There's Something About Daniel
Comments (1)
| TrackBack (95)
By Irfan Yusuf
One of my alltime favorite movies is "There’s Something About Mary". Apart from being a veritable autobiography (the clumsy romantic who thinks he might eventually win out with the pretty girl in the end), it has a fantazmic soundtrack and a plot that just gets thicker and thicker. In fact, the movie is so good that I reckon even my ‘Dilli-vaali’ (i.e. from Delhi) mum would watch it, provided you Bollywoodised it by replacing Ben Stiller with Amitabh Bachan and had a few duets from Lata Mangeshkar and Mohammad Rafi.
One of the best and oft-repeated bits which reinforce the "butch" nature of the otherwise sweet Mary character is when she puts on a serious face and then says something completely outrageous, troublesome, worrying, tragic, etc. You see her listener’s face drop for a few seconds before Mary laughs and says "I’m f#cking with you!"
She might say: "My rabbi is actually a German war veteran from the second world war." Or she might say: "Daniel Pipes has been nominated for a position on the Board of Directors of the US Institute of Peace".
For these outrageous statements, she would watch your jaws drop. Then, in an ever-so-sweet manner, she would say: "For heaven’s sake, Irfy, I’m f#cking withya!!"
I wish Mary was here with me right now. Why? Because my jaw is dropping and dropping and is ready to hit the ground any minute. I just cannot believe that Daniel Pipes could seriously be nominated for a position like this.
Pipes? A Director of the Institute of Peace? Nah! You're f#cking with me, aren’t you. Serious?
Pipes visited Sydney in August 1998 as a guest of an allegedly liberal think tank known as the Centre for Independent Studies. He was invited to give a few lectures which, as it happened, generally went unnoticed. He attracted a few positive raves from one or two conservative writers as well as a few pseudo-conservative try-hards.
For instance, a pseudo-conservative columnist for the otherwise sensible Sydney Morning Herald, Miranda Devine, wrote an interesting piece on one of Pipes’ Sydney lectures
Her article, entitled "A New Fear Stalks the Land", adequately reflects the paranoia that underpins so much of Pipes’ analysis of all things vaguely related to Islam.
Throughout his tour, Pipes gathered troops for his international war against what he labels "militant Islam." He claims this new form of Islam makes up at least one in ten Muslims and is growing fast. And how do you identify this dangerous terroristic radical Islam?
Simple. Look for a Muslim complaining about discrimination. Muslims who refuse to accept discrimination against them are militants who should be shipped off to Guantanamo Bay. Look for Muslim firefighters from New York who campaign to grow beards and then a few weeks later are killed while trying to rescue people trapped at the WTC. Look for Muslim government workers who insist on covering their hair at work.
In short, look for Muslims who do not wish to be denied rights which the law gives them but which Daniel Pipes would love to see taken away. And look for Muslims who refuse to have their foreheads slapped with some useless label like "militant" or "fundamentalist", who refuse to be sidelined or marginalized and who refuse to believe their non-Muslim neighbors and colleagues are against them.
Of course, Pipes denies that he is in anyway encouraging war between the West and the rest. He says that "moderate" and "liberal" and "secular" Muslims need to be helped.
I guess before 1991, Pipes would have suggested the US support that champion of moderate liberal Baathist Islam against the nasty militant Iranians. If chemical weapons are used, all the better.
Pipes’ analysis is simplistic. He centralizes the trivial and trivializes the central. Usually his solution is one that involves even more suspicion and conflict. His analysis is rarely taken seriously by any but the most bigoted and ignorant observers. The more highly respected academic writers on the Islamic world, like John Esposito and Karen Armstrong, rarely even mention Pipes in their work.
Why do academics ignore him? A professor of Middle Eastern History at Stanford University puts it like this: "After failing in his own pursuit of an academic career, Pipes has evidently decided to take revenge on the scholarly community that rejected him."
In fact, the only people even vaguely interested in Pipes’ work are pro-Likud Zionists and other similar persons who would prefer all those nasty Mozlems would just go away. It is only those who would like to see a war between civilizations that find Pipes’ works useful.
Pipes may deny all this. He might say that he has calmed down, that he tries not to use titles like "The Muslims are coming! The Muslims are coming!!" for every article he writes. He might claim that he no longer has problems with the "smelly foods" of Muslim migrants. But the fact is that anyone wishing to find good enough reason to support any form of islamophobia will almost always start with Pipes’ work.
So there you go. Prez Dubya has already declared Islam to be a religion of peace, a great civilization, and a faith America does not regard as the enemy. Pipes says more and more Muslims are becoming part of "militant" Islam, that this must be stopped and that militants must be crushed. And apparently Dubya now wants Pipes, an academic war-monger par excellence, to sit on the US Institute for Peace.
Come on, Mr President. Are you f#cking with us?
