the time the chairperson of the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). The endowment had put $600,000 toward the funding of The Africans and Cheney felt that Mazrui had not held to the conditions on which the endowment had granted the funding. Cheney said that she was promised a variety of interviews presenting different sides of the story, and was outraged when there were no such interviews in the show. Cheney demanded that the NEH name and logo be removed from the credits. She also had the words "A Commentary" added to the American version of the series, alongside Mazrui's credits. In defense of the series and its alleged bias, Mazrui made the statement: "I was invited by PBS and the BBC to tell the American and British people about the African people, a view from the inside. I am surprised, then, that people are disappointed not to get an American view. An effort was made to be fair but not to sound attractive to Americans." Ward Chamberlain, the president of series co-producer WETA, also stepped in to publicly defend the series and Mazrui by saying that, in a fair telling of history, the western world should not be expected to come out looking good from the African perspective. Other academic controversies His experience as a controversial figure was different in the two continents. While he was surrounded by controversy at U of M (he has been accused of being anti-Semitic, anti-American, and generally radical) he wrote to his African colleagues saying that the debate had remained remarkably civil and academic. On the other hand, in Jos, things got so heated that the university faculty once put out a flyer threatening to punish anti-Mazrui libel "in the pugilist style." Ironically, the libeler was a socialist accusing Mazrui of being overly imperialist for participating in western dialogues. Israel-Palestine Probably the most fire Mazrui came under during his tenure at the University of Michigan was in response to his views on the Israel-Palestine conflict. Mazrui was an outspoken supporter of Palestine and, more than that, an outspoken critic of the state of Israel. Mazrui made the argument that Israel and the Zionist movement behaved in an imperialist fashion and that they used their biblical beliefs and the events of the holocaust for political gain. He went so far as to call the Israeli government "fascist" in its behavior. This sparked controversy. The