The Professor's Obsession: Joel Beinin

	Joel Beinin

Campus Watch West Coast Representative Cinnamon Stillwell explores Stanford historian Joel Beinin's radical views of America, Israel, and the Middle East in "The Professor's Obsession," published at FrontPage Magazine:

Stanford Middle East history professor Joel Beinin's appearances on the Peninsula Peace and Justice Center (PPJC) Palo Alto cable television program "Other Voices" reliably produce anti-American, anti-Israel invective. In September 2008, Beinin declared, "The American empire is going down," and during a taping for the February 2009 show, "Gaza and the Future," he pronounced, "The United States aids and abets Israeli war crimes."

What Beinin labeled Israeli "war crimes" (i.e. defending its citizenry) and U.S. collusion therewith were central to his discussion, as the show aired soon after Israel's military incursion into Gaza in December 2008.

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By Winfield Myers | June 5, 2009 at 10:50 am | Permalink

Islamic Speakers Bureau Backed By Radical Profs

	Sherman Jackson

Jonathan Schanzer has broken another story on a group that presents itself as moderate but which allies itself with radical professors who have made a career out of issuing apologias for radical Islam. (See "PARC's Anti-Israel Polemics" from last year.)

In "Islamic Speakers Bureau Backed by Radical Profs," published May 31 at The American Thinker, Schanzer explores the connections between the Wahhabi apologists professors John Esposito, Sherman Jackson, and Ingrid Mattson and the proselytizing organization ING:

A California nonprofit dedicated to "teaching about Islam & Muslims" at U.S. high schools and college campuses features a board of advisors that is stacked with some of the most controversial activist professors in the field of Middle Eastern studies today. The imprimatur of these scholars may signal a troubling shift toward the support of proselytizing efforts and the further unraveling of Middle East Studies in America.

The board of Islamic Networks Group (ING) is a veritable Who's Who of Islamist apologists and activists. Leading the list is John Esposito, the founding director of the Saudi-funded Center for Muslim Christian Understanding at Georgetown University. He famously stated that the suicide-bombing Hamas organization engages in "honey, cheese-making, and home-based clothing manufacture."

Joining Esposito on the ING board is Sherman Jackson of the University of Michigan, who was a trustee at the North American Islamic Trust and worked with the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), both un-indicted co-conspirators in the U.S. v. Holy Land Foundation.

To read the rest of this essay, please click here.

By Winfield Myers | June 1, 2009 at 4:00 pm | Permalink

Who Speaks For Islam? Not John Esposito

	John Esposito

In a Campus Watch-sponsored article, Stanford undergraduate Jonathan Gelbart reports today on Georgetown professor John Esposito's May 13 lecture at Stanford. In "Who Speaks for Islam? Not John Esposito," Gelbart shows that Esposito's efforts to put a happy face on radical Islam fell flat:

Georgetown University Professor John Esposito is the media's favorite go-to man for questions about Islam. As the founding director of the Saudi-financed Prince Alwaleed Bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding at Georgetown, he is also notorious for downplaying radical Islam. Stanford University hosted his latest round of apologetics on May 13.

Esposito, who spoke at Stanford last year, was on campus to promote the film version of his recent book (co-authored with Dalia Mogahed of the Gallup Center for Muslim Studies), Who Speaks For Islam? What a Billion Muslims Really Think. He was joined by the film's executive producer, Muslim convert Michael Wolfe. The 55-minute film claims to present the results of the "largest, most comprehensive study" of Muslim opinion ever done. The crowd's political leaning were evident in the audible hisses that greeted the cinematic image of former President George W. Bush.

To read the rest of this essay, please click here.

By Winfield Myers | May 28, 2009 at 9:11 am | Permalink

Whitman's Shampa Biswas: Instigator or Educator?

