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The Middle East Forum (MEF) is a controversial Philadelphia-based policy institute founded by Daniel Pipes that is notorious for attacking academics in the United States who disagree with its hardline view of Israeli security and Middle East politics. In an early mission statement, MEF claimed “to define and promote American interests in the Middle East," in part by "fighting radical Islam, whether terroristic or lawful.”[1] As of November 2011, MEF’s mission statement read: “The Middle East Forum promotes American interests in the Middle East and protects the Constitutional order from Middle Eastern threats. The Forum sees the region—with its profusion of dictatorships, radical ideologies, existential conflicts, border disagreements, corruption, political violence, and weapons of mass destruction—as a major source of problems for the United States. Accordingly, it urges active measures to protect Americans and their allies.”

MEF’s vision of U.S. interests in the region range from the international to the  domestic, and includes a distinctly anti-Islamic agenda. “U.S. interests in the Middle East include fighting radical Islam; working for Palestinian acceptance of Israel; robustly asserting U.S. interests vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia; developing strategies to deal with Iraq and contain Iran; and monitoring the advance of Islamism in Turkey. Domestically, the Forum combats lawful Islamism; protects the freedom of public speech of anti-Islamist authors, activists, and publishers; and works to improve Middle East studies in North America.”

MEF’s attack on “lawful Islamism” has secured it a place alongside other prominent U.S. advocacy groups in what the Center for American Progress (CAP) calls “the Islamophobia network”—a patchwork of prominent U.S. foundations, opinion makers, and media personalities who spread negative impressions about Islam and Muslims in the United States. In a widely noted 2011 report about the network, CAP listed MEF as one of “five key think tanks led by scholars who are primarily responsible for orchestrating the majority of anti-Islam messages polluting our national discourse today.” The report argued  that Pipes, who has a doctorate in medieval Islamic history, “has parlayed his prestigious academic credentials to great effect,” but has “become increasingly out of touch with the realities of the Muslim world at home and abroad, making more extreme and unfounded observations about Islam in the United States.” The report noted that Anders Breivik, the Norwegian terrorist who in July 2011 murdered 77 people in a protest against “cultural Marxism,” cited the work of Pipes and MEF 18 times in his xenophobic manifesto.

Leadership

Pipes, son of the anti-Soviet crusader Richard Pipes (who was both a Team B and Committee on the Present Danger member in the 1970s), frequently lambasts Arab politics, urges militarist polices aimed at overthrowing Mideast regimes, and pushes a hawkish “pro-Israel” agenda. He has stirred controversy in the past with seemingly anti-Arab remarks that have bordered on racism, once referring to Muslim immigrants to Europe as "brown-skinned peoples cooking strange foods and not exactly maintaining Germanic standards of hygiene."[2] He has also expressed support for anti-Islamic politicians like Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, and served a controversial term at the U.S. Institute for Peace under President George W. Bush, which was marked by his friction with the administration over its supposed “legitimization” of U.S.-based Arab and Islamic groups.[3]

Other notable MEF staff include Efraim Karsh, MEF director and editor of the organization’s journal Middle East Quarterly, and Steven Rosen, a former lobbyist for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) who works as director of MEF’s “Washington Project.” According to his MEF bio, Karsh is an academic who has authored 15 books and “has held various academic posts at Harvard and Columbia universities, the Sorbonne, the London School of Economics, the International Institute for Strategic Studies in London, the Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies in Washington D.C., and the Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies at Tel-Aviv University.”[4]

Rosen is a controversial “pro-Israel” ideologue who was indicted by the U.S. Justice Department as part of a federal investigation into the alleged passing of sensitive U.S. information to Israel. The charges were eventually dropped.[5]

Unlike other neoconservative groups to which it is sometimes compared—including the Center for Security Policy and the Foundation for Defense of Democracies—MEF’s various boards are not brimming with well known ideological wonks and former politicians. Some commentators have noted that the entire organization acts as a vehicle for Pipes and his diatribes against those with whom he disagrees. In 2002, Juan Cole, a University of Michigan professor whose criticism of one-sided U.S. support for Israel and other U.S. “war on terror” policies has made him a target of MEF’s “Campus Watch” project, argued that the “Middle East Forum is not really a forum. Somebody rich in the community has set [Pipes] up with a couple of offices and a fax machine and calls him a director. … They put out this Middle East Quarterly. It publishes scurrilous attacks on people. There’s no scholarship. It’s a put-up job. As for Pipes himself, let’s just say that he’s not a full professor at a major university.”[6]

