Daniel Pipes: “The Left is the biggest threat to the United States.”

Ann-Marie Murrell July 9, 2015

548 1 minute read

In June at the David Horowitz Freedom Center Texas Retreat I asked several of our greatest American thinkers the same question: “What do you consider the biggest threat in America?”

First up is Daniel Pipes, President of the Middle East Forum. If you’re not familiar with Mr. Pipes, here is a sampling of his resume:

He has taught at Harvard, Princeton, Chicago, the U.S. Naval War College, and Pepperdine.
He has worked at the State and Defense departments, held two presidential-appointed positions, testified before congress, and worked for five presidential campaigns.
He is a prize-winning columnist, formerly for the New York Times Syndicate and now writing independently.
He is the author of 12 books and his writings have been translated into 35 languages.
He founded the Middle East Forum in 1994, whose slogan is “Promoting American Interests,” and built it into a $4 million-a-year organization.
He has a stellar record of anticipating problems. Some examples:
In 1991, writing about the prospect of U.S. forces occupying Iraq, he predicted that “American troops would find themselves quickly hated, with Shi’is taking up suicide bombing, Kurds resuming their rebellion, and the Syrian and Iranian governments plotting new ways to sabotage American rule. Staying in place would become too painful, leaving too humiliating.”
In 1993, within days of the signing of the Oslo accord, he wrote: “Arafat has merely adopted a flexible approach to fit circumstances, saying whatever needed to be said to survive. The PLO has not had a change of heart — merely a change of policy … enabling it to stay in business until Israel falters, when it can deal a death blow.”
In 1995, he wrote about radical Islam: “Unnoticed by most Westerners, war has been unilaterally declared on Europe and the United States.”
He has the right critics, from Edward Kennedy to Edward Said, from Lyndon LaRouche to Walt/Mearsheimer, and from Tariq Ramadan to the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
Al-Qaeda invited him by name, in a September 2006 video, to “repent and enter into the light of Islam.” He declined, saying, “I am faithful to my own religion, to my own country, and to my civilization.”