Thursday, March 24, 2011
Juan Cole and the "Googlesmear"
Juan Cole, I thought I would repost this older exchange concerning
some of the same matters.
My first expose of Cole was here:
http://archive.frontpagemag.com/readArticle.aspx?ARTID=9198
Here is Cole's original "statement."
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/11071.html
My response to that follows:
Historians in the News
Steve Plaut: Response to Juan Cole's Response
http://hnn.us/roundup/entries/11070.html
Steven Plaut, at frontpagemag.com (3-29-05):
The new head of the Middle East Studies Association, Professor Juan
Cole from the University of Michigan, has responded on his own web
page to the in-depth expose of his bias I published recently in
Frontpage Magazine. In that article, Cole's long history of
distortion, ignorance, and bias was carefully documented. In
particular, I challenged the Cole Doctrine, which holds that all
terrorism is due to "occupation." I showed that most terrorism has
nothing to do with "occupation," that most occupation does not cause
terrorism, and that terrorism is more often the cause than the
consequence of "occupation."
Cole is apparently unable to defend his record against the criticism
contained in my piece and instead complains, in a column on his own
web page, that he was a "victim" of a "GoogleSmear." By this he means
critical analysis of what he writes, which then gets cited and
reposted on the web, something he dislikes (but can't answer). He is
upset when web commentators publish correctives to his extremist and
unfounded views, and then these show up whenever someone googles his
name in the web's best known search engine.
But more importantly, this is all a bit like the libelous pot calling
the kettle black. Cole's habitual response whenever anyone exposes his
errors and bias is to whine that he is being "smeared." But Cole has a
long history of smearing and threatening respected scholars like
Daniel Pipes and Martin Kramer, who – unlike Cole – are careful with
the facts. "Googlesmearing" -- as opposed to the fact-filled
documented analysis I wrote in the above FPM article -- is hardly a
"new way of discrediting a political opponent," as Cole described it.
Indeed, Cole and his leftist friends have been doing it for years.
In his attempt to defend his indefensible record, Cole writes, "The
GoogleSmear depends on subtle changes of wording that make the
individual sound like an idiot." In all candor, we do not think anyone
needs word changes nor Google to assist in making Juan Cole sound like
an idiot. Noam Chomsky has said, "Juan Cole is a very serious and
knowledgeable analyst." Need we say more.
Cole's "idiot" reference is actually meant to refer to a small piece
of my original article (before I corrected it), which mistook a spoof
of what Cole writes for the real thing. But what does it say about
Cole that's hard to tell the difference? In any case, unlike Cole, I
am happy to acknowledge an error when I make it, since it is not – as
it is with him – the very substance of my discourse.
No sooner does Cole complain about "dubious facts" in the Frontpage
piece about him and about his being a victim of "GoogleSmear" than he
himself decides to illustrate GoogleSmear for his readers by
performing it against me. Thus, his first and main defense of his good
name is to repeat a lie about myself invented earlier this week by his
crony, superior ship's officer, and editor at antiwar.com, Dennis
"Justin" Raimondo. Cole clearly regards Raimondo as a legitimate,
authoritative source of information, while complaining that his
critics rely on dubious sources. We counted 14,400 web pages in which
the names Juan Cole and Justin Raimondo appear together.
One is known by the company that one keeps and Cole keeps intimate
company with Raimondo, who is best known for fabricating a conspiracy
theory reprinted on neonazi web sites all over the Internet about how
Jews supposedly knocked down the World Trade Center to make poor bin
Laden look bad. Raimondo has even self-published this theory as a
"book." Cole obviously has no problems being associated with a
crackpot like Raimondo nor with citing his libelous ravings as
"authoritative." And then he complains that we at Frontpage Magazine
are responsible for his own damaged reputation.
Cole rests the better part of his "self-defense" on labeling me "an
Israeli defender of the terrorists (sic) around the late extremist
Rabbi Meir Kahane," the fellow who set up the Jewish Defense League.
So what is the source of this invention reported with scholarly
seriousness by Professor Juan Cole? Why, it is Justin Raimondo
himself, of course! In fact, Cole thanks Raimondo profusely on his web
page for smearing me as a supposed Kahanist.
