Daniel Pipes, a new kind of Israel-basher

Between September 11, 2001 and September 11, 2002, Daniel Pipes became one of the main American commentators focused on terrorism and Islam. According to an analysis made by The Nation, which has just spoken about him in a very caustic way [1], during that period he appeared in 110 television shows and 450 radio programs. His editorials have been welcomed by the Wall Street Journal and Los Angeles Times, whereas the New York Post has included him among its journalists.

The Pipes Dynasty

This sudden mediatic glory is not casual. It is the result of his personal talent, an extensive formation and the prestigious sponsors he has. He plays a key role in the political strategy of the neoconservatives who govern in Washington and Tel Aviv.
To understand this career, we have to go back 30 years in time. In order to put an end to the Watergate crisis and the personal conflicts it provoked, President Gerald Ford took drastic measures in regards with the several republican trends that supported him.

On November 3, 1975, he got rid of his Secretary of Defense, James Schlesinger, and of countless collaborators. These measures were mockingly called the “Massacre of Halloween”. After this, Ford surrounded himself with a very limited number of officials who were actually the same ones that took power in year 2001: he appointed Dick Cheney Secretary General of the White House; Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of Defense, and George H. Bush (father), director of the CIA [2].
A press campaign organized by friendly associations alerted then the public opinion to the underestimation of the red danger on the part of the CIA. By making people believe he had yield to pressures, President Ford authorized the creation of an independent committee to assess the Soviet threat. Its director was Harvard professor Richard Pipes.

He formed a team, known as Team B, which was made up by the staunchest supporters of the Cold War, among which we have General Lyman Lemnite [3] and young Paul Wolfowitz. It was like this that the Pipes’ Report, published in Commentary, the magazine of the American Jewish Committee founded by Irving Kristol, allowed the Ford Administration to resume the arms race.
Richard Pipes had a firstborn child: Daniel. He studied the history of Medieval Islam in Harvard and distinguished himself in the university for his opposition to the leftist demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

In 1981 he published Slave Soldiers and Islam, his first work, an academic and well-documented masterpiece where his political convictions were still not present. It was written before the 1979 Iranian Islamic revolution, the fact that would mark the birth of the analyst’s convictions. In 1982, when his father Richard joined the Reagan’s administration, Daniel Pipes did the same thing and worked for the analysis team of the State Department. He devoted a lot of time to his second book, In the Path of God, which was published in 1983 and increased his concerns with regards to Muslim fundamentalism by following its escalation in a dozen of States. A phenomenon that, according to him, was extremely directed to the oil incomes Arab states began to have after the war in Kippur.

A Compromised Intellectual

After leaving the State Department in 1983, Daniel Pipes worked as a professor in several universities, such as the United States Naval War College, but he felt he was marginalized in the academic field. He stopped publishing university texts and chose to write articles focused on several teams: terrorism, Israel, the case of Salman Rushdie, which he published in Commentary [4].
His options have not always been the best: he exaggeratedly praised the merits of manuscript From Time Immemorial, a work about the Zionist colonization of Palestine written by Joan Peters.

However, his book was very criticized by some important journalists who analyzed its blatant lies, its obvious mistakes and its plagiarism. Pipes’ interest on the Israeli issue began to come to the surface step by step. After criticizing the mediatic treatment given to the war in Lebanon, which damaged Israel’s image, in 1988 he published an article in the New York Times where he rejected the idea of a Palestinian State that would be a «nightmare» for its inhabitants: according to him, such solution would «affect Arabs more than Israelis» because Palestinians would be forced to live under the control of a terrorist organization, Yasser Arafat’s PLO.
However, Daniel Pipes could not be considered as an unconditional supporter of the Israeli government. He has actually criticized it sometimes, especially when he has reproached it for not repressing Palestinian populations enough. Pipes believes Palestinians must be annihilated and he has accused academicians such as Rashid Khalidi of making statements justifying violence.
According to Juan Cole, professor at the University of Michigan, «one of the things Pipes means when he accuses university professors of supporting terrorism, is that we reject his approach to see all Palestinians as terrorists.».

Robert Strausz-Hupé

By the mid 80s, Pipes moved to Philadelphia where he became director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute - FPRI of the University of Pennsylvania, an institution created by geopolitician Robert Strausz-Hupé who would be became its eminence grise. Founded in 1955, the institute has been publishing magazine Orbis since 1957.

