polls, palestinians and the path to peace, page-7

Daniel Pipes!!! Would you say after reading this lot below that he was a little biased???


PIPES SAYS ENFRANCHISEMENT OF U.S. MUSLIMS THREATENS JEWS



"I worry very much from the Jewish point of view that the presence, and increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims...will present true dangers to American Jews."

Daniel Pipes speaking before the convention of the American Jewish Congress, 10/21/2001

---



DANIEL PIPES SAYS ALL MUSLIMS MUST BE WATCHED

THE WAR'S MOST AGONIZING ISSUE
Daniel Pipes, Jerusalem Post, 1/22/03

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.

Muslim visitors and immigrants must undergo additional background checks.
Mosques require a scrutiny beyond that applied to churches, synagogues and
temples. Muslim schools require increased oversight to ascertain what is
being taught to children…



---

DANIEL PIPES: WAR OF THE DIATRIBES
Peter Rodgers, Weekend Australian, 11/16/02
Peter Rodgers is a former Australian ambassador to Israel.

Militant Islam Reaches America
By Daniel Pipes, Norton, 296pp, $49.95

READING Daniel Pipes's latest book, brimming with dire warnings of Islamic threats, made me deeply envious. I so wish I could be a polemicist, then I'd never have to worry about accuracy and balance, about passing off egregious nonsense as alarming statement of fact, about repetition and self-contradiction. I, too, could trumpet mediocre fictions as insightful prophecies…

Pipes's solution to the problem of militant Islam amounts to supporting its enemies, whoever they are and no matter what they do, just as it earlier made sense to stick by Saigon or Augusto Pinochet in Chile. It was, of course, the US's later determination to stick by those fighting the Russian communists in Afghanistan that led the CIA into bed with Osama bin Laden. How little we learn...

---

BALTIMORE SUN SLAMS DANIEL PIPES' BOOK

'MILITANT ISLAM' -- IGNORING HISTORY AND CURRENT REALITY
Robert Ruby, Baltimore Sun, 9/29/02

A polemic has license for exaggeration, but Militant Islam makes indefensible claims. Citing Iran's eight-year war against Iraq, Pipes suggests that Islamic states are inherently war-like, ignoring the fact that the war was started by secular Iraq. Afghanistan's civil wars are blamed on militant Islam, a gross simplification ignoring the venality and murderousness of the warlords who opened the way for the Taliban…

A chapter devoted to the unmasking of Islamic sleeper cells could be mistaken for self-parody. Clues to search for include, "Sending or receiving large amounts of money; criminal activity, especially reliance on counterfeited money and smuggling; a promising career that failed, descent into drugs and alcohol, then redemption through Islam; an offer to work for the enemy's intelligence service…"

---

DANIEL PIPES LAUNCHES "ENEMIES LIST" WEB SITE

Pro-Israel Web Site To Monitor Views Of US Academia
Daniel Golden, Dow Jones News Service, 9/17/02

NEW YORK - (Dow Jones) - A pro-Israel think tank plans to start an Internet site Wednesday to monitor the attitudes of American professors and universities toward Islamic fundamentalism and the Arab-Israeli conflict.

To be launched by the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, www.campus-watch.org will maintain what it calls "dossiers" on professors and academic institutions and collect information from students regarding their teachers' political opinions…

-----

DANIEL PIPES AND "THE WAR ON ACADEMIC FREEDOM"
Kristine McNeil, The Nation, 11/11/02

The year since Congress passed the USA Patriot Act has brought an ever-growing enemies list from our nation's thought police…

Based in Philadelphia and headed by anti-Arab propagandist Daniel Pipes, Campus Watch unleashed an Internet firestorm in late September, when it posted "dossiers" on eight scholars who have had the audacity to criticize US foreign policy and the Israeli occupation. As a gesture of solidarity, more than 100 academics subsequently contacted the Middle East Forum asking to be added to the list…

