Limp Dick
Cause and effect, people.
Last week Richard Cohen had an article in the Post that was explicitly pro-Israel, but at least had the merits (a cringing compliment to the horrible Niall Ferguson aside) of some even-handed rhetoric.
This, of course, for some people was evidence of Cohen’s anti-semitism or something. By ‘some people,’ I mean these nitwits:
JOHN GIBSON, HOST: Israel has a lot of enemies, but one columnist suggests its most formidable enemy is history itself.
In an op-ed in Tuesday’s Washington Post Richard Cohen writes: “Israel itself is a mistake. The idea of creating a nation of European Jews in an area of Arab Muslims (and some Christians) has produced a century of warfare and terrorism of the sort we are seeing now.”
My next guest says Israel has, in fact, made some mistakes. But first, let’s ask him about that quote. New York Sun columnist Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum and author of “Miniatures,” joins us now.
So Mr. Pipes, Richard Cohen’s remarks sound very much like the president of Iran, who says if you wanted to create a place for Jews after the Holocaust you should have done it in Europe, not in Arab lands.
DANIEL PIPES, NEW YORK SUN COLUMNIST: There’s a big difference, John. The president of Iran goes on to say that Israel must be eliminated. And from what I can tell from this rather odd column that you’re referring to by Richard Cohen Tuesday, he says Israel was a mistake in its creation, but he’s in no way calling for its elimination.
GIBSON: No, I know that.
PIPES: So it’s like asking the question: Is the United States a mistake? Maybe it should have been Indian territory. It’s academic.
Now before anyone gives too much credit to Pipes for correcting the smear, notice how he compares the Zionist-Arab conflict to the U.S.-Native Americans issue. I think I know where this is going…
GIBSON: What is the mistake that you think Israel made that led to the situation?
PIPES: Well, I don’t think Israel itself is a mistake. But I think Israelis, since 1993, have had a wrong understanding of their situation. Namely that through compromise, retreat and so forth, they can win the good will or at least the acquiesce of their neighbors and the conflict.
My view is that the Israelis had it right before 1993 in their aspiration for victory. Wars end with one side winning and one side losing. If you don’t win, you lose.
That’s well-euphemised. But one can’t miss the point. Brad’s already detailed what ‘Glennocidal Tendencies’ means; this bit of finessed exterminationism could be called Pipes’s corollary to Instayokel’s dictum. Pipes is “merely” Curtis LeMay to Professor Corncob’s out-and-out Dr. Stangelove.
Anyway, Richard Cohen was put on notice: he wasn’t being sufficiently loyal to the right team. For good measure, “Crack” Pipes helpfully hinted where Dick’s argument should go. And so Dick, otherwise turgidly resistant to criticism from bloggers, promptly went flaccid, atoning for his error (all the while insisting he’d made no errors — to paraphrase Nietzsche, one’s vanity is strongest when one’s pride has been dealt a great blow) by, as Wolcott puts it, “plant[ing] his ass firmly on the side of overkill.”
Dick — what a pussy.
You shit-stirrer you.
Wars end with one side winning and one side losing. If you don’t win, you lose.
Does anyone with even a slight acquantance with history really believe this horseshit? History is filled with inconclusive wars; just in the last half century there has been the Korean War, the Yom Kippur War, and the Iran-Iraq War, just to name a few.
Fallacy of black and white reasoning.
Classic logical error. But then wingnuts excel at trivial argumentation, not basic logic.
Who cares – Daniel Pipes is an asshole. He is part of some forum that makes you believe that they are looking at ways of finding compromise regarding Arab-Israeli relations but what he really does is call for the Muslim/Arab/Persian poulation to be slapped back to the stone age. He has NO love for Islam whatsoever.
Fucking Dickhead.
Not to mention the War of 1812, whitch ended with the Treaty of Ghent, and everyone going back home.
You know what’s not limp? The Red Sox offense. Or maybe it’s just that the A’s pitching is limp. Either way, a 10-batter, 6-run inning is just delicious.
Pipes has been agitating for teh final solution to the brown people for over 20 years.
All he deserves for this latest is one Macarena.
At best.
http://billmon.org/archives/002571.html
Did anyone else read this?
I don’t understand how anyone can look at Daniel Pipes and still not accept the theory of evolution.
Daniel’s dad is a historian named Richard Pipes, whose speciality is Russian history. He’s been faculty at both Yale and Harvard. He’s actually a fairly decent Russian historian, right up until October 1917, at which point in time he becomes a flaming psychopath.
I’ve read a couple of Pipes Sr.’s books, and it’s increidble – you’re reading the writing of a fairly competent, if exceptionally dry, historian, and then you turn a page and it’s like you’re plunged into the middle of a Gor novel, or something by Edgar Rice Burroughs. Richard Pipes is a rabid anti-communist, and his prejudice turns him into a ravingly poor historian. He routinely shills for ideas that no other historian has taken seriously since the ending of the Palmer raids – things like Lenin being a paid German agent provocateur and such. But outside of the revolution, he’s a fairly competent and sane historian.
Daniel Pipes strikes me as a guy who is probably almost reasonable – on any issue *outside* of “The Brown People Question”. It’s like he’s got the same insanity as his dad – frothing obsession with an idee fixe, except it’s just a different fixation.
Yeah, the problem is obviously that not enough Palestinians have died. Very good thinking, Mr. Pipes.
For a crowd that was crowing about spreading Western democratic values throughout the region, they’re quick to jump back on the kill-the-wogs bandwagon.
“…so I took her to see India…at the Oval.”
“…and she kept on referring to the cricketers as ‘niggers’, and I said ‘no, no, these people aren’t niggers…they’re wogs’.”
Wars end with one side winning and one side losing. If you don’t win, you lose.
Um, Crack Pipes, you dipwad, if that were really the case, then your racist, Neo-Confederate, Jeebofascist buddies wouldn’t have infected and taken over the machinery of the goddamn Republican party like a retrovirus on steroids.
The good guys won the Civil War, but lost the PR battle afterwards. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have had horse hockey like Gone with the Wind, portraying the antebellum South as a genteel paradise full of happy darkies and swooning belles fanning themselves on the verandah. F*ck the Confederacy, and f*ck all that Lost Cause bullshit, too!
Wars end with one side winning and one side losing. If you don’t win, you lose.
Oh, so Pipes admits that the US lost in Vietnam? Cool.
One morning I told a guest he could watch tv in the lobby. The motherfucker turned on Fox News. After listening to that crap for 2 hours, I screamed, “goddamn it, I can’t take this shit anymore!!! I am feeling my self get stupid”!! And walked over and shut off the TV. The guy gave me a funny look and went to his room.
When he complained to the manager, she laughed.
Israel is a mistake.
A huge, mindblowing mistake.
I say we take away all those people’s homes and land, then give it back to the Palestinians everything was taken from in the first place.
Let them become Eastern European gypsies again, and alot of problems would be solved.
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Daniel Pipes Hate America as well as all Christians , Muslims, …He Uses America For what he thinks the interest of “Israel”
His website is an insult to America!!!