The only problem is that I am not. Raimondo's evidence for this smear
against me is that he googled my name and the word "Kahanist"
together, and discovered two articles of mine in which I used the word
"Kahanist" in the text. But that was all he found. In neither article
did I express any support for the Kahanists or Kahanism. Talk about
Googlesmears! Cole, also accuses me of posting comments under a false
name on a web bulletin board and accuses me of using illegal drugs,
which is equally fanciful and absurd.
Not only have I never been a Kahanist, but - on the contrary - I have
been a critic of Kahane and his organization for well over 30 years,
and have been attacked by the Kahane movement on more than one
occasion. But such facts cannot be expected to deter the scholarly
head of the Middle East Studies Association, Juan Cole, and his
conspiracist mentor Raimondo in their zeal to discredit my analysis of
Cole's actual positions and performance. Cole, by the way, is as fond
of infantile conspiracist "theories" as Raimondo, and – again like his
mentor – likes to spread anti-Jewish libels. Both Raimondo and Cole
have a habit of responding to any documentation of their lies by
shrieks and slanders and with threats.
Cole never quite gets around to addressing the main criticism against
him that appeared in my FPM article, namely that his theory that
"terrorism is caused by occupation" is without empirical foundation.
In his column, he simply repeats his "theory" that occupation produces
terrorism, whereas in fact the reverse is more commonly the case.
If the Cole Doctrine were true, why did the illegal Chinese occupation
of Tibet not produce terrorism? – that was one of the many questions I
asked in my column attacking Cole's "theory"! Cole responds on his web
page: because "the Tibetan population was not socially mobilized,"
adding, "the Chinese government certainly saw the Kampa revolt of 1959
to be a terrorist action." Actually, a handful of Kampas struggled
against the Maoist colonialists, starting in 1951. Leave it up to a
socially-mobilized apologist for Maoism like Cole to denounce these
Kampa rebels, who never targeted civilians, as terrorists, while
Hizbollah and Hamas – real terrorist organizations that embrace
Osama's jihad – are legitimate anti-occupation protest movements in
Juan Cole's eyes.
Cole then adds: "The Zionist Right maintains that you can't criticize
Israeli violations of basic human rights and international law until
you first criticize all the other 188 countries in the world." Cole is
not too far off this time. Human rights are a hundred times better
respected and protected in Israel than in the next-best Middle East
countries and better than in close to 188 others. Someone who harps
constantly on supposed human rights abuses by Israel – which is a way
to demonize and delegitimize Israel, a country under threat of
annihilation from the Arab dictatorships Cole supports - while
ignoring human rights in other countries is acting in behalf of
malevolent political agendas.
It is exactly like those who shrieked in the late 1930s about human
rights abuses of ethnic Germans in Czechoslovakia, while ignoring the
fact the human rights record of Czechoslovakia was far better than in
the countries seeking to delegitimize and destroy it. Professor Cole
resents anyone questioning his real motives. Does he really imagine
that his bluster against the "Zionist Right" will hide his attempts to
promote the agendas of the anti-Semitic Left?
Cole takes sanctimonious exception to the fact that I referred to the
Sudanese murdering people in southern Sudan as "Arabs" and noted that
those being massacred in Sudan are black Africans. The ruling classes
in Sudan consist of people who speak Arabic, are Moslems, run a
program of coerced "Arabization" in the country, and Sudan is a member
of the Arab League. Their victims are black Africans, even if much of
the Sudanese murdering class is also black.
After raising the Sudan race issue, which was never mentioned at all
in the Frontpage piece criticizing him, Cole insists that this proves
that "The rightwing Zionists want to racialize the Sudan conflict." We
wonder how many people are capable of reading Cole's web site without
the constant need to shout "Huh??!!" By the way, lots of Israeli Jews
are black also. What does that make them, Professor Cole, well -
besides right-wing Zionists?
Standing back to view the man whom the leftwing Middle Eastern experts
on America's college campuses have made the quarterback of their
anti-American game plan, here is Cole's view of bin Laden and 9-11 and
the war on terror, taken from Raimondo's site, where Cole has
published many articles:
"The attack on the World Trade Center was exactly analogous to Pearl
Harbor. The Japanese generals had to neutralize the U.S. fleet so that
they could sweep into Southeast Asia and appropriate Indonesian
petroleum.... Likewise, al-Qaeda was attempting to push the United
States out of the Middle East so that Egypt, Jordan, Israel and Saudi
Arabia would become more vulnerable to overthrow, lacking a superpower
patron. Secondarily, the attack was conceived as revenge on the United
States and American Jews for supporting Israel and the severe
oppression of the Palestinians.... Ironically, however, the Bush
administration then went on to invade Iraq for no good reason."