As with redbaiting during the 1950s, the leaders of these current attacks are exploiting the fear and anxiety the American public feels about enemies abroad in order to advance their own political agenda. Now with access to
the Internet, Pipes and his supporters have been able to expand their attacks into a virtually limitless campaign of harassment and intimidation…

The Campus Watch site is a showcase for the signature distortions on which Pipes has built his twenty-five-year career. He twists words, quotes people out of context and stretches the truth to suit his purpose…

Pipes is notorious in the academy for calling Muslims "barbarians" and "potential killers" in a 2001 National Review article and accusing them of scheming to "replace the [US] Constitution with the Koran," in a similar piece in Insight on the News. Along these lines, a 1990 National Review article insisted 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."



In addition to running the Middle East Forum, serving on a Defense Department antiterrorism task force and writing columns for the Jerusalem and New York Post, Pipes is also a regular contributor to the website of
Gamla, an organization founded by former Israeli military officers and settlers that endorses the ethnic cleansing of every Palestinian as "the only possible solution" to the Arab-Israeli conflict…

---

DANIEL PIPES: BRANDED A BIGOT
DOUGLAS CARD, Oregonian, 11/17/02

Last summer I suffered collateral damage as the protagonists in the Middle East conflict brought the verbal war home to Oregon. In his column in the New York Post, controversial columnist Daniel Pipes listed me as one of
several leftist anti-Semites at U.S. universities whose extremist rhetoric encouraged attacks on Jewish students.

Based on the false claims of a disgruntled student, Pipes charged that I had called Israelis "baby-killers" and "bashed Israelis and Jews at every opportunity" in my University of Oregon sociology class last fall.

This accusation of racism cut to the root of who I am and what I do as a sociologist. It has been one of the most painful experiences of my life. From here to Jerusalem, where it also was published, it libeled my name
and the university's…

I've learned many things from this terrible ordeal. Although I value both freedom of the press and academic freedom, this case is a reminder that these freedoms must be accompanied by the thoughtful exercise of civility
and professional responsibility. Never should we impugn the character of another without first carefully checking the facts.

Once the accusations are out there, they are hard to dispel. In fact, with Pipes' column still on his Web site, I and others he attacked have received hundreds of incredibly vicious spam e-mails in the past few weeks, some of
which were responses to forged messages from my "hijacked" e-mail identification…

We must not allow intimidation to replace thoughtful, open-minded discourse in our communities and on our campuses during this time of ethnic conflicts and increasing nationalism…

---

THOUGHT CRIME ON CAMPUS
John Sugg, Creative Loafing, 10/2/02

Last month, the blitzkrieg (and that word was chosen precisely for its Nazi allusion) against academia roared into high gear. Daniel Pipes, one of America's most notorious Arab-haters and Islamophobes (qualities held in
high esteem in Washington these days), launched a website, www.campus-watch.org, that solicits students to spy on their teachers…

Pipes is best known for his strident and often racist denunciations of Arabs and Islam. In an effort to divide Americans -- one that if you inserted "blacks" for "Muslims" and "whites" for "Jews," would be vigorously damned as KKK-speech -- he told the American Jewish Congress a year ago that he worries "the presence and increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims...will present true dangers to American Jews."

I contacted Pipes, and he not only confirmed his quote but, incredibly, added: "It is accurate in itself but you must note that this was spoken to a Jewish audience. I make the same point respectively to audiences of
women, gays, civil libertarians, Hindus, Evangelical Christians, atheists, and scholars of Islam, among others, all of whom face 'true dangers' as the number of Muslims increases..."

---

PIPES SEEKS TO BLOCK ASHRAWI SPEECH
WASHINGTON TIMES, 9/13/02

COLORADO SPRINGS - Hundreds of protesters brought some of the furor of the Middle East conflict to Colorado yesterday as Hanan Ashrawi delivered the keynote address at a symposium on the September 11 terrorist attacks…

College President Richard Celeste, the former Democratic governor of Ohio and U.S. ambassador to India, defended the college's right to invite provocative speakers and said that pro-Israeli scholar Gideon Doron would
respond to Mrs. Ashrawi's talk with a keynote address today.

