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The Middle East Forum (MEF), a Philadelphia-based policy institute founded by Daniel Pipes, is one of a number of hardline neoconservative think tanks devoted to promoting a broad war on terror focused on the Middle East. According to its website, the MEF "seeks to define and promote American interests in the Middle East." It defines U.S. interests as including "fighting radical Islam, whether terroristic or lawful; working for Palestinian acceptance of Israel; improving the management of U.S. democracy efforts; reducing energy dependence on the Middle East; more robustly asserting U.S. interests vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia; and countering the Iranian threat."

Its mission statement reads in part: "MEF sees the region, with its profusion of dictatorships, radical ideologies, existential conflicts, border disagreements, 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." (The closely aligned group U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon [USCFL], which until 2004 co-published with MEF the Middle East Intelligence Bulletin, has a nearly identical mission statement: "The United States Committee for a Free Lebanon holds that the United States has vital interests in the Middle East and sees the region, with its profusion of dictatorships, radical ideologies, existential conflicts, border disagreements, political violence, and weapons of mass destruction as a major source of problems for the Free World.")

In a January 2004 letter to forum readers, Pipes recounted the 1994 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."

Despite his alleged early difficulties with being heard, Pipes claims that since 9/11, things have changed: "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."

One of MEF's core programs is Campus Watch, a controversial initiative aimed at monitoring what it claims are the "often erroneous and biased teachings and writings of U.S. professors specializing in the Middle East." One critic of Campus Watch, 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."

Similarly, the well-regarded 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 neoconservative Jews" 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."

MEF also publishes the Middle East Quarterly(MEQ). Michael Rubin of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) is editor, and Patrick Clawson of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy serves as senior editor. Robert Satloff and Samuel Lewis sit on MEQ's Board of Editors, along with Fouad Ajami of Johns Hopkins, Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, James Phillips of the Heritage Foundation, and Steven Plaut of the University of Haifa.

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," the MEQ publishes analyses and diatribes typically covering Mideast politics. The lineup for its Summer 2007 issue included articles criticizing Israel's failure to learn from its mistakes in its Summer 2006 war against Hezbollah in Lebanon, accusing Iraqi Kurds of emulating Saddam Hussein, and questioning whether Iraq is embroiled in civil war.

Amid much controversy, President George W. Bush made a recess appointment of Pipes, MEF's founder and the publisher of the MEQ, to the board of the U.S. Institute of Peace during the summer 2003 congressional recess, but did not reappoint him when his term ended a year later. In 2000, Pipes, son of the anti-Soviet crusader Richard Pipes (who was both a Team B and Committee on the Present Danger member in the mid-1970s), coauthored a jingoistic report with Ziad Abdelnour, founder of the now defunct U.S. Committee for a Free Lebanon, that advocated U.S. military action to force Syria out of Lebanon and to disarm Syria of its alleged weapons of mass destruction.

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 members who signed the MEF report demanding that Washington confront Syria 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 (Jim Lobe, "Calls to Attack Syria Come from a Familiar Choir of Hawks," Foreign Policy In Focus, April 16, 2003).

Between 1996 and 2005, according to Media Transparency, the Middle East Forum received nearly $300,000 from Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation, one of the top right-wing foundations. Much of the Bradley money was to support Campus Watch. 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. Hascoe is president of JINSA.