Daniel Pipes, a new kind of Israel-basher

[Violet_Crumble]

By Bradley Burston

I used to be an American Jew. And then I read Daniel Pipes.

"As Israelis go to the polls," Dr. Pipes wrote this week in an article that originally appeared in the New York Sun, "not one of the leading parties offers the option of winning the war against the Palestinian Arabs."

Dr. Pipes goes on to admit "a certain frustration" with the apparent unwillingness of Israelis to go out there and do the right thing: bring the Arabs to heel, by use of overwhelming force.


<snip>

Daniel Pipes is a new kind of Israel-basher. He is an equal-opportunity hater of Israelis. None of us is good enough for him. We lack the will to fight like the man he quotes as a role model for us, Douglas MacArthur. From unilateralism to transfer, nothing we come up with is good enough for him.

Try as we might, we just can't seem to win his war for him.

I guess he'll just have to do it by himself.

http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/pages/ShArt.jhtml?itemNo=700807&contrassID=2

[leveymg]

1. If I recall, MacArthur didn't win his war (Korea) either

Why can't people learn to choose their role-models more carefully before they open their big mouths and call for Final Solutions?

Maybe Mr. Pipes should have chosen someone more assertive for such a mission? General Friedrich Paulus, maybe?

[hadrons]

2. how did this clown become a college professor?

[TomClash]

4. His daddy was a college professor at Harvard -

Richard Pipes. He was a hard right Sovietologist who turned out to be quite wrong about what would happen inside the Soviet Union. Despite his ranting and raving, he fail to predict that the scientific-techonological revolution in the USSR would lead to the decline and collapse of the regime, something liberals and the CIA were quite right in analyzing - one of the great untold stories of history.

[Coastie for Truth]

7. The same way Mearsheimer and Walt and Finkelstein did

Read Karabel, "The Chosen" and Ted Caplow's "The Academic Marketplace" and Dolores Burke's "A New Academic Market Place".

It's a game - more networking (with racism and sexism) then anything else.

[TomClash]

3. I always find it amusing

when Americans tell others they have to use force.

Daniel Pipes is Meir Kahane without the courage.

[Englander]

5. American Likudniks - what's with them?

:shrug:

[Poll_Blind]

6. Diasporic Guilt and ignorance = American Likudnik. n/t

PB

[Englander]

11. That sounds about right. n/t

[Coastie for Truth]

8. Kinda like Ernest Bevin in the mirror.

[Englander]

10. Blimey!

So, yer saying they're racist/genocide 'enablers'/war criminals?
As you've called Bevin an a-s Brit, & a Holocaust 'enabler', & a war criminal, it appears
that these American Likudniks are being compared to the, quote, 'personification of evil'.
Which is one way to describe Pipes...

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_topic&forum=124&topic_id=117964#118024

[Tom Joad]

9. Read Dan Pipes support for US military aid to Saddam!

http://tomjoad.org/pipes.htm

I know that is a "vanity" website, but you can read an actual copy, from a public library, of Dan Pipes, adviser to Bush, suggest that the US arm Saddam in the Iran/Iraq war. Go dig up a copy yourself if you don't believe me. This was the time Saddam was at his bloodiest. That must be what attracted Dan Pipes to this cause. Because i think Pipes' primary interest is getting more Arabs killed. For Pipes "peace" is the peace of a large, large, cemetery.

Daniel Pipes was appointed by President Bush during the Summer Congressional recess in August 2003 (to avoid a problem with Congress, why should Bush's appointments be questioned by anyone?) to the the board of United States Institute of Peace, a Congressionally sponsored think tank dedicated to "the peaceful resolution of international conflicts." He served there until the end of 2004. There is more than a little irony in this. He sees no problem that cannot be solved by militarism. For example, in looking at the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, he has stated that "What war had achieved for Israel," Pipes explained at a Zionist conference in Washington DC, "diplomacy has undone." Nothing short of total military victory will do.

"Conditions of peace have, by and large, been created through military victory"-- Daniel Pipes
Most people call that conquest.

So it should really come as no surprise that Pipes, whose hatred of Arab and Muslim people is legendary, would give his backing for military aid to the Iraq regime of Saddam Hussein, back when the Iraqi President was "gassing his own people" (killing Iranians and Kurds). After all, it was a military option. And for Pipes, any military option must be attempted before any alternative is even considered. This is keeping with the Pipes motto of "Give War a Chance!".

So it is in the interest of our understanding of this man, and the thinking of President Bush Jr. and those, like American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) and the currently misnamed Anti-Defamation League, that support this extremist, that Pipes' article, which appeared in The New Republic on April 27, 1987 is presented.

Back Iraq
It's Time for a U.S. Tilt
by Daniel Pipes and Laurie Mylroie

[pelsar]

12. actually a lot of jewish americans are far to the right...

i 'm constantly accused of being a left wing liberal who is causing the demise of israel by my lack of will to fight....(thought you guys would like to hear that)...and it always by americans in New York, etc

[Coastie for Truth]

13. 77% of the Jewish Vote went for Kerry

77% of the Jewish Vote went for Kerry notwithstanding Kristol, Wolfowitz, Feith, Larry Franklin, Pipes, etc. 77% of the Jewish Vote went for Kerry

Check out

<<<SNIP>>>
The power of economics reflected the strength of the backlash against the privatization and deregulation policies pushed by Binyamin Netanyahu, the leader of the right-wing Likud Party who was finance minister earlier in the decade. A Likud loss was inevitable after Prime Minister Ariel Sharon split off from the party to form Kadima once Likud rejected his West Bank pullout plan. Olmert took over Kadima's leadership after Sharon was incapacitated by a stroke.

