Daniel Pipes

Daniel Pipes is president of the Middle East Forum and a historian. A columnist for The Washington Times, his special interests include the public role of Islam, Turkey, the Arab-Israeli conflict, and the liberal-conservative divide. He recently finished a book titled “Israel Victory: Zionist Acceptance and Palestinian Liberation.”

His website, DanielPipes.org, offers an archive of his work of over 55 years and an opportunity to sign up to receive e-mails of his current writings. With 88 million page visits, it is one of the Internet’s most accessed sources of specialized information on the Middle East and Muslim history. He tweets at @DanielPipes.

CBS Sunday Morning says Daniel Pipes was “years ahead of the curve in identifying the threat of radical Islam.” “Unnoticed by most Westerners,” he wrote, for example, in 1995, “war has been unilaterally declared on Europe and the United States.” The Boston Globe states that “If Pipes’s admonitions had been heeded, there might never have been a 9/11.” The Wall Street Journal calls Mr. Pipes “an authoritative commentator on the Middle East” and the Washington Post deems him both “a prominent conservative intellectual” and “perhaps the most prominent U.S. scholar on radical Islam.” The New York Times calls him “smart and well-informed.”

Mr. Pipes received his A.B. (1971) and Ph.D. (1978) from Harvard University, both in history, and spent six years studying abroad, including three years in Egypt. Mr. Pipes speaks French, and reads Arabic and German. He has taught at Harvard, Pepperdine, the U.S. Naval War College, and the University of Chicago. He was affiliated with Princeton in 1977-78 and a fellow at the Hoover Institution in 2008-12. He served in five presidential administrations between 1982 and 2005, including two presidentially-appointed positions, vice chairman of the Fulbright Board of Foreign Scholarships and board member of the U.S. Institute of Peace. He was director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, 1986-93.