“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.”
-- Daniel Pipes, National Review, Nov. 19, 1990.
Daniel Pipes is expected to speak on campus through the Spotlight Series April 29. For his sycophants, he is a media darling, “expert” on Islam, Muslims and the Arab-Israeli conflict. For most notable scholars of the Middle East, he is a pixilated xenophobic who represents modern-day McCarthyism.
Daniel Pipes is a leading Islamophobe and conspiracy theorist who recently launched campuswatch.org, a website that included “dossiers” on professors and academic institutions thought to be too sympathetic to Islam and Muslims. They even had a whole-page advertisement printed in this very newspaper some months back. That ad was some of the most racist shit I have ever seen in the American media.
Daniel Pipes has supported profiling of Muslims, Arabs, refused to condemn the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and justified Israel’s razing of Palestinian villages.
In the National Post, dated July 18, 2001, he said, “Israel needs to take more active steps ... Bury suicide bombers in potter’s fields rather than deliver their bodies to relatives. Raze the PA’s illegal offices in Jerusalem, its security infrastructure and villages from which attacks are launched.”
He has called for increased surveillance of ordinary American Muslims and claims that 10 to 15 percent of them are potential killers. “There is no escaping the unfortunate fact that Muslim government employees in law enforcement, the military, and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism, as do Muslim chaplains in prisons and the armed forces.” Daniel Pipes, Jerusalem Post, Jan. 22, 2003.
Pipes espouses a theory of conflict resolution that believes that peace usually is achieved only by one side defeating the other with military force or other pressure, and only rarely through reconciliation or negotiation. In the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, dated July 2001, he said, “The Palestinians are a miserable people ... and they deserve to be.”
Besides these caustic statements, he made another great leap of utter nonsense in his career by writing “Militant Islam Reaches America,” which is basically a compilation of his junk statements and vague “research.” He writes garbage like “Profs who hate America” (New York Post, Nov, 12, 2002), which basically was a charlatan’s attempt to stifle any disagreement with Israeli policies.
Daniel Pipes has a long history of advocating the political disenfranchisement and marginalization of America’s Islamic community and regurgitating xenophobic comments.
To allow this campus to be a platform for such a bigot and polemicist who has no academic integrity of any sort is bewildering to say the least. When this self-proclaimed academic comes to campus, he will bleat about blown-up babies and America’s moral obligations to the only democracy in the Middle East called “Israel” without giving any context and preferring to quote only those who are just as notorious as he is.
There is a petition making rounds to prevent him from speaking. Please e-mail me for more information. Finally, I did very sincerely hope that this university rescinds its decision considering that he has made a mockery of academia and can only go around spreading misinformation and hatred.
Sajid Shabbir (sshabbir@students.wisc.edu) is a junior majoring in electrical engineering