Writing at his new blog, The Rubin Report, GLORIA Center Director Barry Rubin points to Shampa Biswas, Whitman College Director of Global Studies and associate professor of politics, as an example of the "terrible, anti-democratic, and anti-American ideas" pervading higher education. As demonstrated in a glowing profile at the Whitman College web site and a 2007 convocation address, Biswas is yet another Edward Said acolyte helping to turn the field of Middle East studies (in which she specializes) into a forum for political activism and moral relativism.

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By Cinnamon Stillwell | April 22, 2009 at 6:40 pm | Permalink

Recommended New Blog: The Rubin Report

Anyone who keeps up on Middle East politics should know about Barry Rubin, Director of the Global Research for International Affairs (GLORIA) Center, Professor at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya, Israel, and editor of the Middle East Review of International Affairs Journal (MERIA). Rubin's books, articles, and mailing list have lent expertise, common sense, and wisdom to the complicated morass that is the Middle East. He has been a contributor to the Middle East Quarterly and many of his useful insights into the field of Middle East studies have been reprinted and referenced at Campus Watch.

Now Rubin has started his own blog: The Rubin Report. Here is the GLORIA Center announcement:

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By Cinnamon Stillwell | April 21, 2009 at 2:39 pm | Permalink

Rashid Khalidi's Paranoia

Writing in today's Jerusalem Post, Campus Watch adjunct scholar Jonathan Schanzer reports on a recent conference call in which Columbia University professor Rashid Khalidi spun conspiracy theories about an alleged Israeli "matrix of control":

Rashid Khalidi, the former PLO spokesman-turned Columbia University professor, is convinced that Israel has constructed a "matrix of control" in the Middle East. Khalidi once cited books and articles to back up his skewed views of Middle East history. Now he cites obscure Internet claims of an "occupation settlement industrial complex."

On April 1, Khalidi gave a one-hour phone briefing to Brit Tzedek v'Shalom (The Jewish Alliance for Justice and Peace) - a leftist organization based in Chicago. While occasionally sounding balanced and insightful, he launched into short rants throughout the call.

Notably, about eight minutes in, he began to froth about a "network of interests which is bound up with the maintenance of this matrix of control. The occupation settlement industrial complex - a network of companies that an Israeli Web site called 'whoprofits' put together." Based on this site, which published a disclaimer about the "accuracy, completeness, usefulness of any information and/or documents disclosed," along with input from radical leftists like Jeff Halper and Palestinian apologists like Amira Haas, Khalidi claimed there are "hundreds of companies, hi-tech companies, that keep the databases on which Israel manages... the four million Palestinians... The telephone databases to the security companies that manage the checkpoints to the companies that build the roads... the settler-only roads." And so on and so forth.

To read the rest of "The Professor's Paranoia," please click here.

By Winfield Myers | April 19, 2009 at 11:19 am | Permalink

Will Columbia Tenure Joseph Massad?

That is the question as everyone concerned about the future of Columbia University, Middle East studies, and academic integrity await word from Morningside Heights. Although Massad called the Angry Arab from Cairo and reported that he had been awarded tenure, the silence from Columbia's administration could mean, as Martin Kramer speculates, that Massad's ad hoc tenure committee has approved him and sent the case to the provost, from which it could go to CU's president and board of trustees.

I have assembled a compendium of Massad's writings to provide, in a single convenient document, a resource to shed light on the nature and content of his work. In the introduction, I characterize Massad's scholarship:

Massad is not merely vitriolic in his criticism of America, Israel, Jews, and his detractors. He is intellectually vulgar, a purveyor of racialist conspiracy theories and counterfactual historical revisionism who has bullied his own students. He makes a mockery of scholarly obligations to dispassionate research and reporting with his naked political advocacy and villainizing of opponents. Moreover, he juxtaposes events or individuals with little or nothing in common in an attempt to invert our moral universe, cloud our understanding of history, and thwart our ability to learn from the past.

To read "Will Columbia Tenure Joseph Massad?" please click here.

