A professor advocating surveillance of all Muslims won US government endorsement

Evidence

The structure of the racial myth of European superiority, sustained by the idea of a clash of civilizations and its corresponding geopolitics, may be grasped in their popular form at a glance in the media interventions of Daniel Pipes. An American professor of Middle Eastern Studies, Pipes has become widely known as much for his hard-line opposition to a just peace between Palestinians and Israelis as he is for his widely disseminated anti-Muslim and anti-Arab pronouncements in the media. Pipes has recommended, for example, that all Muslims should be kept under surveillance. He is the founder of Campus Watch, a website that, among other things, ‘invites student complaints of abuse, investigates their claims, and (when warranted) makes these known.’ Campus Watch has identified professors who are critical of Israel, posting their names on its web site, a practice some have experienced as a witch hunt or as McCarthy-era persecution. Amid strenuous protest, the White House nominated Pipes to the board of directors of the United States Institute of Peace, a nomination personally endorsed by President Bush. — Sherene Razack, Casting Out, 217

Categorization

• XREF: Campus Watch’s blacklisting of critical professors parallels contemporary academic cancel-culture debates and McCarthy-era precedents the reader may know from other readings.
• SEED: An essay angle: how academic institutions legitimize surveillance of entire religious groups through appointments to official bodies like the US Institute of Peace.