Juan Cole's Conspiratorial Anti-Israel Hatred

Once in a while, in my posts on Iraq, I'll link to Juan Cole, who's one of the most rabid antiwar leftists on the academic scene. A Middle East "expert," Cole's mounted a endless campaign on the utter demonization of Israel.

Cinnamon Stillwell has a report on Professor Cole's recent activities:

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.

There's more at the link.

Note that Cole's a major eminence in the radical leftosphere, folks who are also prone to the unhinged ravings of BDS sufferers. Indeed, as I write this post, Daily Kos has an entire entry pumping of Cole's theories of the "FBI’s proposed new system for profiling Muslims and Arab-Americans."

Thank goodness we have wonderful souls like Cinammon Stillwell to cast the light of reason on such abject nihilism.

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Related: If you've not done so, be sure to read Stillwell's post-911 classic essay, "The Making of A 9/11 Republican."