Middle East studies in the News

Juan Cole: Illogic :: Michael Jordan: Basketball

by Eric Trager
Contentions (Commentary Magazine Blog)
April 28, 2008

http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/trager/3711

http://www.campus-watch.org/article/id/5024

Professor-cum-blogger Juan Cole's habit of producing illogical analogies to evaluate events in the Middle East is legendary. As Martin Kramer has noted, Cole's faulty analogies have been employed misleadingly to compare such dissimilar phenomena as the caliphate to the papacy; Saudi Arabia to Amish country; and the Sunni-Shiite divide to the Catholic-Protestant one.

Well, Cole is at it again:

Israeli ambassador to the UN Dan Gillerman called Carter a bigot for his diplomacy. Gillerman called Hizbullah, an Arab party, "animals" in summer of 2006. Would he like to expand the reference to include other races? … For Likudniks to call Jimmy Carter a "bigot" is sort of like the Ku Klux Klan denouncing Nelson Mandela for racial insensitivity.

Just in case you missed it, Cole's stunning logic goes something like this: the Likud Party is to Jimmy Carter what the KKK is to Nelson Mandela. Or, as it would have been written on the old version of the SAT, "Likud: Carter :: KKK: Mandela."

Still don't get it? Let me help. To make sense of Cole's analogy, one must accept the bizarre premise that denouncing Hizbullah–a militant group representing one extreme faction within one of twenty-one Arab states–constitutes KKK-like racism against all Arabs (and possibly against many other peoples). It therefore follows logically that, in protesting the anti-Hizbullah "Likud Light" Israeli government, Jimmy Carter is actually protesting KKK-like racism, much as Nelson Mandela did in South Africa.

Yet, for Cole, the notion that criticism of Hizbullah constitutes anti-Arab racism is dangerously revealing of his true intentions. After all, Cole has often railed against the exact same logic when applied to Israel, arguing that accusations of anti-Semitism against Israel's most vitriolic critics–such as himself–are "designed to silence." Indeed, by accusing Dan Gillerman of racism for denouncing Hizbullah, Cole's own internal logic suggests that he is trying to stifle one of Hizbullah's most prominent detractors–an aim consistent with Cole's legacy of apologias for radical Islamists.

Of course, Cole's pollution of the blogosphere is nothing new. But, insofar as Cole's students now hail from a generation that no longer studies analogies in preparation for the SATs, his distortions may be more dangerous than ever before.

Note: Articles listed under "Middle East studies in the News" provide information on current developments concerning Middle East studies on North American campuses. These reports do not necessarily reflect the views of Campus Watch and do not necessarily correspond to Campus Watch's critique.

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