Hi. Hope you had a fine vacation, with friends, family, good
food, and some thoughts about history, brilliant ideas, the
remarkable people who founded the nation and some of the
fine writers I've passed along. Here's another great person, in
a contemporary struggle which ties in to much else going on.
So, back to our own present and future.
Ed
The Nation
(July 3, 2006 issue)
Burning Cole
by Philip Weiss
Neoconservatism is an elite calling. It thrives in think tanks, not
union halls; its proponents want most of all to influence the powerful. No
wonder Ivy League labels have always been important to neocons. This
fixation on intellectual prestige explains the recent neocon uprising over
the possibility that Juan Cole, scholar and blogger, would become a Yale
professor. It was one thing for Cole to hold forth from the University of
Michigan, where he has been a professor for twenty years. But Yale would
provide "honor" and "imprimatur," says Scott Johnson, a right-wing blogger.
"That's a huge thing, to have them bless all his rantings on that blog."
On June 2 Johnson broke the story (on powerlineblog.com) that Yale's
Senior Appointments Committee had the day before rejected Cole after three
other Yale committees had signed off on him. By then a process that usually
takes place behind closed doors had become thoroughly politicized by the
right. "I'm saddened and distressed by the news," John Merriman, a Yale
history professor, said of the rejection. "I love this place. But I haven't
seen something like this happen at Yale before. In this case, academic
integrity clearly has been trumped by politics."
The controversy erupted this spring after two campus periodicals
reported that Cole was under consideration by Yale for a joint appointment
in sociology and history. In an article in the Yale Herald, Campus Watch, a
pro-Israel group that monitors scholars' statements about the Middle East,
was quoted as saying that Cole lacked a "penetrating mind," and suggesting
that Yale was "in danger of sacrificing academic credibility in exchange for
the attention" Cole would generate. Alex Joffe, then the director of Campus
Watch, told me Cole "has a conspiratorial bent...he tends to see the Mossad
and the Likud under his bed." For its part, the Yale Daily News twice
featured attacks on Cole by former Bush Administration aide Michael Rubin, a
Yale PhD associated with Campus Watch and the American Enterprise Institute.
In an op-ed Rubin wrote, "Early in his career, Cole did serious academic
work on the 19th century Middle East.... He has since abandoned scholarship
in favor of blog commentary."
Academics dispute this. They say that Yale was drawn to Cole by
top-rank scholarly achievement. He is president of the Middle East Studies
Association, speaks Arabic and Persian, and has published several books on
Egyptian and Shiite history. "We were impressed with Cole's scholarly work,
and a wide set of letters showed that he is also highly regarded by other
scholars in the field," says political science professor Frances Rosenbluth,
a member of the Yale search committee that chose Cole. Zachary Lockman, an
NYU Middle Eastern studies professor, says, "It's fair to say he is probably
among the leading historians of the modern Middle East in this country."
Joshua Landis, a professor at University of Oklahoma, describes Cole as "top
notch."
"He was the wunderkind of Middle East Studies in the 1980s and 1990s,"
Landis says. "He can be strident on his blog, which is one reason it is the
premier Middle East blog.... [But] Juan Cole has done something that no
other Middle East academic has done since Bernard Lewis, who is 90 years
old: He has become a household word. He has educated a nation. For the last
thirty years every academic search for a professor of Middle East history at
an Ivy League university has elicited the same complaint: 'There are no
longer any Bernard Lewises. Where do you find someone really big with
expertise on many subjects who is at home in both the ivory tower and inside
the Beltway?' Today, Juan Cole is that academic."
Of course, Cole is on the left, while Lewis is a neoconservative. And
it is hard to separate Cole's scholarly reputation from his Internet fame.
Cole started his blog, Informed Comment, a few months after September 11. He
quickly became the leading left blogger on terrorism and the Middle East,
delivering every day, often by translating from Arabic newspapers. He could
discuss the pros and cons of, say, an invasion of Iraq with complete
authority. Here, for instance, are some of his writings in the lead-up to
war: "The Persian Gulf is the site of two-thirds of the proven petroleum
reserves in the world. Yet the countries along its littoral have no means of
providing security to themselves.... The two exceptions here are Iran and
Iraq.... Iraq did so badly in the Iran-Iraq war, however, that it left
itself without credibility as security provider in the region. It also was
left deeply in debt." A US invasion "will inevitably be seen in the Arab
world as a neo-colonial war.... The final defeat of the Baath Party will be
seen as a defeat of its ideals, which include secularism, improved rights
for women and high modernism. Arabs in despair of these projects are likely
to turn to radical Islam as an alternative outlet for their frustrations."
At times, his voice rose.
"The idea that terrorists willing to commit suicide will be afraid of
the US after it invades Iraq is just a misreading of human nature," he wrote
in 2003. "If the US really wanted to stop terrorism, it would invade the
West Bank and Gaza and liberate the Palestinians to have their own state and
self-respect."
Israel's treatment of Palestinians has always been important in Cole's
reading of the Middle East. Naturally, Israel is central to neocons, too.
Michael Rubin accused Cole of missing the good news from Iraq and of being
anti-Semitic. That charge was soon taken up in the Wall Street Journal and
in the New York Sun. "Why would Yale ever want to hire a professor best
known for disparaging the participation of prominent American Jews in
government?" wrote two Sun authors. One of them, according to Scott Johnson,
was a student of Alan Dershowitz's at Harvard. The other is Johnson's
daughter, Eliana, then a Yale senior. After that article, Johnson, a
Minneapolis lawyer and Dartmouth grad, wrote up the case on his blog, which
describes itself as a friend of Israel, and attacked Cole as a "moonbat."
