Daniel Pipes

In 2016, Pipes resigned from the Republican Party after it endorsed Donald Trump as its 2016 presidential candidate. Yet he announced in a Boston Globe article of October 20, 2020, that he was voting for Trump in that year's presidential election, on the grounds that, "Rather than the person, I advise a focus on a party’s overall outlook... I urge fellow voters to dwell on the strikingly different platforms of the two major parties...and support whichever one better suits their own views; and to do so regardless of the candidates' many failings."

Pipes supported Israel in the 2014 Gaza War stating "the civilized and moral forces of Israel came off well in this face-off with barbarism". He has also defended the controversial Canary Mission, stating "collecting information on students has particular value because it signals them that attacking Israel is serious business, not some inconsequential game, and that their actions can damage both Israel and their future careers".

In 2010, Pipes advocated that U.S. President Barack Obama "give orders for the U.S. military to destroy Iran's nuclear-weapon capacity. ... The time to act is now." He argued that "circumstances are propitious" for the U.S. to initiate a bombing of Iran, and that "no one other than the Iranian rulers and their agents denies that the regime is rushing headlong to build a large nuclear arsenal." He further stated that a unilateral U.S. bombing of Iran "would require few 'boots on the ground' and entail relatively few casualties, making an attack more politically palatable."

Pipes has praised Mustafa Kemal Atatürk in Turkey and the Sudanese thinker Mahmoud Mohamed Taha. In a September 2008 interview by Peter Robinson, Pipes stated that Muslims can be divided into three categories: "traditional Islam", which he sees as pragmatic and non-violent, "Islamism", which he sees as dangerous and militant, and "moderate Islam", which he sees as underground and not yet codified into a popular movement. He elaborated that he did not have the "theological background" to determine what group follows the Koran the closest and is truest to its intent.

In September 2008, he said, "Palestinians do not accept the existence of a Jewish state. Until that change, I don't see any point in having any kind of negotiations whatsoever." He also described the Israeli public as focused on a mistaken policy that he considers to be "appeasement".

On January 7, 2008, Pipes wrote an article for FrontPage Magazine claiming that he had "confirmed" that President Obama "practiced Islam". Media Matters for America responded by exposing Pipes reliance on "disputed Los Angeles Times article", whose key claims were debunked by Kim Barker in the Chicago Tribune on 25 March. Ben Smith, in an article on Politico, criticized Pipes for what he said were false or misleading statements about Barack Obama's religion, stating that they amounted to a "template for a faux-legitimate assault on Obama's religion" and that Daniel Pipes' work "is pretty stunning in the twists of its logic".

Pipes wrote in 2007, "It's a mistake to blame Islam, a religion 14 centuries old, for the evil that should be ascribed to militant Islam, a totalitarian ideology less than a century old. Militant Islam is the problem, but moderate Islam is the solution." Pipes described moderate Muslims as "a very small movement" in comparison to "the Islamist onslaught" and said that the U.S. government "should give priority to locating, meeting with, funding, forwarding, empowering, and celebrating" them.

In 2006, Daniel Pipes said that certain neighborhoods in France were "no-go zones" and "that the French state no longer has full control over its territory." In 2013, Pipes traveled to several of these neighborhoods and admitted he was mistaken. In 2015 he sent an email to Bloomberg saying that there are "no European countries with no-go zones."

Zachary Lockman, Professor of Middle Eastern and Islamic Studies and History, wrote in 2005 that Pipes "acquired a reputation in Muslim American circles as an 'Islamophobe' and 'Muslim basher' whose writings and public utterances aroused fear and suspicion toward Muslims". He stated that Pipes's remarks "could plausibly be understood as inciting suspicion and mistrust of Muslims, including Muslim Americans, and as derogatory of Islam".

When Pipes was invited to speak at the University of Toronto in March 2005, a letter from professors and graduate students asserted that Pipes had a "long record of xenophobic, racist and sexist speech that goes back to 1990". but university officials said they would not interfere with Pipes's visit.

