Philadelphia – The Middle East Forum posted a new page today on www.campus-watch.org, a site launched last month to monitor the campus-based Middle East specialists. The new page lists more than 100 academics from North American institutions who requested to be listed on the site in solidarity with eight academics identified as apologists for Palestinian violence or militant Islam.
The page (www.campus-watch.org/apologists.php) is posted as part of the ongoing Campus Watch effort to monitor and critique, with the goal of improving, Middle East studies at North American institutions of higher learning.
“After we launched www.campus-watch.org, academics deluged us with emails; some of them requested inclusion with the original eight professors cited,” says Daniel Pipes, director of the Middle East Forum.
“Most of them are academics from other fields,” continues Pipes, “and I suspect that few of them actually read our statement of purpose, for very few of them understand what issues Campus Watch was created to address. Still, if they insist on declaring public solidarity with Palestinian or Islamist violence, this is important information for university stakeholders to be aware of, so we are posting their names.”
Campus Watch addresses five problems in Middle East studies: analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students.
The Middle East Forum is a 501(c)3 think tank that works to define and promote American interests in the region and to shape the intellectual climate in which U.S. policy is made.
