a 21st Century McCarthyite
Daniel Pipes
Daniel Pipes tracks our nation’s traitorous professors so you don’t have to.
By Valerie Saturen
February 27, 2008
Illustration by August Pollak
Have you ever suspected that your campus may be little more than the intellectual equivalent of an Al Qaeda training camp, dutifully churning out youthful armies of Osama Bin Laden-hugging, America-hating traitors? Well, fear not. Pundit and right-wing crusader Daniel Pipes is keeping an eye on your university and the treasonous activity percolating therein. Thanks to Pipes and his website, Campus Watch, you can rest assured in the knowledge that someone is working to bring your subversive, un-American professors/terrorists to justice, Joe McCarthy-style, and to replace their indoctrination sessions with a curriculum as fair and balanced as FOX News.
Pipes’ nostalgia for the Cold War may be hereditary. His father, Harvard historian Richard Pipes, headed Team B, a group of extremely hawkish analysts devoted to studying Soviet military and political strategies. A Boston native, Daniel Pipes enrolled at Harvard, where his father was still teaching, in 1967, to study mathematics. Unfortunately, the abstract world of numbers went over his head. “I wasn’t smart enough,” Pipes confessed, “so I chose to become a historian.” While his classmates staged sit-ins in the Harvard administration building to protest the Vietnam War, he wondered why anyone would walk out of classes or miss meals they had already paid for.
Upon earning his B.A. in history, Pipes spent two years studying Arabic in Cairo, and then returned to Harvard to begin working on his Ph.D. in medieval Islamic history. In the late ’70s and early ’80s, in the wake of the Iranian Revolution and the assassination of Anwar Sadat by an Islamist militant, he abandoned his initial interests and became obsessed with radical Islam