That didn't satisfy protesters, who came armed with their own keynote speaker, Middle East scholar and author Daniel Pipes. Speaking to demonstrators outside after Mrs. Ashrawi's address, Mr. Pipes called her appearance at the event "a grievous error."

"Simply put, the United States is engaged in a war on terror, and Mrs. Ashrawi is on the side of America's enemies," said Mr. Pipes, who was escorted to the college by state Attorney General Ken Salazar.

"We should work so that this type of anti-American spokeswoman is not welcome on American campuses," Mr. Pipes said…

---

PIPES AND DERSHOWITZ: AUTHORS WITH A BIAS
Gary D. Keenan, Vancouver Sun, 9/14/02

Kudos to Tim Carter for his perceptive reviews of Militant Islam Reaches America by Daniel Pipes and Why Terrorism Works by Alan Dershowitz ("Two analysts come up empty," Sept. 7).

Those familiar with their track records understand that, in writing these books, Pipes and Dershowitz are promoting a point of view that is pro-Israel and anti-Arab/Muslim. As an "associate" of the pro-Israel Washington Institute for Near East Policy, which is connected to like-minded organizations such as the Middle East Forum, the Middle East Research Institute and superhawk Richard Perle's American Enterprise Institute, Pipes has made a career of Arab- and Muslim-bashing...

---

DANIEL PIPES: GREAT LEAPS OF UTTER NONSENSE
Don Wycliff, Chicago Tribune, 10/31/02

Last Friday, while all the talking heads who had filled the airwaves with their expert opinions during the D.C.-area sniper crisis were wiping egg from their faces, Pipes was declaring in his column that the outcome was
really quite unsurprising and elementary. "It came as no surprise," he wrote, "to learn that the lead suspect as the Washington, D.C.-area sniper is John Allen Muhammad, an African-American who converted to Islam about 17
years ago. Nor did it surprise that seven years ago he provided security for Louis Farrakhan's 'Million Man March.' Even less does it amaze that he reportedly sympathized with the Sept. 11 attacks carried out by militant
Islamic elements."

And why was what so many others found remarkable "no surprise" to Pipes?

Because, he said, "it fits into a well-established tradition of American blacks who convert to Islam turning against their country."

Huh? "Well-established tradition"? "Turning against their country"…?

In speaking of an alienation that "goes back decades," Pipes is being either disingenuous or willfully ignorant. Only in very recent decades has America ceased to impose alienation on its black citizens. The wonder is not that an Elijah Muhammad defied the draft during World War II; the wonder is that many more African-Americans did not.

Finally, to suggest that John Allen Muhammad undertook his alleged homicidal odyssey out of some ideological motivation is not only to pop off without so much as a shred of evidence, it is to go against the evidence
that does exist and that suggests this was a man with a terribly diseased mind.

Daniel Pipes has done well over the last few years, hammering away at the dangers of militant Islam. But his column on the sniper suspect just demonstrates the wisdom of an old expression: When the only tool you've got
is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail.

---

DANISH POLITICIANS REFUTE DANIEL PIPES' "FACTS"
Elisabeth Arnold and Elsebeth Gerner Nielsen, National Post, 9/6/02

As Danish politicians, we are offended by the way integration problems in Denmark were portrayed by Daniel Pipes and Lars Hedegaard and we wish to set the record straight (Muslim Extremism: Denmark's had Enough, Daniel Pipes and Lars Hedegaard, Aug. 27).

The authors claim that 40% of Danish welfare expenses are consumed by Muslim immigrants…Muslim immigrants do not receive 40% of those allocations even though they represent a substantial part of the clients. The main
reason being: It is hard to compete on a job market not interested in employing immigrants.

The further assumption that more than half of all rapists in Denmark are Muslims is without any basis in fact, as criminal registers do not record religion.

