Juan Cole: The Ted Williams of Middle East Studies?

by Winfield Myers  •  Mar 25, 2010 at 1:53 pm

http://www.campus-watch.org/blog/2010/03/juan-cole-the-ted-williams-of-middle-east-studies

Daffodils are blooming, baseball season is just around the corner, and Juan Cole is spinning conspiracy theories. Some things in life are consistent year after year.

Today at American Thinker, I challenge Cole's latest unfounded attack on Campus Watch:

University of Michigan history professor Juan Cole is desperate for you to know that he is eminently qualified to speak publicly on the Middle East. He is, we are told in the opening paragraph of his recent response to the Atlantic's Jeffrey Goldberg,

[a] Middle East expert who lived in the Muslim world for nearly 10 years, travels widely there, speaks the languages, writes history from archives and manuscripts and follows current affairs ...

But from this triumphalist beginning, the story takes a tragic turn: In spite of these qualifications (which you, dear reader, almost certainly do not share), Cole "found that none of [his] experience counted for much when [he] entered the public arena in the United States."

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