Muslim groups slam divisive Bush peace nominee

By Katrin Dauenhauer

Washington, DC, Aug. 15 (IPS)— US Arab and Muslim groups are strongly opposing the controversial nomination of an outspoken Middle East scholar to a federally funded peace institute, but the administration said this week that Daniel Pipes might get to take the position without a Senate vote.

President George W. Bush nominated Pipes to the board of directors of the US Institute for Peace (USIP) in April, but the move has been stalled by concerns about Pipes’ highly controversial views on the Muslim world and the Arab-Israeli conflict, among others.

This week the president suggested he might use a “recess appointment” to place Pipes, director of the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, in the USIP position while the Senate is on its summer break. The appointment would last until the next Congress is sworn in, potentially not until 2005.

“Such an appointment, which would bypass the legitimate role of the Senate on such nominations, would be an inappropriate manner to install an inappropriate nominee,” said Hussein Ibish, the spokesperson of the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee (ADC) on Friday.

“This back-door move by the president is a defeat for democracy and an affront to all those who seek peace,” according to Ibrahim Hooper, communications director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) in a statement.

At a meeting last month of the Senate committee on health, education, labor and pensions, the body that would have taken the initial vote on the nomination, several senators expressed opposition to Pipes’ views.

“The United States Institute of Peace is the last place that we need someone who is going to be a lightning rod for controversy — and Mr. Pipes is a lightning rod. If he is on the board, more of the talk is going to be about him and his views than it will be about the work of the entire institute,” said Democratic Senator Tom Harking.

That meeting ended without a vote.

Opposition to Pipes’ nomination is also coming from a number of newspapers, including the Washington Post, the Dallas Morning News, and the Chicago Tribune.

Pipes’ nomination also caused controversy within the Jewish community, with peace groups opposing his nomination but other bodies, like the American Jewish Committee (AJC), endorsing the decision.

Pipes has used his work to “alert the American public to the dangers posed by extremist Islamism in this country and abroad,” wrote the AJC’s Harold Tanner and David Harris. “At the same time, Dr. Pipes has been a defender and champion of moderate Islam.”

An expert on radical Islam, Pipes has long infuriated Arab organizations with his warnings of Islamic fundamentalism and its threat to US security.

But his opinions have ranged far wider.

“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,” he told the National Review in 1990.

More recently, Pipes has called for law enforcement bodies to use racial and ethnic profiling and has fiercely advocated that mosques in the United States be regular targets of police surveillance.

“This man’s hateful views stand outside the mainstream American tradition of equality and tolerance. He is a bigot. He promotes fear and hatred of many communities, not just Arabs and Muslims,” said Ibish.

“His attacks on African Americans are particularly vicious. He is also a strident opponent of the Oslo peace process and President Bush’s road map for peace,” he added.

“And interestingly enough, it was Pipes who in the 1980s was criticizing the administration for not giving enough support to Saddam Hussein.”

Pipes has established a project called Campus Watch, a web site run by the Middle East Forum that monitors the work of Middle East scholars for pro-Arab bias. Many scholars have likened it to academic neo-McCarthyism.

“Daniel Pipes is not a credible, non-biased person. This involves his points on Islam but also his intellectual credibility. He is literally harassing fellow academia by establishing a monitoring website,” said Mahdi Bray, executive director of the Muslim American Society-Freedom Foundation (MAS).

She also criticized the White House’s role in the nomination process.

“I think the reason is pretty obvious. It’s the Christian Right. Daniel Pipes fits to this constituency and has friends among them. And it has been the core constituency of this president and that’s why he is doing this step,” Bray added.

Congress created the USIP in 1984 as an independent, non-partisan federal institution to “promote the prevention, management and peaceful resolution of international conflicts.”

The esteemed institute’s bipartisan 15-member board is appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate.

Critics fear the current controversy could severely damage the USIP’s integrity and credibility.

“Given Mr. Pipes’ opposition to the president’s call for understanding and respect and his disdain for the principles of conflict resolution, any such appointment must be seen in the larger context as an attempt to undercut the very mission of the USIP,” said the Arab American Institute in a statement.

“With someone of Mr. Pipes’ caliber serving on its board, our friends and allies around the world will undoubtedly have questions about whether we are serious about ending violence and what we mean by ‘conflict resolution’.”

Study of Bush’s psyche touches a nerve

By Julian Borger

Washington, DC, Aug. 13-- A study funded by the US government has concluded that conservatism can be explained psychologically as a set of neuroses rooted in “fear and aggression, dogmatism and the intolerance of ambiguity.”

As if that was not enough to get Republican blood boiling, the report’s four authors linked Hitler, Mussolini, Ronald Reagan and the rightwing talk show host, Rush Limbaugh, arguing they all suffered from the same affliction.

All of them “preached a return to an idealized past and condoned inequality.”

Republicans are demanding to know why the psychologists behind the report, “Political Conservatism as Motivated Social Cognition,” received $1.2 million in public funds for their research from the National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health.

The authors also peer into the psyche of President George W. Bush, who turns out to be a textbook case. The telltale signs are his preference for moral certainty and frequently expressed dislike of nuance.

“This intolerance of ambiguity can lead people to cling to the familiar, to arrive at premature conclusions, and to impose simplistic clichés and stereotypes,” the authors argue in the Psychological Bulletin.

One of the psychologists behind the study, Jack Glaser, said the aversion to shades of gray and the need for “closure” could explain the fact that the Bush administration ignored intelligence that contradicted its beliefs about Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction.

The authors, presumably aware of the outrage they were likely to trigger, added a disclaimer that their study “does not mean that conservatism is pathological or that conservative beliefs are necessarily false.”

Another author, Arie Kruglanski, of the University of Maryland, said he had received hate mail since the article was published, but he insisted that the study “is not critical of conservatives at all.”

“The variables we talk about are general human dimensions,” he said. “These are the same dimensions that contribute to loyalty and commitment to the group. Liberals might be less intolerant of ambiguity, but they may be less decisive, less committed, less loyal.”

But what drives the psychologists? George Will, a Washington Post columnist who has long suffered from ingrained conservatism, noted, tartly: “The professors have ideas; the rest of us have emanations of our psychological needs and neuroses.”

Source: Guardian (UK)