The New York Times reported that American Muslims were "enraged" by Pipes' arguments that Muslims in government and military positions be given special attention as security risks and his opining that mosques are "breeding grounds for militants." In a 2004 article in The New York Sun, Pipes endorsed a defense of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II, and linked the Japanese-American wartime situation to that of Muslim Americans today.

In 2003, President George W. Bush nominated Pipes for the board of the United States Institute of Peace. A filibuster was launched by Democratic Senators in the United States Senate against Pipes' nomination. Senator Tom Harkin said that he was "offended" by Pipes' comments on Islam, and that while "some people call [Pipes] a scholar... this is not the kind of person you want on the USIP." While defending Pipes' nomination, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer distanced Bush from Pipes's views, saying that Bush "disagrees with Pipes about whether Islam is a peaceful religion". Pipes obtained the position by recess appointment and served on the board until early 2005. His nomination was protested by Muslim groups in the U.S., and Democratic leaders. The Los Angeles Times wrote that "in trying to prevent Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes from joining the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace, Sens. Edward M. Kennedy (D-Mass.), Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.) and Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) are abusing their privilege."

In The Nation, Brooklyn writer Kristine McNeil described Pipes in 2003 as an "anti-Arab propagandist" who has built a career out of "distortions... twist[ing] words, quot[ing] people out of context and stretch[ing] the truth to suit his purpose".

Pipes' think tank the Middle East Forum established a website in 2002 called Campus Watch, which identified what it saw as five problems in the teaching of Middle Eastern studies at American universities: "analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students." According to The New York Times, Campus Watch is the project for which Pipes is "perhaps best known."

Through Campus Watch, Pipes encouraged students and faculty to submit information on "Middle East-related scholarship, lectures, classes, demonstrations, and other activities relevant to Campus Watch". The project was accused of "McCarthyesque intimidation" of professors who criticized Israel when it published "dossiers" on eight professors it thought "hostile" to America. In protest, more than 100 academics demanded to be added to what some called a "blacklist". In October 2002 Campus Watch removed the dossiers from its website.

Four months before the September 11, 2001 attacks, Pipes and Emerson wrote in The Wall Street Journal that al Qaeda was "planning new attacks on the U.S." and that Iranian operatives "helped arrange advanced ... training for al Qaeda personnel in Lebanon where they learned, for example, how to destroy large buildings."

In October 2001, Pipes said before a convention of the American Jewish Congress: "I worry very much, from the Jewish point of view, that the presence, and increased stature, and affluence, and enfranchisement of American Muslims, because they are so much led by an Islamist leadership, that this will present true dangers to American Jews."

In 1990, Pipes wrote in National Review that Western European societies were "unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene ... Muslim immigrants bring with them a chauvinism that augurs badly for their integration into the mainstream of the European societies." At that time, he believed Muslim immigrants would "probably not change the face of European life" and might "even bring much of value, including new energy, to their host societies". New York University academic Arun Kundnani cited the article as "Islamophobic". Pipes later said "my goal in it was to characterize the thinking of Western Europeans, not give my own views. In retrospect, I should either have put the words 'brown-skinned peoples' and 'strange foods' in quotation marks or made it clearer that I was explaining European attitudes rather than my own."

Pipes supports Israel in the Arab–Israeli conflict and is an opponent of a Palestinian state. He wrote in Commentary in April 1990 that "there can be either an Israel or a Palestine, but not both ... to those who ask why the Palestinians must be deprived of a state, the answer is simple: grant them one and you set in motion a chain of events that will lead either to its extinction or the extinction of Israel." Pipes has proposed a three-state solution to the conflict, in which Gaza would be given to Egypt and the West Bank to Jordan.

Pipes largely left academia after 1986, although he taught a course titled "International Relations: Islam and Politics" as a visiting professor at Pepperdine University's School of Public Policy in 2007. Pipes told an interviewer from Harvard Magazine that he has "the simple politics of a truck driver, not the complex ones of an academic. My viewpoint is not congenial with institutions of higher learning."

