The War on Academic Freedom

[BinZiad]

The War on Academic Freedom
by Kristine McNeil


The year since Congress passed the USA Patriot Act has brought an
ever-growing enemies list from our nation's thought police. First
there was Senator Joseph Lieberman and Lynne Cheney's American
Council of Trustees and Alumni report unveiled last
November--"Defending Civilization: How Our Universities Are Failing
America and What Can Be Done About It." The forty-three-page
document
purports to advocate the preservation of academic freedom and
dissent
while being all about suppressing both when the views expressed
conflict with blind support for US foreign policy.

In attempting to smear dozens of "unpatriotic" professors, the
organization laid the foundation for the Middle East Forum's recent
blacklisting project, Campus Watch--a website that hopes to do for
students and professors what Project TIPS would have done for mail
carriers and plumbers.

Based in Philadelphia and headed by anti-Arab propagandist Daniel
Pipes, Campus Watch unleashed an Internet firestorm in late
September, when it posted "dossiers" on eight scholars who have had
the audacity to criticize US foreign policy and the Israeli
occupation. As a gesture of solidarity, more than 100 academics
subsequently contacted the Middle East Forum asking to be added to
the list. In response, Pipes has since posted 146 new names, all
identified as supporters of "apologists for suicide bombings and
militant Islam." He also claims "most of the writers are academics
from fields other than Middle East studies (and so are not qualified
to judge the work of the academics we listed)." By this standard, he
is similarly unqualified, as he is not a professor and his PhD was
earned in medieval history. Of the Campus Watch eight, seven are
modernists. Hamid Dabashi of Columbia teaches and writes about both
medieval and modern Iranian social history.

Naming the names of academics critical of Israeli policy has a
history spanning more than two decades. In 1979 the American Israel
Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) formed its Political Leadership
Development Program, which "educates and trains young leaders in
pro-Israel political advocacy," enlisting hundreds of college
students to collect information on pro-Palestinian professors and
student organizations. By 1983 the program had attracted more than
5,000 students on 350 campuses in all fifty states. The next year
the
findings were published as The AIPAC College Guide: Exposing the
Anti-Israel Campaign on Campus,which surveyed 100 campuses and
instructed students on how best to counter a "steady diet of
anti-Israel vituperation." Around the same time, the Anti-Defamation
League covertly distributed a twenty-one-page booklet containing
"background information on pro-Arab sympathizers active on college
campuses" who "use their anti-Zionism as merely a guise for their
deeply felt anti-Semitism."

As with redbaiting during the 1950s, the leaders of these current
attacks are exploiting the fear and anxiety the American public
feels
about enemies abroad in order to advance their own political agenda.
Now with access to the Internet, Pipes and his supporters have been
able to expand their attacks into a virtually limitless campaign of
harassment and intimidation. Since the dossiers were first posted,
the targeted professors have been inundated with hostile spam,
rendering their e-mail accounts almost useless, and most have been
victims of "spoofing," in which their identities are stolen and
thousands of offensive e-mail messages sent out in their names. More
than one scholar has received telephone death threats. When
University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole reported that he
and his colleagues had been disabled by thousands of hate messages a
day since their dossiers were posted, Pipes claimed to be shocked,
shocked! at the response his website has elicited. "If Professor
Cole
has in fact been subject to such harassment, Campus Watch joins him
in demanding that whoever stands behind this reprehensible behavior
cease immediately," he told the History News Network, but he has yet
to post a statement on the site.

The Campus Watch site is a showcase for the signature distortions on
which Pipes has built his twenty-five-year career. He twists words,
quotes people out of context and stretches the truth to suit his
purpose. John Esposito, director of Georgetown's Center for
Muslim-Christian Understanding and an expert on militant Islam, is
depicted as a Hamas apologist and blamed, without evidence, for the
State Department's decision to refuse crucial Sudanese intelligence
on Osama bin Laden before September 11. Joseph Massad, an assistant
professor of modern Arab politics and intellectual history at
Columbia, is maligned for signing a letter to the editor of the
Columbia Spectator in defense of Edward Said in 2000. The letter,
co-signed by Columbia colleagues Hamid Dabashi (a fellow
blacklistee)
and the late Magda Al-Nowaihi, is presented as self-evident in its
taint. Stanford history professor and Middle East Studies
Association
(MESA) president Joel Beinin (not on the list but singled out
elsewhere on the site) is quoted completely out of context and said
to blame "US foreign policy for the attacks of September 11, 2001,
rather than militant Islam."

