Daniel Pipes
Solly Ezekiel of
GedankenPundit has dinner with Daniel Pipes and offers some interesting thoughts...
bq. On Saturday night I went to a dinner party where the guest of honor was none other than Daniel Pipes. He was in Vancouver, BC (where I grew up) to speak at the Hillel Foundation at the University of British Columbia, and in between speaking engagements a former classmate of mine managed to have him over for dinner. I got a chance to chat with him for a while, and later on he addressed the room and entertained questions. What he said was very interesting.
bq. He started by describing the causes to which he devotes his time. He works for the DoD on the War on Terrorism, which he is trying to have renamed the War on Militant Islam ("terrorism is a tactic, not an enemy," he said). He also founded
CampusWatch, the organization that monitors Middle East studies at universities. He also works toward assisting moderate Muslims to confront militant Muslims and reclaim the religion from those who have turned it into an excuse for violence (interestingly, and perhaps not too surprisingly, he said this is the area that generates the most vehement hatred toward him). Finally, he monitors the relationship between the American and Saudi governments.
bq. He talked about the situation between Israel and the Palestinians. The core of the problem, he said, is that the Palestinians still haven't given up on their dream of destroying Israel (no surprise there). He also said that if you graph Palestinian optimism that Israel can be destroyed as a function of time, between 1948 and 1993 it was dropping. It hadn't dropped to zero, but it was dropping. In 1993, with Oslo, the Palestinians once again started getting more optimistic that they could destroy Israel. Three years ago, when Ariel Sharon started getting tough with the Palestinians again, that optimism once again started to fade. Between 1993 and 2000 the diplomats managed to undo most of what the military had accomplished in the years since 1948; the big mistake of Oslo was that the Israelis assumed the Palestinians had already given up on their dream of destroying Israel.
bq. Turning to the War on Militant Islam, he said that misidentifying our enemy has already damaged the war effort, and that the sooner we realize who our enemy is, the sooner we will win this war. If you're hunting a rapist, he said, you don't waste your time interviewing women; if we're hunting terrorists, we need to remember that militant Islam draws all its recruits from Muslims. It doesn't appeal to anyone else. It's non-PC, but it's the truth.
bq. He also talked about the unhealthy relationship between our government and that of Saudi Arabia. In his view our relationship with the Saudis is unique in that foreign policy is set not by the State Department but by a small number of individuals who are either expecting to be on the Saudi payroll when they leave government, or are on the Saudi payroll already. He cited examples of restrictions some government employees have to follow for a period of years after they've left the government in order to avoid any potential conflict of interest; those who set our foreign policy with the Saudis ought to be subject to the same restrictions.
Read the whole thing.
Posted by DaveH at December 9, 2003 9:41 AM