Pipe Down

Go to the website of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (cair), and you will see an urgent call to "Act Now! Ask Senate to reject the Daniel Pipes Nomination." Elsewhere on the site, another "Action Alert" beckons you to ask the president "to rescind nomination of 'Islamophobe.'" President Bush has named Daniel Pipes, an eminent and scrupulous scholar of Arab politics and Islam--though one not fearful of argument--to the board of directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace, an appointment that requires Senate confirmation. Cair, a collective fellow-traveler of, and apologist for, Muslim extremism, has made Pipes's defeat its current priority. And three U.S. senators on the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee (Ted Kennedy, Tom Harkin, and Chris Dodd)--alas, all Democrats--have already signed on to its campaign (with Senator Jim Jeffords apparently leaning their way, too). The senators' public grievance is that Pipes is "provocative" and "controversial." How can any authority on the Middle East and Islamic extremism be anything else, if he is saying anything serious? And it is precisely challenging and stimulating thinking on these matters that the nation requires from its centers of learning, of which the U.S. Institute of Peace is a promising example. It is just possible, of course, that, despite the national need for bracing scholarship on the Arab and Muslim worlds, what Senator Kennedy wants the institute and its overseers to deal in is pabulum, the calming clichés that left us wholly unprepared for September 11, 2001. It is exactly Pipes's aversion to pabulum that has persuaded a wide-ranging roster of notable area specialists and independent intellectuals to publicly endorse his nomination, a roster that includes Fouad Ajami, Paul Kennedy, James Q. Wilson, John Keegan, and Raymond Tanter. For committee Democrats to defeat Pipes would not be politically wise; after all, handing a victory to the Muslim hate front is not exactly what voters want. Worse, it would signal that the Democrats are ready to silence a truthful voice of honest scholarship about the Middle East.