Daniel Pipes

Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum, a member of the presidentially-appointed board of the U.S. Institute of Peace, and a prize-winning columnist for the New York Sun and The Jerusalem Post.

Education and Career

Pipes received his A.B. (1971) and Ph.D. (1978) from Harvard University, both in history. Pipes speaks French, and reads Arabic and German. He spent six years studying abroad, including three years in Egypt, where his activites included writing a book on colloquial Egyptian Arabic published in 1983. He has been awarded a honorary doctorates from universities in Switzerland and the United States. Pipes frequently discusses current issues on television, appearing on such U.S. programs as ABC World News, CBS Reports, Crossfire, Good Morning America, NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, Nightline, O’Reilly Factor, and The Today Show. He has appeared on leading television networks around the globe, including the BBC and Al-Jazeera.

Pipes has published in such magazines as the Atlantic Monthly, Commentary, Foreign Affairs, Harper's, National Review, New Republic, and The Weekly Standard. Many newspapers carry his articles, including the Los Angeles Times, New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, another hundred, plus hundreds of websites. His writings have been translated into nineteen languages and he has lectured in twenty-five countries.

In April 2003, President Bush announced Pipes' nomination to the government-sponsored U.S. Institute of Peace. Soon afterwards, an array of leftist, Arab, and Islamist groups denounced the appointment, so President Bush bypassed the Senate and went ahead with a recess appointment. For the full story on this episode, see http://www.danielpipes.org/usip.php.

Pipes has taught at the University of Chicago, Harvard University, and the U.S. Naval War College. He has served in various capacities at the Departments of State and Defense, including vice chairman of the presidentially-appointed Fulbright Board of Foreign Scholarships. He sits on five editorial boards, has testified before many congressional committees, and worked on four presidential campaigns. He is listed in Who's Who in America and Who's Who in the World.

For a complete biography, including many articles about Pipes, see http://www.danielpipes.org/bios/.

Predictions

Radical Islam: Pipes has long expressed concern about the dangers of radical Islam to the West and was one of the few analysts who understood its threat well before 9/11. As early as 1985, he wrote in Middle East Insight that “The scope of the radical fundamentalist’s ambition poses novel problems” for the United States. In the fall 1995 of the National Interest, he wrote: Unnoticed by most Westerners, war has been unilaterally declared on Europe and the United States.. More specifically, four months before the attack on the twin towers, Pipes and Steven Emerson wrote in The Wall Street Journal that Al Qaeda was "planning new attacks on the US" and that Iranian operatives "helped arrange advanced ... training for Al Qaeda personnel in Lebanon where they learned, for example, how to destroy large buildings."

Arab-Israeli conflict: He wrote in Commentary in April 1990: “there can be either an Israel or a Palestine, but not both. To think that two states can stably and peacefully coexist in the small territory between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea is to be either naïve or duplicitous. If the last seventy years teach anything, it is that there can be only one state west of the Jordan River. Therefore, to those who ask why the Palestinians must be deprived of a state, the answer is simple: grant them one and you set in motion a chain of events that will lead either to its extinction or the extinction of Israel.”

The Dangers of Occupying Iraq: In April 1991, when a debate was raging about the desirability of a U.S. intervention against the Saddam Hussein regime, Pipes wrote in the Wall Street Journal about the prospect of U.S. forces occupying Iraq, “with Schwartzkopf Pasha ruling from Baghdad”: “It sounds romantic, but watch out. Like the Israelis in southern Lebanon nine years ago, American troops would find themselves quickly hated, with Shi’is taking up suicide bombing, Kurds resuming their rebellion, and the Syrian and Iranian governments plotting new ways to sabotage American rule. Staying in place would become too painful, leaving too humiliating.”

Arafat's Intentions at Oslo: Writing in the Forward within days of the signing of the Oslo Accords, Pipes observed: “Mr. Arafat has merely adopted a flexible approach to fit adverse circumstances, saying whatever needed to be said to survive. The PLO had not a change of heart – merely a change of policy. … the deal with Israel represents a lease on life for the PLO, endabling it to stay in business until Israel falters, when it can deal a death blow.”

Evaluations

The Wall Street Journal calls him “an authoritative commentator on the Middle East.” MSNBC describes him as one of the best-known “Mideast policy luminaries” and CNN has called him one “of the country’s leading experts” on the Middle East.

The Boston Globe wrote that "If Pipes's admonitions had been heeded, there might never have been a 9/11." It was precisely after Sept. 11, 2001, that Pipes came fully into his own, explaining to a confused and deeply concerned country just who its enemy is and why. Insight on the News 15 April 2002

Pipes is also well-known in academia, where his generally conservative positions—especially his argument that radical Islam poses a totalitarian threat to civilized life—conflict with the views of many campus-based scholars, who are overwhelmingly on the left and are intolerant of disagreement with their views.

