Juan Cole: Difference between revisions

Juan R. I. Cole is a Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History in the History Department at the University of Michigan. Since 2002, he has become prominent as a pundit critical of U.S. and Israeli policy in the Middle East.

Education and background

• 1975 B.A. History and Literature of Religions, Northwestern University
• 1978 M.A. Arabic Studies/History, American University in Cairo
• 1984 Ph.D. Islamic Studies, University of California Los Angeles
• 1984-1990 Assistant Professor of History, University of Michigan
• 1990-1995 Associate Professor of History, University of Michigan
• 1992-1995 Director, Center for Middle Eastern and North African Studies, University of Michigan
• 1995- Professor of History, University of Michigan

Cole was awarded Fulbright-Hays fellowships to India (1982) and to Egypt (1985-1986). He speaks Arabic (Modern Standard as well as Lebanese and Egyptian dialects), Persian, and Urdu, and is familiar with Turkish.

Cole has travelled extensively in the Middle East . He was formerly a member of the Bahá'í Faith.

Career

Academic career

Cole is a Professor of Modern Middle East and South Asian History in the History Department at the University of Michigan.

From 1999 until 2004, he was the editor of The International Journal of Middle East Studies. He has served in professional offices for the American Institute of Iranian Studies.

He was elected president of the Middle East Studies Association of North America in November 2004, term to start in November 2005.

Extra-academic career: "Informed Comment" blog and punditry

From 2002 onwards, Cole has became increasingly active as a pundit in UK and US media on topics related to the Middle East. His focus has primarily been Iraq, Iran and Israel. In 2002, Cole started a blog entitled: Informed Comment covering "History, Middle East, South Asia, Religious Studies, and the War on Terror". The blog has won various awards as of April 2006 the most prominent being the 2005 James Aronson Award for Social Justice Journalism from Hunter College. It has also received two 2004 Koufax Awards: the "Best Expert Blog" and the "Best Blog Post". Cole has published political writings in The Guardian, the San Jose Mercury News, Salon.com, the San Francisco Chronicle, The Boston Review, The Nation, Tikkun, and others. In 2004, the U.S. Senate Committee on Foreign Relations requested Cole's testimony at hearings to better understand the situation in Iraq.

Controversy

Subjects of Punditry vs. areas of academic expertise

Professor Efraim Karsh, who published extensively on Middle Eastern affairs, has challenged Cole's expertise on subjects he addresses in his blog: "Having done hardly any independent research on the twentieth-century Middle East, Cole's analysis of this era is essentially derivative, echoing the conventional wisdom among Arabists and Orientalists regarding Islamic and Arab history, the creation of the modern Middle East in the wake of World War I, and its relations with the outside world." . John Fund, in the Wall Street Journal wrote that: "[Cole's] scholarship is largely on the 19th-century Middle East, not on contemporary issues.

On his blog, Cole has attacked critics for commenting on Iraq when they do not know Arabic or have familiarity with Iraqi culture , but it has been noted that despite his failure to know Hebrew or to have any background in Israeli studies, he makes Israeli politics a major focus of his blog commentary".

Intellectual standards and integrity

On the occassion of Juan Cole's assumption of the presidency of the Middle Eastern Studies Association, Archaeologist, Historian, and Campus Watch Director Alexander H. Joffe wrote an article entitled "Juan Cole and the Decline of Middle Eastern Studies" in the Middle East Quarterly. Joffe introduces the article by stating that Cole's election, "marks an endorsement of his work by hundreds of professors in various fields of Middle Eastern studies in American universities," and in the article criticizes Cole as symptomatic of a "widespread urge" among Middle Eastern Studies scholars "to promote polemic over scholarship." Other critics have echoed these concerns

Joffe also raised issues of Cole's intellectual integrity, pointing to an instances in which Cole altered his blog posts after they were demonstrated to contain incorrect historical information. cited in .

Cole has also been criticized by Jonah Goldberg and others for failing to acknowledge his own past positions on the war in Iraq and elections in Iraq and Iran.