Its first number included Strausz-Hupé’s manifesto: L’Equilibre de demain [5]. In it he expressed the following: «Should the coming world order be an American universal empire? It should be for it would hallmark the American spirit. The coming order would be the last phase of a historical transition and it would put an end to the revolutionary period of this century.
The mission of the American people is to eliminate nation-States, to lead hopeless countries to form wider unions and stop, through its power, the trifling attempts to sabotage the new world order for they offer mankind nothing but a corrupted ideology and brute force…For the next fifty years, the future belongs to the United States.
The American empire and mankind would have no clashes, but would be two names for a same universal order guided by peace and happiness. Novus orbis terranum (New world order)». Later, Daniel Pipes published again this manifesto. From 1986 to 1993, Daniel Pipes was editor in chief of Orbis. During these years, he published several articles in it welcoming the support of Iraq against Iran, such as the one titled The Baghdad Alternative by Laurie Mylroie [6]. In addition, and along with this young woman, he wrote an article in The New Republic about this topic too [7].
In 1990 he published an article in the National Review titled “Muslims are Coming! Muslims are Coming!” in which he expressed his alarmist opinions about this issue. He wrote: «Western Europe societies are not well prepared for a massive immigration of people of matt skin that cook rare dishes and do not follow German hygienic norms [8]».
In this period, his books and articles distinguished themselves for its extremely hard positions criticizing Arab countries, whether it was Syria, Iran or even Saudi Arabia, a Washington’s ally. Since then, he alerted to the threat «Muslims of the United States» would represent for the American security. Thus, in an article published in Commentary he opposed the «prerogatives» given to Muslim American organizations due to the discrimination they said they suffered [9].

By supporting his friend Steven Emerson’s idea, who is also an expert on terrorism, Daniel Pipes told the «USA Today» that the 1995 attack in Oklahoma City proved the West was being attacked and fundamentalists «were targeting them». In 1990, Daniel Pipes founded a section of the FPRI, the Middle East Forum (MEF) to «promote the American interests in the region». In 1994, it became an independent association that some time later published the Middle East Quarterly and, since 1999, the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin [10].

In 1997, Daniel Pipes was involved in the creation of the US Committee for a Free Lebanon (USCFL) along with banker Ziad K. Abdelnur, an expert of the Middle East Forum. Daniel Pipes and the experts of the FPRI, the MEF and the USCFL were very active in the work of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP) where the most outstanding hawks and the cream of Likud gathered [11].

Daniel Pipes became famous as a hunter of the «fifth column» that emerged in American universities. In 2002, he created a section of the MEF, the Campus Watch, «an organization openly aimed at reporting the wrong analysis and the political distortions regarding Middle East studies». According to The Nation, one of the first measures taken by the organization was to open «McCarthy-styled-files» to the different professors they suspected were not quite pro-Israel. As a result, more than a hundred academicians contacted the Campus Watch for they wanted their names to be added to the list. This made Daniel Pipes furious and he described them as «advocates of the suicide attacks and the militant Islam».
Likewise, he used other terms such as «self-hating» or «anti-Americans». In an article titled Americans at Universities who hate the United States, he made fun of all those who, like Noam Chomsky, has denounced the American intervention in Iraq refusing to see the «direct threat» that Saddam Hussein represented to the United States. To spread the idea that academicians and students were blind regarding the Islamic threat, he counted on Martin Kramer’s assistance, current editor in chief of the Middle East Quarterly and the Stanley Kurtz, a member of the Hoover Institution and collaborator of the National Review Online.

According to The Nation, his theses had an exceptional mediatic coverage from «the MSNBC to the NPR». The Washington Post devoted its first page to him and even the debate made it to the Congress: a project to create a consultative committee, whose members appointed by the government would be in charge of supervising the related-to-the-Near-East- educational programs financed with federal funds to thousand of students, was being analyzed.
From that moment on, all programs had to «include all viewpoints» and not «only the criticism against the American foreign policy», as explained by Stanley Kurtz in the House of Representatives in June 2003 [12].

