Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June 2003, pages 30, 86

Believe It or Not

 

President Bush Nominates Controversial Pipes to Peace Post

 

By Delinda C. Hanley

Believe it or not, President George W. Bush has nominated Daniel Pipes, a man American Muslims regard as "the nation's leading Islamophobe," to the 15-member board of the U.S. Institute of Peace. USIP is a nonpartisan taxpayer-funded federal think tank established by Congress to promote "the prevention, management and resolution of international conflicts."

Just what kind of conflict resolution skills does the controversial Pipes possess? According to Ori Nir in the April 11 Jewish American newspaper Forward, Pipes "espouses a theory of conflict resolution that rests on the assumption that peace usually is achieved only by one side defeating the other with military force or other pressure, and only rarely though reconciliation or negotiation."

The May 1 Milwaukee Journal Sentinel called Pipes "a vicious ideologue, a leading American proponent of the most extreme brand of right-wing Zionism."

Pipes, who heads the Philadelphia-based think tank Middle East Forum <www.meforum.org>, also is a sharp critic of any U.S. efforts to broker Israeli-Palestinian peace, including the president's "road map." In numerous editorials and speeches, available on his Web site, Pipes maintains that "Israel should seek complete victory over the native Arab population of Palestine," which, he says, means "destroying the Palestinians' will to resist Israeli occupation and seizure of their land."

"Pipes' nomination sends entirely the wrong message as America seeks to convince Muslims worldwide that the war on terrorism and the war against Iraq are not attacks on Islam," said Council on American-Islamic Relations executive director Nihad Awad. "Pipes' anti-Muslim polemics have had the opposite impact of that sought by the institute. His views promote unending conflict, not peace."

The Interfaith Alliance, a 150,000-member coalition of 65 faith traditions, agrees, and on May 2 it protested Pipes' nomination because "he clearly harbors inherent biases against Muslim Americans."

Pipes writes columns for the New York Post, the Jerusalem Post, and the Detroit Jewish News. He also appears on television talk shows and has written 11 books, including four on militant Islam. Soon after Pipes launched his slick Web site, <www.danielpipes.org>, which is maintained by Israeli settler Grayson Levy to promote Pipes' articles, another Web site mysterious-ly appeared. That Web site, <www.danielpipes.com>, directed readers to CAIR's informative Web site page titled, "Who is Daniel Pipes?" After a lawsuit was threatened the link, sadly, disappeared. Happily, all the information still is still available at <www.cair.org>.

 

"Israel should seek complete victory over the native Arab population of Palestine," Pipes says.

Pipes' own words expose him for what he is. Increasing numbers of "brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene" are immigrating to the West, he warns. "Muslim customs are more troublesome than most" (National Review, Nov. 19, 1990).

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

In an Oct. 21, 2001 speech to the American Jewish Congress, Pipes warned of the "true dangers" posed by "the presence, and increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims." He has called for increased surveillance of American Muslims, claiming that 10 to 15 percent are "potential killers." And he has stated 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" (Jerusalem Post Jan. 22, 2003).

Pipes' Middle East Forum provides publicity as well as financial assistance to self-proclaimed anti-terrorism expert Steven Emerson. Emerson and Pipes helped fuel anti-Islamic hysteria by immediately blaming the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing and the 1996 crash of TWA Flight 800 on Muslims.

½ontroversy surrounds Pipes, who recently founded Campus-Watch, an initiative reminiscent of McCarthy-era days. The project is dedicated to monitoring college campuses for pro-Arab academic biases. Its Web site (<http://www.campus-watch.org>) lists academics who are critical of U.S. and Israeli policies in the Middle East. Pipes, the May 1 Daily Texan recalled, was quoted in a 2001 National Review article as calling academics he disagrees with "barbarians" and "potential killers" who seek to "replace the [U.S.] Constitution with the Qur'an."

The Pipes appointment is generating headlines for the USIP just as it begins an $80 million fund drive to build a new headquarters on Constitution Avenue on the national capital Mall. The USIP already has an annual operating budget of $16.2 million, wholly funded by U.S. taxpayers. Will Pipes' nomination to the board of directors help USIP's fund-raising efforts?

 

An Anonymous Expert

Another expert on Muslims, who prefers the anonymous "Sarah," provided astounding information about American Muslims to the "FBI, the Treasury Department, Customs, the INS, and even the White House," according to her May 4 "60 Minutes" interview with Bob Simon. Sarah single-handedly shut down the U.S.-based charities Benevolence International Foundation and the Holy Land Foundation for Relief and Development after she accused them of funding al-Qaeda.

Born to a wealthy Jewish Iraqi family, Sarah's mother moved her to Israel when her father, along with eight other Jews, was arrested, convicted and hanged for spying for the Israelis. Sarah began her own career as a "terrorist hunter" by dressing in Muslim hijab and attending meetings in which, she alleges, the Holy Land Foundation charity, solicited contributions for Hamas. When Sarah demanded that the Texas-based charity help find her the child of a "martyr" to sponsor, the Foundation complied. As far as Sarah was concerned, that proves they are terrorists. She contacted the White House, and, she told Simon, "It wasn't long before the whole operation was stopped."

Sarah and "her colleagues" next collected trash from the dumpsters of Muslim-owned offices in the Washington, DC suburb of Herndon, VA. One of the letters they found in the trash was from Saudi Arabia. Sarah produced charts for the "60 Minutes" TV crew that illustrate a flow of cash from Saudi Arabia to Herndon, and then on to charities and think tanks—and chicken farms—all allegedly used to launder money and fund terrorists.

With Sarah's help, the U.S. Customs Department in March 2002 raided the Herndon offices and 28 other locations, carting away truckloads of evidence. (Just what they carted away from the chicken house isn't clear.)

More than a year after the raids, closures, and freezing of assets, no criminal charges have been brought against anyone. If there is real evidence against these charities, moreover, apparently it is too secret to share with attorneys defending the Muslims.

"I am not after Muslims," Sarah claims. "I'm after hunting terrorist Muslims....I know I stopped them. I'm only one person. Give me the credit."

Believe it or not, one anonymous Israeli woman and a headline-grabbing American, Pipes, have accused U.S. scholars, diplomats, chaplains, charity workers and, yes, even chicken farmers of terrorism. They've even hoodwinked the U.S. government into listening to—and paying them for—their self-described "expertise."

Delinda C. Hanley is news editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs.

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