CAMERA Washington Director’s Letter to Rice University

This past September, a Rice University professor of History, Ussama Makdisi, has been particularly active in spewing and publishing anti-Israel vitriol, but our Washington, D.C. area branch has been active in combating his lies!  Check out the letter CAMERA sent to the university administration, the full text of which is reproduced below.  So far, the university has not responded, despite the publication of our earlier op-ed taking Makdisi to task. Read our first piece on the issue here.

Sept. 17, 2014

Dr. Alida Metcalf

Chair

Department of History

Rice University

6100 Main Street, Houston, Texas 77005

Dear Dr. Metcalf:

Please allow me to introduce myself. My name is Eric Rozenman and I am Washington director of CAMERA, the 65,000-member, Boston-based Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America.

CAMERA is a non-partisan, 501(c) 3 educational organization that monitors news and other communications media coverage of and commentary on the Middle East in general, Arab-Israeli issues in particular. We take no policy position on negotiated settlements to Arab-Israeli matters but rather hold media accountable to traditional journalism standards of objectivity, accuracy, context, balance and absence of conflicts of interest.

I am forwarding to your attention the link to a CAMERA Op-Ed posted at The Hill, a newspaper focused on and serving Capitol Hill and Congress, on September 12. It rebuts an anti-Israel polemic by Ussama S. Makdisi, a Rice University professor of history.

Prof. Makdisi’s commentary was hardly fact-based. It was, as you will find at this link, erroneous and misleading. We bring this to your attention in the expectation that such revisionist propaganda is in not representative of or supported by the history department at Rice. As Lord Acton, the British historian known for his observation that power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely, also stressed, “truth is the only merit that gives dignity and worth to history.”

Thank you for your attention to this important matter, and we look forward to hearing from you.

Sincerely,

Eric Rozenman

Washington Director

CAMERA—Committee for Accuracy in Middle East Reporting in America

Copies:

David W. Leebron, President, Rice University