THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume X, Issue # 167, July 9, 2008
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
JUAL COLE'S JIHAD AGAINST ISRAEL
By Cinnamon Stillwell
THE MIDDLE EAST & THE ISRAELI-ARAB CONFLICT -- THE FLAWED ANALYSIS OF JUAN COLE: EXCUSING THE
VIOLENCE & HATRED DIRECTED AT JEWS & THE STATE OF ISRAEL -- CITING & TAKING AT FACE VALUE LEFTIST, ISLAMIST,
& ANTI-SEMITIC SOURCES -- EMBRACING & ATTEMPTING TO PEDDLE CONSPIRACY THEORIES DIRECTED AT THE U.S.A. IN
GENERAL & THE POLITICAL RIGHT IN PARTICULAR -- CONCLUSIONS CHARACTERIZED BY OVERT BIASES & DERIVED FROM A
HIGHLY SELECTIVE READING OF SOURCES -- COMMENTARY REFLECTING AN EAGERNESS TO BELIEVE THE PRESS OF HOSTILE
FOREIGN DICTATORSHIPS, RATHER THAN U.S. DEFENSE DEPARTMENT ACCOUNTS & REPORTS
FULL STORY:
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 socalled
"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 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 socalled
informed commentary is a font of uninformed conspiracy-mongering where terrorists are excused and the regimes that
support them whitewashed.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
Israel & the Arabs -- The Israeli-Arab Conflict
Middle East -- Arabs, Arab States,
& Their Middle Eastern Neighbors
American Foreign Policy -- The Middle East
Islamism & Jihadism -- Radical Islam & Islamic Terrorism
Page Three
Page Two
Page One
International Politics & World Disorder:
War & Peace in the Real World
Page Two
Page One
Islamist Terrorist Attacks on the U.S.A.
Osama bin Laden & the Islamist Declaration of War
Against the U.S.A. & Western Civilization
Islamist International Terrorism &
U.S. Intelligence Agencies
U.S. National Security Strategy
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.
The foregoing article by Ms. Stillwell was originally published in Front Page Magazine, July 9, 2008, and can be
found
on the Internet website maintained by the Middle East Forum, a foreign policy think tank which seeks to define and
promote American interests in the Middle East, defining U.S. interests to include fighting radical Islam, working for
Palestinian Arab acceptance of the State of Israel, improving the management of U.S. efforts to promote constitutional
democracy in the Middle East, reducing America's energy dependence on the Middle East, more robustly asserting U.S.
interests vis-à-vis Saudi Arabia, and countering the Iranian threat.
(Article URL: http://www.meforum.org/article/1930)
Republished with Permission of the Middle East Forum
Reprinted from the Middle East Forum News
mefnews@meforum.org (MEF NEWS)
July 9, 2008
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THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
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Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
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