Daniel Pipes was recently included in the list Jewish diary The Forward makes with the names of the 50 most influential American Jewish [13]. His appointment to the US Institute of Peace (USIP) made by President Bush has upset the Muslim community, especially the Muslim Public Affairs Council.
This financed-by-federal-funds-think tank is aimed at promoting «a pacific solution to international conflicts», a concept that has nothing to do with Daniel Pipes political thought: actually, in February 2002, Pipes wrote that «diplomacy rarely ended conflicts» [14]. Just after joining the USIP he focused in purging the list of collaborators. Thus, he excluded the Center for the Study of Islam and Democracy which, according to him, was a pro-terrorist group infiltrated into the venerable public institution [15]. He left the USIP at the beginning of 2005.

The thinker of Islamphobia

Daniel Pipes is the author of several concepts that have been imposed in the public debate.
Above all, he is the inventor of the «New Anti-Semitism» [16]. This term is used to identify the opposition of American Muslim pressure groups against American Jewish pressure groups regarding the Palestinian issue. It is an amalgam between anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism that has been quite used lately. He is also the inventor of the «Militants of Islam» [17].
The expression identifies those Muslims who, not satisfied with their domestic prayers, join community organizations and defend the rights of the Palestinians to the detriment of the Israelis supported by the United States. It creates a new amalgam between Muslim identity, the struggle against the State of Israel, and the challenging of Washington’s policy. This presents those Americans of Muslim religion as traitors, mainly.

Finally, he invented «the Middle East complot theory». The Arabs, who refuse to accept their incapacity to solve their problems, imagine they are victims of Western complots [18].
In 2002, Daniel Pipes went to all radio and television stations to campaign against The Great Imposture, a work about September 11 attacks and the change of regime that took place in the United States afterwards [19]. By having no arguments at all to oppose this book and wrongly believing the author was Arab, he made emphasis in seeing it as an example of the conspiracy of Arab intellectuals living in France.
His judgment was used in France by Guillaume Dasquié and Jean Guisnel [20] and later by Daniel Leconte [21].

In 2003, he was invited to the most important Arab political show, The Opposite Direction(Al-Jazeera), to participate in a debate with Thierry Meyssan. Yet, he couldn’t go for he was waiting for his USIP appointment confirmation by the Congress. To replace him, he sent his loyal assistant, Jonathan Schanzer [22] who couldn’t refute the debated book.
In France, Pipes counted also on the help of his translator, Guy Milliére, to spread his ideas. He published «Ce que veut Bush», an apologetic work based on interviews with Daniel Pipes, Paul Wolfowitz, etc. [23].

Daniel Pipes’ obsession is Islamphobia. In 1999 he published an article in The Forward where he stated: «Muslims who hate the United States and, especially, the Jewish people living there, are increasing and they are becoming more powerful thanks to the protection that the democracy and the indulgence of a pluralist and charitable society offer to them».
September 11 attacks strengthened the convictions of this analyst and increased his supporters too. For him, 9/11 allowed him to publish in 2002 Militant Islam Reaches America, an up-to-that-moment «unpublishable» book that alerted to the fact that Muslim American populations included an «important number» of people that «supported the goals of the planes hijackers», that «hated the United States and, after all, wanted to turn it into a Muslim country».
Jim Lobe, of Inter-Press Service agency, has said he received a proposal of a subsidy project in which Daniel Pipes proposed the creation of «The Islamic Progress Institute» that «could work on a moderate, modern and pro-American approach» on behalf of the Muslim community. According to him, Muslim fundamentalists were «Nazis», «potential murderers», that represented a «real threat» for Jewish, Christians, women and homosexuals.

The war in Iraq has been the moment of glory for Daniel Pipes’ theories for it has been «a unique opportunity to replace the most violent regime of the world». Since the fall of Saddam Hussein’s regime, Pipes has spoken about this issue and has actually stated that Iraq would need a «strong man with a democratic spirit» for Iraqis «have the conspiracy theory in their minds» and are not ready to govern themselves as Westerners do.
Even today, in the New York Sun, he has said the name of the person he would like to see in such a post. The fact that this person is a military man is not surprising. Former major general Jassim Mohammed Saleh al-Dulaimi is known for not participating in the atrocities committed by Saddam Hussein’s regime as well as not having radical ideological convictions and his well known social position [24].