Sherna Gluck of Radio Intifada Mischaracterizes Campus Watch

Back on October 4, Sherna Gluck, the host of Radio Intifada, which broadcasts on KPFK from Los Angeles, examined “the campaign to silence critics of Israel.” During the course of the show, she referenced a September 7, 2007, Campus Watch web log entry, “Cal State Fresno’s Middle East Studies Project Raises Red Flags,” by my colleague Cinnamon Stillwell.

One of her guests was Laurie Brand, who directs the University of Southern California’s School of International Relations. Brand was president of the Middle East Studies Association in 2004 and now co-chairs its Committee on Academic Freedom with Beshara Doumani of the University of California, Berkeley.

Gluck is listed as being with the South/West Africa and North Africa Collective (SWANA). She has also taught women’s studies at Cal State Long Beach. She made the following statement in the couse of an alarmed discourse on David Horowitz’s Islamo Fascism Awareness Week. I have transcribed from the audio of the show:

And I understand that they’re taking their little show to Fresno State as well, and initially I was kind of confused as to why Fresno State was on the list, but then saw the write-up in their Campus Watch attacking both the dean and one of the major faculty members, someone we have on the show fairly regularly to speak about Iran [perhaps Sasan Fayazmanesh], as they form the Middle East studies program.

Aside from why one should be concerned about the people involved in assembling Fresno’s program (see Cinnamon’s blog entry on that), Gluck implies that Campus Watch is part of the Horowitz Freedom Center, which is sponsoring the Islamo Fascist Awareness Week.

As she could have learned with minimal exertion, Campus Watch is a project of the Middle East Forum, a nonprofit think tank located in Philadelphia. We have no ties--none whatsoever--to any other organization extant. Any action we undertake, from our Campus Speakers Bureau to posts at our blog, are undertaken through our own initiative, and not through any efforts coordinated with anyone else.

So the “write-up in their Campus Watch” was not, as Gluck erroneously asserts, part of the Freedom Center’s campaign.

Which leads me to ask why the academic left has such a difficult time understanding a simple fact of human life in complex societies: unrelated individuals and organizations can and do observe the same phenomena and independently arrive at similar conclusions about said phenomena.

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Winfield Myers

Winfield Myers is managing editor of the Middle East Forum and director of its Campus Watch project, which reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North American universities. He has taught world history and other topics at the University of Michigan, the University of Georgia, Tulane, and Xavier University of Louisiana. He was previously managing editor of The American Enterprise magazine and CEO of Democracy Project, Inc., which he co-founded. Mr. Myers has served as senior editor and communications director at the Intercollegiate Studies Institute and is principal author and editor of a college guide, Choosing the Right College (1998, 2001). He was educated at the University of Georgia, Tulane, and the University of Michigan.