Setting The Record Straight

Campus Watch corrects false allegations made against it.

Campus Watch Responds:

Daniel Monterescu, assistant professor of urban anthropology at the Central European University in Budapest, has taken to the pages of Haaretz to attack Campus Watch on the false premise that CW sponsors "blacklists."

Every year confused students confess to me that they found my name on the Jewish S.H.I.T. List – a right-wing American list of 7,000 "Self-Hating and Israel-Threatening Jews." My name appears alongside a clumsy caricature, in which I am seen sharing a bed with Israeli pro-Palestinian activist Tali Fahima, in a very erotic situation. My inclusion on this list, along with many other Israeli scholars whose work reflects criticism of Israeli policy, has always aroused a snicker of "And he didn't even know he was one" – in light of the narrow-mindedness of American neo-conservative discourse, which believes in issuing blacklists sponsored by Campus Watch and the Masada 2000 project.

For the record (a broken one, it seems, given the frequency with which we must correct this baseless charge), CW does not issue "blacklists"; Monterescu will search our website in vain for any such list. Nor has CW ever accused anyone of being a self-hating Jew--a charge as offensive as it is absurd.

But the story doesn't end there. In a bizzare twist, the catalyst for his mischaracterization of CW, and the subject of his op-ed, was a face-to-face attack on him by leftist European (not Middle Eastern) anti-Semitic academics attending a conference in Turkey. A drunk Frenchman called him a "sionard," which Monterescu explains is, "a French slang combination of Zionist ('sioniste') and idiot ('connard')."

Sacre bleu! What to make of a leftist Israeli professor teaching in Hungary who, when called a Zionist idiot by European peers at a Turkish conference, attacks CW? Monterescu believes the attack on him, "attests to the spread of a racist left-wing discourse in European university circles, a mixture of right-wing anti-Semitic propaganda with self-righteous post-colonial discourse."

With apologies to Hayden White, et al.: he who metacritiques aberrant discourses in the (unintentional) ironic mode should take care not to represent himself as qualifying for his own narrow-minded liste de merde.

(Posted by Winfield Myers)