Tag: Juan Cole

Your mission: Get Kramer! This entry will self-destruct…

On By Martin Kramer

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 on Martin Kramer. Who is he? Where did he come from? When he was head of the Dayan Center in Tel Aviv, to whom did he report in the Israeli intelligence community? Who funded his work on Hizbullah? Was he fired from heading the Dayan Center? How does he suddenly show back up in the US after a 20-year absence with a book that blames unpreparedness for 9/11 on US professors of Middle East Studies instead of on the Israeli Mossad and the US CIA/FBI? What was his role in getting up the Iraq War and in advising the US on the wrong-headed policies that have gotten so many Americans killed? Who pays his salary, now, exactly? What are his links with AIPAC, and with the shadowy world of far-right Zionist think tanks and dummy organizations?

I’ve restricted my critique of Cole to his on-the-record writings and statements, where there’s ample grist. I’ve never puttered around his personal background, his job, his salary, his travels, or his grants. From what I hear, there’s ample grist for that too, and some of it is relevant, but I haven’t gone there. Since he’s decided to insinuate that I’m some sort of Mossad operative, I’m assuming he has no substantive arguments to make in his defense. And he has the temerity to call his critics “sleazeballs” and accuse them of McCarthyism.

Cole’s would-be sleuths didn’t turn up much information, and some actually refused the assignment. But I’ve secured the following Cole-ordered oppo research about me (I can’t reveal my methods), and it appears to be very well-informed. In fact, the author almost seems to have a direct line into my mind…

Martin Kramer
Oppo Research for Professor Juan Cole

Question: “Who is he? Where did he come from?” Answer: Kramer was born in Washington, D.C. (ah-ha!), in 1954, and grew up in Maryland. He began his Middle Eastern studies under Itamar Rabinovich at Tel Aviv University, and continued under Fouad Ajami, L. Carl Brown, the late Charles Issawi, and Bernard Lewis, all at Princeton. (Lewis directed his doctoral thesis.) He also did a year at Columbia with J.C. Hurewitz. These “scholars” have all been exposed, by a previous oppo researcher, either as orientalists or native informants; they apparently recruited the young and impressionable Kramer to their service. As Kramer’s doctorate neared completion, Rabinovich persuaded him to join the faculty of Tel Aviv University, and he has been there ever since. He has a fair number of scholarly publications, which have propelled him through the ranks. All this academic labor just to build his cover…

Question: “When he was head of the Dayan Center in Tel Aviv, to whom did he report in the Israeli intelligence community?” Answer: The Dayan Center, we have discovered, is part of Tel Aviv University, and it seems to house a well-known group of scholars. Its director reports to a board of governors, which includes prominent public figures and academics (ex officio: the university president, the provost, and the dean of the faculty of humanities). We cannot substantiate the suggestion that its director reports to “Israeli intelligence,” although we know that all academics in Israel are agents unless proven otherwise. Still, Kramer seems particularly chagrined by what he regards as a disgraceful smear of his institution and his colleagues.

Question: “Was he fired from heading the Dayan Center?” Answer: No, he served two consecutive three-year terms, the term limit according to university regulations. (We are not sure why Professor Cole has tasked us with this question, and perhaps we should not raise it, given his own rather attenuated stint as director of Michigan’s Middle East center…)

Question: “Who funded his work on Hizbullah?” Answer: Kramer had a two-year grant from the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, and a one-year fellowship from the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington. The Wilson Center is part of the Smithsonian Institution, so Kramer’s work was funded, at least in part, by the U.S. government! (Inadvertently, however, we discovered that Professor Cole’s own work on Shiism was funded by… federal tax dollars. We will keep this information confidential.)

Question: “Who pays his salary, now, exactly?” Answer: Kramer is a full-time tenured academic at Tel Aviv University. They have paid him a monthly salary for twenty-four years. We have secured one of his pay slips, and they seem to figure it out pretty exactly. Especially the deductions…

Question: “How does he suddenly show back up in the US after a 20-year absence with a book that blames unpreparedness for 9/11 on US professors of Middle East Studies instead of on the Israeli Mossad and the US CIA/FBI?” Answer: According to our evidence, Kramer wasn’t absent for twenty years. In the 1980s and 1990s, he came back half a dozen times on visiting professorships and fellowships. Counter-intelligence even spotted him lurking in the corridors at conferences of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). That apparently kept him current with the goings-on in Middle Eastern studies, and seems to have provided inspiration and fodder for his book. We have checked, and were surprised to find that Professor Cole isn’t mentioned in that book. This omission can be used against Kramer: he failed to predict the rise of Juan Cole! In his defense, Kramer will probably say: it was so implausible.

