|
||||||||||
|
|
Juan Cole's Jihad
Against Israel by Cinnamon Stillwell 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 favored 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 demolishing 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 neighbors. 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 neighbors continue to repeat rumors 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 accumulated 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
Jewish-American officials of dual loyalty, and he has a habit
of taking Iranian regime-owned press at face value. 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 support
preordained conclusions, an eagerness to believe the press of foreign
dictatorships over one's own Navy, and the reliance on crude conspiracy
theories will ensure only that consumers of media reports 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 support
them whitewashed. Cinnamon Stillwell is the
Northern California Representative for Campus Watch, a project of the Middle East Forum. She can
be reached at stillwell@meforum.org. |
|||||||||
