This is not the way to tackle anti-Semitism

[Violet_Crumble]

Dedicated to those who think Daniel Pipes is okay

Anti-Muslim rhetoric from the likes of Daniel Pipes is unhelpful, writes Maher Mughrabi.

Daniel Pipes is a rhetorical bomb-maker, and last weekend he struck in Melbourne. Combining his audience's horrific memories of the Holocaust with present fears of Iranian weapons programs, he stood back and waited for a publicity explosion.


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Anti-Semitism is a serious and enduring problem, which must be tackled through education and exchange at every level of society. It may be that Pipes has something to teach us about its range and character today. But I wonder about placing him front and centre at an anti-Semitism conference, for a number of reasons.

That he still commands audiences might surprise those who remember that in 1987 he urged the United States to supply Saddam Hussein with better weapons and intelligence, on the basis that the Baathist leadership was an important force for moderation and US security in the region. That Saddam was the aggressor did not seem to matter; what was important was that Iran should be utterly defeated.

Pipes' stance on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict also hinges on the need for a complete military defeat of one side. Believing that "what war had achieved for Israel, diplomacy has undone", he has long opposed a two-state solution of the kind proposed by George Bush and the international community and to which even Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon now pays lip service.

<snip>

Pipes has also gone on Australian television to express the view that "easily half" of the world's Muslims believed the terrorist atrocities of September 11, 2001, were "a great thing". To stigmatise more than half a billion people in this way is surely not the act of someone who has studied the way in which anti-Semites of the 1920s and '30s stigmatised East European Jews as carriers of Bolshevism. And when Pipes notes that "all immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most", one wonders if he recalls that less than a century ago an American newspaper could argue that "the innate racial characteristics of Jews so conflict with Christian customs and prejudices that happy marriages are impossible".




http://www.theage.com.au/news/Opinion/This-is-not-the-way-to-tackle-antiSemitism/2005/02/07/1107625135855.html?oneclick=true

[Djinn]

1. Ah Daniel

good to see that everything he says STILL resembles a steaming slick of untreated sewage

[Name removed]

2. Deleted message

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[gottaB]

3. Thanks for posing that level-headed critique

Pipes is an incendiary figure, but many who read him might not recognize it because of their own prejudices. The tack taken by Mughrabi effectively cuts through the bs.