Give the devil his due, the true star of the Philadelphia synagogue event I went to a week ago was Daniel Pipes. Pipes was the most physically impressive of the speakers, at
about 6-6 it would seem, and true to his name, lean as a rail. He was the most logical, cold, and presentable.
The shock is in his ideas. Pipes is an extremist, and a foreign policy adviser to Giuliani.
that we are pussyfooting in the Middle East. There are “those who want to
appease and those who want to win… those who seek resolution, and those who
seek victory." Peeps Pipes: "The word victory has disappeared from our discourse.” Israel is pussyfooting with the Arabs. He says that there is not one leader in Israeli
politics who does not think that the Israelis will have to make a deal with
their neighbors, and Pipes says that a deal would be foolish and postpone war. Are these ideas in the American interest?
"All the talk of reaching a resolution. It doesn’t work. If you reach some kind of resolution, you postpone the ending of the war," pipes up Pipes. Rabin was wrong to say that Israel must make peace with its enemies. You make peace with "former enemies." Enemies must be
defeated and broken and made to understand that they have lost, not negotiated
with. “They must give up… We must not appease, we must win.”
Wild applause from the old, scared crowd. Appeasement is a Holocaust term. And the Third Reich looms over everything. Pipes said that we could no more make peace with Saddam or Ahmadinejad than we could have with the Nazis. Islamofascism is "Islamo-Nazi-fascism." Holocaust-consciousness is emblematic of the American neocons. They utterly blur the Nazis-in-Germany and Islamic-radicals-in-the-Muslim-world. They play on Eastern-European Jewish memory/paranoia.
Pipes says that it will be easy to "physically" defeat our enemies. The real battle, he says, is on the political battlefield–in an American argument over how far we should go. Clearly, he is losing. Pipes is completely out of the American mainstream. An armchair intellectual, he is prescribing militarism to societies
beleaguered by militarism. In Israel the young people have to take off a year after
their military service and smoke weed in Argentina with other Israeli vets,
just to decompensate for the years as occupiers and checkpoint guards.
It would be unfair not to cite Pipes’s brilliance. He had two wonderful riffs. In Europe, he said,
for neo-Nazis and antisemites; that they are so focused on Muslim immigration
that “they are losing interest in Jewish issues…. And Jews in
Republican here. (Were those enemies humiliated, or did they just come around?)
The other great point he made was about Muslim history. “Through
fourteen centuries of Islamic history” Jews have preferred to live in Muslim
societies than Christian ones. Over and over again, Jews fled Christian societies
for Muslim ones. But 1945 was the turning point. “You see a switch. When for
1300 years it was the other way.” Jewish life in Muslim societies was better: we were understood and integrated. Jewish figures were part of Muslim
society. Maimonides in the Egyptian court, compared to Rashi, excluded from French
life. “The situation is new. It could very well be a temporary one. It is very
much a reality.”
What is Pipes leaving out of the picture? Israel’s birth, in which the crimes of
European antisemitism were–as Ahmadinejad said on our national television the other night!–made the problem of the Arab world, through Jewish
emigration and political nationalism. Americans have to cool this region down by acknowledging the grievances on both sides. That means: marginalize Pipes!