In response, Cole has defended those positions on his weblog, and specifically responded to Goldberg, noting the latter's complete lack of expertise on the issue: "Jonah Goldberg knows absolutely nothing about Iraq. I wonder if he has even ever read a single book on Iraq, much less written one. He knows no Arabic. He has never lived in an Arab country. He can't read Iraqi newspapers or those of Iraq's neighbors. He knows nothing whatsoever about Shiite Islam, the branch of the religion to which a majority of Iraqis adheres."[7]

Goldberg also criticized Cole's reliance on ad hominem arguments

On Human rights in Israel vs. the Arab world

Economist Steven Plaut, on the Right-wing Web site FrontPageMag.com, mentions Cole's collaboration with Justin Raimondo, and charges that Cole "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." Dr. Alexander H. Joffee presents and discusses Cole's comments on human rights and democracy in Israel as part of a longer article .

Charges of use of anti-semitic conspiracy theory

Professor and Head of Mediterranean Studies at King's College London Efraim Karsh writes that "Cole's discussion of U.S. foreign policy frequently veers toward conspiratorial anti-Semitism." . Steven Plaut writes that Cole "believes that a group of Jewish 'neo-conservatives' largely runs U.S. policy toward the Middle East. His recurrent theory is that a nebulous 'pro-Likud' cabal controls the U.S. government from a small number of key positions in the Executive Branch" . Many other critics have also discussed Cole's reliance on anti-semetic conspiracy theory in his extra-academic writings .

In a response to charges of antisemitism, Cole has asserted that his US neoconservatives and Israeli Likudnik critics have used claims of "antisemitism" against him not because they believe he is antisemetic, but rather as a tool of intimidation due to his political views: "So this is the way it goes with the Likudniks. First they harass you and try to have you spied on. Then they threaten, bully and try to intimidate you. And if that fails and you show some spine, then they simply lie about you. (In this case the lies are produced by quoting half a passage, or denuding it of its context, or adopting a tone of pained indignation when quoting a perfectly obvious observation)... The thing that most pains me in all this is the use of the word "antisemite." Pipes already had to settle one lawsuit, by Douglas Card, for throwing the word around about him irresponsibly." Cole believes that "...among the real targets of Pipes and Co. is liberal and leftist Jews." Furthermore, Cole accuses his critics of "...encouraging a new kind of antisemitism, which sees it as unacceptable that Jews should be liberals or should criticize Likud Party policies."

Legal threats and responses to legal threats

Cole threatened legal action against Daniel Pipes and historian Martin Kramer, after Campus Watch (an organization which Pipes runs and which Kramer is associated with through its parent organization also run by Pipes ) published a Juan Cole "dossier" on the Campus Watch website. A screenshot of the "dossier", can be seen online . Cole asserted that the dossier incorrectly portrayed him as a supporter of Islamic extremism, exposed him to acts of violence, and that it therefore constituted "stalking".

Cole was threatened with legal action by Yigal Carmon of the Middle East Media Research Institute for making "false statements" about MEMRI on his Blog. Cole had characterized MEMRI as "a sophisticated anti-Arab propaganda machine [that is a] public relations campaign essentially on behalf of the far right-wing Likud Party in Israel". After outlining Carmon's past history as an Israeli army officer and ties of MEMRI founder Meyrav Wurmsur's husband to the Likud party in Israel and Vice-President Richard Cheney's office, Cole went on to suggest that, "MEMRI is funded to the tune of $60 million a year by someone.". In a personal letter to Cole, Carmon objected to Cole's statements, saying that they went, "beyond what could be considered legitimate criticism, and...qualify as slander and libel" Carmon also objected to Cole's, "trying to paint MEMRI in a conspiratorial manner by portraying us as a rich, sinister group.

