To the Editor:
Eyal Press's biographical article on me in the May 10 issue ["Neocon Man"] contains several errors, mostly minor:
§ In the Path of God was finished before I arrived in Washington in 1982, not while I was living in that city.
§ The conclusion that I produced "little original research" after 1983 perhaps reflects the absence of most of my (as yet undigitized) writings from that era on www.danielpipes.org, my website, where Press apparently did most of his research on me – and not an actual paucity of publications. I published during those years, for example, on such topics as "Mamluk Survival in Ottoman Egypt," "The Rise of the Sa'di Dynasty in Morocco" and "Syria's Imperial Dream."
§ I am misquoted about not ever having been to the West Bank and Gaza. I repeatedly traveled in both areas between 1969 and 1996. Among other destinations, I visited Yasir Arafat in his Gaza office.
§ I did not say that Militant Islam Reaches America was "unpublishable" before 9/11, only that some of the articles in it were unpublishable before then – notably Chapter 11, "We Are Going to Conquer America."
§ I did not complain about Muslim hygienic standards in my 1990 National Review article; I paraphrased French politicians on this topic.
§ That several "dissenting Middle Eastern specialists ... received hate mail and death threats" as a result of Campus Watch's or my critiquing them has yet to be established. Over a one-and-a-half-year period, I repeatedly asked for proof that such mail was received and have yet to be shown a single example. While I unequivocally denounce all hate mail and death threats, until proof is forthcoming, I am skeptical about their existence in this case.
DANIEL PIPES
Washington, DC
PRESS REPLIES
I agree that these matters are mostly minor. Nevertheless, I address each point in order:
§ Robert Dickson Crane, who worked with Daniel Pipes in the State Department, told me that Pipes was working on In the Path of God in the office they shared in Washington in the early 1980s. I'll leave it to them to work out.
§ I stand by my claim that Pipes produced "little original research" after 1983. His voluminous output since then consists overwhelmingly of interpretive essays and op-eds on topical subjects, not original scholarship, along with books that rely mostly on secondary rather than archival sources.
§ In our tape-recorded interview, I asked Pipes whether he'd visited the occupied territories recently; he said no. "At all?" I asked. He answered, "Not a friendly place, no." Evidently, he meant he had not visited the territories recently at all, as opposed to ever. My apologies for the misunderstanding.
§ A November 29, 2001, profile of Pipes in the Philadelphia Inquirer quotes him describing the manuscript of his book on Muslims in America as "unpublishable" before 9/11.
§ Pipes understandably wishes to distance himself from the remark about Muslim hygienic standards. Yet there were no quotes around the views he claims to have been paraphrasing, and in the preceding sentence he wrote that such fears have "substance."
§ Juan Cole told me he received hate mail after being singled out by Pipes, and that his e-mail was flooded with spam. Hamid Dabashi, a professor at Columbia, went further, playing for me taped phone messages he had received. "You stinking Muslim terrorist pig. You terrorist bastard," said one caller. "Listen, you Muslim terrorist bastard, we're watching you. We know where you live. We know where you work," said another.
EYAL PRESS
New York City
PIPES REPLIES
In his reply to my letter to the editor '("Letters," June 7), Eyal Press writes "Robert Dickson Crane, who worked with Daniel Pipes in the State Department, told me that Pipes was working on In the Path of God in the office they shared in Washington in the early 1980s." To my knowledge, I have met Robert Dickson Crane once in my life, on February 3, 1999, when he attended a seminar outside Washington, DC, at which I spoke on "Islamism: a Critique." Never to my knowledge have I worked with him in any capacity, much less did we at any point share an office. (I have written to Crane to inquire about this point, thinking that perhaps there was some contact that I have forgotten; but he has not replied.) Crane seems to have a number of odd ideas about me and my work; I document another example on my weblog at www.danielpipes.org/blog/166. For the record, I lived in Chicago until August 1982 and finished the manuscript of In the Path of God while living there. I moved to Washington and began work in the State Department in September 1982. Other than some finishing editorial touches, I did not work on the book while in Washington, and the first copy was in hand in March 1983.
DANIEL PIPES
Washington, DC
July 5, 2004