NOTE: In the article referenced above, Daniel Pipes smears the Muslim community in Denmark with several accusations eerily similar to those leveled against the Jewish community in Europe by anti-Semitic propagandists prior to World War II.

These include: 1) being parasites on the society, 2) being disproportionately engaged in criminal behavior, 3) having "unacceptable" customs, 4) seeking to take over the country, and 5) sexual aggression
against women in the dominant culture.

---

THE REAL `DANGER WITHIN' IS RELIGIOUS HATRED
H.D.S. GREENWAY, The Boston Globe, 12/24/2001

It was with sadness, then, that I picked up a copy of Commentary last month to find that professor Daniel Pipes…had written an article entitled: "The Danger Within: Militant Islam in America."

After mocking editorial writers, politicians, and the president of the United States for having "tripped over themselves" to describe American Muslims as just ordinary people who "love their country," Pipes warned that
the "Muslim population in this country is not like any other group, for it includes within it a substantial body of people…who share with the suicide hijackers a hatred of the United States…"

Thus having set the stage for the entire Muslim population in this country to be considered "not like any other group," Pipes goes on to cherry-pick statements from Muslims, not all of them Americans, that would indicate their evil intentions…

This kind of rhetoric is the real face of the danger within.

---

DANIEL PIPES' WEB SITE MAINTAINED BY ISRAELI SETTLER

Daniel Pipes' web site, www.danielpipes.org, is maintained by an Israeli settler, http://grayson.org.il/, who is also webmaster for a settler news service, http://www.yeshanews.org/.

Pipes' webmaster describes his reasons for creating YeshaNews:

"My name is Grayson Levy, and YeshaNews is my personal project - one of the ways I try to make the world a better place. I am committed to reporting, in real time, all that's newsworthy from Yesha. Whether it's bad tidings, such as the incessant stonings, drive-by shootings, or road-side bombs, or good news, such as a community activity, a new housing project in a Jewish community, or a new bypass road opening, YeshaNews will have it first, and in some cases, exclusively."

Editorials published by YeshaNews go so far as to deny the existence of the Palestinian people:

"The time has come to formally recognize that there is no palestinian people, they have never existed, they are a figment of our imagination, the fruit of years of Arafat deceit. The so-called palestinians are Arabs, who
have nothing more in common than their language and religion. They have never had a homeland, and certainly not in Eretz Yisrael. Search in history books from the 1940s, 50s, 60s, even 70s and find references to the
palestinian people. They will not be found, because they do not exist."

---

DANIEL PIPES AND THE NEW INQUISITION
By Justin Raimondo, Antiwar.com, 11/14/2001
http://www.antiwar.com/justin/j111401.html

A whole mini-industry has grown up in the wake of the 9/11 atrocity dedicated to the proposition that Islam is the root of all evil in the world. Just as anti-Communism employed and otherwise elevated a whole cadre
of professional witch-hunters - and witch-doctors - so the rise of anti-Islamism opens up a whole new frontier for those thrown out of work by the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the cold war. With untold
billions of tax dollars being thrown into the "war on terrorism," the market for anti-Islamists, once severely restricted, has expanded exponentially, and this field of expertise is no longer quite so rarefied.
The war has made formerly obscure figures, such as New York Post columnist and author Daniel Pipes, familiar to news junkies, and it is in Pipes that the anti-Islamist ideology takes on its purest, most extreme form...

Pipes believes that the international Islamist conspiracy - there is no other way to phrase it - is out not to destroy America but to subjugate it. Asked by Salon whether the goal of the Islamists is to create a Muslim
state in America, his answer was "without a doubt." One can only wonder if he said this with a straight face. Pipes went on to explain that this meant a state prohibition on converting out of Islam, as well as the banning of
pork, criminalizing adultery, and "doing away with the equality of the sexes." How does he know this? Well, you see, he kind of divines it...