By Winfield Myers | April 15, 2009 at 12:42 pm | Permalink

Answering David Newman's Hollow Charges against Campus Watch

In "Bashing the Academic Left," a rambling rant against critics of left-wing Israeli professors published in today's Jerusalem Post, Ben-Gurion University government professor David Newman strays far afield in his unfounded, and unsupported, attacks on Campus Watch. In his second paragraph he writes:

The last few years have been 'in season' for attacking the academic left, a form of academic McCarthyism that is hard to recollect going back 10 or 20 years. Most pernicious and consistent is the self-styled Campus Watch, created by the neo-con critic of the Israeli left, Daniel Pipes. It uses students and faculty to spy on those teaching courses on Israel and the Middle East. Anyone who so faintly utters a word of criticism is immediately labeled as such, including some of the best critical scholars of Israel today.

Critics who cannot muster empirical arguments often settle for ad hominem attacks and hackneyed clichés, and no cliché is more worn than the charge that off-campus critics of higher education engage in McCarthyism. Campus Watch (CW) has no governmental authority, no powers of subpoena, no ability to force anyone to do anything. Nor do we wish for such powers. In what way has CW prevented Newman from speaking his mind? Does he not make these charges in a major newspaper? But feelings of persecution lend a touch of authenticity to lives of some academics, providing as they do a veneer of viability and importance to those who might otherwise be overlooked and ignored.

Using students and faculty to spy on academics? The aggrandizement of academics knows no bounds. We welcome reports from sources with hard evidence, which we always corroborate. And do students and professors not have a right to judge the behavior of academics? Does speaking up make them spies? By extension, are movie and theater critics, journalists and editorialists, and Consumer Reports employees all spies? Does Newman suggest that critics of professors somehow violate a code of silence--what happens in the classroom stays in the classroom? Is this La Cosa Nostra or Las Vegas?

Moreover, given that Newman couples his attacks on CW with a primary focus on Israeli universities, he seems not to realize that CW critiques only Middle East studies in North American universities. We do not critique Israeli universities, as even the briefest study of our web pages would reveal.

He continues:

Campus Watch is a disgrace for anyone who believes in the concept of freedom of speech, and so it would appear is the copy organization Israel Academia Monitor, an interview with which appeared in the April 7 Jerusalem Post. It is little wonder that Dana Barnett was unprepared, or more likely unable to give a single name of an academic who has not been hired or promoted at an Israeli university for professing right-wing political views. I sat for three years on the promotions and tenure committee of my own university faculty. Despite the fact that the members of that committee shared a diverse range of political views, not once was the political critique allowed to intervene in what was, and remains, a very tough and demanding, but very fair, system of professional mobility.

A disgrace "for anyone" who believes in free speech? Such a sweeping statement that claims to speak for so many members of the human race (surely hundreds of millions), and yet not a shred of evidence? The academic left has for years claimed that to disagree with it is to silence it. This is a precious affectation, not an informed argument.

Finally, Newman writes:

Even more disturbing is the fact that organizations such as Campus Watch, Israel Academia Monitor and NGO Monitor, to name but a few, will not disclose the names of their donors and supporters, unlike the EU, which is a very transparent organization. While the right-wing organizations pretend to seek transparency among others, they constantly refuse to divulge the same information about their own institutions. Perhaps they would be embarrassed by the fact that many of their donors hold extremist right-wing views deemed totally unacceptable to the vast majority of the Israeli public, and in some cases advocate (from afar) the breaking of Israeli law.

Newman's information is flawed and his analogy fails. Campus Watch is a project of the Middle East Forum (MEF), a nonprofit 501 (c) 3 organization. As such, it is a private entity. MEF accepts no government funds, and like most other nonprofits, it does not publicize donors unless asked by them to do so. The same may be said of major think tanks of all political persuasions. Since donations are tax deductable, most individual donors certainly list MEF as a recipient of funds on their tax returns, and foundations list organizations to which they donate. The European Union, on the other hand, is a public governmental organization obligated to list recipients of its largesse (although I have European friends who would find the idea that it is "transparent" risible).

