Daniel Pipes is the founder and director of Middle East Forum, an anti-Muslim hate group.
In 2013 Pipes asserted, “as full-body Islamic covers spread, criminals increasingly use them to perpetrate their offenses.” His evidence was the approximately two such crimes that happen each year in Philadelphia. As a result, Pipes concludes that officials need to “Ban the niqab and burqa in public places.”
In 2004, Pipes said he supported the widely-repudiated internment of Japanese-Americans. He wrote: “Yes, I do support the internment of Japanese Americans in World War II.“
President George W. Bush was forced to bypass a Republican-controlled Senate confirmation process to place Pipes temporarily on the board of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP). Pipes faced stiff opposition to his USIP nomination and would not have been confirmed if his nomination was subjected to a vote. At a July 23, 2004 Senate committee meeting, Sens. Edward Kennedy (D-Mass.), Christopher Dodd (D-Conn.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) all opposed his appointment. Sen. Harkin, who was involved in the formation of the USIP, spoke at length about Pipes’ statements warning of the “dangers” posed by the enfranchisement of American Muslims and his “dossiers” on academic critics of Israeli policies. Pipes only served an interim term.
In 2002, Pipes launched Campus Watch, a website that included “dossiers” on professors and academic institutions he considered to be too critical of Israel or too sympathetic to Islam and Muslims. Joel Beinin, a professor of Middle East History at Stanford University, wrote an essay entitled The New American McCarthyism: Policing Thought about the Middle East, which criticized the website for making false claims that Middle East Studies Programs across higher educational institutions are driven by anti-Muslim McCarthyist ideology. Beinin mentions Campus Watch as part of a larger anti-intellectual campaign aimed at regulating discourse on the Middle East and equating criticism of Israel to radical Islam.
“This religion would seem to have nothing functional to offer,” Pipes said of Islam in 1996.
In 1990, Pipes asserted: “Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene…All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most.”
Pipes has stated that the views of far-right French racist Jean-Marie Le Pen “represent an important outlook in the national debate over immigration and Islam” and said that he (Pipes) supports racial and religious profiling of Muslims and Arabs.
