Juan Cole’s persistence at Middle East commentary and polemic is in itself a tribute to the carnival of wonders that is the Internet. For years now, the Richard P. Mitchell Collegiate Professor of History at the University of Michigan has been spouting all manner of conspiracist nonsense on his blog Lightly Worn Authority or whatever it’s called, and passing this off as the labors of hard-won expertise. As ever with WordPress fantasy-merchants, he has shown himself to be very sensitive to scrutiny or challenge, bearing out the worst claims made against his intellectual rigor in how he chooses to respond to them. When Christopher Hitchens questioned Cole’s grasp of the Persian language, relating to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s well-documented and serially-translated threat to “wipe Israel off the map,” which Cole denied Ahmadinejad ever made, the blogger-academic replied with a maddened screed that indicted the Hitch for warmongering, alcoholism and other offenses that had little to do with Farsi linguistics. He then also threatened to sue Slate magazine in an email exchange with its then-editor Jacob Weisberg, which he happily reproduced on his site.
Cole’s sense of amour propre (“for more, see my classic Salon article”) is matched by his almost enviable lack of self-awareness for how he comes across when defending his dubious positions against the raised eyebrow and the puzzled expression. This may be one reason — at least one that exists outside the mind of Juan Cole — that Yale University declined to have him on its faculty. Another was his confusion over the chronology of contemporary Middle Eastern events — a non-issue for a Comparative Literature or Applied Physics professor, but decidedly sticky for a specialist in Middle East history. He famously made the doubly wrong assertion that the 9/11 Commission cited Israel’s incursion into the Jenin refugee camp as one of the motivations of Al Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Center and Pentagon. The Jenin episode occurred seven months after 9/11.
Though my favorite instance of Cole’s colorfully inventive assessments came in mid-January 2009. So exasperated was he at the seemingly unshakable hold that a certain Levantine-minded lobby group had on U.S. foreign policy that he proposed the creation of a counter-lobby to restore the priority of the national interest. The name for this would-be organization? The “America First” PAC.
Well, that was enough to draw an impassioned ix-nay from Cole’s “friend and comrade” Spencer Ackerman, formerly a national security reporter for The New Republic and now a reporter for Wired:
Maybe you’d want to avoid using the term “America First” for what you’re talking about here. I share your frustration over the inability of the emerging progressive American Jewish lobbying apparatus to pull American support from the Gaza war. But many of the efforts you’re talking about are duplicative with what they’re actually doing right now. It takes time. If there were a quick solution, it would have been implemented by now.
But using the name “America First” has really bad overtones. Not only did the America First Committee lobby to keep the U.S. out of the second World War — we don’t have to argue that that was a wrongheaded position, I trust — but its (to say the least) comfort with antisemetic rhetoric disgraces it for all time. I know first-hand that you do not share such sentiment or such comfort. We’ve all written overheated stuff. I’m no exception. So maybe think of a different name here? [Italics in the original.]
Heeding this fraternal warning only too well, Cole did what anyone cited as a “public intellectual” on Wikipedia might do. He deleted his embarrassed and historically illiterate reference to a Jew-hating, pro-Nazi movement and replaced it with the “For America” PAC. Good. No problems there, save for the fact that he not only never admitted to committing a bloomer — what price, informed comment? — but then tried to cover up having made it by deleting the comment thread that appeared underneath his first-draft post. This, too, had featured helpful historical lessons in domestic World War II-era politics. Nevertheless, the permanent URL to the revised and now-archived copy of Cole’s post stills reveals the uncomfortable truth of his knowledge of actual, as opposed to imagined, fifth columns.
Indeed, this wasn’t the first or last time that Cole had wandered into a matrix of his own misfortune by examining the subject of Jewish statehood. One of Cole’s stocks-in-trade is to use surrogate bywords to describe anyone who doesn’t believe that Israel’s founding was a colonialist mistake. They include “Zionist,” “neocon,” “Likudnik” and “AIPAC.” Jonathan Chait, another New Republic hand (the magazine really ought charge Cole for its services) hilariously dissected his stream-of-consciousness dithyrambs, now taking the form of presenting Atlantic correspondent Jeffrey Goldberg as a) a covert agent of Israel and b) a “blood-and-soil” nationalist in the mould of Adolf Hitler. Contradictions are not Cole’s strong suit.
Now The Guardian’s Brian Whitaker has approvingly linked to another of Cole’s on-the-spot Middle East commentaries, this one assessing the strategic savvy of Muammar Gaddafi’s allegation that the Libyan rebels are Al Qaeda militants:
Interestingly, Qaddafi’s language seems calculated to appeal to the far right in Europe and Israel, which views all Muslims as potential terrorists. It is an attempt to build a Qaddafi-National Front-Likud-Peter King front against the democracy movement in the Middle East.
Peter King may wish to inhabit a well-fortified safe-house in Armagh but, last I checked, he was not a member of the European far right. Nor does comparing Israel’s second-largest mainstream political party, which carried Arab-Muslim members and voters even before it gave up on its dream of territorial maximalism, with France’s neo-fascist National Front withstand much investigation. (Jean-Marie Len Pen is concerned with the Middle East only insofar as he wants all Muslims and Arabs in France to return there forthwith.) Yet Cole really does seem to think that a Bedouin strongman who dresses like Gene Simmons and talks like Charlie Sheen is dog-whistling to Gallic ultras. He also thinks that Gaddafi, who has called for the creation of a binational state of “Isratine” — in the op-ed pages of the New York Times, no less — can win over the hearts and minds of Israel’s secular hawks.
Gaddafi, Le Pen, Netanyahu and King: That’s quite a fantastical foursome to fuse together, even for Juan Cole. Credibility has no sell-by date in cyberspace. But this chap’s reputation, now more than ever, seems a Google algorithm gone badly wrong.