Archives: Posts From 2008

How Europe's Counterterrorism Laws Differ from America's
By Daniel Pipes | Thu, 3 Jul 2008 | Permalink | Comments (13)
Excerpt: In my column, "Which Has More Islamist Terrorism, Europe or America?" I show that "the Muslim per-capita arrest rate on terrorism-related charges in the United States is 2.5 times higher than in Europe." I mentioned there a difference in the legal ...

If Not [Arab-Israeli] Peace Now, What?
By Daniel Pipes | Tue, 1 Jul 2008 | Permalink | Comments (7)
Excerpt: Moment Magazine asked several analysts briefly to discuss the state of Arab-Israeli diplomacy. "Many Israelis, perhaps even a majority according to some polls, believe that the time has come for Israel to follow the 2003 Road Map to create two ...

Barack Obama, Google, and This Website
By Daniel Pipes | Mon, 9 Jun 2008 | Permalink | Comments (24)
Excerpt: I pay my first visit to the "Googleplex" in a few days and thought I'd prepare by seeing how this website, www.DanielPipes.org, does in Google's rankings. I started out with the hot name of the moment, "Barack Obama," and was midly stunned to see that I ...

John Hagee, the Holocaust, and Me: Thinking about Allies
By Daniel Pipes | Thu, 29 May 2008 | Permalink | Comments (40)
Excerpt: Leonard Fein has noted in the Forward that I am one of those scheduled to speak at John Hagee's Christians United for Israel conference in July. In the light of new information about Pastor Hagee's views on the Holocaust and the news that John McCain ...

Bangladeshis Banned by Bahrain
By Daniel Pipes | Wed, 28 May 2008 | Permalink | Comments (7)
Excerpt: Imagine this scenario in a European country: A Bangladeshi migrant worker, a car mechanic, is charged with a premeditated murder, accused of slitting the throat of a European national with a hacksaw due to a disagreement concerning payment for work done ...

Abba Eban Speaks on Israel's 10th Anniversary
By Daniel Pipes | Thu, 8 May 2008 | Permalink | Comments (18)
Excerpt: On the occasion today of Israel's 60th anniversary, going back fifty years and watching a television interview on April 12, 1958, with the country's then-ambassador to the United States, Abba Eban, offers both an insight into what has changed and what ...

Responding to Joshua Muravchik about "Moderate Islamists"
By Daniel Pipes | Thu, 1 May 2008 | Permalink | Comments (48)
Excerpt: Joshua Muravchik of the American Enterprise Institute began a debate with me on the subject of lawful Islamists in a June 2007 piece titled "Pipes v. Gershman," to which I responded on July 6, 2007 at "When Conservatives Argue about Islam." Muravchik ...

Laurie Mylroie's Shoddy, Loopy, Zany Theories – Exposed
By Daniel Pipes | Wed, 30 Apr 2008 | Permalink | Comments (6)
Excerpt: Andrew McCarthy, the U.S. prosecutor who successfully put away Omar Abdel Rahman, the blind sheikh, has finally written the piece that many of us have long intended to do but never got around to doing – exposing the work of Laurie Mylroie.I met Mylroie ...

Predicting the 2008 U.S. Presidential Election
By Daniel Pipes | Wed, 23 Apr 2008 | Permalink | Comments (39)
Excerpt: In March 2004, I took a risk and in a blog titled "Predictions about the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election" stated that "I expect the U.S. presidential election in 2004 will be a Bush blow-out, reminiscent of 1984." Today, I took a similar trip out on a ...

Exposed: Griffith University Grovels for Saudi Money
By Daniel Pipes | Tue, 22 Apr 2008 | Permalink | Comments (7)
Excerpt: Richard Kerbaj, the Australian's extraordinary young reporter, has himself another scoop, one that reveals the inner workings of Brisbane-based Griffith University's efforts to win A$1.37 million in Saudi funding for its "Islamic Research Unit." ...

Mecca Mean Time?
By Daniel Pipes | Mon, 21 Apr 2008 | Permalink | Comments (17)
Excerpt: That Greenwich Mean Time became universally accepted resulted from centuries of British cultivation of the maritime sciences. Although replaced by the technically more advanced Coordinated Universal Time, GMT remains in place; more importantly, perhaps, ...

Those Gentle Humanitarians at Fatah
By Daniel Pipes | Thu, 17 Apr 2008 | Permalink | Comments (6)
Excerpt: In addition to Fatah clearly and explicitly wanting to eliminate Israel; for a fresh example see the statement on April 9 by the Palestinian Authority representative in Lebanon, Abbas Zaki, about the Israelis: the PLO, he says, intends to "drive them out ...

