“Despite the apparent decision by President George W. Bush against re-nominating him to the board of the United States Institute of Peace (USIP), ‘anti-Islamist’ activist Daniel Pipes is working as diligently as ever to protect the United States and the Western world from the influence of radical Islamists.”
Daniel Pipes (the man who describes Muslims as “brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene”) exposed by Jim Lobe.
Islamists have established a base in Germany and are working to subvert western democracy. So Lorenzo Vidino claims.
“One does not have to be a Le Pen fan to acknowledge that his views, however crudely expressed, represent an important outlook in the national debate over immigration and Islam. Le Pen should be able to state them without fear of getting in trouble with the law.”
Daniel Pipes defends Jean-Marie Le Pen’s right to incite racial hatred.
The fallout from the US ban on Tariq Ramadan continues. A wider attack on the Kroc Institute at Notre Dame University, the academic institution where Professor Ramadam was due to take up his position as a lecturer, has been launched by Front Page Magagine.
See Thomas Ryan, ‘The Fighting Islamists of Notre Dame’.
“New antiterrorism measures proposed by Britain’s Labour government in late January – including curfews, electronic tagging, and house arrest for terror suspects – were a step in the right direction for a nation increasingly beset by radical Islamists…. Yet, despite the almost-daily reports of terrorist schemes and anti-Semitic attacks coming out of Scotland Yard, some leading Labour-party officials still don’t grasp the severity of the Islamist threat – in fact, they are advancing ideas and policies that would strengthen it…. Rather than condemn the rise of Islamism in Britain, they seek to appease and cajole the country’s restless and growing Muslim minority by bowing to its every demand, no matter how much it would infringe on the rights of the British majority.”
Erick Stakelbeck and Nir Boms in the National Review, 9 February 2005
In an apparent victory for radical Muslims and the left wing of the American foreign policy establishment, President Bush has failed to take any action to renominate Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes to the board of the United States Institute of Peace.
Bush appointed Pipes, a conservative Middle East analyst and syndicated columnist who has drawn the ire of some Muslims, to the publicly funded institution on August 23, 2003, after a Senate hearing on the matter ended without the presence of a quorum necessary for a confirmation vote. The controversial recess appointment ended in early December with the closing of the previous Congress. The institute has removed Pipes’s name from the list of board of directors posted on its Web site.
Pipes told the Forward that he has not asked to be renominated by the president and that he had not queried the White House about its intentions. “My time there is finished,” he said of the institute.
The White House had nothing to add on the matter. “When there’s an announcement, we’ll go ahead and make one,” spokeswoman Maria Tamburri said.
Pipes said that he “tried to be helpful to the USIP,” but he acknowledged that “at certain times I was frustrated.”
The nomination of Pipes, who has made a career out of identifying and denouncing what he sees as radical Muslim penetration of American institutions, was opposed by senators Edward Kennedy, Tom Harkin and Christopher Dodd, all Democrats; Arab and Muslim groups, including the Council on American-Islamic Relations as well as the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, and Middle East analysts Judith Kipper of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and William Quandt of the University of Virginia.
Many conservative-leaning newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, the New York Post and The New York Sun, supported it. Several Jewish communal agencies, including the American Jewish Committee and the Zionist Organization of America, supported Pipes.
David Harris, executive director of AJCommittee, said he still holds out hope that Bush will renominate Pipes. “We’re looking into it,” Harris said. “We’re eager to see him remain.”
“British ‘Islamophobia’ may be driven more from suspicion about the intentions of British Muslims to try to institute Sharia there, rather than racism or bigotry.”
Robert Spencer at Dhimmi Watch, 13 January 2005
“The office of London Mayor Ken Livingstone has released a dossier defending his meeting with Yusuf al Qaradawi. It’s a hard hitting document which forcefully defends Qaradawi’s status as a moderate and takes to task the mayor’s critics for misrepresenting Qaradawi’s views. It offers considerable evidence of Qaradawi’s consistent appeals for dialogue with the West and his condemnations of terrorism, and defends him against charges of anti-Semitism.”
Abu Aardvark welcomes Ken Livingstone’s dossier.
Islamophobia and Tariq Ramadan
From the Morning Star, 8 January 2004
By Ken Livingstone
Last month I appointed Yasmin Qureshi as my human rights adviser, and asked her to also address the related issue of the rise in Islamophobia.
One issue that Yasmin has drawn attention to is the treatment of respected Islamic scholar Tariq Ramadan by the US authorities, after Mr Ramadan resigned his professorship at an American university following the withdrawal of his visa.
Swiss-born Professor Ramadan is one of the most respected philosophers of religion and conflict resolution. He was named by Time magazine as one of the world’s top 100 influential thinkers last year. He was described by the Christian Science Monitor’s commentator on ethics and religion, Jane Lampman, as “one of Europe’s most prominent Muslim reformers.”
Mr Ramadan spoke at City Hall last summer in favour of a woman’s right to choose to wear the Muslim headscarf, or hijab, in the light of the new French law banning conspicuous religious symbols in schools.
When the furore broke in the media last year about the visit of Sheikh Yusuf al Qaradawi to City Hall, Peter Tatchell and others condemned the conference at which he spoke on the grounds that no speaker had defended the right of women not to wear the hijab.
In fact, Tariq Ramadan said: “It is against the Islamic teaching to force a woman to wear the Hijab, because it is an act of faith.”
Despite Ramadan’s respected academic status, his American visa was revoked in July under the Patriot Act, adopted after the terrorist attacks on September 11, thus preventing him from taking up his post at the University of Notre dame in Indiana. He has so far been refused a new visa.
US watchdog group hounds Middle East scholars
by Sarah Richards
Globe and Mail, 8 January 2005
Like any émigré to the United States, Tariq Ramadan was dependent on the stamp of somebody, somewhere, deep inside the Department of Homeland Security. His life was governed by waiting for one letter to set things in motion – packed bags, plane ticket, new job teaching at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.
But after waiting seven months in vain for a visa, Mr. Ramadan decided to throw in the towel. “You know, I have kids here,” he said. “We are in limbo, we don’t know what will be our future, and I said, ‘Okay, it’s not going to work like that.'”
Mr. Ramadan was speaking from his apartment in Geneva in December. He had resigned his two Notre Dame positions, including one as the Henry R.Luce Professor of Religion, Conflict and Peace building at the Joan B. Kroc Institute for International Peace Studies.
He never saw a student or even made it to the United States, because his visa was revoked days before he was to arrive in August. A second visa application proved fruitless.