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Campus Watch on Facebook

Campus Watch (CW) now has a Facebook page, so please stop by, give us a look, and if so inclined, a "like." We plan on linking to all of our new articles and blog posts, as well as posting updates on developments in the field of Middle East studies. CW West Coast Representative Cinnamon Stillwell will be the administrator.

Please click here to access the Campus Watch Facebook page.

By Campus Watch | January 26, 2012 at 12:32 pm | Permalink

Farewell to UCLA's Sondra Hale

Sondra Hale

The rabidly anti-Israel University of California, Los Angeles anthropology and women's studies professor Sondra Hale has retired. Her list of dubious achievements is long and, over the years, Campus Watch has chronicled a good number:

Hale was one of the founding members of the organizing committee for the Campaign for the Cultural and Academic Boycott of Israel. At the time of its inception, she touted her prominent involvement, telling the Daily Bruin in February, 2009 that, were it to go into effect, "foreign exchange and cooperative programs with Israel would cease."
At an October, 2009 conference at the Center for Near Eastern Studies (CNES)--for which she served as chair of the Faculty Advisory Committee--Hale equated the pro-Israel groups StandWithUs and the Zionist Organization of America (ZOA) with "Nazis" and "McCarthyists."
In response to widespread criticism regarding the blatantly anti-Israel and, at times, anti-Semitic nature of a January, 2009 "Human Rights and Gaza" CNES symposium, Hale penned an op-ed in the Daily Bruin, slamming UCLA student and member of Bruins for Israel, Ben Meiselman, for having the temerity to publish a piece criticizing the symposium.
Hale was one of the signatories to a ridiculously conspiratorial 2002 open letter warning that Israel would use the Iraq war to perpetrate "ethnic cleansing" against the Palestinians.
Shifting focus to her other specialty, Africa, Hale suggested in November, 2007 that Islamist-perpetrated genocide in Darfur could be prevented by sending in "mediation, negotiation, healing and psychotherapy . . . professionals to work with people when tensions are building up."

UCLA now has an opportunity to make amends for Hale's years of agitprop and politicization of her discipline by filling her position with someone who will pursue disinterested, rigorous scholarship.

By Cinnamon Stillwell | January 10, 2012 at 3:31 pm | Permalink

Willful Blindness Toward Terrorists at UCLA a Decade After 9-11

Lisa Hajjar

In a Campus Watch essay published today at FrontPage Magazine, Judith Greblya reports on a recent roundtable discussion at the University of California, Los Angeles, at which Lisa Hajjar of UC-Santa Barbara and others attacked America, Israel, and the West and issued apologias for terrorists. Sadly, it's what close observers of contemporary Middle East studies have come to expect from our leading universities.

The University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Center for Near Eastern Studies hosted a roundtable discussion last month titled, "After a Decade of the 'War on Terror': The Middle East, Human Rights and American Muslims." Sponsored by the UCLA School of Law Critical Race Studies Program, the event featured UCLA law professor Asli Bali, University of California, Santa Barbara sociology professor Lisa Hajjar, and American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) Southern California attorney Ahilan Arulanantham. The audience of approximately twenty people was comprised mostly of law and graduate students, along with a few members of the community.

According to the introduction, the speakers were to "examine this decade on the war on terror in the broader context of the international community," but the two-hour event quickly descended into a forum for America-bashing. All three speakers called the existence of Islamic terrorism into question and, what's worse, behaved as if the attacks of September 11, 2001 never occurred.

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

By Winfield Myers | December 23, 2011 at 10:17 am | Permalink

Rashid Ghannoushi: John Esposito's Islamist in Tunis

John Esposito

In an article written for Campus Watch that appears today at American Thinker, journalist Stephen Schwartz examines the beliefs of Tunisian political leader Rashid Ghannouchi. Although Georgetown's John Esposito has spent years whitewashing Ghannouchi's reputation, Schwartz exposes the Tunisian as a radical Islamist:

Rashid Ghannoushi (or Rachid Ghannouchi in French) is the ideological elder of Tunisia's Ennahda, or the Renaissance Party, the local branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. He arrived in Washington on Monday, November 28, 2011, in the halo of a skewed electoral victory by his party in the small North African country's recent elections.

