[ Wednesday, February 11, 2004 ]
An Evening With an Idiot
Daniel Pipes came to speak at UC Berkeley last night despite the fact that
many Berkeley faculty members and students were offended by his opinions. It was advertised as, "An Evening with Daniel Pipes," as if it were something to be enjoyed. Nevertheless, the front cover of the flier said, "No bags, food, banners, signs or disruptions." It was sponsored by Berkeley Hillel, Israel Action Committee, the Jewish Student Union, and shockingly also the ASUC (student government). He was invited to discuss the "various biases of Middle Eastern Studies Departments nationwide and their impact on students' educations."
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Pipes, here's some info about him and things he has said:
• He has targeted the Berkeley MSA and the Center for Middle Eastern Studies as "terrorist" organizations and in the past, has blacklisted Berkeley professors, graduate student instructors and activists as an act of intimidation.
• He created Campus-watch.org that "monitors and critiques" Middle Eastern Studies programs to influence US Policy in the Middle East and in the past, collected dossiers on prominent University students and professors as a McCarthy witch hunt of views considered critical of Israel or lacking in patriotic zeal. (Several Berkeley professors and students are listed.)
• He supports current House of Representatives legislation, HR 3077 which
would appoint board members from the Homeland Security, Department of Defense and the National Security Agency as an International Education Advisory Board "to increase the accountability by providing advice, counsel and recommendations to Congress on international education issues for higher education." (Congressman Boehner, 9/19//03) This resolution will directly impact universities "by dictating the curricula taught, course materials assigned in class and the faculty who are hired in institutions that accept Title VI funding."(Michael Bednar, 10/20/03)
• He stated before the convention of 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" will present true dangers to American Jews." (10/21/01)
• "Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene...All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most." (National Review 1990)
• He is all for Muslim racial profiling. "There is no escaping the unfortunate fact that Muslim government employees in law enforcement, the military, and the diplomatic corps need to be watched for connections to terrorism, as do Muslim chaplains in prisons and the armed forces. Muslim visitors and immigrants must undergo additional background checks. Mosques require a scrutiny beyond that applied to churches, synagogues and temples. Muslim schools require increased oversight to ascertain what is being taught to children."(Jerusalem Post, 1/22/03)
• He declares that Muslim American participation in national politics is implied as Islamic domination. "Of course, to build an Islamic society means taking political power. And while this remote, it is just foreseeable. A French woman of North African origins told a reporter, 'Tomorrow I will be mayor, the day after president of the republic.'" (danielpipes.org/article/198)
• He considers Muslim populations as a threat. "Demographic facts underlie Western fears both of jihad and immigration. Population growth permeates the Muslim consciousness with confidence about the future and imbues Westerners with a sense of foreboding..Muslims revel in some of the most robust birth rates in the world." (Danielpipes.org/article/198)
• "Fears of a Muslim influx have more substance than the worry about jihad. West European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene. Muslim immigrants bring with them a chauvinism that augers badly for their integration into the mainstream of the European societies…" (Danielpipes.org/article/198)
So, basically he's a racist, bigoted, Zionist author and speaker. He's the director of the Middle East Forum and a member of the presidentially-appointed board of the U.S. Institute of Peace (I'm sure we can all imagine how legit these organizations are!). He tries to link academia into national security by attacking area studies (Middle Eastern studies, African American studies, Native American Studies, and Asian American Studies) at universities through cutting government funding to those departments. From what I've gathered, he attacks Edward Said's Orientalism, which challenges the objectivity of Europeans research on the East. Instead, he wants universities to use "embedded" scholars who provide rationalization of policies rather than critique them. His campus watch program basically blacklists Middle Eastern professors and students in attempt to intimidate them. And the idiot calls himself an "expert on Islam."