He can "sense" it! US intelligence agencies are employing the services of psychics in the search for Osama bin Laden, according to reports, but Pipes' extrasensory powers are even more valuable to the war on the home
front. For Pipes and his ilk are the attack dogs of the New Inquisition, whose job it is to sniff out "intimations" of treason…

The view of the anti-Islamists coincides perfectly with the perspective of the Israeli foreign ministry. What they want is the sort of "war on terrorism" the Bush administration is laboring mightily to deny: a war on
Islam. A war in which the US and its faithful ally, Israel, take on the entire Muslim world - and US military power is utilized, albeit indirectly, to further the dream of a Greater Israel...

---

DANIEL PIPES SAYS "RAZE" PALESTINIAN VILLAGES
The National Post, 7/18/01

Israel needs to take more active steps...Bury suicide bombers in potter's fields rather than deliver their bodies to relatives (who turn their funerals into frenzied demonstrations)…Permit no transportation of people
or goods beyond basic necessities. Shut off utilities to the PA...Raze the PA's illegal offices in Jerusalem, its security infrastructure and villages from which attacks are launched.

---

DANIEL PIPES HIRES PR FIRM FOR STEVEN EMERSON

A Little PR Help Never Hurts
National Journal, 12/01/2001

Prominent anti-terrorism expert Steven Emerson has received a lot of attention recently, thanks in part to help from the PR and lobbying firm BKSH & Associates. The Middle East Forum [headed by Daniel Pipes], which
helps finance Emerson's research on terrorism, hired BKSH after September 11. BKSH played a role in arranging airtime recently for Jihad in America, a 1994 video that Emerson made about terrorist cells in the United States.
The video was aired at a congressional hearing in October at which Emerson testified.

SEE: STEVEN EMERSON'S CRUSADE - "Why is a journalist pushing questionable stories from behind the scenes?" By John F. Sugg - http://www.fair.org/extra/9901/emerson.html

---

PROTOCOLS OF THE ELDERS OF MECCA?

WEB PROVIDES EQUAL OPPORTUNITY FOR HATRED
Vlae Kershner, The San Francisco Chronicle, 8/17/00

"There's plenty of narrow-mindedness against a wide variety of groups on the Web. Consider this on www.jewishworldreview.com, a well-designed webzine for politically conservative Jews.

"In a column on the mixed reaction to Lieberman among Muslims, columnist Daniel Pipes baldly states that Muslim claims that they face discrimination and harassment in the United States are 'false.' He gives no supporting
evidence.

"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?"

---

PIPES SAYS PALESTINIANS ARE "A MISERABLE PEOPLE"

"The Palestinians are a miserable people...and they deserve to be."
Daniel Pipes, Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, July 2001

---

POLICE, MUSLIMS REFUTE HERNDON LINK TO TERRORISM
Jeannie Baumann, Herndon (Va.) Observer, 6/15/2001

The Herndon police chief has refuted a statement in a Wall Street Journal editorial [by Steven Emerson and Daniel Pipes] that identified Herndon as the location of an organized terrorist cell connected to international terrorist Osama bin Laden...

...Herndon Police Chief Toussaint E. Summers Jr. said the police department contacted the Federal Bureau of Investigation after the editorial appeared to verify the citing, and he said the bureau has no evidence of any al-Qaeda activity in the town.

"All we did was try to verify the information in the article, and there appears to be no truth to it at all..."



WHO IS DANIEL PIPES?





Throughout his career, Daniel Pipes has exhibited a troubling bigotry toward Muslims and Islam. As early as 1983, even an otherwise positive Washington Post book review noted that Pipes displays "a disturbing hostility to contemporary Muslims...he professes respect for Muslims but is frequently contemptuous of them." Pipes, said the reviewer, "is swayed by the writings of anti-Muslim writers...[the book] is marred by exaggerations, inconsistencies, and evidence of hostility to the subject." (The Washington Post, 12/11/83)



In The Weekly Standard (1/22/96), Pipes offered a glowing review of the infamous anti-Muslim book "Why I Am Not a Muslim." The National Catholic Reporter (11/17/95) called that book "the literary equivalent of hate radio...literary warfare against Islam," useful only to those "interested in returning to the polemical past to do battle with Islamic believers." Pipes called the book "quite brilliant" and "startlingly novel." "This religion would seem to have nothing functional to offer," remarked Pipes.



