71 migrants suffocate in a truck in Austria. What does this recall?
Tag: Juan Cole
Shoddy and inaccurate?
The Muslim Brotherhood didn't have to vow to "kill all the Jews" at their November rally. They just had to quote one particular hadith, and they did.
ABC: Anything But Cole
Juan Cole is running two campaigns on his blog. One is against Israel—business as usual for Cole. The other is promoting his blog in the 2008 Weblog Awards competition (Middle East category), where there are ten finalists (I am one). Yesterday, Cole called on his readers to turn out and vote for him. His pitch? …
Cole spills wine at Cana
Juan Cole today opens a dramatic post with the following passage, in response to the deaths yesterday, from Israeli fire, of several dozen Palestinian civilians sheltering at an UNRWA school in Gaza: In 1996, Israeli jets bombed a UN building where civilians had taken refuge at Cana/Qana in south Lebanon, killing 102 persons; in the …
Juan Cole loses head
"The American deployment of terror against the Iraqi population has, of course, dwarfed anything the French accomplished in Egypt by orders of magnitude."Juan Cole Juan Cole is busy promoting his new book Napoleon's Egypt, the hook being a comparison between Napoleon Bonaparte in Egypt and George W. Bush in Iraq. This could make for an …
Israel’s summer wars
Israel's generals mull over American professors (a satire).
Cole in the bullrushes
Juan Cole has decided that Muqtada al-Sadr can't be in Iran. He has no way of knowing that from freezing Ann Arbor, but his method, if it can be called that, is to bring all his superior knowledge to bear, and then surmise the truth. So even though the United States military and an adviser …
Cole, fascism, and mind quality control
Over at Sandstorm, I have a column on the intellectual history of the Islamism-fascism comparison in the social sciences. The comparison wasn't born in the White House, but has a long academic pedigree. There I quote Michigan professor Juan Cole's denunciation of "the lazy conflation of Muslim fundamentalist movements with fascism." But there was nothing …
Islamism and Fascism: Dare to Compare
On Tuesday of last week, Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wisconsin) entered the fray over the Bush Administration's description of the enemy as "Islamic fascism." (Bush first used the phrase on August 7, and other top officials have followed suit.) Feingold: I call on the President to stop using the phrase "Islamic Fascists," a label that doesn't …
Cole cult ignores Ajami
While on the road, I was amazed to read this quote in The Nation, served up by Joshua Landis after Yale's thumbs-down to Juan Cole: "Juan Cole has done something that no other Middle East academic has done since Bernard Lewis, who is 90 years old: He has become a household word. He has educated …
Take it like a man
Professor Juan Cole has produced another offensive quote, which appears in an article about the academic boycott of Israel: "If Israelis want to be a state, they, both genders, should take the criticism like men and stop being crybabies about 'anti-Semitism.'" Here is news for Cole: Israel has been a state for nearly sixty years. …
Juan Cole’s next book
The Yale search committee that's come up with Juan Cole as a finalist claims not to be interested in his blog, according to a report in the Yale Daily News: Frances Rosenbluth, a member of the search committee for the professorship, said the committee considered only [Cole's] scholarly writing—not his blog or his political views—when …
Inside job at Yale?
In February, I wrote that I would be shocked if Yale appointed Juan Cole to a professorship in the Yale Center for International and Area Studies. Now that he's been declared a finalist, I see I'm not alone. The appointment has been the subject of three hard-hitting pieces in the Yale Daily News, the New …
Cole and Yale
On Tuesday, Juan Cole posted this appeal on his website, Informed Comment: If among my loyal readers there are any attorneys with expertise in libel law, in the US or UK, who might be willing to consult on a possible series of lawsuits for reckless defamation of character resulting in professional harm--done on a contingency …
The Colephate
Juan Cole's penchant for specious analogies misleads his readers once again, this time in regard to the caliphate. Here is Cole: There are different conceptions of the caliphate, sort of a Sunni papacy. At some points in history the caliph was both a temporal and a spiritual leader. But over time there was a separation …
Israeli plot against Juan Cole!
Juan Cole, who doesn't get the television time that he used to, has been reduced to appearing on webcasts from makeshift studios. It's a completely apt setting for his nutty theories. See, for example, the first segment of a homespun interview Cole gave to a Daily Kos blogger named Markinsanfran, a.k.a. Dio. (You'll need Quicktime to view …
Professor Cole, I was there first
Juan Cole continues to have his unedifying tit-for-tat with Christopher Hitchens over his credentials. In the frenzy, Cole has resorted to listing his many travels to the Middle East (with dates), the Middle Eastern languages he says he knows or reads, and so on. It's come to that. But Cole claims one credential that I …
Cole-ture shock
The Ora-Cole of Ann Arbor, author of the mega-blog "Informed Comment," and El Presidente-elect of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA), Professor Juan Cole, shares his keen ethnographic insights into the killing of American journalist Steven Vincent in Basra last week. An article in the London Telegraph (to which I also linked) reported that investigators …
Inspector Cole on London assignment
One of my missions is to save readers of Juan Cole's weblog from his errors. (This has the potential of becoming a full-time job.) The latest one comes in today's posting about Shehzad Tanweer, 22, one of the British-born suicide bombers from Leeds. Cole first announces that his investigation is in full swing: "I have …
Cole-or blind
I've promised to track Juan Cole's deletions, and here's a fine one. Yesterday he threw up a post with this title: "Israeli Brown Shirts Protest, Threaten Violence." (He wrote this: "To the lexicon of brown shirts and black shirts of the European far right can now be added the phrase 'Orange Shirts,' the color favored …
Tit for tat with Juan Cole
Over the past week or so, I've hammered Juan Cole over his substantive errors and elisions, and watched in amazement as he's engaged in denial and deletion to keep his imaginary reputation for infallibilty intact. But he practically bowled me over when he issued a call, on his weblog, for posters at Daily Kos to …
Your mission: Get Kramer! This entry will self-destruct…
These last few weeks, Professor Juan Cole, blogger extraordinaire, has been even more over-the-top than usual, and I've been busy calling him on errors and elisions. The other day, he responded at his weblog with this appeal to his admirers at a left-of-center online forum called Daily Kos: Please do up an oppo research diary …
Continue reading Your mission: Get Kramer! This entry will self-destruct…
Making Cole-slaw of history
For a trained historian, even in Middle Eastern studies, Juan Cole is scandalously incompetent when it comes to cause and effect. Here's his latest gaffe, made in the context of the London bombings: According to the September 11 Commission report, al-Qaeda conceived 9/11 in some large part as a punishment on the US for supporting …
Juan Cole replies
While I was traveling, Juan Cole responded to my post on his past Iraq positions (and especially his early characterization of the war as a "noble enterprise"). Cole doesn't link to me, or even mention my name, lest he send readers scurrying over here to read chapter and verse. But it's a direct response, and …
Juan Cole’s noble enterprise
Juan Cole suffers from selective memory when it comes to his position on the Iraq war.
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