Organizations

Pipes founded the Middle East Forum (www.MEForum.org), an independent 501(c)3 organization, in 1994. Its mission is to “promote American interests” through publications, research, consulting, media outreach, and public education. The Forum publishes two journals, the Middle East Quarterly and the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin; it sponsors Campus Watch, a project to review, critique, and improve Middle East studies; and it sponsors events in four cities.

Campus Watch gained much attention when it opened doors in September 2002. It is a project that identifies "'five problems: analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students" in the teaching of Middle Eastern studies at American universities. Students are invited to submit first-hand reports regarding teachers, books and curricula. Campus Watch was immediately hailed as a needed antidote to the extremism in the academy and had a number of scoops and successes.

Sample Quotations

Even as the nation monitors the Muslim world within its borders more closely for signs of Islamism, it must continue, of course, to protect the civil rights of law-abiding American Muslims. Political leaders should regularly and publicly distinguish between Islam, the religion of Muslims, and Islamism, the totalitarian ideology. In addition, they should do everything in their power to make sure that individual Muslims, mosques, and other legal institutions continue to enjoy the full protection of the law. A time of crisis doesn’t change the presumption of innocence at the core of our legal system. Police should provide extra protection for Muslims to prevent acts of vandalism against their property or their persons.
-- Fighting Militant Islam, Without Bias, City Journal, Autumn 2002

There is no escaping the unfortunate fact that Muslim government employees in law enforcement, the military, and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism, as do Muslim chaplains in prisons and the armed forces. Muslim visitors and immigrants must undergo additional background checks. Mosques require a scrutiny beyond that applied to churches, synagogues, and temples. Muslim schools require increased oversight to ascertain what is being taught to children.
--Jerusalem Post, Jan 22, 2003. p.9

Anti-Islamist Muslims - who wish to live modern lives, unencumbered by burqas, fatwas and violent visions of jihad - are on the defensive and atomized. However eloquent, their individual voices cannot compete with the roar of militant Islam's determination, money (much of it from overseas) and violence. As a result, militant Islam, with its West-phobia and goal of world hegemony, dominates Islam in the West and appears to many to be the only kind of Islam.
--Voices of Islam, New York Post, September 23, 2003

Books

For details on Pipes's fourteen books, see http://www.danielpipes.org/books.php.

Four books deal with Islam: Militant Islam Reaches America (2002), The Rushdie Affair (1990), In the Path of God (1983), and Slave Soldiers and Islam (1981).

Three books concern Syria: Syria Beyond the Peace Process (1996), Damascus Courts the West (1991), and Greater Syria (1990).

Four deal with other Middle Eastern topics: The Hidden Hand (1996) analyses the way Arabs and Iranians see themselves and the outside world. The Long Shadow (1989) and Miniatures (2003) contain essays on varied Middle Eastern and Islamic topics. An Arabist's Guide to Colloquial Egyptian (1983) systematizes the grammar of Arabic as spoken in Egypt.

Conspiracy (1997) establishes the importance of conspiracy theories in modern European and American politics.

• Slave Soldiers and Islam (1981)
• An Arabist's Guide to Colloquial Egyptian (1983)
• In the Path of God (1983), ISBN 0765809818
• The Long Shadow (1989)
• Greater Syria (1990)
• The Rushdie Affair (1990)
• Damascus Courts the West (1991)
• The Hidden Hand (1996)
• Conspiracy (1997)
• Syria Beyond the Peace Process (1996)
• Militant Islam Reaches America (2002), ISBN 0393052044
• Miniatures (2003)

Pipes has edited two collections of essays, Sandstorm (1993) and Friendly Tyrants (1991). He is the joint author of eleven books.

Website

Pipes opened a personal website, www.DanielPipes.org, in December 2000. The website has a number of distinguishing features:

• It is the single most accessed source of specialized information on the Middle East and Islam.
• It regularly features translations into several foreign languages of Pipes’s columns.
• It includes a weblog that according to DayPop.com is one of the most read to and linked to on the Internet.
• It hosts a reader’s forum with 16,000 comments.

Readers may sign up at http://www.danielpipes.org/subscribe.php to receive Pipes’s new materials as they appear.

External links

• Daniel Pipes’s personal website
  • Biography
  • List of books
• Middle East Forum
• Campus Watch

• Harvard Magazine: Militant about "Islamism"
• Washington Post: Middle East Studies Under Scrutiny in U.S.

• • The Truth About Daniel Pipes, :by columnist Charles Krauthammer
• Los Angeles Times: “A Misdirected Attack”
• Financial Times: Islam's battle with a hostile world
• World Magazine: Truth on Terror