Campus Watch   Setting the Record Straight

Declaring Forever War

January 7, 2008

Response to:

Declaring Forever War
by Michael C. Desch
The American Conservative
January 14, 2008
Categories:
False allegations of attacking professors who criticize Israel

Campus Watch Responds:

In his effort to demonize Middle East Forum director Daniel Pipes, who is an unofficial advisor to the presidential campaign of Rudolph Giuliani, Michael Desch mischaracterizes Campus Watch and wrongly discounts Pipes’s assessment of the state of Middle East studies.

Desch claims that Campus Watch is:

[A] group that monitors Middle Eastern studies on campus for evidence of anti-Israel bias.

To the contrary, CW monitors Middle East studies for evidence of shoddy or politicized scholarship, abuse of authority over students, and other failures to execute their professional obligations.

Then, without presenting evidence to back up his claim, Desch states that the following assessment by Pipes, made in the New York Sun in 2006, is “over the top":

Self-hating Westerners have an out-sized importance due to their prominent role as shapers of opinion in universities, the media, religious institutions, and the arts. They serve as the Islamists’ auxiliary mujahideen.

As research by Campus Watch has demonstrated, radical faculty play a significant role in shaping public opinion, and the steady stream of anti-American, anti-Western cant from scholars such as Joseph Massad, Joel Beinin, Juan Cole, and many others does indeed misrepresent the threat of radical Islamists to the West. Readers curious about their statements need only search the Campus Watch site for statements made by scholars of Middle East studies that support Pipes’s judgment.

(Posted by Winfield Myers)