Campus Watch Critiques, UC Santa Cruz Paper Cries "Censorship!"

I have a new blog post up at Campus Watch, which offers a rather satirical rebuttal to the latest attempt to mischaracterize our work:

In this week's issue of City on a Hill Press, the student newspaper for the University of California at Santa Cruz (UCSC), reporter Marc Abizeid spins a bone-chilling tale of silenced professors and a Middle East studies field threatened by a shadowy network of "radical pro-Israel interest groups." At the helm of this nefarious conspiracy is of course Campus Watch, which Abizeid paints as a ruthless organization bent on censoring anyone who strays from the straight and narrow.

The problem is none of it's true.

Much like the disaffected academics he profiles in the ominously titled, "Silencing Debate on the Middle East," Abizeid suffers from the delusion, common on university campuses, that criticism is suppression.

Abizeid at least took the time to solicit my views on Campus Watch, but the long, tendentious list of questions he e-mailed me played his hand from the get-go. And, despite my best efforts to set the record straight, the finished product confirmed my suspicion that Abizeid's mind was made up long before he began his research.

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