Left-leaning types love to uncritically lap up the nonsense Juan Cole puts out, but for once this excuse-maker for Islamic barbarism has more than met his match. If one is going to play the apologist, you'd think one would at least know to pick one's battles wisely rather than uttering pabulum like the following:
It bears repeating as long as the accusation is made. Ahmadinejad did not "threaten" to "wipe Israel off the map." I'm not sure there is even such an idiom in Persian. He quoted Khomeini to the effect that "the Occupation regime must end" (ehtelal bayad az bayn berad). And, no, it is not the same thing. It is about what sort of regime people live under, not whether they exist at all. Ariel Sharon, after all, made the Occupation regime in Gaza end.
Everything I've said about Galbraith below applies in even greater measure to Juan Cole, with the merciful exception that as yet no one's been foolish enough to take policy advice from Professor Cole: I've long lost track of the number of occasions when the man has gotten his facts completely wrong about Islam in regions I know intimately, let alone the numerous embarrassments he's incurred at the hands of actual Middle Eastern Muslims. Anti-war types love Juan Cole because he coronates what they want to hear with the label "Professor", thereby lending it an air of scholarliness, while I'm sure he comes across much more pleasantly in person to the combination room tea set than any number of fire-breathing bloggers who have something different to say: that, however, does not mean he is any better at grasping the realities of the Middle East than Galbraith was at grasping the realities of the early 1980s Soviet Union; one has only to read his non-sequitur of a response to Hitchens' piece to realize that Juan Cole's is a decidedly third-rate intellect, professorship notwithstanding (Andrew Sullivan does a good job of demolishing Cole's claptrap).
NB: To all the lefties who think calling Cristopher Hitchens a "drunk" somehow refutes what he has to say about Cole, please be advised that argumentum ad hominem is a logical fallacy. Even if Hitchens were a strung-out heroin junkie and the devil's right-hand man, it still wouldn't have any bearing on whether or not he was right about the dishonest Professor Cole; as such, referring to a supposed personal weakness of a man with which you are in any case no better acquainted than I am - i.e. not at all - only makes you look like idiots with no legitimate arguments worth making.
UPDATE: See this post for a nice little collection of f***-ups by Juan Cole, the far from merry old soul. I'm sure he'll fit in quite well at Yale, already home to a Taliban spokesman and adoring host of a Chinese communist dictator.
Juan Cole famously claimed that 9/11 was in part caused by the Jenin massacre, which apart from being a hoax, occurred several months later. The man is a clown.
Posted by: Ross | May 04, 2006 at 04:06 PM