Is Campus Watch Part of a Conspiracy?

In their now-notorious pamphlet, The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt say this about the founding of Campus Watch in 2002:

The Lobby also monitors what professors write and teach. In September 2002, Martin Kramer and Daniel Pipes, two passionately pro-Israel neo-conservatives, established a website (Campus Watch) that posted dossiers on suspect academics and encouraged students to report remarks or behaviour that might be considered hostile to Israel.

A brief version of the Mearsheimer and Walt study appeared in the London Review of Books, so I replied to them in a letter to the editor of that publication on March 16, 2006, taking issue with the above quotation.

This account is inaccurate in several ways (e.g. Martin Kramer had no role in founding Campus Watch), but I write specifically to state that no ‘Lobby’ told me to start Campus Watch. Neither the Middle East Forum nor myself has ever taken orders from some mythical ‘Lobby’, and specifically I decided to establish Campus Watch on my own, without direction from any outside source. I challenge Mearsheimer and Walt to provide their information that connects this ‘Lobby’ to my decision to establish Campus Watch.

Daniel Pipes
Philadelphia

My letter was published in the April 6 issue. Mearsheimer and Walt replied to me in a letter in the London Review of Books dated May 11:

the Israel lobby is not a secret, clandestine cabal; on the contrary, it is openly engaged in interest-group politics and there is nothing conspiratorial or illicit about its behaviour. Thus, we can easily believe that Daniel Pipes has never ‘taken orders’ from the lobby, because the Leninist caricature of the lobby depicted in his letter is one that we clearly dismissed. Readers will also note that Pipes does not deny that his organisation, Campus Watch, was created in order to monitor what academics say, write and teach, so as to discourage them from engaging in open discourse about the Middle East.

To this, I replied to the London Review of Books:

I hesitate to extend my exchange with John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt, but their May 11, 2006, letter contains an erroneous passage that compels comment: …

Three responses. First, Mearsheimer and Walt unconditionally concede they have no information about the alleged “lobby” giving me orders concerning Campus Watch, confirming the falsehood of their initial claim.

Second, what they dismiss as a “Leninist caricature” of a lobby – one that strategizes and gives orders – is the only type of lobby that exists. If no one instructed me to begin Campus Watch, how could Campus Watch’s coming into existence be part of an organized campaign?

Third, my previous note strove for brevity, so I did not contest Mearsheimer and Walt’s inaccuracy about the goal of Campus Watch. I shall do so now: I deny their point that Campus Watch intends to discourage academics “from engaging in open discourse about the Middle East.” As the mission statement at www.Campus-Watch.org explains, the project “reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North America with an aim to improving them.”

Campus Watch is to Middle East studies as political analysis to politics, film criticism to movies, and consumer reports to manufacturing; we provide assessments for the public. Unlike politicians, actors, and business executives, who accept criticism with good grace, academics howl with umbrage at being judged.

Daniel Pipes
Middle East Forum

Comment: My small role in Mearsheimer and Walt’s massive account symbolizes the sloppiness of their account and discredits their conspiracy-theory vision of efforts to build a strong U.S.-Israel bond.

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Daniel Pipes

Daniel Pipes, a historian, has led the Middle East Forum since its founding in 1994. He taught at Chicago, Harvard, Pepperdine, and the U.S. Naval War College. He served in five U.S. administrations, received two presidential appointments, and testified before many congressional committees. The author of 16 books on the Middle East, Islam, and other topics, Mr. Pipes writes a column for the Washington Times and the Spectator; his work has been translated into 39 languages. DanielPipes.org contains an archive of his writings and media appearances; he tweets at @DanielPipes. He received both his A.B. and Ph.D. from Harvard. The Washington Post deems him “perhaps the most prominent U.S. scholar on radical Islam.” Al-Qaeda invited Mr. Pipes to convert and Edward Said called him an “Orientalist.”