Daniel Pipes Hates America (part of an ongoing series)
(posted by Daniel Koffler)
Harvard law student Joel B. Pollak takes to the WaPo op-ed page to argue that the teaching of the Arabic language is somehow sinister in intent and effect. Kudos to Matthew Yglesias for aiming some well-earned snark at the real culprit, Fred Hiatt, for giving such loathsome innuendo a prominent national platform. I, too, have often wondered what could be done to augment Charles Krauthammer’s home roost any further, and now we know.
Apart from the fact that literally nothing in Pollak’s description of his Arabic text is the least bit out of the ordinary — the description, if accurate, reminds me distinctly of German, Latin, and Persian texts I’ve read, presumably because there is substantial thematic overlap between some uncounted number of foreign language texts; when I learned Old English, by contrast, the material was vastly more dark and violent than anything Pollak has to report — there are two serious points to make that go beyond Hiatt’s issues of taste and judgement (let’s put it that way):
1) This kind of nonsense has real consequences, and they are bad for America.
2) Daniel Pipes is the Patient Zero of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim bigotry. If you open up your morning paper to find such bigotry therein — but I mean really over-the-top stuff that’s not just prejudiced, but conspiratorial, paranoid, and more in that vein — check Pipes’ archives for the past 3-6 months. It’s a very good bet that you’ll locate the original, and usually considerably more virulent version of the fear and hate you’ve just encountered.
The second point actually helps illustrate the first. Several years ago, a Yemeni-American teacher named Debbie Almontaser won a charter from the city of New York to open up an Arabic-immersion public day school in Brooklyn, which she named the Khalil Gibran International Academy after the famous Lebanese Christian poet. She secured financial backing from the Gates Foundation and was helped in her managerial and organizational tasks by a secular Arab-American community group, the latter after she explicitly declined support from a sectarian Muslim outfit.
Obviously, Osama himself might as well have been opening up shop over the Manhattan Bridge, so the usual chorus of lunatics, racists, and bedwetters (not mutually exclusive categories) swelled to a hysterical crescendo before the cornerstone of the school had had time to set in place. You can read a summary of what followed here, or a longer, less opinionated account here. To make a long story short, it was none other than Daniel Pipes who launched the campaign of defamation against Ms. Almontaser in a New York Sun op-ed in which he deliberately distorted her words to mean the precise opposite of what she had said, and readily copped to knowing nothing about her or her school except that it was to be an Arabic-immersion school. Which hardly presented an obstacle to libelling her as a surreptitious jihadist, since, as Pipes explains:
In practice…Arabic-language instruction is inevitably laden with pan-Arabist and Islamist baggage…[L]earning Arabic in of itself promotes an Islamic outlook.
Or in bumper sticker form, “fuck the ragheads.” Needless to say, the campaign of defamation was successful and aborted Almontaser’s project before it could ever get off the ground.
Now ask yourself, what would be a low-cost way to improve American education, build up our stocks of a vitally important national security resource, and help foster friendship between the west and the Muslim world? Why, of course, investing heavily in educating Americans in Arabic, Persian, Dari, Pashto, Urdu, Hindustani generally, Indonesian, and so on.
Pollak is right, incidentally, that Arabic courses are popular at the (mainly elite, private) universities that offer them, but of course very few students who begin studying a language at the tertiary level will attain anything approaching fluency or even conversational competence. On the other hand, the benefit to American national security of having a large sub-population skilled in Arabic is obvious. So the harm to national security of destroying young students’ opportunities to learn Arabic, per student whose opportunity is destroyed, is real and in principle measurable. What can you say about people who are so monomaniacal in pursuing their vendettas against brown-skinned ululators that they are happy to harm US national security to gain a small edge over their bogeymen? I say, at the very least such people hate America.
“Okay,” you might say, “that looks pretty bad, but there’s no reason to think Pipes is the origin of all or even many pathological slanders of Arabs and Muslims.” Au contraire. Remember that insane Edward Luttwak op-ed in the Times a month or two ago — the one that alleged that Muslims worldwide will regard Barack Obama as an apostate Muslim and target him for death, and will be correct, according to the tenets of Islam, in doing so? The op-ed a very embarrassed Clark Hoyt demonstrated in painstaking detail was bullshit in every particular and never should have run in the Times (though Ali Eteraz’s refutation was instant and even more devastating)? Yeah, that little slice of dementia originated in Pipes’ feverish, racist imagination, too. And by the way, the pathogen is still spreading, even beyond our borders. Melanie Phillips, a strong contender to be the worst opinion writer in Britain, recycled Pipes’ violent hallucinations less than a month ago in the UK Spectator.
So if you’re eager to get a glimpse of tomorrow’s anti-Arab/Muslim hate meme today, look no further than danielpipes.org. A quick glance at the current offerings turns up a classy argument that Noam Chomsky and Ken Livingstone are basically Islamofascists, and this very sober assessment of the existential threat Islamist terrorists living in America and Europe pose to all of us. If all goes well, those should be coming to a paper of record near you any day now.
Tags: bigotry, daniel pipes, islamofascism
July 5th, 2008 at 9:49 pm
Daniel: I cannot eviscerate the vile Mr. Pipes any better than you have, but I strongly second your endorsement of foreign-language immersion schools. I was fortunate enough to attend a private school that began teaching us French in 4th grade, and by 7th the French teacher also taught us some of our history and science classes en francais. (Math/algebra were exempted because some students had enough problems with those subjects without having to struggle with the language.)
Throughout high school I continued until there was not more they could offer me in French, and as an undergrad I picked up the easiest minor in the world by CLEPing out of all but three French credits. More importantly, I learned how to THINK about language. Further, I could read foreign newspapers and travel in Europe without sounding like an arrogant, parochial American.
After 15 years of not having used my French, I’ve lost a great deal of it, but find that when I encounter text in that language much of it comes rushing back.
Among the several defects in American education, is that we do not teach our young foreign languages — it becomes harder with each passing year for a person to learn second and third languages. Young childhood is the prime period to begin. Another language should be a part of the curriculum in every K-6 school.
September 12th, 2008 at 6:40 pm
[...] affiliation has a monopoly on trying to punish or silence opponents — see Horowitz, David and Pipes, Daniel — and given the right set of background premises, certain individuals and their views might [...]