Middle East Studies in the News
Juan Cole's Jihad Against Israel
by Cinnamon Stillwell
July 9, 2008
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27 links @[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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One can always count on University of Michigan history
professor Juan Cole to excuse violence and hatred
directed at Israel. At his blog, Informed Comment
(which, judging by the references to the mythical Jenin
"massacre" and the USS Liberty canard in the comments
section, is read avidly by anti-Israel conspiracy theorists),
Cole takes pains to explain away last week's horrific
bulldozer attack in Jerusalem.
Cole apparently sees no contradiction between his
perfunctory admission that "Violence against innocent
civilians is always condemnable and deplored by IC,"
and his claim to add "context" to the attack by trying to
justify the alleged motivations of the perpetrator,
Palestinian construction worker Husam Taysir Dwayat.
Citing Al-Jazeera International (one of his favoured
sources), Cole asserts that, "the bulldozer operator had
been working on a controversial rail line connecting
West Jerusalem to Arab East Jerusalem, which many
Palestinians feel will further disadvantage them." He
then launches into a litany of Israel's supposed sins,
including demoli****ng illegal buildings in East
Jerusalem, what he calls "rapid encroachments on
the Palestinians in the West Bank," the so-called
"violence of Israeli colonists (many of them
Americans) against native Palestinians," and the
Israeli Defense Forces (IDF) use of military action
to protect Israeli citizens from their genocidal neighbours.
Among his sources, Cole cites the Israeli leftist
"human rights group" B'Tselem, which has been known
to play fast and loose with facts in order to provide a
sympathetic media with lurid stories about imagined
Israeli human rights transgressions‹qualities that
make the group an ideal source for Cole's unlimited
paranoia. Earlier this year Cole used the occasion of
the Hamas-inspired media fabrication regarding
electricity and fuel shortages to accuse Israel of
perpetrating atrocities, war crimes, and slavery against
Gazans, not to mention killing asthmatics and
newborns. Yet Cole can't muster the same outrage over
the calculated murder of women, children, infants, and
any civilian unlucky enough to have crossed paths with
Dwayat's bulldozer.
As for Dwayat's motivations, Cole chooses to ignore the
fact that he yelled "Allah Akbar" while stepping on the
gas pedal, that his mother praised him as a shaheed
(martyr) while ululating from the balcony of the family
home, or that Palestinian terrorist groups are tripping
over themselves trying to take credit for the attack.
Meanwhile, his family blames the Jewish woman with
whom Dwayat was once involved (and who he was
convicted of raping) and his neighbours continue to
repeat rumours about "haredi teenagers" throwing stones
at Dwayat the day before the attack. But in Cole's
morally relativistic world, Dwayat was simply forced
to mow down Israeli civilians because he was "seized
with a fit of rage over ac***ulated grievances in his
own mind, real or imagined." So much for context.
Such obfuscation is standard fare for Cole, who
continues to insist that Iranian president Mahmoud
Ahmedinjad was mistranslated when, at the aptly
named World without Zionism conference in October,
2005, he said that Israel should be "wiped off the
map". Of course, the Iranian regime constantly calls
for Israel's destruction and regularly evinces hatred
towards Jews. Iran's state-run television replays a
seemingly endless repertoire of conspiratorial,
anti-Semitic programming, much of which mirrors
Nazi-era propaganda. The allegation that the films
"Chicken Run" and "Saving Private Ryan" are tools
for "Zionist propaganda" is just a recent example.
Perhaps Cole can justify that ludicrous claim as well.
After all, he's accused American Jewish officials of
dual loyalty, and he has a habit of taking Iranian
regime-owned press at face value.
[Perhaps Cole also has dual loyalty
- Iranian-American?]
Cole's use of his blog to peddle conspiratorial
tendencies directed at the United States in general,
and those on the right in particular, is nothing new.
Writing at his blog in January this year, Cole implied
that the harassment of U.S. Navy vessels in the Straits
of Hormuz by Iranian patrol craft was part of a GOP
conspiracy. As Campus Watch director Winfield
Myers noted at the time:
That a Middle East studies professor upon whom the
press relies for insight into this key region can be so
wrong-headed in so many ways‹and in a single
blog post‹bodes ill for efforts to bring supply the
American public with accurate, reliable information
about the Middle East. Overt biases, a selective
reading of sources to sup****t preordained conclusions,
an eagerness to believe the press of foreign
dictator****ps over one's own Navy, and the reliance
on crude conspiracy theories will ensure only that
consumers of media re****ts on the region are too
often misinformed, and that academic Middle East
specialists are further discredited.
The real context for Cole's apologia for Dwayat, the
bulldozer terrorist, and his "grievances," is that Cole's
so-called informed commentary is a font of
uninformed conspiracy-mongering where terrorists
are excused and the regimes that sup****t them
whitewashed.
-oOo-
Cinnamon Stillwell is the Northern California
Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the
Middle East Forum.
She can be reached at stillwell@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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