Funded think tanks weaponize academic smears to discredit Muslim scholars

Evidence

The Middle East Forum (MEF), managed by Daniel Pipes and with a war chest of nearly 5 million, funds many Islamophobic organizations. Borrowing from the McCarthyist playbook, the MEF has accused more than one hundred American academics of condoning terrorism, underestimating the threat of radical Islam, or being apologists for “radical Islam.” Among MEF’s targets are well-known Arab and Muslim professors, including Khaled Abou El Fadl, Nadia Abu Al-Haj, Lila Abu-Lughod, Hamid Dabashi, Rashid Khalili, Mahmood Mamdani, Joseph Massad, and Omid Safi. MEF collaborates with conservative politicians to propagate the false idea that Muslims are infiltrating the US government and the White House as part of a secret plot to take over the country. That MEF’s revenue rose from 2 million in 2002 to more than $5 million in 2016 evinces the receptivity of Americans to its Islamophobic mission. — Sahar F. Aziz, The Racial Muslim, 803

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to McCarthyite tactics of blacklisting academics and to the machinery by which other minority communities (Jews, leftists) were discredited — parallels the history of anticommunist loyalty investigations.
• SEED: Angle: how the McCarthyist playbook gets ‘borrowed’ wholesale by a new movement — the mechanics of reputational assassination as a funded, organized practice distinct from spontaneous bigotry.