I'm NOT Sorry, HaHaHaHa!

Having secured his seat on the board of the US Institute of Peace, Daniel Pipes is now free to respond to the many detractors who tried to "bork" him over the past few months. His defense of a widely circulated 1991 comment—that Europeans "are unprepared for the massive immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and maintaining different standards of hygiene"—was taken out of context, says Pipes; he was actually parodying stereotypical views of Europeans. This sounds a bit like the Ionesco character who wants you to know that he's obsessed with race because he's an anti-racist, not a racist. (I've also seen the "different standards of hygiene" cited elsewhere as "less than German standards of hygiene." Dunno whether this was other people rewriting Pipes or Pipes rewriting himself.) Still, it's good to hear him finally present his case:

[T]he accusations remain painful to me. I've spent two-thirds of my life studying the Middle East, learned the Arabic language, traveled the Muslim world, lived three years in Cairo, taught courses on the region at Harvard and specialized on it at the State and Defense departments.

In short, my career has been exactly devoted to "bridging differences and bringing peace."