Recently, Pipes questioned the origins of the Quran, Islam's revealed text, and questioned whether the Prophet Muhammad ever existed.



He wrote: "The Koran is a not 'a product of Muhammad or even of Arabia,' but a collection of earlier Judeo-Christian liturgical materials stitched together to meet the needs of a later age...A few scholars go even further, doubting even the existence of Muhammad." (The Jerusalem Post, 5/12/2000)



According to Pipes, the night journey of the Prophet Muhammad from Mecca to Jerusalem referred to in the Quran (17:1) never occurred. This event, known as "al-Isra wa al-Miraj," is marked each year by millions of Muslims worldwide. In the Los Angeles Times, Pipes wrote: "The Prophet Mohammed never went to the city, nor did he have ties to it." (7/21/2000)



Pipes also 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.



In 1990, he said: "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." (National Review, 11/19/90)



In a review of a book that called for dialogue with the Muslim world, Pipes objected to the fact that the author: "...fails to...consider the implications of growing Muslim populations in the West. [The book], in other words, provides little guidance to the Islamic threat." (Wall Street Journal, 10/30/92)



On a radical pro-Israel web site, Pipes claims that "as the population of Muslims in the United States grows, so does antisemitism."

("The New Anti-Semitism," http://freeman.io.com/m_online/jan98/pipes.htm)



He does not limit this claim to Arab Muslims alone. Pipes wrote that "Iranians and Pakistanis, to take two groups of non-Arabs, are at least as widely conspiracy-minded and as anti-Semitic as, say, Tunisians and Kuwaitis." (Commentary, 9/1/99)



Of African-American Muslims, Pipes wrote: "...black converts tend to hold vehemently anti-American, anti-Christian, and anti-Semitic attitudes." (Commentary, 6/1/2000)



In an editorial in Canada's National Post, Pipes implied that the Canadian Muslim community could pose a threat to that country. He wrote: "Following Marxism, Leninism and Fascism comes Islamism...Islamism is a...phenomenon that has the power to do mischief...right here in Canada." (8/7/99)



(Pipes now claims all these quotes were taken out of context.)



This is the same "expert" who claims Muslims have no real religious attachments to the city of Jerusalem and who recently argued that American Muslims pose a threat to the Jewish community. ("If I forget thee: does Jerusalem really matter to Islam?" The New Republic, 4/28/1997, and "America's Muslims against America's Jews," Commentary, 5/01/1999)



In response to a suggestion that American Muslim voter registration drives are a positive development, Pipes wrote: "I fail to see how conducting voter registration drives implies the Islamists are not 'bad.' The CPUSA [Communist Party USA] also staged registration drives, and for similar reasons." (MSANEWS, 8/18/99)



Following the arrest of two Arab graduate students on a flight bound for Washington, D.C., (the airline later apologized for the incident) Pipes supported the practice of religious and ethnic profiling.



According to the Baltimore Sun: "'It seems well worth it in order to keep would-be terrorists off guard,' said Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum, a think tank. He defended the close monitoring of Arab passengers, arguing that 'the record shows over the last generation that the great acts of violence are coming from the Middle East...'" (The Baltimore Sun, 11/24/1999, Page 1A)



Noted scholar and author Edward Said, whose works include "Covering Islam" and "Orientalism," wrote that Pipes is one of a group of anti-Muslim pundits who seek to "make sure that the '[Islamic] threat' is kept before our eyes, the better to excoriate Islam for terror, despotism and violence, while assuring themselves profitable consultancies, frequent TV appearances and book contracts." (The Nation, 8/12/1996)



A former director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies (and one of Pipes' instructors) had this to say:



"...to speak for myself, I have been appalled frequently by his [Pipes] polemical stance on almost everything having to do with Islam, Muslims, or the Palestinian/Israeli issue...



