Daniel Pipes doesn’t exemplify a man of peace, so why should he be honored as one?

Pipes is a controversial Middle East scholar who was very recently appointed by President Bush to the Board of Directors of the United States Institute of Peace. He was appointed in recess by the president following the stalling of the Senate. Pipes has never been shy about his beliefs about Islam, and there was a public outcry to keep him off the board of the United States Institute of Peace, an “independent, nonpartisan federal institution created by Congress to promote the prevention, management, and peaceful resolution of international conflicts.”

Daniel Pipes is director of the Middle East Forum, a conservative think tank in Philadelphia, Pa., and is also the brain behind Campus Watch, a highly-criticized organization dedicated to tracking and mobilizing people against academics who teach about the Arab world at universities and are critical of Israeli policies.

But what makes Pipes so controversial, you ask? A multitude of articles and books as well as speeches implicating Islam entirely as a problem, and in which he concludes that diplomacy is not the solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but rather total violent defeat of the Palestinians.

According to Michael Scherer in the May 2003 issue of Mother Jones magazine, in Pipes’ spring speech at a conference in Washington, D.C., he said the Israelis must force a “change of heart” in the Palestinians. He said, “How is a change of heart achieved? It is achieved by an Israeli victory and a Palestinian defeat. The Palestinians need to be defeated even more than Israel needs to defeat them.”

Scherer also states, “Pipes sees no room for negotiation, no hope for compromise and no use for diplomacy.” Frankly, Pipes makes Israeli Prime Minister Sharon look moderate.

He’s been called “America’s leading Islamophobe” by the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR). He’s defended racial and religious profiling and suggests mosques in America should be under police surveillance.

According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Pipes wrote, “Singling out a class of persons by their religion feels wrong, if not downright un-American,” he wrote. But “if Americans want to protect themselves from Islamist terrorism, they must temporarily give higher priority to security concerns than to civil-libertarian sensitivities.”

When he was nominated for the vacancy, faith-based organizations such as Council on American-Islamic Relations, Churches for Middle East Peace, and Tikkun (the progressive Jewish movement), among many others, mobilized to stop him. The opposition to his nomination was in the press and the mailboxes of representatives, and it seemed to be working as his anti-Muslim activism became known.

At the Congressional session about his appointment, Rev. Dr. C. Welton Gaddy, president of the Interfaith Alliance said, “Given Dr. Pipes’ record of unrelenting derogatory and inflammatory statements directed at Islam, I would have problems with this appointment under any circumstances.”

The fight to keep Pipes off of the board was not reserved to political organizations. In fact, it was our very own Sen. Tom Harkin, along with Sen. Kennedy, D-Mass., and Sen. Dodd, D-Conn., who were the most critical of Pipes in the Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions July 23.

According to a CAIR press release, Harkin brought up the point that “Iowa is home to the oldest operating mosque in America in Cedar Rapids and that Muslims are a vibrant segment of that state’s population. ‘[Daniel Pipes is] not the person that ought to be on the United States Institute of Peace board,’ said Harkin.” Harkin should know, because he helped create the institute in 1984.

It’s also not the case that he is needed to balance the board—it already has its fair share of hawks like Harriett Zimmerman of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee and Douglas Feith, Undersecretary of Defense.

Despite the opposition in Senate committees and public outcry, President Bush bypassed Congress and personally appointed Pipes a few weeks ago.

What is most unsettling about Pipes’s appointment is not that he has made derogatory remarks, but democracy was bypassed so that one of our few federal institutions dedicated to peace now counts a man better known for hate as one of its directors.