Zakariya Zubeidi's Crushed Will To Fight
By Daniel Pipes | Mon, 14 Apr 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Excerpt: Until recently the commander of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigades in Jenin, Zakariya Zubeidi was a terrorist leader against Israel, but he is that no longer. In an interview with Ha'aretz, he tells about his listless new post-terrorist life, blaming much of ...

Learning in Arabic about Jews and Judaism
By Daniel Pipes | Thu, 10 Apr 2008 | Permalink | Comments (9)
Excerpt: When I lived in Cairo in the 1970s, I conducted a little experiment: What, using only Arabic-language sources, could I learn about Jews, Judaism, Jewish history, Jewish culture, and the like? The paucity of resources stunned me; basically, the best way ...

Strange Sex Stories from the Muslim World
By Daniel Pipes | Wed, 9 Apr 2008 | Permalink | Comments (56)
Excerpt: The deepest differences between Muslims and Westerners concern not politics but sexuality. Each side has a long history of looking at the other's sexual mores with a mixture of astonishment and disgust. Here are some examples from the Muslim side of the ...

SaveIsraelsChildren.com
By Daniel Pipes | Thu, 3 Apr 2008 | Permalink | Comments (22)
Excerpt: The effort is the first time since World War II – when the Germans bombed London, and London children were sent off to families in the countryside to be cared for until the German assault ended – that a "people-to-people" campaign has been organized to ...

Middle Eastern Political Candor
By Daniel Pipes | Tue, 1 Apr 2008 | Permalink | Comments (13)
Excerpt: Prince Hassan bin Talal, younger brother of the late King Hussein of Jordan and uncle to the current King Abdallah II, has long spoken his mind. He continued and extended this tradition today in an interview with Stephen Sackur on the BBC program ...

Pakistan Ties Iraq for Most Suicide Bombing Deaths
By Daniel Pipes | Mon, 24 Mar 2008 | Permalink | Comments (4)
Excerpt: Pakistan's Post compares numbers of incidents and numbers of deaths from suicide bombings in three Muslim countries and comes up with surprising results. In these first months of 2008, Pakistan had the most attacks (18 to Iraq's 13), while Iraq had the ...

An International Law to Respect Religion?
By Daniel Pipes | Wed, 19 Mar 2008 | Permalink | Comments (33)
Excerpt: There's a contradiction brewing among Muslim political leaders on the question of creating a global law to respect religion. On the one hand, the Muhammad cartoons and other episodes leave them intent to find a mechanism to suppress public anti-Islamic ...

Hijabs on Western Political Women
By Daniel Pipes | Wed, 19 Mar 2008 | Permalink | Comments (159)
Excerpt: For fun, how about collecting those instances when female political leaders, especially leftist ones, don the hijab (Islamic headscarf)? Oriana Fallaci, interviewing Ayatollah Khomeini in September 1979 in Qum, Iran. The interview lasted six hours and at ...

Churches in Saudi Arabia?
By Daniel Pipes | Tue, 18 Mar 2008 | Permalink | Comments (370)
Excerpt: For some years now, the Vatican has made reciprocity the key to its relations with Muslim-majority states. For example, Cardinal Jean-Louis Tauran, the Vatican equivalent of foreign minister, commented in 2003 that "There are too many majority Muslim ...

The Organization of the Islamic Conference Gets Feisty
By Daniel Pipes | Sat, 15 Mar 2008 | Permalink | Comments (35)
Excerpt: Founded by the Saudis on the basis of a conspiracy theory (concerning the Aqsa Mosque fire of August 1969), the 57-member Organization of the Islamic Conference has always had a disreputable quality to it, a quality hardly purified by the recent decision ...

"America's Chickens are Coming Home to Roost"
By Daniel Pipes | Thu, 13 Mar 2008 | Permalink | Comments (65)
Excerpt: The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Jr. of Chicago's Trinity United Church of Christ, and Barack Obama's pastor since 1988, told his congregation in a sermon on Sept. 16, 2001, "The Day of Jerusalem's Fall," that U.S. terrorism had precipitated Al-Qaeda's attack. ...

Must U.S. Taxpayers Pay for Iraqi Electricity?
By Daniel Pipes | Tue, 11 Mar 2008 | Permalink | Comments (8)
Excerpt: I have complained for five years now that the U.S. government assumed responsibilities in Iraq – constitution writing, school textbooks, inter-tribal relations, dam conservation – that rightfully belong to Iraqis. The purest symbol of this usurpation, ...

