Daniel Pipes saw it coming. Long before 9/11 he warned of the terror threat and reminded his countrymen that they were not immune. His post-9/11 book, Militant Islam Reaches America, represents the culmination of his prophetic scholarship.
He identifies Islamo-fascism as the enemy not only of the United States but of peace and democracy generally. Pipes resists the adolescent romanticizing so tempting, and so fatal, to academics. His analysis reflects respect for Islamic culture, society, and thought and pays the Islamic world the courtesy of taking it seriously. The picture he describes is not always pretty, but it has the virtue of accuracy and depth.
Although terrorists have struck at Israelis, Americans, Europeans, and others, the war is being fought among Muslims and for the Islamic soul. The counterpoint to radical Islam, Pipes says, is moderate Islam. These are not the words of someone who "hates" either Islam, Muslims, or Arabs.
Pipes also is a patriot. He does not consider the United States a blot on humanity.
The left despises him.
Earlier this year President Bush nominated Pipes as a director of the Institute for Peace. History teaches that peace has no finer friend than the prophet who prepares for war. The 20th Century's greatest peacemakers were not the pacifists and accommodationists of the 1930s and the Cold War, but Winston Churchill and those who recognized the totalitarian threats. Pipes today plays a similar role.
His nomination bumped up against the diabolical resistance of the uninformed and the malevolent. The Islamic lobby discredited itself by attacking him. Obstructionist Senators put the nomination on hold. Those eager to see the Democratic Party reclaim the Roosevelt legacy and to rejoin the vital center waited vainly for stalwarts aggressively to promote a nominee who has earned bipartisan support. Bush broke the logjam by naming Pipes to a recess appointment, which does not require the Senate's approval.
A reading of the record makes one point clear: Pipes' critics oppose him not because he is wrong but because he is right. His crime has been to tell the truth. Ideologues won't forgive him.