But Likud's collapse to 12 seats and a fourth-place tie with Shas, Greenberg (Stanley Greenberg, an American pollster who worked for the Labor Party) said, was a sign that reaction against Netanyahu's free-market economic policies "was so strong that Netanyahu couldn't get an audience" on security issues. At one point in the campaign, the former finance minister apologized for the social pain his approach -- widely hailed by free-market economists outside Israel -- had inflicted.

Writing yesterday in Haaretz, journalist Ruth Sinai pointed to rising poverty rates to argue that the election was "above all a victory for the civic, social welfare agenda" and "a clear expression of public disgust for the economic policy championed by the Likud." Greenberg noted that for the first time, "poverty was a word that gained currency in the mainstream political debate."

Paradoxically, domestic social concerns rose to the top of voters' minds precisely because the security situation is frozen. Most Israelis do not see how negotiations are possible with Hamas. The death of grand dreams -- either of a "Greater Israel" that included the West Bank or of a permanent negotiated peace with the Palestinians -- allowed many Israelis to look homeward and seek greater social justice within their own society.
<<<SNIP>>>

and Amos Oz writing in the San Francisco Chronicle

<<<SNIP>>>
In Tuesday's vote, the vast majority of the Israelis -- for the first time since the military occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in 1967 -- indicated their readiness to give up 90 percent of the occupied Palestinian territories, including some sections of the city of Jerusalem. Their readiness -- not their happiness.

What the vast majority of the Israelis held -- for years -- to be unthinkable, even suicidal for Israel -- they have sadly endorsed today.

The reasons for this change of heart are several harsh slaps of reality: a violent Palestinian uprising in the occupied territories, a sense of international isolation and the realization that the demographic balance between Jews and Arabs might be changing in favor of the Palestinians if Israel stays in the occupied territories.

There may be an even deeper reason for this change: the Israelis have gradually changed the order of their priorities. They have moved from territorial appetites to materialistic appetites, from militancy to pragmatism, from selfish nationalism to interdependence.

<<<SNIP>>>

Notwithstanding what some self-proclaimed erudite intellectual analysts say

1. 77% of the Jewish Vote went for Kerry notwithstanding Kristol, Wolfowitz, Feith, Larry Franklin, Pipes, etc. 77% of the Jewish Vote went for Kerry - One of the furthest left voting blocs in the US.

2. The Israeli electorate is actually to the left of the the US Jewish community.

3. And both groups are to the left of the self-proclaimed erudite intellectual analysts.

[Violet_Crumble]

14. The Americans who are like Pipes aren't just Jewish Americans...

Conservatives would love him with a passion for obvious reasons. Their 'support' of Israel is a matter of convenience for them. They get to indulge their bigotry against Arabs while veiling the Antisemitism that most of them feel, and also get the added advantage of knowing that Israel cops the flack if it does the dirty work of the US for it...

As for Americans who identify as being left-wing and who seem to adore Pipes, I've noticed at DU and a blog I hung out at for a while before arriving here that they're way more extreme and hateful in their views than Israelis tend to be. I've found most Israelis I've encountered online can discuss the conflict without frothing at the mouth the way some US liberals do. I suspect that it has something to do with them usually not falling into the trap of attempting to dehumanise or turn either the Israeli or the Palestinian populations into symbols like many of the Americans do. Israelis have much more riding on genuinelly wanting a peaceful resolution (though I think some have a way to go before they realise that peaceful resolution must also be a just one for both peoples) while Americans have the luxury of distance. So for Americans like those, both populations stop being normal human beings and start being nothing more than symbols eg. Palestinians are raving terrorists and Israelis are eternal victims. They appear to totally oppose any attempts to build trust between Israelis and Palestinians and imo want nothing more than the bloodshed to keep on going so they can keep their cheer-squad routines going...

I posted an article a week or so back about how Israeli diplomats here were the first in the world to vote in the election. In the article it said that Israel had had to take the step of not allowing Israeli citizens who resided overseas to vote coz of the tendency of Americans to try to inflict their extremist views on Israel. Folk like Pipes and his ilk aren't 'supporting' Israel with their attitudes, they're trying to sentence Israel to an unending existance of bloodshed and conflict, and Israel and the Palestiniand deserve far better than that...

Violet..

[Englander]

15. That's it, I imagine a sizeable proportion are stuck at 'Exodus'.

I imagine a fair amount of the Israeli-supporting Americans are still at the
'Exodus'-era of viewing the situation, where the plucky Irgunists are all clones
of Paul Newman, & the past forty-ish years of brutal occupation haven't dislodged
that cuddly myth.

btw, wasn't there a link at another forum that defined 'Likudnik', a few months
ago? It was a long article from a blog, I think. Do you remember that one, & could
you post it, Vi?

[Violet_Crumble]

16. Is this the article yr looking for?

http://headheeb.blogmosis.com/archives/027104.html

Violet...

[Englander]

17. That's the one, thanks! n/t

[Name removed]

18. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[Violet_Crumble]

19. No worries...

I should give credit to someone in this forum for sending me that article. We don't see eye to eye but I've got a lot of respect for him :)

Violet...