Columbia U. Prof. Cole's Analogies

We recently commented on Prof. Jonathan Cole's organizing of the Columbia University Cheerleaders for Bias in the Classroom. He was defending the "right" of assistant professor of modern Arab politics Joseph Massad to intimidate Jewish students in his classroom and promote one-sided bashing of Israel there. Massad is accused of threatening to expel a student from his classroom because she defended Israel's military actions. You can get a feel for Massad's academic objectivity from thisdiatribe of his in the anti-Semitic Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram. As reported in the NY Sun, Prof. Cole said:

"Mr. Cole on Tuesday night cast Mr. Massad as an exemplary teacher who is under no obligation to give equal weight to student opinions expressed during class. Just as a Jewish history professor doesn't have to take seriously a student who denies the Holocaust, Mr. Massad is not required to give equal time to an argument denying the 1982 Shatila refugee camp massacre in Lebanon, he said."

In other news reports, apparently Cole also defended Massad's "right" to introduce anti-Israel indoctrination in his classroom by noting that Jagdish Bhagwati, a world-class professor of economics, does not give equal time in his class to people who think that international trade is something bad. "We are witnessing a rising tide of anti-intellectualism," the New York Sun quotes Cole as saying, calling the present situation at the university "another era of intolerance and repression."

Now let us parse those statements of Cole a liitle. What Cole is trying to say is that someone denying that Israel was responsible for the massacres in Sabra and Shatilla, Lebanon, in 1982 is equivalent to a professor denying that the Holocaust occurred (something that would be no problem at all, by the way, at Depaul University) or to someone defying the wall-to-wall consensus in economics that international trade is beneficial to all countries involved in it.

In other words, telling the truth about Sabra and Shatilla is, in the learned sociologist Cole's view, as intolerable as lying about the Holocaust or promoting a superstitious faith in trade protectionism as legitimate economic thinking.

Just to remind you, some 400 or so Palestinians were killed in Sabra and Shatilla in 1982. The number there who were killed by Jews or Israelis was exactly zero. In Sabra and Shatilla, Palestinian Arabs were killed by Lebanese Christian Arabs, members of the Falange militia, who went on a rampage right after their leader was murdered, probably by Palestinians allied to Syria. The killings at Sabra and Shatilla occured a week after Damour, where 500 plus Christian civilians were murdered, killings that have never interested the Jew-haters.

When Arabs murder Arabs, the Israel-bashers and Jew-baiters all decide that somehow it is all the Jews' fault. They have yet to implicate the Jews in the Rwanda tribes killing one another, but give them time. True, the liberal media, including those inside Israel, and an Israeli commission of inquiry later blamed Ariel Sharon for not having the prescience to forecast what the Falange were planning to do to the Palestinians. But not a single one of Sharon's attackers, who insisted after the massacres that reasonable people could have foreseen them coming, did himself or herself foresee them coming nor issue any warning of what the Falange might do. Talk about Monday morning quarterbacks!

So the same people who have never had a word to say against the countless intentional mass murders of Jewish civilians by Palestinian Islamofascist terrorists never tire of screaming about the "guilt" of Sharon and the Israelis in the massacre of Arabs by other Arabs at Sabra and Shatilla. When Jews cannot be blamed, as in the case of the 200,000 people in Algeria murdered by Islamists, the liberal media have yet even to take note of the events.

So, to return to Prof. Cole, sociologist and ex-provost from Edward Said's old university, he believes that stating the simple truth about Sabra and Shatilla in the classroom would be as outrageous as promoting economic superstition or lying about the Holocaust.


P.S. Neofascist JUSTIN RAIMONDO, airhead Gauleiter of the seditious and fanatically anti-American Antiwar.com blog, gets all self-righteous and holy because he managed to find a single error (my mistaking a satiric quote of Juan Cole's for a real one) in a long exposé of Cole's bias by me, a trivial error that we immediately fixed. Can we take this as a concession that everything ELSE in that piece about Cole was CORRECT? (Cole by the way seems to be a close comrade of Raimondo and often publishes his diatribes on Raimondo's sleazy little Web page.) What a shame that Comrade Raimondo does not invest the same efforts in his own Web site. We doubt that any serious investigator could find a single sentence on Raimondo's entire site that is NOT erroneous or tendentially biased and grossly misleading. And we have yet to see Raimondo admit to being wrong about ANYTHING!