Daniel Pipes Hates America (part of an ongoing series)
Saturday, July 5th, 2008Harvard 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. (more…)