"...The irony in [an article written by Pipes] is of course that Dr. Pipes and other radically and blindly pro-Zionist American Jews are much farther along the chauvinist and ultimately anti-American spectrum than are even radical American Muslims.



"Yet Dr. Pipes, despite his own apparently strong, even blind, support for the Israeli state and its policies -- even those policies that are attacked by thoughtful Israelis themselves as racist and oppressive -- sees no incongruity in his condemnation of many Muslim Americans as a threat to the American state and democracy..." (Posted on Arabic-Info, PNET and Arab Nationalist lists, 9/10/99)



One of the anti-Muslim pundits supported by Pipes is Steven Emerson. Emerson is best known for his 1994 PBS production "Jihad in America." Muslims say he has a long history of defamatory and inaccurate attacks on the Islamic community in this country.



Emerson was the "journalist" who fueled anti-Islamic hysteria by blaming Muslims for the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995. He also said Muslims were responsible for the downing of TWA Flight 800 in 1996.



Emerson's organization, the Investigative Project, is a spin-off of Pipes Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum (MEF). In an investigative report by iViews.com, Emerson confirmed that MEF funded his activities in the past and said: "Clearly I had a very close relationship with them (MEF) and I continue to have a very close relationship."



Emerson is currently involved in a multi-million-dollar defamation lawsuit against a Florida newspaper, its senior editor, and a former investigative reporter for The Associated Press (AP).



The complaint centers on allegations published by the newspaper that two AP reporters said Emerson gave them a document on terrorism supposedly from FBI files. The reporters said the document was actually authored by Emerson. The lawsuit also disputes allegations that Emerson gave false information to a Senate subcommittee during testimony in 1998.



He has recently been forced to retract accusations he made last year about a former journalism lecturer at California State University in Hayward, Ca.



Of Emerson, Pipes says: "I am proud to work with him." (MSANEWS, 9/2/99)



Pipes also seeks to silence those who oppose his one-sided view of Islam. In 1996, he attacked the Council on Foreign Relations for publishing a newsletter that he accused of "giving voice to Muslim fundamentalists." ("Fundamentalist Flap Roiling Council on Foreign Relations," Forward, 5/10/1996)



American Muslims recall Mr. Pipes finger-pointing following the bombing of the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. (Pipes now admits that he was wrong on this point.) As The Village Voice noted: "Leaping directly into hysteria was the right-wing Daniel Pipes...who told USA Today...'People need to understand that this is just the beginning. The fundamentalists are on the upsurge, and they make it very clear that they are targeting us. They are absolutely obsessed with us.'" (5/2/95)



It would seem Mr. Pipes is the one with the obsession.



Given this history of hostility toward Muslims in general and to the American Muslim community in particular, it is not surprising that Pipes paints a black and white image of good "integrationist" or "traditional" Muslims who love mom and apple pie versus bad Muslim "chauvinists" and "Islamists." This distinction without a difference is merely a smoke-screen for attacks on any Muslim who would defend Islam.



In his writings to date, Pipes has never offered objective criteria that would distinguish between "integrationist" and "chauvinists." His definition of "chauvinist" must be fairly broad. In his National Post article, Pipes wrote: "The Internet boasts hundreds of Islamist [chauvinist] sites; I doubt whether there is a single one that is traditional [integrationist] Muslim." (8/7/99)



Pipes obviously hopes to convince people of other faiths that the bad American Muslims are in the majority since he claims they "run most of the Muslim institutions in the United States." (Los Angeles Times, "It Matters What Kind of Islam Prevails," 7/22/99)



In a commentary on Pipes' claim that Muslims wish to take over America *8/17/2000), San Francisco Chronicle writer Vlae Kershner said: "...Daniel Pipes baldly states that Muslim claims that they face discrimination and harassment in the United States are 'false.' He gives no supporting evidence.



"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?"



The kind of agenda-driven polemic offered by Pipes only serves to fan the flames of ignorance and prejudice. But perhaps that is his intent.