Today's Washington Post reports the complaints of the Council on American-Islamic Relations against the appointment of Daniel Pipes to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace. Pipes is of course well-known to NRO readers as a critic of extremist Islam--and as a defender and champion of the moderate Muslims who are extremists' first victims. Pipes' carefully researched work offends CAIR, and no wonder: While CAIR presents itself to the press and the U.S. government as a civil-liberties organization, Pipes keeps track of the group's true purposes, avowed in places where it assumed nobody was looking. Thus it was Pipes who brought to public attention this 1998 statement by CAIR's chairman, Omar M. Ahmad: "Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran . . . should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on earth."
CAIR has also militantly opposed the war on terrorism. It has denounced both the Iraq war and also--as early as October 2001--the campaign against the Taliban in Afghanistan.
Despite their antiwar record, representatives of CAIR believe themselves to possess great influence with the U.S. government, and they are now organizing to block Pipes' appointment. It will be an important symbolic victory for them if they can succeed--not just because they will have scored a point against Pipes, whom they detest, but also because they will have demonstrated their ability to bend the U.S. government to their will. As Pipes has written in another context, groups like CAIR "are demanding ... that the United States take a giant step toward applying within its borders the strictures of Islamic law (the shari'a) itself. A basic premise of that body of law is that no one, and especially no non-Muslim, may openly discuss certain subjects--some of the very subjects, as it happens, that CAIR wishes to render taboo."
