Setting The Record Straight

Campus Watch corrects false allegations made against it.

Campus Watch Responds:

Speaking at a March, 2014 Friends of Sabeel – North America conference, Hatem Bazian—a senior lecturer in the department of Near Eastern studies and director of the Islamophobia Research & Documentation Project at the University of California, Berkeley—made the following false charges against Middle East Forum president Daniel Pipes and Campus Watch (CW):

[Pipes] runs the [sic] Campus Watch where he sends students and pays students to lodge reports on faculty who speak on the issue of Palestine. He has a website and that information is there.

Neither Pipes nor CW does anything of the kind. While CW's website contains the largest archive of Middle East studies-related articles on the internet and includes contributions from students, we focus on shoddy, politicized scholarship, not academics' views on "Palestine." Moreover, CW does not pay students to report on biased faculty; there are plenty of volunteers exercising their right to convey what goes on in the classroom or at public events.

Bazian's misrepresentations are simply the latest in a chorus of consistent and erroneous mentions since CW's 2002 inception, demonstrating our continuing effectiveness in keeping Middle East studies specialists on their toes.

(Posted by Cinnamon Stillwell)