Today, the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions will vote on President Bush's nomination of Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes to the board of the United States Institute of Peace.
The outcome is far from certain.
Ted Kennedy, the committee's ranking Democrat, is expected to vote against Pipes, according to a spokesman. Most of the other committee members - including Hillary Rodham Clinton - were refusing to say where they stand until the very last minute.
This follows a concerted and vituperative campaign by the anti-Israel lobby to sink Pipes, whose weekly column we are proud to have appear on these pages.
Indeed, his courageous and distinguished record of scholarship - with its pointed criticism of the extremists who have hijacked Islam - has earned him the loathing of terrorism's defenders.
As Frank Gaffney, president of the Center for Security Policy, has written: "Few people have done more over a longer period of time to warn of the dangers posed by extremist Islam to its co-religionists and the rest of us than Daniel Pipes."
The Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR), in particular, has long smeared Pipes. But then, it's no surprise that CAIR would find Pipes - whom the group has termed a "bigot" and an "Islamophobe" - so troubling.
Back in 1998, CAIR's board chairman, Omar Ahmad, said that "Islam isn't in America to be equal to any other faith, but to become dominant. The Koran, the Muslim book of scripture, should be the highest authority in America, and Islam the only accepted religion on Earth."
(Ahmad now denies having made the statement, which was widely reported - but not until two months ago, nearly five years after the fact.)
So, no wonder that CAIR and its allies declared a virtual jihad on Pipes' nomination, which they've fought with phone banks, mailings and political pressure.
Pressure of the kind that apparently got Ted Kennedy to knuckle under.
If Pipes' nomination is defeated today, which would preclude it coming before the full Senate, the real losers will be those who are determined to confront terrorism and fight it.
And not to apologize for it.
