Daniel Pipes complains: “My talks at university campuses sometimes occasion protests featuring Leftists and Islamists who call me names. A favorite of theirs is ‘racist’. This year, for example, a ‘Stand up to Racism Rally’ anticipated my talk at the Rochester Institute of Technology, I was accused of racism against Muslim immigrants at Dartmouth College, and pamphlets at the University of Toronto charged me with ‘anti-Muslim racism’.”

And it’s not just Daniel who is traduced in this way: “When U.S. Rep. Tom Tancredo raised the idea of bombing Islamic holy sites as a form of deterrence, a Nation of Islam leader in Denver, Gerald Muhammad, deemed his comments racist.”

Pipes has the answer to these slanders. “Islam being a religion with followers of every race and pigmentation, where might race enter the picture?” he demands.

New York Sun, 22 November 2005

This is, of course, precisely the argument used by the Nazi BNP to evade Britain’s racial hatred laws. According to Pipes’ reasoning, those of us who argue that the fascists’ hatred of Islam is inspired by the fact that the vast majority of Muslims are non-white are guilty of misrepresenting poor innocent Nick Griffin and his friends as racists.