On Tuesday, April 29, 2003, Daniel Pipes is coming to speak at UW-Madison for the Wisconsin Union Directorate's Spotlight Series. Since his appearance was announced, there has been a strong voice of dissent amongst a small minority on campus. However, if the majority knew this man, there would be only a minority to support him.
Throughout his career, Mr. Pipes has shown a strong revulsion to Islam, the Middle East and Arab culture. Although he has a Ph.D. in history from Harvard, he has been shunned by academics in his field for his racist and ungrounded statements. His critics include the former director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies and one of Pipes' instructors, who said, \... I have been appalled frequently by [Pipes'] polemic stance on almost everything having to do with Islam, Muslims or the Palestinian/Israeli issue."" Although he is regarded by the mass media as a knowledgeable academic on the Middle East, Mr. Pipes has only gained recognition through his racist and provocative statements, from groups who can gain politically from his biased and one-sided rhetoric.
Pipes is the founder and director of an organization called the Middle Eastern Forum, which has developed a Web site, www.campuswatch.org, where campus community members can report academics for expressing 'anti-American' attitudes. Daniel Pipes and www.campuswatch.org, however, are a direct threat to the ideals this country was built on.
He is against freedom of speech, using McCarthy-style tactics to intimidate into silence any academics with dissenting views. Despite the fact that the United States is a proud immigrant society, according to Mr. Pipes, immigrants are a threat to America. He said in a November 1990 article that ""Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene ... All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.""
He is against freedom of religion, saying that Islam should not be taught in a ""positive light"" in our schools and that 15 percent of all Muslim-Americans are potential killers. He is most certainly against the separation of church and state when he says that all Muslims in the police force, military or any other federal job should be monitored for terrorist ties. Since when did one's religion determine his or her patriotism?
Not only are Mr. Pipes' ideologies in direct conflict with the constitution of the United States and the freedoms that we hold inalienable, he also supports fascist, antidemocratic methods of ""protection"" in today's international climate, when we need our freedoms more than ever. Mr. Pipes supports the internment of Japanese Americans as having been necessary for domestic security, he uses McCarthy tactics to silence any dissent and if you read much of his rhetoric, I challenge you to change the word Muslim with the word Jew and you will see that just as in Nazi Germany, nationalism and fear are two of the most effective tools used to isolate a minority of the population, dehumanize them and then attack their freedoms and their rights to exist.
"" _____ are parasites on the society, ____ are disproportionately engaged in criminal behavior, ______ have ""unacceptable"" customs, _____ seek to take over the country, and ____ have sexual aggression against women in the dominant culture,"" Pipes said in a September 2002 National Post article.
This is unacceptable.
It is important that we bring speakers from a broad spectrum of views, from conservative right-wing representatives to liberal left-wing representatives. However, this man has no political views to express besides his white supremacist, Judeo-Christian superiority complex. Although he tries to pressure into silence those who disagree with him, he has the right and privilege to freedom of speech that every American enjoys. What disappoints me is that the University of Wisconsin is willing to give him a platform from which to spout his xenophobic rhetoric for his ideal of a religiously pure state.
There is no validity to his arguments and all he spouts is hate speech. As a Judeo-Christian, brownish-pinkish-reddish-yellowish-whitish immigrant American who likes to speak my mind, eat a variety of foreign foods and practice my religion (or lack thereof if I so choose); an American who wants to be able to work for the federal government without my beliefs being an issue and without being harassed for my views, Mr. Pipes is a threat to me, and I do not want the name of my university or our money to be wasted on his bigotry.