Question: “What was his role in getting up the Iraq War and in advising the US on the wrong-headed policies that have gotten so many Americans killed?” Answer: Kramer hasn’t had any advisory role beyond his website, nor has he repackaged himself as an instant Iraq expert. None of Kramer’s statements uncovered so far competes with our own Professor Cole’s characterization of the war as a “noble enterprise.” (We still await further clarification from Professor Cole, as to whether we were for the war and are now against it, or were against the war and are now for it.)

Question: “What are his links with AIPAC, and with the shadowy world of far-right Zionist think tanks and dummy organizations?” Answer: Kramer once addressed a panel at the annual AIPAC conference in Washington. Last year he spoke at AIPAC’s annual “summit” at the new Seminole Hard Rock Hotel and Casino in Hollywood, Florida. Kramer does not seem to have been followed by the FBI, although some agents may have been operating undercover.

As for his links with the “shadowy world of far-right Zionist think tanks,” Kramer is quite secretive. We have ascertained that he spends three months each year at The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, as the Wexler-Fromer Fellow. (The Wexlers and Fromers are two couples out of New York who have admired Kramer’s work.) He is a senior editor at the Middle East Quarterly, which he edited for three years. (We all know whose journal that is.) And he has a connection to the (Haim!) Saban Center (Brookings Institution), which brings him each year to the U.S.-Islamic forum in Qatar. It has not been difficult to retrieve this information from the “shadowy world,” since the relevant think tanks busily compete to get into the limelight.

Urgent query for Professor Cole! We prepared this report for you in response to your weblog entry of July 11. But when we checked back the next day to see whether we had answered all questions, we saw that the paragraph tasking us with oppo research on Kramer had disappeared! We are perplexed. Did the Likudniks and Neocons penetrate your system and remove your instructions? A distinct possibility. Did you have one of your late-night “slips of the keyboard,” and inadvertently delete them? That happens often. Or perhaps you deliberately programmed your instructions to self-destruct? We don’t pretend to fathom the depth of your reasoning (no one can), so we would appreciate some guidance from on high. Do you desire this report, or should we destroy it? It would be most embarrassing were it to fall into the hands of Kramer himself…

Making Cole-slaw of history

On By Martin Kramer

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 Ariel Sharon’s iron fist policies toward the Palestinians. Bin Laden had wanted to move the operation up in response to Sharon’s threatening visit to the Temple Mount, and again in response to the Israeli attack on the Jenin refugee camp, which left 4,000 persons homeless. Khalid Shaikh Muhammad argued in each case that the operation just was not ready.

Did Cole read the same 9/11 report as the rest of us? There’s not a single passage in the 9/11 report mentioning Sharon’s (or Israel’s) policies, and I challenge him to produce one. Cole just made it up. And in point of fact, the report’s narrative definitively contradicts him.

The report makes it clear that 9/11 was conceived well before Sharon became prime minister of Israel in March 2001. Chapter 5, section 2 (p. 153) says the following, based on the interrogation of Khalid Shaikh Muhammad (KSM), the 9/11 mastermind:

According to KSM, he started to think about attacking the United States after [Ramzi] Yousef returned to Pakistan following the 1993 World Trade Center bombing…. He maintains that he and Yousef…speculated about striking the World Trade Center and CIA headquarters as early as 1995.

The idea was fully hatched by early 1999 (p. 154):

KSM acknowledges formally joining al Qaeda in late 1998 or 1999, and states that soon afterward Bin Ladin also made the decision to support his proposal to attack the United States using commercial airplanes as weapons…. Bin Ladin summoned KSM to Kandahar in March or April 1999 to tell him that al Qaeda would support his proposal. The plot was now referred to within al Qaeda as the “planes operation.”

The election of Ehud Barak as Israeli prime minister in May 1999 didn’t put a crimp in the planning. To the contrary: preparations proceeded apace, and Bin Laden pushed even harder for the operation, which wasn’t quite ready. Bin Laden did so again after Sharon’s visit to the Temple Mount. But that visit took place on September 28, 2000, when Sharon was leader of the opposition. He only became prime minister five months later.

In short, the 9/11 operation could hardly have been “conceived” as a response to U.S. support for Sharon’s “iron fist policies.” It was conceived, its operatives were selected, and it was put in motion, long before Sharon took the helm.

And what of Cole’s claim that Bin Laden wanted to launch the attacks “in response to the Israeli attack on the Jenin refugee camp, which left 4,000 persons homeless”? The Jenin operation took place in April 2002, seven months after 9/11. Apparently, in the bizarre universe of the Colesque, Sharon’s horrid deeds are always at fault for 9/11, even if he committed them after the event. (Hat tip to the vigilant readers of Tony Badran’s latest Cole-smashing post.)

Cole has been summoned by certain media to pronounce on the motives of Al-Qaeda in striking London. He hasn’t got a clue. He can’t keep the basic chronology of the 9/11 plot straight, and he doesn’t have any notion of overall Middle Eastern chronology, which means he regularly mangles cause and effect. Reason? Bias trumps facts. If historians could be disbarred, Cole would have lost his license long ago. Instead, the Middle East Studies Association has elected him its president. So much for scholarly standards.

