Setting The Record Straight

Campus Watch corrects false allegations made against it.

Campus Watch Responds:

In an exercise in moral equivalency and intellectual relativism masquerading as a call for moderation, Abukar Arman posits that Al Qaeda and its supporters represent a line of thought and action on which Campus Watch occupies the opposite extreme--a supposed mirror image of the murderers for which Arman's piece is an apologia.

He writes:

Extremists on both sides of the fence find justifications in their myopic vision and dogmatic interpretation of their respective ideologies. They set up programs and apparatuses to create an environment conducive to groupthink where they could coerce freethinkers, limit the scope of their independent analysis, and zealously suppress the emergence of any new paradigm that could threaten the status quo. And nothing illustrates this better than a project known as Campus Watch that blacklists freethinking professors and scholars in academia- the very institutions that supply the market place of ideas [courtesy of two of the most belligerent Noecons and most notorious Islamophobes in the U.S. , David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes]

Campus Watch coerces no one, limits no professor's ability to speak his mind, has no blacklists, and is not connected with David Horowitz. Nor are Daniel Pipes and Horowitz guilty of the absurd charges Arman levels against them.

CW does not "suppress the emergence of any new paradigm," although Arman falsely conflates the positions of CW and other critics of politicized scholarship and agitprop in Middle East studies with those of terrorists. In doing this, he seeks to defend extremism and the academics who qualify it through their shoddy work. He fails on both counts.

(Posted by Winfield Myers)