Students at Champaign-Urbana attacked Daniel Pipes as evil racist

A reader writes:

As a 2004 graduate of the University of Illinois, I can honestly tell you that the news of the editors’ suspension is really not news to me. The left-wing student body and much of the administration is eager to display their dhimmitude.

Back in December of 2003 there was uproar in Champaign-Urbana concerning the appearance of Daniel Pipes at the behest of the Students for the Defense of America (run by a friend of mine) and a couple other student organizations. For days the newspaper ran editorials and letters to the editor about how evil and racist Pipes was, and hundreds of students appeared outside Foellinger Auditorium, where the talk was to take place, to protest his appearance. So worried about trouble was one student organization that all those entering where wanded with a metal detector before entering the auditorium.

Having never heard Pipes before, I wasn’t sure what to expect. There had to be a reason Islamophiles were foaming at the mouth. After listening to the speech, which was interrupted by protesters repeatedly, I sat in my seat with a feeling of bewilderment. This is who they were up in arms about? Talk about hypersensitive! I was left arguing with my friend, who invited Pipes, that he was far too soft. Even back in 2003 I was aware of this. Nobody was willing to say that Islam itself is the problem, and until someone is willing to admit that, I don’t feel I can take their suggestion about fixing our current problems seriously.

I thank the reader for this letter. The thuggish leftist manifestation against Pipes, a man whose demeanor is mild, and whose positions on radical Islam, while certainly courageous in the current context, are deeply compromised by his unceasing apologetics for Islam, suggests how out of wack contemporary politics is. For one thing, imagine the effect such attacks must have on Pipes’s own view of himself. As I have observed before, moderate conservatives who are targeted by the left as extreme right-wingers get the notion that they truly are right-wingers, standing boldly at the farthest conceivable edge of conservative thought. As a result, when other conservatives criticize them for their lack of serious conservative principles, they dismiss the criticisms out of hand as the effusions of—right-wing extremists.

When liberal and moderate conservatives are cast as the extreme right, actual conservatives disappear from view.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at February 15, 2006 08:31 PM | Send