From 1986 on, Pipes worked for think tanks. From 1986 to 1993, he was director of the Philadelphia-based Foreign Policy Research Institute (FPRI) and editor of its journal, Orbis. In 1990, he organized the Middle East Forum as a unit of FPRI; it became an independent organization with himself as head in January 1994. Pipes edited its journal, the Middle East Quarterly, until 2001. He established Campus Watch as a project of the Middle East Forum in 2002, followed by the Legal Project in 2005, Islamist Watch in 2006, and the Washington Project in 2009.

Pipes has long expressed alarm about what he believes to be the dangers of "radical" or "militant Islam" to the Western world. In 1985, he wrote in Middle East Insight that "[t]he scope of the radical fundamentalist's ambition poses novel problems; and the intensity of his onslaught against the United States makes solutions urgent." In the fall 1995 issue of National Interest, he wrote: "Unnoticed by most Westerners, war has been unilaterally declared on Europe and the United States."

Pipes' opposition to Iran is long-standing. In 1980, Pipes wrote that "Iran made the transition to a post-oil economy. It is the only major oil exporter to abandon the heady billions and return to live by its own means." Pipes was critical of the Reagan administration for its role in the Iran–Contra affair, writing that "American actions also helped to legitimize other kinds of help for, and capitulation to, the Ayatollah."

After graduating with a PhD from Harvard in 1978 and studying abroad, Pipes taught at universities including Harvard, Chicago, Pepperdine, and the U.S. Naval War College on a short-term basis but never held a permanent academic position. He then served as director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, before founding the Middle East Forum. He served as an adviser to Rudy Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign.

He taught world history at the University of Chicago from 1978 to 1982, history at Harvard from 1983 to 1984, and policy and strategy at the Naval War College from 1984 to 1986. In 1982–83, Pipes served on the policy-planning staff at the State Department in 1982–83.

Pipes returned to Harvard in 1973 and, after further studies abroad (in Freiburg-im-Breisgau and Cairo), obtained a Ph.D. in medieval Islamic history in 1978. His Ph.D. dissertation eventually became his first book, Slave Soldiers and Islam, in 1981. He switched his academic interest from medieval Islamic studies to modern Islam in the late 1970s, with the rise of Ayatollah Khomeini and the Iranian revolution.

Pipes attended the Harvard pre-school, then received a private school education, partly abroad. He enrolled in Harvard University, where his father was a professor, in the fall of 1967. For his first two years he studied mathematics but has said "I wasn't smart enough. So I chose to become a historian." He said he "found the material too abstract." He credits visits to the Sahara Desert in 1968 and the Sinai Desert in 1969 for piquing his interest in the Arabic language, and travels in West Africa for piquing his interest in the Islamic world. He subsequently changed his major to Middle Eastern history, for the next two years studying Arabic and the Middle East, and obtained a B.A. in history in 1971. His senior thesis was titled "A Medieval Islamic Debate: The World Created in Eternity," a study of Muslim philosophers and Al-Ghazali. After graduating in 1971, Pipes spent two years in Cairo, where he continued learning Arabic and studied the Quran, which he states gave him an appreciation for Islam. He wrote a book on colloquial Egyptian Arabic, published in 1983. In all, he studied abroad for six years, three of them in Egypt.

Pipes was a firm supporter of the Vietnam War, and when his fellow students occupied the Harvard administration building to protest it in the 1960s, he sided with the administration. Pipes had previously considered himself to be a Democrat, but after anti-war George McGovern gained the 1972 Democratic nomination for President, he switched to the Republican Party. Pipes used to accept being described as a "neoconservative", once saying that "others see me that way, and, you know, maybe I am one of them." However, he explicitly rejected the label in April 2009 due to differences with the neoconservative positions on democracy and Iraq, now considering himself a "plain conservative".

Daniel Pipes (born September 9, 1949) is an American historian, writer, and commentator. He is the president of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its Middle East Quarterly journal. His writing focuses on American foreign policy and the Middle East as well as criticism of Islam.

The son of Irene (née Roth) and Richard Pipes, Daniel Pipes was born into a Jewish family in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1949. His parents had each fled German-occupied Poland with their families, and they met in the United States. His father, Richard Pipes, was a historian at Harvard University, specializing in Russia, and Daniel Pipes grew up primarily in the Cambridge, Massachusetts area.