October 11, 2017

Middle East Studies Profs Gone Bad

"I'm a professor!"  So cried Maryland Institute College of Art (MICA) professor Anila Daulatzai as she was forcibly removed from a Southwest Airlines flight for lying about having a life-threatening allergy to the two dog...

October 7, 2017

The Zionists are Coming! Panic at San Francisco State U.

In the fevered imagination of the academic left, these are dark days at San Francisco State University (SFSU).  Speakers at a two-day conference, "Rights and Wrongs: A Constitution and Citizenship Day Conference at San Francisco State ...

December 3, 2016

Prominent Mideast Studies Profs Sexually Harassed Students

The famously self-righteous field of Middle East studies, which lambasts outside criticism as “censorship” and condemns America, Israel, and the West while lauding Islamists, now finds itself on the defensive. Two of its leading lights, t...

July 14, 2016

Academia Indicts America for Orlando Terrorist Attack

Following Omar Mateen's massacre of forty-nine people at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Florida, professors of Middle East studies reacted predictably by blaming guns, American homophobia, Christians, Deep South bigotry – anything but Islamic ...

December 11, 2015

Academia on San Bernardino Attack: No Jihad Here

As Islamic terrorist attacks increase in the West, so, too, does the obfuscation of Middle East studies academia.  By employing the predictable tropes of poverty, alienation, workplace violence, the need for gun control, bullying, "Islamoph...

June 22, 2015

Bonfire of the Vulgarians: Middle East Studies in Decline

Earlier this year, a firestorm erupted when Connecticut College philosophy professor Andrew Pessin’s 2014 Facebook comments, in which he compared Hamas in Gaza to a “wild pit bull . . . chained in a cage, regularly making mass efforts to ...

May 9, 2015

State-Funded University Promoting Alliances with Hamas-dominated Palestinian Universities?

Rabab Abdulhadi, director of San Francisco State University (SFSU)’s Arab and Muslim Ethnicities and Diasporas Initiative (AMED) and a committed anti-Israel activist, has long sought an alliance between SFSU and two Palestinian universities, An...

March 30, 2015

Radical Middle East Studies Establishment Does Not Like Criticism

Thirteen years after Campus Watch (CW)’s inception in 2002, radical, politicized Middle East studies academics remain indignant that an organization dared confront them with the horror of outside criticism, which they falsely equate with censor...

December 19, 2014

UCLA Prof Assigns Pro-Israel Book in Order to Trash It

[Correction: We have learned from James Gelvin that the assignment to locate and write about the historical errors in Alan Dershowitz's book, The Case for Israel, also included Jimmy Carter's book, The Blood of Abraham.] It seemed too good...

October 30, 2014

MESA and IIIT: Islamists Infiltrating Academia

The field of Middle East studies has a troublesome penchant for partnering with Islamist organizations. Case in point: The 2014 annual conference of the Middle East Studies Association of North America (MESA) will host an International Institute of I...

September 21, 2014

Defending Salaita: Anti-Israel Profs Unite!

While Steven G. Salaita’s inflammatory, anti-Israel, anti-Semitic Twitter posts and atrocious academic record may have cost him a tenured professorship at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC), they did nothing to lessen his sup...

August 31, 2014

Hamas's Academic Apologists

Reaction by Middle East studies professors to Israel’s recent effort to destroy Hamas’s terrorist infrastructure epitomizes their perennial pro-Hamas, anti-Israel, and anti-American biases. In lieu of reasoned, informed, and balanced asse...

September 5, 2013

Duke Prof's Recipe for Restoring Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood

Beware Middle East studies professors offering advice. In the wake of the Muslim Brotherhood's (MB) ouster from Egypt's presidency, South African-born Duke University Islamic studies professor Ebrahim Moosa has joined South Africa's ambassador to the...

November 11, 2011

The Middle East Studies Establishment vs. Walid Phares

When Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney announced last month that Walid Phares -- a Lebanese-American Christian, adjunct professor of jihadist global strategies at the National Defense University, and former Middle East studies professor a...

November 15, 2009

Fort Hood and the Academic Apologists

In the wake of the horrific attack at the Fort Hood military base in Texas earlier this month, and the mounting evidence that the shooter, Major Nidal Malik Hasan, was motivated by Islamist beliefs, the media has turned to Middle East studies "e...

November 2, 2008

Obama's Middle East Studies Mentors

When voters go to the polls on November 4th, they will choose not only a new presidential administration, but also the candidate's circles of influence. In the case of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama, this includes Rashid Khalidi, Edwa...

August 18, 2007

Appeasement Finds a Home in the Academy

Instead of providing moral clarity in a time of war, too many academics busy themselves inventing strategies to get along peaceably with genocidal terrorist groups and the governments that aid and abet them. Among the appeasers, three professors of M...

July 21, 2007

Campus Watch and California's Middle East Academic Radicals

After the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, it became painfully clear that if America was to become more engaged in the Middle East, it would need to develop a greater understanding of the area. Scholars of Middle East studies at our nation's univ...

May 30, 2007

The Muddled Mess of Middle East Studies

What's ailing contemporary Middle East studies? A symposium earlier this month at Stanford University provided a clue.A paranoid fixation on imagined American and Israeli "empire"; the refusal to accept legitimate criticism; an insulated, e...

May 1, 2007

Brown University's Middle East Studies Workshop

Brown University, with a Middle East studies department currently offering no courses and losing one of its few professors in the field, is hosting a workshop titled "The Study of the Middle East and Islam: Challenges After 9-11" on Ma...

February 27, 2007

Hollywood's Big Ho-Hum

Having recently written about the politicization of various awards, I decided to sit in on Sunday night's Academy Awards just to verify that my criticism was justified. All I can say to those who wrote to me vociferously denying the politicization of...

January 21, 2006

The Passion of the Left: Hating Christians

If viewers happened to be tuned into CSPAN several weeks ago, they were in for quite a spectacle. CSPAN was re—airing a conference that took place in May of 2005 with the ominous title, "Examining the Real Agenda of the Far Religious Right." S...

January 18, 2006

Hollywood's Propaganda Binge

The Golden Globe Awards, Hollywood's latest orgy of self—congratulation, demonstrated how utterly out of touch with mainstream America Hollywood has become. Far from the days when Hollywood celebrated traditional values, moral fiber and Am...