Aside from the dossiers, the site's McCarthyite "Keep Us Informed"
section has provoked the most outrage, as it encourages students to
inform on their professors, rather than challenge them openly as
part
of the academic process. Pipes contends that "American scholars of
the Middle East, to varying degrees, reject the views of most
Americans and the enduring policies of the US government about the
Middle East.... Campus Watch seeks to reverse the damage already
caused by the activist/scholars on American campuses. We see this as
an ongoing effort, one that should continue so long as the problem
exists." He describes MESA as a "left-leaning" mafia offering only
"groupthink." The fact that MESA and Middle East studies departments
include Arabs and Arab-Americans studying their own region is a
particular outrage to Pipes: "Middle East studies in the United
States has become the preserve of Middle Eastern Arabs, who have
brought their views with them. Membership in the Middle East Studies
Association (MESA), the main scholarly association, is now 50
percent
of Middle Eastern origin. Though American citizens, many of these
scholars actively disassociate themselves from the United States,
sometimes even in public."

[BinZiad]

continued...

Pipes is notorious in the academy for calling fundamentalist Muslims
"barbarians" and "potential killers" in a 2001 National Review
article and accusing them of scheming to "replace the [US]
Constitution with the Koran," in a similar piece in Insight on the
News. Along these lines, a 1990 National Review article insisted
that "Western European societies are unprepared for the massive
immigration of brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and
maintaining different standards of hygiene.... All immigrants bring
exotic customs and attitudes, but Muslim customs are more
troublesome than most." In addition to running the Middle East
Forum, serving on a Defense Department antiterrorism task force and
writing columns for the Jerusalem and New York Post, Pipes is also a
regular contributor to the website of Gamla, an organization founded
by former Israeli military officers and settlers that endorses the
ethnic cleansing of every Palestinian as "the only possible
solution" to the Arab-Israeli conflict.

At the end of September, after a torrent of criticism, Campus Watch
took down the dossiers and funneled their contents into its "Survey
of Institutions," which profiles twenty-four North American
universities even more broadly than was the case prior to the
revamping of the site.

Pipes's intention is not merely to silence a small cadre of
scholars.
Martin Kramer, editor of MEF's Middle East Quarterly, laid out the
think tank's objectives quite explicitly last year in his book Ivory
Towers on Sand: The Failure of Middle Eastern Studies in America.
The
idea is to cut off government Title VI funding to Middle East area
studies programs--which was increased after September 11--and
redirect it to a new Defense Department program. Called the National
Flagship Language Initiative, the new program launched this past
April to establish learning centers for Arabic, Farsi and Turkish,
among other languages, to support Americans willing to make a "good
faith effort" to join the Defense Department, the CIA or a number of
other government agencies after graduation.

MESA opposes the program on the grounds that its association with
the
Defense Department and the CIA potentially endangers the safety and
institutional access of students studying abroad, and favors
programs
administered through the Department of Education.

Despite his claims of "not seeking to derail anyone's career," as he
recently assured a university audience, Pipes aims for that and much
more. Ruining people's careers may be only the tip of the iceberg.
If
he succeeds in smearing scholars by pressuring university
administrations, students and their parents, and eliminating their
sources of funding, some in the academy fear that Campus Watch
eventually may try to offer allegations and support to John
Ashcroft's Justice Department with the aim of having their targets
charged with crimes punishable under the USA Patriot Act.

As Queens College professor Ammiel Alcalay notes, "Once you create a
climate in which any kind of oppositional thinking is suspect, you
can push that further and begin to see where people's work has
appeared, if they've written a check to a charitable organization,
done a fundraiser, visited a country, written something that has
been
quoted out of context, etc. There are myriad ways."

History professor Zachary Lockman, of New York University's Middle
East studies department, believes that Campus Watch's primary goals
are to stifle debate on Iraq,the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and US
policy toward Islamist movements, and to discredit their opponents
in
the academy by branding them soft on terrorism. In a letter to Pipes
and Kramer, he wrote, "Though I'd watched you two in action for many
years, I never thought you'd stoop quite this low, to such a crude
effort to undermine the integrity and norms of academic life and
achieve by innuendo, misinformation and implied threat what you
could
not achieve by reason and free intellectual exchange."

But opposition to Campus Watch's efforts in the academy is growing.
On October 23 Professor Amy Newhall, MESA's executive director,
announced that the organization will work with the American
Association of University Professors' recently formed Committee on
Academic Freedom in a Time of Crisis, set up to investigate
harassment of scholars and disruption of academic freedom. And at
its
upcoming annual conference, MESA is expected to pass a resolution
condemning Campus Watch, similar to the one it unanimously endorsed
18 years ago censuring the efforts of the ADL and AIPAC.

Both Esposito and Lockman are very pleased with the support they
and their colleagues have been shown since the lists were posted.
Many of the academics who wrote asking to be added to Pipes's list
are untenured, potentially placing their jobs at risk, thus
underscoring their commitment to fight Pipes's distortions. "I
think there are a lot of people who have a good sense that this is
an attack on everyone," Lockman says. "Many of us learned from
McCarthyism. If it's Middle East studies this year, it will be
something else the next."