Copyright 2008 DanielPipes.org Sat, 17 May 2008 14:31:13 -0400 http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://www.danielpipes.org/blog webmaster@danielpipes.org en-us Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/05/abba-eban-speaks-on-israels-10th-anniversary.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/05/abba-eban-speaks-on-israels-10th-anniversary.html Thu, 8 May 2008 00:00:00 EST 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 has not and an opportunity to hear the most eloquent defender, bar none, of the Jewish state. Video and transcript of the interview can both be found on the University of Texas website. Take the very first exchange, in which a flat-toned Mike Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/05/responding-to-joshua-muravchik-about.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/05/responding-to-joshua-muravchik-about.html Thu, 1 May 2008 00:00:00 EST 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 initiated a second round in February 2008 with an article (co-authored with Charles P. Szrom), "In Search of Moderate Muslims." Here is my reply to the latter, in the form of a letter to the editor of Commentary magazine, published in the May issue Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/04/laurie-mylroies-shoddy-loopy-zany-theories.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/04/laurie-mylroies-shoddy-loopy-zany-theories.html Wed, 30 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST 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. Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/04/predicting-the-2008-us-presidential-election.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/04/predicting-the-2008-us-presidential-election.html Wed, 23 Apr 2008 20:39:18 EST 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 limb and replied to a question about Barack Obama: He is the first far-leftist possibly to become the Democratic candidate for U.S. president since George McGovern succeeded at this in 1972. Should Obama be nominated, I expect he will do less Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/04/exposed-a-university-grovels-for-saudi-money.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/04/exposed-a-university-grovels-for-saudi-money.html Tue, 22 Apr 2008 04:45:00 EST 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." Griffith's Vice-Chancellor Ian O'Connor wrote in a letter to Saudi ambassador Hassan T. Nazer, dated September 11, 2006: We would be pleased to discuss ways in which your contribution could be recognised through, for example, the naming of a particular Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/04/mecca-mean-time.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/04/mecca-mean-time.html Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST 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, its exact opposite, running through the Pacific Ocean defines the International Date Line. So much for science and history. According to the BBC, at a conference held in Qatar titled, "Mecca, the Centre of the Earth, Theory and Practice," a Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/04/those-gentle-humanitarians-at-fatah.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/04/those-gentle-humanitarians-at-fatah.html Thu, 17 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST 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 of all of Palestine." But in addition to this – which should be enough to render it unfit for negotiations with Israel or benefits from Western states – it is also a horrific organization in its own right. For one instance of its brutality, Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/04/learning-in-arabic-about-jews-and-judaism.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/04/learning-in-arabic-about-jews-and-judaism.html Thu, 10 Apr 2008 19:21:47 EST 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 to learn about these subjects was to read between the lines of antisemitic tracts. It is therefore with delight that I read today that the American Jewish Committee, under the directorship of Yehudit Barsky, has launched a new website, Asl Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/04/strange-sex-stories-from-the-muslim-world.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/04/strange-sex-stories-from-the-muslim-world.html Wed, 9 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST 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 divide (in reverse chronological order) that have me, for one, shaking my head: -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Saudi imam details heavenly sexual delights: Omar Al-Sweilem, a Saudi imam, extols Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/04/saveisraelschildrencom.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/04/saveisraelschildrencom.html Thu, 3 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST 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 remove children from a war zone. Sadly, indeed embarrassingly, the children are those of S'derot, an Israeli town of 19,000 near the border with Gaza that has been under a missile barrage since the Israeli retreat from Gaza in September 2005, Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/04/middle-eastern-political-candor.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/04/middle-eastern-political-candor.html Tue, 1 Apr 2008 00:00:00 EST 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 HardTalk when he stated that Arab regimes friendly to Washington (e.g., those in Jordan, Egypt, and Saudi Arabia) are lying when they claim that Tehran is working through Hamas. These Arab governments, he argued, are pushing this story to advance their Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/pakistan-ties-iraq-for-most-suicide-bombing.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/pakistan-ties-iraq-for-most-suicide-bombing.html Mon, 24 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST 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 most deaths (274 to Pakistan's 250). Afghanistan came in way behind with 3 attacks and 15 dead. Comments: (1) Coalition troops are not fighting in Pakistan. (2) Israel's totals trail these two countries by an order of magnitude. (March 24, 2008) Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/hijabs-on-western-political-women.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/hijabs-on-western-political-women.html Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST 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 one point, an indignant Fallaci removed her chador in and threw it at Khomeini. Princess Diana during a 1996 visit to a cancer hospital in Pakistan. . Hilary Clinton, when she was still wife of the U.S. president in 1997, traveled to Eritrea Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/an-international-law-to-respect-religion.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/an-international-law-to-respect-religion.html Wed, 19 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST 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 sentiments. As such laws cannot single out Islam exclusively for protection, they must include respect for religion in general. Here is one example of this wish, as expressed by Yemen's Prime Minister Ali Mohammed Mujawr in late February who, as Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/churches-in-saudi-arabia.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/churches-in-saudi-arabia.html Tue, 18 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST 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 countries where non-Muslims are second-class citizens" and pushed for reciprocity: "Just as Muslims can build their houses of prayer anywhere in the world, the faithful of other religions should be able to do so as well." That sounded good, but Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/the-organization-of-the-islamic-conference.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/the-organization-of-the-islamic-conference.html Sat, 15 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST 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 that the U.S. government to send to it a "special envoy." This year's meeting in Senegal has found the OIC particularly bellicose on the question of the Shari‘a (Islamic law), perhaps as a result of the surging price of oil. In particular, it Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/americas-chickens-are-coming-home-to-roost.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/americas-chickens-are-coming-home-to-roost.html Thu, 13 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST 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. "We bombed Hiroshima, we bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon, and we never batted an eye. We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/must-us-taxpayers-pay-for-iraqi-electricity.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/must-us-taxpayers-pay-for-iraqi-electricity.html Tue, 11 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST 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, however, is the provisioning of utilities. In particular, Americans have for five long years assumed responsibility for, and Iraqis have griped about, the inconsistent supply of electricity. Here is a new report on the problem, by Glenn Zorpette Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/is-the-solution-to-hire-more-muslim.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/is-the-solution-to-hire-more-muslim.html Tue, 4 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST 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 by Alan Blank in the Daily Pilot. Bennett, Blank writes, thinks news organizations ought to hire more Muslim reporters. To illustrate this point he drew mainly from quotes of notable colleagues and statistical polls, rarely giving his own Daniel Pipes http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/islamic-hotels-forwarding-islamic-law.html http://www.danielpipes.org/blog/2008/03/islamic-hotels-forwarding-islamic-law.html Mon, 3 Mar 2008 00:00:00 EST 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 food. Oddly, they will be marketed under brand names such as Cliftonwood and Wings, with initial operations in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Jordan, Egypt, Malaysia and Thailand, and Europe to follow. In addition, Almulla notes, the