Daniel Pipes Knows How to Mix Just Enough Truth With Doctrine
Adrienne McPhail, worthington90@cybernet.it

There are dangerous men in the world and Daniel Pipes is one of them.

He first came to my attention several years ago during a visit to Washington. It appeared that a number of Arab-Americans were concerned about him and the growing influence he was exerting in the media and the political arenas.

Prior to the attacks of Sept. 11 Pipes was voicing his apprehension regarding the dangers of Muslim immigration into the United States as a potential “fifth column” for radical Islamists. After the attacks, Pipe’s media exposure grew. Called upon as a “Middle Eastern expert,” he staged his campaign instilling a combination of fear and prejudice into the American public, particularly concentrating on Saudi Arabia.

He zeroed in on the Wahhabi doctrine and skillfully crafted an entire theory on the cause for terrorism based on partial data but with just enough truth to make it appear reasonable.

Adrienne McPhail is an American journalist, now working in Japan, whom I knew when she was working in the KSA. It turns out her sentiments on Mssrs Pipes and Schwartz match mine exactly, though we’d never discussed them, in fact.

Both Pipes and Schwartz could provide a very important service if they were intellectually honest. By over-stating the evidence, by relying on emotional buzz-words instead of facts, by selective quoting, and by missing very large boxes of clues about Islam and the Middle East, though, they become demagogues. They get far more airtime and column inches than their arguments deserve. What they are very successful at, in fact, is self-promotion through telling people what they want to hear.

I have no patience with groups like CAIR, either, though. They use the same warped logic as Pipes. They also have absolutely no sense of perspective, assuming that anything that negatively affects an American Muslim must be the result of plotting, planning, and intentional acts. The seem as unable to accord the range of human behaviors to Muslims as Pipes and Schwartz are, only in opposite directions.

The space for useful conversation would become much wider if the demagogues of both sides would just shut up for a while.