Australian Muslim community groups are right to be outraged over Australian Jewish organisations hosting lectures by Daniel Pipes last week.
Pipes is founder and president of the Middle East Forum (MEF), a think tank which describes its mission as promoting American interests in the Middle East but which critics regard as one of the most frequently accessed sources of Islamophobic misinformation on the internet and a key player in the multi-million dollar Islamophobia industry.
Contrary to the way the backlash was presented in The Australian, it is not just Muslims who feel betrayed by the speaking tour.
Some of the strongest condemnation of Pipes came from within the local Jewish community, with the Australian Jewish Democratic Society calling him a “racist hate monger” in a Facebook post. Writer and community activist Alex Fein also labelled him a hate monger, and criticized Jewish Communities Council of Victoria for hosting him. “It is an entirely unnecessary blow to Muslim Jewish relations in Australia that will do nothing to enhance Jewish community life,” she said.
Pipes told The Australian that he was surprised by the backlash: “it feels very 2002, 2003. I haven’t encountered it in many years.” He had, in fact, experienced something similar just last month over a speech he gave at the Baltimore Council on Foreign Affairs. On that occasion, the largest Arab-American civil rights group and peak Muslim community organisation each issued statements calling for the event to be cancelled, with Pipes being labelled “the grandfather of Islamophobes.”
Executive Director of the Australia Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, Colin Rubenstein, defended the Melbourne lecture, telling The Australian that characterisation of Pipes as racist is “cheap, false propaganda designed to shut down discussion of genuine issues.”
Read the article by ABC Religion and Ethics website.