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| Below is the highly edited (without permission) letter published by the Boston Globe. To read the letter as submitted with signatories please go here | ||||||
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About Daniel Pipes's nomination
6/29/2003 WE WERE particularly disturbed by Jeff Jacoby's misleading and partisan June 22 op-ed page column, ''Pipes's effective route to peace.'' We are signatories to a letter delivered recently to the US Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions urging it to reject the nomination of Daniel Pipes to the US Institute for Peace or else hold full public hearings so his extremist views can be fully exposed to the American people. Pipes, as Jacoby's column implies, is widely held to have virulently racist views and is one of our country's leading Muslim bashers. Jacoby would like to try to dispel this using Pipes's own talking points to imply that only extremists or Islamists would believe such a thing about Pipes. But James Zogby, whom Jacoby attacks for comparing Pipes to David Duke, is a well-known and widely respected moderate. The groundswell of opposition to the Pipes nomination is not from any fringe or marginal group from within the Muslim or Arab-American community. He is vehemently opposed by every major mainstream Muslim and Arab-American group in the country. In addition, this itself hardly exhausts the opposition. The majority of us are neither Muslims or Arab-Americans (and certainly not Islamists). This kind of labeling, direct or by implication, is not just false, it is pernicious. JOHN WOMACK Jr. Professor of History Center for International Development Harvard University EVELYN FOX KELLER Professor of History and Philosophy of Science MIT Cambridge This letter was signed by 58 other professors from around the country. This story ran on page D10 of the Boston Globe on 6/29/2003. © Copyright 2003 Globe Newspaper Company. |
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