Financing

A non-exhaustive Right Web investigation of MEF’s Form 990 tax records from 2000-2009 shows that the organization’s coffers have been replete with funds from foundations identified by CAP as top funders of the Islamophobia network. During this period, MEF received at least $325,000 from the Russell Berrie Foundation, $240,000 from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, $200,000 from the Newton and Rochelle Becker Charitable Trust, and over $2 million from both the Donors Capital Fund and the William Rosenwald Family Fund. All told, Right Web identified at least $8,801,450 raised by MEF in this period, primarily coming from “pro-Israel” organizations and other right-wing outfits. (See our findings here).

Between 1996 and 2005, according to Media Transparency, the Middle East Forum received nearly $300,000 from the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, one of the top right-wing foundations. Much of the Bradley money was to support Campus Watch.[7] According to its 2004 Form 990, MEF received $1,800,000 in 2003 in the form of gifts, grants, and contributions. In 2001 Norman Hascoe's Hascoe Family Foundation gave MEF $20,000, and in 2003 the Hascoe Charitable Foundation gave MEF $10,000.[8] Hascoe served as president of JINSA.

Origins

In a January 2004 letter to Forum readers, Pipes recounted the founding of MEF as a nonprofit, four months after the Oslo Peace Accords were signed, "a time when," according to Pipes, "most specialists and policymakers were wearing rosy-tinted glasses—prophesying an Arab-Israeli peace breakthrough, subsiding radicalism in the Middle East, enhanced economic co-operation, and so on." He continued: "Al Wood, Amy Shargel, and I conjured up the Forum while sitting around my kitchen table. We had $25,000 in the bank; one secretary; and we worked for reduced or no salary. We worked the first six months out of a 'home office'—my house. My dining room, study, children's room, and guest room served as MEF world headquarters. Those early days demanded endless hours and involved some rough moments as we forwarded a more skeptical approach to the Middle East. Frankly, this doubtful approach had a tough time getting heard."

In 2004, as the United States remained in the thrall of President George W. Bush’s “global war on terror,” Pipes claimed: "Today, the issues that galvanized us 10 years ago—such as militant Islam's jihad against the United States, the persistence of Palestinian hostility to Israel, the unacceptability of Saddam Hussein's rule, the need to address Syrian adventurism, and the danger posed by Islamist groups operating in the United States—are among the dominant national U.S. political issues. Our work is no longer a somewhat arcane specialist's concern but the vital area of foreign policy (and, increasingly, domestic policy too). We no longer need to worry about getting heard."[9]

Although Pipes and the Middle East Forum have long been considered hostile to Islam, Pipes has since drawn a slight distinction between himself and a more recent crop of prominent Islamophobes like Pamela Geller. “This anti-Islamic agitation has been growing over time, and it’s much stronger than in 2001,” he told Michelle Boorstein of the Washington Post’s “On Faith” blog in 2010. “Pipes,” Boorstein wrote, “says while he shares a concern about radical Islam with today's crop of bloggers, he considers them ‘anti-Islam’ because in his view they see the faith and it[s] scripture as fundamentally problematic for a pluralistic, democratic society like the United States and unchangeable.”[10]

Still, Pipes told Boorstein that he shares “the same enemies” with the latest generation of agitators. "We're in the same trench but we have different views of what the problem is. We both see an attempt to impose Islamic law, sharia, in the West. We are both against it, and want to maintain Western civilization. But [we] understand the nature of the problem differently,” he said. This led Boorstein to wonder whether or not this was an “important distinction.”[11]

Activities

MEF’s website says that the group “works to define and promote American interests in the Middle East and protect the Constitutional order from Middle Eastern threats” in “three main ways: 1) Intellectually: Through the Middle East Quarterly, staff writings, lectures and conference calls, the Forum provides context, insights, and policy recommendations. 2) Operationally: The Forum exerts an active influence through its projects, including Campus Watch, Islamist Watch, the Legal Project, and the Washington Project. 3) Philanthropically: The Forum distributes nearly $2 million annually through its Education Fund, helping researchers, writers, investigators, and activists around the world.”[12]

