WASHINGTON -- Senators opposing President Bush's nomination of Daniel Pipes' nomination to the U.S. Institute of Peace have cited a quote that, taken out of context, does not accurately represent Pipes' published views.
On April 4 Bush named Pipes, head of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, to the USIP. Congress established the institute in 1984 "to promote the prevention, management, and peaceful resolution of international conflicts." Its 15 board members, Democrats and Republicans, serve without pay.
The forum describes itself as a think thank that works to define and promote American interests in the Middle East. "In particular, it believes in strong ties with Israel, Turkey, and other democracies as they emerge," according to its Web site.
The nomination has sparked opposition. The Washington Post, for example, called it "sort of a cruel joke." On April 19 the Post editorialized that Pipes "has long been regarded by Muslims" as a destroyer of bridges between Islam and the West, and that his nomination is "salt in the wound" of Muslims who are "anxious that they are being singularly scrutinized" by the Department of Justice.
Pipes' often-stated position is that militant Islam is the problem, and moderate Islam is the solution. He believes authoritarian Muslim societies must modernize by embracing democratic institutions and the rule of law.
On Nov. 19, 1990, Pipes argued in the National Review that an unwarranted fear of Islam should not be used to fill an emotional vacuum that the end of the Cold War might create. He wrote that nothing justifies seeing Muslims as the paramount enemy.
Pipes revised and updated the article as the second chapter of his 2002 book "Militant Islam Reaches America." The chapter is titled "The Imaginary Green Peril." In it he dismissed fears of an Islamic military threat but stated that immigration now concerns him more than in 1990, when he wrote that Muslim immigrants to Western countries had shown themselves to be more resistant to assimilation than their predecessors.
Nevertheless, Pipes wrote, "if handled properly, the immigrants can ... bring much of value, including new energy, to their host societies."
At a July 23 meeting of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pension Committee, Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass.,speaking against the nomination, read a quote from the chapter that Pipes has said characterizes European views and not his own:
"Western European societies are unprepared or unwilling to deal with the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples whom they perceive as cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene."
Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, objected to Pipes' nomination on many grounds, including the extracted quote. He recalled his mother, a Slovenian immigrant, who "talked funny" and would on certain feast days wear the clothes of her native land to church.
"She wanted to bring some of her customs with her to this country," Harkin said. "But anyone who knew my mother could never deny that she was American to the core."
However, these objections are not supported by a full reading of the chapter.
Pipes wrote that the last time Muslims physically threatened the West was the Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 and that nothing justifies seeing Muslims as the paramount enemy.
He said Muslims are not fanatical by nature, that radical Islamists are no more than 15 percent of the Muslim population in most places, and that Islam is not a political unit. "More Muslim governments cooperate with the West than threaten it," Pipes wrote. For all these reasons, jihad remains outside the realm of serious U.S. policy discussion.
Shifting to issues of culture, Pipes wrote that all immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but those of Muslims are more troublesome than most. Most troublesome, he wrote, is the stated goal of taking political power to build an Islamic society.
But Pipes'conclusion is that the challenges created by Muslim immigration to the West, although painful, are also finite. Alarmist predictions of a cataclysmic battle of civilizations are wrong.
Pipes wrote that communities of even fundamentalist Muslims who choose to live outside the American mainstream could be accommodated, along the lines of the Pennsylvania Amish and the Hassidic Jews of New York City.
The vote at the July 23 committee meeting was postponed for lack of a quorum.
