“The proclivity toward apologetics for enemies of the United States are problems that scholarship on the Middle East shares with other area-studies,” hissed Daniel Pipes in the winter of 1995-1996. Mr. Pipes, the proud winner of this year’s “Islamophobia” Award, issued by the Islamic Human Rights Commission, and who has been called, appropriately, an “anti-Arab propagandist,” is busily threatening academic freedom in American universities. And we should all care.  

Mr. Pipes is the director and founder of the Middle East Forum, a think tank that claims that it “works to define and promote American interests in the Middle East,” which, in turn, established a sinister program which it benignly calls “Campus Watch.” The Middle East Forum outlines the deeply troubling and menacing big-brother mission of the Campus Watch program:

The program, established in September of 2002, monitors the often erroneous and biased teachings and writings of U.S. professors specializing in the Middle East, with the goal of improving the scholarly study of the region. A Campus Speakers Bureau provides speakers who can provide accurate and balanced information to American students in the classroom.

The goal of the Campus Watch program is as evident as it is reprehensible: to promote Mr. Pipe’s virulently anti-Arab approach to Middle Eastern studies and to blacklist those professors who refuse to share his vision.

Dissatisfied with merely blacklisting professors through the Campus Watch program, Pipes seeks to cut funding, doled out by the Department of Education under the Title VI program, for Middle East studies programs housed in universities. In his academically misguided but characteristically pert tone, he recently wrote: Middle East Studies: Wasted Money. If Middle Eastern studies cannot be taught according to Mr. Pipes’ often-discredited academic and political inclinations, they should not, apparently, be taught at all.

Lest time be overly kind to Mr. Pipes and wipe our memories of the fact that he wrote, in 1990, 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,” we should maintain our own watch on Mr. Pipes if we wish to safeguard the academic freedom and integrity of American universities and research institutions.  

Mimi Hanaoka