Setting The Record Straight

Campus Watch corrects false allegations made against it.

Campus Watch Responds:

From Daniel Pipes's "Department of Corrections (of Others' Factual Mistakes about Me)":

The Economist mangles Campus Watch: I wrote a letter to the Economist which it did not publish:

In "Why are conspiracy theories so popular?" (Dec. 19, 2002), your correspondent approvingly quotes a paragraph from my book Conspiracy, then adds this gratuitous sentence:

Mr. Pipes does good work in skewering anti-Jewish conspiracy theorists, but his recent founding of 'Campus Watch', a website devoted to 'outing' pro-Arab academics, emits a whiff of burning books."

"Outing" pro-Arab academics, burning books? Had The Economist bothered to visit Campus-Watch.org, it would find a mission statement there explaining that Campus Watch

monitors and critiques Middle East studies in North America, with an aim to improving them. The project mainly addresses five problems: analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students. Campus Watch fully respects the freedom of speech of those it debates while insisting on its own freedom to comment on their words and deeds.

This does not sound to me remotely like the Campus Watch of your correspondent's slightly fevered imagination.