David Bernstein of The Volokh Conspiracy unmasks Professor Juan Cole of the University of Michigan for publishing and building an anti—Israel case on phony reports, and failing to correct the error when notified. Juan Cole matters because he is so often used as an "expert" by the likes of the New York Times. Yale even considered him for a professorship before wisely thinking otherwise.

Most recently, he has been spreading more disinformation about Israel "terror tactics" — the lie that Israel targeted a funeral party for destruction. Cole likened this "practice" to the "terror" tactics "where you kill people and then kill their funeral party later" as used by the Baathist insurgency in Iraq. Bernstein writes:

I am fairly confident that Cole is aware that the early reports were corrected, and that his post is inaccurate. The reason is that I emailed him (anonymously) at two separate email addresses on two separate days to inform him. First, on the day he made his post, I provided a link to the corrected Reuters story, which appeared just hours after the initial report. A few days later, I sent him another email, with a link to both the Reuters story and the story he himself cited, pointing out that neither of them supported what he wrote. This did not lead him to correct his report, even though it had been the lead entry on his blog for an entire day.

The NYT relied upon Juan Cole as an expert to explain away and disabuse its readers of the notion that Iranian leader Ahmadinejad meant what he said about his desire to destroy Israel. In the world of experts, the New York Times chose to use a clearly biased, and often wrong, propagandist.

Cole has many critics: many question his academic talent  He also has a string of his own statements that can certainly be construed as being anti—Semitic. He has stated that Jewish American public servants are 'Jewish American Likudniks' that use the Pentagon as 'Israel's Gurkha regiment, fighting elective wars on behalf of Tel Aviv.' Many other instances of his problematic attitudes toward Jews abound.

Ed Lasky   8 16 06