Based on what? The CAIR-led anti-Pipes blitz would seem to have scored some direct hits. With the words "provocative" "highly controversial" and "decidedly one-sided," Sen. Tom Harkin, D-Iowa, dismissed Pipes' careful scholarship and reasoned analysis, in the end belying the senator's own ignorance of, let's say, the provocative and highly controversial centuries of jihad Pipes has studied.
Sen. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., denounced the nominee because of a 1990 phrase Pipes has said he wrote about European attitudes toward the massive influx of Muslim immigrants onto the continent -- "brown-skinned people cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene."
Whether this is or was a European attitude, it is objectionable to political correctionists not because it isn't true, but because it is indicative of difference, of foreignness, which, in today's world, is about the only thing left that dares not speak its name.
Are peoples all the same? Are religions all similarly inspired? I hope Harkin and Kennedy -- and their committee colleagues, including fellow Democrats Hillary Clinton, John Edwards, Patty Murray, Christopher Dodd; Independent James Jeffords; and Republicans Judd Gregg, Bill Frist, John Ensign, Lindsey Graham, John Warner and Sam Brownback -- take note of the Pew findings. They indicate that a growing number of Americans may finally be seeing through the political correctness that blinkers so much of the government's perspective on Islamic militancy. This is the same political correctness that searches my 75-year-old mother-in-law or Al Gore as much as it searches young male Arab or Muslim airplane passengers; it is the same political correctness that, as retired FBI special agent Don Lavey recently told WorldNetDaily.com, still inspires "the continued reluctance on the part of the entire FBI to ever use 'Islamic' and 'terrorism' in the same sentence."
And it is the same political correctness that Pipes, through serious study and forthright truth-telling, has long labored to debunk. Which is all the more reason that Daniel Pipes should be confirmed without further delay once Congress reconvenes in September. Anything less is nothing less than a victory for our deadliest enemies.