Campus Watch
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Campus Watch is a project of the Middle East Forum, an American pro-Israel and pro-Iraq War think tank. It was founded by Daniel Pipes and the current director of Campus Watch is Winfield Myers.
Founded in 2002, its website states that it: "reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North America with an aim to improving them. The project mainly addresses five problems: analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students. Campus Watch fully respects the freedom of speech of those it debates while insisting on its own freedom to comment on their words and deeds."
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[edit] Support
Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institute, Professor of Classics, California State University, Fresno, said:
- "If professors, scholars, and public intellectuals choose to enter the civic arena and voice their beliefs, then they are all subject to scrutiny--praise, blame, rebuttal, agreement, even parody--for what they say and write in public fora. In the case of controversies about the Middle East, where tempers run high and there is easy promulgation of false knowledge, Daniel Pipes' Campus Watch sheds light on often volatile and intemperate proclamations-allowing both the scholarly community and the public at large to read what our professors and experts write and then to determine on their own whether it is accurate or mere nonsense." [1]
Responding to critics of Campus Watch, Daniel Pipes writes: "Campus Watch is to Middle East studies as political analysis to politics, film criticism to movies, and consumer reports to manufacturing; we provide assessments for the public. Unlike politicians, actors, and business executives, who accept criticism with good grace, academics howl with umbrage at being judged." [1]
[edit] Criticism
Many opponents of Campus Watch see it as an attempt to stifle any criticism of Israel in American academia. [2][3] [4][5]
Rashid Khalidi, a Director of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University and a target of Campus Watch:
"This noxious campaign is intended to silence such perfectly legitimate criticism, by tarring it with the brush of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, truly loathsome charges. They reveal the lengths that these people apparently feel impelled to go to in order to silence a true debate on campus." [6]
Joel Beinin, then Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University, now Director of the Middle East Studies Department at the American University in Cairo, said this of Campus Watch:
"Campus Watch [..] compiles dossiers on professors and universities that do not meet its standard of uncritical support for the policies of George Bush and Ariel Sharon. Among other things, this may be Pipes' way of taking revenge on the scholarly community after failing in his own pursuit of an academic career in Middle East studies.[....] The efforts to stifle public debate about U.S. Middle East policy and criticism of Israel are being promoted by a network of neo-conservative true believers with strong links to the Israeli far right. They are enthusiastic supporters of the Bush administration's hands off approach to Ariel Sharon's suppression of the Palestinian uprising. And they are aggressive proponents of a preemptive U.S. strike against Iraq." [2]
Political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote in March 2006 that Campus Watch was founded by "passionately pro-Israel neoconservative Jews" with the intention of "encourag[ing] students to report comments or behavior that might be considered hostile to Israel" and that it was a "transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars."[7]
[edit] See also
- Jonathan Calt Harris, one of the editors of Campus Watch
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- ^ Daniel Pipes, Is Campus Watch Part of a Conspiracy?, Middle East Forum, May 12, 2006
- ^ The War on Academic Freedom by Kristine McNeil, The Nation, November 11, 2002
- ^ Zionism vs. Intellectual Freedoms on American College Campuses, David Green, ZMag
- ^ Short Cuts, Sarah Roy, London Review of Books, April 1 2004
- ^ The New Commissars Anders Strindberg, The American Conservative, February 2 2004
- ^ ADC Denounces New Efforts to Chill Academic Freedom, Press Release, Arab Americans Anti-Discrimination Committee, September 26 2002
- ^ The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt, March 2006
