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Articles and Blog Posts by Daniel Pipes
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ShareMax Blumenthal, like others on the far-Left, jumped on the July 2011 Norwegian massacre of 77 dead and 319 injured to impugn the counter-jihadi right. His screed, "Anders Behring Breivik, a perfect product of the Axis of Islamophobia" included this sentence:
The rhetoric of the characters who inspired Breivik, from Pam Geller to Robert Spencer to Daniel Pipes, was so eliminationist in its nature that it was perhaps only a matter of time before someone put words into action.
In other words, we three were to blame for the massacre. A year later, Blumenthal returned to the same theme, this time focusing on just me:
To his shame, Pipes earned eighteen citations in the manifesto of Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, the self-proclaimed "counter-jihadist" standing trial for the murder of seventy-seven people, mostly teenagers. Drawing heavily on sources like Pipes to justify his actions, Breivik said he carried out the slaughter to punish Europe for succumbing to "Islamicization" and multiculturalism.
Continue ReadingNo Longer Banned in the British Library!
by Daniel Pipes • April 9, 2014
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The British Library, I documented yesterday, had blocked my website and those of the Middle East Forum while letting through some of the most foul antisemitic and Islamist sites. The article ended with mention of my writing to the library, a government institution, to request that the blocks be removed. Also, a substantial number of readers wrote to the library in protest.
As a result, I am happy to report, the blocks have been removed. A representative of the library's Electronic Services wrote me:
Apologies for the fact that the websites you listed below were blocked by the Library's WiFi service. … I am writing to inform you that all sites listed are now available via the Library's WiFi.
The library's press office (@BLpressoffice) announced the end of the block on Twitter.
@DanielPipes re. your websites being blocked erroneously by @britishlibrary wifi: these have now been unblocked. Apologies for the mistake.
So, the library owned up to its mistake and corrected it expeditiously. I am pleased and reassured by this response.
by Daniel Pipes • April 8, 2014 • National Review Online
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Prominent counter-jihadis like Geert Wilders, Michael Savage, and Robert Spencer have the distinction of being banned from entry into the United Kingdom – and, now, Her Majesty's Government, in its wisdom, has also banned two websites connected to me. It's not quite the same, admittedly, and I am working to get this ban removed, but I also wear it as a perverse badge of honor given that government's shameful record vis-à-vis Islamism.
Say you're in the British Library, the national depository library and a government institution, roughly equivalent to the Library of Congress in the United States or the Bibliothèque nationale in France. Say you want to read what David Brog writes about declining Evangelical support for Israel in the latest Middle East Quarterly. You type in MEForum.org and get the following result:
Or perhaps you wish to learn why I distinguish between Islam and Islamism, or why I worry about Islamist aggression in Britain, so you type in DanielPipes.org only to find this:
Chris Christie and the "Occupied Territories" Incident
by Daniel Pipes • April 3, 2014 • National Review Online
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A small but significant event took place on March 29 at the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas. Hosted by Sheldon Adelson, the mega-donor to Republican presidential campaigns, the event drew four leading potential candidates for president in 2016, including New Jersey governor Chris Christie.
In the Q&A session, Christie recounted a trip he took with the RJC to Israel in 2012. In the course of a choppy sentence in which he expressed his admiration for the country, he used the term occupied territories to refer to the West Bank: "I took a helicopter ride from the occupied territories across, … and just felt, personally, how extraordinary that was, to understand the military risk that Israel faces every day."
New Jersey governor Chris Christie spoke at the Republican Jewish Coalition in Las Vegas March 29.
Conservatives Rally on the Streets of Paris
by Daniel Pipes • April 2, 2014 • National Review Online
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On a recent Sunday in Paris, I had the opportunity to witness an anti-immigration street protest. The approximately 600 participants followed started next to the catacombs in Place Denfert-Rochereau, walked a 1.9 km route in about 1½ hours along two broad boulevards, and ended at the Place d'Italie, where they spent an equal length of time listening to speeches.
Organized by Résistance Républicaine (led by Christine Tasin) and Riposte Laïque (led by Pierre Cassen), the demo on March 9 also included such important figures on the right as Fabrice Robert (head of Bloc Identitaire) and Renaud Camus (a theorist). Agence France Press covered the event with a reasonably objective account that major media (l'Express, Libération, Métro, Le Parisien, Le Point) then published.
