A pro-Israel think tank plans to start an Internet site Wednesday to monitor the attitudes of American professors and universities toward Islamic fundamentalism and the Arab-Israeli conflict.
To be launched by the Philadelphia-based Middle East Forum, www.campus-watch.org will maintain what it calls “dossiers” on professors and academic institutions and collect information from students regarding their teachers’ political opinions.
Forum director Daniel Pipes, and Martin Kramer, editor of the forum’s Middle East Quarterly, have been prominent critics of Middle East studies as taught in U.S. universities. They contend that many academics in the field are overly sympathetic to Islamic fundamentalism and underestimated the threat of terrorism prior to Sept. 11, 2001.
Institutions the site will focus on include the University of North Carolina, where freshmen this year were required to read passages from the Koran, and Harvard University, where a Muslim-American student delivered a commencement address originally titled, “My American Jihad.”