SteveSilver.net

Seeing Pipes

Tonight I went to a speech at NYU by Daniel Pipes, the right-leaning Middle East scholar who has drawn colorful responses from activists in past college visits nationwide, including an appearance at Brandeis two years ago that I missed by only a few hours. The two biggest surprises of the evening were that Pipes said just about nothing particularly controversial, and that his opponents were practically invisible.

I go to these political speech/debates in Manhattan semi-frequently, and when I do, there's normally about a 95/5 liberal/conservative split- at one the week after the election last year, the moderator asked "how many of you think Bush stole the election in Ohio?," and just about every hand in the room shot up. But perhaps because it wasn't widely publicized, and perhaps because it was co-sponsored by the NYU Federalist Society and the Republican Jewish Coalition, the crowd was about 95% pro-Pipes, and only one of the questions in the Q&A session was overtly hostile. One of the 5% blogged it here.

The gist of Pipes' speech was that the true enemy in the War on Terror is not "terror," but rather the ideology of radical Islam. Not the religion of Islam itself, not Muslims themselves, but the ideology. There are many areas in which Pipes is to my right- he doesn't trust Mahmoud Abbas, for one, and opposed the January Iraq elections. But he's also no ultra-righty- he did point out that Ann Coulter's post-9/11 call to invade every Muslim country and convert their inhabitants to Christianity "obviously, is untenable."

The best moment was when Pipes was asked to respond to accusations that he's a racist, and he replied that the issues at play here have nothing whatsoever to do with race. I thought of the same thing before the speech, when I tried to guess which side of the debate each person who walked into the room was on- which is difficult, since many members of both sides tend to favor beards and/or headscarves.