Back to last night. The MSA, SJP, and other student organizations decided to do a joint protest, so many of us met two hours before the speech began. There were about sixty or seventy MSA and SJP members there. We had to get free tickets from the organizers. I must've stood with my hand outreached right in front of the woman handing them out for a good few minutes…She just ignored me and handed them out to others around me (She didn't want to give the tickets to Muslims, and my hijab obviously classified me as one). When she realized I wasn't going anywhere, she reluctantly handed me the ticket. They made an announcement that with the exception of small purses, no bags would be allowed (Because we're such terrorists, you know!). Next, they made us stand in lines to get patted down, not once but twice…first by the organizers and secondly by the police! They even searched out purses. Someone commented that it's like we're going through an Israeli checkpoint. Someone else said that we were getting searched more thoroughly than in airports. I couldn't believe how stupid the whole thing was.
Once inside, we sat together and waited. And waited. And got photographed a gazillion times by Hillel and the Israel Action Committee members. They do that every time there's a protest so they can document who we are. I bet they have meetings in which they project our photos on large screens and talk about us. Other organizers were filming us with their camcorders. Daniel Pipes finally showed up, apologizing about the hold up because of necessary "security measures." I remarked to my friend, "Now I know why they didn’t want us to bring in food! I would've thrown a pie at him….Then again, why waste perfectly good food on such an idiot?"
He talked about the Middle East, the War on Terrorism, militant Islam, and his Campus Watch program. It was supposed to be a silent demonstration, but we got loud. Who can be silent with him spewing garbage like that? I for one can't; I think I really surprised my fellow MSAers by how vocal I was. Where his supporters cheered him, we all boo-ed him down. We also hissed at him and yelled "Racist," "Bigot," "Idiot, "Shame," and "Nazi," among other things. One student (who is blacklisted on his site) raised his hand to ask a question and a policeman escorted him out of the auditorium. And they called that free speech! I don't know why they even paid him money to come speak on campus…The man is a terrible public speaker! He's so boring and has a monotonous voice! We interrupted Pipes several times and basically messed up all attempts on the parts of the organizers to make the program run smoothly. If we yelled together, the policemen couldn’t do anything because there were too many of us. When some students yelled on their own, though, they were escorted out. There were policemen at the end of every aisle. The pro-Pipes audience members got so angry! It's one thing to see students yelling, but when middle aged, white-haired men are getting all red and yelling, it's a pretty ugly site! The organizers told us to write our questions down on the cards they provided, as there was a Q&A session planned. We could totally see them picking out the questions they wanted, though, which was to be expected because the whole program was one-sided. About an hour into the program, a little before the Q&A session, one of the SJP guys waived his scarf over his head as a signal for us to stand up and exit the building…We left to protest Daniel Pipes' agenda and the fact that the ASUC had sponsored the event. We continued chanting as we exited the building and came outside. The police barricaded the entrance so we wouldn’t be able to go back inside (not that we wanted to), so we stayed outside and chanted until the speech and Q&A session was over and people were exiting the building. One of the policemen grabbed a sister's arm and forcefully removed her from the building, even though she hadn't even been yelling…She was so upset and will be filing a complaint. As I was chanting outside, one man got in my face and yelled at me to go blow myself up. Another woman yelled at me to go free myself. Such idiots. And Pipes is such a coward that he didn't even leave through the normal exit.
We had a lot more of a chance to discuss our actions today, especially since we made it to the front page of the
campus newspaper. People had different opinions. Some of the Muslim students hadn't left with the rest of us when we made our big exit the yesterday. They thought that heckling just made us look bad, and that Pipes used it to his advantage. According to one of my Muslim teachers, it was a chance for Pipes to boost his ratings, to secure some major fundraising, and to prove his thesis that universities don't have a diversity of opinion. By making it seem like he wasn't allowed to talk, he'd gain sympathy and funding from organizations. According to the same teacher, the whole event and the audience were props for his program and he had wanted confrontation—He's going to be at a congressional hearing in two weeks, and any footage from the program will prove his point. Maybe my teacher's right…and in that case, I'm a bit ashamed of how we acted. But at the same time, I think we need to be vocal because sitting silently doesn’t accomplish anything. At least we took up seats…If we hadn't, other people would've been there listening to Pipe's crap. And man, does he talk crap!
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