Welcome. Although there is coordination between www.DanielPipes.org and the sites belonging to the Middle East Forum, this site is the private, personal site of Daniel Pipes, it is registered in his name, it is owned by him, and it is legally unconnected to the Middle East Forum.
Statistical Overview
www.DanielPipes.org received about 10,000 unique visitors a month from its opening in December 2000 until 9/11. After 9/11, the number of visitors jumped to about 50,000 a month. The readership has continued to grow and has reached over 300,000 unique visitors a month. The number of page views per month increased from about 50,000 to over a million. In all, the site has received nearly 10 million unique visitors. (Source: internal tracking.)
The largest number of readers come from the United States, followed by Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, France, Israel, and Germany. At the other end of the spectrum, a single visitor has come from Reunion, Falkland Islands, and the Central African Republic. Three visitors from Antartica have dropped by. (Source: ExtremeTracking.com)
www.DanielPipes.org has ranked as high (in February 2006) as the website with the 15,273rd largest readership on the web.(Source: Alexa.com) It receives many more visitors than some large institutional sites and is usually the number-one source for specialized information on the Middle East and Islam.
The site is linked to by 123,000 other pages (with the most readers coming from WorldNetDaily.com and FrontPageMag.com) and has been located through the search of 90,000 different words. (Source: ExtremeTracking.com)
The site contains a feature indicating how many readers are at the moment on the site, which usually ranges between 100 and 200. The highest number of readers at any one time was 450, in May 2003.
The most common words that bring readers to www.DanielPipes.org via search engines are, in descending order, "Islam/Muslim/Islamic," "jihad," "sex," "war," "America," "Arab," and "Israeli."
Foreign Language Sites
The site contains translations of Mr. Pipes's writings into twenty-five languages. Of these, nine- Danish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish - have their own homepages.
Here are the URLs of those language sites, their inauguration dates, and the average monthly unique visitors (source: internal tracking).
Please note: Translators for other languages are encouraged to contact Mr. Pipes about their availability.
The Weblog
The weblog (or blog) at www.DanielPipes.org was started in February 2003 and took full shape by mid-2003. The goal of the weblog is provide a way for Mr. Pipes, the author of twelve books and a weekly columnist, to do several things:
Serve as public notes for other authors to draw upon: for example, "Londonistan Follies" gave Mona Charen the information for her column "Our Enemies are Stupid," about terrorism in London.
Entries are dated by when something happens rather than when the entry was written. This has the advantage of directing the reader to when an event takes place.
Mr. Pipes sees the weblog as a fast way to comment on many topics. He therefore frequently quotes and paraphrases his sources.
Out of 41,000 weblogs monitored by DayPop.com (and out of an estimated 10 million weblogs in all), DanielPipes.org has ranked 271st highest in terms of the number of links from other weblogs and as high as 110th highest in terms of over-all readership. (Source: DayPop.com)
Readers' Comments
A forum to comment on Daniel Pipes's articles was opened in April 2002; some 90,000 comments by readers have been posted since then, or about 1,500 a month.
The comments section intends to offer an opportunity for readers from many vantage points to interact. But it is a moderated forum, meaning that an editor vets comments before posting them. Comment writers are encouraged to express their views freely.
That said, comments are rejected if scurrilous, off-topic, vulgar, ad hominem, or otherwise viewed by the editor as inappropriate. On occasion, offending sections of comments are deleted and the remainder posted. In such cases, the editors exclude what they find unacceptable and replace it with elipses (...) to indicate editing has taken place.
In brief, the editors of www.DanielPipes.org and Mr. Pipes do their best to permit wide-ranging views while maintaining standards of civility and intelligence.
The Danish cartoon controversy of February 2006 somewhat changed the rules, for this issue heightened emotions and rhetoric concerning free speech, religion, insults, and blasphemy. The cartoon issue prompted the editors to permit a wider range of impassioned statements so as to reflect the tone of the debate. For further comments on the legitimate scope of the current debate, see "Talking Freely about the Enemy."
According to the Dallas Observer of May 18, 2000, Janney was a member of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, radical Islam's foremost lobby in North America. According to InfoCom Corporation in Richardson, Texas, he was an employee at the firm. (InfoCom was subsequently shuttered by the U.S. government and its owners, the five Elashi brothers, were found guilty of illegal transactions with Hamas, Libya, and Syria.)
By March 2001, www.DanielPipes.com redirected the visitor automatically to the CAIR site and specifically to a page defaming Daniel Pipes. On learning the laws that protect against "cybersquatting," a lawyer representing Daniel Pipes send a notice to John Michael Janney, threatening a lawsuit if he did not release the www.DanielPipes.com web site. Janney subsequently did not attempt to renew www.DanielPipes.com, allowing it to lapse.
In early 2002, Mr. Pipes registered the now-available domain www.DanielPipes.com; since then, it automatically transfers the reader to www.DanielPipes.org.
The "DPlist" Mailing Service
Associated with this website, Daniel Pipes sends out his writings, plus occasional other items about him or invitations to his events, some 2-3 mailings a week. Called "DPlist," it can be subscribed to at http://www.danielpipes.org/subscribe.php.
DPlist began in July 1999, in response to an e-mail campaign initiated against Mr. Pipes by the Council on American-Islamic Relations on publication of his article, "It Matters What Kind of Islam Prevails," so that he would have a list of people to respond to its calumnies. In fact, a request for support was made only one time, later in 1999. Since then, the list has grown substantially and in March 2007 exceeded 25,000 subscribers.
The mail service is also available in several other languages. Each of these has a separate URL for signing up:
From time to time, to help pay for the maintenance of www.DanielPipes.org, an advertisement will be sent to the DPlist recipients. To make the commercial quality clear, the word [Ad], in square brackets, begins the subject line. As is the case in a newspaper or magazine, the sending of an advertisement implies only that it meets certain basic qualifications, and specifically does not imply endorsement of the product by Daniel Pipes.
Names of DPlist recipients are never sold to an outside party.
Posting Policies
Articles: Most articles from the pre-internet age, meaning roughly before 1996, are posted as they were submitted by Daniel Pipes for publication, not as edited and as they finally appeared. For the exact text of what appeared in print, please consult the original place of publication. Articles since then are posted as published, with the exception of some small silent corrections (typos, spelling mistakes, addition of material in square brackets).
Interviews: Interview transcripts, especially from television, tend to be done hastily by various services and therefore contain numerous mistakes (names, spelling, grammar); these are generally cleaned up before posting at www.DanielPipes.org.
Blogs: Weblogs are a dynamic medium with no cut-off date, no authoritative version, so these are continuously edited to ensure the highest quality texts.
Ads: This blog includes advertisements arranged by Blogads, D&D Marketing Solutions, google.com, Tribal Fusion, and other agencis. As is the case in a newspaper or magazine, the appearance of an advertisement and on this site implies only that it meets certain basic qualifications, and specifically does not imply endorsement of the product by Daniel Pipes.