The Middle East Forum Debates Moderate Islam
by Daniel Pipes • March 30, 2014
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Raymond Ibrahim's recent piece for CBN, "Why 'Moderate Islam' is an Oxymoron," has prompted questions because it contradicts my views and yet (because he is a fellow at the Middle East Forum) it appears on MEForum.org and was sent to the MEF mailing list.
In reply, some comments on the content of his article and the propriety of its appearing with Middle East Forum sponsorship:
(1) On content: Ibrahim and I agree that a moderate Islam does not presently exist but disagree whether it might potentially exist. In the words of an article I published last year, "a reformed Islam can emerge" if Muslims
emulate their fellow monotheists and adapt their religion with regard to slavery and interest, the treatment of women, the right to leave Islam, legal procedure, and much else. When a reformed, modern Islam emerges it will no longer endorse unequal female rights, the dhimmi status, jihad, or suicide terrorism, nor will it require the death penalty for adultery, breaches of family honor, blasphemy, and apostasy.
by Daniel Pipes • March 26, 2014
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In 2009, my elder two daughters both had plans to move to western Europe, so they asked me to apply for Polish citizenship. This would allow them in turn to derive citizenship through me and acquire a European Union passport that allows them freely to live and work in 28 countries. Nothing loath, I began what turned into a four-year process of bureaucratic challenges to request the president of Poland to grant me citizenship.
While not easy nor routine, I had hopes for success based on the fact that both my parents, Richard and Irene, were born in Poland and lived there until their mid-teens, plus the fact that my father had had a major role while in the Reagan White House during the Polish crisis of 1981-82, my mother is the long-time president of the American Association for Polish-Jewish Studies, their both receiving medals from the Polish government, my own good relations with Radek Sikorski, the country's foreign minister, and my mother having been granted Polish citizenship.
Sisi's Incompetent Anti-Islamist Campaign
by Daniel Pipes • March 24, 2014
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An Egyptian court in short order sentenced some 529 people to death today for the killing of a single police officer. News like this gives one pause.
Very tough treatment of Islamists is needed to repress this totalitarian movement, including rejection of their efforts to apply Islamic law, keeping them out of mainstream institutions, even excluding their parties from the democratic process. But Field Marshall Abdel Fattah al-Sisi's extra-legal crackdown on Islamists will likely backfire and help the Islamist cause by winning them broad sympathy. Even if today's absurd judgment gets reversed on appeal, it and others like it are doing real damage.
Sisi is riding high now, with out-of-sight popularity ratings, but he appears as unprepared to rule Egypt as another military man, Gamal Abdul Nasser, was 60 years ago. Two factors in particular – the dismal economy and the hostility between pro- and anti-Islamists – will likely bring Sisi down fast and hard. When that happens, Islamists will benefit from his incompetence no less than Sisi exploited the failures of Mohamed Morsi. The cycle continues, the country falls further behind, and the precipice looms.
The Worrisome Future of Special Operation Forces
by Daniel Pipes • March 23, 2014
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I just had an opportunity to learn first-hand about the United States Special Operations Command (SOCOM) at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, headed by the famed Admiral William H. McRaven.
I expected the focus to be on Navy SEALs, Army Rangers, and their air force and marine counterparts. I thought I would hear about the exploits of this 67,000-strong command operating in 84 countries, maybe even about the taking down of Osama bin Laden. But that was not to be. Instead, the command's new mission, starting with the motto, "You can't surge trust," filled the time.
That new mission took some time to sink in because of SOCOM's turgid language; here's a key paragraph from the Operating Concept for special operations forces (SOF):
by Daniel Pipes • March 22, 2014
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In its frenzied loathing of the Netherlands' most important politician, Geert Wilders, the Dutch press will do almost anything to attack him.
He's now in hot water for calling on a reduction in the number of Moroccans in the Netherlands. Tom-Jan Meeus of the leading newspaper NRC Handelsblad asked my opinion on this development. I wrote a response that both endorsed and criticized Wilders:
As is often the case, I disagree with Mr Wilders' tactics while sympathizing with his goals. It is entirely understandable that the indigenous peoples of a country feel stress when large numbers of immigrants from an alien civilization, more than a few of them hostile, move in.