Is the Solution to Hire More Muslim Journalists?
By Daniel Pipes | Tue, 4 Mar 2008 | Permalink | Comments (42)
Excerpt: Philip Bennett, managing editor of the Washington Post, offered a franker set of views than perhaps he intended when he spoke on March 3 at the University of California-Irvine's Center for the Study of Democracy about media coverage of Islam, as reported ...

A Second Islamist Organization Apologizes to Me
By Daniel Pipes | Mon, 3 Mar 2008 | Permalink | Comments (9)
Excerpt: The Middle East Forum sent out a press release today, "Muslim Weekly Apologizes to Daniel Pipes," that provides details on the statement just issued by a London-based publication. This makes it the second Islamist organization that has apologized to me, ...

Islamic Hotels, Forwarding Islamic Law
By Daniel Pipes | Mon, 3 Mar 2008 | Permalink | Comments (13)
Excerpt: Abdulla Mohamed Almulla, chairman of the Dubai-based company, Almulla Hospitality, has plans to invest US$2 billion in as many as 90 hotels operating under a Shar'i supervisory board that will follow Islamic laws in banning alcohol and serving only halal ...

Why was Abdullah Muhammad al-Ahdal Killed in 1989?
By Daniel Pipes | Sun, 2 Mar 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)
Excerpt: I concluded my survey in The Rushdie Affair of the effects of the Khomeini edict against Salman Rushdie in the winter of 1989 with an account of a double homicide: Just when the incident appeared to have abated, two Muslims living in Brussels were ...

Yossi Klein Halevi: Israel's Withdrawal from Gaza a "Disaster"
By Daniel Pipes | Sun, 2 Mar 2008 | Permalink | Comments (11)
Excerpt: I called the Ariel-Sharon orchestrated retreat from Gaza at the time it happened "one of the worst errors ever made by a democracy" but have generally refrained from refrains of "I told you so" in the 2½ years since. Yossi Klein Halevi's analysis in the ...

Dismantle UNRWA
By Daniel Pipes | Sat, 1 Mar 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)
Excerpt: As many others have pointed out, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency should not exist nearly sixty years after it was brought into existence. A refugee organization specifically for Palestinians, it alone of its type has perpetuated a problem that ...

Winston Churchill Compares "Mein Kampf" to the Koran
By Daniel Pipes | Thu, 21 Feb 2008 | Permalink | Comments (44)
Excerpt: As the Dutch politician Geert Wilders nears the release of his film expected to present the Koran as analogous to Hitler's Mein Kampf ("My Struggle"), a point he has already made, it is worth recalling who else has made this comparison. Yes, in recent ...

Applying Philip Salzman's Theory to Gaza
By Daniel Pipes | Thu, 24 Jan 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Excerpt: I provide today, at "The Middle East's Tribal Affliction," a summary of Philip Carl Salzman's new book, Culture and Conflict in the Middle East, with its over-arching explanation of what makes the Middle East distinctive. Here is a summary of the summary ...

Mirror Image: Palestinians Continue to Mimic Zionism
By Daniel Pipes | Thu, 10 Jan 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)
Excerpt: At "Mirror Image: How the PLO Mimics Zionism," I document how Palestinians have repeatedly imitated the Zionist movement. Here follow updates on that theme. Birthright Israel came into existence in 2000. It provides the gift of first time, peer group, ...

"Saudi Arabia to End Wheat Growing"
By Daniel Pipes | Wed, 9 Jan 2008 | Permalink | Comments (12)
Excerpt: So reads an apparently routine Reuters story – ah, but what drama lies behind it! Shortly after the first oil-price run-up of 1973-74, the Saudi rulers decided that they needed to protect themselves against a reverse boycott by the farming superpowers, ...

Sudden Jihad Syndrome – It's Now Official
By Daniel Pipes | Wed, 2 Jan 2008 | Permalink | Comments (43)
Excerpt: The attempt by Mohammed Taheri-azar in March 2006 to drive a rented Jeep Cherokee onto a plaza at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill and kill as many students as he could prompted me to coin the term Sudden Jihad Syndrome to describes cases ...

Bibliography – My Writings on Arabs Appreciating Israel
By Daniel Pipes | Wed, 2 Jan 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)
Excerpt: Amid the fury and violence of the Arab-Israeli conflict, a not-insignficant number of Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims maintain a high regard for the Jewish state. They represent the potential solution to this problem, so their views are more important ...

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