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To the Editor: 

Chris Bagley's article “Web site to lose critic list” (Daily Planet, Oct. 1) is incomplete. Daniel Pipes, who publishes the “Campus Watch” blacklist (his “think tank” consists of himself) is a professional bigot. 

As far back as 1983, the Washington Post wrote (Dec. 11, 1983) that Pipes displays “a disturbing hostility to contemporary Muslims ... he professes respect for Muslims but is frequently contemptuous of them.” In The Weekly Standard (Jan. 22, 1996), Pipes called an anti-Muslim book “quite brilliant” and “startlingly novel,” adding that “This religion would seem to have nothing functional to offer.” (The National Catholic Reporter found the book, “Why I Am Not a Muslim,” to be “the literary equivalent of hate radio... literary warfare against Islam.”) Pipes expressed his distaste for Muslim immigrants who “wish to import the customs of the Middle East and South Asia” in the Los Angeles Times (July 22, 1999). Earlier he complained in the National Review (Nov. 19, 1990): “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.” 

That's a small but representative sample of Pipes' rants. He even blamed Muslims, with no evidence whatever, for the Oklahoma City bombing (USA Today, May 2, 1995). A former director of Harvard's Center for Middle Eastern Studies (and one of Pipes' instructors) wrote, “I have been appalled frequently by his polemical stance on almost everything to do with Islam, Muslims, or the Palestinian/Israeli issue. ...The irony is of course that Dr. Pipes and other radically and blindly pro-Zionist American Jews are much farther along the chauvinist and ultimately anti-American spectrum than are even radical American Muslims.” (Arabic-Info web posting, Sept. 10, 1999). 

Without putting Pipes into his slimy racist context, your reporter's line that Pipes “seeks to promote fair and open debate” is naive. For Cal's Israel Action Committee to front for him speaks volumes about them. 

Ken Scudder 

San Francisco