In addition to being the man controlling Tunisia's main Islamist movement from behind the scenes, without an elected post and the responsibility that it would bring with it, Ghannoushi comes to America as someone who was, to a significant extent, lifted to power by the support of American Middle Eastern studies establishment. Indeed, the successful rise of Ghannoushi is symbolic of the American academic penchant for enabling and justifying radical Islam. A key advocate in this enterprise was the notorious professor John L. Esposito, director of Georgetown University's Saudi-financed Alwaleed bin Talal Center for Muslim-Christian Understanding (ACMCU).

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

By Winfield Myers | December 11, 2011 at 9:33 am | Permalink

The 'Angry Arab' Goes Mad

As'ad AbuKhalil

Writing for Campus Watch, Rima Greene and I report on a recent lecture from the self-described "Angry Arab," California State University, Stanislaus professor As'ad AbuKhalil. Our article appears today at Frontpage Magazine:

As'ad AbuKahlil—a political science professor at California State University, Stanislaus—spoke last month at a day-long "teach-in" at the University of California, Berkeley titled, "Building Solidarity with the Arab Spring." It consisted of a number of "workshop sessions" at the Valley Life Sciences Building, followed by a "plenary session" at the Multicultural Center, and was co-sponsored by the Arab Resource Organizing Committee, the Berkeley Muslim Students Association PAC, the International Socialist Organization, and the Syrian American Council.

AbuKhalil's workshop on "The U.S. and the Arab Uprising" was held in a tiny, hot, windowless room filled with students wearing hijabs and keffiyehs. . . . AbuKhalil, author of the "Angry Arab" blog, was introduced as "the most influential Arab blogger in English and Arabic." Wasting no time living up to his self-caricature, he presented the demise of Israel as his life's work, referred repeatedly to the "usurping Zionist entity," and characterized the U.S. as the source of all that ails the Arab world.

To read the entire article, please click here.

By Cinnamon Stillwell | December 8, 2011 at 12:40 pm | Permalink

Using the 'Arab Uprisings' to Bash America and Israel

James Gelvin

Judith Greblya, writing for Campus Watch, reports on a recent lecture at UCLA on the "Arab uprisings" that devolved into a forum for America and Israel bashing. Her article appears today at Frontpage Magazine and it begins like so:

On Thursday November 10, 2011, approximately sixty people gathered for a lecture hosted by the University of California, Los Angeles's Center for Near Eastern Studies. The event was titled, "Taking Stock: The Arab Uprising on the Eve of Their First Anniversary" and it featured two history professors, James Gelvin of ULCA and Juan Cole of the University of Michigan.

Though the two-hour event promised to illuminate the various particulars and multi-layered realities of the Arab uprisings, it quickly dwindled into a platform for the type of postcolonial, anti-American, and anti-Israel rhetoric typical to the field of Middle East studies, and certainly to the notoriously biased Gelvin and Cole.

To read the entire article, please click here.

By Cinnamon Stillwell | November 18, 2011 at 12:39 pm | Permalink

Juan Cole: Critic of Democracy, Apologist for Tyranny

Juan Cole

Juan Cole, among the highest-profile Middle East scholars in the U.S., delivered a lecture on Iran's response to the so-called "Arab spring" at New York University recently. Alan Jacobs, a student of Middle East studies in New York City, filed a report for Campus Watch that appears today at FrontPage Magazine:

Few professors in the controversial world of Middle East studies boast more about their own notoriety than Juan Cole, a man who believes the consistent criticism of his public positions to be a sign of distinction. Yale University's decision not to hire him for an endowed chair five years ago due to insufficient scholarship led him to publicly charge that George W. Bush and the CIA torpedoed his candidacy. When organizations such as Campus Watch publicize Cole's outlandish commentary, he cries "censorship" and labels them "McCarthyite."

His latest lecture at New York University—a collaboration with Sinan Antoon, an Iraqi-American assistant professor of Arab culture and politics at NYU—dealt with Iran's response to the "Arab Spring." In a packed room of over 100 mostly Iranian and Arab-American students, Cole analyzed the Islamic Republic of Iran from a "classical realist" perspective. If one didn't know any better, one would have departed the lecture believing that Iran justifiably protects its own interests; that America is a malignant and aggressive force and Israel its trigger-happy satellite; that Turkey's Islamist Freedom and Development Party (AKP) is headed by a practical and liberal Prime Minister Erdogan who promotes "Middle Eastern multiculturalism"; and that a moderate Islamist party in Tunisia called Ennahda does the same.