More to the point, without naming any donors to CW or the other organizations he mentions, Newman impugns their reputations by raising the specter of "extremist right-wing" donors whose views are "totally unacceptable" to some, and who may even "advocate" breaking the law. Where is his evidence for this absurd, unfounded charge? Who are these extremists? If he knows any, surely he would list their names and thereby embarrass any organization that accepted their donations. Once again lacking empirical evidence to advance a reasoned argument, Newman resorts to hollow insults and baseless charges.

By Winfield Myers | April 14, 2009 at 6:01 pm | Permalink

Duke's Gaza 'Teach-In' a Platform for Misinformation

Jay Schalin, senior writer at the Pope Center for Higher Education Policy in Raleigh, NC, reports today on a recent Duke University "teach-in" on Gaza. He learned a great deal--about the biases of academics. Here are the opening paragraphs of Schalin's article, "What I Learned at Duke University's Gaza 'Teach-In'" which appears at The American Thinker:

I attended a "teach-in" about Israeli-Palestinian relations at Duke University the other night. Part of my job is to attend college lectures and report on them, in order to provide the public with some idea of who is being invited on to the American campus and what ideas they present. As I entered the lecture hall, I saw a stack of blank Amnesty International petitions, asking Secretary of State Hillary Clinton to support a U.N. investigation into the commission of war crimes by the Israel during the recent Gaza conflict.

The lecture was attended by perhaps 50 people, mostly young, and mostly of Middle Eastern descent (head scarves outnumbered yarmulkes by about six-to-one). There was also a smattering of American students.

Before the event, I was curious whether any of the four "teachers" would give a balanced presentation, or whether the affair would be totally one-sided. The two main speakers were young pro-Palestinian activists: Laila El-Haddad, a former Al-Jazeera journalist, and Duke graduate student Rann Bar-On. There was little reason to expect much ideological balance from them, given descriptions of their activities on the Web. I particularly expected Bar-On, who has been active in such organizations as the International Solidarity Movement, which used foreign college students to disrupt anti-terror activities in Israel, to make a few inflammatory statements.

To read the rest of this article, please click here.

By Winfield Myers | February 28, 2009 at 8:34 am | Permalink

Khalidi's Fear

Columbia University historian and former PLO spokesman Rashid Khalidi has received more media attention in recent months than any Middle East studies specialist in recent memory. His friendship with Barack Obama when both lived in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood received significant attention during last year's presidential campaign, including from CW West Coast Representative Cinnamon Stillwell.

Our latest critique of Khalidi appears today at FrontPage Magazine. Mary Madigan reports on a recent conference held at Columbia Law School that forced Khalidi to confront George Fletcher, a law professor whose invitation to debate Khalidi has ignored. Here are the opening paragraphs of the article:

I expected Columbia's "Understanding the War on Gaza" conference on January 29 to be similar to UCLA's recent "Gaza and Human Rights" symposium: a one-sided lesson on how to spread anti-Zionism, anti-Semitism, and anti-Americanism. However, it was surprisingly balanced, perhaps because it was sponsored by Columbia's Law School. Most of the panelists focused on the legal aspects of the recent conflict and acknowledged that we should not make any judgments until evidence was accumulated.

The principal exception to this reasoned approach was propagandist and former spokesman for the PLO, Rashid Khalidi.

Khalidi is a study in contrasts. He blurted out his belief that "the law is an ass" during a discussion with students, yet he condemned Israel's lack of respect for the law and presented a sympathetic view of (illegal) terrorism as a tactic. He used facts and numbers that, in his own words, "may or may not be correct" to convince his audience that everything we thought we knew about the situation in Gaza is wrong. He published known fabrications in the New York Times Op-Ed, lied about the terms of the June cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, and made the hand-waving claim in front of a crowd of legal experts that according to some laws, somewhere, "there is a right of resistance to occupation." (He later admitted that no legal system recognized that right.)

To read the rest of this article, please click here.

By Winfield Myers | February 17, 2009 at 11:31 am | Permalink