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Politics : Foreign Affairs Discussion Group -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ilaine who wrote (48219)	9/30/2002 9:47:04 AM
From: spiral3	Respond to of 281500

that is for JohnM to say.

To: Ilaine who wrote (48219)	9/30/2002 12:04:59 PM
From: JohnM	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 281500

However, surely JohnM does not advocate shutting Campus Watch down because it endangers the safety of academics and intellectuals who specialize in Middle Eastern studies. My guess is that even JohnM would agree that it does make a contribution, however small, to public debate about ideas which matter. I appreciate, CB, that you are offering me the reasonable position here. Despite my, you must feel, unreasonable position, surely I would not be so unreasonable as to think that website should be dismantled. Thanks. But I'm afraid I will have to disappoint you. You see I read it as one degree short of the websites in which anti-choice zealots put up lists of abortion providers, which led to the physical harrasment of them and their families and to the deaths of some. I not only do not think Campus Watch makes a contribution to the public debate; I think it diminishes it by seriously threating academic freedom. Moreover, I think the imputation that Pipes and Kramer, among others make, that the issue here is anti-Americanism is objectionable, to put it mildly. The claim, here, that the field is monolithic may well be true. I genuinely have no serious idea. That issue can be debated ad nauseum, on television, in the newspapers, on the streetcorners, in faculty coffee get togethers, in trustee meetings, whatever, without doing so in a way that threatens faculty members. In its worst form this is a campaign which says you must say what he think you must say or prepare for us to try to publicly shame you, at best, or leave you open to physical attack at worst. Not my idea of protection of free speech.