Putin's Invasion Scrambles the West

by Daniel Pipes  •  March 30, 2022  •  Washington Times

How has the Ukraine crisis affected political life in the West? Deeply but contradictorily. Vladimir Putin's invasion wakened sleeping populations to eternal power realities, exacerbated leftist de-platforming, and bizarrely enhanced his appeal on the Right.

Power realities: A century-long peace following the Napoleonic wars left Europeans mentally unprepared for the carnage of World War I; similarly, the 77-year peace after World War II bred a faulty European assumption that trade and diplomacy could solve the continent's problems. Military strength was seen as anachronistic as slavery. Slogans such as "There is no military solution" and "War never solved anything" prevailed.

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The Great Inquiry into National Character

by Daniel Pipes  •  Spring 2022  •  Academic Questions

Of all the books that no one can write, those about nations and national character are the most impossible.
- Jacques Barzun, 1943[1]

Like an impressionist painting, national character appears when a body of countrymen are viewed from an appropriate distance.
- Don Martindale, 1967[2]

Clever people among today's intelligentsia disdain the very idea that there is such a thing as "national character."
- Thomas Sowell, 2009[3]

Stereotypes about national character – a generalization about an ethnic group's enduring qualities – may seem to be the stuff of idle cocktail-party chatter, the observations of jaundiced hotel keepers, or the superficial impressions of travelers; but they are much more. Indeed, a long and impressive tradition of elite politicians, intellectuals, and social scientists have opined on this topic.

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review of Unveiled: How Western Liberals Empower Radical Islam

by Daniel Pipes  •  Spring 2022  •  Middle East Quarterly

The subtitle promises a dry analysis, but Mohammed (b. 1974) delivers instead an intensely personal autobiography that mainly revolves around two themes: her demonic Islamist mother and the process of liberating herself from this mother by repudiating both the maternal and the Islamist bonds. As Mohammed, a Canadian of Egyptian heritage, explains about the latter: "First, I was a nonpractising Muslim, then I didn't believe in any organized religion, then I was spiritual but not religious, then I was agnostic, and then finally I identified as atheist."

The author barely mentions her two formidable family connections: she is the great-grandniece of Mohamed Naguib, the first-ever president (1953-54) in Egypt's history until he was shoved aside by Gamal Abdel Nasser; and she was married to and had a child by Essam Marzouk, a violent jihadi now thought to be either dead or rotting in an Egyptian jail. Fittingly, that marriage was pushed on her by a mother who herself lusted for the future son-in-law.

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review of The Scramble for Europe: Young Africa on Its Way to the Old Continent

by Daniel Pipes  •  Spring 2022  •  Middle East Quarterly

Smith, professor of African Studies at Duke University, looks at demographics to reach deep conclusions about the future of Europe and Africa. Consider some raw facts: when Europe's "scramble for Africa" took place about 1885, Europe (excluding Russia and what is now Turkish Thrace) had an estimated population of 240 million people and Africa 100 million. Today, those numbers are 600 million and 1.25 billion. In 2050, predictions peg them at 600 million and 2.5 billion. Over the 165-year period, then, Africa will have grown ten times faster than Europe.

Noting these numbers and the desperation of many young Africans to reach Europe, Smith holds that "neither Europe nor Africa has yet taken the full measure of the challenge that lies ahead. The two continents are still unprepared for a migratory encounter of unprecedented magnitude." He proceeds to explore this challenge in his absorbing book, what he wryly calls the "scramble for Europe."

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review of Leaving the Allah Delusion Behind

by Daniel Pipes  •  Spring 2022  •  Middle East Quarterly

Having written and edited a small library of books on Islamic topics, the pseudonymous Ibn Warraq has now collected some of his writings on ex-Muslims in a book with four parts: freethought and atheism in classical Islam, the mysterious Treatise of the Three Imposters (a reference to Moses, Jesus, and Muhammad), the influence of Ibn Rushd and Ibn Tufayl on Western freethinking, and atheism among Muslims in the modern age.

The author kicks things off with his characteristic verve: "Greeks and Aristotle lead to Muslim Materialists, and Averroes, who in turn leads to the thirteenth and fourteenth century Renaissance in Europe. Averroes's influence extends to Jewish philosophers whose influence on the European Enlightenment leads to the modern world." This is intellectual history on a grand scale, of the sort that hardly any member in good standing of a university history department would dare offer, but the sort that makes the pace quicken and the mind race.

No less emphatically, Ibn Warraq explains his purpose: "A history of atheism and freethought in Islam [is] a moral necessity; it gives necessary succor to ex-Muslims, and provides evidence that many in Islamic civilization have shaken off the intellectual shackles of Islam, and, what is more important, atheism can provide a new identity, and show a means of living moral lives without the aid of Islam."

