How Do You Define Crank?»

National Review’s Lisa Schiffren thinks the question of whether Barack Obama studied the Qur’an as a child is relevant to the American presidential campaign:

Barack Obama has emphatically denied that he was ever a Muslim, practicing or otherwise. Other people, including family members and teachers, remember things differently. Daniel Pipes collects the varying information here. Several elementary-school teachers in Indonesia have told reporters that he was enrolled as a Muslim — and thus studied Koran instead of the Catechism — at the Catholic school he attended. One of his various half sisters says it too, and several passages in his autobiography seem to indicated the same thing. Make of it what you will. Certainly that he may have been educated or raised Muslim is no disqualifier, but if he is lying about his upbringing for political acceptance, it speaks to character. We don’t know if he is, but we know Daniel Pipes is no crank.

I suppose it’s stating the obvious to note how transparently disingenuous it is for Schiffren to insist that Barack Obama come clean (and prove a negative) about not “having been raised Muslim,” while assuring us, of course, that this would be “no disqualifier,” after she and the gang at National Review have worked so assiduously to make it a disqualifier.

I have to agree with Schiffren about Daniel Pipes, though. I tend to regard cranks as mostly harmless eccentrics, like people who believe that our planet was seeded by aliens who will soon return to harvest us, or people who design and construct hugely complicated machines to perform odd combinations of simple household tasks, or Dr. Phil. There’s nothing harmless about Daniel Pipes, a right wing scholar-activist who, since 9/11, has made a career of trafficking in hoary old Orientalist stereotypes in order to stoke Americans’ prejudice against, and fear of, Islam.

Pipes runs the Middle East Forum, an organization which answers the question “What if the John Birch Society had its own think tank?” Pipes also oversees Campus Watch, a project that keeps tabs on scholars it deems to be insufficiently pro-Israel.

Last summer Pipes spearheaded a campaign against the Khalil Gibran International Academy in New York, a public school focused on Arab culture and language. The campaign eventually caused the resignation of the school’s principal, Debbie Almontaser. Pipes based his hostility to the school on what he called “the basic problems implicit in an Arabic-language school: the tendency to Islamist and Arabist content and proselytizing.” Needless to say, Pipes offered no evidence for that claim.

In keeping with his stated belief that Arab- and Muslim-Americans deserve to be subjected to “special scrutiny,” Pipes apparently thinks the question of whether Barack Obama ever practiced Islam as a child is so important to the future of the American republic that, since December, he has penned three different articles on that subject, always making sure to apply a thin veneer of “scholarly rigor” over what is in fact nothing more than an attempt to smear by insinuation and innuendo. Despicable.

But no, Daniel Pipes is no crank. That would be an insult to cranks.

Yglesias: ‘Look At The Failures That The Right Has Brought On Us. Isn’t It Time To Do Something Different?’»

Continuing Matt Yglesias‘ interview with Think Progress about his new book, (reviewed here by Democracy Arsenal’s Ilan Goldenberg), Yglesias discussed some of the reasons why conservatives have successfully colonized so much of the territory around the foreign policy debate.

Yglesias said that “Democrats and liberals have not historically made [foreign policy] their big point of emphasis.” He also noted that, over the last several decades, the right has been much more audacious about foreign policy, building institutions, creating think tanks, and “work[ing] in a very organized and disciplined way to try to change our understanding” about how the world works, and about what policies American national security requires:

There wasn’t some organic popular hue and cry to invade Iraq. This was a movement that was built up over a period of years,…before September 11th—at a time when people would have said, “Well, you know, Paul Wolfowitz, that’s totally unrealistic. This is never going to happen.” And you know, it was never was going to happen. Except, then 9/11 came. That changed the dynamic. It made it possible to do things, and they laid the groundwork for it.

Yglesias suggested that “if liberals want to accomplish things in foreign policy…they need to lay the intellectual and popular ground-work for it,” building up organizations such as the Center for American Progress and creating the institutions to support progressive arguments for better foreign policy.

Yglesias also noted that this is a particularly opportune historical moment for such an alternative:

At the moment, what Bush has done has so clearly failed, that I think anyone has to at least stop and listen to what opponents have to say. That doesn’t mean necessarily you’ll convince people. You need to have good arguments. You need to have the fight. But there’s a chance to get the hearing for it. You can say, “Look at this. Look at the failures that the right has brought on us. Isn’t it time to do something different?”

Watch it:

Transcript: Read the rest of this entry »