Until I wrote my piece on Janet Albrechtsen and Campus Watch, I didn’t know anything about Daniel Pipes beyond the fact that he was a hawkish US academic who’d visited Australia on a speaking tour recently. But now his name seems to be coming up everywhere. Both Jason Soon and Tim Dunlop mention him in recent posts.
So I thought I’d find out a bit more about him. Until recently, it appears, he was prominent primarily as Jewish-American supporter of Israel, sympathetic to the Likud party and hostile to the Oslo peace process. I haven’t been able to determine his exact views on the Israel-Palestine question, but he’s published irredentist historical arguments claiming Jerusalem as ‘holier to Jews than to Muslims’, and he uses the terminology (Eretz Israel, Judea and Samaria) normally associated with claims that Israel is entitled to the entire West Bank.
Since I’m mainly concerned with the war on terrorism, I was more interested to pursue the question of Pipes’ views on the terrorist activities of Jewish groups such as Irgun and LEHI (also called the ‘Stern gang’) during the struggle to establish Israel in the 1940s. I found this interview between Pipes and former Israeli PM and LEHI leader Yitzhak Shamir, published by his Middle East Forum of which Campus Watch is a subsidiary. The most relevant piece is:

MEQ: How do you reply to those who accuse you, on account of your role in LEHI, of being a terrorist?
Shamir: My reply is that had I not acted as I did, it is doubtful that we would have been able to create an independent Jewish State of our own.

Shamir offers the standard defence of terrorism – that, for a national group under military occupation, it’s the only route to achieve political goals. Pipes, as interviewer, offers no comment of his own, but in the context, is clearly sympathetic. He doesn’t, here or elsewhere that I could find, draw distinctions between civilian and military targets. (LEHI attacked both Briitsh occupying forces and Palestinian civilians).
The distinction between terrorism and guerilla warfare is not sharp, and there’s no moral distinction between a truck bomb and one dropped from a plane. Nevertheless, I think the crimes against humanity committed both by LEHI and Palestinian groups like Hamas were and are not just morally wrong but counterproductive. Since terrorism, including ‘state terrorism’ such as bombing of civilian targets in war, is usually countrproductive, the moral burden on those who would seek to claim that it is justified in a particular case is very heavy.
Pipes doesn’t appear to agree in the case of LEHI. He must therefore be regarded as sympathetic to the general claim that terrorist methods are morally justified to advance a good cause.
More importantly, this evidence confirms my view that what Pipes and Campus Watch are doing is advocating the suppression of free speech, not as an emergency measure against the terrorist threat, but in order to silence opponents of their own political views.