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review of Jews and the Qur'an

by Daniel Pipes  •  Spring 2022  •  Middle East Quarterly

Bar-Asher, professor of Islamic Studies at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, tackles one of the most delicate and subtle questions of religious history and current politics in this slender but packed book: what is the place of Jews in the Qur'an? (Before going further, note that he ignores the powerful body of revisionist history, limiting himself only to the increasingly discredited conventional history.)

For starters, Bar-Asher sifts through Jewish life in Arabia before the Qur'an and concludes that, basically, no reliable information is available. When looking at the Islamic scripture, he finds "The image of Jews and Judaism that emerges from the Qur'an varies according to whether those meant are the biblical Hebrews or the contemporaries of Muhammad." To simplify, the former are praised and the latter are condemned. (In this, one sees an early version of the contemporary "people love dead Jews" phenomenon.)

Favorable Qur'anic verses portray Jews as the chosen people or as the Israelites who exited Egypt and arrived in the Promised Land or those who received the Torah. Unfavorable verses focus on idolatry, which Bar-Asher calls "tangible proof of the Hebrews' and then the Jews' rejection of monotheism"; on the weird Qur'anic assertion that Jews believe one Uzayr to be a prophet or even the son of God; or on the calumny that Jews murdered their own prophets.

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review of European Islamophobia Report 2020

by Daniel Pipes  •  Spring 2022  •  Middle East Quarterly

This massive tome, now in its sixth annual edition, features 37 authors and covers 31 countries. Published in conjunction with seven "cooperation partners" (pointing to the establishment nature of this topic), it for some reason hides the blatant Turkish government role that the prior five editions proudly displayed.

The study leaves the gate asserting that in 2020, "the state of Islamophobia in Europe not only has not improved, but has worsened, if not reached a tipping point." Worse, "French and Austrian Muslims have been left in the hands of brutal state violence." Not only that, but the editors are grandiose about the importance of their topic for all of Europe: "Islamophobia not only directly devalues the lives of otherized people, but questions the humanity of a society that pretends to stand for the equality of all humans."

As one might expect, those 886 pages are replete with instances of horrible things done and said against Muslims. As one might equally expect, many of the instances are not so horrible.

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review of Countering Islamophobia in North America

by Daniel Pipes  •  Spring 2022  •  Middle East Quarterly

The Muslims-as-victims campaign has turned into a significant cottage industry, with university centers, academic organizations, and a vast, if repetitive, bulk of writing devoted to showing that Muslims, due to no fault of their own, suffer from a range of unprovoked maladies and unjustified biases at the hands of nasty Westerners.

In a typically banal example of this genre, Aswad's Countering Islamophobia in North America diligently ignores the many Muslim activities that drive anti-Muslim sentiments. An anthropologist of Egyptian origins who has taught at Wayne State University, Aswad mentions ISIS all of three times but the Muslim Brotherhood, al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden, and the 1979-81 Iranian hostage crisis only once each. More notable are those individuals, groups, and concepts that do not appear a single time: Iranian leaders Khomeini and Khamene'i, al-Shabaab, and the Sharia. The Taliban of Afghanistan are never discussed; the group comes up just once, in the context of a Florida teacher, who allegedly called a 14-year-old Muslim student a "raghead Taliban." The persistent maltreatment of Jews and Christians in Muslim-majority countries goes entirely unnoted.

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review of The Perfect Police State

by Daniel Pipes  •  Spring 2022  •  Middle East Quarterly

Prior colonial rulers – the Spanish in Mindanao, the Dutch in Aceh, the French in Algeria, the Russians in Central Asia – have sought to control their Muslim subjects and defang Islamic sentiments, always failing. Can the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) in the territory historically known as East Turkestan and renamed Xinjiang by its Chinese overlords, succeed in this task?

As Cain's title suggests, he believes it can. An investigative journalist and technology writer, he emphasizes the mix of the indomitable CCP will and twenty-first-century methods. From first-hand experience and extensive interviews alike, he reports that there exists no "surveillance state so well-honed and menacing as this one," not even North Korea's. Xinjiang's government does not merely surveille and monitor its subjects but seeks "to purge their thoughts" of bad ideas, a wholly different undertaking and one intimately tied to the Uyghurs' Turkic and Islamic identities. The goal is cultural genocide without killing. As an apparatchik in a detention camp put it, "We are the surgeons who operate on your brains, your ideology. Your minds are poisoned. Now, we will give you medicine. You must be grateful to our great nation for this medicine."

Cain describes in detail the impact of a state-imposed video camera in a Uyghur household. Of course, this effort requires the active participation of high-tech companies, and they (Microsoft in particular) have been only too willing to oblige.

