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Campus Watch is a project of the Middle East Forum and is associated with Daniel Pipes.

Its website states that it: "reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North America with an aim to improving them. The project mainly addresses five problems: analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students. Campus Watch fully respects the freedom of speech of those it debates while insisting on its own freedom to comment on their words and deeds."

Critics however have claimed that it's real purpose is to attempt to intimidate academics who have criticised the policies of Israel and the United States in the Middle East.

It's horrendous in the sense that the health, social life, economic life of Iraqis are no better. I don't think they have more democracy than they had under Hussein. —Gabriel Piterberg associate professor of history at UCLA, commenting on the situation in Iraq post-Saddam, March 22, 2004. source

Throughout the Arab world Islamists have concluded violence and terrorism not only hurt their movement but harm the interests of the Muslim community. Since 9/11 some of the most militant Islamists published books condemning Osama bin Laden and Ayman Zawahiri's tactics. —Fawaz Gerges, a professor of Middle East studies at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, commenting on what is happening in the Middle East post 9/11, in an interview in the Christian Science Monitor on February 4, 2004. source

"Its support for Hizbullah in southern Lebanon is "terror" only in the sense that Israeli support for Gush Emunim in the West Bank is "terror." Indeed, the Likud policy in the West Bank is far worse than the policies of Hizbullah,since the Lebanese Shiites just want their own territory to be free of foreign occupation--they aren't expanding into other people's back yards." —Juan Cole, Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History at the History Department of the University of Michigan, comparing the Likud party in Israel to Hizbullah in Southern Lebanon, October, 11, 2004. source

Victor Davis Hanson, Senior Fellow, The Hoover Institute, Professor of Classics, California State University, Fresno, said:

"If professors, scholars, and public intellectuals choose to enter the civic arena and voice their beliefs, then they are all subject to scrutiny-praise, blame, rebuttal, agreement, even parody-for what they say and write in public fora. In the case of controversies about the Middle East, where tempers run high and there is easy promulgation of false knowledge, Daniel Pipes' Campus Watch sheds light on often volatile and intemperate proclamations-allowing both the scholarly community and the public at large to read what our professors and experts write and then to determine on their own whether it is accurate or mere nonsense." [1]

Responding to critics of Campus Watch, Daniel Pipes writes: "Campus Watch is to Middle East studies as political analysis to politics, film criticism to movies, and consumer reports to manufacturing; we provide assessments for the public. Unlike politicians, actors, and business executives, who accept criticism with good grace, academics howl with umbrage at being judged." ^[1]

The controversy over Campus Watch, involving among other things, charges and counter-charges of McCarthyism, is documented on the web site itself. Many opponents of Campus Watch see it as an attempt to stifle any criticism of Israel in American academia. ^{[2][3] [4][5]}

Rashid Khalidi, a Directory of the Middle East Institute at Columbia University and a target of Campus Watch:

"This noxious campaign is intended to silence such perfectly legitimate criticism, by tarring it with the brush of anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism, truly loathsome charges. They reveal the lengths that these people apparently feel impelled to go to in order to silence a true debate on campus." ^[6]

Joel Beinin, a Professor of Middle East History at Stanford University, said this of Campus Watch:

"After failing in his own pursuit of an academic career, [Daniel] Pipes has evidently decided to take revenge on the scholarly community that rejected him. [....] These efforts to stifle public debate about U.S. Middle East policy and criticism of Israel are being promoted by a network of neo-conservative true believers with strong links to the Israeli far right. They are enthusiastic supporters of the Bush administration's hands off approach to Ariel Sharon's suppression of the Palestinian uprising and aggressive proponents of a preemptive U.S. strike against Iraq." ^[7]

Political scientists John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote in March 2006 that Campus Watch was founded by "passionately pro-Israel neoconservatives" with the intention of "encourag[ing] students to report comments or behavior that might be considered hostile to Israel" and that it was a "transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars."^[8]

• Jonathan Calt Harris, one of the editors of Campus Watch
• Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America - a related organization that monitors media coverage for similar bias

• Official site
• Campus Watch at SourceWatch.