Campus Watch
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Campus Watch is a controversial project of the Middle East Forum. According to its website, Campus Watch '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.' The controversy over Campus Watch, involving among other things, charges and counter-charges of McCarthyism, is fully documented on the site itself. Many opponents of Campus Watch see it as an attempt to stifle any criticism of Israel in American academia.
Quotations cited by Campus Watch
- It's horrendous in the sense that the health, social life, economic life of Iraqis are no better. I don't think they have more democracy than they had under Hussein. —Gabriel Piterberg associate professor of history at UCLA, commenting on the situation in Iraq post-Saddam, March 22, 2004. source (http://www.dailybruin.ucla.edu/news/articles.asp?id=28102)
- Throughout the Arab world Islamists have concluded violence and terrorism not only hurt their movement but harm the interests of the Muslim community. Since 9/11 some of the most militant Islamists published books condemning Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri's tactics. —Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle East studies at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, commenting on what is happening in the Middle East post 9/11, in an interview in the Christian Science Monitor on February 4, 2004. source (http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0204/p09s01-cogn.html)
- "You can't mention MESA without mentioning its nemesis: Campus Watch."
Turi Munthe, from "True patriotism from MESA, whatever its critics say", —Daily Star (Lebanon), November 22, 2003.
- "Its support for Hizbullah in southern Lebanon is "terror" only in the sense that Israeli support for Gush Emunim in the West Bank is "terror." Indeed, the Likud policy in the West Bank is far worse than the policies of Hizbullah,since the Lebanese Shiites just want their own territory to be free of foreign occupation--they aren't expanding into other people's back yards." —Juan Cole, Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History at the History Department of the University of Michigan, comparing the Likud party in Israel to Hizbullah in Southern Lebanon, October, 11, 2004. source (http://www.juancole.com/2004_10_01_juancole_archive.html#109751471690902111)
Criticism
Professor Rashid Khalidi of the University of Chicago commented, "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."
External links
- Official site (http://www.campus-watch.org/)