Alex Joffe denies that a network went after Cole. "There wasn't any
organized opposition. It was a question of people becoming aware of it
somehow and each getting in his two cents." Asked about pot-stirrers,
Johnson says, "I think if you look anywhere but Yale, you'd be making a
mistake."
Well, if this isn't a network, neither are the professionals who
exchange cards at New York parties. Joel Mowbray, a Washington Times
columnist who has assailed the consideration of Cole, sent a letter to a
dozen Yale donors, many of them Jewish, warning of Cole's possible
appointment. According to the Jewish Week, "Several faculty members said
they had heard that at least four major Jewish donors...have contacted
officials at the university urging that Cole's appointment be denied."
Still, Johnson's point is well taken. It must have been Yale insiders who
got the news out to Cole's enemies, as Cole's appointment passed one after
another of several institutional hurdles. The vote in the history department
was said to be 13 to 7 with three abstentions (which count as no). This
signaled unusual opposition to an appointment recommended by an
interdisciplinary search committee. Yale's history department includes
prominent supporters of the Bush international agenda like John Gaddis and
Donald Kagan.
After Cole's defeat, Rubin suggested that Yale now had an opportunity
to hire a real talent, someone at the level of, say, Aaron Friedberg, a
professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton. Who is
Friedberg? A former national security aide to Vice President Cheney through
the first two years of the war that the-network-that-is-not-a-network wanted
to get us into. Having a role in the greatest foreign-policy disaster of our
generation is evidently a worthy credential in academia. Douglas Feith,
after all, is about to join the Georgetown faculty.
As Scott Johnson notes, the left didn't care about Cole's appointment
as much as the right. (Maybe because the left values his blog, which an Ivy
League job might have cut in on.) In retrospect, though, it is appalling to
consider what was done to Cole's reputation over this blue-chip appointment.
Cole chose not to discuss the process publicly while it was happening.
"I think that a hiring process in academia is a professional matter," he
told me. But he also said that Yale sought him out, and that the
vilification process was orchestrated. "There were clearly phone calls
amongst the persons doing it." The Yale Herald quoted two Michigan students
one of whom had visited him at his office in Ann Arbor and questioned his
openness to Jews. "I am frankly suspicious," Cole says. "How did [the
Herald] track down these students?"
Lockman, Cole's fellow Middle Eastern scholar at NYU (speaking for
himself only), finds the process fearful. "Since September 11 there has been
a concerted effort by a small but well-funded group of people outside
academia to monitor very carefully what all of us are saying, ready to jump
on any sign of deviation from what they see as acceptable opinion. It's an
attack on academic freedom, and it's not very healthy for our society."
Cole declined to talk about his feelings on losing the job. Still, the
pain came through in his comments. Modern Middle Eastern studies has always
been politicized, he says. He jumped into the blogosphere for a simple
reason, to counter the common assertion that the Israeli occupation had
nothing at all to do with the 9/11 attacks. "I'm from a military family. I
had two cousins working in the Pentagon that was attacked. So this was
personal to me. My country had been attacked. The mistreatment of the
Palestinians and the high-handed policies of the Israeli right were deeply
implicated in the attacks. I was angry.
"I knew when I began to speak out that I wasn't going to be hired. I
knew my academic career was over. I knew that I can be in this place, be a
professor of Middle Eastern studies at the University of Michigan for the
rest of my life. But I would never be a dean. I would never be a provost. I
would never be in the Ivy League. I'm not surprised. I'm not upset.
Actually, the bizarre thing is that Juan Cole was considered by Yale in the
first place."
***
RADIO INTIFADA - Voices from Kolkata to Casablanca
Voices of struggle, Voices for change
Thursday, July 6, 2006, 3-4pm
KPFK 90.7 fm; and streaming live @ www.kpfk.org
"Operation Summer Rain:" Israel's Assault of Palestine
This week's Radio Intifada examines the real agenda behind Israel's
"Operation Summer Rain" assault on Palestine - assailed even by the father
of the kidnapped Israeli soldier. We will be getting reports from Gaza and
the West Bank - where Israeli raids are occurring and elected officials are
being arrested - and talking with activists/analysts in the US about the
political implications of this latest siege. .
with guests:
*Dr. Asaad Abu Kharekh of the Gaza University Teachers Association
*Sam Bahour, El Bireh (West Bank) resident and longtime Palestinian American
activist
* Dr. Jess Ghannam, Board member of Gaza Community Mental Health Program and
member of Al Awda's international Executive Committee
Co-produced and co-hosted by Muna Coobtee and Sherna Gluck of SWANA (South
and West Asia and North Africa) Collective of KPFK
Announcement: Victory in LA 8's Aiad Barakat's suit against the government
In the midst of the terrible news from Palestine and the ongoing violation
of immigrant rights, it is a relief to have some good news. The LA 8's Aiad
Barakat won his lawsuit against the government for denying his citizenship.
Even though this victory won't necessarily have broader implications for the
LA 8 case or for immigrant rights, it is important and we congratulate Aiad
his lawyers, Ahilan Arulanantham, David Cole and Mark Van Der Hout.
For more details, listen to Aisha Mason's interview with Mark Van Der Hout
on KPFK's Morning Review, Thursday, July 6th, 7 to 8 am.
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