A group of UW-Madison students met Monday with the directors of the “Spotlight Lecture Series” at the Memorial Union to protest and demand the cancellation of the scheduled lecture to be given by openly racist and self-acclaimed Middle East expert Daniel Pipes.

Mr. Pipes is well known to the academic community in the United States as the founder of campuswatch.org — a watchdog-style website that collects dossiers on nearly all Middle Eastern-studies lecturers on campuses across the United States and Canada. This website organizes a “black list” of lecturers who disagree with Mr. Pipes’ extreme Zionist opinions.

Members of Mr. Pipes’ “black list” are often marked so for being critiques of Israel’s occupation of Arab lands, use of excessive force, targeting of children, political assassinations, collective punishment, house demolitions, building of settlements, the election of a prime minister being indicted for war crimes, or the apparent unwillingness to reach a peaceful settlement to the conflict.

Mr. Pipes’ offensive views are bluntly expressed in his speeches. He was quoted as saying, “Western European societies are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene … All immigrants bring exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more troublesome than most” (National Review, 11/19/90).

Muslims are not the only group targeted by Pipes. He is a staunch defender of the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. He was also quoted saying, “black converts tend to hold vehemently anti-American, anti-Christian and anti-Semitic attitudes” (Commentary, 6/1/2000).

Pipes claims that he draws a distinction between good Muslims and “militant” or bad Muslims; however, he “doesn’t know of any good Muslims.” In an interview Monday, Pipes told the host of “Democracy Now,” Amy Goodman, that most Muslims in the United Stated are a threat and should be kept under surveillance. Responding to her question whether that was a form of racism, he said: “No, they can be of any race or ethnicity, as long as they are Muslim.”

Faultily presenting himself as an advocate of free speech and dialogue; in recent days, Mr. Pipes has walked off the set of an Al-Jazeera television interview when he found out that a leader of the American Muslim community would participate in the discussions. Similarly, Monday he hung up the phone on Amy Goodman twice during his less-than-an-hour interview on “Democracy Now,” because they asked Hussien Ibish, the Communications Director of the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, to respond to Pipes’ claims.

Pipes neither likes debates nor panel discussion. Not as long as somebody could challenge his unproven claims and insulting rhetoric. He says that most American Muslim institutions — he’s used figures like 80 percent, 85 percent — are infiltrated by “Islamists,” a scary term that Pipes never defines. He’s going to tell you that the American Muslim leadership is “Islamist,” and he will cite quotes that consist more of ellipses than words.

Presented by all the above-mentioned facts, the directors of the Spotlight lecture series still insist on bringing Pipes to speak on campus. As a matter of fact, they did not seem surprised by anything representatives of multi-cultural student groups had to say about Pipes.

Had Mr. Pipes’ hatred and rhetoric been primarily directed against African Americans, Jews, Latinos, Native Americans or Asians, it would have been widely condemned, criticized and rejected. It would have been branded as racism, anti-Semitism or what have you.

Targeting Muslims, the current generation’s “lamb of sacrifice,” apparently does not exceed the levels of “political correctness” in the eyes of the Spotlight directors. So far, I cannot understand whether insisting on this event is sacrificing our moral values fought for by people like Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and the Mahatma Gandhi, or simply maintaining a regular “lamb of sacrifice” to practice our viciousness on occasions.

I am an advocate of freedom of speech, and as a sensible person, I know when free speech goes too far. I refuse to give a stage in my university to a person to teach students how to hate others based on their skin color or the smell of their food.

Fayyad Sbaihat ([email protected]) is a senior majoring in chemical engineering.