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

By Winfield Myers | November 17, 2011 at 10:43 am | Permalink

The Middle East Studies Establishment vs. Walid Phares

Walid Phares

In an article for Campus Watch published today at American Thinker, I address the recent attacks against Walid Phares from three of the most biased, politicized professors in the field of Middle East studies: As'ad AbuKhalil of California State University, Stanislaus; Duke University's Ebrahim Moosa; and Omid Safi of the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. It begins like so:

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney announced last month that Walid Phares -- a Lebanese-American Christian, adjunct professor of jihadist global strategies at the National Defense University, and former Middle East studies professor at Florida Atlantic University -- would be a special adviser on the Middle East and North Africa, it elicited howls of fury from the usual suspects. Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR) -- an unindicted co-conspirator in the Holy Land Foundation Hamas funding case and the chief Islamist organ in the U.S. -- sent a letter to the Romney campaign stating CAIR's predictable objections, while publications such as the Daily Beast, Salon.com, and Mother Jones followed suit with error-filled hit pieces.

Phares's moral clarity on Islamism and jihadism do not sit well with those who would rather engage in apologetics and obstructionism. This explains why his fiercest opponents have included some of the worst from the field of Middle East studies.

To read the entire article, please click here.

By Cinnamon Stillwell | November 11, 2011 at 12:37 pm | Permalink

Gilbert Achcar's Anti-Zionism of Fools

Gilbert Achcar

Writing for Campus Watch, Rima Greene and I report on a recent lecture by the University of London's Gilbert Achcar at UC Berkeley, as part of a University of California speaking tour. Our article appears today at Frontpage Magazine:

"Don't expect me to take a pro-Israel view. I'm an Arab."

So declared Gilbert Achcar—professor of development studies and international relations at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies—at the outset of his lecture last month at the University of California, Berkeley. Those in the audience hoping for scholarly objectivity were thus informed that Achcar's ethnicity trumped intellectual independence and that, despite evidence to the contrary (Nonie Darwish, the founder of Arabs for Israel, comes to mind, as do the majority of Israel's Arab citizenry), an Arab could not be pro-Israel. One had to give him credit for at least confirming his biases up front.

A Lebanese-born, self-described "academic, writer, socialist, and anti-war activist," Achcar was on a University of California speaking tour to discuss his 2010 book, The Arabs and the Holocaust: The Arab-Israeli War of Narratives. His UC Berkeley lecture was sponsored by the Center for Middle Eastern Studies (CMES) and was held in its Saudi-largesse-provided Sultan Room, with a glowing introduction from CMES vice chair Emily Gottreich. The audience of around 75 students and adults had to strain at times to discern Achcar's words, delivered as they were in a heavy accent and low tones, but the crowd appeared politically sympathetic.

To read the entire article, click here. If so inclined, please e-mail your concerns and comments to the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at UC Berkeley (cmes@berkeley.edu) and to the Jewish Studies Program at UC Davis (jst@ucdavis.edu).

By Cinnamon Stillwell | November 10, 2011 at 12:19 pm | Permalink

Academic Pay to Play: Radical Islamists Fund One of Their Own in Ontario

Ingrid Mattson

Ingrid Mattson's appointment to the new chair in Islamic studies at Ontario's Huron University College--and the radical Muslim organizations who supported the establishment of the chair--offer a textbook example of the pernicious influence Islamist groups can play in higher education. I critique this process in an article published yesterday at American Thinker, "Academic Pay to Play: Radical Islamists Fund One of Their Own in Ontario":

Huron University College (HUC) in Ontario announced Friday morning the appointment of Ingrid Mattson, a professor at Hartford Seminary in Connecticut and former president of the Islamic Society of North America (ISNA), as the first London and Windsor Community Chair in Islamic Studies at its Faculty of Theology.

The move validates widespread concern, as revealed in this Campus Watch article by Canadian journalist Barbara Kay and a letter from concerned faculty and friends at HUC, both published in May, that the support of several Islamist groups in funding the chair would lead to the appointment of a radical Islamist as the first holder. In Ingrid Mattson, the funders' wishes have been fulfilled.

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

By Winfield Myers | October 17, 2011 at 9:18 am | Permalink