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Forward - January 10, 2005
The U.S. Institute of Peace:
Bush fails to re-nominate Daniel Pipes opposed by Muslims
By E.J. Kessler
In an apparent victory for radical Muslims and the left-wing of the American foreign policy establishment, President Bush has failed to take any action to re-nominate Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace.
Bush appointed Pipes, a conservative Middle East analyst and syndicated columnist who has drawn the ire of some Muslims, to the publicly-funded institution on August 23, 2003 after
The controversial recess appointment ended in early December with the closing of the previous Congress. The institute has removed Pipes’s name from the list of board of directors posted on its Web site.
Pipes told the Forward that he has not asked to be re-nominated by the president and had not queried the White House about its intentions. "My time there is finished,” he said of the institute.
The White House had nothing to add on the matter. "When there’s an announcement, we’ll go ahead and make one,” said spokeswoman Maria Tamburri.
The nomination of Pipes, who has made a career out of identifying and denouncing what he sees as radical Muslim penetration of American institutions, was opposed by Senators Edward Kennedy, Tom Harkin and Christopher Dodd, all Democrats; Arab and Muslim groups including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, and the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, and Middle East analysts Judith Kipper of the Center for Strategic and International Studies and William Quandt of the University of Virginia.
It was supported by many conservative-leaning newspapers, including The Wall Street Journal, The New York Post and The New York Sun. Several Jewish communal agencies, including the American Jewish Committee and the Zionist Organization of America supported Pipes.
The executive director of the American Jewish Committee, David Harris, said he still holds out hope that Bush will re-nominate Pipes. "We’re looking into it,” Harris said. "We’re eager to see him remain.”….
Pipes, a Harvard-educated historian who has published four books on militant Islam, is director of the Middle East Forum, a not-for-profit institute he founded in 1994. The Middle East Forum sponsors Campus Watch, a project critiquing alleged pro-Arab bias in academic Middle East studies.
http://www.forward.com/main/article.php?ref=kessler20050110451
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