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| Abbreviation | MEF |
|---|---|
| Formation | 1990 |
| Type | 501(c)(3) nonprofit think tank |
| Location | |
President | Daniel Pipes |
| Revenue | $4.13 million [1] (2022) |
| Expenses | $5.0 million [1] (2022) |
| Website | www |
The Middle East Forum (MEF) is an American conservative [2] 501(c)(3) [3] think tank founded in 1990 by Daniel Pipes, who serves as its president. [4] MEF became an independent non-profit organization in 1994. It publishes a journal, the Middle East Quarterly.
The Middle East Forum was founded in 1990 by Daniel Pipes as an independent non-profit organization with the mission of “promoting American interests”. In 2002, the MEF advocated for strong U.S. ties with Turkey, Israel, and other pro-American governments in the region, a stable price for oil, human rights, and peaceful conflict resolutions. [5] It publishes the Middle East Quarterly and runs various advocacy programs. [6] Pipes said in 2003 that "militant Islam is the problem and moderate Islam is the answer", [7] but the left-leaning Center for American Progress and the Southern Poverty Law Center have criticized the MEF for spreading anti-Islamic messages. [8]
In 2018, the MEF stated that it had been "heavily involved" [9] in the release from prison of British anti-Islam activist and far-right political operative [10] Tommy Robinson, who is best known as a co-founder, former spokesman and former leader of the English Defence League (EDL) organization, and for his service as a political adviser to the leader of the UK Independence Party (UKIP), Gerard Batten. [11] They revealed that "the full resources of the Middle East Forum were activated to free Mr. Robinson", [9] which included: conferring with Robinson's legal team and providing necessary funds; funding, organizing and staffing the "Free Tommy" London rallies on 9 June and 14 July, which was, they claim, reported by The Times , The Guardian , and The Independent ; funding travel of the US congressman, Rep. Paul Gosar, Republican from Arizona, to London to address the rallies; and lobbied Sam Brownback, the State Department's ambassador-at-large for International Religious Freedom, to raise the issue with the UK's ambassador, which he did. [9] [12] The MEF has itself been considered a part of the counter-jihad movement. [13]
Georgetown University's Bridge Initiative reported in 2018 that the MEF had received millions of dollars from Donors Capital Fund ($6,768,000), the William Rosenwald Family Fund, the Middle Road Foundation, and the Abstraction Fund. [14]
 | |
| Discipline | Middle Eastern studies |
|---|---|
| Language | English |
| Edited by | Efraim Karsh |
| Publication details | |
| History | 1994–present |
| Publisher | Middle East Forum (United States) |
| Frequency | Quarterly |
| Yes | |
| Standard abbreviations | |
| ISO 4 | Middle East Q. |
| Indexing | |
| CODEN | MEQUFZ |
| ISSN | 1073-9467 |
| LCCN | 94660065 |
| OCLC no. | 644061932 |
| Links | |
Middle East Quarterly was founded in 1994 by Daniel Pipes and the current editor-in-chief is Efraim Karsh, research professor and former Director of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London. [15]
In 2002 Juan Cole, a professor at the University of Michigan and a Campus Watch target, accused the journal of making "scurrilous attacks on people". [16] In 2014, Christopher A. Bail of Duke University described it as a "pseudo-academic" journal with editorial board members who share an ideological outlook, adding that while it appears to present legitimate academic research, it is regularly criticized "as a channel for anti-Muslim polemics". [17]
The journal is abstracted and indexed in:
In 2002, the Middle East Forum launched an initiative called Campus Watch that it claimed would identify "analytical failures, the mixing of politics with scholarship, intolerance of alternative views, apologetics, and the abuse of power over students" within academia. [20] Winfield Myers is the director of Campus Watch. [21]
Initially, Campus Watch published the profile of eight university professors and teachers, who, it said, were "hostile" to America and "preaching dangerous rhetoric to students". This led around 100 professors to accuse Campus Watch of "McCarthyesque" intimidation and ask that their names be listed on Campus Watch too. [22] Subsequently, Campus Watch removed the list from its website. [23] [24]
The Israel Victory Project, launched in 2017, is an initiative aimed at securing an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by putting pressure on Palestinians to end anti-Israel terrorism and acknowledge Israel's legitimacy as a Jewish state, rather than through bilateral negotiations. Daniel Pipes has stated that "Peace is not made with enemies; peace is made with former enemies." [25] [26] [27]
Daniel Pipes is an American former professor and commentator on foreign policy and the Middle East. He is the president of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its Middle East Quarterly journal. His writing focuses on American foreign policy and the Middle East as well as criticism of Islamism.
Campus Watch is a web-based project of the Middle East Forum, a think tank with its headquarters in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. According to its website, Campus Watch "reviews and critiques Middle East studies in North America with an aim to improving them." Critics of Campus Watch say that it is a pro-Israel lobbyist organization involved in harassing, blacklisting, or intimidating scholars critical of Israel.
"Eurabia" is a far-right, anti-Muslim conspiracy theory that posits that globalist entities, led by French and Arab powers, aim to Islamize and Arabize Europe, thereby weakening its existing culture and undermining its previous alliances with the United States and Israel.
Gisèle Littman, better known by her pen name Bat Ye'or, is an Egyptian-born, British-Swiss author and historian, who argues in her writings that Islam, and its perceived anti-Americanism, anti-Christian sentiment and antisemitism hold sway over European culture and politics.
Nonie Darwish is an Egyptian-American author, writer, founder of the Arabs for Israel movement, and director of Former Muslims United. Darwish is an outspoken critic of Islam.
