Kennedy vendetta's price

Sen. Edward M. Kennedy has won another little personal vendetta and the nation is the worse off for it.

President Bush decided to make a recess appointment of Middle East expert Daniel Pipes to the board of directors of the Peace Institute, a small government think-tank of about 70 researchers. That means Pipes does not have to face Senate confirmation but must leave at the end of the Senate's term next year. In other words, the nation gets his services for about 15 months instead of a normal four-year director's term.

Kennedy has led opposition to Pipes on the grounds that his record did not "reflect a commitment to bridging differences and preventing conflict," a comment of the purest balderdash. Other liberals have called Pipes a bigot, which is a simple lie.

To bridge differences and prevent conflict, to say nothing of prompting and evaluating research on conflict resolution, it helps to know what the differences are, between whom, and where and how conflict may arise. In his scholarly work, at the think-tank in Philadelphia he leads and in his articles (which this newspaper has been proud to publish, including today), Pipes has called attention to the threat of militant Islam, the dangers of which he was among the first in public life to see.

Islam is a vast tapestry of many threads, and is now a battleground between militants who claim its backing for terror and oppression and the majority who find no support in the faith for such crimes. It is vital for civilization that the majority prevail.

Pipes' warnings do not make him anti-Islamic at all. We suspect Kennedy has not himself read much if any of what Pipes has actually written. If he had, the senator would not have been so foolish.

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