Juan Cole: Burning Juan Cole

History News Network ^ | June 22, 2006 | PHILIP WEISS

[mcvey]

Neoconservatism is an elite calling. It thrives in think tanks, not union halls; its proponents want most of all to influence the powerful. No wonder Ivy League labels have always been important to neocons. This fixation on intellectual prestige explains the recent neocon uprising over the possibility that Juan Cole, scholar and blogger, would become a Yale professor. It was one thing for Cole to hold forth from the University of Michigan, where he has been a professor for twenty years. But Yale would provide "honor" and "imprimatur," says Scott Johnson, a right-wing blogger. "That's a huge thing, to have them bless all his rantings on that blog."

On June 2 Johnson broke the story (on powerlineblog.com) that Yale's Senior Appointments Committee had the day before rejected Cole after three other Yale committees had signed off on him. By then a process that usually takes place behind closed doors had become thoroughly politicized by the right. "I'm saddened and distressed by the news," John Merriman, a Yale history professor, said of the rejection. "I love this place. But I haven't seen something like this happen at Yale before. In this case, academic integrity clearly has been trumped by politics."

The controversy erupted this spring after two campus periodicals reported that Cole was under consideration by Yale for a joint appointment in sociology and history. In an article in the Yale Herald, Campus Watch, a pro-Israel group that monitors scholars' statements about the Middle East, was quoted as saying that Cole lacked a "penetrating mind," and suggesting that Yale was "in danger of sacrificing academic credibility in exchange for the attention" Cole would generate.

[mcvey]

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[Fenris6]

In retrospect, though, it is appalling to consider what was done to Cole's reputation over this blue-chip appointment.

Oh bullocks. Cole's reputation spoke for itself. And thats putting it nicely.

[Alama]

All I can say is that it is good Cole wasn't appointed... Now if he could be fired by Michigan...

[mcvey]

Of course, the search process is always politicized at large schools. They can take who they want and so they can choose all who are the same stripe they are.

This little bit of counter-politicizing is the type of check-and-balance we should practice more vigorously

McVey

[AdvisorB]

Notice how the author of this distorted article refers to Scott Johnson of "Powerline" as a "right-wing blogger" but introduces the hideously leftist cole as a "scholar and blogger." I would say there is a lot of loaded language in this hit piece.

[A_perfect_lady]

In an article in the Yale Herald, Campus Watch, a pro-Israel group ...

Oh, they're a "pro-Israel" group, are they? Is that how we now classify anyone who points out that Arabs target civilians and Israelis don't?

[BenLurkin]

"Neoconservatism . . ."

Stopped reading right there.

[Fenris6]

Yup. But its the Nation, so what else do you expect.

Cole is a Jew basher. Yale can do better.

[Stepan12]

Cole is a Jew basher. Yale can do better

Yale already gives prestige and an education to a Taliban spokesman. Yale helps enough enemies of America without bringing in another. They're a dime a dozen these days.

[Fenris6]

Thats true. I was kinda wondering what the big deal was - so what, another Ivy League school misses out on another moonbat professor tyrannizing his department and students. They'll find another Ward Churchill type.

[TSchmereL]

This article is from the Nation:

In the opinion of Philip Weiss "the war that the-network-that-is-not-a-network wanted to get us into" was "the greatest foreign-policy disaster of our generation."

The "the-network-that-is-not-a-network" is the "vast neocon conspiracy."

That neoconservatism is an elite calling is questionable to me. It is a proposition that Philip Weiss presents without much evidence to back it up.

I will have more to say about this later.

[TSchmereL]

Philip Weiss highlights one of Juan Cole's most outrageously ignorant statements.

In 2003, Juan Cole wrote "If the US really wanted to stop terrorism, it would invade the West Bank and Gaza and liberate the Palestinians to have their own state and self-respect."

Now that Israel has quit Gaza, only to be attacked most recently and forced to enter it militarily, you would think that Philip Weiss would recognize that Juan Cole was just wrong.

But their agenda has nothing to do with the truth.

Their agenda is pure anti-Americanism and anti-American-ally.

Israel has been offering Palestinians a state for years. In return, the Palestinians overwhelmingly elected Hamas.

But none of these facts matter to people like Juan Cole and Philip Weiss. Facts don't matter to these people.

The issue is never the issue. The "Revolution" is the issue.

[Criminal Number 18F]

Is that how we now classify anyone who points out that Arabs target civilians and Israelis don't?

I dunno how "we" classify people, but the author of this piece appears to have a strong dislike for Jews and a particular desire to blame them for Cole's Yale undoing. (It appears to me that a lot of Yalies past and present had a hand in it, and that their input weighed much more heavily than Dartmouth grad Scott Johnson's).

Whether those Yalies were "Neocons" or not ("Neocon" being the way that the left now says "Kike"), I can't say I have any idea. Unlike Philip Weiss, I don't classify people by their present or ancestral religion. But the whole of his article indicates a real fixation on, and hostility towards, Jews.

Nobody seems to want to believe this, but they're just people like anybody else. Some good ones, some not so good. It doesn't seem psychologically healthy to fixate on them, and there are examples of this fixation leading to real trouble.

Anyone cognizant of 20th Century history, even at the hard-left History News Network or in the flag-burning precincts of The Nations, should be attuned to the results of giving people like Cole and Weiss political or ideological power.

Weiss also plays fast and loose with the facts:

Academics ... say that Yale was drawn to Cole by top-rank scholarly achievement. He is president of the Middle East Studies Association, speaks Arabic and Persian, and has published several books on Egyptian and Shiite history.

Cole does speak Persian -- he is a member of the Iranian offshoot of Islam, the Bahai Faith -- but his Arabic is extremely limited. He can exchange basic greetings, and that's about it. He can read the alphabet and sound words out and look them up in a dictionary. But native speakers frequently mock his stentorian pronouncements on Arabic connotation and denotation.

The Middle East Studies Association is an anti-American, anti-Israeli, and indeed anti-Semitic group.

Zachary Lockman, an NYU Middle Eastern studies professor, says, "It's fair to say he is probably among the leading historians of the modern Middle East in this country."

Lockman, a buddy of Cole's of a similar far-left, anti-American bent, is lying through his teeth there. Apart from his blog, which is usually so uninformed it's a laughingstock, Cole's publications do not include a single word on the 20th or 21st Centuries.

Cole recently has been toying with 9/11 conspiracy theories that absolve Arabs. Chimpy McHalliburton did it, I guess. And, most reprehensibly of all, when Iraqi bloggers made fun of Cole's crude Arabic, he tried to get them murdered by publishing a claim -- absent any information or any motivation but his own petty animus -- that they were CIA agents.

So Weiss and Cole and Lockman can continue to believe that Cole was undone by the Joooooooooz, and continue to bark at passing yarmulkes or set fire to synagogues or whatever it is that they do in their spare time... aside from write Cole's howlingly inept blog.

d.o.l.

Criminal Number 18F