Campus Watch Responds:
The latest smear-job against Campus Watch is from the Orwellian-named California Scholars for Academic Freedom (CSAF), an group of anti-American, anti-Israel ideologues that emboldens bullies and intimidates dissenters to ensure that theirs is the only view on campus.
In a letter to San Francisco State University (SFSU) president Leslie Wong, CSAF demands that he “protect” viscerally anti-Israel SFSU prof. Rabab Abdulhadi from Campus Watch’s national campaign to end SFSU’s nefarious Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) with Hamas-friendly An-Najah University in the West Bank. (Read about our campaign hereand here.)
As Mary McCarthy said of Lillian Hellman, “every word she writes is a lie, including ‘and’ and ‘the,” so CSAF’s missive on CW oozes its mendacity line after line. In fact, its misrepresentations are the highest per-word of anything we’ve read. So, in the order of their appearance, let’s refute their errors (you might want to grab a cup of tea, or perhaps a bottle of wine):
CW’s campaign amounts to a “smear campaign": It’s called “criticism.” But academics, unlike professionals of a less delicate sensibility, reply not with fact-based refutations (much less an admission of error), but with ad hominem attacks that leave unchallenged the charges against them, as is the case here.
CW and the organization of which it is a part, the Middle East Forum, are part of the “pro-Israel lobby” that tries to silence anyone whose subject is Palestine: Leave it to those whose claims of sophistication are loudest to wallow in the most primitive forms of crude conspiracy mongering. We challenge CSAF to prove these baseless charges.
CW is part of a “network": No (again), we’re part of MEF and utterly independent of everyone else.
“Similar attacks” have led to “the defamation and physical threatening of students ... [and] faculty,” and therefore we’re trying to “intimidate” and “threaten others and deter them from their rights": Among the oldest techniques of silencing critics: unsupported claims of defamation and threats of physical violence. So prove it, CSAF. When did CW ever provoke this? Who has been threatened as a result of anything CW has ever done? (Note: “threaten” is not a synonym of “criticize.”)
CW intends to “end any critical discourse on Israel": Hyperbole or psychosis? You be the judge.
We are “fundamentally anti-intellectual in [our] aims": That a transparently political organization capable of grandly issuing a letter dripping with lies and spouting crude conspiracy theories while studiously avoiding any attempt to refute CW/MEF’s campaign claims we’re “anti-intellectual” is beyond parody. Then follows this howler:
“It is worth noting that two of the main proponents of these organizations [that CASF attacks], David Horowitz and Daniel Pipes, were named as leading Islamophobes by the Southern Poverty Law Center.”
Three other activists, Steve Emerson, Daniel Pipes and Frank Gaffney, have interacted with many of the core group [of 10 hardliners] as well and also have offended many Muslims, but they are somewhat more moderate in their views of Muslims than those who are profiled below.
The second paragraph below consists of nothing more than smears and falsehoods.CASF again makes no attempt to refute any of our research and continues to substitute slander for argument. Prove that we lie, spread innuendo, rehash anything (we do our own research and add to the work of others). As for stirring a “public panic” via “Islamophobia” and “stereotyping,” this is comical even by contemporary Middle East studies standards. We must have missed the news that our campaign sparked rampaging mobs in the streets of SF. We leave false portrayals to our opponents, as occurred during Abdulhadi’s service as faculty advisor for SFSU’s General Union of Palestine Students (GUPS), which included the display of stencils adorned with the disturbing motto, “My Heroes Have Always Killed Colonizers.” Only in academe are open disagreement and fact-based charges represented as intimidation and infringement on one’s freedom. Weak tea indeed.
Although the final paragraphs spout more empty charges of “racism,” (prove it) “personal attack” (criticism) and “intimidation” (i.e., telling the truth) without addressing the moral repugnance of aligning with a Hamas-friendly institution, we were particularly gratified that CASF’s petulant smear ends with the most hackneyed cliché extant by charging us with “McCarthyist” tactics. What a disappointment it would have been had they omitted this transparently silly charge. As we’ve gotten used to stating over and over, CW has neither the means nor the desire to mimic the tactics of Tail Gunner Joe, a U.S. Senator empowered to subpoena witnesses, hold hearings, and more. That we have truth on our side is evident to anyone who examines the facts and notes our latest opponent’s failure to refute a single plank of our campaign. We’ve gotten used to stating that, too.
(Posted by Winfield Myers)