Cole posted Carmon's letter on his Blog, along with a suggestion that Carmon was threatening to sue not because he found Cole's remarks libelous, but out of an attempt to silence him using a Strategic lawsuit against public participation. He encouraged his readers to write to MEMRI in protest, saying, "Israeli military intelligence is used to being able to censor the Israeli press and to intimidate journalists, and it is a bit shocking that Carmon should imagine that such intimidation would work in a free society. "

Kramer made clear his distaste for Carmon's legal threat, but claimed that, "...the sad truth is that Cole himself was the first to hurl the threat of a frivolous lawsuit against a website—and with far less justification."

Disputed Translations

In October 2004, Cole disputed MEMRI's translation of the 2004 Osama bin Laden video released days before the 2004 U.S. Presidential Election. The video showed Osama saying: "...your security is not in the hands of Kerry, nor Bush, nor al-Qaeda. No. Your security is in your own hands. And every state [wilayah] that doesn't play with our security has automatically guaranteed its own security." MEMRI used the modern standard Arabic definition of "wilayah" as "province or administrative district" to translate "wilayah" as "U.S. state" and suggested that bin Laden was attempting to speak to voters in individual states to influence their choice of candidate. However, Cole claimed that "while [MEMRI] are right to draw attention to the oddness of the diction, their conclusion is impossible." Cole suggested that bin Laden was not using the standard Arabic sense of "wilayah", as in the Arabic name of the United States of America, (الولايات الأمريكية المتح) but rather, either an archaic or a fundamentalists' sense of the word meaning "government", or that he might have lapsed into a local idiom in which "wilayah" might mean "city". Cole points out, "Bin Laden says that such a "state" should not trifle with Muslims' security. He cannot possibly mean that he thinks Rhode Island is in a position to do so. Nor can he be referring to which way a state votes, since he begins by saying that the security of Americans is not in the hands of Bush or Kerry. He has already dismissed them as equivalent and irrelevant, in and of themselves." Yigal Carmon's article asserting the MEMRI translation of the word can be found in this article in the National Review Online. The MEMRI translation contains a note: "The Islamist website Al-Qal'a explained what this sentence meant: "This message was a warning to every U.S. state separately." Al-Jazeera translated the expression in question as "every state". There is no indication that the weblog Carmon quoted had any affiliation with al-Qaeda or Osama bin Laden. Asad Abu Khalil denounced the weblog -- "some anonymous writer on some anonymous website belonging to some anonymous group from an anonymous country" -- quoted by Carmon as "kooky" and noted that the quote in the MEMRI translation was taken out of context.[8][9]

Christopher Hitchens, referring to Cole as "a minor nuisance on the fringes of the academic Muslim apologist community", pilloried Cole for his comments on a private discussion list that suggested that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's statements on Israel had been mistranslated. Conceding that Ahmadinejad's phrase, "wipe Israel off the map", as was done by the Associated Press and Nazila Fathi of the New York Times' Tehran bureau, may have been "...slightly too free a translation", Hitchens argued that it nonetheless clearly meant "annihilate", and ended with; "One might have thought that, if the map-wiping charge were to have been inaccurate or unfair, Ahmadinejad would have denied it. But he presumably knew what he had said and had meant to say. In any case, he has an apologist to do what he does not choose to do for himself. But this apologist, who affects such expertise in Persian, cannot decipher the plain meaning of a celebrated statement and is, furthermore, in need of a remedial course in English."

Pointing out that the translation Hitchens found fault with was an early draft, taken from a private discussion group formed to develop ideas and discuss difficult translations with other academics and journalists, Cole defended his interpretation. Cole wrote, "Ahmadinejad did not say that 'Israel must be wiped off the map' with the implication that phrase has of Nazi-style extermination of a people. He said that the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time. It is in fact probably a reference to some phrase in a medieval Persian poem." Cole quoted the full context of the original email that Hitchens had cited, including the translation of the disputed passage: "The phrase he then used as I read it is "The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)." He also demanded an apology from Hitchens for making public his message, in breech of the group's "no forwarding rule." He also referred to Hitchens' piece as being either ghost written by a right-wing think-tank, or the product of Hitchens' "...very serious and debilitating drinking problem." Cole also pointed out that he was not an "apologist" for Ahmadinejad, whom he called a "little shit" and of whom he had written in the original email: "I should again underline that I personally despise everything Ahmadinejad stands for, not to mention the odious Khomeini, who had personal friends of mine killed so thoroughly that we have never recovered their bodies."