Efraim Karsh is an Israeli and British historian who is the founding director and emeritus professor of Middle East and Mediterranean Studies at King's College London. Since 2013, he has served as professor of political studies at Bar-Ilan University. He is also a principal research fellow and former director of the Middle East Forum, a Philadelphia-based think tank. He is a vocal critic of the New Historians, a group of Israeli scholars who have questioned the traditional Israeli narrative of the Arab–Israeli conflict.
Jonathan Calt Harris a native of Illinois, is an American Christian Zionist, writer, and a foreign policy analyst. From 2008 to 2016, he served as an assistant director of Policy & Government Affairs at AIPAC, the American Israel Public Affairs Committee in Washington, DC.
Obsession: Radical Islam's War Against the West is a 2005 documentary film about the purported threat of Islamism to Western civilization. The film shows Islamic radicals preaching hate speech and seeking to incite global jihad. It also draws parallels between World War II's Nazi movement and Islamism and the West's response to those threats.
Khaleel Mohammed was a Guyanese-born professor of Religion at San Diego State University (SDSU), in San Diego, California, a member of Homeland Security Master's Program, and, as of January 2021, Director of SDSU's Center for Islamic and Arabic Studies.
Douglas Murray is a British neoconservative political commentator, cultural critic, and journalist. He founded the Centre for Social Cohesion in 2007, which became part of the Henry Jackson Society, where he was associate director from 2011 to 2018.
Quilliam was a British think tank co-founded in 2008 by Maajid Nawaz that focused on counter-extremism, specifically against Islamism, which it argued represents a desire to impose a given interpretation of Islam on society. Founded as The Quilliam Foundation and based in London, it claimed to lobby government and public institutions for more nuanced policies regarding Islam and on the need for greater democracy in the Muslim world whilst empowering "moderate Muslim" voices. The organisation opposed any Islamist ideology and championed freedom of expression. The critique of Islamist ideology by its founders―Nawaz, Rashad Zaman Ali and Ed Husain―was based, in part, on their personal experiences. Quilliam went into liquidation in 2021.
Marc d'Anna, writing under the pen name Alexandre del Valle, is a Franco-Italian geopolitologist, writer, professor, columnist, and political commentator.
Stephen Christopher Yaxley-Lennon, better known as Tommy Robinson, is a British anti-Islam campaigner and one of the UK's most prominent far-right activists. Since 28 October 2024, he has been serving an 18-month prison sentence for contempt of court.
Counter-jihad, also known as the counter-jihad movement, is a self-titled political current loosely consisting of authors, bloggers, think tanks, street movements and so on linked by beliefs that view Islam not as a religion but as an ideology that constitutes an existential threat to Western civilization. Consequently, counter-jihadists consider all Muslims as a potential threat, especially when they are already living within Western boundaries. Western Muslims accordingly are portrayed as a "fifth column", collectively seeking to destabilize Western nations' identity and values for the benefit of an international Islamic movement intent on the establishment of a caliphate in Western countries. The counter-jihad movement has been variously described as anti-Islamic, Islamophobic, inciting hatred against Muslims, and far-right. Influential figures in the movement include the bloggers Pamela Geller and Robert Spencer in the US, and Geert Wilders and Tommy Robinson in Europe.
The Investigative Project on Terrorism (IPT) is a non-profit research group founded by Steven Emerson in 1995. IPT has been called a prominent part of the "Islamophobia network" within the United States and a "leading source of anti-Muslim racism" and noted for its record of selective reporting and poor scholarship.
History Alive! The Medieval World and Beyond is a series of social studies and history textbooks published by Teachers' Curriculum Institute (TCI).
Conspiracy theories are a prevalent feature of Arab politics, according to a 1994 paper in the journal Political Psychology. Prof. Matthew Gray writes they "are a common and popular phenomenon" that are important to understanding the political landscape of the Arab world. Variants include conspiracies involving Western colonialism, Islamic anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism, superpowers, oil, and the war on terror, which is often referred to in Arab media as a "War against Islam". Roger Cohen theorizes that the popularity of conspiracy theories in the Arab world is "the ultimate refuge of the powerless". The prevalence of conspiracy theories reflects effective top-down dissemination of disinformation by state actors, rather than a unique susceptibility of Arab culture to conspiracy, as some have claimed. State hostility and weak protections for journalists present major obstacles to challenging conspiracy theories, as journalists struggle to gather information and put their lives at risk by contradicting their governments. The spread of antisemitic and anti-Zionist conspiracism in the Arab world and the Middle East has seen an extraordinary proliferation since the beginning of the Internet Era.
Gatestone Institute is an American conservative think tank based in New York City, known for publishing articles pertaining to U.S. foreign policy in the Middle East, specifically with regard to Islamic extremism. It was founded in 2012 by Nina Rosenwald, who serves as its president.John R. Bolton, former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations and former National Security Advisor, was its chairman from 2013 until March 2018. Its current chairman is Amir Taheri. The organization has attracted attention for publishing false or inaccurate articles, some of which were shared widely.
Nina Rosenwald is an American political activist and philanthropist. An heiress to the Sears Roebuck fortune, Rosenwald is vice president of the William Rosenwald Family Fund and co-chair of the board of American Securities Management. She is the founder and president of Gatestone Institute, a New York-based right-wing anti-Muslim think tank.
The counter-jihad movement in France consists of various organisations and individuals such as Riposte Laïque and Republican Resistance, led by Pierre Cassen and Christine Tasin respectively, Observatory on Islamisation, and other groups such as those founded by Alain Wagner. The movement has cooperated with the Bloc Identitaire, Daniel Pipes and the Middle East Forum, Stop Islamisation of Europe, and has organised events such as the "Apéro Géant: saucisson et pinard", a happy hour gathering of wine and deli meat cold cuts whose ingredients include pork.
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