Setting The Record Straight

Campus Watch corrects false allegations made against it.

Campus Watch Responds:

In a characteristically over-the-top post at his blog, Informed Comment, University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole rants and raves about a recent speech given by Martin Kramer, National Security Studies Program Senior Fellow at Harvard University. In the process, he makes the following false assertion:

He is associated with Daniel Pipe's [sic] 'Middle East Forum,' a neo-McCarthyite organization dedicated to harassing American academics who do not toe the political line of Israel's ruling Likud Party.

Campus Watch—a project of the Middle East Forum that reviews and critiques Middle East studies academia and is therefore, the presumed target of Cole's accusation—is neither "McCarthyite," "neo-McCarthyite," nor any of the other tired clichés routinely hurled in our direction by paranoid opponents. We provide analysis and criticism, period.

Moreover, Campus Watch does not "harass" academics for being anti-Israel or, more specific to Cole's accusation, anti-Likud Party, but rather, critiques shoddy, politicized, and tendentious scholarship in the field of Middle East studies. Of course, that doesn't quite have the dramatic impact for which Cole is aiming, but more importantly, it's the truth.

(Posted by Cinnamon Stillwell)