Andrew Sullivan, a friend of Hitchens', dissected Hitchens', Cole's, and a third-party translation of Ahmadinejad's speech, and concluded, "Cole's rhetorical sleight of hand strikes me as deliberate deception, an attempt to deny the existence of a real genocidal evil in the world that Cole himself knows exists. Why? You decide. But Cole has exposed himself more brutally than Hitch ever could."

Yale Position

Cole currently has been shortlisted for a professorship of contemporary Middle East studies at Yale University. This has attracted controversy.

John Fund, in the Wall Street Journal wrote that: "Mr. Cole's appointment would be problematic on several fronts. First, his scholarship is largely on the 19th-century Middle East, not on contemporary issues. "He has since abandoned scholarship in favor of blog commentary," says Michael Rubin, a Yale graduate and editor of the Middle East Quarterly. Mr. Cole's postings at his blog, Informed Comment, appear to be a far cry from scholarship. They feature highly polemical writing and dubious conspiracy theories."

Michael Rubin, a Yale graduate who is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and editor of the Middle East Quarterly, disagrees with Cole's appointment in the The Yale Daily News stating: "Universities thrive on scholarly discourse. Professors should be open to new ideas ­-- not only those that challenge policymakers, but also those that test entrenched campus opinion. Unfortunately, Cole has displayed a cavalier attitude toward those who disagree with him. In a February interview with Detroit's Metro Times, he argued that the U.S. government should shut down Fox News. "In the 1960s, the FCC would have closed it down," he argued. "It's an index of how corrupt our governmental institutions have become that the FCC lets this go on." Many Yalies may not like Fox, but top-down censorship is no solution."

Eliana Johnson, a senior at Yale, and Mitch Webber, a Yale graduate at Harvard Law School, wrote in the New York Sun that, "The prospect of Mr. Cole joining the Yale faculty is disturbing for many reasons. His "scholarship" in this area consists entirely of crude polemics, and his outlook is colored by a conspiratorial view of history. Mr. Cole has used his modicum of fame not to participate in the realm of respectable scholarly debate but to express his deep and abiding hatred of Israel and to opine about the influence of a Zionist cabal on American foreign policy"

Selected bibliography

• Sacred Space and Holy War: The Politics, Culture and History of Shi`ite Islam (I.B. Tauris, 2002) ISBN 1860647367
• Modernity and the Millennium: The Genesis of the Bahá'í Faith in the Nineteenth Century Middle East (Columbia University Press, 1998) ISBN 0231110812
• Colonialism and Revolution in the Middle East: Social and Cultural Origins of Egypt's `Urabi Movement (Princeton University Press, 1993) ISBN 0691056838

External links

• Juan R. I. Cole Home Page at the University of Michigan
• Informed Comment - Juan Cole's weblog

Cole and other pundits

• Iraq as the 51st State - Asia Times interview with Cole, June 18, 2004
• Articles by Cole at Salon.com
• Juan Cole's Bad blog, by Efraim Karsh in the The New Republic
• Juan Cole Has Made His Intellectual Insecurity Clear, by Jonah Goldberg in the National Review
  • Cole responds
• Sullivan on Iraq War, Sept. 1, 2002 by Cole
  • Andrew Sullivan responds in Contra Cole
• Manipulation of the Blogging World on Iraq? by Cole
  • Ali of the blog Iraq The Model responds with Answers and Clarifications
    • Cole responds to Ali
• Juan Cole and the Decline of Middle Eastern Studies an extensive critique by Alexander H. Joffe of Middle East Forum. Andrew Sullivan, who coined the term "Fisking", described Joffe's piece as a "classic of the genre." [10]

References

28 Christopher Hitchens, Slate, May 2, 2006