MEF’s most controversial program has been Campus Watch, an initiative aimed at monitoring what MEF claims are the "often erroneous and biased teachings and writings of U.S. professors specializing in the Middle East." Joel Benin, a former professor of Middle East studies at Stanford University, said of the program: "Campus Watch ... compiles dossiers on professors and universities that do not meet its standard of uncritical support for the policies of George Bush and Ariel Sharon. ... The efforts to stifle public debate about U.S. Middle East policy and criticism of Israel are being promoted by a network of neoconservative true believers with strong links to the Israeli far right. They are enthusiastic supporters of the Bush administration's hands off approach to Ariel Sharon's suppression of the Palestinian uprising. And they are aggressive proponents of a preemptive U.S. strike against Iraq."[13]

The international relations scholars John Mearsheimer and Stephen Walt wrote in their controversial 2006 critique of the influence of the “pro-Israel lobby” on U.S. foreign policy that Campus Watch was founded by "passionately pro-Israel neoconservatives” with the intention of "encourag[ing] students to report comments or behavior that might be considered hostile to Israel" in a "transparent attempt to blacklist and intimidate scholars."[14]

MEF publishes the Middle East Quarterly (MEQ), currently edited by Efraim Karsh. Senior editors of the journal include Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy (WINEP). Robert Satloff and Samuel Lewis sit on MEQ's Board of Editors, along with Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins, James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation, and Steven Plaut of the University of Haifa. Also on the board is Dennis Ross, a hawkish former Middle East adviser to President Obama who left the administration to rejoin WINEP.

Describing itself as "a policy-oriented journal aimed to provide cutting-edge information for specialists and absorbing information for a general readership" and the "only journal on the Middle East consistent with mainstream American opinion,"[15] the MEQ publishes analyses and diatribes typically covering Mideast politics, national security, and the supposed spread of Islamism. The Fall 2011 edition, for example, offers an exposition of the “unheeded alarms on jihadist terrorism” prior to 9/11, a story about the supposed rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in Europe, and an invective against “anti-Israel” academics, among other offerings.

Until 2004, MEF copublished with the now-defunct U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon (USCFL) the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, which described itself as “a monthly online publication focused on internal political developments in the Middle East, especially those that are thinly-covered in other English-language publications.”

In an earlier collaboration with Ziad Abdelnour and the USCFL, MEF and the Committee coauthored a jingoistic report that advocated U.S. military action to force Syria out of Lebanon and to disarm Syria of its alleged weapons of mass destruction.[16]

Virtually all 31 signatories of the MEF report, which was used to persuade Congress to introduce and pass the 2003 Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act, were USCFL members, and several became high officials or advisers in the Bush foreign policy team, including Elliott Abrams, Paula Dobriansky, Richard Perle, Douglas Feith, and David Wurmser. Other high-profile USCFL signatories were Frank Gaffney, director of the Center for Security Policy, David Steinmann of the Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs (JINSA), and Michael Ledeen of AEI.

Passed in the House of Representatives on October 15, 2003, and signed by Bush on December 12, 2003, the Syria Accountability and Lebanese Sovereignty Restoration Act enumerated several reasons—support for terrorism, possession of weapons of mass destruction, and harboring Iraqi Ba'athists—that laid the groundwork to justify another "regime change" invasion in the region. The appointment of David Wurmser, a longtime advocate of U.S. military action against Syria, to the staff of Vice President Dick Cheney in September 2003 was widely regarded as another signal that the U.S. regional restructuring crusade might soon be taking the road to Damascus.[17]

Since 2006, MEF has also run a project called “Islamist Watch,” which bills itself as an outfit to combat “the ideas and institutions of nonviolent, radical Islam in the United States and other Western countries.” A 2008 press release on MEF’s website explained that “nonviolent radical Islam is more likely to alter the makeup of Western society over time than is terrorism,” and quotes Daniel Pipes: "Quietly, lawfully, peacefully, Islamists do their work throughout the West to impose aspects of Islamic law, win special privileges for themselves, shut down criticism of Islam, create Muslim-only zones, and deprive women and non-Muslims of their full civil rights."

Noting accordingly that its interest is not in “counterterrorism” but rather the “political, educational, cultural, and legal activities of Islamists” in the West, the Islamist Watch website chronicles articles in a database called “Creeping Dhimmitude,” which attempts to show the “special accommodations” made for Muslims in non-Muslim countries.

Please note: IPS Right Web neither represents nor endorses any of the individuals or groups profiled on this site.