Slandering Campus Watch as "McCarthyite"
Reader comment on item: Defund Middle East Studies

Submitted by Leonard Applebaum (Israel), Mar 15, 2004 at 08:41

As an American and Israeli citizen living in Israel, I recently heard a BBC radio program discussing the current situation re- Middle East studies programs in US universities, on which you were a guest. Talk about biased! Most of the guests were members of the US academic community who brought up the absurd charge comparing any attempt to dare criticize their viewpoints as "McCarthyism."

But what outraged me the most was the insidious and truly Orwellian comment that one of them made implying something to the effect that "....I respect Campus Watch's right to criticise, but if it were to come to the point where violence was involved, that would be troublesome..." It was THIS remark that was actually displayed the VERY ESSENCE of McCarthyist tactics, which is to tar your opposition with a slanderous remark by suggesting the possibly of violence on their part, when they know very well that it is virtually 100% unlikely that members of Campus Watch would ever conceive of fomenting violence, doing so with full knowledge that it is actually the Islamicists for whom these academics act as apologists who were the ACTUAL perpetrators of violence!

So we have arrived here at the completely absurd situation in which failed academics, who did nothing for at least 20 years since the 1979 Iranian Revolution to warn America about the potential that they would be the brunt of a violent Islamacist attackact, not only having the gall to tar their critics with the slanderous label "McCarthyite", but who even after September 11th have become, incredibly, the Islamicists' chief apologists and whine insipidly about how we have to "understand the causes of the distress of the common man in the Middle east." It is these failed academics who would be the objects of pity if they weren't so dangerous.

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