To the Editor:
Max Blumenthal in "The Sugar Mama of Anti-Muslim Hate" devotes several paragraphs to me in which he commits several of his wonted errors and shoddy distortions. Four for the record:
"Expressing his solidarity with Wilders, Pipes echoed the Dutch politician's racial views on Muslim immigrants": Hardly, I have repeatedly and publicly distanced myself from Wilders' views of Islam, Muslims, and Muslim immigrants. More than that, I have never expressed racial views on anyone, least of all Muslims.
Blumenthal willfully distorts a twenty-two-year old quote: As I have established in some detail, the phrase "brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene" was a paraphrase of then-current French leaders' views, not my own.
Blumenthal writes of me, "In 2001 he neatly encapsulated the zero-sum mentality that defines his view ..., declaring, 'I worry very much, from the Jewish point of view, that the presence, and increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims, because they are so much led by an Islamist leadership, that this will present true dangers to American Jews'." Zero-sum mentality? Hardly, I pointed to the very real problem for Jews (among others) of a rising "Islamist leadership." In an era of multiple and brutal American Islamist attacks on Jews, who could yet deny this is a growing danger?
"To his shame, Pipes earned eighteen citations in the manifesto of Norwegian terrorist Anders Behring Breivik, the self-proclaimed 'counter-jihadist' standing trial for the murder of seventy-seven people, mostly teenagers." Another distortion, for Breivik mentioned hundreds of authors in his manifesto and some of them more often than me. He cited Hitler 42 times, Muhammad 36 times, and Osama bin Laden 29 times. More apropos, he cited György Lukács 51 times, Karl Marx 27 times, Theodor Adorno 26 times, Herbert Marcuse 24 times, Antonio Gramsci 23 times, Colin Barker 20 times, and Barack Obama 19 times. Were the Nation to boycott this posse of Marxists, leftists, and their protégés, its pages would stand quite empty.
Yours sincerely,
Daniel Pipes