Addendum: Experienced Cole-watchers know that when he makes a mistake, he just goes back and tidies up his postings. So he’s purged the Jenin reference. Instead, he writes that Bin Laden wanted to move up the operation “in response to Sharon’s crackdown in spring of 2001.” That’s not what the 9/11 report says. It says Bin Laden may have considered speeding up the operation to coincide with a planned Sharon visit to the White House (p. 250).

Knowing Cole’s habits, I saved the original posting. It’s here. The doctored version is here. Blogger etiquette demands that substantive errors be fixed by adding or posting an explicit correction. Cole exempts himself, as he must, given the gross inaccuracies that plague his weblog. So you quote him at your peril: his words might change under your feet. Here, for example, is a poor Cole admirer from Pakistan who quoted Cole Sahib’s Jenin revelation. I don’t have the heart to notify him that his hero got it wrong. (See Jenin update below.)

Further reading: See my Cole archive, where I revisit some of Cole’s wackier interpretations of Al-Qaeda. See especially the entry entitled “Dial 911-COLE,” which unearths his comparison of the 9/11 perpetrators to the Applegate people—UFO nuts. A year after 9/11, he dismissed Al-Qaeda as “an odd assortment of crackpots, petty thieves, obsessed graduate students, would-be mercenaries, and eccentric millionnaires.” No wonder Cole has had so much trouble digesting the 9/11 report.

Update: An intermediary wrote to Cole to bring his attention to his flawed representation of the 9/11 report. Cole’s response: “T.P. points out by email that I should have said that the 9/11 Commission concluded that the timing of 9/11 was attributable to Sharon, not that the operation was largely conceived in response to him. This is correct; one writes blogs in haste and my phrasing was insufficiently careful.” Actually, this isn’t correct either: the 9/11 commission found that operational readiness determined the timing of 9/11. Khalid Shaikh Muhammad rebuffed Bin Laden’s attempts to move it up.

Cole goes on to say that it is still “my conviction based on intensive study of Bin Laden, Zawahiri and Khalid Shaikh Muhammad” that they saw 9/11 as “punishment for the Israeli occupation of Jerusalem.” I think it’s much deeper than that, based on my own “intensive study,” but that’s neither here nor there. The fact is that the 9/11 report doesn’t make or endorse Cole’s argument. And now that we know Cole works in haste, thus misreading a plain English text, what should we think of his hasty translations (renditions?) of Arabic? Take them with a grain of salt, or just bring along the entire salt shaker.

Jenin? No word on that one. (See Jenin update below.)

Update: “Another American,” a diarist at Daily Kos, is working to persuade readers that this critique deserves serious consideration. He’s running into some stiff opposition from militant (and occasionally obscene) Cole addicts. Have a peek.

Jenin Update: The “Pakistani admirer” who quoted Cole’s Jenin claim has cropped up in Tony Badran’s comments, with this: “I contacted Cole regarding his slip-up, and he said simply that it was a slip of the keyboard, which was, I must add, an odd defense.” Oh, it’s not odd. Maybe it’s one of those wireless keyboards, and a transmission from a UFO (you know, flown by the Qaeda-Applegate people) interfered with his computer, and just slipped that Jenin reference in. I think that’s a better explanation than the time warp thesis i.e., that in a parallel universe, Jenin did happen before 9/11. After all, we have entered the Cole-mine, where the usual laws of physics are suspended, and magical things become commonplace.

Another update: Cole now announces his editorial “policy,” which will be news to readers of his weblog (who still haven’t been told about the Jenin fix). “I post late at night and sometimes am sleepy and make mistakes. My readers are my editors and correct me. If the corrections come the same morning, I make them directly to the text, as a ‘second edition.’ If the posting has been up a few days, I put a footnote when making a correction. That is, I consider the text correctable for the first day or so. That is my editorial policy. Like it or lump it.” Got it? For the “first day or so,” an entry is just a draft! But wait a minute… don’t most people read the entry on the “first day or so”? Isn’t that when it’s most likely to get quoted? And what if a reader doesn’t want to be Cole’s editor? (I’ve got my own stuff to edit, thank you.) So here’s my policy and it’s simple: you broke it, it’s yours; you post it, it’s yours. Like it or lump it.

Updated again! Believe it or not, Cole has repeated the offense: the “sleepy” explanation has been purged from his site! Here is the original entry (which I saved, of course), and here is the purged version. (He also cut a nasty personal attack on me, which I’ll treat separately.) Well, he can keep deleting. I’ll keep storing.

Tit for tat: I go to all this trouble to correct Cole, and he attacks me personally. So here’s my rejoinder.

Juan Cole replies

On By Martin Kramer

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 it’s Colesque in its elisions. Read my post, read his reply, and decide for yourself.