Setting The Record StraightCampus Watch corrects false allegations made against it.
Campus Watch Responds:[Cross-posted from the Campus Watch Blog] Rabab Abdulhadi, the San Francisco State University professor and founding member of the US Campaign for the Academic and Cultural Boycott of Israel (BDS) behind the odious Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) between her school and terrorist-friendly An-Najah University in the West Bank, has responded to the Middle East Forum's petition calling on SFSU president Leslie Wong to end the MOU. Her reaction comes in the form of an email to Nada Elia, a retired professor of global and gender studies who now writes for the rabidly anti-Israel, anti-American online magazine Mondoweiss:
It will not shock that a "scholar" so morally challenged as to ally with a terrorist-friendly institution will have trouble with basic research. Abdulhadi apparently relied on the erroneous information in this petition for information on CW/MEF. Had she used primary sources rather than ideologically-driven secondary sites, she would know that the Forum is an independent nonprofit with no connection to David Horowitz. She would also have realized that the Southern Poverty Law Center hasn't called Daniel Pipes anything; they simply exclude him from their coverage. Then again, one who favors primary over politicized secondary sources might also avoid another glaring weakness of Abdulhadi's reply: her reliance on cant rather than facts in her failed attempt to rebut the charges in MEF's petition. For even one as gifted in the ars minor of academic jargon as Abdulhadi (and we readily acknowledge her proficiency in this field) cannot hope to disprove the facts laid out by MEF for a simple reason: they're true. Ad hominum fallacies ("Islamophobia, racism and xenophobia") disprove not a single one of the Forum's carefully researched and painstakingly explained charges against SFSU, Abdulhadi, and An-Najah, as summed up in the Forum's petition:
Nor does the most favored, hackneyed, and self-serving cliché of the academic left, the charge that dark "McCarthyist" forces are seeking to silence those engaged in "justice-centered knowledge production." Aside from the obvious fact that MEF has no recourse to government power over citizens, anyone seeking to engage in "knowledge production" centered on justice might begin by condemning terrorism, cutting ties with universities praised by Hamas, and pursuing objective, empirical scholarship. Until Abdulhadi and SFSU president Leslie Wong take the first steps along this path by scrapping their MOU with An-Najah, their intellectually vacuous defense of the indefensible will continue to disgrace their university. (Posted by Winfield Myers) |
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