Middle East Quarterly

The Middle East Quarterly is a journal published by Daniel Pipes. Its website states: "In the halls of academe, the Quarterly delivers a welcome balance to the many materials that relentlessly attack the United States and Israel."

Is Middle East Quarterly a trustworthy source of information?

Here is some information/comment about two of the main people behind the journal, Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer:

1 Pipes was one of those reviewers who favorably received From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab–Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, a book which was so egregiously wrong that even the Zionist historian Yehoshua Porath had this to say about it:

"I am reluctant to bore the reader and myself with further examples of Mrs. Peters's highly tendentious use—or neglect—of the available source material. ... Everyone familiar with the writing of the extreme nationalists ... would immediately recognize the tired and discredited arguments in Mrs. Peters's book. I had mistakenly thought them long forgotten. It is a pity that they have been given new life.

("Mrs. Peters's Palestine", New York Review of Books, January 16, 1986).

See Porath's review in the New York Review of Books and the subsequent correspondence between Porath and Pipes which appeared in the same journal.

2 Here is an extract from an article by Joel Beinin on attempts to silence criticism of Israel in US universities:

"Another effort to police dissent is focused on those who teach Middle East studies on college campuses. Middle East Forum, a think tank run by Daniel Pipes and supportive of the Israeli right wing, has established a Campus Watch website. After failing in his own pursuit of an academic career, Pipes has evidently decided to take revenge on the scholarly community that rejected him. ... Campus Watch notes that "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." Some Americans have foolishly believed that all U.S. citizens have equal rights regardless of their country of origin and that pointing to peoples' country of origin to discredit them is a form of racism. This too, is outmoded thinking according to Campus Watch. But imagine the uproar that would be created by the suggestion that because Daniel Pipes is Jewish he may be more loyal to Israel than to the United States."

(Joel Beinin, "Who's watching the watchers?", History News Network, September 30, 2002).

3 Here is an extract from another article by Joel Beinin on attempts by those behind the magazine to incite hatred of Arabs and Muslims:

Martin Kramer also edits Middle East Quarterly, the house organ of the Middle East Forum, the neo-conservative think tank directed by Daniel Pipes. Pipes has a long record of attempting to incite Americans against Arabs and Muslims. In 1990 he wrote: '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'. One recent project of the Middle East Forum is Campus-Watch, a website designed to police dissent on university campuses. Its aim was to 'monitor and gather information on professors who fan the flames of disinformation, incitement, and ignorance.'

(Le Monde Diplomatique, July 2003, page 7 of English edition)

4 Here is what Robert Fisk had to say:

Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer of the Middle East Forum now run a website in the United States to denounce academics who are deemed to have shown "hatred of Israel". One of the eight professors already on this contemptible McCarthyite list -- it is grotesquely called "Campus Watch" -- committed the unpardonable sin of signing a petition in support of the Palestinian scholar Edward Said. Pipes wants students to inform on professors who are guilty of "campus anti-Semitism".

(Robert Fisk, "How to shut up your critics", The Independent, October 21, 2002).

Contact

Website: meforum.org