He then adds:
"Al-Qaeda has succeeded in several of its main goals. It had been
trying to convince Muslims that the United States wanted to invade
Muslim lands, humiliate Muslim men, and rape Muslim women. Most
Muslims found this charge hard to accept. The Bush administration's
Iraq invasion, along with the Abu Ghraib prison torture scandal, was
perceived by many Muslims to validate bin Laden's wisdom and
foresight.... The U.S. is not winning the war on terror. Al-Qaeda also
has by no means won. But across a whole range of objectives, al-Qaeda
has accomplished more of its goals than the U.S. has of its."
In sum, the more Cole complains about those who criticize his
extremist political agenda, his undeniable bias, and his general
absence of scholarship, the more he proves how correct in fact they
are.
Comment
http://hnn.us/readcomment.php?id=57596&bheaders=1#57596
Another Scholarly Associate of Prof. Cole (#57596)
by steven plaut on March 30, 2005 at 3:44 AM
ANOTHER Scholarly Source and Colleague of Juan Cole
We recently documented the deep involvement, identification, and
collaboration of Prof. Juan Cole, who is serving as reigning "Rais" of
the Middle East Studies Association, with one Dennis "Justin"
Raimondo, who edits the anti-American pro-terror antiwar.com. Raimondo
fabricated a conspiracy "theory" about how supposedly dem Joos were
the real ones who knocked down the World Trade Center all to make bin
Laden and his 19 Saudi hijackers look bad. This theory is now staple
lard on all neonazi web sites and some Stalinist ones too, like
Pravda, where Raimondo writes a regular column. Raimondo seems to be
determined to act out in his own life the script from Kevin Abrams'
book.
Now Raimondo and his ravings are ordinarily not worth discussing
outside the clinic, and are of interest here only in the fact that
Prof. Juan Cole is a follower and admirer of Raimondo, publicly thanks
and compliments Raiomondo, and publishes his own articles on
Raimondo's web site.
At first, we assumed this was just a singular slip in judgment on the
part of our learned professor of Middle East political correctness.
Surely Cole does not know what sort of crackpot Raimondo really is,
right?
Wrong!
It turns out that Raimondo is NOT the only far-left-neofascist
conspiracist crackpot with which Cole makes common cause and is on
intimate collegial terms. We checked out the links on Juan Cole's own
personal web site and blog. There we discovered among Cole's list of
"Political and Academic Weblogs" the weblog of Kurt Nimmo.
"Academic" weblog? You may recall that Nimmo is the
employment-challenged New Mexico photographer-wannabe who may or may
not have been canned from a job at his local Walmart's photo lab, who
may or may not have finished high school, the fellow who insists that
because of "the neocons" (by which he means Dem Joos) he just cannot
find a job - unlike the many millions of illegal immigrants who cannot
speak English and all find jobs. Nimmo is a regular columnist for
Alexander Cockburn's Counterpunch, and has been moonlighting as a
columnist for Uruknet, the web site base of Iraqi pro-Saddam exiled
Ba'athists.
Nimmo, who makes Raimondo look like a Harvard Dean, claims he is not
really a columnist for the Ba'athist site because he only publishes
his columns there. We counted 40 Nimmo columns on Uruknet. Nimmo also
insists the pro-Saddam site is really run by Italian peace lovers and
not Ba'athist Iraqis, and my guess is his evidence is that his friends
there say "Marhaban, We arrrr Italian Beoble Insh'Allah". And yes, the
Saddamist Uruknet also comes out to endorse Professor Cole, Raimondo
and Nimmo, the merry threesome.
Nimmo has as long a track record of justifying terror, spin doctoring
al-Qaeda, and promoting crackpot conspiracy theories as Raimondo, and
Nimmo is just as openly anti-Semitic.
So the big question for the University of Michigan is how can it be
that one of its profs is someone who regards Nimmo as one of his bona
fide "academic" colleagues and links his personal page to such a
critter, a prof who openly identifies with Justin Raimondo, a prof who
is the hero of the week for the Iraqi Ba'athists. We would ask the
Middle East Studies Association a similar question, about how can Cole
be its President under these circumstances, but we fear we have
already answered out own question.
We are wondering if the next academic weblog and academic source for
his research that Prof. Cole will name will be Rense.com or David
Irving's web site.