Wanting to bring this transfer of peoples under control is sensible - just as Moroccans feel when Dutch and other Europeans turn up in Marrakesh, just as a Dutch newspaper reported in 2010 (see http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2010/05/european-immigrants-in-marrakech). That said, I wish that Mr Wilders went about protesting this issue in a more cautious way.
by Daniel Pipes • March 10, 2014 • The Washington Times
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How does Islam shape the way Muslims live? The religion's formal requirements are the narrow base for a far wider structure of patterns that extend the formal rules of Islam, stretching them in unexpected and unplanned ways. A few examples:
The Koran strictly bans the consumption of pork, leading to the virtual disappearance of domesticated pigs in Muslim-majority areas, then their replacement by sheep and goats. These latter overgrazed the land which led, as the geographer Xavier de Planhol observes, to "a catastrophic deforestation" that in turn "is one of the basic reasons for the sparse landscape particularly evident in the Mediterranean districts of Islamic countries." Note the progression from Koranic dietary injunction to the desertification of vast tracts of land. The scriptural command was not intended to cause ecological damage, but it did.
by Daniel Pipes • February 23, 2014
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Jonathan Pollard's life sentence for the crimes he committed nearly 30 years ago is, without a doubt, both a travesty of justice and completely disproportionate.
Indeed, I offered Pollard advice and help when he called me from prison for some years in the mid-1990s. For example, I published an original document about his trial in 1997 and evinced new information about him from Caspar Weinberger in a 1999 interview. I have maintained a weblog entry exposing the rank hypocrisy of U.S. leaders who come down so hard on Pollard even as American intelligence services spy no less, and probably much more, on Israel.
I mention these bona fides because I do not want Barack Obama to pardon Pollard.
Iran's Nuclear Buildup and American Irrelevance
by Daniel Pipes • February 22, 2014
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The Menendez-Kirk "Nuclear Weapon Free Iran Act of 2013" (S. 1881) threatens the Iranian regime with additional sanctions and appears to be the only way to counter the Obama administration's flaccidity vis-à-vis Tehran.
I am skeptical, however, that it can do much good.
- Like the megalomaniacs in North Korea, the mullahs are dead-set on building a nuclear arsenal regardless of the toll this takes on their long-suffering subject population. Yes, sanctions increase economic privation which could lead to a counter-revolution but the odds of that happening in time are very small. Thus, the Menendez-Kirk bill is more symbolic than real.
- Tehran has threatened to abandon the P5+1 negotiations should the Menendez-Kirk bill become law, but Tehran gains too much from diplomacy to scuttle it for symbolic reasons. Its threat is just a tactic to pressure the Obama administration into opposing the congressional bill. Were the bill to come into effect, Tehran will surely find an excuse to keep talking.
In short, Washington is no longer a player in the Iran game. The views and actions of the U.S. government count about as much as those of the Belgian government - i.e., hardly at all.
The Rushdie Fatwa 25 Years Later
by Daniel Pipes • February 14, 2014
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Twenty-five years ago today, Ayatollah Khomeini brought his edict down on Salman Rushdie. Iran's revolutionary leader objected to the author's magical-realist novel The Satanic Verses because of its insults to the Muslim prophet Muhammad and responded by calling for the execution of Rushdie and "all those involved in the publication who were aware of its contents."
That Rushdie was born in India, lived in Britain, and had no significant connections to Iran made this an unprecedented act of aggression, one that resounded widely at the time and has subsequently had an enduring impact. Indeed, one could argue that the era of "creeping Shari'a" or "stealth jihad" or "lawful Islamism" began on February 14, 1989, with the issuance of that short edict.
Obama's Hollow Promises Abroad
by Daniel Pipes • February 12, 2014 • The Washington Times
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As U.S. credibility and stature diminish in world affairs, the American president and his secretaries of state and defense engage in eloquent denial. Unfortunately for them, realities trump words, even persuasive ones.
At the World Economic Forum in Davos, "where the water-cooler chatter was about America's waning influence in the Middle East," John Kerry proclaimed himself "perplexed by claims... that somehow America is disengaging from the world." Nothing could be further from the truth, he asserted: "We are entering an era of American diplomatic engagement that is as broad and as deep as any at any time in our history." Likewise, Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel has called for "a renewed and enhanced era of partnership with our friends and allies."
In this spirit, Obama has made multiple promises to reassure allies.
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