ANOTHER Scholarly Source and Colleague of Juan Cole

We recently documented the deep involvement, identification, and collaboration of Prof. Juan Cole, who is serving as reigning "Rais" of the Middle East Studies Association, with one Dennis "Justin" Raimondo, who edits the anti-American pro-terror antiwar.com. Raimondo fabricated a conspiracy "theory" about how supposedly dem Joos were the real ones who knocked down the World Trade Center all to make bin Laden and his 19 Saudi hijackers look bad. This theory is now staple lard on all neonazi web sites and some Stalinist ones too, like Pravda, where Raimondo writes a regular column. Raimondo seems to be determined to act out in his own life the script from Kevin Abrams' book.

Now Raimondo and his ravings are ordinarily not worth discussing outside the clinic, and are of interest here only in the fact that Prof. Juan Cole is a follower and admirer of Raimondo, publicly thanks and compliments Raimondo, and publishes his own articles on Raimondo's web site.

At first, we assumed this was just a singular slip in judgment on the part of our learned professor of Middle East political correctness. Surely Cole does not know what sort of crackpot Raimondo really is, right?

Wrong!

It turns out that Raimondo is NOT the only far-left-neofascist conspiracist crackpot with which Cole makes common cause and is on intimate collegial terms. We checked out the links on Juan Cole's own personal web site and blog. There we discovered among Cole's list of "Political and Academic Weblogs" the weblog of Kurt Nimmo.

"Academic" weblog? You may recall that Nimmo is the employment-challenged New Mexico photographer-wannabe who may or may not have been canned from a job at his local Walmart's photo lab, who may or may not have finished high school, and the fellow who insists that because of "the neocons" (by which he means Dem Joos) he just cannot find a job - unlike the many millions of illegal immigrants who cannot speak English and all find jobs. Nimmo is a regular columnist for Alexander Cockburn's Counterpunch, and has been moonlighting as a columnist for Uruknet, the web site base of Iraqi pro-Saddam exiled Ba'athists.

Nimmo, who makes Raimondo look like a Harvard Dean, claims he is not really a columnist for the Ba'athist site because he only publishes his columns there. We counted 40 Nimmo columns on Uruknet. Nimmo also insists the pro-Saddam site is really run by Italian peace lovers and not Ba'athist Iraqis, and my guess is his evidence is that his friends there say "Marhaban, We arrrr Italian Beoble Insh'Allah". And yes, the Saddamist Uruknet also comes out to endorse Professor Cole, Raimondo and Nimmo, the merry threesome.

Nimmo has as long a track record of justifying terror, spin doctoring al-Qaeda, and promoting crackpot conspiracy theories as Raimondo, and Nimmo is just as openly anti-Semitic.

So the big question for the University of Michigan is how can it be that one of its profs is someone who regards Nimmo as one of his bona fide "academic" colleagues and links his personal page to such a critter, a prof who openly identifies with Justin Raimondo, a prof who is the hero of the week for the Iraqi Ba'athists. We would ask the Middle East Studies Association a similar question, about how can Cole be its President under these circumstances, but we fear we have already answered out own question.

We are wondering if the next academic weblog and academic source for his research that Prof. Cole will name will be Rense.com or David Irving's web site.