Pipes argued that "the precise opposite is more likely to happen: The war in Iraq will lead to a reduction in terrorism." Pipes has since admitted in response to the latter statement that, "Mubarak got this one right and I got it wrong. It could have been otherwise, but the too-close involvement of the coalition troops in Iraq has spurred Muslim anger and fostered more terrorism."
Pipes has criticized the policies of the occupation of Iraq. He called for "a third position" of "Iraqification" (in reference to Vietnamization). He advocated "getting foreigners quickly out of the business of running Iraq... that elections be delayed and that authority be turned over to a democratically minded Iraqi strongman." He also stated that "I think it is possible and necessary at times to go to war without taking responsibility for the country that you make war on."
Arab-Israeli conflict
Pipes is a supporter of Israel in the Arab-Israeli conflict and an opponent of a Palestinian state. He wrote in Commentary in April 1990 that "there can be either an Israel or a Palestine, but not both... to those who ask why the Palestinians must be deprived of a state, the answer is simple: grant them one and you set in motion a chain of events that will lead either to its extinction or the extinction of Israel." Pipes has proposed a Three state solution to the conflict, in which Gaza would be given to Egypt and the West Bank to Jordan.
In September 2008, he said, "Palestinians do not accept the existence of a Jewish state. Until that change, I don't see any point in having any kind of negotiations whatsoever." He also described the Israeli public as focused on a mistaken policy that he considers to be "appeasement".
Iran
Pipes currently advocates that U.S. President Barack Obama "give orders for the U.S. military to destroy Iran’s nuclear-weapon capacity ... The time to act is now." He claims that "circumstances are propitious" for the US to initiate a bombing of Iran, and that "no one other than the Iranian rulers and their agents denies that the regime is rushing headlong to build a large nuclear arsenal." He further states that a unilateral US bombing of Iran "would require few 'boots on the ground' and entail relatively few casualties, making an attack more politically palatable."
Pipes' opposition to Iran is long-standing. In 1980, Pipes wrote that "Iran made the transition to a post-oil economy. It is the only major oil exporter to abandon the heady billions and return to live by its own means." Pipes was critical of the Reagan administration for its role in the Iran-Contra affair, writing that "American actions also helped to legitimize other kinds of help for, and capitulation to, the Ayatollah."
Pipes has previously advocated that the U.S. "unleash" the Mujahedeen-e Khalq (MEK) against Iran. Though MEK is listed as a terrorist group by the United States, the European Union, Canada, Iraq and Iran, Pipes describes this listing as a "sop to the mullahs". He writes, "the MEK poses no danger to Americans or Europeans, and has not for decades. It does pose a danger to the malign, bellicose theocratic regime in Tehran."
Saudi Arabia
Pipes believes that Saudi Arabia is neither a "friend" nor a "foe" of the United States, but a "rival".
Pipes believes that what he views as Saudi Arabia's "massive implication in the death of 3,000 Americans on 9/11... is reason for the victims and their families to consider suing it for compensation."