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review of Arab American Women: Representation and Refusal

by Daniel Pipes  •  Spring 2022  •  Middle East Quarterly

For many centuries, the word Arab meant roughly the Bedouin. In the age of nationalism, it came to define nearly all those who spoke Arabic as a mother tongue (though not Jews and some others). This eventually transmuted into the political movement of Arabism, especially during the glory years of Gamal Abdel Nasser, 1956-67. Such concepts as Arab socialism and the Arab mind became prominent. By 1980, however, the self-evident hollowness of the Arab concept had become only too obvious and the term receded from political and cultural life, becoming limited mainly to matters having to do with language, such as Arabic literature.

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How to Answer When Asked for Your Pronouns
Letter to the Editor

by Daniel Pipes  •  February 10, 2022  •  Wall Street Journal

Colin Wright correctly points out that replying to the question, "What are your pronouns?" implies acceptance of the premise that humans can choose their gender ("When Asked for Your 'Pronouns,' Don't Answer," op-ed, Feb. 5). His suggestion not to reply to the pronoun impertinence makes good sense.

But matters are sometimes more complex. The only person to ask me for pronouns did so in bureaucratic mode as I was scheduling a medical appointment. Not wanting to jeopardize my health for a principled stand on pronouns, I unhappily mumbled "he/his." Some employers and schools require staff and students to supply pronouns. In such cases, rudeness, sarcasm or refusal do not work.

Something succinct, clever and polite is needed. My best retort is, "I think you know the answer," but I welcome better ones from your readers.

Daniel Pipes
Philadelphia
Mr. Pipes founded Campus Watch.

Feb. 10, 2022 addendum: Other suggestions:

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The Need for a Focus on Western Islamism

by Daniel Pipes  •  February 1, 2022  •  Focus on Western Islamism

Why this website, why this publication? Because the West needs it.

Some background: Islamism in the West burst into public attention with the book burning and radical statements that accompanied the 1988-89 attacks on Salman Rushdie and his novel, The Satanic Verses. Ayatollah Khomeini's death edict made Western publics aware for the first time, and with due shock, that quietly growing populations of Muslims presented civilizational problems that, say, Chinese, Hindus, and Christian Africans did not. These boiled down to a minoritarian but powerful desire to apply medieval-style Islamic laws (the Sharia) in the West, with all their dire implications for non-Muslims and females, and to transform Western societies.

A long sequence of attacks over the next dozen years associated Islam with violence. Some won great notoriety but none achieved major proportions: for example, the World Trade Center bombing of 1993 killed only six and the attempt to bring down the Eiffel Tower failed. Jihad remained a somewhat erudite concern, mostly limited to policy types. Meanwhile, Islamists organized and gloated at their unimpeded advance.

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Do Europe's Nations Have National Characters?

by Daniel Pipes  •  January 28, 2022  •  The Article

Tourists tend to have stereotypes about national character – the English are snobs, French people stylish, Germans serious, and Italians joyous, or some variations on that list. More interestingly, deep thinkers also have much to say on this topic, sometimes writing weighty tomes on the matter. Have historians, sociologists, and anthropologists of Europe reached a consensus on those national characters? What about their nearest neighbors in the Middle East? A survey finds utter chaos.

The English, to quote my own review of distinguished authors such as David Hume, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and George Orwell, are simultaneously held to be "serene and moody; brotherly and conceited; fair and greedy; haughty and deferential; hypocritical and noble; stolid and humorous." In short, the combined wisdom of "groaning shelves of books and articles on the English national character, many written by distinguished figures ... amounts to a massive contradiction."[1]

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CAIR Again Lies About Me

by Daniel Pipes  •  January 18, 2022

In a press conference on Jan. 12, Edward A. Mitchell of the Council on American-Islamic Relations stated the following at 25:02 about an individual named Tariq Nelson:

Mr. Nelson mentions that IPT [the Investigative Project on Terrorism] connected him with Daniel Pipes. ... Mr. Pipes called Mr. Nelson. And Mr. Pipes, according to Mr. Nelson, asked him to start speaking out against Muslims, the Muslim, the mainstream Muslim community, which is what some other extremist Muslims have done in coordination with hate groups. Tariq Nelson refused to do that and therefore the Middle East Forum did not work with him.

Searching my records for all communications with Tariq Nelson, I found a short exchange of texts with him between Feb. 23 and Mar. 10, 2017:

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More Vanished American Words

by Daniel Pipes  •  January 9, 2022

I recently published 25 "vanished American words" that someone born around 1950 would understand and those born after 1960 would probably not. I asked for additional suggestions and got many. Selecting out the best of them, here is a new list, now over four times longer. Some are very obscure (Gestetner) and others not so much (telephone booth).

As an aside, two readers protested the inclusion of "party line" as a vanished phrase. No, one replied, it "is still alive and well," as in the example, "the MSM follows the Democrat party line." Yes, but I meant a telephone party line; the readers' unfamiliarity with this phenomenon neatly confirms my point. (January 9, 2022)

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